You really cannot make this stuff up

Charles Krauthammer has mischief in his eyes, thank God, when he tells of his crush on Obama:
It's pleasant to fantasize that Obama will enact conservative policies when reality bites, but here's the truth: Obama is a piece of fluff. He's never been sternly tested, but when he's been gently tested he sides with convenient evil then lies about it, whether it's Reverend Wright, Professor Ayers or, most definingly, the Born Alive Infants Protection Act in Illinois.

There's little chance he'll have the guts to do the inconvenient right thing, but, oh my, he'll sure sound as tho he wants to. Don't watch his lips and don't watch his hips, watch what he does. He'll convene a Fiscal Responsibility Summit. He says:

his administration will begin confronting the issues of entitlement reform and long-term budget deficits soon after it jump-starts job growth and the stock market.

"What we have done is kicked this can down the road. We are now at the end of the road and are not in a position to kick it any further," he said. "We have to signal seriousness in this by making sure some of the hard decisions are made under my watch, not someone else's."

Yadda, yadda, yadda. His nominee for Treasury secretary is a blatant tax cheat. If Obama persists in nominating Geithner, you'll know he's stupid as well as immoral. Every time an American completes their tax return, they'll be thinking about Geithner's scam at the IMF.

What might have been

In the late '90's I had an apartment in Galaxy Towers, Gutenberg, New Jersey, looking out on Manhattan from the 2nd highrise from the right in this picture. Had I been there this afternoon I might have got a great shot of US Airways flight 1549 ditching in the Hudson. Alas. The shot below I took from a ferry like the ones at the rescue, looking north to the GW Bridge with New Jersey left and Manhattan right.


Update: Imagine the stricken plane gliding down over the GW Bridge. Apparently the plane came within 600 feet of the bridge, but it was ok as the pilot, Captain Chesley B. Sullenberger III, had the presence of mind to hold his EasyPass up to the cockpit window.

So he passed the test

To add my admiration to Mick's appreciation of George W. Bush, Kipling's lines are apt:

IF you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated, don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise:
.........
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
' Or walk with Kings - nor lose the common touch,
if neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And - which is more - you'll be a Man, my son!

Homer's Guide to Healthy Living..

..work in a nuclear power plant.

"It's safer to work in a nuclear plant than it is in real estate," says Patrick Moore, a scientist and founding member of Greenpeace who began supporting nuclear energy several years ago. He cites data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and notes that a Columbia University study published in 2004, which followed 54,000 nuclear-plant workers for 15 years, found that they had fewer cancers, less disease and lived longer than the average person.

Other pluses -

It's good for the planet:

"If you honestly believe that greenhouse gas is the seminal issue of the day, as world population and economic growth continue to expand, so will the need for electric capacity," says Sheila Slocum Hollis, a partner at the Washington law firm of Duane Morris who specializes in energy law. "Whether to power electric vehicles or for general manufacturing needs, ultimately people are looking toward nuclear as the big power source."

Waste is well-managed:

Exelon and other operators have addressed the problem of nuclear-waste disposal with "dry-cask storage" -- high-tech sealed containers that they keep on their sites. Due to innovations like that, many of the safety concerns that arose after accidents at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania in 1979 and Chernobyl in Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) in 1986 have eased.

There's a huge construction backlog that doesn't need new public borrowing....talk about stimulative infrastructure spending:

"Nuclear power is in a renaissance," says Tom Neff, a physicist and research affiliate at MIT's Center for International Studies. In fact, 17 applicants are seeking government approval to build 26 nuclear plants, meeting a Dec. 31 deadline for federal tax credits and potentially ending a 30-year hiatus in the construction of new U.S. nuke facilities.

I trust we'll all be driving to work in nuclear-powered Humvees rather than prissy Priuses. It's greener too! 

Convenient truth.

Color and sound

I've mentioned Jonathan Glazer's movie 'Birth' before. Glazer made an ad for Sony Bravia tv's - no cgi:

And here's the original sound:

h/t ligress

An Intricate Interweaving of Advanced Technology and Sophisticated Traders

Blah,blah,blah.....

One of the critical ingredients in creating the added value which Madoff Securities offers its clients is the firm's intricate interweaving of advanced technology and experienced traders. The firm's position at the forefront of computerized trading is widely acknowledged in the US financial community.

