There's a new Rasputin at large in Russia; you can read about this bunco artist here. (Link courtesy of More Than Zero).

I'm charitable when I call this guy a charlatan. If he were one, I'd actually have some respect for him because I have precious little time or fools for those who chuck away the conveniences of modern society to pursue development of their "spiritual" side. That's silly behavior, and people who do that disqualify themselves from consideration as anything other than self indulgent. I'm of the opinion that, if you're going to throw it all away and ruin your life, shoot heroin. The high's probably better, and you'll get to your precious heaven quicker anyway.

More later. A rant is aborning.

Chandra Levy's remains have been found, and so as regular as the proverbial Capistrano birds, the media is returning full tilt to the story. I have been more forgiving of last summer's media obsession over her disappearance than have a lot of people who seem to think that if the media hadn't been covering Levy and Conduit, it would have been training its collective eye on al-Qaeda operatives. That's doubtful to say the least, especially given the recent discovery that our Administration, which we pay to do this stuff, didn't, or couldn't. Some smart agent in Phoenix paints the entire picture, and his memo flounders around in the Great Interstice that is the bureaucracy. Then there's Minneapolis, and who knows how many other dots that weren't connected. (I only used that shopworn phrase because I saw it three separate places in last Sunday's New York Time. The grey lady needs a thesaurus.)

At this time, however, crime-lab-to-Modesto, all-Chandra 'n Gary-all-the-time is unwarranted and irresponsible. While some bimbo from Talk magazine more or less compares the tragedy of Levy's disappearance to the events of September 11th (equating the two as she did, insultingly, last night on bubblevision), India and Pakistan raise the rhetorical roof, mass troops, and ascend to ever higher levels of def con. Read about it (if you dare) here.

Nuclear war has always been considered unthinkable (which is a nonsensical observation anyway, since to consider nuclear war "unthinkable" in the first place is to think about it). Whatever. Last September should have proved that the "unthinkable," or, more accurately, the "impossible," is no longer either. Considering nuclear war to be impossible or unthinkable, for one thing, dulls the edge of vigilance. It's like trying to quarantine a virus by putting a police line around a house whose inhabitants are sick.

The Indian subcontinent is a long way off, true, but a nuclear weapons exchange there could kill hundreds of millions of people. We should be blunt about that possibility and blunt about that number, and not be precluded from talking about this situation in those kind of harsh terms simply because some people might think it's fear mongering. It might be in order to have a little more fear mongering about this South Asian situation, and a little less coverage of how or why Baretta killed his wife (or for that matter, a little less fear mongering about Nonspecific Disasters from the Executive Office to cover the significant swath of Administrative butt revealed by recent events)--especially now, when nations, or particularly cultures and religions with death cults and death wishes, with great gobs of WMDs seem to be in a collective march off the short plank of reason into the deep end of medievalist fantasy and idiocy.

Between I and P, they have an estimated 100 nuclear weapons -- mostly Indian -- and the populations of those countries are increasingly concentrated in huge urban centers like Dehli, Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Ahmadabad, and of course Bombay, all fat targets within range of the other side's delivery systems. (I suppose "fat" is not a word to be used lightly in that part of the world, but I digress.) It's doubtful whether Pakistan could reach such Indian cities as Hyderabad or Calcutta, much less Madras or Bangalore, the two main cities in the south. Radiation from any bombings to the west surely would, however. It is entirely feasible that an India/Pakistan nuclear french kiss (I know that's an absurd metaphor, but I can't resist it, as eros and death are often considered two sides of the same coin and whatnot) could result in the kind of wholesale slaughter of a percentage of the human race as hasn't happened since the Black Death of the 14th century. Who knows what the ramifications of such carnage would be, geopolitically, economically, environmentally? Many a brain in many a think tank in DC is probably churning through these scenarios right now.

The Indian air force has deployed its Jaguars at forward (read: aggressive) positions; the Jaguars are ground attack aircraft that can be fairly easily adapted to carry nuclear weapons. All of Pakistan is easily within the range of these planes. India also has ballistic missles, the Prithvi and the Agni but, according to the Federation of American Scientists Military Analysis Network, it is unclear whether these can be easily adapted to a nuclear use. Pakistan's nightmare arsenal is much smaller, which, perhaps paradoxically, means the situation is more unstable, because there is such an asymmetry of force strength between the two nations' nuclear (and for that matter, conventional) capabilities. Pakistan's major weapon appears to be a Chinese-made jet, the A-5, a ground-attack type. Pakistan also has a few squadrons of F-16s which were not furnished with the requisite equipment to carry nuclear weapons when the U.S. sold these to Pakistan back in the 80s; these planes can be adapted, however.

This leads to the question of the survivability of the weapons systems, and particularly the impression of that survivability.Our concept of nuclear brinksmanship is invariably predicated on the history between the US and USSR. Big differences between that conflict and this one. The India-Pakistan face-off has a lot more inherent instability than did the US/USSR rivarly. The superpowers constructed their nuclear forces, and the strategies for their possible use, to maximize the survivability of those forces after a surprise first strike by the other side as an attempt to preempt the other's ability to strike back. This led to the element of deterrance that, for all its madness, the doctrine of mutually assured destruction helped sustain. This in turn kept the superpowers more or less at arms length and the overall situation stable, because both sides knew they could not take out the others' delivery systems in one fell swoop.(The fact that neither side had suicidal leaders -- not even the manaical Stalin, who never hestitated to sacrifice millions during World War II -- certainly helped here.) India and Pakistan's nuclear forces, however, do not seem to have this kind of built-in survivability. So there's a destabilizing "use it or lose it" mindset prevailing, which necessarily makes the decisionmakers trigger happy.

With all this in mind, a renewed national obsession over the Levy case, fueled by a media addicted to celebrity scandal, is not exactly warranted. It all reminds me of one of the great ends to one of the great movies, "Bridge on the River Kwai," when the doctor at the POW camp looks down at all that has happens and mutters "madness, madness."

UPDATE: Joe Katzman at his blog "Winds of Change" has an alternate, and far less worrisome scenario regarding I&P. He backs it up with reasoned analysis, too.

STOP THE PRESSES! The Pope has found a way to put to rest the scandal dogging the Roman Catholic Church, by forgiving the sinners. Boy, I'm relieved.

That crazy guy who trumpted the "end of history" in a book a while back, Francis Fukuyama, has now launched a crusade against cloning. Another neocon strikes up the band for government control of the individual. Ain't it funny how often that is happening? (I'm embarrassed to admit that old Frank has settled into a comfy academic perch at my alma mater, Hopkins). I'll take his article down later, for my own good. But I'm not going to do as well as a good man called Brink Lindsey has. In his blog, Lindsey carves up Fukayama's petty idiocy perfectly. Quoting a conservative friend who observes that "the essence of human nature is the desire to improve your condition, (and) you can''t oppose that" Lindsey writes, "But Fukuyama does -- in the name of defending an imaginary, static "human nature," he sets himself against the essential dynamism that defines our humanity." Exactly.

Because I spent, oh, about a half an hour of my time on the subject, I'm going to recycle here an e-mail I recently wrote. I'm generally a believer that more is better, and that while quality is subjective, quantity is objective. In this spirit, I'll never hesitate to lard up my blog with random bloviating taken from any context that can be wrenched into this form.

Quality is fine and a wonderful thing, and useful when assessing an Italian restaurant or a painting. But the true measure of net worth is a number thing and nothing but, just as the true measures of bodily strength and horsepower and a daisy cutter's destructive impact on some Islamic fanatics can all be captured in a number. Maybe the true worth of a blog, in fact, is not the quality of the posts, but how many of them there are. If only I could get my archives to work, I could really gild the lily, since I have an evidently limitless capacity for jabbering away. (Somewhere in here, there's a Borges short story; or at least a good puzzle: if 500 bloggers post continually, how long will it take before two of them post exactly the same thing, in the same words.)

