September 2005

Jonathan Harvey wades through flood waters after rescuing his dog 'Cuddles' from his flooded home after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast Monday in Gulfport, Miss. (AP/John Bazemore)

August 30, 2005

Yesterday, the market action was excellent, which surprised me given the hurricane.  Today it is not so good, but still I am ahead.  TEX, however, was a great disappointment. I was being patient with that one, but now that there is an SEC investigation, there is no point in holding it.  No telling what the investigation will discover.

August 31, 2005

Doing OK so far.  I made the mistake of not thinking of companies like BMHC until today.  That one should have been bought yesterday.

I wonder if the building codes would allow this in my neighborhood.  Part of the Burning Man Festival

Sept 8, 2005

Sudden sell-off on BMHC today, so I just took profits.  The move was really exaggerated.  Also, SHLD sold off big time, but I am keeping it, and if I sell more covered calls I will break just about even on the cost basis.

I watched David Gregory object to the evasion of the President's press secretary. I do not see how people like the secretary, who is paid to evade and say nothing, can live with themselves.  Definitely in the total spin zone.  I guess he just laughs all the way to the bank.  I would love to see him on O'Reilly's show, but he would never come on.  And O'Reilly would give him a few chances and then just cut off the sound.  I saw him do that once, and it was priceless.

September 11, 2005

A four year anniversary of the terrorist attack on NYC and the Pentagon.  Are we any safer?  Will tomorrow be the date of another attack?

Meanwhile, a few reflections on what happened in New Orleans.  Obviously the mayor and the governor were not good leaders.  But what about the people themselves?  Were so many of them robbed of their initiative by being told over and over that they were victims?  From Steyn:

Readers may recall my words from a week ago on the approaching Katrina: "We relish the opportunity to rise to the occasion. And on the whole we do. Oh, to be sure, there are always folks who panic or loot. But most people don't, and many are capable of extraordinary acts of hastily improvised heroism." What the hell was I thinking? I should be fired for that. Well, someone should be fired. I say that in the spirit of the Mayor of New Orleans, Ray Nagin, the Anti-Giuliani, a Mayor Culpa who always knows where to point the finger.

As General Blum said at Saturday's Defence Department briefing: "No one anticipated the disintegration or the erosion of the civilian police force in New Orleans."

Indeed, they eroded faster than the levees. Several hundred cops are reported to have walked off the job. To give the city credit, it has a lovely "Comprehensive Emergency Management Plan" for hurricanes. The only flaw in the plan is that the person charged with putting it into effect is the mayor. And he didn't...

But I don't want to blame any single figure: the anti-Bush crowd have that act pretty much sewn up. I'd say New Orleans's political failure is symptomatic of a broader failure.

I got an e-mail over the weekend from a US Army surgeon just back in Afghanistan after his wedding. Changing planes in Kuwait for the final leg to Bagram and confronted by yet another charity box for Katrina relief, he decided that this time he'd pass. "I'd had it up to here," he wrote, "with the passivity, the whining, and the when-are-they-going-to-do-something blame game."...

Consider the signature image of the flood: an aerial shot of 255 school buses neatly parked at one city lot, their fuel tanks leaking gasoline into the urban lake. An enterprising blogger, Bryan Preston, worked out that each bus had 66 seats, which meant that the vehicles at just that one lot could have ferried out 16,830 people. Instead of entrusting its most vulnerable citizens to the gang-infested faecal hell of the Superdome, New Orleans had more than enough municipal transport on hand to have got almost everyone out in a couple of runs last Sunday.

Why didn't they? Well, the mayor didn't give the order. OK, but how about school board officials, or the fellows with the public schools transportation department, or the guy who runs that motor pool, or the individual bus drivers? If it ever occurred to any of them that these were potentially useful evacuation assets, they kept it to themselves.

So the first school bus to escape New Orleans and make it to safety in Texas was one that had been abandoned on a city street. A party of sodden citizens, ranging from the elderly to an eight-day-old baby, were desperate to get out, hopped aboard and got teenager Jabbor Gibson to drive them 13 hours non-stop to Houston. He'd never driven a bus before, and the authorities back in New Orleans may yet prosecute him. For rescuing people without a permit?...

