ParisRant: Nudity, Beer and Real Estate...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

It's a funny old world. One day, you're looking forward to taking up digs in a lovely little tree-lined suburb outside Paris, the next you're telling one of life's tapeworms to stick the house up his arse.

I'll tell you what I object to about the real estate rental market in France (as compared with that in Australia). In Australia, the owner pays the agent (usually on an ongoing basis out of the rent receipts). In France, the renter pays the agent, in one lump sum (usually one month's rent) at the start of the tenancy. In other words, the actual rent is (for a one year lease) 8% higher than the stated rent (due to the presence of this human tapeworm).

Leaving aside the actual cost, think of how it tilts incentives. If the agent's fees are paid up front, there is no incentive for the agent to manage the rental in way that avoids conflict - if the tentant leaves (which he is entitled to do under French law at any time, on two month's notice) the agent signs up some other sucker and collects another agency fee. What a carve-up.

This is a market failure, pure and simple. It is also one of the few remaining transactions in which some parasite interposes themselves between the actual participants and collects an ad valorem fee (i.e., a fee that varies with the value of the transaction, rather than being priced according to the costs of provision of the service). Remember when brokerage used to be like that? I know... it still is in some situations - i.e., where the person performing the transaction is either a nuffnuff or is using other people's money.

But what really sticks in my craw is the idea of paying some human hookworm a month's rent, in the full knowledge that they think of themselves as serving the interests of the 'other side' (because agents are like politicians - they think that power lies on the side of capital and thus will fellate capital until they get slapped on the top of the head).

So I decided I won't do it - pure and simple. No agency rentals for me, henceforth.

Thankfully the market has already sensed my hatred of middle-men and other parasites, and was already working on a solution before I arrived. France is blessed with a series of magazines in which individual proprietors try to find individual purchasers or renters. The major one is called 'De Particulier à Particulier' (from individual to individual). Funnily enough, a load of real estate hookworms actually ring the ads and try to shoe-horn their way in... which has resulted in a lot of people putting a specific "agences s'abstenir" ("agencies, don't bother") notice on their ads.

This is why I love markets - they hate friction and eventually (when left alone) they get rid of all frictions and enable voluntary exchange in the least-cost way. A glory to behold and a thing of beauty...

Anyhow, le Vesinet is off. Bugger. However we have moved into a very groovy little pad in the 7th... which we discovered from l'Express this week is one of the chic-est (and therefore most expensive) arondissements in Paris. (The 16th - where we used to be - is the outright most expensive, but it was as boring as batshit).

As usual in the final stages of a blowoff, the dumb money is avalanching in, and both the 16th and the 7th have had real estate prices go on a parabolic trajectory in recent years (the 16th has had average appreication of 37% p.a. since 2002... there must have been advance word that I was moving in), while the 7th is only slightly behind (at 87% total appreciation over the same period).

'Brad'n'Ange's apartment is in the 7th, and is a snip at a mere €40,000 a month - a penthouse straight across the river from the Eiffel Tower. Their administrative assistant has moved into our old apartment in the 16th [I'm not kidding: our agent - Alain - handles Brad'n'Ange's account].

Our place in the 7th is nowhere near as swish as Mr & Mrs Smith's (you knew that already) but at least when you go out onto Rue St Dominique to get a loaf of bread, you can see the tower on your right (and the Irish pub in the street has good Guinness and a big-creen TV for le Rugby). [I know - what the hell would I know about Guinness... it tasted just as awful as I remember, but the Irishman next to me said "Great Guinness" or something unintelligible to that effect]. The coffee at the Columbus Cafe is just like Lygon Street *(that is rare for anything except espresso).

At the old place, we were 700m from the Arc de Triomphe and 100m from the Bois de Boulogne; now we are 250m from Les Invalides (where some short-assed Corsican bloke is buried) and 500m from the Eiffel Tower. Cool.

More importantly, the place will have internet access starting within a week - and so normal Rant channels will be resuming transmission (so long as I can tear myself away from the 100 cable TV channels we get as part of the package).

Which brings me to breasts.