According to the criminal complaint Bernie Madoff made off with $50 b's of other people's money thru The Perfect Ponzi. That's a world record for a criminal charge. My movie about this will be called "The Owner's Name Is On The Door"

In an era of faceless organizations owned by other equally faceless organizations, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities LLC harks back to an earlier era in the financial world: The owner's name is on the door. Clients know that Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining the unblemished record of value, fair-dealing, and high ethical standards that has always been the firm's hallmark.

A starring part will be played by The Lipstick Building, Madoff's business address. I love that corner of midtown Manhattan at 54th and 3rd, where you can find a Houston's restaurant and bar beneath a Barnes and Noble in the belly of the Citicorp Building. How ironic...Citicorp! Once the world's largest bank, brought to its knees by The Great Unwinding of 2008, the same rush to liquidity that exposed Madoff. To quote John Stuart Mill:

Panics do not destroy capital; they merely reveal the extent to which it has been previously destroyed by its betrayal into hopelessly unproductive works.

Talking about timing tipping the Times (ugh)

Mick makes a good case that a newspaper website won't approach Google in ad revenue. I say there's great potential to improve the NYT content and grow the readership. The NYT is different from all other US papers - it's more widely read by the powerful and wannabes. To the rest of the world, it's the single daily which represents America. It's just that it's so mismanaged and so disrespected that it can't exploit it's uniqueness.

My focus is the stock price. Right now there's nothing in the price for the trophy value or brand value of the business. In a bull market it could easily be worth $5b to own the NYT + 58% of the NYT building + a stake in the Red Sox + About.com + The Boston Globe and some other stuff, but even after the 50% rise since I placed my bet a few days ago the market cap. is only $1b. That $5b guess is without thinking about a hook-up or takeover by a Yahoo! or Google or Microsoft.

Another factor here is that the market may have bottomed - I think so. It touched 7,500 just before Obama started to announce that his economic team would consist of sane experts like Volcker and Summers. Before that it was possible that the US economy would be governed by socialists. There's a Tsunami of money sequestered in zilch interest assets like gold and Treasuries. If that flows back into equities, there'll be an overshoot to the upside taking us back to 12,000 at least. Another tip was Genco (para 6) - a dry bulk shipper under the cosh thanks to the 90% drop in the Baltic Index. Genco's up 60%. I'd still tip potentially bankrupt GM (some good cars, much lower gas prices, incentive to reform the cost base) and Xstrata (base metals). Last Friday the market saw unexpectedly bad employment figures and went up. That's not any bear market I recognize.

Timing tipping The Times (ugh)

Yesterday I wrote a discursive piece tipping The New York Times Company. By hideous yet happy chance I seem to be on the same wavelength as the management.Today they announce Times Extra which upgrades their front page to a 3rd party content aggregator. A small step, but significant. The Times has potential. It's America's best known journal despite treachery, disgrace and mismanagement and it's a major owner of the brand value of New York City itself. NYC has global recogniton approached only by London and Paris as a city of the imagination. Once the NYT figures out its global potential on the web, it could gain a massive boost to circulation and advertising. This little step today may prod the market to see NYTco as an internet growth play to own rather than a dead trees decay play to short. Price today - $8.10. Market cap - $1.16b.

Tipping the Times (ugh)

This blog is a great tip sheet for those who know. 10 days ago I wrote:

A propos of nothing, on Friday I went long the New York Times at $5.14. I can only imagine good news from here on. How could it be worse?

The stock is presently at $7.70, up 50%. I get a kick from making money from assets which I detest since it proves I can detach my judgement from my emotions. Gold at $250/oz was another case. I dislike gold as an asset. So much of its value derives from the collective mass mania of the world's central banks in the late '70s, early '80s - one of the least remarked, most obscene squanderings of other people's money yet perpetrated. Anyhoot I do loathe The NYT. Also the profession it defiles, print journalism, is obviously done for. So here's why I think the stock can go to $20 within 6 months:

1. Staring death in the face forces management to do what needs to be done.

2. There are ways the Dems can give taxpayers' money to the NYT without a straight bail-out. Job ads is one used by UK government and quangos to boost their favourite organ, the Guardian, which prints a weekly 100+ page supplement for jobs in social work and worse.

