Playing in the casino
is very different than building a core base of wealth. The era we are in is one of financial destruction where paper promises are revealed for the fraud they have become. I try to time markets for short-term profits only so I can turn those paper dollars into physical gold. The casino is rigged and many of the counterparties involved are now insolvent and desperate.
If you have not yet turned 10-50% of your liquid net worth into physical gold, you better get going and stop worrying about exact timing. Yes, the U.S. Dollar has held up well and will continue to do so for a time as the deflationary wave intensifies. However, this is an opportunity to diversify out of the dollar into the only asset class in a sustainable bull market - gold.
Gold will outperform the U.S. Dollar over the longer run (years), because the U.S. Dollar is in trouble over the long run. You can argue all day about the dollar versus the yen or euro, etc., but this is a fool's debate in the long-run. All paper promises are sinking relative to real money. Short-term trading is playing in the casino and those who are good at it can make some extra paper to be turned into something of longer term value.
As I have said before, investing is a relative value game. If the debate is between stocks, real estate, commodities or cash for longer term (3-5 years) investors, that's an easy debate. Cash will outperform the other asset classes, but only if you are in the right form of cash. Gold is still the best form of cash and the only reliable one on a long-term basis.
People who dislike gold are those who have fallen for the bullshit conventional wisdom that comes from JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and every central bank and government in the world. These behemoths are the people who profit the most from a fiat paper money system and need the sheeple to remain ignorant so their con game can continue. If we are talking 3-6 months, sure old Uncle Buck may outperform gold, but if we are talking the next 5 years, gold will trounce the dollar and the dollar may not even exist in 5 years.
Holding physical gold is not the same as holding the GLD ETF. Mark my words: before this secular bear market is over, the GLD (gold) and SLV (silver) ETFs will be exposed for the fraud that they are. They do not hold the gold or silver they say they do and these ETFs are destined for failure, as are many ETFs. I use ETFs as short-term trading vehicles for now, but there will come a time soon when it won't be worth the counterparty risk for many ETFs other than for intraday trading.
Yes, of course the capital markets will survive, but Madoff-like scandals will wipe out whole ETFs and zero out their holders in one fell swoop. The government will probably step in and make the investors involved whole, but this is not guaranteed. Bank failures and market maker failures are absolutely an important part of this bear market and we ain't seen nothin' yet.
So, while I play in the casino for paper profits, I know that paper profits are fleeting and temporary. The more I make, the more physical gold I can buy. And until the Dow to Gold ratio gets back to 1 (or lower), this bear market in stocks is NOT over.
For those who think gold is primarily an inflation hedge, you are largely incorrect. Gold is a better deflation hedge than inflation hedge. Gold performs better as money than as a commodity. We had plenty of inflation in the 1990s and 2000s, but gold didn't do well. Inflation moves around from asset class to asset class, and gold moves in and out of favor during inflationary periods. During deflationary credit contractions, gold is one of the only places to hide to preserve wealth and eliminate counter-party risk.
If you think the U.S. government and international banks don't present a counter-party risk at this stage of the game, I don't think anything I say in this blog can change your mind. You have drank too much of the Kool Aid and I wish you only the best, though I fear the worst when it comes to your long-term financial health. Just don't say you were never warned...
Poetry Friday - buzz
buzz
The year just past, all things considered, has
been good to me: my writing has returned,
the things (however painful) I have learned
about myself have not been useless. As
my thirties peek at me from ambush three
years in the future, I take comfort from
the knowledge I can take them as they come.
Till then, there's nowhere else I'd rather be,
so long as I succeed in keeping men
at arm's length. I don't want to have to start
all over every year, Greg. More is less
and less is more, that's what I've learned, as when
you asked me, Do you see how far apart
we're sitting? and I should have answered, Yes.
31 October 1977
2 November 1977
2 November 1977
Poetry Friday - buzz
buzz
The year just past, all things considered, has
been good to me: my writing has returned,
the things (however painful) I have learned
about myself have not been useless. As
my thirties peek at me from ambush three
years in the future, I take comfort from
the knowledge I can take them as they come.
Till then, there's nowhere else I'd rather be,
so long as I succeed in keeping men
at arm's length. I don't want to have to start
all over every year, Greg. More is less
and less is more, that's what I've learned, as when
you asked me, Do you see how far apart
we're sitting? and I should have answered, Yes.
31 October 1977
2 November 1977
2 November 1977
Going DOWN!
Short-term trader plunge alert! The next week is NOT going to be pretty for the bulls. For my bearish brethren, the cash register is going to start ringing. There is too much complacency and too little fear as we re-test the panic fall lows, thus, we will smash below them with a vengeance.
The $VIX and $CPC (put to call ratio) tell the story in the charts. These charts that follow are busy, but the basic issue is simple: when lows in a bear market are re-tested, fear (i.e. $VIX) and the short ratio (i.e. $CPC or $CPCE) should both increase in order to cement a lasting bottom so that an intermediate advance can occur. This is not what's happening, so we'll keep dropping from here. Period.
Here's a $VIX chart from recent history (2 year daily chart):
Here's the last cyclical bear market within this secular bear (2000-2003 bear):
Here's some summation index action ($NYSI) relative to the S&P 500:
I am also very concerned (or, as someone who is short, should I say excited?) about the put to call ratio, a measure of sentiment related to what people are actually doing with their money (i.e. action, not talk):
Bottom line: I remain confidently short. Bulls beware, the panic wash-out ain't even started yet! A 10% drop/rinse from here is not an unreasonable proposition and should finally get the bulls to shit their pants so we can have a decent rally into the spring. Think 1937-1938 (apologies to Institutional Advisors for the chart theft):
$$$$ drop from the helicopters straight ahead for the bears...
This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 4
I once heard a gay minister snidely dismiss freedom of speech issues in the classroom. This gives him common ground with many of his opponents, who would gladly keep him and other GLBT people out of even college classrooms, let alone secondary or primary schools. This same minister was among the IU staff, students and faculty who agitated against the First Amendment in September 2003, demanding that the University censor a faculty member's antigay web log. Some of them jeered at the First Amendment and the Constitution in general, dismissing them as a piece of paper for the benefit of rich white men only. Not long after, of course, many of these same cultured despisers of the Constitution were outraged that George W. Bush wanted to change the sacred Constitution to forbid recognition of same-sex marriage.
Freedom of speech in the classroom is a sticky issue. I don't think any court would invoke the First Amendment to support a student who disrupted a class by launching into a one hour sermon complete with scriptural references. The Christian Right, for its part, only supports student freedom and activism by its own children against competing sects or secularists; in general they prefer students to be silent and passive.
Preventing a kid from harassing another kid for whatever reason in the classroom, the hallways or school grounds is not an infringement of the harasser's First Amendment rights. Some bigots might argue informally that it is (like a jaywalker who defends himself by arguing, "It's a free country!"), but I don't believe such arguments would or should stand in any court. However, students' rights are already limited enough without trying to stifle them further.
I understand that where a teacher can't (for political or other reasons) make a teachable moment out of a bigoted remark, squelching certain terms in class may be the only available course. This does not make a safe space, though, and there should be no pretense that it does. It's a stopgap, a papering over that may be unavoidable, but it isn't education. Nor does it prepare students for life in a pluralistic society.
