Favorite short from the Robin Hood Conference. Weird trading pattern. It dropped as the talented speaker, Anthony Bozza of Lakewood Capital, explained the disaster that was Universal Insurance Holdings (UVE), then bounced, then dropped. Probably still a good short — but the company’s now widely known as a disaster and that could cause things like short squeezes.
Nike doing good for us. It’s announced a $12 billion stock-repurchase authorization, a 14% dividend hike, and a 2-for-1 stock split, which will go into effect on December 24. My friends swear Nike’s Air Max are the most comfortable shoes they’ve ever worn. Here’s the latest iteration. Do not wear them to the theater. Your wife will not be pleased. Been there. Done that.
Talk about an interesting five-day chart:
At Robin Hood Bill Ackman pounded the table very persuasively for Valeant. He argued that virtually every pharma company had its share of problems — FDA subpoenas, violations, etc. — and had moved along, survived and thrived.
Latest Tips, from personal experience:
+ Never put a coating on your spectacles. The online providers will try and get you for an extra $6. But the coating doesn’t work. “Been there, done that.”
+ Check. Check. Check. Check that the corrections you asked for were made.
+ Not all toilets are the same. There are cheap ones and expensive ones. Toto toilets are the best. You can fix others with a new flap and a new chain. But it’s a pain.
+ You may receive this email:: “Unbeglichene Rechnung 17.11.2015 Buchungsnummer 41817440“. It is a scam. Delete the message instantly. Do not open the attachment.
+ If your bank suddenly closes your corporate bank account, ask them if they didn’t confuse you with some other company with the same name — but with a different federal tax ID. Don’t laugh. It just happened to a friend of mine.
+ To repeat: never put more than one “action” item in an email. Your recipient will answer your first question and ignore all your others.
+ Your bicycle will be easier to pedal better if you keep its tires rock hard, like 100 lbs.
+ The higher the voltage of your Black and Deck Dustbuster, the better it will work. Anything 14.4 volts or higher is better. The best is 20 volt lithium.
+ Always exercise every day. My older friends who haven’t moved in 30 years are now reaping the consequences. Their bodies are falling apart.
+ Uniqlo has regular sales. It’s worth getting on their mailing list, just for the sales. I’m addicted to their ultra light-weight down jackets and vests.
+ Wired works much better than WiFi wireless in our home network. This little $20 gadget will extend a wired Ethernet network.
This is what I got this morning using it:
Works like a charm. To buy it from Amazon click here.
How to fight ISIS. Everyone has a different theory, most of them wrong. Because I traveled in those areas I’ve always been fascinated with them. Here’s a short piece from The Week magazine. It’s pretty good. Today comes news of yet another terrorist hotel killing — three dead and over 100 held hostage. This time in Bamako, the capital of Mali:
The demoralizing truth about ISIS by Damon Linker
Did you experience a surge of righteous satisfaction the moment you heard that France had begun bombing Raqqa, Syria, in retaliation for ISIS’s brazen attack on central Paris? I sure did. But my satisfaction was mixed with foreboding.
To judge from their public statements, everyone from French President François Hollande and U.S. President Barack Obama on down through the entire Republican and Democratic presidential fields appears to believe that there is a military solution to the problem of the Islamic State. But there isn’t.
Yes, the spectacular and bloody attack on a long-time friend and ally of the United States by a singularly repellant organization requires a military response. Yes, we can and must work hard to protect ourselves against future attacks – both through intelligence gathering and police work at home and abroad, and through targeted attacks on the terrorist organization’s senior leadership. But we need to be honest with ourselves about the nature of the enemy and its capacity to withstand our best efforts to destroy it.
Such honesty appears to be in short supply.
Consider: My statement above, about the need to gather intelligence and use police and military force, could have been written about al Qaeda in the fall of 2001. Indeed, it was written, over and over again, and delivered by George W. Bush in his September 20, 2001 speech to Congress and the American people in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
What followed was more than a decade of precisely what just about everyone is calling for now. First we attacked al Qaeda in Afghanistan. Then we took the fight to other countries, using covert ops, guided missiles, and drone strikes. Then we invaded Iraq and overthrew its government, which gave al Qaeda a new base of operations and a chance to do battle with the American military directly.
This American occupying force, which (especially after Bush’s troop surge) was vastly larger than what even the most hawkish commentators are advocating now for the escalating fight against ISIS, eventually degraded al Qaeda in Iraq, took out the broader organization’s senior leadership, and wore down its ability to launch attacks in the West. Then, at long last, we managed to kill Osama bin Laden. By the time President Obama completed our withdrawal from Iraq, most analysts considered al Qaeda to be vastly weaker than it once was.
That is, until the rise of a new terrorist threat – the Islamic State – which grew out of the chaos of the Syrian civil war.