I've got nothing against them, personally - they are a nice shape (sometimes) and it's pretty clear that I'm a good old red-blooded heterosexual feller (since I am a lumbering great hairy doofus with no fashion sense or taste in interior design). But honestly, I reckon even the most prematurely-weaned bloke on the planet would get a bit sick of seeing nipples after about a week of French telly. You see them on ads, for god's sake. Bums are slightly rarer (although one was plastered across a furniture van advertising beds).

The odd thing about the bum-bed-ad was that it featured a lady lying on her side on a bed. Nothing odd about that, you remark.

She was lying on her side, legs together (as you do), but (being a bloke with an eye for detail) I noticed that in the little gap between the top of her thighs you could see a teensy skerrick of background... yes, folks, this was a clear 'beaver shot' (as I believe our American friends call it).

And it's not the first... there is an ad for 'feminine body wash' ("cloaca-cleaner", as The Lovely derisively calls it) in whch the bottle of cleaner is delicately positioned in front of the 'bits' that it is used to cleanse.

Lemme tell you, lads, those 'bits' either belong to a 12 year old, or to someone who suffers (wax-wise) for her art (her 'art' being posing with a bottle of clacker-cleaner in front of the front-bottom). This wasn't a 'Brazilian' - this was the Gobi desert.

A short term top in the Dow either tonight or tomorrow... short any index you fancy.

And if everything pans out, I should be the proud owner of a new RantMobile reasonably soon - a pink Mini (the old body style of course - I would not have one of the new ones as a gift, and if omeone gave me one of the new ones I would piss on it before I sold it to buy an old-fashioned one). It's all the way up at Amiens (note to Mav - that's about where your plane will arrive, you big Wog). €600... BARRRRgain...

FreedomRant: A Short Note...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

Read this review, and watch the movie (in places where the cinema industry is non-competitive like the new People's Republic of Australia and/or Phoney Toney's Disunited Kindgom, it will probably not be released - so get it from Morpheus). If your mind has more than one functional synapse, you will get it. The review is excellent, but still fails to do justice to the film itself.

Me, I always get films from Morpheus - it helps reduce the monopoly profits that are earned through the intellectual falsehood of 'intellectual property', where movie and music houses take advantage of creative artists' lack of financial acumen.

Be a heretic.

ParisRant: Encore, with PARAGRAPHS this time...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

Things were going far too well, obviously. Sure, there was the whole "Froggish ignorance of the Joys of Toast" thing... but I had assumed that to be the sum total of the negatives. If this was the sole hint of grit in the spinach of life, thought I, then this is all rather swell.

And then stark reality jumped out and bit me squarely on my 41-and-a-bit year-old arse.

Turns out that real estate agents are the same everywhere; that is, people whose only alternative employment is as a burglar, a stockbroker, or a used-car salesman. You ought to have known that it would be the case, and I ought to have known it too. There is a certain sameness in all the 'ticket clipping' "professions" - where some git interposes himself into a transaction somehow and charges an ad valorem fee for something that has relatively invariant production costs.

If I had a child who grew up to be a real estate agent, I would tell others that he was a car thief rather than face the shame of having soiled humanity with yet another ticket-clipper.

The story goes like this.

A giant hairy smelly 41-year-old bloke (me) and a slim, quietly spoken Power Lawyer (The Lovely) go out to the scenic suburb of le Vesinet to look at a cottage. The cottage is advertised as 'meublé' (furnished) and sure enough, the place has everything you could expect (our Paris flat was rented furnished, and included linen, towels, toaster, coffee machine... you name it). The agent gives assurances that the furniture that we see on our little tour will 'reste ici' (stay here) when the existing tenant leaves.

D'accord, we say. C'est genial, we think. Lovely area, nice little house. A bit smaller than we wanted, but it's worth the slightly-excessive rent because the furniture is of a high standard.

We hold our noses at the idea of paying a real estate agent €850 for doing bugger all (in France there is an 'agent's fee' on every rental, and it's usually a month's rent; our fee was 20% less than a month's rent). Two month's rent as bond, a month's rent in advance, and the agents fee totals €4000 exactly.