Rather than "safe space," we need to build institutions for teaching self-defense, to help children and adults deal with difference and disagreement, even offense, without panicking; but also to defend themselves against bigotry. More positively, we need to encourage everyone to know why they hold the beliefs they do, a kind of knowledge that requires understanding of opposing beliefs. We also need structures for conflict engagement -- horizontally (person to person) rather than vertically (authority to perpetrator). Teachers would function here as referees, monitoring procedures and preventing verbal disputes from turning into violence, rather than as coaches who are trying to produce a given outcome. I realize that my proposal won't go over very well with diversity managers and other professionals, because it will ultimately teach students to defend themselves against their teachers -- and their parents. I intend it to do so.
Some gay men in an Internet chat room I frequent argued against my self-defense approach. They said that teaching everyone self-defense would just produce better-equipped bullies. These guys were mainly concerned to rationalize a do-nothing attitude, but they did stumble on a valid point, which is that bigotry is a moving target. If we try to change the school environment, the children (and their parents, and teachers and administration) will not be molded passively like clay. They will respond creatively, unpredictably, to try to prevent changes in their accustomed environment. Whatever intervention we design had better include provisions for spotting and reacting to creative, unpredictable counter-moves. I believe that a self-defense approach, based as it is on dialogue -- which means listening seriously to the other sides -- leaves room for such a response, and makes it possible.
Frustrating though it is, this same resistance to indoctrination is one of the things that makes change possible. Because some people refused social indoctrination about race, class, sex roles and sexuality, change has happened in American society -- change for the better, in my opinion, though not everyone agrees with me.
Any program which fails to take resistance into account is not only doomed to failure, but wrong-headed. One of many things I like about Speakers Bureau is that we have no real authority. We can't tell people what to think, we aren't there to enforce anything. We're there to make more talk; not less speech, but more speech.
Let me try to make one thing clear: I am not saying that minority kids need to develop thicker skins, as some apologists for bigotry have been known to suggest. I think everyone needs to develop thicker skins, including bigots as well as, well, liberals. In a much-anthologized article, self-styled free-speech champion Nat Hentoff attacked "PC" and "speech codes" because "liberal students and those who can be called politically moderate ... no longer get involved in class discussions where their views would go against the grain of PC righteousness" -- that is, where someone might disagree with them too vehemently ("'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech", Dissent, Fall 1991; reprinted in Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding [Graywolf Press, 1992], 52). Hentoff quoted a cartoonist who got "hisses from the audience" for criticizing "PC" at a "free speech forum" at Brown University. Liberal white and black faculty are reluctant to oppose "PC" publicly, Hentoff claimed, because "they want to be liked -- or at least not too disliked" (53). Minority students, Hentoff argued, should fight hostility with "more speech," rather than being intimidated. If they do so, however, people like Hentoff attack them for "PC righteousness" and intimidating liberals and moderates; the contradiction looks pretty blatant to me. "Liberals" and "moderates" (two groups which Hentoff apparently thinks contain no minorities!), however, should not be exposed to unkind words or criticism, nor need they meet them with "more speech"; they -- but not blacks, gays, or women – can simply play the victim. (Hentoff’s complaint is really quite funny in its way, for it’s just the people he considers “liberal … and those who can be called politically moderate” who are denounced by the Right as the enforcers of “PC righteousness.”)
There is -- how shall I put this? -- a passive-aggressive element in this liberal and moderate withdrawal from discussion, a refusal to face the undeniably unpleasant anger of minorities: if they can't ask for their rights nicely, we won't listen to them. The African-American lesbian poet and feminist Audre Lorde was sharply critical of white feminists who want "to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women." (Sister Outsider [Firebrand,1984], 126)
As gay scholar Jeffrey Escoffier wrote in a valuable essay on multicultural public dialogue (in American Homo [California, 1998], 200), "Stoicism is necessary in public debate. No one enjoys being humiliated in public. Participation in public dialogue will not be fruitful if we do not learn to accept conflict, pain, and hurt feelings. Some of the detrimental effect of political correctness stems from the fear of being criticized or misrepresented in public. Expressions of anger and hostility should be expected." Escoffier also quoted African-American activist and singer Bernice Reagon (198): "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'" Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project."
Schools are among the places where such dialogue should take place. In practice, totalistic safe space too often means that what makes the teacher uncomfortable will become unspeakable, and it is expected that the teacher will become uncomfortable very easily, as an example to students. I submit that teachers should rather be guides into new and sometimes frightening realms of ideas, showing by example that what makes us uncomfortable or even offends us will not disable us, let alone kill us, and that anything can be questioned, discussed, debated.
Recently while I was rereading Lawrence Block’s murder mystery Eight Million Ways to Die, I found this wonderful passage, set in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:
Freedom of speech in the classroom is a sticky issue. I don't think any court would invoke the First Amendment to support a student who disrupted a class by launching into a one hour sermon complete with scriptural references. The Christian Right, for its part, only supports student freedom and activism by its own children against competing sects or secularists; in general they prefer students to be silent and passive.
Preventing a kid from harassing another kid for whatever reason in the classroom, the hallways or school grounds is not an infringement of the harasser's First Amendment rights. Some bigots might argue informally that it is (like a jaywalker who defends himself by arguing, "It's a free country!"), but I don't believe such arguments would or should stand in any court. However, students' rights are already limited enough without trying to stifle them further.
I understand that where a teacher can't (for political or other reasons) make a teachable moment out of a bigoted remark, squelching certain terms in class may be the only available course. This does not make a safe space, though, and there should be no pretense that it does. It's a stopgap, a papering over that may be unavoidable, but it isn't education. Nor does it prepare students for life in a pluralistic society.
Rather than "safe space," we need to build institutions for teaching self-defense, to help children and adults deal with difference and disagreement, even offense, without panicking; but also to defend themselves against bigotry. More positively, we need to encourage everyone to know why they hold the beliefs they do, a kind of knowledge that requires understanding of opposing beliefs. We also need structures for conflict engagement -- horizontally (person to person) rather than vertically (authority to perpetrator). Teachers would function here as referees, monitoring procedures and preventing verbal disputes from turning into violence, rather than as coaches who are trying to produce a given outcome. I realize that my proposal won't go over very well with diversity managers and other professionals, because it will ultimately teach students to defend themselves against their teachers -- and their parents. I intend it to do so.
Some gay men in an Internet chat room I frequent argued against my self-defense approach. They said that teaching everyone self-defense would just produce better-equipped bullies. These guys were mainly concerned to rationalize a do-nothing attitude, but they did stumble on a valid point, which is that bigotry is a moving target. If we try to change the school environment, the children (and their parents, and teachers and administration) will not be molded passively like clay. They will respond creatively, unpredictably, to try to prevent changes in their accustomed environment. Whatever intervention we design had better include provisions for spotting and reacting to creative, unpredictable counter-moves. I believe that a self-defense approach, based as it is on dialogue -- which means listening seriously to the other sides -- leaves room for such a response, and makes it possible.
