You read it here..

I now forecast that Steve Jobs will soon resign from Apple and Disney.

See this and this.

Reasons to be cheerful....

1, McCain's a busted flush. His base was the liberal media. That's gone.

2, Hillary Shrillary's an overt defeatist. Her Iraq policy is "Troops Out by end 2008." That's it. If they aren't out she'll "really resent it." That's the most authentic thing she's said since "vast right-wing conspiracy." Resentful defeatists don't win elections. They may win nominations in the Resentful Defeatist Party, not general elections in America.

3, Hizzonner has burst out of the traps. Social conservatives like me still want to like Giuliani and in the video clip he's credible to me in dealing with abortion, ie he'll appoint the right judges. He's definitely wishy-washy to liberal on Amnesty and Civil Unions, but he's dealing with those issues as practical matters, not as a way of hollowing out society. I prefer Romney, so far. I like his intellectual grasp and I sense that Romney's best days are ahead. But if you contrast the GOP top 2 - men of accomplishment, executives - with the Resentful Defeatist top 3 - lawyers all and of the parasitic kind at that - 2008 should be a walkover.

Rattitude

Last week we were in St John's, US Virgin Islands. Our rented villa in the jungle was stormed by the gentleman on the left. Crazed by the smell of food left on the kitchen counter by the previous guests, this tree rat gnawed umpteen holes in the wire mesh over all the windows and tried to gnaw his way through the glass. He succeeded one night by scaling a vertical, holdless wall to an upper window. I trapped him the next night and released him a couple of miles away down the mountain. (I'll pass over my tarantula catching exploits as you may not believe me).

The aggression and fearlessness of this rat so impressed us that we named him Francis Drake after the English hero and scallywag who had terrorised the Spanish Main from his base nearby.

What a life! born a nobody, commanded the second voyage around the world, thrashed the world's major military power all over the globe, contemporary of Shakespeare, died on the attack.

Note: In fact Francis Drake was the first man to command a voyage round the world as Magellan died en route.

Cabbages and queens

The film 'The Queen' is the kind of faction docudrama I avoid, but the reviews drew me. Helen Mirren is indeed terrific as Elizabeth Windsor. It's a deft, unsentimental, but not cynical, script about the political aftermath of Diana's death. Tony Blair is acceptably impersonated with one great moment near the end, but the Queen is there in front of our eyes. What gradually differentiates this film is how impressive and honorable is the Queen's dry-eyed response to the emotional blackmail all around. Cherie Blair's contempt for the Queen and for Blair's respect towards the Queen is laid out in its gorgeous, smirking shallowness. Maybe stoicism and duty are making a comeback in time for the battles to come. What next, a remake of El Cid?

Oh, and there's a bedroom scene with the memorable line "Move over, cabbage."

The subsidariat

The British press is far livelier than the US press. If I had to pick one title to live with, it would be The Guardian, altho and because I loath its politics. It is well designed and sometimes surprises. It's columns are often so grotesque (Polly Toynbee take a bow), that I get a freak-show frisson. My wife would choose The Daily Mail, a middle-brow, gossipy, somewhat palaeo-con, anti-Bush, anti-Blair tabloid. It has some of the best columnists like Richard Littlejohn, Melanie Phillips and Peter Hitchens. The Mail is the one politicians curtsy to. It used to be The Sun. The Mail has flourished under the editorship of Paul Dacre, a rather private man whom I knew slightly at school. He is the most influential editor in Britain, tho I suspect his animus against the Iraq war is driven by an animus against Blair which is driven by an animus against Cherie Blair which has a root cause we know not where. Here the BBC reports Dacre's thunderbolts.

An extract from elsewhere:

Dacre also accused the "subsidariat", a group in which he also placed the Times, Guardian and Independent, of being "consumed by the kind of political correctness that is patronisingly contemptuous of what it describes as ordinary people.

These papers take bribes from the state in the form of ads for the marauding army of social engineers which infests the UK, hence "subsidariat".

For an excruciatingly funny first-hand account of Grub Street in recent times, I recommend The Insider by Piers Morgan, editor of the Mirror, fired for publishing faked photos of British soldiers torturing Iraqis. His caddish, intimate witness to Murdoch, Diana and the Blairs will define them down the ages.

The sound of one shoe dropping

I'm running a short position in Apple stock and wrote here "The optics of the story are awful - backdated options grants, fictitious board meetings, Apple apparently lying outright to say that Jobs derived no value from the operation - but the market wants Jobs to get away with it (so do I in my heart) because he's so admirable...."

The market's discounting of Jobs's vulnerability was founded on an Apple board report exonerating Jobs, but if there's a smell test for whitewash, that report wouldn't pass it, tho the whitewash was applied by the Inventor of the Internet himself who may now be in line to be prosecuted. Anyone who bought Apple stock after the Gore report was published, may have a powerful case.

Since I placed my short last week the stock has dropped 10%, but after last night's close it emerges that the feds have questioned Jobs. Now the market may shrug this off, fairly reasoning that this Justice Department, which wouldn't prosecute Sandy Berger, lacks the balls to apply the law to Steve Jobs or Al Gore. But, you know what, greed is fully priced in Apple's stock and fear is a bouncing baby. Steve may look fetching announcing new products in an orange jumpsuit. Al Gore would look more fetching.

Why I love Steve Jobs (14 minutes).