Honesty requires that we face facts, no matter how demoralizing those facts may be. And the singular fact of our historical moment is that the Greater Middle East is in the midst of a massive, civilizational convulsion. This convulsion is marked by intense instability and violence. The violence takes the form of both conventional and asymmetrical warfare – and the latter, in the form of jihadism, radiates outward, periodically striking the West and other regions of the world.
Al Qaeda was an early expression of this reality. ISIS is the latest. And we have no reason at all to suppose it will be the last. Which is why optimistic pronouncements about the Islamic State being contained and weakened, whether they come from the president, indefatigably naïve journalists, or perennial fans of military adventurism, miss the point entirely.
If ISIS really were an “Islamic State,” if it controlled fixed territory with defined borders, then it might be possible to destroy it using military force. But ISIS isn’t a state, at least not yet. It is an idea – an idea that is both a radically revisionist (and apocalyptic) form of Islam and an anti-colonialist program that seeks to erase the national borders drawn by Western imperial powers 100 years ago and substitute a transnational Islamic empire modeled on the caliphate established by the immediate successors to Prophet Muhammad 14 centuries ago.
Do I seriously believe that this idea will be realized? No, I don’t think that vast numbers of Muslims from around the globe will respond to ISIS’s call for an ingathering of believers to avenge Islam’s civilizational humiliation at the hands of the infidels and embrace a form of postmodern neo-medieval barbarism in the Mesopotamian desert.
But it doesn’t much matter. Scholar Olivier Roy may be right that ISIS “recruits only at the margins,” but those margins contain quite enough people to wreak an awful lot of havoc. It doesn’t take many. Thanks to social media and other forms of 21st-century communication technologies, a virtual community of angry, disaffected Muslims living in Syria, the Parisian banlieues, immigrant neighborhoods of Belgium, and anywhere else on Earth can band together to plot and provide logistical support for bloody attacks that will supposedly advance the Islamist idea with nothing more sophisticated than a handful of rifles.
Ideas can only be vanquished on the battlefield when they are instantiated in a place with concrete institutions that can be decisively conquered and crushed. The idea that motivates jihadists from Raqqa and Tripoli to Brussels and beyond isn’t like that. It lives mostly in the minds of those devoted to it, and so it can only be defeated by an alternative idea.
The Judeo-Christian and secular post-Christian West is singularly ill-suited to supply such an alternative idea to people consumed by visions of Islamic purity, grandeur, supremacy, and revenge. It will have to come from deep within Islamic civilization itself.
Does this mean that ISIS poses an “existential threat,” as Republicans are so fond of putting it? Not at all. But that doesn’t mean it won’t inspire fear, drain blood and treasure, destabilize economies, undermine civil liberties, and provoke harmful right-wing reactions throughout the West for the foreseeable future.
And it’s not at all clear what we can do about it – beyond continuing to play the high-stakes game of Whac-A-Mole that’s already consumed American foreign policy and its intelligence services for 14 years.
That’s called (barely) managing a problem, not solving it.
It means that at the moment the best we can reasonably hope for is to protect ourselves, however imperfectly.
And wait for the storm to pass.
Today’s Economist delves into the problem:
It concludes pessimistically:
Military force is not enough on its own, though. It will make the rest of the world safer in the short run, but the critics are right that Islamic terror will end only when the Middle East lives in peace. The parallel aim, therefore, must be for regional powers to stop fighting through their proxies, and for the creation of federal states in Syria and Iraq that give Sunnis, Shias, Alawites and Kurds confidence that they can live together with decent representation in government. That requires strengthening the administration in Baghdad. And it means bringing an end to Syria’s civil war. Alas, judging by last week’s meeting in Vienna, such a settlement is still distant indeed.
The diplomacy will not be easy and military action should not be forestalled by its lack of progress. But the pursuit of political settlements must be earnest and involve all the parties, including Russia and Iran. The sticking-point is Mr Assad, whom both countries support. If there is to be peace in the remnants of his country, he has too much blood on his hands to remain in power indefinitely. Yet Vladimir Putin has his own jihadist threat-exacerbated by the departure of Islamists from the south Caucasus to Syria. Just perhaps, Mr Putin can be persuaded that Russia does not need Mr Assad to get rid of IS and also end up with an ally in western Syria.
Raqqa seems a terribly long way from the streets of Paris on a carefree Friday night. But the killings showed how easily violent ideas cross borders. Innocent lives are still at risk. They will probably be at risk for many years. All the more reason to act now, against every link in the chain.
Matt Taibbi from Rolling Stone steps in with his pessimistic conclusion:
Conventional wisdom in America is finally out of ideas with regard to the Middle East. No matter what any of the candidates on either side of the aisle say publicly about the Islamic State, privately nobody has a clue. The only thing that everyone can agree on is that ISIS scares the hell out of people, and nobody wants to get within 100 miles of even one of those crazy bastards.