Some time later, we go out to le Vesinet on a Saturday (let the record show that this was last Saturday) - ostensibly to sign the paperwork and move right on in.

Bzzzzt. Wrong - but thank you for playing.

We got to meet the chatelaine of the grand house to which the cottage belongs (she is a very nice lady), but we were told that although the existing tenant had left, we could not take over the place without getting contents insurance.

That's the least of the problem - the interesting thing took place prior to that, when we went back in to inspect the property.

There was not a stick of furniture in the place. Well, there was an old table and 3 chairs - but everything else had gone with the prior tenant.

We mentioned this to the agent - who tried to brazen it out, letting us know that it hardly costs anything to buy a fridge, a washing machine, a microwave, a couple of couches, a bed (at least one), lamps, a TV... the sorts of things that we were led to believe were already a part of the chattels. Conservatively, I reckon new versions of all that stuff would total about €2500. I mentioned that if it costs 'presque rien', then HE could buy the stuff. He thought that was funny.

Frankly, he can stick the place up his arse - which is sad, because it's a nice location and the chatelaine seems a really nice lady.

Why is it that real estate agents the world over are the same grimy parasites, I wonder. Willing to try any 'arnaque' (con-job) - advertising an unfurnished place as furnished, claiming that the garden was 100m² when it's probably half that size... that sort of thing. IOt burns me up, because by trying to pull that sort of shit, they are basically letting you know that they think you're an idiot.

Speaking of idiots, Ariel Sharon's headache continues, and the European press fails to spot its hypocrisy - mewling about freedom of expression in the Muhammad-cartoon frisson while David Irving, Ernst Zundel and others sit in jail for questioning the State version of the unpleasantness of 1939-1945.

Frankly, if the State has to enforce a particular 'correct line' of thought under pain of imprisonment, I am inclined automatically to wonder why the truth needs armed goons to help make itself apparent. As Jefferson said, the governments don't need to throw force of arms behind the truth: the truth needs no defending.

Oh - and all this crapola about bird flu... doesn't it make it screamingly obvious that the attack on Iran is getting closer? Got to get the population diverted and concerned, so that their critical faculties are in a state of disequilibrium whe nthe war drums are ramped up. So it's bird fl uand chikungunya, 24/7. It makes me sick. the odds against this virus mutating into a human-human transmissable disease are about the same as for any flu in any year. EVERY year 25000 people die of flu across the world. H5N1 has killed at most a dozen people... so we are spending billions of dollars on PR for a war, and on the remote possibility that a particular disease will self-generate. MADNESS.

ParisRant XVI: The Photos...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

I mentioned that as soon as I could get a reader for the memory ard from my camera, I would make available some photos. Unfortunately, I have no mechanism by which I can reduce the size or resolution of the images, so they are pretty 'fat' (averaging 250kb), so I have not used 'img' tags below - instead I have used 'a href' tags which will open each image in a new browser window. Note that for some of them I cocked up the date function on the camera - seting the year to 2005 rather than 2006.

I particularly urge you to take a look at the photo of my beautiful right ear - taken from the other side of the table at le Ronsard (our favourite cafe in Montmartre... when you see what's behind me, you will see why it's our fave).

So here goes... I've tried to give it some structure...

Our Bit of the 16th

As I've said before, the 16th is a bit stuffy; lots of lovely buildings, but you get overloaded by it within a couple of days. Still, it's quite pretty...

The End Of Our Street (294k)

Our Front Door (204k)

Our Metro Station - Porte Dauphine(401k)

Sights and Bodyparts

My Beautiful Right Ear (with some churchy-looking thing in the background) (182k)

The Aforementioned "Churchy-looking thing" (Sacre Coeur) (243k)

Some Other Church-Shaped Object (Notre Dame) (348k)

A Monument to Politicians' Vanity (City Hall, Paris) (328k)

Our Permanent Digs - le Vesinet

I think i've mentioned this before, but le Vesinet is the only town in Paris that is also defined as a National Park. The photos below were taken in the winter, but you can imagine how green and lovely it will be when the trees have foliage.

And swans in the little stream than runs near our place... how neat. Sadly, there is a law in France whereby only the King is allowed to eat swans - so I guess that means that when I take over I will have to reinstate the Monarchy.