The e-mail in question revolved around this Bob Brinker chap, who is, I suppose, a commentator on the stock market. He has a radio show; some think he is a "guru." He's got the requisite eponymous website, wherein he invites those who surf by to partake of his market wisdom. Mostly fee-based stuff, and there's nothing wrong with that; at least his site does not launch Night of the Popups. My love of fees, however, is in direct proportion to my ability to charge them, so my enthusiasm for his site is tempered by my reluctance to credit my Visa. Brinker's site does have a "sound money" audio freebie, but my surge protector, like my credit, has inherent limits -- only so many outlets -- so my computer's multimedia potential has not been fully realized. My speakers aren't up, and there's nothing more worthless than an audio file without speakers. I realize I'm missing out on the whole broadband experience, which makes me something between a Luddite and a neophyte, I suppose: too plugged in to be the former, too old to be the latter.

Back to Bob Brinker, and he's calling for a "secular" bear market. I suppose that, first off, I should be pleased that he's calling it a "secular" market instead of a "religious" one. Actually, this is a usage -- "secular" to describe long-term trends in securities markets -- that seems to have acquired a lot of ... er, currency, over the past few years in the biz press. (It was a secular bull market a couple of years ago, that was going to go on and on and on and on ... ) One of the uses of this word is to describe a thing occurring once in an age or a century, or to describe a period of time lasting ages or centuries. Or to characterize, at least, a long interval of time: longer than, say, a year or two, which is as far into the future as anyone can reasonably, accurately, and responsibly predict the future course of the stock market.

Brinker is calling for a "secular bear market" lasting 10 years or so; I guess that 2002 is Year Three, which means we have to hump it for seven more years of this stuff. Question is, why should anyone heed this call any more than, say, Miss Cleo calling for a spiritual antelope of a market? Bob Brinker: I thought at first he was the guy with the white hair who hosted the "Price is Right" who hugs the fat contestants and then beds down the blondes who model the camping equipment dressed in the height of Brownie short-shorts fashion. No, this is Bob Brinker, market guru, who evidently "called" the bear market back in January of 2000.

What was that call? That month, he advised his listeners to reduce their exposure to stocks to 60% of their total portfolio. I'm not sure what percentage he had advised investors to have in stocks prior to that; it would be helpful to know if he had been advising investors to be fully invested, or to be 65% percent invested. If the latter, going from 65% to 60% is not exactly the kind of market call that would register on the Richter scale, at least in my opinion. It's always been a big deal in the biz biz when, for instance, Abby Cohen, one of the heavy hitters of the Street, advises a "rebalancing" of a portfolio. That rebalancing is never anything I'd consider to be real dramatic; she'll go from 65% to 60% in stocks, for instance. But, boy, does that make the Street sit up like it's just heard a banshee in its collective ear. Clocks stops, tides fail, earth stands still, and a few pacemakers are strained. Not to bash Abby, who's as legit as they come and always worth listening to, but these numbers don't exactly rivet my attention, when the Nasdaq market loses 70% of its value in 18 months (from March of 2000 to September of 2001). In that context, an asset reallocation from 68% to 65% is something less than a tectonic shift on the order of the Loma Preita earthquake; it's more like dust motes stirred up by the slamming of a phone on the receiver after your broker tells you to sell a stock at an 80% loss which he had recommended six months ago.

All this is not to say that Mr. Brinker does not know his stuff. No doubt he does. Evidently, he's very good at describing the nuances of the market to the individual investor, and anyone who can, and is willing to, provide the average Joe or Josephina copies of the keys to the gates of investing is performing a public service. With the duplicity and conflicts of interest of so many brokerage firms open to such display now, it's more than ever important for an investor to make his or her own decisions, and not to rely on Henry Blodgett and company. That means they have to learn something about what they're doing and, to the extent Mr. Brinker is willing to teach, he does a valuable and good thing. Whether that translates into taking his advice, and especially hewing to it all the time, is another thing entirely.

I'll give credit to Brinker for "calling" the market top in January 2000 -- although I'll bet he wasn't at the time calling it a "market top," but probably something like a "prudent reallocation of assets away from a market we think has become slightly overvalued." Still, in saying that, Brinker comes out smelling like the proverbial rose. And perhaps it's unfair to hold him to the standard that he needed to say at that time, this is a bubble and get out now. Few, if any, did, and the legit people in the business all admit they were burned in one way or another, because they all were. If they had been any kind of significant skepticism about the market bubble, it wouldn't have bubbled up to the levels it did in the first place. Only in retrospect does it seem obvious that the index was at an unsustainable level, just like only in retrospect is it obvious that barbaric religious lunatics would want to use planes as weapons of mass destruction against innocents in skyscrapers. In the winter of 1999-2000, when everyone was worried about what would happen when the clocks turned that left-most digit from "1" to "2", every disaster, it seems, was being predicted, except the two which eventually happened: the stock market collapse and September 11th (and, please, I'm not equating the two here, I'm just making a point). In other words, there were very few people then calling for Nasdaq to be brutalized by a 70% decline; if all the people who claim now to have seen that kind of collapse coming had acted accordingly, then the Nasdaq would never have gone much above 3000, much less topped out at 5000.

So Brinker was better than most. When we gauge the effectiveness of services in our culture, however, "better than most," when the "most" are atrocious, hasn't, historically, cut it. In the 1970s, when the American auto industry was, by most accounts I've read, punching out absolutely wretched stuff, does anyone commend to fond memory now the odd 1970s car that might not have been as bad as the others, for any reasons other than sentiment or esthetics?

I would credit Brinker's call a bit more if I knew more about its specifics; a quick "Google" search of newsgroups such as misc.invest.stocks, however, didn't turn any up. Since January of 2000, in fact, some stock sectors -- health manitenance organizations, consumer nondurables, some industrials, precious metals -- have done quite well. It's the technology and telecommunications sectors, and to a lesser extent, all big captialization names -- in other words, the companies held by the vast majority of retirement plans in this country and which make up (or at least made up) the "stock market" in the public's mind -- that have been eviscerated. The relative weighting of these companies on specific indicies has directly influenced these indicies relative performance; the Russell 2000 index made up of companies with small captializations, or market values of five billion dollars or less, has done far better than the aforementioned Nasdaq composite index.

For a fair analysis of Brinker, his admittedly prescient January of 2000 market call should be placed in the context of other market-timing calls he's made since. One was to buy the Nasdaq (in the form of the so-called "triple QQQs", basically a stock that trades the Nasdaq index) in the autumn of 2000. At the time, the Nasdaq was struggling to hold around 3500 (I can't believe I just typed that: "struggling to hold 3500"). Then there was the election, and the ongoing Florida drama (which, at the time, seemed like the event, or at least the controversy, of a lifetime; have times ever changed). The Nasdaq couldn't handle the Saga of the Chads, however, and it plunged through the 3000 level (I'm not sure of the exact number) that had represented the bottom of the April of 2000 selloff, when the tech/telecom investment bubble first burst. I'm not sure where Brinker's call came, but if he suggested buying the triple-Qs after that support level of 3000 had been broken, then that's a clear violation of any rule of technical analysis known, and it would have been almost irresponsible of him to recommend buying the Qs, to an audience that by definition is probably not that sophisticated about investing and probably does not trade. Perhaps that's being too hard on him, and I'm not sure exactly when he made that call, anyway, so I shouldn't reach such a conclusion. But from what I've read on Google -- not the final word, I know -- whatever Brinker might have saved his listeners by getting them out in part earlier in the year, he lost a lot of that when he made that autumn call. How so? The percentage loss on the Nasdaq between March of 2000 and November of 2000 (from 5100 to 3400, approximately) was
33 percent (actually, very close to the 31.8% figure beloved by practitioners of the Fibinacci method). A similar point loss has occurred between then and now (the Nasdaq is, as of this writing, about 1700); that is a 50% loss, however. I'd be interested to hear whether Brinker was one of those pitching the "new tech" names in the fall of 2000 -- the JDSUs and CIENAs and AMCCs -- when they were all priced to the stratosphere and when so many of the commentariat were pitching them like the real estate salesmen were pitching Florida in Mamet's "Glengarry Glen Ross."