Frustrating though it is, this same resistance to indoctrination is one of the things that makes change possible. Because some people refused social indoctrination about race, class, sex roles and sexuality, change has happened in American society -- change for the better, in my opinion, though not everyone agrees with me.
Any program which fails to take resistance into account is not only doomed to failure, but wrong-headed. One of many things I like about Speakers Bureau is that we have no real authority. We can't tell people what to think, we aren't there to enforce anything. We're there to make more talk; not less speech, but more speech.
Let me try to make one thing clear: I am not saying that minority kids need to develop thicker skins, as some apologists for bigotry have been known to suggest. I think everyone needs to develop thicker skins, including bigots as well as, well, liberals. In a much-anthologized article, self-styled free-speech champion Nat Hentoff attacked "PC" and "speech codes" because "liberal students and those who can be called politically moderate ... no longer get involved in class discussions where their views would go against the grain of PC righteousness" -- that is, where someone might disagree with them too vehemently ("'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech", Dissent, Fall 1991; reprinted in Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding [Graywolf Press, 1992], 52). Hentoff quoted a cartoonist who got "hisses from the audience" for criticizing "PC" at a "free speech forum" at Brown University. Liberal white and black faculty are reluctant to oppose "PC" publicly, Hentoff claimed, because "they want to be liked -- or at least not too disliked" (53). Minority students, Hentoff argued, should fight hostility with "more speech," rather than being intimidated. If they do so, however, people like Hentoff attack them for "PC righteousness" and intimidating liberals and moderates; the contradiction looks pretty blatant to me. "Liberals" and "moderates" (two groups which Hentoff apparently thinks contain no minorities!), however, should not be exposed to unkind words or criticism, nor need they meet them with "more speech"; they -- but not blacks, gays, or women – can simply play the victim. (Hentoff’s complaint is really quite funny in its way, for it’s just the people he considers “liberal … and those who can be called politically moderate” who are denounced by the Right as the enforcers of “PC righteousness.”)
There is -- how shall I put this? -- a passive-aggressive element in this liberal and moderate withdrawal from discussion, a refusal to face the undeniably unpleasant anger of minorities: if they can't ask for their rights nicely, we won't listen to them. The African-American lesbian poet and feminist Audre Lorde was sharply critical of white feminists who want "to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women." (Sister Outsider [Firebrand,1984], 126)
As gay scholar Jeffrey Escoffier wrote in a valuable essay on multicultural public dialogue (in American Homo [California, 1998], 200), "Stoicism is necessary in public debate. No one enjoys being humiliated in public. Participation in public dialogue will not be fruitful if we do not learn to accept conflict, pain, and hurt feelings. Some of the detrimental effect of political correctness stems from the fear of being criticized or misrepresented in public. Expressions of anger and hostility should be expected." Escoffier also quoted African-American activist and singer Bernice Reagon (198): "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'" Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project."
Schools are among the places where such dialogue should take place. In practice, totalistic safe space too often means that what makes the teacher uncomfortable will become unspeakable, and it is expected that the teacher will become uncomfortable very easily, as an example to students. I submit that teachers should rather be guides into new and sometimes frightening realms of ideas, showing by example that what makes us uncomfortable or even offends us will not disable us, let alone kill us, and that anything can be questioned, discussed, debated.
Recently while I was rereading Lawrence Block’s murder mystery Eight Million Ways to Die, I found this wonderful passage, set in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:
Mary, one off the regulars at St. Paul’s, had said it. She was a birdlike woman with a tiny voice, always well dressed and well groomed and soft-spoken. I’d heard her qualify once, and evidently she’d been the next thing to a shopping-bag lady before she hit bottom. One night, speaking from the floor, she’d said, “You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don’t have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that’s not true. Bad feelings won’t kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won’t.”Alas, many teachers (and others) do not believe this: they agree that what offends us will disable us, perhaps permanently. They are wrong. So let me close with this question to "safe space" advocates. If, as I've been arguing, totalistic safe space is incompatible with serious dialogue about serious issues, what do you envision as a proper place for discussion?
This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 4
I once heard a gay minister snidely dismiss freedom of speech issues in the classroom. This gives him common ground with many of his opponents, who would gladly keep him and other GLBT people out of even college classrooms, let alone secondary or primary schools. This same minister was among the IU staff, students and faculty who agitated against the First Amendment in September 2003, demanding that the University censor a faculty member's antigay web log. Some of them jeered at the First Amendment and the Constitution in general, dismissing them as a piece of paper for the benefit of rich white men only. Not long after, of course, many of these same cultured despisers of the Constitution were outraged that George W. Bush wanted to change the sacred Constitution to forbid recognition of same-sex marriage.
Freedom of speech in the classroom is a sticky issue. I don't think any court would invoke the First Amendment to support a student who disrupted a class by launching into a one hour sermon complete with scriptural references. The Christian Right, for its part, only supports student freedom and activism by its own children against competing sects or secularists; in general they prefer students to be silent and passive.
Preventing a kid from harassing another kid for whatever reason in the classroom, the hallways or school grounds is not an infringement of the harasser's First Amendment rights. Some bigots might argue informally that it is (like a jaywalker who defends himself by arguing, "It's a free country!"), but I don't believe such arguments would or should stand in any court. However, students' rights are already limited enough without trying to stifle them further.
I understand that where a teacher can't (for political or other reasons) make a teachable moment out of a bigoted remark, squelching certain terms in class may be the only available course. This does not make a safe space, though, and there should be no pretense that it does. It's a stopgap, a papering over that may be unavoidable, but it isn't education. Nor does it prepare students for life in a pluralistic society.
Rather than "safe space," we need to build institutions for teaching self-defense, to help children and adults deal with difference and disagreement, even offense, without panicking; but also to defend themselves against bigotry. More positively, we need to encourage everyone to know why they hold the beliefs they do, a kind of knowledge that requires understanding of opposing beliefs. We also need structures for conflict engagement -- horizontally (person to person) rather than vertically (authority to perpetrator). Teachers would function here as referees, monitoring procedures and preventing verbal disputes from turning into violence, rather than as coaches who are trying to produce a given outcome. I realize that my proposal won't go over very well with diversity managers and other professionals, because it will ultimately teach students to defend themselves against their teachers -- and their parents. I intend it to do so.
Some gay men in an Internet chat room I frequent argued against my self-defense approach. They said that teaching everyone self-defense would just produce better-equipped bullies. These guys were mainly concerned to rationalize a do-nothing attitude, but they did stumble on a valid point, which is that bigotry is a moving target. If we try to change the school environment, the children (and their parents, and teachers and administration) will not be molded passively like clay. They will respond creatively, unpredictably, to try to prevent changes in their accustomed environment. Whatever intervention we design had better include provisions for spotting and reacting to creative, unpredictable counter-moves. I believe that a self-defense approach, based as it is on dialogue -- which means listening seriously to the other sides -- leaves room for such a response, and makes it possible.
Frustrating though it is, this same resistance to indoctrination is one of the things that makes change possible. Because some people refused social indoctrination about race, class, sex roles and sexuality, change has happened in American society -- change for the better, in my opinion, though not everyone agrees with me.
