In Search of the Perfect Investment

Time to short McDonalds and IBM. 

I still haven’t found my complete list of activist stocks. So far, I have Apple and GM. Remember last week’s chart from the Economist:

Apple has 1,000 people working an electric car. I think it’s a brilliant idea. Meantime, I hope they speak some sense into the auto makers. Like why can’t the screen on my iPhone pop up on the screen of my new Mercedes car? Why do the car companies have to keep inventing their own idiotic interfaces?

Ripped off by cable and cell phone companies. Yes, we all are. Last night Time Warner Cable removed three months of $4.95 “home WiFi” charges, one $4.75 late fee, agreed to double my Internet speed to what they had originally promised three months earlier, and agreed to re-instate the channels which they had cut off accidentally. It only took an hour. We missed the show we wanted to see.

Meantime, Verizon owes me $25 a month or so reduction in my cell phone bills because my phone’s two-year contract is over. I suspect that it’s really much cheaper to buy an unlocked iPhone directly from Apple and simply buy cheap service from Verizon, AT&T or whoever. One of the biggest myths foisted on us are the cheap phones we buy under two-year “contracts.” I put the word “contract” in quotes because it’s a not a contract the way I understand contracts.  For example, I’ve never seen spelled out what happens when my two-year “contract” expires in two years.

I read a lot about “cutting the cable” and getting TV over the air and over the Internet, via Roku or Google’s Chromecast. You can get movies and shows from a thousand places like Hulu, Amazon and others. But there are always gaps. My best “solution” remains Slingbox, which I have attached to my Verizon FiOS service in New York. Via Slingbox I can watch any live channel I can see in New York or anything I’ve recorded on my FiOS PVR (personal video recorder. As I wrote this, I was actually able to figure out how to watch CNBC over the Internet via a Verizon site — http://tv.verizon.com/livetv. And it actually works. To get it up, I had to swear on a stack of bibles I was a Verizon subscriber. I can now pipe CNBC (or other Internet TV show) to my big screen TV via an HDMI cable connected via the Mini Display-Port to HDMI adapter, my ThinkPad  laptop needs, viz:

To buy this $14 gadget from Amazon (which your laptop probably needs also), go here. This stuff is not easy, But when it finally works, the picture you get on your TV is acceptable. Not HD, but OK.  Very useful for traveling, or saving money on TV in your vacation house. Or just simply trying to get flavor of where Internet TV is headed. And maybe cutting your cable and cell phone bills a little.

The end of an era. Radio Shack store in the Westfield Center in Palm Desert, CA. last Saturday.

I bought three cables from them. Two worked. One didn’t. Par for the course.

They were still selling breadboards and components for making your own circuit boards. When was the last time someone did that? Thirty years ago? Amazing Radio Shack lasted so long.

What does ISIS really want? They appear to want an empire, akin to the Ottoman Empire. right now they control an area greater than Great Britain and they’re attracting thousands of new recruits every month! Few people know much about them. And few governments (like the U.S.) have a clue on how to respond to them. The Atlantic magazine has just published a major piece on ISIS. The writer traveled the globe interviewing experts and  participants. This is the best piece ever written on ISIS. It wasn’t cheap. Here are a few excerpts:

+ The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse.

+ The group seized Mosul, Iraq, last June, and already rules an area larger than the United Kingdom. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi has been its leader since May 2010, but until last summer, his most recent known appearance on film was a grainy mug shot from a stay in U.S. captivity at Camp Bucca during the occupation of Iraq. Then, on July 5 of last year, he stepped into the pulpit of the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, to deliver a Ramadan sermon as the first caliph in generations — upgrading his resolution from grainy to high-definition, and his position from hunted guerrilla to commander of all Muslims. The inflow of jihadists that followed, from around the world, was unprecedented in its pace and volume, and is continuing.

Our ignorance of the Islamic State is in some ways understandable: It is a hermit kingdom; few have gone there and returned. Baghdadi has spoken on camera only once. But his address, and the Islamic State’s countless other propaganda videos and encyclicals, are online, and the caliphate’s supporters have toiled mightily to make their project knowable. We can gather that their state rejects peace as a matter of principle; that it hungers for genocide; that its religious views make it constitutionally incapable of certain types of change, even if that change might ensure its survival; and that it considers itself a harbinger of-and headline player in-the imminent end of the world.

The Islamic State, also known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS), follows a distinctive variety of Islam whose beliefs about the path to the Day of Judgment matter to its strategy, and can help the West know its enemy and predict its behavior. Its rise to power is less like the triumph of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt (a group whose leaders the Islamic State considers apostates) than like the realization of a dystopian alternate reality in which David Koresh or Jim Jones survived to wield absolute power over not just a few hundred people, but some 8 million.

We have misunderstood the nature of the Islamic State in at least two ways. First, we tend to see jihadism as monolithic, and to apply the logic of al-Qaeda to an organization that has decisively eclipsed it. The Islamic State supporters I spoke with still refer to Osama bin Laden as “Sheikh Osama,” a title of honor. But jihadism has evolved since al-Qaeda’s heyday, from about 1998 to 2003, and many jihadists disdain the group’s priorities and current leadership.

Bin Laden viewed his terrorism as a prologue to a caliphate he did not expect to see in his lifetime. His organization was flexible, operating as a geographically diffuse network of autonomous cells. The Islamic State, by contrast, requires territory to remain legitimate, and a top-down structure to rule it. (Its bureaucracy is divided into civil and military arms, and its territory into provinces.)