Our Little Hidey Hole in le Vesinet (374k)

Our Neighbour's Bigger Hidey-Hole (256k)

The Folks Over The Back Fence (or rather, their Castle...) (353k)

Another Neighbour's Shack... (240k)

DUCKIES!!! (460k)

SWANS, too... (368k)

Same swans, different angle (362k)

ParisRant: Propaganda, Cheese and Liberté

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

If we will, we can still save ourselves the cost of empire building. We have only to square off against this propaganda, and to supplement rationality with a determination that, come what may, we will not lend ourselves, as individuals, to this new outrage against human dignity. We will not cooperate. We will urge non-cooperation upon our neighbors. We will resist, by counterpropaganda, every attempt to lead us to madness. Above all, when the time comes, we will refuse to fight, choosing the self-respect of the prison camp to the ignominy of the battlefield. It is far nobler to clean a latrine than to kill a man for profit.

That was written in 1947, by Frank Chodorov, in an article entitled "A Byzantine Empire of the West?" in which Chodorov forecast the waning of the British Empire and the continued rise of the American Empire.

I strongly recommend that you read the entire article, which is redolent with scorn for anybody who believed that the supposed argument of the US (that its actions were being taken to defend the world against the threat of socialism).

That same scorn should now be directed with as much venom as we can muster, against those who attempt to deploy the canard of a "War Against Terror" as cover for their attempt to continue to extract resources by force (military action or the threat thereof) and by fraud (the payment for said resources in a depreciating currency, the creation of which is unconstrained by any stock of real assets).

In fact as another writer once said, the fraud itself is impossible without the threat of force - only the dominant military power can attempt to 'clip' the coinage it uses in its trade with the rest of the world.

Which brings me to the French (again).

I like it here, in spite of what folks might have thought after my little diatribe against the idiotic grammar of the language.

But it should not be expected that one should like evrything about a place, even though overall the place gets top marks. As far as I can discern, there is nothing on this or any other planet which yields unalloyed joy - every silver lining has a cloud, as it were.

Frankly though, there are some things that a genuinely civilised polity requires, and that ought to be generated endogenously by the economy of any society that wants to claim to be culturally advanced.

"What are these necessaries?" I hear you ask... "What is it that makes a truly "Great Society"?

Bacon. Toast. Custard (not that thin soupy 'creme anglais', but a proper thick stuff that you can stand a spoon up in). Pepperoni. A decent pizza. A good old-fashioned meat pie. Good hard tasty cheese (like the stuff they produce in Cobram).

The French produce almost 400 different cheeses, and many of them taste terrific - but none of them (and I swear to you, I have seen at least 250 of the 300-odd) is remotely like Cracker Barrel Special Reserve. You know the one - the one in the black packet (or if you want it even bitey-er, the Cobram one in the black wax 'Toblerone' shape).

How can this be? You can get magnificent bufalo mozarella at the local supermarketm but the closest that the French cheesemaker can get to a decent Tasty is a feeble Emmenthal. You can get Reggiano as cheap as chips, but you can't get Pecorino for blood nor money.

How can this be?

Well, the cheese issue is easy to explain. It all comes back to the defining characteristic of a great civiliation... Toast.

If a country has no tradition of Toast, it will have no tradition of Toasted Ham and Cheese sangers (with optional onions and tomato). It will have no tradition of Bacon and Eggs on... you guessed it... Toast.

It is for this reason that the Frog version of a toasted ham and cheese sanger (the 'croque monsieur') is a feeble thing that includes - of all things - a bloody dollop of bechamel sauce in its innards. The cheese on a croque monsieur is plentiful, but it's bloody Emmenthal.

And the Frog version of bacon and eggs ('oeufs en plat bacon') is a heartbreaker... the 'bacon' is like the speudo-bacon they used to put on McDonald's breakfast muffins, and there is no... wait for it... TOAST.

No toast! All you get is a little side dish with some cut-up baguette! It is as if they are still trying to 'get one back' for Agincourt!