UPDATE: Another day, another dollar (down).
Tomorrow's Times (London) runs an Apple story, US investigators condemn Apple's options inquiry. Extract - "An SEC source said: “To have a representative from the Department of Justice — a criminal prosecutor — attend an interview with a company CEO is a very serious matter. This is not a polite request for information. The way the interview was conducted and the way the investigation seems to be moving forward [suggest] that Apple has a lot more explaining to do before the authorities will even begin to be satisfied.”"

The Times (New York) website runs an Apple story about designs for mythical Apple products. Also a story in the Tech section about how HDTV is showing up too much detail in porn movies. Now why would the omitters of truth at the NYT be playing down what may be the biggest business story of the year ?

Options on the optics of options

Yesterday I shorted Apple stock by spread-betting long on $95 July puts with July at $98. I write this on a brand new Blackbook, recently added to my other 5 Macs. I love the idea of the iPhone and I am pretty sure that OS X (or its Unix based descendant) will displace Windows.

I used options, despite the high price of implied volatility, to be consistent with my rule of guaranteed stop-loss taking. I may very well be very wrong given that I'm trying to call the zenith of a rocket. I don't usually try to stop rockets or catch falling knives when I gamble in stocks or commodities, but this time there's something urgent in my thinking - Steve Jobs may be in deep doo-doo over the Apple options shenanigans. The optics of the story are awful - backdated options grants, fictitious board meetings, Apple apparently lying outright to say that Jobs derived no value from the operation - but the market wants Jobs to get away with it (so do I in my heart) because he's so admirable and there's so much money riding on Apple. So, if I'm right, the market is thinking egosyntonically and I, working with fingerspitzengefuhl + wit, will profit by sidestepping my own bias.

Oh, and a hell of a lot of good news is already in the price.

We'll see.

UPDATE: Apple stock fell 2.5% yesterday (good). After the close Apple announced spectacular Q4 figures, way ahead of expectations. The stock rose 5% in after hours trading (bad), then dropped back (good). Today's action will be interesting. Should the stock fail to surge or even close lower, that would be a classically significant repudiation of bull news (good). Should the stock do well, that would be normal and it will take a while to see what shakes out.

I remain an Apple fan, but not a fan of the stock price here and now. The undervalued bear factor is Jobs's vulnerability. The undervalued, but longer term bull factor is that Apple's Operating System will displace Windows.


UPDATE 2: It was an interesting day. Apple stock fell by over 6%.

Nuke Berlin

Russian/Belarussian disputes and shenanigans over energy prices and transit fees in the Druzhba ('Friendship') pipeline are jeapordizing German oil supplies, so there's a rethink about nuclear power. Intellectual meltdown ensues:

"Those who use oil shortages in order to propagate nuclear energy are not capable of intellectually comprehending the topic of energy supplies," said Ulrich Kelber, the deputy president of the SPD parliamentary bloc.

Members of the opposition Greens also protested the idea of making changes to the nuclear phase-out.

"With uranium, you can neither heat your homes nor fuel your cars," said Jürgen Trittin, a Greens politician.

Well, my flat in London is heated by uranium which generates power which France exports to the UK. Electricity is in fact France's fourth largest export thanks to the 58 nuclear power stations built from 1974 in reaction to the 1973 Arab oil embargo. This program has been a success strategically, environmentally, economically, safetyally (help!) and Germany would do well to substitute its coal-burn, mega-windfarms and heating oil addiction with the wonders of modern nuclear power whose main feedstock is human ingenuity.

And...given the low marginal cost of nuclear generated power, it may be more attractive to displace the internal combustion engine with rechargable batteries. Greens may then boycott 'uranium' cars in favour of gasoline cars. Wankers.

Some of my best friends are penguins

Went to the children's bookstore, bought 'And Tango Makes Three' for my 6yo niece. Nice illustrations of penguins in Central Park Zoo. 'Touching and delightful variation on a major theme' - Maurice Sendak. 'Will delight young readers and open their minds' - John Lithgow. Sit down with said niece and my little daughters. The boy penguins, Roy and Silo, 'didn't spend much time with the girl penguins...instead Roy and Silo wound their necks around each other.."They must be in love"' Non-bigot zoo-keeper slips them an egg, which they incubate, hatch and parent. 'Tango was the very first penguin in the zoo to have two daddies.' So turns out the book is straight propaganda for homosexual adoption with the elegant twist that you can't know that until you read it. (By the way the happy gay penguin marriage was broken by a female called Scrappy tho that's not mentioned in the book).

So this is an impressively multilayered lie aimed at children. There's no evidence that the animals were homosexual. Male penguins incubate eggs. One of the penguins mated with a female. The animals were in an utterly artificial setting. The book is packaged to deceive.

By the way, can I have the beautiful word 'gay' back? It's a family name in my family, short for Grace. Lying to children is neither gay nor gracious.

The BBC does Mormon

The BBC correspondent in Bubble, DC, is one of the most self-important people in the world, so "Is America ripe for a Mormon president?" should be definitive as dogma for bien pensants. The signal to snide ratio is about 50/50, but the piece shows the confusion in attitudes of a liberal who 'gave 10 minutes' to encounter real, decent people who subscribe to a worldview anathematized by other secular cardinals . He deals with the conflict by piling on against his version of the other Christian nuts who dominate America.

Le weekend

I took a couple of grown up daughters and a couple of friends to Paris for the weekend. The 2.5 hour train from city-centre to city-centre is great, tho it would have taken as long to wait for a cab at Gare du Nord as the rest of the journey. Incroyable! My experienced nr.3 daughter led us down the Metro at midnight. What surprised me was how friendly the Parisians were. Smiles in every bar and eaterie, English spoken, quite other than the Paris of old. I believe it's a conscious change and I congratulate them.