A Bear in the White House

Economies are fragile. Perception is very important in their behavior. Lack of confidence in a bank or a currency can be fatal, regardless of the underlying circumstances.
That is why this is so unusual. Told in a CNBC interview that Wall Street is "pretty calm" about the government shutdown and political infighting, Obama said: "This time I think Wall Street should be concerned.”
This is unprecedented in memory: A U.S. president talking down the stock market.
No confidence. No encouragement. No optimism. No offer at compromise.
Unheard of.
Incidentally, here is graph, a composite of the last 17 government shutdowns, describing the S and P behavior over time:

An Apple from the Postmodern Tree

In Hindu, "avatar", from the word meaning "descent", refers to the the descent of a god to earth in a human or other form. According to Wiki, it is usually translated into English as "incarnation", but more accurately as "appearance" or "manifestation." Modern computer lingo uses avatar as a substitute for oneself, an alternative personality or a representative of someone on-line or gaming. It is inevitable it would evolve into the academic world.

In 2002 an article appeared in the Dickensian, the magazine of the Dickens Fellowship, describing a meeting between Charles Dickens and Dostoevsky written by Stephanie Harvey. In it, the Russian novelist recalls the meeting in an 1878 letter to his doctor and friend S.D. Yanovksy. This letter and its review in the Dickensian has been written about and commented upon for a while. Most recently it was analyzed by Eric Naiman from the University of California in the Times Literary Supplement.

What emerges is a fraud, sizable and somewhat whimsical. The Dostoevsky letter does not exist.  Nor does Stephanie Harvey, at least as Stephanie Harvey. She is, instead, A.D.  (Arnold) Harvey, a disgruntled would-be male academic, a writer of literature and history, a man disappointed by his inability to get a teaching position, a man who seemingly falls somewhere between a bitter, angry social critic and an avuncular curmudgeon. For the last thirty years he has been Stephanie Harvey, Graham Headley, Trevor McGovern, John Schellenberger, Leo Bellingham (author of "Oxford: The Novel"), Michael Lindsay, Janis Blodnieks and Ludovico Parra--authors, critics, poets--writing, publishing, and often commenting  in scholarly journals and little magazines on one another. (He even, as Trevor McGovern, invented the new concept of "self-plagiarism" by publishing an article which in reality was chapter seven from Harvey's--his-- first book, "Britain in the Early 19th Century", with just the first and last sentence changed.) As Naiman wrote, "..[Harvey created]...a community of scholars who can analyse, supplement and occasionally even ruthlessly criticise each other's work."

The revelation has provoked outrage and angst. Peer review has suffered. Good and honest men humiliated. Resignations offered.

But in a postmodern  world of disbelief, uncertainty, misconception and inexactness no one should be surprised. Or indignant.

Cab Thoughts 10/2/13

"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be' – she always called me Elwood – 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."--Elwood P. Dowd

 

The Pirates started Liriano in the play-in because he was their consistently best pitcher, their strongest at home and very effective against left handers--the strength of Cincinnati's line-up--despite the fact he had a serious cold. Cincinnati started Queto, their historically best pitcher, despite the fact he had only pitched 12 innings in three months. Why?

Almost 90 elephants have been slaughtered by poachers who poisoned them with industrial cyanide, authorities in Zimbabwe said. Park spokesperson Caroline Washaya-Moyo told NBC News that 87 corpses had been found so far, all with their tusks removed.

The last time the rube Republicans refused to increase the debt ceiling and shut the government down they lost two House seats but gained two in the Senate.

Seth Klarman, the portfolio manager of The Baupost Group, is a very successful practitioner of the value investing strategy. In 1991 he wrote a book explaining the logic and practice of the approach called "The Margin of Safety." While it is viewed as a classic, it has never been reissued. The price has gone up to $2200.00 for a good copy, probably a lot more than the investments he recommended.

The Randolph County school board in North Carolina voted 6 to 1 to retract its ban on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man at school libraries.

