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| I just wrote this as a response to Caleb K's post, and thought I should also put it here so more people see it. -RZ.
Stocks are incredibly high right now. With all the bad things that
COULD happen (e.g. Iran announcing it has developed nuclear weapons,
further instability in Nigeria, tropical storms in the gulf coast, the
Fed raising interest rates), you may want to look into short selling a
company. I short sold Abercrombie & Fitch last month, which is
really hurting me right now because their stock has gone up, up, up.
With their P/E ratio currently at 18.2 it is one of the most expensive
stocks in the sector and will likely go back down sometime between now
and November. My long position is in ethanol, which is an aggressive
growth sector targeted to outperform the S&P at least for the
coming year. And at around $16, VeraSun (VSE) is trading at about 50%
of the price it was getting during its IPO in June. It has recently
vamped up capacity, opening a large ethanol plant in Iowa. Since
alternative energy is inextricably linked to the oil and gas industry,
cheaper gasoline means that the short-term for ethanol could be down
further, so you may want to wait and see if these stocks get even
cheaper. But ethanol is a great bet come springtime, mark my words.
I'd love to get some feedback on my ideas. What is everybody thinking? | | |
| I'm going to post this article in its entirety because it is a brilliant explanation of my own feelings right now. The article was published on 9/23/03 in the Detroit Free News by Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer, and can be found here http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060923/OPINION03/609230306/1008/OPINION01
One final thing. I fully support the ecumenical movement and interfaith dialogue, which I remember from my childhood in Minnesota's Twin Cities and also from my university days at OU. Free speech is one of the most beautiful privileges of living in much of the developed world (the illegality of Holocaust denial in some European countries being an exception), and I hope this never changes. Yet still, I respect the CHOICE of participants in interfaith dialogue to reject hostility and inflammatory comments toward others' beliefs. I, as a citizen of the United States, should have the right to say anything I want about Islam. But hold me to this - I promise never to flaunt my free speech by intentionally provoking Muslims, such as was done with the publication of the cartoons satirizing the Prophet Mohammed.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Religious fanatics, regardless of
what name they give their jealous god, invariably have one thing in
common: no sense of humor. Particularly about themselves. It's hard to
imagine Torquemada taking a joke well. Today's Islamists seem to
have not even a sense of irony. They fail to see the richness of the
following sequence. The pope makes a reference to a 14th-century
Byzantine emperor's remark about Islam imposing itself by the sword,
and to protest this linking of Islam and violence: In the West Bank and Gaza, Muslims attack seven churches.
In London, the ever-dependable radical Anjem Choudary tells a
demonstration at Westminster Cathedral that the pope is now condemned
to death. In Mogadishu, Somali religious leader
Abubukar Hassan Malin calls on Muslims to "hunt down" the pope. The
pope not being quite at hand, they do the next best thing: shoot dead,
execution-style, an Italian nun working in a children's hospital."How
dare you say Islam is a violent religion? I'll kill you for it" is not
exactly the best way to go about refuting the charge. But of course,
refuting is not the point here. The point is intimidation. First,
Salman Rushdie. Then the false Newsweek report about Quran-flushing at
Guantanamo. Then the Danish cartoons. And now a line from a scholarly
disquisition on rationalism and faith given in German at a German
university by the pope. And the intimidation succeeds:
politicians bowing and scraping to the mob over the cartoons;
Saturday's craven New York Times editorial telling the pope to
apologize; the plague of self-censorship about anything remotely
controversial about Islam -- this in a culture in which a half-naked
pop star blithely stages a mock crucifixion as the highlight of her
latest concert tour. In today's world, religious sensitivity is a
one-way street. The rules of the road are enforced by Islamic mobs and
abjectly followed by Western media, politicians and religious leaders. The
fact is that all three monotheistic religions have in their long
histories wielded the sword. The Book of Joshua is knee-deep in blood.
The real Hanukkah story, so absurdly twinned (by calendric accident)
with the Christian festival of peace, is about a savage insurgency and
civil war. Christianity more than matched that lurid history with
the Crusades, an ecumenical bloodbath that began with the slaughter of
Jews in the Rhineland, a kind of a preseason warm-up to the featured
massacres to come against the Muslims, with the sacking of the capital
of Byzantium (the Fourth Crusade) thrown in for good measure. And
Islam, of course, spread with great speed from Arabia across the
Mediterranean and into Europe. It was not all benign persuasion. After
all, what were Islamic armies doing at Poitiers in 732 and the gates of
Vienna in 1683? Tourism? However, the inconvenient truth is that
after centuries of religious wars, Christendom long ago gave it up. It
is a simple and undeniable fact that the violent purveyors of
monotheistic religion today are self-proclaimed warriors for Islam who
shout "God is Great" as they slit the throats of infidels -- such as
those of the flight crews on 9/11 -- and are then celebrated as heroes
and martyrs. Just one month ago, two journalists were kidnapped
in Gaza and were released only after their forced conversion. Where
were the protests in the Islamic world at that act -- rather than the
charge -- of forced conversion? Where is the protest over the
constant stream of vilification of Christianity and Judaism issuing
from the official newspapers, mosques and religious authorities of Arab
nations? When Sheik 'Atiyyah Saqr issues a fatwa declaring Jews "apes
and pigs"? When Sheik Abd al-Aziz Fawzan al-Fawzan, professor of
Islamic law, says on Saudi TV that, "Someone who denies Allah, worships
Christ, son of Mary, and claims that God is one third of a trinity. ...
Don't you hate the faith of such a polytheist?" Where are the
demonstrations, where are the parliamentary resolutions, where are the
demands for retraction when the Mufti Sheik Dr. Ali Gum'a incites
readers of al-Ahram, the Egyptian government daily, against "the true
and hideous face of the blood-suckers ... who prepare (Passover) matzos
from human blood"? The pope gives offense and the Mujaheddin
Shura Council in Iraq declares that it "will break up the cross, spill
the liquor and impose the 'jizya' (head) tax, then the only thing
acceptable is conversion or the sword." This to protest the accusation
that Islam might be spread by the sword. As I said. No sense of irony. | | |
| "The devil himself is right in the house. And the devil came here
yesterday. Right here," said Chavez, who also called Bush a "world
dictator" in need of a psychiatrist. Chavez's remarks were greeted with
applause by the U.N. delegates. | | |
| My new home. Renting for $600/mo., just two blocks from the most chill beach in Southern California. The house is old and small, but the community is vibrant, I walked around today and saw softball games, basketball, people walking dogs on the beach, ultimate frisbee, surfing, soccer, couples holding hands, and people walking into houses with 12 packs in hand. It's going to be a fun summer. | | |
| I read something kind of funny today...
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. war on terrorism has made the world safer, the State Department's counterterrorism chief said on Friday, despite more than 11,000 terrorist attacks worldwide last year that killed 14,600 people.
The U.S. State Department said the numbers, listed in its annual Country Reports on Terrorism released on Friday, were based on a broader definition of terrorism and could not be compared to the 3,129 international attacks listed the previous year.
Asked if the world was safer than the previous year, U.S. State Department Counterterrorism Coordinator Henry Crumpton told a news conference, "I think so. But I think that (if) you look at the ups and downs of this battle, it's going to take us a long time to win this. You can't measure this month by month or year by year. It's going to take a lot longer."
"This is not the kind of war where you can measure success with conventional numbers," Crumpton said. | | |
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