Tautology of the Skeptical Sinner

In other news, Bernanke also believes that the Bigfoot body was not a hoax.

Personally, I’d listen to Buffet more than the Fed chairman. This is nothing but another straw for the bulls to grasp at, boys and girls, nothing but a self-delusional bear market rally.

Next week will be a little up and down, but when we push past September, its going to be a Dark October.

It’s a great time to be short on financials.

(I’m short on Bank of America corp at the time of writing)

While I’m thankful that confidence is surging again, I’m too plugged in to the economy to think that this is anything but a short term Bear Market Rally.

Don’t people read? Can’t they hear the desperation in the Real Estate and Automotive sectors? Don’t they understand that the tangled mess of the Subprime CDOs is still ready to bite?

I’m short on Citi and Bank of America, and I expect them to both drop substantially by the end of the year.

I don’t mind if I lose money on these options, because if I do - it will mean that the financials did manage to get their sh*t back together and that the economy won’t be in the deep freeze for much longer.

I’m going with a blend of Puts (Options) with Citi and Bank of America, Jan 09 date on the expectation that the value of these options will rise.

.CMC - 15.00 Strike Price (Meaning a 25% drop or worse, in the stock price of Citi between now and Jan 09) - Currently trading at $0.93 - I imagine any seriously bad news (Which I’m expecting) will put the value of this option up to $1.50 or more for a 50% + gain.

.BACME is another one I want to get in on, but the price right now is a little more than I would like. Its a strike price of $25.00, and trading at $2.04 today, meaning that Bank of America shares need to fall $8 - I would expect these to go as high as $4.00 if Bank of America gets more bad subprime fallout. My target price is around $1.80 before I buy these puts.

If you’re not familiar with Options, please keep in mind that it is essentially gambling. Never work options if you are unfamiliar with the risks.

If you’re looking for a long hold investment, I’m liking ACI - they’re coal, and if you don’t think that the Green Revolution is going to fly all the way, they’re definitely a sound long term aquisition as an exporter of coal. A Strong dollar, or Agressive Eco-legislation will push the price down further, but ultimately, Energy is a long term growth product, and there are tons of coal burning power plants around the world.

I came across two excellent opinion pieces.

One from the LA Times 
“The United States’ so-called war on drugs brings to mind the old saying that if you find yourself trapped in a deep hole, stop digging. Yet, last week, the Senate approved an aid package to combat drug trafficking in Mexico and Central America, with a record $400 million going to Mexico and $65 million to Central America.
The United States has been spending $69 billion a year worldwide for the last 40 years, for a total of $2.5 trillion, on drug prohibition — with little to show for it. Is anyone actually benefiting from this war? Six groups come to mind.”

And One from Matt Hutchens from the MPP
“For almost forty years, America has been engaged in a war which has cost us trillions of dollars and ruined the lives of millions of our citizens. We have been fighting against drugs in a street war across the country. The definition enemy combatant has changed through the course of this conflict, first encompassing only the smugglers and distributors, then growing to include users, and now reaching beyond our borders to the farmers in the developing world who produce the source crops. Today we are told that all these parties are contributing to the forces of Terror, and that the whole chain of enemy forces is complicit in a conspiracy against us. If this were true, though, wouldn’t we disarm our enemies by taking control of the economic forces that are the source of their power?”

Prohibition fails. Prohibition puts money in the hands of those who have no disregard for law, order, decency or justice. That money isn’t taxed, or accounted for. It’s laundered and used to buy guns. It’s used to corrupt law enforcement officers. It’s used to further spread the insidious influence of the drug gangs through violence, intimidation, with reckless disregard for the innocents who are unfortunate enough to get in the way.

Yet it isn’t drugs that create these monsters. It’s policy. Just like Mob violence over liquor gambling and prostitution has drastically waned since the laws regulating them have gotten less restrictive, the same effect will occur when politicians stop trying to “BE TOUGH ON CRIME” and start “Being SMART about crime”.

Billions of dollars a year are being wasted on fighting a war that just takes fathers away to prison, and puts dollars into the hands of crooks. The crooks eventually get taken down, and like the hydra, a dozen try to take the place of the severed head. After all, this is a simple matter of risk vs reward. The Risk is prison or death, the reward is riches - and when the ability to succeed in this bloody business is measured only by how willing to take that risk you are, it’s not surprising that those with nothing to lose are throwing their lives away on the chance that those riches can be theirs.