Imagine how happy I would be if I could sit in 'le Ronsard' (a little cafe at the foot of Sacre Coeur cathedral) and have a breakfast of bacon and eggs on toast.

The other problems (pepperoni and pizza) are related. After searching high and low, I have failed utterly to find a decent pepperoni. The French 'saussicon sec' has absolute no spice about it, and I like a decent hot pepperoni (ooo-er). Without good pepperoni and good cheese, any attempt to make a pizza is doomed.

But let me tell you this: when you can sit in a restaurant ('le Procope') which has occupied the same premises in Rue de l'Ancienne Comedie in the 6th arondissement since 1686, you will forgive the lack of Toast.

Franklin and Jefferson were regular visitors in the 1700s, and early drafts of both the US and French Constitutions were drafted within the very place. they have one of Napoleon's hats i nthe entry foyer. And the place is genuinely magnificent. We ate there recently with one of the Lovely's senior colleagues (the chap who is also a member of the "Legion d'Honneur" - the Frog equivalent of a Knight of the Realm). And the amazing thing is. it's not expensive and you don't have to book months in advance.

Why not? Simple, silly, All the 'restaurant wankers' go elsewhere - to places run by 'celebrity chefs' - and the 'restaurant wanker goes there solely because they think other people like them will be there. Think 'Rockpool' or 'Tetsuyu' in Sydney (both SHIT, Sydneysiders - sorry), or 'Flower Drum' or 'Circa' in Melbourne (although admittedly at Flower Drum you actually get a decent feed).

Le Procope doesn't give a fuck if Gerard Depardieu eats there or not (he doesn't) - they do what they have done for three centuries... a good meal at a decent price. For example the set-menu 'Menu des Philosophes' is three tasty courses with wine for €30, and even if you go a la carte you won't get stung for more than about €60 a head. I had (these were from the Menu des Philosophes): a duck terrine, roast duck, and the best creme brulee I have ever tasted in my life, and we had a nice Rose and a couple of bots of Santa Cristi chianti.

And as I discovered when I was telling Mum about it, they have a website, so you can take a look at the dining rooms at this link although there is no photo of the Salon Benjamin Franklin which was the room we ate in.

ParisRant: Coda on Language

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

Notice something? The SPI (and most stock indices, in fact) formed a new, lower year-to-date high last week, and from there tanked like billy-oh.

Don't be fooled by the pump last night in the S&P - that's strictly an options-expiration related piece of shenanigans.

Last weekend I had hoped to get access to a computer which was not part of an internet cafe intranet - but that didn't happen for a variety of reasons. As a result, I was not able to log in to RantControl (I think it would be foolhardy in the extreme to do so from a public computer). So I was unable to grab the SPISpy Rules of Engagement (RoE) document from the secure drive, which meant I couldn't send it to those of you who have not yet got hold of it. That is a pain, but it will be remedied very shortly - we move into the house in le Vesinet this weekend (YAY!!).

Speaking of things French, I'm becoming more and more annoyed with the government-sponsored get-together of Froggish boffins who 'refined' the French language (from memory it was in the 1800s). Like typical government-orchestrated grand plans, the resulting changes were little more than the deletion of some words which were falling out of use anyhow (but the loss of which deprived French of the depth of nuance that English has).

More important issues were left undone - structural issues. For example, the notion that possessive pronouns agree with the gender of the object. For example, if I was speaking of "Peter and his mother", in French I would say "Pierre et sa mere", which always looks to me as if it is "Peter and her mother". This is why the Frogs often stuff up possessive pronouns in English, where the structure is more logical.

To extend the example (and give a better explication as to why the French way is a bad thing), consider the phrase "Peter and his mother got into his car" ... in French, that's (roughly - just concentrate on the car) "Pierre et sa mere sont entrées dans sa voiture". If you were translating that as an English speaker, you would be forgiven for thinking it was his mother's car, because sa is the feminine possessive pronoun.

Also, the fact that adjectives and adverbs have to agree by gender and number - stupid. Examples: un poivron vert, deux poivrons verts, une voiture verte, deux voitures vertes. One green pepper, two 'greens' peppers, one 'greene' car, two 'greenes' cars... notice the extra 'e' in verte(s) when attached to a feminine object (voiture is feminine). It's just stupid.