I haven't heard Brinker's show, but "financial genius" is a term I'd be hesistant to employ when describing him. These media financial touts get one call right, and their suddenly the Oracle of Omaha (Warren "nu'cler" Buffett) if not of Delphi. What is often obscured by the dust raised when these panegyrics get tossed around is that expert's subsequent performance. Joseph Granville is a classic example; he said in 1981 that the stock market was historically undervalued and that it represented a great opportunity. He was right. Since then, however, he's made one bad call after another.

Brinker, after all, is first and foremost a market commentator. That's what pays the freight. I'm sure he invests and does well. He probably wouldn't have gotten his perch in the commentariat if he hadn't had some kind of track record. But these guys are in the business of making dramatic, which usually means contrarian, calls. There's nothing wrong with being a market contrarian; in fact, that's a sound investment strategy to be employed. Whenever everyone's ecstatic, you sell; when the blood's on the streets, you buy. That's generally hard for human beings to do, however, since we are instinctively creatures who find security in the herd. To be a contrarian on a consistent basis takes a lot of discipline psychologically, and psychological discipline is the hardest of all to instill. And if you are not a contrarian on a disciplined, consistent basis, then you're probably better off just rolling the dice.

The market commentariat has been exploding in membership over the past few years, and will probably continue to do so, since more and more people (and especially in the light of the Merrill Lynch scandal) are going to be tempted to invest for themselves (that is, if they invest at all; plenty have left the stock market, never to return, and that's a shame). A whole herd is out there, waiting to be led, and the market commentariat sees a lot of opportunity. How to get noticed? Make the dramatic calls, say the melodramatic things, use terms like "secular bear" and scare the hell out of everyone.

One of the best investors out there, I believe, is Bill Miller. He oversees a couple of Legg Mason mutual funds. His returns have beaten the S&P 500 average every year for the past 12 years. That's simply phenomenal, and no accident. No lucky throws of the dice there. That's particularly impressive in that his record has been established during a period that encompassed every kind and extremity of market environment: grinding bears, strong bulls, bubbles, markets going nowhere, markets going haywire. There's a guy I'll call a genius; to have a record like that, he must have mastered both the psychological and fundamental aspects of the market. Miller's not always appearing on television or radio, however. Why? Because while Brinker and James Cramer and all these other "geniuses" are popping up all over the media, Miller is putting in serious time analyzing companies, analyzing markets, analyzing psychology, and making his clients money, not making himself a reputation. Evidently, he's buying technology and telecom right now: AOL, for instace, which if you listen to most people is going the way of Westinghouse. Meanwhile, the Janus funds, which were buying AOL in the 50s, are selling it now down here at 19.

Brinker might, like Cramer does, provide a good service, in that he explains the nuances of the market, and I suppose he's pretty good at that. Assuming he's ethical as well, that makes him probably superior to 75% of the commentariat. That doesn't mean he's right all the time, however. He could be right about being in a "secular" bear market, although again I'd like to know exactly what he means by that. Does he mean that the major averages are going to continue to go down over the next decade? Or just that the Nasdaq
will not get back to 5000 in the next 10 years? Or something in between? He could very well be right that Nasdaq will not get back to 5000 in the next 10 years. But -- and, again, I emphasize, in the absence of any external event like a catastrophic terrorist attack of Buffett's nightmares -- there is just no fundamental economic evidence to suggest that the stock market is going to continue to tank for the next 10 years; in fact, there is a preponderance of evidence suggesting otherwise. The economy is strong and getting stronger, inflation is, in the short term at least, a nonissue, the cost of money is historically low, productivity continues to increase (and act as a brake on inflation), and the technological revolution that everyone seems to have forgotten about (which prompted, in a way, the bubble in the first place) is still going on. Against this background, we're well into our third down calendar year in the stock market, which hasn't occurred since the Great Depression. Even the most pessimistic bear would not even try to compare the fundamental economic conditions of today to those prevailing duirng 1929-31.

Brinker doesn't really have much of an idea where the market will be going in 10 years. Obviously I don't. For that matter, Bill Miller doesn't, either. No one can predict things 10 years out. Too many variables, and too much time for any one variable to launch a chain of events that no one can possibly foresee with any degree of accuracy. Does anyone know what the status of the war will be in 2012? Will there even BE a Wall Street or a New York City in 2012? Assuming the Apocolypse doesn't happen, what will interest rates be in 2012? What will the growth rate of GDP be? What will inflation be? What will the dollar's relative strength
verses the Euro be? No one knows the answers for these in 2003, much less 2012. To try to predict where they will be 10 years from now, or what might happen over the next 10 years, is throwing the dice.

And the dice are loaded, but not for bear. In the absence of any real facts, when you throw the dice, the best thing to do is use history as a guide. And history suggests that the stock market goes up, and that you're better off having your money in the stock market than anywhere else (that is, if you believe that more-is-better when it comes to money, which is what captialism is all about, anyway), since it is the asset class that has consistently outperformed all others: precious metals, bonds, cash, real estate, the mattress. This is a generality, of course, but when you're going out 10 years into the future, generalities are -- and I'll say this in keeping with Sunday's merciful end of the X-Files (a show that should have ended five years ago) -- the truth that is out there.

Weather nurd alert: the NWS is calling for snow flurries tomorrow evening in the Maryland mountains. Lows in the upper 30s in DC. That's about 20 degrees below normal. As aberrational in its way, if not as dramatic, as last month's La Plata tornado (which was downgraded to an F4; that's a rant for another time.)

Where was this frickin' pattern in February, when it could have been put to good use fomenting paralyzing blizzards?

Next time some Bible thumper prattles on about how sordid and blasphemous our popular culture is, direct them here. I particularly liked the handy ratings scheme. Finally that NPAA garbage has been put to some good use.

While much of the world, under the auspices of the marvelous and unbiased United Nations, is excoriating Israel for a Jenin massacre that never occurred, the human capacity for brutality has been on rather horrid display in many other precincts of the globe. Most of these locations are countries -- Algeria, Uganda, Sudan -- that always seem to be the most strident in the aformentioned U.N. in their denunciations of "Zionist terrorists," "American hegemonical imperialism," and other such bogeymen.

Here's a long yet also interesting article about distinguishing speech that is volatile, unnerving, perhaps even omnious -- yet nonetheless Constitutionally protected -- from common and vile threats that should not only fall outside of First Amendment protection, but should be legally actionable. I just read the article's beginning and the conclusion, so I might not being doing it full justice ("full justice" and "blogging" are usually, and perhaps inevitably, exclusive of one another). The author's premise is that --

"To determine when speech is protected by the First Amendment, and therefore not punishable as a threat, most circuits have adopted either a reasonable speaker or a reasonable listener test. Both these tests essentially boil down to an evaluation of whether or not a reasonable recipient of the statement would believe it constituted a true threat.[16] The Supreme Court has never reviewed the differing circuit court tests to determine their constitutionality ... "

This is necessarily a pretty subjective and contextual basis for delineating "you're a &%$#@ who doesn't deserve to live" from "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse." I wonder how adequate it is as a standard for defining how far the right to free speech (about which I am, for the record, more or less an absolutist) goes to protect the sponsors of the online, so-called "Nuremburg Files," which lists abortion providers names' and home addresses, advocates punishing them for "crimes against humanity," and celebrates their assassinations by drawing a line through their name of those who are murdered by anti-abortion zealots. This is the kind of test case that drives people like me nuts: to defend what I consider to be the most fundamental right there is, and to be consistent in that defense, I have to look the other way when people who would make the Taliban look like the editorial board of Playboy magazine start in on their blood and thunder tirades against modernity. But when should that kind of vitriolic talk be considered a criminal threat? (Needless to say, this kind of thing goes on with the extreme "left" as well, as when African-Americans who refuse to abide by a boycott of Korean grocery stores are threatened with physical harm by the other blacks who have instigated the boycott.)

