Thursday, April 30, 2009

Zodiac Killer Revealed by Daughter?

A very interesting story is now developing in regards to the Zodiac killer.
A 42 year old woman named Deborah Perez claims that her father was the Zodiac killer in northern California, Guy Hendrickson. She says she wrote one note to the police, and still has the first victim's glasses, from a cabbie, that her dad kept as a souvenir.

Here's the USA Today version of today's story:
Woman's Dad the Zodiac Killer?

Now, I hope that everyone interested in this case or well-made films has seen the 2007 movie Zodiac, excellent examination by director David Fincher of both the police and a journalist's investigations into the serial killings.

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Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Are Foreign Enemies Crushing Our Markets?

I just did an analysis of the leveraged ETFs (exchange traded funds) for YTD in 2009. It doesn't look good, as nearly all are down vs the underlying indices. So whatever is causing this (management fees?), it's not a good bet for the public investor.

Jim Cramer of Mad Money (CNBC, the "Orwellian voice of corporate propaganda", and proud of it) is wrong that they have too much leverage, because options and futures traders have even more leverage (at least 10-1, 40-1 on futures?) and there are options on everything now - so you'd have to ban all leveraged instruments if that argument of his holds water. I've often thought the futures (especially trading off hrs) have way too much influence - a few guys overnight (Al Q on laptops in their caves using sovereign funds?) can sell em off and clobber the market's opening for no reason. I saw the Dow futures down 500 pts once (when worth 4000) simply because Brazil devalued its currency! WHY do we allow this? The futures should only trade when the market is open to allow immediate adjustments. Like allowing invidual investors to get out with a small loss, not wake up suddenly down 15% like the Brazilian pesata day.

No one seems to care, do they? - let's just give our petrodollars to our enemies who then use them to short the mkt and hurt us even more - this is madness! All this is giving "them" the weapon to kill our kind of gambling capitalism, where corporations survive based on market value! (I didn't realize this until the market runs on the most important financial stocks; suddenly their credit was worthless due to low stock prices). Plus they don't pay tax on the capital gains or dividends either - double whammy of investing 'Pearl Harbor'!

"We had to stimulate foreign investment" they would tell us - WHY?? Why not stimulate them buying goods and not wrecking our investment markets? This system of economics baffles me, it places us at the mercy of our enemies, who certainly don't want us to prosper through investing or it looks like our brand of corrupt capitalism succeeds for the average citizen, which I don't believe anyway. This only benefits those with enough capital to make more, pay huge executive salaries that only benefit a few, and also encourages the buying of politicians and agencies like the FDA, and if they NEED to pay off or contribute to all these to "get their policies invoked", then those must NOT be policies benefial to all, or they would have been implemented already.

Common sense, it there's any remaining in the face of total economic collapse.

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Tuesday, April 28, 2009

Can the World Attain Peace?

I often think that since man's evolutionary nature has been established as nomadic hunter-killers (scientists have proven that the herbalist humanoids died off, each time, but the killer-carnivores survived, largely by eating carrion like other animals), we will remain in this state of evolution until something radical changes us all. Perhaps it will take another deadly plague, perhaps another world war that will end with all national borders being eradicated.

One would hope for our evolution into spiritual beings, as in Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End", but that seems still centuries away, sadly. (Kubrick wanted to film this novel, but with existing technology, "2001: A Space Odyssey" was all they could film together at the time, he and Clarke wrote this story just for the film; Clarke, by the way, did not believe in evil, never had a book with any.)

As long as there are invisible national boundaries, we will always have each nation's own sovereignty and security causing wars. Perhaps when the polar caps melt, and 90% of the world's populations are displaced who live along coastlines and major rivers, then we can lose the nationalistic militarism that keeps the world in conflict.

Just because we have the term utopia doesn't mean it cannot be attained. Most of our reality is created from dreams; the future is what we build from these. We also have the opposite term: dystopia, which seems to be the current world state for the last 3000-5000 years at least. If one can be reality, so can its opposite; the Yin-Yang of the universe should always eventually occur to balance each other.

Mankind apparently also finds some sort of validation in the glory and courage necessary for warriors. It seems that women don't have this need as much as the need to create and foster life, thankfully! We all need to assert this feminine grace toward life, and forget about the valor of war, which is attained at the high cost of innocent life. If, rather than "good/evil" struggles, we all just concentrated on progress, exploration, healing, and creating, we might find a better alternative than death and destruction.

A quote from Lawrence of Arabia, "War is for young men of courage and valor, keeping the peace is for old men with nothing else to do." (Alec Guinness as Prince Feisal). Great script, won an Oscar®.

Personally, I would go to jail before fighting in any war or killing another being, nothing is that important. I would die myself before becoming a killer.