Likewise adverbs:

• Desolé - 'Sorry' (singluar, masculine);
• Desolée - 'Sorry' (singluar, feminine);
• Desolés - 'Sorry' (plural, masculine);
• Desolées - 'Sorry' (plural, feminine).

Frankly, the language is set up so that every sentence worth writing is more of a grammatical obstacle course, rather than an exercise in getting a thought across. What is more maddening is that the nuances descibed above have little impact on the spoken sentence (although the 't' in vert is silent, but that it 'verte' is not).

in other words, the nuance is basically a way to separate smartasses from dumbasses in written French,,, which smells like a vestige from the periods in hostory when the elite attempted to keep literacy to a minumum.

Anyway, among other things that's probably why the French have never produced a truly great philosopher... people spend too much mental effort on dumbass things like gender and number agreement (and whether composite tenses use etre or avoir, and how to use the subjunctive, and other meaningless stylistic embroidery). And other stuff, like the fact that words like 'which' and 'this' also change with the gender and number of the object.

Don't get me wrong, I don't find it hard, I just find it annoying because it's pointlessly inefficient.

Of course, English spelling (and English orthography in general) is a pain in the arse, but eventually English will evolve out of all its silly spellings (where 'ough' can be 'uff', 'ow', 'oo', 'oh' or 'ock'). In fact English orthography is already changing... with things being descibed as 'Lite' or 'Hi-Fibre'. I might not like it, but it makes sense if the language is for communication rather than a make-work scheme for English teachers. Webster said of English that it had to rationalise its spelling or...

"...the minds of men may again sink into indolence; a national acquiescence in error will follow, and posterity be doomed to struggle with difficulties which time and accident will perpetually multiply."

Here's a forecast: French will become a 'fringe' language (like Basque or Breton) unless it fixes these little annoying things... people will simply migrate to English.

And don't get me started on German 'cases'...

SPIRant: Better Late Than Never...

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

The SPI has taken a nosedive, but oddly it happened two days late (at least according to my view of the world). Anyone who shorted Monday morning's first overbought ought to be a happy camper.

As you will have seen from the last blog instalment, my initial guess was that overbought would be hit between 10:30 and 11:00 a.m.: as it turned out, that timing was WAY too early. The actual timing was 4 p.m. Monday with the SPI above 4885 - evidenced by a textbook CCI divergence of the type that I have harped on about for over a year.

Sadly I can't post a chart from here, but there are any number of sites (e.g., futuresource.com) that enable registered users to overlay the CCI and %R over a 15-minute chart - so for the moment youse can all look for youse-selfs.

Anyhow, if you ignored the SPISpy-RoE and simply jumped in between 10:30 amd 11:00 a.m., you got set at between 4831 and 4846, and then had to endure a significant "negative excursion" before the trade worked - the key thing is it now smells of roses (and just quietly, with the session low at 4793, everyone trading more than one unit should have taken at least half of their position off the table, and anyone trading one unit shuld be out completely). I made it clear that the change to a longer holding period for SPI trades (out to a period of 2-3 days rather than 15minutes-1 day) would mean a bit less accuracy - which is why the SPISpy-RoE becomes important (to 'refine' entries once the overall direction is provided). those SPISpyers who don't have a copy should let me know ASAP.

I also mentioned that the SPI would bounce to a new, lower weekly and daily high this week - so far that has panned out nicely, with the SPI reaching 4900-ish on Tuesday morning prior to the tank.

ParisRant: Not Long Now

Note - from June 24th 2009, this blog has migrated from Blogger to a self-hosted version. Click here to go straight there.

Well, it was bound to happen one day. In fact, it was bound to happen TODAY - since 'it' is a function of the calendar.

'It' is the beginning of my 42nd year of post-partum existence; some time 41 years ago, the doctor said "It's a boy"...

so all the stories you might have heard about me being carved out of a piece of granite and breathed to life by Crom are false... I admit it.