The author's intent is to try and distinguish "warning threats," which are allowed, indeed protected, by the First Amendment, from "true threats" that have nothing to do with expression or First Amendment protection of even unpopular and unpleasant speech, and everything to do with intimidation and coercion. She proposes appending the preexisting tests of what makes up "free speech" (about which there is no consensus anyway) withh another measure for distinguishing between the two classes of speech: "actor intent," or whether the speaker and/or associates intend to take action to manifest the threats they make.

Her proposal makes good sense, but it seems to me it still does not completely address the problem. The speaker's intent to back a threat up with action can really only be fully determined after the fact; the intent of violence which would disqualify the threatening speech from First Amendment protection can only be proved after the violence itself occurs. Otherwise it's just supposition, no matter how many tests of intent are applied. It's one thing if some guy who's got a conviction for breaking and entering threatens, upon his release from jail, to kill the owner of the house where the criminal had been caught. That would be a "true threat." But if some loudmouth in a bar with too much to drink but no criminal record starts blathering away about how some public figure should be shot, does that constitute a "true threat"? There'll be a lot more in jail if they do. Look at most any bulletin board thread about some controversial subject, and you'll find posters throwing around all kinds of imprecations and blood oaths.

The law here is mirky, and I agree with the author that there needs to be some kind of clarification, lest any strong speech is eventually rendered taboo, if not illegal, by what would be in effect government-mandated speech codes masquerading as prevention of "true threats." If the test of what is a "true threat" is left up to, say, those who currently oversee the implementation of "speech codes" in universities, then we might as well all just yank out our vocal cords now, be done with it, and learn how to sign.

Of course then they'd go after that.

Hitchens, as usual, gets it right. On the excesses in zeal that characterize both the Palestinians and the Israelis:"September 11, more than anything, marked the opening of a culture war between those who believe that god favors thuggish, tribal human designs, and those who don't believe in god and who oppose thuggery and tribalism on principle. That ought to be the really historic and dialectical sense in which it "changed everything.""

This is as perfect a summary as I've read of what the great danger of our times is: the worst instincts of the species for flocking together coupled with, and driven by, petty, theistic rationalizations that are directly contrary to the traditions of secularism and rationality that have been the strengths of Western civilization and, in fact, the real Saviors of the human race.

My natural inclination is to support the Israelis, for two reasons: (1) it is a secular democracy surrounded by hostile enemies and (2) I still remember, AND WILL NEVER FORGET, those cheering Palestinian bastards on September 12th. My support for any Palestinian cause is directly contingent upon the level of mortification in that community over the Atrocity. If that reaction reflected how most Palestinians feel, the hell with them. But I'm not sure that it does.

The old bromide--that there are two sides to most issues--cannot be put aside here. To acknowledge this is not to indulge in sophistry and moral relativity. No matter how offensive Palestinian behavior has been, and no matter how legitimate (not to mention measured) the Israeli response, it remains that, for the past generation, ultra-Orthodox Israeli "settlers" have been moving into the West Bank as an occupying force, with a concomitant degradation of the rights of the Palestinians there. This has further poisoned an already toxic environment, and the redress can't just be catering to these territorialists who employ the same logic, if not to quite as base ends, as do fundamentalist Islamicists: that their behavior is a reflection of their god's will, that their god is the true god, and that all other considerations are not only inapplicable, but blashphemous. "Blasphemy": the greatest expletive in the language.

I hadn't heard of Sharon's Minister of Internal Security Mr. Landau until reading about it here, but a cabinet minister who advocates the gassing of adjacent populations, no matter how hostile, cannot really be borne in a country which wants to claim (and has, generally, the right to claim) the moral high ground. Sharon and the ultra-Orthodox reactionaries who support him, intent as they are in making real their Old Testament fantasy of a Greater Israel at the expense of the Palestinians, is not the Israel I'm supporting. It's rather unfortunate that such an unsavory group like Sharon and Likud is heading up the country right now, and that we have to, in supporting Israel's right to defend itself against homicide bombers, end up tacitly backing a bunch that considers the West Back their "God-given" backyard with the same fervor that the gangsters of al-Qaeda prosecute their despicable jihad on the Western infidel. This is not moral equivalence; I'm asserting that the motivations (and from motivation to act is still a ways to go, especially for those operating in the secular democratiic tradition of an Israel as opposed to the medieval environment of a Saudi Arabia) of the ultra-Orthodox settlers of the West Bank and of the minions of OBL are equally alien to me and equally offensive.

There really is no choice but to support Sharon's hard line against the PA and Arafat, whose duplicity and bile is unarguable, but that doesn't translate into backing the Israelis' own fundamentalists.

On the other hand, Charles Krauthammer, in his latest jeremiad against cloning (one no different from all the others he's written over the years) reminds me why I've always been ambivalent about him. He gets it all wrong on the issue. Granted, he steers clear of the cheapskate prohibitionist argument based on personal religious belief, where prohibitions on behavior are functions of a cadre of individuals' fervency in accepting what are, at bottom, unarguably mythologies. That just makes Krauthammer's whole position even more nonsensical.

His whole basis for wanting the government to ban theraputic cloning is that to sanction cloning would be to sanction "the creation of a human embryo for the sole purpose of using it for its parts." It is "commodification" of the human embryo. (Why, it's a "Bridge Too Far"! I'm waiting on the movie. I hope it stars the clones of Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, and John Wayne; I'd much prefer them to Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, and Bruce Wills.) Krauthammer tosses around other various third-rate tropes from the Brave New World playbook, a style of argument unworthy of the man who quite accurately has said (and was one of the first to say) that the War on Terrorism must ultimately go through Riyadh, and will not be effective if it simply ends with corralling Saddam.

Krauthammer's argument begs the question, naturally, of what exactly it is about the blastocyst--the thing being used in the cloning--that makes it "human." Arguments that try to define "humanity" as occurring at one instant, instead of recognizing that the evolution of a random accumulation of cells into a human being is a complex process, don't work. For one thing, as a legal matter, to enforce the "humanity" of a blastocyst means society will eventually have to give the sperm 'n egg (sandwich?) the same rights that, say, you and I have. (That's what the ludicrous "Human Life Amendment" would do.) Reductio ad absurdium, indeed. I'm quite offended by those who believe a fertilized egg has the same rights that I do, and anybody who is concerned about individual rights should be, too. This smacks of--dare I say it, and ain't it ironic?--moral relativity on their part on the part of cloning opponents, who are usually so quick to accuse others of that. They are assigning the same rights that you and I have to a random agglomeration of cells at the very instant the ol' sperm slithers into the orb. Talk about the excesses of identity politics; it is particularly silly when there is no real identity to politicize about. I don't know when life "begins" -- for some people, I'm not sure it ever does, but that's another issue -- but I know when it doesn't, and that's in the nanoseconds after fusing of the sperm and egg.

Krauthammer's argument basically boils down to the nonsensical "slippery slope" fear: that somehow theraputic cloning will lead to all kinds of Frankenstinian horrors. That's been thoroughly debunked here. I'll add a couple more, however.

For one thing, cloning will occur, if not in the U.S. then elsewhere (already biotechnology companies are preparing to move out of the country to a less restrictive location, such as the U.K., if these prohibitions are imposed). Why should the U.S. concede worldwide leadership in something like this simply because of some byzantine conception of personhood by a bunch of people who if they had their way would never let us read anything other than the Book of Common Prayer?

Second, say theraputic cloning is banned and criminalized in this country, as would happen under the Senate version of the Human Cloning and Prohibition (key word there) Act of 2001 already passed by the House. The Senate version is the brainchild of Senator Sam "Mullah" Brownback of Kansas, who would find a worldview complementary to his in many of the madrasses between the Nile and the Indus. This little piece of legislative legerdemain, in criminalizing the process of creating embryonic stem cells to regenerate lost organs or repair damaged cells, mandates fines of a million dollars or more as well as criminal penalties of up to 10 years not only for the practitioners of this devilry, but also for the patients as well. You can see where this will go: another War on Drugs, complete with vast sums of Federal dollars wasted, systematic violations of civil liberties, the aforementioned loss of U.S. leadership in scientific research, and on and on. All because some dandified right-wing kooks are worried that everyone will start wanting to clone themselves into perpetuity. (Or maybe it's because some of them just like it when human beings suffer, suffering so often being what compels people to the church and keeping its coffers full and its priests endlessly supplied with ... well, do I have to spell it out?)