Any program which fails to take resistance into account is not only doomed to failure, but wrong-headed. One of many things I like about Speakers Bureau is that we have no real authority. We can't tell people what to think, we aren't there to enforce anything. We're there to make more talk; not less speech, but more speech.
Let me try to make one thing clear: I am not saying that minority kids need to develop thicker skins, as some apologists for bigotry have been known to suggest. I think everyone needs to develop thicker skins, including bigots as well as, well, liberals. In a much-anthologized article, self-styled free-speech champion Nat Hentoff attacked "PC" and "speech codes" because "liberal students and those who can be called politically moderate ... no longer get involved in class discussions where their views would go against the grain of PC righteousness" -- that is, where someone might disagree with them too vehemently ("'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech", Dissent, Fall 1991; reprinted in Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding [Graywolf Press, 1992], 52). Hentoff quoted a cartoonist who got "hisses from the audience" for criticizing "PC" at a "free speech forum" at Brown University. Liberal white and black faculty are reluctant to oppose "PC" publicly, Hentoff claimed, because "they want to be liked -- or at least not too disliked" (53). Minority students, Hentoff argued, should fight hostility with "more speech," rather than being intimidated. If they do so, however, people like Hentoff attack them for "PC righteousness" and intimidating liberals and moderates; the contradiction looks pretty blatant to me. "Liberals" and "moderates" (two groups which Hentoff apparently thinks contain no minorities!), however, should not be exposed to unkind words or criticism, nor need they meet them with "more speech"; they -- but not blacks, gays, or women – can simply play the victim. (Hentoff’s complaint is really quite funny in its way, for it’s just the people he considers “liberal … and those who can be called politically moderate” who are denounced by the Right as the enforcers of “PC righteousness.”)
There is -- how shall I put this? -- a passive-aggressive element in this liberal and moderate withdrawal from discussion, a refusal to face the undeniably unpleasant anger of minorities: if they can't ask for their rights nicely, we won't listen to them. The African-American lesbian poet and feminist Audre Lorde was sharply critical of white feminists who want "to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women." (Sister Outsider [Firebrand,1984], 126)
As gay scholar Jeffrey Escoffier wrote in a valuable essay on multicultural public dialogue (in American Homo [California, 1998], 200), "Stoicism is necessary in public debate. No one enjoys being humiliated in public. Participation in public dialogue will not be fruitful if we do not learn to accept conflict, pain, and hurt feelings. Some of the detrimental effect of political correctness stems from the fear of being criticized or misrepresented in public. Expressions of anger and hostility should be expected." Escoffier also quoted African-American activist and singer Bernice Reagon (198): "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'" Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project."
Schools are among the places where such dialogue should take place. In practice, totalistic safe space too often means that what makes the teacher uncomfortable will become unspeakable, and it is expected that the teacher will become uncomfortable very easily, as an example to students. I submit that teachers should rather be guides into new and sometimes frightening realms of ideas, showing by example that what makes us uncomfortable or even offends us will not disable us, let alone kill us, and that anything can be questioned, discussed, debated.
Recently while I was rereading Lawrence Block’s murder mystery Eight Million Ways to Die, I found this wonderful passage, set in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:
Freedom of speech in the classroom is a sticky issue. I don't think any court would invoke the First Amendment to support a student who disrupted a class by launching into a one hour sermon complete with scriptural references. The Christian Right, for its part, only supports student freedom and activism by its own children against competing sects or secularists; in general they prefer students to be silent and passive.
Preventing a kid from harassing another kid for whatever reason in the classroom, the hallways or school grounds is not an infringement of the harasser's First Amendment rights. Some bigots might argue informally that it is (like a jaywalker who defends himself by arguing, "It's a free country!"), but I don't believe such arguments would or should stand in any court. However, students' rights are already limited enough without trying to stifle them further.
I understand that where a teacher can't (for political or other reasons) make a teachable moment out of a bigoted remark, squelching certain terms in class may be the only available course. This does not make a safe space, though, and there should be no pretense that it does. It's a stopgap, a papering over that may be unavoidable, but it isn't education. Nor does it prepare students for life in a pluralistic society.
Rather than "safe space," we need to build institutions for teaching self-defense, to help children and adults deal with difference and disagreement, even offense, without panicking; but also to defend themselves against bigotry. More positively, we need to encourage everyone to know why they hold the beliefs they do, a kind of knowledge that requires understanding of opposing beliefs. We also need structures for conflict engagement -- horizontally (person to person) rather than vertically (authority to perpetrator). Teachers would function here as referees, monitoring procedures and preventing verbal disputes from turning into violence, rather than as coaches who are trying to produce a given outcome. I realize that my proposal won't go over very well with diversity managers and other professionals, because it will ultimately teach students to defend themselves against their teachers -- and their parents. I intend it to do so.
Some gay men in an Internet chat room I frequent argued against my self-defense approach. They said that teaching everyone self-defense would just produce better-equipped bullies. These guys were mainly concerned to rationalize a do-nothing attitude, but they did stumble on a valid point, which is that bigotry is a moving target. If we try to change the school environment, the children (and their parents, and teachers and administration) will not be molded passively like clay. They will respond creatively, unpredictably, to try to prevent changes in their accustomed environment. Whatever intervention we design had better include provisions for spotting and reacting to creative, unpredictable counter-moves. I believe that a self-defense approach, based as it is on dialogue -- which means listening seriously to the other sides -- leaves room for such a response, and makes it possible.
Frustrating though it is, this same resistance to indoctrination is one of the things that makes change possible. Because some people refused social indoctrination about race, class, sex roles and sexuality, change has happened in American society -- change for the better, in my opinion, though not everyone agrees with me.
Any program which fails to take resistance into account is not only doomed to failure, but wrong-headed. One of many things I like about Speakers Bureau is that we have no real authority. We can't tell people what to think, we aren't there to enforce anything. We're there to make more talk; not less speech, but more speech.
Let me try to make one thing clear: I am not saying that minority kids need to develop thicker skins, as some apologists for bigotry have been known to suggest. I think everyone needs to develop thicker skins, including bigots as well as, well, liberals. In a much-anthologized article, self-styled free-speech champion Nat Hentoff attacked "PC" and "speech codes" because "liberal students and those who can be called politically moderate ... no longer get involved in class discussions where their views would go against the grain of PC righteousness" -- that is, where someone might disagree with them too vehemently ("'Speech Codes' on the Campus and Problems of Free Speech", Dissent, Fall 1991; reprinted in Patricia Aufderheide, ed., Beyond PC: Toward a Politics of Understanding [Graywolf Press, 1992], 52). Hentoff quoted a cartoonist who got "hisses from the audience" for criticizing "PC" at a "free speech forum" at Brown University. Liberal white and black faculty are reluctant to oppose "PC" publicly, Hentoff claimed, because "they want to be liked -- or at least not too disliked" (53). Minority students, Hentoff argued, should fight hostility with "more speech," rather than being intimidated. If they do so, however, people like Hentoff attack them for "PC righteousness" and intimidating liberals and moderates; the contradiction looks pretty blatant to me. "Liberals" and "moderates" (two groups which Hentoff apparently thinks contain no minorities!), however, should not be exposed to unkind words or criticism, nor need they meet them with "more speech"; they -- but not blacks, gays, or women – can simply play the victim. (Hentoff’s complaint is really quite funny in its way, for it’s just the people he considers “liberal … and those who can be called politically moderate” who are denounced by the Right as the enforcers of “PC righteousness.”)