I’m not a drug user myself, and I really have no desire to be able to purchase narcotics legally. But the simple math is this- the cost of this war is too high. In blood and Tax dollars. Legalize it, regulate it, and tax it - then just like taxes from Alcohol, educate and rehabilitate excessive abusers.

We don’t have the money to burn on this morality crusade. Lets stop spending money on protecting us from us.

Both, apparently, found this story on Rush Limbaugh’s site.

“Just yesterday — this is not anything that hasn’t happened before but it just continued to happen. Just yesterday, we learned that owners of land will not be able to develop it in Montana because of a grouse, a grouse population.  The ultimate aim is to get the grouse put on the endangered species list so the owners of that property can’t do diddly-squat with it.  There’s oil underneath that land, and there’s an opportunity for developers to make residential areas out of it or what have you.  So there are people active in this country, doing everything they can to destroy the country’s ability to grow, to remain prosperous, and to remain a superpower.”

For those of you, like me, who prefer their news without frothing, the Denver Post has a more complete story here: http://www.denverpost.com/politics/ci_9589531

Short summary: The departing Bush administration are trying to open up more oil drilling sites in Montana, Colorado and Utah. Many of these sites are home to dwindling populations of native species, and as such, development of this land has environmentalists deeply troubled.

What it comes down to is we either break our dependence on oil or we break a few eggs to continue sating our need for gasoline. It truly is a shame that these lands are protected by innocent animals, and not some native human population we have no problem displacing. Or invading.

Mankind has been devouring this world since the dawn of time, if environmentalists are correct, and believe that mankind needs to stop doing irreperable harm to the ecology to avoid long-term, unforseen and devastating results, then we can’t just draw circles on the map and say “ok this part’s protected”.

The population of the U.S. is growing, and will continue to grow exponentially. Short of a pandemic that only affects the human population, we’re going to continue to adversely impact nature. Species will continue to become extinct and greed, sloth and indifference will speed up that process.

In the meantime, however, expending energy time and funding on trying to save every single piece of flora and fauna is going to be a) insanely futile b) insanely expensive. Does this world really miss the Dodo? The same liberal minds who support ecologically sound policy, are also thinking people who for the most part support the theory of evolution. (If not, they can just pray for a divine solution and peacefully go about their day). Nature will adapt as it always has.

We need a compromise. We can’t go willy nilly wiping out everything that stands in our way of a quick buck, but we also can’t realistically save everything specie on the planet, unless we cut population growth to zero. Immediately. (By the way, I’m a huge supporter of zero population growth - I just don’t see it happening any time soon)

So do we really need to protect ALL of these endagered species? Or should we give them a timetable to adapt or die?

And will the earth really miss the Sage Grouse? The Tambalacoque seems to be getting by just fine without the Dodo.

Responsible. Sane. Measured.

Sadly, the only ones getting the money to make noise about one view point or the other are extremists.

I saw an Inconvenient Truth, and it was an excellent documentary, well presented and quite terrifying.

The media helpfully let us know each week of some other sign that the planet is warming up.

Those who propose that it is man’s impact on the atmosphere, similar to CFCs on the ozone layer, want us to adopt a radical shift in eco-policies, and they say we need to do it now.

The cost: They don’t talk about the specifics too much, but by getting rid of cheap but dirty energy like coal, the price of energy is going to go up. Guess who pays for that: You. Higher Electricity bills, even higher prices in the Grocery Store, in fact higher prices everywhere - the only thing sure to go down in price is cars - non-hybrid cars that is. Oh, and governments are going to pay for it using your taxes.

Fear is a great motivator, and having the population focusing on this end of days scenario is a good distraction from the other things we ought to be doing.

The reason I’m still skeptical is that we do not have accurate temperature records of the climate changes the earth has been through - we only have the last 250 years… we can draw conclusions based off archeological evidence and historical accounts of both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age - but we can’t directly corrolate the impact of the Industrial Revolution and the CO² we’ve pumped into the atmosphere compared to the solar cycles others say is the primary driver of climate change.

Why do most ancient cultures have The Great Flood in their mythos?

I am not a blind skeptic, there is a lot of evidence that man may be heating up the planet… but this planet’s been around a hell of a lot longer than we have, and she’s a tough old bitch.

I’m still on the fence. But if global warming were a stock would you buy or sell. http://wattsupwiththat.wordpress.com/2008/06/12/temperature-stock-report/

Then there’s the visual evidence http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/north-pole-ice-melt-460608