+ Following takfiri doctrine, the Islamic State is committed to purifying the world by killing vast numbers of people. The lack of objective reporting from its territory makes the true extent of the slaughter unknowable, but social-media posts from the region suggest that individual executions happen more or less continually, and mass executions every few weeks.

+ Centuries have passed since the wars of religion ceased in Europe, and since men stopped dying in large numbers because of arcane theological disputes. Hence, perhaps, the incredulity and denial with which Westerners have greeted news of the theology and practices of the Islamic State. Many refuse to believe that this group is as devout as it claims to be, or as backward-looking or apocalyptic as its actions and statements suggest.

Their skepticism is comprehensible. In the past, Westerners who accused Muslims of blindly following ancient scriptures came to deserved grief from academics-notably the late Edward Said-who pointed out that calling Muslims “ancient” was usually just another way to denigrate them. Look instead, these scholars urged, to the conditions in which these ideologies arose-the bad governance, the shifting social mores, the humiliation of living in lands valued only for their oil.

+ According to Bernard Haykel (the foremost secular authority on the Islamic State’s ideology), the ranks of the Islamic State are deeply infused with religious vigor. Koranic quotations are ubiquitous. “Even the foot soldiers spout this stuff constantly,” Haykel said. “They mug for their cameras and repeat their basic doctrines in formulaic fashion, and they do it all the time.” He regards the claim that the Islamic State has distorted the texts of Islam as preposterous, sustainable only through willful ignorance. “People want to absolve Islam,” he said. “It’s this `Islam is a religion of peace’ mantra. As if there is such a thing as `Islam’! It’s what Muslims do, and how they interpret their texts.” Those texts are shared by all Sunni Muslims, not just the Islamic State. “And these guys have just as much legitimacy as anyone else.”

+ In Haykel’s estimation, the fighters of the Islamic State are authentic throwbacks to early Islam and are faithfully reproducing its norms of war. This behavior includes a number of practices that modern Muslims tend to prefer not to acknowledge as integral to their sacred texts. “Slavery, crucifixion, and beheadings are not something that freakish [jihadists] are cherry-picking from the medieval tradition,” Haykel said. Islamic State fighters “are smack in the middle of the medieval tradition and are bringing it wholesale into the present day.”

+ Leaders of the Islamic State have taken emulation of Muhammad as strict duty, and have revived traditions that have been dormant for hundreds of years. “What’s striking about them is not just the literalism, but also the seriousness with which they read these texts,” Haykel said. “There is an assiduous, obsessive seriousness that Muslims don’t normally have.”

Before the rise of the Islamic State, no group in the past few centuries had attempted more-radical fidelity to the Prophetic model than the Wahhabis of 18th-century Arabia. They conquered most of what is now Saudi Arabia, and their strict practices survive in a diluted version of Sharia there.

+ If al-Qaeda wanted to revive slavery, it never said so. And why would it? Silence on slavery probably reflected strategic thinking, with public sympathies in mind: when the Islamic State began enslaving people, even some of its supporters balked. Nonetheless, the caliphate has continued to embrace slavery and crucifixion without apology. “We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women,” Adnani, the spokesman, promised in one of his periodic valentines to the West. “If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it, and they will sell your sons as slaves at the slave market.”

+ Before the caliphate, “maybe 85 percent of the Sharia was absent from our lives,” Choudary told me. “These laws are in abeyance until we have khilafa”-a caliphate-“and now we have one.” Without a caliphate, for example, individual vigilantes are not obliged to amputate the hands of thieves they catch in the act. But create a caliphate, and this law, along with a huge body of other jurisprudence, suddenly awakens. In theory, all Muslims are obliged to immigrate to the territory where the caliph is applying these laws.

+ All Muslims acknowledge that God is the only one who knows the future. But they also agree that he has offered us a peek at it, in the Koran and in narrations of the Prophet. The Islamic State differs from nearly every other current jihadist movement in believing that it is written into God’s script as a central character. It is in this casting that the Islamic State is most boldly distinctive from its predecessors, and clearest in the religious nature of its mission.

+ Muslims can say that slavery is not legitimate now, and that crucifixion is wrong at this historical juncture. Many say precisely this. But they cannot condemn slavery or crucifixion outright without contradicting the Koran and the example of the Prophet. “The only principled ground that the Islamic State’s opponents could take is to say that certain core texts and traditional teachings of Islam are no longer valid,” Bernard Haykel says. That really would be an act of apostasy.

Read the entire Atlantic piece here.

Australians. We know three things about them:

+ Australia is the land where the men are men and the sheep (of which there are many) are scared.

+ When asked if there are sheep in his background, Australians will answer “Naaaah.”

+ An Irishman flies to Australia. He hands over his passport to Customs. The officer says, :”Do you have any felonies on your record?”

The Irishman replies, “Is that still a requirement to get in?”

Harry Newton who had a lovely long weekend, playing tennis and reading. You got to kiss a lot of frogs in this business of finding the perfect investment — which is still your own business.

We have only the teeniest vision of how destroyed parts of Syria, Iraq, Libya, etc. are. Here’s Kobani in Northern Syria after ISIS tried in vain to take the town over. These images stuck with me all weekend.

For more photos of Kobani, click on here and here. Before this, Kobani had a population of 50,000. They’ve now all fled.