There is -- how shall I put this? -- a passive-aggressive element in this liberal and moderate withdrawal from discussion, a refusal to face the undeniably unpleasant anger of minorities: if they can't ask for their rights nicely, we won't listen to them. The African-American lesbian poet and feminist Audre Lorde was sharply critical of white feminists who want "to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women." (Sister Outsider [Firebrand,1984], 126)
As gay scholar Jeffrey Escoffier wrote in a valuable essay on multicultural public dialogue (in American Homo [California, 1998], 200), "Stoicism is necessary in public debate. No one enjoys being humiliated in public. Participation in public dialogue will not be fruitful if we do not learn to accept conflict, pain, and hurt feelings. Some of the detrimental effect of political correctness stems from the fear of being criticized or misrepresented in public. Expressions of anger and hostility should be expected." Escoffier also quoted African-American activist and singer Bernice Reagon (198): "We've pretty much come to the end of a time when you have a space that is 'yours only.'" Dialogue is the primary medium through which we can construct political coalitions and a multicultural project."
Schools are among the places where such dialogue should take place. In practice, totalistic safe space too often means that what makes the teacher uncomfortable will become unspeakable, and it is expected that the teacher will become uncomfortable very easily, as an example to students. I submit that teachers should rather be guides into new and sometimes frightening realms of ideas, showing by example that what makes us uncomfortable or even offends us will not disable us, let alone kill us, and that anything can be questioned, discussed, debated.
Recently while I was rereading Lawrence Block’s murder mystery Eight Million Ways to Die, I found this wonderful passage, set in an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting:
Mary, one off the regulars at St. Paul’s, had said it. She was a birdlike woman with a tiny voice, always well dressed and well groomed and soft-spoken. I’d heard her qualify once, and evidently she’d been the next thing to a shopping-bag lady before she hit bottom. One night, speaking from the floor, she’d said, “You know, it was a revelation to me to learn that I don’t have to be comfortable. Nowhere is it written that I must be comfortable. I always thought if I felt nervous or anxious or unhappy I had to do something about it. But I learned that’s not true. Bad feelings won’t kill me. Alcohol will kill me, but my feelings won’t.”Alas, many teachers (and others) do not believe this: they agree that what offends us will disable us, perhaps permanently. They are wrong. So let me close with this question to "safe space" advocates. If, as I've been arguing, totalistic safe space is incompatible with serious dialogue about serious issues, what do you envision as a proper place for discussion?
Trading on top of big picture fundamentals
There is trading, there is longer term investing and there are fundamental underpinnings of investing. I like an approach that recognizes all three. Underlying fundamentals are important to understand as an investor, because they tend to cause the underlying long-term moves, though stocks often lead or lag the fundamentals. Trading relates more to technical analysis and timing of surges in the direction of the major trend and pullbacks against the trend.
Not exactly new information, I know, but I always like to re-visit and keep an eye on the big picture. Here are the fundamental facts as I understand them:
1. We are in the midst of a deflationary credit contraction, the size and ferocity of which will rival (if not surpass) the last so called "Great Depression."
2. We are not yet close to the bottom of the current cyclical bear market, which is occurring in the context of a secular bear market that began in 2000.
3. The only "long-term" (i.e. measured in years) safe havens in this storm are cash and cash equivalents (e.g., gold and short-term U.S. Federal government bonds) and gold mining stocks.
4. The deflationary credit contraction cannot stop until all the bad debts are purged from the system. As long as the credit system is contracting and unstable, inflation and economic growth are highly unlikely to occur.
5. The banking system in the U.S. and Europe is insolvent. Bankers, the credit dealers in our economy, cannot perform their role of extending credit until they become solvent/stabilize. Until housing and commercial real estate prices stabilize, it is not reasonable to expect the banking system to stabilize. Housing and commercial real estate prices are not yet close to stabilizing.
For those who don't like to trade, this is all you really need to know. There are a few significant real world applications of this general knowledge:
1) If you leave your life savings in general stocks, you will lose most of your life savings.
2) Don't buy real estate (or invest in real estate-type vehicles).
3) Cash and gold held in an arrangement that eliminates counterparty risk are the best investments for safety and gold mining stocks are the only sector of the economy in a bull market, as deflation is wildly bullish for gold miners.
Sometimes keeping things is simple is better, no? And yet, most people are leaving their money in the stock market like good little sheep, out looking for real estate "deals," and smirking along with CNBC commentators when gold is mentioned.
A final steep leg down in blue chip gold mining stocks began today. This tells me that the quick, deep gold price correction I have been waiting for is now underway and should only take 2 weeks or so to complete 90% of the move down - patient potential buyers get ready. I also suspect this leg down in blue chip gold miners won't take long and will provide the buying opportunity for which I have been patiently waiting. The miners will bottom before the gold price, so don't rush to buy gold too soon until you see the gold miners stop dropping.
My favorite blue chip gold mining stock is Goldcorp (GG). This stock should now be in its final 1-2 week leg down in a correction that began almost 2 months ago. The base being created by this stock for a spring launch has me extremely excited. I will be betting the farm on this stock soon.
Here's a current chart of GG:
Here's an example of typical similar prior GG stock price action during last year's bull run (2007-2008):
And here's what happened next in 2008:
Now folks, a 40% gain in 2 months is more than enough for me in a stock. And, since I use options, this is likely to be a potential 80% (or more) profit opportunity if history rhymes and it should only take 4-8 weeks to make that kind of gain. Also, please don't think the example in the charts above from last year's bull move is unusual for GG!
I'm going to be busy until early next week and posting will be quite sparse - happy trading...
See new entries on my website
I have been having trouble posting my entries on blogger. I installed software on my website and it is now self contained. You can see my new entries at www.cindigay.com, click on blog.Here's a preview of my current project:
What do you mean, bullish?!
I'm looking at DIG, the double bullish ETF on oil and gas stocks, and thinking about what comes next once this panic wash-out blows over. At $20/share for this ETF, I think an easy 50-100% gain can be made within a few months on the bear market rebound. Oil went from darling to red-headed step child in the blink of an eye, but every collapse is followed by a decent dead-cat bounce and the one in DIG, given its double leverage, should be fantastic.
Since I believe we may be in the final week of yet another intermediate bear market leg plunge (roughly 21% so far over the last 7 weeks), it's time to start planning for what comes next. I think DIG is as good an ETF sector play as any for a wicked bounce higher as a short term trade to be held for 2-8 weeks. Don't be in a rush to buy too soon, as this thing could hit $15 if the final plunge turns ugly. However, at under $20/share, I think DIG is a lock for a relatively quick, very profitable trade.
Visa.. ohh..visa..(its unfair !)
Well.. most people ask me why i went back to Thailand and Malaysia for the 2nd time this year.
My answer is.. if we don't need to have visa to go to Australia or Europe countries.. i will might go there...