Once, there were people like Friedman and Donald Rumsfeld who thought Middle Easterners everywhere, even potential terrorists, would get with our program after one whiff of a Cinnabon (and after experiencing the honor of freely voting for an American-sponsored politician).
But we’re finally realizing that large parts of the region are immune to our powers of persuasion. There’s not much percentage in forcing 21st-century Americana on a group of angry young religious cultists who think the 8th century smacks of dissolute modernism.
These people are nuts. They commit atrocities over beard length and think al-Qaeda are corrupt moderates. Any day now, they’ll start emulating the radicals in Woody Allen’s Bananas and begin forcing their citizens at gunpoint to wear their underwear on the outside.
God knows what to do about them, but can we at least stop trying to match stupid with stupid? No more can-do capitalist evangelism, no more harebrained ideas for bringing progress to the region. Let’s just get the Manson family surrounded and leave our big ideas at home, for once.
Cockpit announcement
“Ladies and Gentlemen, this is your captain. Welcome to Flight 293, non-stop from London Heathrow to New York. The weather ahead is good, so we should have an uneventful flight. So, sit back, relax, and… OH…MY GOD!
Silence followed…
Some moments later, the captain came back on the intercom. “Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m sorry if I scared you. While I was talking to you, a flight attendant accidentally spilled coffee in my lap. You should see the front of my pants!
Then from the back of the plane, a Newfie passenger yelled, “For the luvva Jaysus ye should see da back of mine!”
Harry Newton who has one reader who loves looking at Harry’s grandchildren. He tells me that my photos assure him that his grandchildren are more advanced, more beautiful and more intelligent. He sees my grandchildren as the S&P500 benchmark. which any moron investor (or grandparent) can beat.
Drum roll. On the left is Sophie. On the right is Eleanor. This S&P500 is booming. Eat your heart out.
What the hell is wrong with max?
He is a troll. Just about every blog or website has one.
An interesting thought Friday night from an old friend now in crazy Calif (we make Washington look sane.). For the last few decades, America has feminized its men. It’s no longer normal to join the military or even play rough sports except those on athletic scholarships. Even swings and such are outlawed in playgrounds and every level of school teaches and enforces sensitivity treatment and training. Look at the garbage today at Yale and UoMO. Sissies and weaklings are the model. Then look at the middle east male model and its insanely vicious cruel culture and atmosphere for men. Be tough or die.
There are lots of answers for dealing with ISIS and their ilk, but our pussycat media, politicians and liberals don’t have the guts to take action and follow through, a long tough critical job. But if we don’t, and it’s quite likely that we won’t, the future is going to be MUCH worse and we and Western Society will pay the price. Every civilization discovers this, just look at the demise over time of the Roman Empire….and many others.
Wow! Talk about a generation gap, pahowley. We were raised by your generation to be kind and respectful to our fellow citizens and now one of your is calling us pussycats? Look in the mirror and see what you are missing.
We don’t like to join the military because the politicians of your generation like to show how “tough” they are by sending us to start and fight wars. It used to be, your generation fought wars to defend their respective nations. Now, we have these wars with sponsors who will reap immense benefits with every bullet fired, only to throw us out like used tissues when we come back home. Now, we have wars that your generation itches to start just because someone in some backward nation hurt your feelings.
Interestingly enough, I am glad I was raised by those who are from your generation. I would much rather be labeled a pussycat by your generation for knowing that your generation taught me to respect not just my fellow citizen but my fellow mankind; to understand that the world is full of people who live, think, and act unlike my and my fellow citizens and that is just part of nature; to know and understand that there are people elsewhere who hate me for my values and would love to destroy me and my fellow citizens and accept the fact that there is nothing on earth that I can do to make them like me and my fellow citizens which seems to be a lesson that your generation will never learn; to understand that the world is big enough for all types and accept the fact that I can’t export my ways and force others to accept them at gunpoint.
My generations thanks you for the way you’ve raised us and for also teaching us from your failures.
It’s funny that every parent & grandparent thinks their kid is the cutest. Even when this is clearly not the case.
Like most from Australia you are a coward. You should be embarrassed to be from such a chicken shot nation.
It is just possible that Obama does not try to end the war with ISIS because he knows it is impossible to end any war in the Middle East. Besides, he does not want to harm his cousins.
Harry-
Regarding “Your bicycle will be easier to pedal better if you keep its tires rock hard, like 100 lbs.”
You are correct……much easier to pedal. On the downside, it’s a much harder ride. And one day you will discover your tires are totally flat. They exploded because they weren’t made to take that kind of pressure. I discovered this from personal experience at age 12.
And your prostrate hurts.
Modern tires can easily take 100lb pressure. I ride with them at that pressure every day. And so far, they haven’t exploded — even on New York City streeets.
Everything’s changing, Harry. When I was a kid, bike tires were soft and I was hard. Now, it’s reversed. Ride safely!