Even if theraputic cloning doesn't turn out to offer 90% of the benefits its proponents claim (which is a dubious proposition itself, given that scientific research often leads to benefits that aren't forseen by even its most active supporters), how would the prohibitions against cloning be enforced? The Bill, of course, doesn't specify, and that makes it all the more ominous. Another open-ended invitation for the government to gut individual freedoms, to arrogate to itself yet another set of perogatives to monitor and proscribe individual behaviors that harm no one but seem to offend the ass-backward worldviews of some well-connected wowsers. It's easy to envision a future where, when you go through Customs, you'll have pass genetic muster with an INS officer or some other government type (who recently have so distinguished themselves in securing our borders against malicious foreign nationals). These functionaries will be staffing entry points in international airports, taking random passengers out, extracting cells from them under duress, and seeing if those cells have some telltale blastocystical characteristics. You think airport searches are intrusive now? Wait until they start sticking needles in your noggin.

I can't think of anything more idiotic, but never underestimate the power of the Brownshirts ... er, Brownbacks of the world.

Since the Great Outrage of September 11th -- I want to avoid the increasingly shopworn "9/11" usage, which additionally is too close to "7-11" as with the Stores, the thought of which elicits unpleasantness for a variety of reasons too ridiculous to go into here -- I've been depressed by the feckless and puerile reaction of much of what passes in this country for the intelligensia, in particular those in the liberal arts tribe. It's nothing new that great writers often bungle it horribly, almost unforgivably, when they sound off on the great issues of their times. Evelyn Waugh, the great English novelist and satirist of the early 20th century, was a reactionary racist and misogynist perpetually at war with the profane world he thought he lived in; Ezra Pound was an apologist for fascism who ended up turning traitor during World War Two and was lucky to find his end in the loony bin and not facing a firing squad. More recently, Harold Pinter, who years ago before he became political was one of the great playwrights of our time -- go see "The Birthday Party" or "The Homecoming" if you don't believe me -- has embarrassed himself by calling the United States a plague on mankind for doing things like stopping Milosevic and blasting the Taliban out of Afghanistan.

I always used to defend the academy against the wanton charges of "political correctness," which I always thought was just another rhetorical excess employed by the reactionary monotheistic virtuecratic right, which I despise. The horrors of last autumn, however, have prompted the parsing, I believe, of some of the opinions we had somewhat carelessly wielded prior to that event. I know I've gone through my sock drawer of opinions, throwing out the ones with holes in them.

One of these opinions, or more accurately habits, was my gusto for sticking up for the liberal arts departments of universities, and for the tribe of humanities in general. Because I studied the humanities in college, slaving my ass off writing 30-page papers as an undergraduate while most people my age were beer bonging and feeling each other up, I thought that investment of time meant that my sympathies should lie with, must invariably be aligned with, the academics and the eggheads, and never mind whether the opinions marinating in the academy made any sense to, or much less benefited, me. But I've been doing less and less of that recently, and the reaction of some of these people to last autumn's Zeitgeist-shattering events, and my reaction to their reaction, made it clear to me how little I had in common with these people, and how little I ever really did have in common with them, other than a fondness for literature.

Still ... I've always considered myself something of an intellectual, or a wannabe intellectual, or someone who liked to call himself an intellectual, or at least someone who was most comfortable dissenting from what was popular at the time and which I called being a deep thinker. Dissenting always came easily to me. I was forced on the defensive rather early in my life; additionally, to paraphrase Churchill, setting yourself in opposition to society is something that anybody with any heart does when they are young, and anybody with a brain stops doing at some interderminate later age. So maybe I'm just developing a brain and losing my heart now that I'm beyond that indeterminate later age, or maybe I've just discovered that the brick road is forked and that neither path goes anywhere near Oz, but that the trick is just picking the one that avoids the Wicked Witch. Whether that path is Frost's road less traveled doesn't close the deal the way it used to.

Maybe what I'm doing is not just setting my shoulder against society, trying to push a car stuck in the snow (a hopeless enough task), but setting my shoulder against the world, hoping to make it stop rotating, which is such a hopeless task you don't even think about doing it, except in the abstract. I readily admit I do this, and often that everything is more or less hopeless on a fundamental level, given the nature of the universe. Such is not the stuff of politics, however, but metaphysics and, like most metaphysical conundrums, it contains its own abnegation: if you are part of reality, it's axiomatically impossible to set yourself against it. And if there is any hope for the human race, it rests in the system of liberal, secular democracy and captialism which may be imperfect but, to paraphase Churchill again, is far better than anything else out there. Case in point, the Muslim world.

What I've found is that a lot of intellectuals -- members of the academy, perhaps, is a more apt, if more unwieldly moniker -- don't seem to get this, even though they are prime beneficiaries of it. I doubt they could do much of what they do in, say, modern-day Iran. These memebers of the academy scorn the United States as an imperial, colonial power to the exclusion of any kind of realistic critique of, say, Saudi Arabia, where girls burn up in schools because male firefighters aren't allowed in there to fight fires.

What a lot of intellectuals don't like, then, is the reality of their place in society, and therefore they scorn that society uncategorically. They have the right to speak their mind, but that's not enough for them. Perhaps they aren't listened to as much as they feel they should be, or perhaps they never had the artistic or academic success they feel they should have had. But to admit that these discontents transcend the nation they live in, would be to admit that perhaps they were not talented enough to do what they wanted to do, or perhaps that the breaks didn't go their way, or perhaps that we live in a random universe that is as heedless of our petty little ambitions and desires as we are heedless of a mote of dust.

So they throw their lot in with those who they think are the dispossessed of the world. They equate their personal dissatisfaction with a sordid, racist/sexist/imperialist country (which doesn't acknowlege their genius, either) with the perceived hardships of those seething vast multitudes in the "underdeveloped" world who toil nobly and selflessly while we in the U.S. sop up fifty percent of the world's resources (never mind that we contribute considerably more than 50% of the benefits to mankind). The solidarity with the masses and all that hooey that any real thinking person jettisoned oh, say, sixty years ago.

Like Cassius, they believe that the fault is not in the stars but in themselves but only in that they are underlings. That they aren't Caesar, or at least that they aren't participating in the flow of the national discourse to the extent they want, is maddening. When Noam Chomsky blathers on about "manufacturing consent," he's just peeved at the fact he isn't present at the manufacture, that he is not only not Caesar, he's not Brutus or Marc Antony or even First Messenger.

Therefore, when the American "masses" assert a 90% approval of something, these people like Chomsky, who had nothing to do with what they are convinced is the artificial development -- the manipulation -- of that consensus, must be reflexively opposed to that something. That's perhaps a bit simplistic as analysis, but only a bit, and therefore still valid.

What all of this has meant personally is that I now realize that the validity of any kind of idea does not stand or fall in direct relationship to how that idea deviates from the public consensus: that critical thinking, in other words, is no longer predicated on an a priori dissent from that public consensus. I think that's the problem with many so-called intellectuals in this country; they don't credit the worthiness of an idea unless a huge majority of the country is opposed to it; only then will they embrace the idea.

There's nothing really wrong with occasionally feeling as if everyone else is a moron, and you're the only person with any sense in the world. I believe we all, at one time or another, are infuriated by our fellow citizens' embrace of something that we find to be nonsensical or incomprehensible. It happens to me on an hourly basis. But I don't create a creed around it, and I acknowledge that people have come to those conclusions more or less on their own, and not at the behest of some vague yet omnipotent cabal of tyrants clothed as fellow citizens. A certain breed of academic, however, does think this way; these people, in fact, make a fetish out of dissenting from their fellow citizens' beliefs in things like private property or lower taxes in the same way a certain breed of fundamentalist creates a fetish of brooding over how millions of people in this country rent and enjoy adult films in the privacy of their own homes, yet pay their taxes, don't blow up buildings, and don't sodomize little boys after rehearsing the Eucharist.