Visa require me to have at least US$ 4000 on my bank account for at least 3 month (where the hell i am going to find that much money ehh???). In some other countries even more also depend on how long we will stay in that country. The visa it self only cost less than a m illion.. but the requirement.. hurt me so much lah !!
Hehehe.. im a dirt cheap traveler... I just want to pay for flight ticket and hostel and my food while there..hehehe... (thats an extra income for the country !)
I could understand well, most of these country afraid of illegal imigrant (who? me??!!!!) that come to their country and cant go back to their country (sumpeh loh.. gue gak nyusahin kook !)
I try to seek other countries beside my South East Asia destination that doesn't require Visa (for indoensia passport holder). I found that some interesting countries doesn't require visa..(ehh..)
Untuk yang punya passport indonesia silakan klik disini untuk melihat daftar negara mana aja yang dengan baik hati memperbolehkan kita masuk dengan tanpa syarat gonoh gonih...
Did i read it right ? Morocco is free? ehehehehehehehhe... next time baby..next time....
Patience
is not a virtue of mine or most traders. As an example, I got into KSS (Kohl's corporation) April puts back on 1/26/09. I have been in this trade less than 1 month and I am sitting on 40% gains, but it feels like it is taking forever for this stock to do what I expect/want. I have also been impatiently waiting for gold stocks to slide into a routine steep correction for a while now, but they have been holding strong for an entire 3-4 weeks while I wait.
Knowing how and when to "sit on your hands" or "sit tight and be right" is a hard lesson to learn and must be balanced by the need to abandon an unsuccessful trade when wrong. I know many have expressed to me their anxiety waiting for the gold price to correct, as everyone is afraid of missing "the big move." Trust me, the patience is worth it. In trading, as in life, some big opportunities will pass you by. However, if you wait for the fat, slow pitches before swinging for the fences, the wait is generally worth it.
I couldn't resist the opportunity today and added some more Autozone (AZO) June puts to my collection at the open. I also dumped my PAAS silver miner puts today at a small profit (not as big as I had hoped...). We are getting closer to a bottom and I don't think we will go much more than 10% below the November lows in the S&P 500 before a big rally occurs. Remember my 3 "triggers" that must occur before I start thinking about going long in anything besides puts:
1. RSI near the 30 range on a daily chart of the S&P 500 (check - this one's done)
2. Equity put to call ratio ($CPCE) at/greater than 1.10 on a daily chart (not there yet)
3. $VIX greater than 55 (not there yet)
Don't chase silver or gold here from the long side and don't be a brave bull too soon in general equities. Wait for a fat, slow, sweet pitch. We should have a nice capitulation bottom before it's all over, and I'm guessing it will occur before the week is over. Don't worry about missing the bull train, worry about getting flattened by the bear steamroller. If you are short, it's time to start setting profit goals and then either closing trades once they reach the objective or using stop losses to protect profits.
Are You Born Homosocial, Or Is It A Lifestyle Choice? (Reprise, With Thong)
I was up too late tonight, surfing the web, and I found this article on this blog. (It's not the most work-safe of blogs, so be prudent, Prudence; but it's quite entertaining, a quality not to be sniffed at in this day and age.) Which prompted me to look for, and find, this article by the gay critic Andy Medhurst about Batman, "deviance," and camp, which happily is available online; Medhurst's article had some influence on this earlier posting of mine. Which leads to the question of what a gay critic is, or gay writing, or gay poetry. (Silly! A gay critic is a critic who has sex with other critics of the same sex.) But that's another question for another day.
Are You Born Homosocial, Or Is It A Lifestyle Choice? (Reprise, With Thong)
I was up too late tonight, surfing the web, and I found this article on this blog. (It's not the most work-safe of blogs, so be prudent, Prudence; but it's quite entertaining, a quality not to be sniffed at in this day and age.) Which prompted me to look for, and find, this article by the gay critic Andy Medhurst about Batman, "deviance," and camp, which happily is available online; Medhurst's article had some influence on this earlier posting of mine. Which leads to the question of what a gay critic is, or gay writing, or gay poetry. (Silly! A gay critic is a critic who has sex with other critics of the same sex.) But that's another question for another day.
REASONS NOT TO END IT ALL IN 2009 PT. II
Much thanks to The FADER's Pete Macia, who was able to retrieve this post from his bloglines and allow us to get it back online after the DMCA eradicated it's presence on the internet due to apparent copyright infringement issues. We strive to attain permission for everything we post where possible so we're still not sure what the offending track(s) was, but we suspect it might have been the Hockey or Delphic tracks given their recent major label deals. Without further ado:
We've been talking up our hot tips for '09 for a minute now, but we decided it was high time we took action and threw together a proper list. Here are some bands you're going to give a fuck about over the next 12 months.
We're not exactly sticking our neck out here given the maelstrom of buzz that's surrounded Passion Pit to this point, but we got the album into the office last week and we'd just like to warn you of the ways in which this thing is going to rock the music-consuming public with it's brilliance this spring. There a few things left to be finalized on the LP so we're not at liberty to say much, but we can tell you it will be called Manners and it's just about everything we could have hoped for and more. Careful listeners will discern a few new tracks in the background of Fader TV's behind the scenes look at the making of the record here, and you better believe producer Chris Zane's hype-smashing proclamations about the record lest the truth dropkick you in the jaw when it drops in spring. New material is understandably on lockdown for the time being, so for now here's a next-level reworking of "Sleepyhead" courtesy of our NYC boys The Knocks.
MP3: "Sleepyhead" (The Knocks Remix) - Passion Pit
Speaking of The Knocks, dudes run HeavyRoc studios in Chinatown, where they've spent the last year readying NYC pop sensation Samuel for the big time. Having successfully produced and managed the young pop star-in-waiting to a contract with newly-revived Columbia imprint StarTime (home to Passion Pit, Peter Bjorn & John, et. al), they're currently in the studio readying his debut album. Taste the first fruits of their labor below in the form of debut single "Say Goodbye", which features saccharine backing vocals from Frances' Julia Tepper and guitar work from The Virgins' Wade Oates.
MP3: "Say Goodbye" - Samuel
Theophilus London hardly needs any introduction given the way we've been extolling him as the second coming and all, but he's here just so we can say "we told you so... and then reminded you a couple of more times" when he's selling out arenas like a week from now. "Sandcastles" was born to destroy the charts.
MP3: "Sandcastles (Black x Blue)" - Theophilus London
Switching coasts for a minute, let's talk about Portland indie phenoms Hockey, whose LCD Soundsystem meets The Rapture and Julian Casablanca sound has them primed for big things in the new year. With the headlining slot on Passion Pit's NME sponsored UK tour and a debut album, Mind Chaos, overflowing with commercially viable singles, expect British audiences to embrace Hockey as the next great American indie band of '09.
MP3: "Too Fake" - Hockey [link removed]
We were huge fans of short-lived Mancunian collective Snowfight In The City Centre and their epic debut single "No Light Left", so news of their demise in 2007 was crushing. Fortunately, from their ashes has risen Delphic, an even more promising outfit with a mechanical precision and electronic brilliance in keeping with Manchester's rich musical lineage. With massive industry attention, a full European tour supporting Bloc Party on the horizon and some massive tracks (see: "Doubt") already under their belt, look for Delphic to succesfully realize all the potential Snowfight failed to capitalize on in the months to come.