Pope Francis is continuing his theme that the Catholic Church should be "a home for all," a "field hospital" on life's battlefield.
When asked specifically about homosexuality he replied, "Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free. It is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person." "It is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person" --what exactly does that mean for the Church to say?
A very shallow article in Huffington disparaged this comment as not going far enough. But this is a lot.

British towns that had all its men return from the First World War were known as the "Thankful Villages." There were 52. Towns that also had all its men return from the second war were known as the "Doubly Thankful Villages." There were 14. One was the curiously named Upper Slaughter, a small town which, incidentally, was bombed.

Who is....Alger Hiss?

Just more than half of Americans read at least one book for fun last year, according to an annual survey from the National Endowment for the Arts. More women than men read at least one work of literature, and 64- to 75-year-olds read more than any other age group.

Apparently the victory of Oracle Team USA in the America's Cup, where they had lost two points on a disqualifying penalty and struggled back winning an unheard of eight races in a row to beat the Austrailians who had match point for a week, is one of the greatest comebacks in the history of all sport. Don't know much about sailing, though.

Secretary of State John Kerry plans to sign a controversial U.N. treaty on arms regulation on Wednesday, a senior State Department official told Fox News -- despite warnings from lawmakers that the Senate will not ratify the agreement. So the executive just signs this stuff anyway?

In the data released by College Board, a full 57 percent of graduating seniors aren't ready to transition to college coursework, based on SAT results. The 1498 average total score for all test takers fell short of the 1550 SAT College and Career benchmark, which says students who score at or above that level have a 65 percent change of earning a B- average.

70,000 people attended the World Maker Faire this year in New York.

There are 10,750 hedge funds that control 2.2 Trillion investment dollars. 1600 funds control 99% of that money. 350 control 60%. So there is this hedge fund industry where data is collected and there is this smaller subset where the real numbers are.

Cuba announced Friday that its athletes will be allowed to sign contracts to compete in foreign leagues. Everyone is thinking baseball but their boxers are terrific.

Cassidy Lynn Campbell is a transgender girl in California who won a homecoming queen contest. Since then she has been brutalized and lauded in print by people who think she is either a brave standard bearer or nuts. Some of the stuff is quite vitriolic. After all, this is a child. But I have not seen the obvious question raised: how did this happen? Does this poor girl have a diagnosis that makes treatment reasonable or was this a personal decision that family and the medical profession supported? If the latter, what is the scientific criteria for such interference?

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2009/09/fundamentalist.html

David Gilmour, who said in an interview that he doesn't teach books by women or Chinese authors, has been roundly disowned by faculty members at the University of Toronto, where he teaches classes. Free speech has its limits, especially in universities.

In a recent baseball game A. J. Burnett got 23 "swings and misses" on his curveball in the seven innings he pitched. That was the highest number of "swings and misses" on a single type of pitch in a single game for the last five years. I am unsure which is more astonishing: that his curve was so good or that people know and care enough to calculate and store the information.

AAAAAnnnnddddd ..............a picture of a man on the island of Yap with the island stone currency:

Three Spendthrifts: A Fable

Three men walk into a Dublin bar they found with good reviews on their smart phone. They are told to their dismay that the establishment is a club with membership requirements. The men ask what the membership fee is as they plan to spend about 800 dollars on food and drinks and the money doesn't matter. The maître de says, in that case, he will just say they are members and allows them in, breaking the club rules. Later on in the night the three men are planning to leave. The maître de stops and tells them they should stay because Bono is coming  soon. The men decide to stay but after several hours of more outrageous spending their cards are maxed out and, with no Bono, they leave. In the cab home one looks up "Bono" on his phone and finds U2 is in Australia.

Moral: 1. Eventually the money will matter. 2. Someone who is dishonest to your advantage might as easily be dishonest to your disadvantage.