This fetishness over despising things that most people like, or at least that they don't dislike, often finds its expression in what is called "political correctness." I was having a discussion recently over exactly what "political correctness" is; we decided that it is a conviction about something that is patently absurd and, even more importantly, about something most people consider to be absurd. One such absurdity is the PC belief that most men are irrevocably sexist, and that therefore it doesn't matter if he believes in, say, equal pay for equal work; he's a sexist anyway, and if he believes in equal pay for equal work, he's merely a hypocrite looking to be let off the hook for his sexism. This kind of thinking is the direct, linear decendent of how communists used to (and, in a few benighted precincts of the world, still do) think about rich people who give to charity. The Reds used to think that the charitable rich were merely buying off the poor to alleviate their misery; if they didn't do this, the logic ran, then the masses would rise up and take their fair share from the "leisure class."

This is not to say that groups of people are never driven by ulterior motives; you see this in, for instance, the royal Saudi family spending untold sums to fund the spread of evil Wahibism to pay off Islamic fundamentalists so that the princes can go cavort and gambol in Monaco. The PC types might agree with this, but they would consider it an irrelevance, and that, in bringing it up, I am just trying to divert attention from the fact that I'm a white man and therefore awash in all of the associated evils of that tribe. This is, in fact, how they look at the entire War on Terrorism; it's a deliberate misdirection on the part of that evil junta of whitemen who run this country (forgetting entirely about Rice and Powell, here, but they're just "tokens" anyway) to scapegoat and ravish yet again the Third World so that Texas oilmen can make their umteenth billion. Or something like that.

Well, this is all utter nonsense, and most people, men and women both, know it and moreover are insulted by it. Some wacked-out gender-studies intellectual, however, would point to that huge majority who are so offended and say, "see, that's proof that all men are virulently sexist, in that they've been able to coerce or manipulate or manufacture that consent!" Ah-ha! So the cabal is not only evil, but hugely manipulative of the sisterhood, and so subtle that only the deep thinkers who have spent a lifetime studying gender politics can see through their deviousness! Well, this is as nutty as anything Lyndon LaRouche ever came up with. All that's missing are the secret handshakes and the black helicopters.

It's really an embarassment, then, that these academics (and their acolytes in the public at large; they don't all work in universities) oppose a war against a faction that hates everything these people ostensibly cherish and work for: a secular society, gay rights, women's rights, to name a few. (One wonders how much these people really want these things.) To these people, it was more important that a vast majority of Americans support a war against Islamic fundamentalist terrorism (and that is what this war is all about, make no mistake) than it was that al-Qaeda pulled off the greatest mass murder in U.S. history and the worst act of terrorism (by far) ever. Dissenting from popular opinion was more important than anything else. That's warped.

So, to close this circle, maybe I'm not an intellectual. Come to think of it, I've never been very comfortable with a lot of the newer ideas, primarily because I didn't think I understood a lot of them. Now, however, increasingly I think it's the fault of the sponsors of those ideas, that I didn't understand them (their ideas and the advocates both.) I've read more than a few essays about deconstructionism (although, I confess, not recently), and I'm not unfamiliar with the names of Derrida and Michael Foucault. I always stuck up for the concept of deconstructionism, and that there is no Meaning, because I always liked (and still like) Walt Kelly's line: that there's entirely too much search for Meaning in this world. I found that those who always got so apoplectic about these Frenchmen were always advocated for a restrictive Meaning that I couldn't stomach and that was buncombe anyway. If you were to ask me what's more silly, the works of Jacques Derrida or the Book of Revelations, I'd go with the latter in a heartbeat, although for that reason it makes for much more entertaining reading.

Meaning is three-quarters interpretation of meaning; the reality we perceive is mostly a function of the biases of our environment ... blah, blah, blah. That kind of argument used to matter to me, but now it doesn't. I'll let the believers in the French deconstructionists, or their nemeses on the wacko right, brood over that stuff. If they're lucky, they can go on "The O'Reilly Factor." I really don't think they are the threat to the republic that al-Qaeda is, however.

So, while I was never comfortable with ideas, I've always been a sucker for their presentation. What is called the "superficial" has, IMHADCO, always been underrated. Why did Germany, the home of Goethe and Beethoven, follow Hitler and the Nazis? Because, fundamentally, they (or he, Hitler) put on a rip-roaring show. Aesthetics can be a dangerous thing.

I digress, but then again, novels digress. What a good novel does (and to go back to the original point of this little essay) is not help us to escape from our lives, but help us to enlarge our lives, expand what we consider permissible intellectually, emotionally, and psychologically. Novels allow us to discover parts of ourselves we otherwise wouldn't, because when you read a novel, you're putting yourself, in a way, at risk. You never know what might happen when you turn the page. Your ultimate fantasy, your ultimate nightmare, might be realized. Your most embarrassing moment might be described fully, your moment of greatest pride might be denigrated. Your inner self might be revealed to yourself, and you might not like what you see. Or you might.

When we pick up a book, we want escape, but we want it on our terms, and our terms are in our interpretations of that novel. Great novels, great works of literature, therefore, are those that both present us with a fully realized re-creation of reality, and are robust enough to allow us to impose our own, possibly but not necessarily complementary, reality on that novel. That takes artifice and also a renunciation of the dull and choking fog of ideology. Ultimately, ideology and aesthetics don't mix; they can't mix. Why? The part of the human brain that wants to learn is different from the part of the human brain that wants to transcend all that it's learned. That's what great literature does. Literature helps to expand what it is possible to think, and it should be, as much as possible, free of cant and of the tired arguments with which stern and boring conviction almost always foul liveliness, originality, humor, and most of the things that make life worth living.

That's not the way literature is handled today in the academy, and that probably makes me sadder than most people who read this, who probably don't consider literature to be that important. So many humanities departments today are such ghastly places becuse these boil everything down to ideology, to politics, to group identity. I think that these academicians are, increasingly, distrustful of fine literature because it allows the reader to create his or her own world, and these academicians don't want that to occur. Reading great literature should not teach you what to think, but it can certaintly teach you how to think, which is a lot more dangerous than any dismal dialectical argument in favor of this or that. That's an old argument, but there's still life in the old girl; now, perhaps, more than ever. (Oops, there I go showing my sexism again. Oh, well.)

This essay was going to be about Faulkner (well, it will be when I get around to it), but the best line in American fiction, I think, is when Huckleberry Finn, torn between rescuing his "nigger" friend Jim or letting him be mistreated by a society Huck increasingly realizes is rotten, backed by a smarmy religion that ordained that blacks were, by God's will, slaves, decides to risk his life to help his friend Jim out. The line is, "all right, then, I'll go to hell." That is excellent in multiple ways, and all the more because the P.C. crowd want to ban the book because of the "n" bomb, as it were. That shows how ghastly those people are.

I was reading a bit of William Faulkner this evening, while boozing. Good combination. He's a bit tough to read, but he's like riding a bike; once you get the hang of it, you'll never forget how to do it. His style has been criticized as wordy, as showing off, as style for style's sake. I once knew an arrogant Brahmin from Dehli who was a SERIOUS intellectual, spouting Kant and all those other German dialecticians. When I'd say how much I thought of Faulkner, this guys, synapses hyperactive, would sniff, oh, but he's so provincial, does he have anything, really, to say above and beyond the American South? I always wish I'd said (since this was in Baltimore) that your pompous candy ass was more or less in the American South, so don't be so friggin' denigrating. Sure, the American South is provincial. Sure, it had (certainly at the time Faulkner was writing) a caste system. Reminds me of India, in fact. But I never said that; I just never spoke to the twerp again. He's probably in the academy now, lecturing about the evils of American imperialism. Meanwhile, Muslims slaughter Hindus on a daily basis. The world is full of ironies.