MP3: "Doubt" - Delphic [link removed]
Previously: Reasons Not To End It All In 2009 Pt. I
This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 3
Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, singling out certain students as pariahs -- all these have long been part of school culture, as of adult life. Before shootings in middle-class, predominantly white high schools became a hot media topic, a certain amount of "boys will be boys" harassment and violence was considered normal background noise in school. 'Toughening them up' was even considered desirable: "The boy in America is not being brought up to punch another boy's head, or to stand having his own punched in a healthy and proper manner. ... There is a strange and indefinable air coming over the men: a tendency towards a common ... sexless tone of thought." That was the U.S. commissioner of education, an early advocate of Boy Scouting, in 1910; quoted in Colette Dowling, The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality (Random House, 2000), p. 23. This isn’t found only among boys, either: girls are capable of emotional and physical cruelty to each other, which also has been taken for granted as part of the way things are. (See for example, Leora Tannenbaum, Slut!: Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation [Seven Stories Press, 1999]; and Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut [Scribner, 2002].)Since inculcating social norms is part of education, teachers and administrators are expected to voice and enforce a normal level of bigotry. The infamous teacher who dissuaded young Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X) from his professional ambitions was certainly racist, but he was also reflecting and enforcing white American norms of the 1930s. The same was true in my own pre-Title IX high school days (1965-1969), when girls who got married were expelled, whether they were pregnant or not. (Not the boys who married or impregnated them, of course.) At my high school, one married teacher had to dig in her heels to go on teaching after her pregnancy began to show -- she was pressured to go on leave even earlier, but resisted successfully. God forbid students should see a married, pregnant woman: they might want to get married and have a baby when they grew up! What was really at stake was probably the social norm that respectable middle-class white wives and mothers should not work outside the home. In my parents' schooldays, a teacher would not have been allowed to work after she married.
Social norms change, however, and schools' and teachers' practices change with them. Today's bigotry was often yesterday's norm, but the process of norm enforcement continues, generally without acknowledging that change has taken place. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Four legs good, two legs better.
Michael Bérubé, a professor of English and the father of a son with Down Syndrome, wrote (in Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child [Pantheon, 1996], 26f):
One night I said something like this to one of the leaders of what I usually think of as the other side in the academic culture wars. ... Being a humane fellow, he replied that although epithets like "mongoloid idiot" were undoubtedly used in a more benighted time, there have always been persons of good will who have resisted such phraseology. It's a nice thought, the kind you usually hear from traditionalists when you point out the barbarism and brutality of our human past. But it ain't so. Right through the 1970s, "mongoloid idiot" wasn't an epithet; it was a diagnosis.One of the most insidious aspects of diversity management is its erasure of the history of such change, by making it seem that bigots are just bad people who need to diversify themselves, unlike the respectable people and institutions that protect minorities' feelings. Awareness of this history might produce a becoming humility in the enforcement of today's social norms. But never mind the past. Never mind that earlier in his or her career, today's diversity manager might have expelled gay students or pregnant students or female students who simply failed to return to their locked dormitories before curfew. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. That was then, this is now. You can't change people's minds overnight. Four legs good, two legs better.
What happens, though, when a commitment to diversity and respect for other cultures clashes with other commitments, such as the protection of children against violence? Historian Lillian Faderman (feminist, lesbian, daughter of an immigrant Jewish single mother -- impeccable diversity credentials) cowrote with Ghia Xiong a book on Hmong immigrants in the United States, I begin my life all over: the Hmong and the American immigrant experience (Beacon Press, 1998). "In Laos," they noted, "for a loving parent to beat a child until he was bruised was considered an appropriate, tried-and-true method of teaching him. Hmong parents are puzzled when their American children accuse them of 'child abuse,' as they learned at school such treatment is called. They are devastated when the children threaten to report them to the authorities, as their American teachers informed them they should do if they are being abused." Faderman and Xiong seem to side completely with the parents here; and I have talked to diversity managers who seem to assume that in any conflict of norms, Old Country ways should always prevail against American cultural imperialism. (See also Susan Moller Okin et al., Is multiculturalism bad for women? (Princeton, 1999) and Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity [Beacon Press, 2001].)
Should American teachers ignore bruises on Hmong children, but not on white ones? Breaking the perverse wills of children is an explicit part of much traditional Christian teaching, carried on by James Dobson and other Christian-right gurus. Should Hmong parents be permitted to bruise their kids and still be regarded as "loving" by diversity managers, while Dobson must instruct his readers how to discipline their children without leaving visible marks?
The question of parenting came up on another occasion when I was on a GLB panel speaking to an undergraduate health class. One of the students in the class asked us whether it wasn't reasonable, if the majority in a community sincerely believed gay parents were bad for their children, to take those children away from their parents? I posed an analogy: suppose that in a primarily Episcopalian community, the majority thinks that conservative evangelical parents are bad for their children; or that in a Protestant community, the majority thought Roman Catholics made unfit parents?
The questioner and some of the other students became upset, accusing me of religious intolerance. One student tried to defend me, pointing out that I wasn't really advocating the removal of children from Christian heterosexual families, only following the questioner's logic to its conclusion; but to no avail. The instructor complained in e-mail to a colleague of mine that I was "too combative." Which I am, often, but not in this case. I don't see why undergraduates couldn't follow a simple analogy; that a graduate student couldn't do so is alarming. Perhaps, instead of trying to show the questioner the flaw in her logic, I should have adopted her tactic, becoming distraught and accusing her of religious intolerance. Maybe it would have won me more sympathy from the class and instructor (though it's just as likely I'd have been accused of playing the victim), but would it have taught them anything?
I don't have a simple answer to my questions here, but I'm not asking them rhetorically either. The kind of conflict I'm talking about here is not a new one, but "diversity" sloganeering doesn't seem to have a way to deal with it. We're told, properly enough, to be respectful of other cultures (though not of very similar traditions within our own culture); but we must also protect children against abuse (as long as abuse isn't a treasured part of their exotic traditional cultures). The pretense of impartiality that diversity advocates seek to maintain simply ignores these conflicts, which is not going to make them go away.
This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 3
Racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, singling out certain students as pariahs -- all these have long been part of school culture, as of adult life. Before shootings in middle-class, predominantly white high schools became a hot media topic, a certain amount of "boys will be boys" harassment and violence was considered normal background noise in school. 'Toughening them up' was even considered desirable: "The boy in America is not being brought up to punch another boy's head, or to stand having his own punched in a healthy and proper manner. ... There is a strange and indefinable air coming over the men: a tendency towards a common ... sexless tone of thought." That was the U.S. commissioner of education, an early advocate of Boy Scouting, in 1910; quoted in Colette Dowling, The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality (Random House, 2000), p. 23. This isn’t found only among boys, either: girls are capable of emotional and physical cruelty to each other, which also has been taken for granted as part of the way things are. (See for example, Leora Tannenbaum, Slut!: Growing up Female with a Bad Reputation [Seven Stories Press, 1999]; and Emily White, Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and the Myth of the Slut [Scribner, 2002].)Since inculcating social norms is part of education, teachers and administrators are expected to voice and enforce a normal level of bigotry. The infamous teacher who dissuaded young Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X) from his professional ambitions was certainly racist, but he was also reflecting and enforcing white American norms of the 1930s. The same was true in my own pre-Title IX high school days (1965-1969), when girls who got married were expelled, whether they were pregnant or not. (Not the boys who married or impregnated them, of course.) At my high school, one married teacher had to dig in her heels to go on teaching after her pregnancy began to show -- she was pressured to go on leave even earlier, but resisted successfully. God forbid students should see a married, pregnant woman: they might want to get married and have a baby when they grew up! What was really at stake was probably the social norm that respectable middle-class white wives and mothers should not work outside the home. In my parents' schooldays, a teacher would not have been allowed to work after she married.