My mistake was to think that the citizenry of the Big Easy would rise to the great rallying cry of Todd Beamer: "Are you ready, guys? Let's roll!" Instead, the spirit of the week was summed up by a gentleman called Mike Franklin, taking time out of his hectic schedule of looting to speak to the Associated Press: "People who are oppressed all their lives, man, it's an opportunity to get back at society."

Unlike 9/11, when the cult of victimhood was temporarily suspended in honour of the many real, actual victims under the rubble, in New Orleans everyone claimed the mantle of victim, from the incompetent mayor to the "oppressed" guys wading through the water with new DVD players under each arm.

Welfare culture is bad not just because, as in Europe, it's bankrupting the state, but because it enfeebles the citizenry, it erodes self-reliance and resourcefulness.

New Orleans is a party town in the middle of a welfare swamp and, like many parties, it doesn't look so good when someone puts the lights up. I'll always be grateful to a burg that gave us Louis Armstrong and Louis Prima, and I'll always love Satch's great record of Do You Know What it Means to Miss New Orleans? But, after this last week, I'm not sure I would.

And from Robert Tracinski:

There were many decent, innocent people trapped in New Orleans when the deluge hit—but they were trapped alongside large numbers of people from two groups: criminals—and wards of the welfare state, people selected, over decades, for their lack of initiative and self-induced helplessness. The welfare wards were a mass of sheep—on whom the incompetent administration of New Orleans unleashed a pack of wolves.

All of this is related, incidentally, to the incompetence of the city government, which failed to plan for a total evacuation of the city, despite the knowledge that this might be necessary. In a city corrupted by the welfare state, the job of city officials is to ensure the flow of handouts to welfare recipients and patronage to political supporters—not to ensure a lawful, orderly evacuation in case of emergency.

No one has really reported this story, as far as I can tell. In fact, some are already actively distorting it, blaming President Bush, for example, for failing to personally ensure that the Mayor of New Orleans had drafted an adequate evacuation plan. The worst example is an execrable piece from the Toronto Globe and Mail, by a supercilious Canadian who blames the chaos on American "individualism." But the truth is precisely the opposite: the chaos was caused by a system that was the exact opposite of individualism.

What Hurricane Katrina exposed was the psychological consequences of the welfare state. What we consider "normal" behavior in an emergency is behavior that is normal for people who have values and take the responsibility to pursue and protect them. People with values respond to a disaster by fighting against it and doing whatever it takes to overcome the difficulties they face. They don't sit around and complain that the government hasn't taken care of them. And they don't use the chaos of a disaster as an opportunity to prey on their fellow men.

But what about criminals and welfare parasites? Do they worry about saving their houses and property? They don't, because they don't own anything. Do they worry about what is going to happen to their businesses or how they are going to make a living? They never worried about those things before. Do they worry about crime and looting? But living off of stolen wealth is a way of life for them.

People living in piles of their own trash, while petulantly complaining that other people aren't doing enough to take care of them and then shooting at those who come to rescue them—this is not just a description of the chaos at the Superdome. It is a perfect summary of the 40-year history of the welfare state and its public housing projects.

September 22, 2005

YUCK!  With the aftermath of Katrina, and with Rita bearing down on Galveston - Houston, and with the interest rate raised by the Fed (irresponsibly stupid, I think), it is time to move out of most things that do not stand to benefit directly from this stuff.  So I am mostly in energy and gold (although the gold stocks have not done as well as gold itself).  And maybe time for a short position as well, if it is not too late.

OK.  I went into the short ProFunds today, and the market rallied.  We will see what tomorrow brings.  Also, the energy stocks sold off when the hurricane changed course.  No way to play this volatility.

September 27, 2005

Yesterday was a really good day for my portfolio, if not for the markets in general.  Today I am giving some of that back.  I have two FastBreak systems I am trading now. The rest will be stuff from INVESTools and from the RealTime Trader.  I think I will drop my subscriptions to Zacks, since their ratings are included in INVESTools.  The current systems will not trade very often, at least compared to what I have been doing.

Just in Case You Wondered...

September 30, 2005

A decent month, if somewhat hectic.  I should never have bothered to put on the ProFunds hedge.  

 Account Value = 1,121,694.74