Axion's Annual Meeting

Axion is a small--and getting smaller--battery company that has replaced the negative lead electrode in the lead-acid battery with a carbon electrode (called a "PbC" battery). During charge and discharge, the positive electrode undergoes the same chemical reaction that occurs in a conventional lead acid battery, i.e. lead dioxide reacts with acid and sulphate ions to form lead sulphate and water. The main difference in the PbC battery is that the replacement  activated carbon electrode does not undergo a chemical reaction at all. Instead, the very high surface area activated carbon electrode stores the protons (H⁺) from the acid in a layer on the surface of the electrode and the protons move to the positive electrode during discharge where they are neutralized to form water. The result is reduced acid concentration swings from the charged to discharged state. This results in considerable less sulfate corrosion and a longer battery life.
Faraday is spinning.

The battery has other characteristics: significantly faster recharge rates and greater charge acceptance, significantly longer cycle lives in deep discharge applications, and minimal required maintenance.

The company has been suffering. They have gone to great lengths to keep up their financing as they continue their march from research and development to commercialization.

This is my take on the annual Axion meeting, a take riddled with my bad science, financial bias and fatigue:

The meeting seemed smaller than last year, less hands-on guys. Mr. Peterson was there and, true to his guru status, wore sandals.

77% of shares voted on the motions.

Mr. Granville, a man with a sleepy, Walter Matthau look, stuck to his guns and reiterated the company would have significant orders by the next earnings call. He said some of the urgency in signing the PIPE financing was anxiety of the financial condition of the company by some potential customers. The discussion with potential manufacturing partners (two) was clarified a bit--at least to me--when he said one manufacturer was itself interested in the technology, another manufacturer had a customer who was. The first patent to expire is in 2022; the plate patent expires in 2027. He feels the technology is difficult to reverse engineer. In Class 8 trucks, much of the advantage of battery replacement comes from allowing the downsizing of the engine (which Ecosystem does not allow.)
Uniform string behavior where the PbC batteries self regulate in a series was a prominent, and to me new, theme.

Subjectively, I felt the technology, which has been worked on so long, had more to yield and this uncertainty might hurt the company with potential customers. Nonetheless, much of the advantages and disadvantages of the technology have been learned and further elaboration is probably the province of small back room labs. The next step here is whether the management can take this company from R and D to commercial.

As complicated as their technology is, their current business problem is no more, or less, complicated than that.

From an investment view, the PIPE financing has pit a few investors against the  price of the stock and created a disjunction between the company value and the stock price behavior. However temporary--and it could be permanent--this disjunction seems to beg for exploitation.

Sunday Sermon 9/29/13

Today's gospel is demanding in its message but it is contained within a very upsetting context. A rich man who has ignored a poor man at his doorstep dies and goes to Hell. He tries to negotiate some relief. When it is revealed relief is not possible, he asks that the poor man he ignored in life return to warn his still-living brothers. He is told his brothers have the wisdom of Moses and the prophets to draw on the man says that is not enough. He is told that a man who will not heed the prophets will not heed a man returned from the dead.

His concern for his brothers is winning. One feels for the man. And it makes the reader think of the man's crime; what has he done to deserve this? Was it his wealth? His lack of charity?

Christ, as always, is drawing a line between the material and spiritual world. Wealth is not the point. Even the accumulation of wealth is not the point. It is the satiation. The fullness. The satisfaction with the rewards of life. The rich man is not doomed because he is rich, he is damned because he is content, content with the material world. His glass is full, filled with the wrong things and the spiritual world is crowded out. Strangely he is content to look no further. The unsuccessful poor must always look for more.

This is a riveting message: We must be intellectually restless to fulfill our lives. The spiritual in us demands some unease, some need to search. Success in the world must be managed to allow for the spiritual.

And then the zinger. The brothers will not head the prophets. Nor will they head a man returned from the dead, so great is the hold of the world.

Christ sounds almost bitter.

Cab Thoughts 9/28/13

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

– H. L. Mencken

An 17th-century English merchant ship, The Merchant Royal, was lost at sea off Land's End, Cornwall in rough weather on September 23, 1641. On board were at least 100,000 pounds of gold (nearly one billion USD in today's money), 400 bars of Mexican silver (another 1 million) and nearly 500,000 pieces of eight and other coins, making it one of the most valuable wrecks of all times.