I react oddly to birthdays; my 18th and 21st - often viewed as rites of passage - both came and went with little fanfare (a jam doughnut after the gym, and an early night). Conversely, on the morning of the beginning of my 26th year I felt really, really old.

Likewise, my 40th birthday was a non-event; I think we might have gone to Oscar W's in Echuca (a very nice restaurant), but on reflection I think probably not.

And now I'm turning 41 in one of the world's great metropolises, which is fitting - and yet for some reason I am highly conscious of the passing years today.

As a result of a really good dose of the 'flu, I was waylaid for almost ten days; this prevented a timely re-entry into the SPI (on the short side, of course), but that can't be helped - I'll be looking to short the next bounce as well (the next bounce will result in a lower daily and weekly high - with much the same shape as the S&P500 has made recently).

I read some interesting stuff about the fact that de Gaulle rejected the plans that the Yanks had for France (as part of the American post-war development plan for Western Europe). Basically, de Gaulle knew that the Yanks wanted to impose American culture on everything they touched. De Gaulle told them to piss off, and kicked out all of their military bases at the same time (and withdrew from NATO). Not bad for a big-nosed wanker. he also managed to manufacture the myth that the French were staunchly resisting the Krauts, when in fac tthe battle for France lasted a little over two weeks and Petain took to running his sectors of Occupied France like a duck to water.

Of course the Yanks also wrote their version of events - like claiming the plupart of the glory for D-Day, when most of the planning, manpower and materiel were provided by the Poms and the Canadians. The Yanks also claim to have beaten the Krauts, when in fact the Krauts were already buggered thanks to the arrival of a few million Russkies. And finally, we have the recent film in which the Yanks claimed credit for cracking the German codes by capturing a boat with its ENIGMA machine intact... when in fact that happened in 1941 before the Yanks were even involved in WWII, and the capture was performed by the British.

Just goes to show - when politicians get their court jesters to write the history of an event, the resultant 'history' is 90% bullshit and 10% propaganda. Doubtless the hacks like Tom Friedman are already beavering away like good media whores, writing the historical equivalent of a $20 blowjob to try and put a gloss on Bush's Iraq misadventure. Wait until the final misjudgement is undertaken (with the bombing of Iran).

Folks like Friedman ought to take a walk around Bath (UK), Paris (France) and Rome (Italy), where they will see loads of Roman ruins... abundant evidence of what happens when a country decides that it's model is a 'one thought fits all' way to human perfection. The world is full of ruins left over from Empires who thought that their view of the world was fit to be imposed on everyone else at the point of a sword... and history forgets every one of the dills i ncharge who think (or at least claim that they think) that they're doing the world a favour.

For the Cheneys of the world, that's not really the point, is it? The point is to funnel as much of the taxpayer's loot into the pockets of themselves and their cronies - when they tried to be businessmen, Bush and Cheney required tax-funded bailouts (with Bush it was the use of eminent domain to seize land for his cabal to build a baseball stadium... for Cheney it was defence contracts to save Halliburton from the disastrous results of Cheney's empire-ambitions as Halliburton's CEO). That's why these people think that 'government' is just a process by which they and their pals are indemified from the downside risk of their bets - at public expense.

There should be a little bounce on Monday (early in the session) in the SPI; at this stage 10:30-11 a.m. appears to be the prime shorting window. Remember, everything is now predicated on a 2-3 day holding period rather than explicit targets.

More later...

Oh... one more thing:

Why is everyone making such a frisson about HAMAS' vistory in the recent Palestinian elections if democracy is so all-fired good (it isn't - it's a stupid system that gives every idiot's view the same weight... permitting the systematic fleecing of the herd by the most parasitic amongst its members). Sure, they have often resorted to 'asymmetric response' methods to try and expel their occupiers - but just about every resistance movement does likewise. It is rank hypocrisy For the current Israeli political class to moan about the use of 'terror' when their entire country was brought into existence thanks largely to actions of Irgun Zvai Leumi (who bombed hotels and assassinated a couple of diplomats), and for the US to moan about violent methods that result in civilian casualties is staggering in its bare-faced gall. the US has killed more Iraqis in three years, than Saddam killed in 30... tell me again who is the "Force for Evil"..