Peace to all, José

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Wednesday, April 22, 2009

The Daily Market Reversal

Up Friday, down Monday, up Tuesday, down Wednesday (4.22). Just like that terrible commercial, "you buy and sell the same stocks, again and again." Yep, that's what they're doing. Buy em today, sell em tomorrow, ad infinitum.

Is this market getting to be like a stuck record, constantly skipping back and forth and ending up in the same places? Sometimes it reverses direction daily for 4-8 days in a row. It makes asolutely no sense. One day financials are 'headed for doom', they and the market plunge. The next day, the feds speak, change some rule, and suddenly financials are covered by shorts, 'scrambling like scalded monkeys' ( thanks to Jeff Macke), and the market goes back up. Lately, it's almost like clockwork. A clock with just two settings: light and dark (up and down).

Someone is obviously playing the same old game with us to get churning, trading, commissions, whatever - and the TV propagandists like CNBC are all part of the disinformation game. They just sit there making up news and rumors, then laugh when the market reverses and some sectors, usually financials, move 20%. It's getting very old, and they are losing investors for good whom they should need.

Apparently not, this has become a poker game for insiders only: floor traders, hedge fund managers, big brokerages. The little investor is unwanted and can't pay the huge buy-in required, apparently millions per entry, or you don't rate being in the game.

I think the market professionals didn't really like having the average person in the market, so they figured out a way to get rid of us - all the millions of small IRA and 401 accounts aren't worth the time and effort to do the bookkeeping. If you don't have millions, and allow the brokerages to leverage that for their own use to manipulate stocks in collusion with their colleagues and hedge fund minions, then you're of little use or value, or "the capitalists don't want you."

This has become a game of and for big money only, who are trying their best to eradicate the lower and middle classes from spheres of influence. What they want and may have created is an autocracy of big money - a government by, of, and for the wealthy only. After all, "they create all the jobs", if you listen to the neo-fascist leader of white America, Larry Kudlow of CNBC - the same bozo that was an economic advisor for Ronald "spend like there's no tomorrow" Reagan, who later admitted after the 1987 crash that "the U.S. economy is a house of cards."

Kudlow thinks if you keep giving capitalists a free reign, their immense wealth will "trickle down" to the little guy. Well, that obviously doesn't work: they take what they can steal and smuggle it out to foreign countries with secretive banking, where the U.S. can't get to it, and they can retire both wealthy and out of reach. The joke on us is that millions still believe this, thinking that capitalism is a "lottery they can win", like the housewives paraded for us on shows like Donny Deutsch's "Big Idea", pretending that "you too can get rich with a good idea". Fat chance, I'd be much better off playing the Don't Pass line at any craps table in Nevada, betting against the shooters and with the casino.

Too bad we can't really bet with the casino here. If you buy the stock of a successful company, there's no guarantee they still won't steal all the money and go bankrupt, it seems to be the true American way. In fact, in 1987 some brokerages also went bankrupt and angry investors had to wait for the feds to get around to paying their money back at a pace even slower than the Katrina victims rescue. Let's just hope it doesn't take half a century like it took the Swiss banks to return money stolen from the Jews by Nazis in WW2; they gave it to Israel because this was money without any living heirs, but they held the billions for over 40 years, and no one knows really how much was there, or how much went to other nations' banks.

Money knows no boundaries or politics, and has no ethics to worry about.

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Monday, April 6, 2009

The Dumbest Ongoing Product Bans

Everyone should read this terrific article, about the dumbest bans current invoked by the government.

subtitled: Annual Review of Regulatory Absurdity by Eli Lehrer
The Five Dumbest Product Bans

#1 is the cancer drug Provenge, made by Dendreon (DNDN), of which approval was recommended by the FDA review panel 13-4, with a unanimous vote that "it's safe". However, under suspicious circumstances like conflicts of interest and possible bribery, the FDA itself denied approval, leaving terminal prostate cancer victims with shorter lives and no other promising drug.

This has become just another in a long string of stories involving apparent corporate corruption reaching into the government. Personally, I go in and out of the DNDN stock, thinking one day that justice will prevail and a drug that extends lives will be made available in spite of opposition from big pharma and their lobbyists. I'm currently long the stock once again, since their new test results are supposed to be ready for the feds during 2009.

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Sunday, April 5, 2009

Thoreau on the State vs the Individual

"There will never be a really free and enlightened State, until the State comes to recognize the individual as a higher and independent power, from which all its own power is derived, and treats him accordingly.. to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor; which even would not think it inconsistant with its own repose, if a few were to live aloof from it. A state which bore this kind of fruit, and suffered it to drop off as fast as it ripened, would prepare the way for a more perfect and glorious state, which I have imagined, but not yet anywhere seen."
-- Henry David Thoreau

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