In 2008, the wind industry said it employed about 85,000 people. Solar employment stood at about 93,000 in 2010. Two years—and a nine fold increase in solar power—later, solar employment had increased just 28%.

Government officials from the Benghazi fiasco have been warned by the government not to make themselves available to Congressional inquiry. CNN obtained one email to CIA employees: "You don't jeopardize yourself, you jeopardize your family as well." What?!

A small group of anti-clerical dissidents from Iran called the Mujahedeen-e-Khalq or MEK has been bombing and assassinating in Iran for years and joined Saddam's war against Iran years ago. They have been a source of good espionage within Iran for the U.S., despite being on the terrorist list until last year. Since the Iraq war they have been in camps in Iraq, one called Camp Ashraf, one Liberty. Now that Shiite presence in Iraq's government is growing, the MEK is less welcome. This month 50 were killed by Iraqi troops at Ashraf--or so the MEK claim. Don't worry, the U.N. is investigating.

Pope Francis likes Dostoevsky! "I love very much Dostoevsky and Hölderlin," he said in an interview in "America." "I remember Hölderlin for that poem written for the birthday of his grandmother that is very beautiful and was spiritually very enriching for me. The poem ends with the verse, 'May the man hold fast to what the child has promised.' "

Who was.....Anna Politkovskaya?

Echidnas belong to the family Tachyglossidae in the monotreme order of egg-laying mammals. The four species, together with the platypus, are the only mammals that lay eggs. The echidnas are named after a monster in ancient Greek mythology. They live in Australia and New Guinea.

Gehad el-Haddad, a top Muslim Brotherhood official and aide to ousted Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi, was employed by the Clintons from August 2007 to August 2012, when he left to work full-time for Morsi's regime.

Winston Churchill's mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, had a snake tattooed across her wrist.

According to the new book "Finding Florida" by T. D. Allman, the story about Ponce de Leon and the Fountain of Youth was entirely fabricated by none other than the fiction writer Washington Irving (who also invented 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.')

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/11/benghazi-and-genovese.html

Equality under attack: Magnetic Resonance Imaging of the brains of men and women show women have far greater capacity for communicating with and evaluating people than men do. Women have between fourteen and sixteen areas of the brain to evaluate others' behavior versus a man's four to six areas. The female brain is organized for multitracking -- the average woman can juggle between two and four unrelated topics at the same time. She can talk about several unrelated topics in the one conversation and use five vocal tones to change the subject or emphasize points. Most men can only identify three of these tones and often lose the plot when women are trying to communicate with them. Vision is a factor too. Most men's close-range and peripheral vision is far poorer than women's.

shibboleth: n. 1. The use of a word or pronunciation that distinguishes a group of people.
2. A slogan, belief, or custom that's now considered outmoded. ETYMOLOGY: According to the Book of Judges in the Bible, the Gileadites used the Hebrew word shibboleth (ear of corn; stream) to identify the fleeing Ephraimites who couldn't pronounce the sh sound. 42,000 Ephraimites were slaughtered. Earliest documented use: 1382. Sometimes language can be really, really important. There are some other savage examples: The Parsley Massacre (Haiti), The Battle of the Golden Spurs (Belgium) and The Sicilian Vespers (Sicily).

Euthanasia carried out by doctors is legal in three European countries, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Medical euthanasia, have more than doubled over the decade to 2012. One explanation for the steep rise of Dutch cases is the introduction last year of mobile euthanasia units allowing patients to be killed by voluntary lethal injection when family doctors refused.

After the First World War, Germany introduced a new currency called the Rentenmark, backed not by gold but by land. When the new currency was introduced on November 15,1923, Germany found itself in the curious position of having two official currencies -- the old Reichsmark and the new Rentenmark -- circulating side by side, issued by two uniquely parallel central banks

AAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnddddd....a picture of an echidna