3. The NYT brand could become scintillating. There's excellent content and a vast archive. An imaginative editor would ditch the incredibly boring line up of commentators (does anyone enjoy reading Krugman, Brooks, Dowd, Herbert, Rich, Collins? Why not a line-up of Paglia, Kos, Coulter, Steyn, Carville, Richard Dawkins? People who people want to read. Make your own list. I'd call the commentary team ' The Galacticos' after Real Madrid's soccer stars.

4. The first internet bubble was predicated on the value of eyeballs. Eyeballs bring ads and more eyeballs and more ads. The NYT has quite a few eyeballs now, but could attract vast numbers more with a re-design and a think locally, act globally mindset for it's web business.

5. The NYT brand has been poisoned, but there's an antidote -run it as a newspaper rather than a propaganda organ for the eternally juvenile. Maybe now that Bushitler isn't around to shore up the liberals' religion, their energies will be freed to write about the world as it is. Or maybe the scummy propagandists will just go away. I'm not asking for a paper that agrees with me - tho a Paglia-inspired, Palin-loving NYT would probably become compulsory reading across the political spectrum - I'm asking for a proper wall between editorial and reporting, as well as truthful reporting, better writing, better design and a vision to attract a vast pile of eyeballs across the globe.

6. The sun will rise tomorrow. The biggest factor now in the stock market panic is fear of the unknown. When I read today that Obama positively proclaims that there won't be a windfall tax on oil companies, I thought this is proof that he's not insane. The rally of the last couple of weeks is mainly due to that realization as evidenced by his economic apppointments. An unqualified opportunist is ok, a Chavez-like nutcase would not have been a buy signal. Bombed out businesses like the NYT suddenly have a decent presumption of a Clintonesque administration and can bounce back hard. In the last couple of weeks I've loaded up on NYTco, GM, Genco and Xstrata.....the stinkiest stocks I could think of that I vaguely understand. Each is different, but each has been massively depressed by fear of the unknown. You read it here, Anatreptoids. NB these are all highly risky bets that can go to zero overnight, so you should only make them if you can absorb the entire loss or know how to control the loss using attractively priced hedges (that's the black magic).

7. There are plenty of would be predators on the Times. The Sulzberger family must be exceptionally receptive now to a bid at say $20, under $3bn for the Boston Globe, the Times, the NYT building, a stake in the Red Sox and other sundry assets. Compare last year's $10bn valuation for Facebook or $5bn for Dow Jones. Things change.

Writer's block

I've been a

 little pre-occupied with my snorkelling trip to St John, USVI, and last week 

a distillery tour in Kentucky with a couple of friends. My wife's invited far more Thanksgiving week guests than we have sleeping places and it's too cold to sleep in the shed. Also I have little to add on American politics, tho I'm mulling a few thoughts on how the new administration is in a great position to do radical things such as cut company taxes, abolish the union stranglehold on public education, commence an infrastructure program, drill for American oil and initiate a nuclear power program. 

But the real reason for writer's  block is my trauma at the new images of the Anatreptic tag team. I have a face like a chimpanzee, while Mick's mask looks like a super-hero, Wonderwoman perhaps. My self image is Green Lantern.

A propos of nothing, on Friday I went long the New York Times at $5.14. I can only imagine good news from here on. How could it be worse?

Public squalor, private consolation

Hey ho. America chose government by barbarians, and bullshitters. Voluntarily to be governed by 3 such scoundrels as Obama, Reid and Pelosi says something profound about America. Too bad. It's not just that these folk are political anathema, it's that they seem so unworthy as people. I doubt America will become quite like Belgium, but once the institutions have been captured, it's tough to avert national decay. The USA is now on a flight path to state-funded abortion on demand, human embryos (babies) as inputs to an obscene medical industry, state control of parenting as well as education, re-invention of the Constitution, marriage de-sacralised, normalisation of pedophilia thru early sexualisation (why not? if embryos and other animals are objects to be used, why not children, in fact why not anybody who can be coerced?), state control of speech, the political centre moved to Alinsky/Ayers territory, the abolition of a virile military, the creation of an internal security force of community workers - an American Stasi, state control of private enterprise, und, und, und....Mormons and Catholics, watch out. You'll be tolerated as emblems of freedom of worship providing you turn into non-threatening sects which endorse the social dogmas of the secular religion.

Of course mere decadence is just a phase because the decadents lack courage and will. After some catastrophe the new America (if that country exists) may turn to a Puritan culture, a more compelling religion than liberal dreams. It's called 'Submission'.

The picture is of a daughter's first encounter with a turtle in the wild in St John last week.