I came to realize that how you say something, whether in literature or painting or music or whatever, is really a lot more important than the ideas that every creative artist almost always, at one time or another, screws themselves over trying to shove into their artistic vision. Ideas can be endlessly recycled, and that there's really nothing that knew under the sun, but how you express those ideas will always stop the clocks, get the girl (or boy, or dog), and make them sign on the line that is dotted. The biggest hindrance to creativity is to lard it up with a bunch of fatty, half-assed ideas straight of Derrida, or Dinesh D'Souza, or the Brain From Planet X. Just write the damn book, or paint the damn painting, or compose the damn music, and don't put the meaning front and center. Otherwise you might as well just write for The Nation or The Weekly Standard.

In the Coen brothers' great movie "Barton Fink," an earnest and quite boring playwright, who seeks to create a "theater of the common man," full of Marxist ideas about the dignity of labor and the evil of capital and other such tomfoolery, puts in a stint in Hollywood as a contract scriptwriter. The movie is set during the late 1930s. The writer, who is patterned after an actual playwright (whose name escapes me) who won all kinds of acclaim and prizes from academics THEN, and whose reputation has been going downhill since, in the movie meets up with a character patterned after William Faulkner, who actually did write a few screenplays. In "Barton Fink," this character is called W.P. Mayhew. Anyway, the eponymous playwright (played by John Turturro, who's great as usual) blathers, all self-important and tortured, that "great art must come from a great inner pain." Mayhew has a great riposte: "well, I just like to make things up."

Make things up. That's what, for instance, al-Qaeda or radical Islam (maybe -- ALL Islam?) doesn't do. Their mindset is, you make things up, you're commiting some kind of blasphemous act. (Of course, they are capable of causing -- not creating, causing -- great pain.) They HATE creativity, I believe, more than they hate sexy girls in miniskirts (it can be said to be the same thing, anyway.) Well, I live for two things: aesthetics and the means to enjoy them.

This essay got way out of hand. So I'll make my point brief; look at the first couple of pages of Faulkner's "LIght in August." Simple demonstrative sentences, nothing too abstruse. That comes later (in a page or two, actually; that's when I put the book down and began to bang this out) Faulkner's introducing possibly the most important character in the novel, Lena Grove (the novel is not really about her, but she puts everything in motion). Faulkner writes "After she got to be a big girl she would ask her father to stop the wagon at the edge of town and she would get down and walk." You don't realize how important that line is until you've read the entire novel. The narrative goes on: "She would not tell her father why she wanted to walk in instead of riding. He thought that it was because of the smooth streets, the sidewalks. But it was because she believed that the people who saw her and whom she passed on foot would believe that she lived in the town, too." Nothing fancy there, but I could go on for about 15 pages about how damn good, how evocative, that is. So could anybody else who'd read a lot of Faulkner, or who'd read "Light in August" more than once. That one snippet, I believe, encompasses most of what we consider to be human motivation: envy, shame, pride, willfulness, initiative. The desire for community, the desire to be an individual. At least a couple of the seven deadly sins, and a couple of their opposites as well. That one paragraph has more wisdom in it than the collective works of Noam Chomsky. Our society will be healthier when more people in the liberal arts study Faulkner, and fewer study Noam Chomsky or Andrea Dworkin.

As promised, here's my little stock market game.

A few disclaimers first. There's little doubt in my mind that the Nasdaq index, at least, is bound to test the lows of September 21 (interday low of 1387, closing low of 1423, both occurring on September 21). That's the Nasdaq Composite Index's newest technical support, since it's broken the old one of 1666, which represents a 61.8% retracement of the rally from off the September lows to the early January highs. The 1666 level was important because of a fella called Fibinacci who lived in 13th century Italy, which is important for reasons I won't go into now. It's moot now, anyway; the retracement level did not hold, and that means the next technical support zone is where the rally began: in the 1387-1423 range. This is the level where buying pressure should begin to exceed selling pressure. The 1387-1423 range is the support zone where, theoretically, demand for Nasdaq stocks will become strong enough to stop the price from falling further. Now, if the Composite Index were to break that support zone, however, that would indicate something ugly, which requires an equally ugly term to characterize it: a new paradigm. In other words, a break below the 1387-1423 range would signal yet another downshift in pessimism: that sellers are willing to get out at even lower prices, fearing still lower prices, and that buyers would lose their incentive to buy at that level, since they would be anticipating even cheaper prices in the future. This is very elementary, and very much based on psychology, which is why psychology is 90 percent of investing.

Most people who bought technology in the late 1990s have been washed out of the market, perhaps never to return; now, they're actually bragging about being out of the market with the same gusto they bragged about being in it in 1999 (that right there could be a bullish sign, just as you knew it was time to short Amazon.com when Time magazine named its CEO, Jeff Bezos, as Man ... er, Person, of the Year). These people have lost their shirts, their undershirts, and a good part of their skin. They're gone. Now, if the Nasdaq were to break below the 1423-1387 zone, that would represent a real moment of truth for longer term investors, who started investing in Nasdaq stocks in the mid 1990s or earlier. This is a hardier breed of investor, who probably realizes that we are coming up on four-year cycle upgrades for personal computers and software, that the telecommunication four-year cycle will be coming up in 2003, and that these are upgrades that will by necessity require increased information technology spending. These are investors who realize that the economy is growing very nicely at three to five percent per year, who realize that the cost of money is absurdly low, who realize that inflation, even if there were a temporary cutoff in Mideast oil, will be a nonissue for the forseeable future (since labor costs are low, and labor is far more of a component to inflation than any one commodity), and who realize that stock market sectors that do the worst in one year will tend to do the best in the next. These are investors who realize that the last time there were three consecutive years when the stock market was down was in the 1930s, where the economic backdrop was the Great Depression, 25% unemployment, labor unrest, and breadlines. Not quite that bad now. These are investors who are telling themselves that investing is not a review of the past, but an anticipation of the future, and that valuing technology stocks on the basis of their performance during the technology recession of the past couple of years is as absurd as was valuing technology stocks (as these were in 1999 and 2000) on the basis of rampant Y2K spending.

Still, the reality is brutality, at least in the short run, and the patience and endurance of these investors will continue to be tested. Meanwhile, the herd shills for smallcaps and midcaps with book values slightly smaller than that of my 1988 Mustang, or for paper-pushing health maintenance organizations hated by everyone, or for restaurant chains which serve up second-rate Italian dinners, or for donut distributors, or for stores priding themselves on only selling stuff that's less than a dollar.

Anyway, on to the portfolios. This is a representative sample of the herd's favorites, along with their closing prices as of Friday, May 3: Trigon HealthCare (TGH), 104.84; St. Jude Medical (STJ), 82.73; Ryland Homes (RYL) 115.91; Sysco (the food company, not the networker) (SYY), 28.75; TRICON Global Restaurants (YUM) 62.84; and two iShares, which are basically closed-end funds, to serve as proxies for the smallcaps and midcaps: the S&P SmallCap Value iShares (IJR), 127.10; and the S&P MidCap Value iShares (IJJ) 100.70. I'm being very fair to the herd here, in that I've chosen companies which are well run, and which are still reasonably priced compared to their historical averages, even after their significant run ups in price. That's Portfolio One. Purchasing one share of each of these companies, at the aformentioned prices, comes to 622.87.

Portfolio Two will be a modified version of my old tech-name portfolio from the last contest, absent MCI-Worldcom, which has completely imploded and might not be a going concern for much longer. These companies, on the other hand, will not be going out of business anytime soon (well, probably). Here these are, along with their Friday closing prices: Applied Materials (AMAT), 22.17; Apple Computers (AAPL) 22.81, Cisco Systems (CSCO), 13.14; Dell Computers (DELL), 24.32; Intel (INTC), 26.56; and Microsoft (MSFT), 49.55. To give Portfolio Two a roughly equivalent dollar amount, the Portfolio purchases five shares of CSCO (65.70); four shares each of AMAT (88.68), APPL (91.24), DELL (97.28), and MSFT (198.20); and three shares of INTC (79.68). This gives this Portfolio an aggregate value of 620.78. Close enough

Portfolio Three is the critical list; these are companies NO ONE wants to buy now, companies that most people feel will be either out of business soon or will struggle to stay in business for the forseeable future. Here they are, along with their closing prices on Friday:
Lucent Technologies (LU), 4.40; MCI-Worldcom (WCOM), 1.78; Quest (Q), 5.05, Sun Microsystems (SUNW, 6.77); Oracle (ORCL), 8.43; and, back for a return engagement, CIENA (CIEN), 6.90.

To assign a equivalent dollar amount of 620.00 to this Portfolio, we might have to sop up most of the float in the shares of some of these companies. Anyway, the Portfolio purchases 19 shares each of LU (83.60), WCOM (33.82), Q (95.95), and ORCL (160.17); and purchases 18 shares each of SUNW (121.86) and CIEN (124.20). This gives this Portfolio a total of 619.80. Close enough.

For the record, none of these are recommendations. Especially Portfolio Three, since these are companies which are hated for good reason; they have company-specific issues with their managements. (One wonders when WCOM trades 85 million shares a day, as it did last Tuesday, trades between 2.05 and 2.75, but opens and closes at the same price, 2.47, just who is buying those shares.)This is, as they say, for amusement purposes only. It will be interesting to see where the values of these portfolios are, say, a year from now. Here they are again:

ONE: TGH, STJ, RYL, SYY, YUM, IJR, IJJ
TWO: AMAT, AAPL, CSCO, DELL, INTC, MSFT
THREE: LU, WCOM, Q, SUNW, ORCL, CIEN

Of course, if you believe Warren Buffet's recent apocolyptic prediction, none of this will matter much as we're all being triaged after a terrorist nuclear attack.

Back in October of 2000, just when the bear market was really taking hold, I indulged in an exercise which at the time I thought was just a bit of frivolity, but in retrospect turns out to have been kind of prophetic. At that time, every teletubby analyst or mutual fund manager was horning in on the potential of "new" technology stocks, issues that had already increased about six-fold over the past six months or so. These were companies in burgeoning industries with unbridled potential: telecommunications (including fiber-optic and networking manufacturers), Internet security, and business-to-business and e-commerce software and applications. "Applications" was a big word back then, along with "solutions" and "network".

Meanwhile, these analysts, when asked about the tech stocks that had become household names in the 1990s -- the Intels and Microsofts and Dells of the world -- would heap endless scorn and derision on these "old" technology companies and the investors who were going to ride them down to zero unless they sold them immediately.These companies' prices had already started to crack; they were companies that were primarly centered on the personal computer, or who had blazed the trail in networking and telecommunications but had become wallflowers doomed to be outshone by the sexy new names which were always "taking market share." No mention, of course, of what would happen if that market evaporated (which is what happened) and there was no more share to take; such ideas were absolutely beyond the ken of these sophisticated stock pickers. They considered the PC-centric companies about as wise an investment as investing (in another overused metaphor of those days) in buggy-whip manufacturers after the introduction of the internal combustion engine. I had always thought that the enterprising buggy-whip manufacturer could have gone into the business of adult toys and S&M "applications" and "services," and done pretty well. But I digress.

Anyway, I decided to do a little test one day. I created two fantasy portfolios, one of 20 new-tech names and one of 7 old-tech names: I "bought" one share of each new tech in the model portfolio at the COB on October 17, 2000 (I know, this is REAL ancient history) and 11 shares of each old tech, so that I would be commiting the same amount to each portfolio, $2832.

The new tech portfolio consisted of the following stocks, some of which you might have heard of or (if you're unlucky) invested in: Applied Micro Circuits (AMCC), Ariba (ARBA); BEA Systems (BEAS); Broadcom (BRCD);
Brocade Communications (BRCM); CheckPoint Software (CHKP); CIENA (CIEN); Commerce One (CMRC): I2 Technologies (ITWO); JDS Uniphase (JDSU); Juniper Networks (JNPR); Network Appliances(NTAP); PMC-Sierra (PMCS); Purchase Pro (PPRO); Redback Networks (RBAK); Sanmina (SANM); Sycamore Networks (SCMR); Siebel Systems (SEBL); VeriSign (VRTS); and Veritas Software (VRTS). The old-tech names were Applied Material (AMAT); Apple (AAPL); Cisco Systems (CSCO); Dell Computer (DELL); Intel (INTC); Microsoft (MSFT); and MCI-Worldcom (WCOM).

The thing to do, of course, would have been not to buy any of these companies at any time since then. But given that there are seven levels of hell, and that some choices are unwise, some disasterous, and some fatal, here is how these two model portfolios have performed since.

DATE 10/16 3/30/01 5/2/02
NEW-TECH PORTFOLIO VALUE $2832 $480 $225
OLD TECH PORTFOLIO VALUE $2832 $2259 $1834

Speaks for itself. I'm not surprised at what's going on at Merrill Lynch right now; I've known for a while that the business of stock "analysis" is three parts grift to two parts luck to one part science. A few hundred thousand people "lost" several billion dollars in Enron, and we have Congressional hearings and a soap opera rivaling the Chandra and Gary Show. Millions of investors lost seven trillion in the telecommunications and Internet charnel houses, and we hear very little.

So, now that the bear continues to range across the investing prairie, mauling any brave soul who tries to drive bulls on it, I thought this exercise might be worth doing again. Analysts now are flocking, like the sheep they are, to a whole new bunch of names in a whole different set of industries: HMOs, homebuilders, restaurants, retailers, consumer nondurables. While these names are no doubt far more fundamentally sound than the new tech names were, they've run up an awful lot recently, and are setting up for, I believe, a fall. Maybe a hard one. .

Tomorrow (or maybe the next) I'll come up with a model portfolio of these hot new names which are lusted over by (one would hope) a whole new breed of mutual fund managers who are, however, proving to be as callow and herdlike as their predecessors who shilled for Ariba at 131 and CIENA at 135. Some names I'd put in there include Trigon Industries, Ryland Homes, St. Jude Medical, Wellpoint, Quest Diagnostics, Sysco (the food company), Kohl's Department Stores, and Darden Family Restaurants. Then I'll see how that performs against not one, but TWO model portfolios: (1) tech stocks that have been punished for going on two years now, but still are accepted as going concerns (INTC, MSFT, IBM, CSCO, DELL); and (2) tech stocks that are on the critical list, laden by bad management, debt, and a general paralysis in information technology spending -- the very worst things you can possibly invest in, according to most analysts: Lucent (LU); WCOM; Quest (Q); JDSU, and, based on their performance the past couple of days, Oracle (ORCL) and Sun Microsystems (SUNW). There is, obviously, a whole other universe of companies such as railroads and paper products makers and energies, which are probably the best sectors (if there are any) to be in over the next few months, since these are the sectors of the stock market that tend to do the best in the part of the business cycle we're in: coming out of a recession.

We'll follow these three portfolios, and see how they do.

Yep, name change. "Rant" has been expropriated by every durn blog down in blogville, the tall and the small, and I can't stop it from happening. I'm not comfortable with the name anymore. All these tyros, they might have the best of intentions, but they don't really know what ranting is. After all, I was ranting while most of 'em were climbing through sandboxes or dodging the advances of Brother Bicarbonate of Soda at St. Medicine Cabinet's. So I dove deep into Roget's and came up with "dilettante." I kind of like the juxtaposition of "citizen," with its populist slant, with "dilettante," which implies aristocratic. Since I've got the calm temperment of the former and wield the competence of the latter, "Citizen Dilettante" is adequate as a sobriquet. And if anyone starts using that, I'll just keep reaching deeper into Roget's until I've gone through every ten dollar noun there is.

Here's a hilarious article, in the gotcha tradition, about newer, stronger, and better jounalists, now that we have the technology. It's from an outfit, The New York Press, that calls itself "New York's Free Weekly Newspaper." Usually when I see a tagline like that, I prepare to gag on stories about how gentrification is ruining the essence of inner-city communities, or on how Sir Haight Psychotic's civil rights have been violated after police arrested him for blowing his nose at tourists. But my fears were unfounded. Still, I'd advise them to change their tagline; free weeklies have never been known to have much of a sense of humor, unless it was directed at suburban white men ages 30 to 50.

And, no, I'm not indulging in self pity. I live in the city.