Social norms change, however, and schools' and teachers' practices change with them. Today's bigotry was often yesterday's norm, but the process of norm enforcement continues, generally without acknowledging that change has taken place. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. Four legs good, two legs better.
Michael Bérubé, a professor of English and the father of a son with Down Syndrome, wrote (in Life as We Know It: A Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child [Pantheon, 1996], 26f):
One night I said something like this to one of the leaders of what I usually think of as the other side in the academic culture wars. ... Being a humane fellow, he replied that although epithets like "mongoloid idiot" were undoubtedly used in a more benighted time, there have always been persons of good will who have resisted such phraseology. It's a nice thought, the kind you usually hear from traditionalists when you point out the barbarism and brutality of our human past. But it ain't so. Right through the 1970s, "mongoloid idiot" wasn't an epithet; it was a diagnosis.One of the most insidious aspects of diversity management is its erasure of the history of such change, by making it seem that bigots are just bad people who need to diversify themselves, unlike the respectable people and institutions that protect minorities' feelings. Awareness of this history might produce a becoming humility in the enforcement of today's social norms. But never mind the past. Never mind that earlier in his or her career, today's diversity manager might have expelled gay students or pregnant students or female students who simply failed to return to their locked dormitories before curfew. Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. That was then, this is now. You can't change people's minds overnight. Four legs good, two legs better.
What happens, though, when a commitment to diversity and respect for other cultures clashes with other commitments, such as the protection of children against violence? Historian Lillian Faderman (feminist, lesbian, daughter of an immigrant Jewish single mother -- impeccable diversity credentials) cowrote with Ghia Xiong a book on Hmong immigrants in the United States, I begin my life all over: the Hmong and the American immigrant experience (Beacon Press, 1998). "In Laos," they noted, "for a loving parent to beat a child until he was bruised was considered an appropriate, tried-and-true method of teaching him. Hmong parents are puzzled when their American children accuse them of 'child abuse,' as they learned at school such treatment is called. They are devastated when the children threaten to report them to the authorities, as their American teachers informed them they should do if they are being abused." Faderman and Xiong seem to side completely with the parents here; and I have talked to diversity managers who seem to assume that in any conflict of norms, Old Country ways should always prevail against American cultural imperialism. (See also Susan Moller Okin et al., Is multiculturalism bad for women? (Princeton, 1999) and Vijay Prashad, Everybody was Kung Fu fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity [Beacon Press, 2001].)
Should American teachers ignore bruises on Hmong children, but not on white ones? Breaking the perverse wills of children is an explicit part of much traditional Christian teaching, carried on by James Dobson and other Christian-right gurus. Should Hmong parents be permitted to bruise their kids and still be regarded as "loving" by diversity managers, while Dobson must instruct his readers how to discipline their children without leaving visible marks?
The question of parenting came up on another occasion when I was on a GLB panel speaking to an undergraduate health class. One of the students in the class asked us whether it wasn't reasonable, if the majority in a community sincerely believed gay parents were bad for their children, to take those children away from their parents? I posed an analogy: suppose that in a primarily Episcopalian community, the majority thinks that conservative evangelical parents are bad for their children; or that in a Protestant community, the majority thought Roman Catholics made unfit parents?
The questioner and some of the other students became upset, accusing me of religious intolerance. One student tried to defend me, pointing out that I wasn't really advocating the removal of children from Christian heterosexual families, only following the questioner's logic to its conclusion; but to no avail. The instructor complained in e-mail to a colleague of mine that I was "too combative." Which I am, often, but not in this case. I don't see why undergraduates couldn't follow a simple analogy; that a graduate student couldn't do so is alarming. Perhaps, instead of trying to show the questioner the flaw in her logic, I should have adopted her tactic, becoming distraught and accusing her of religious intolerance. Maybe it would have won me more sympathy from the class and instructor (though it's just as likely I'd have been accused of playing the victim), but would it have taught them anything?
I don't have a simple answer to my questions here, but I'm not asking them rhetorically either. The kind of conflict I'm talking about here is not a new one, but "diversity" sloganeering doesn't seem to have a way to deal with it. We're told, properly enough, to be respectful of other cultures (though not of very similar traditions within our own culture); but we must also protect children against abuse (as long as abuse isn't a treasured part of their exotic traditional cultures). The pretense of impartiality that diversity advocates seek to maintain simply ignores these conflicts, which is not going to make them go away.
Hospital visitation and health care decisionmaking autonomy for EVERYONE
Wisconsin may be poised to go down the same road Maryland choose last year -- the conflation of recognition of same-sex couples with the needs all people have, especially LGBT people estranged from their families of origin, to hospital visits from loved ones and medical decisionmaking by the person who knows them best. (Even Obama got it wrong in his acceptance speech). And Wisconsin is actually getting it worse; they are making couples register as domestic partners to get rights that all human beings deserve.
It seems that whenever a state passes anything with the phrase "domestic partners" for same-sex couples, that's supposed to count as a gay rights win. But look at what Wisconsin actually plans to do. The couple must be same-sex only and must live together. If they register, then they can visit each other in the hospital and make medical decisions for each other.
What is wrong with this picture? Ask my 60+ year old friend in Maryland, who is single yet cares as passionately as her coupled friends about who gets to visit her and make health decisions if she can't. And she's not even estranged from her closest living relative -- a sister 2500 miles away. Think about the gay people who move to gay-friendly areas, away from families of origin. I care that the people they consider family be able to visit them in the hospital. I care that their wishes about a surrogate health-care decisionmaker be upheld.
There ARE answers. A free, easy to use, highly publicized advance directive registry. There are models in gay-unfriendly states, like Idaho, and they protect everyone. How about a law that requires hospitals to ask who you want to visit when you've admitted? It won't help emergency admissions. But the people listed in the advance directive registry should be admitted. And a "close friend" category would help, and I didn't make up that category. Many surrogate health care decision making statutes already list "close friends" among those who can make decisions. At least when no one else is at the hospital, when a person will be without visitors, "close friends" should be allowed.
I hate to put a damper on the celebrations in Wisconsin. I just think it's wrong to conflate recognition of same-sex couples with the basic human right to health care decisionmaking by the person we choose and the chance to be surrounded by loved ones in our darkest hours.
It seems that whenever a state passes anything with the phrase "domestic partners" for same-sex couples, that's supposed to count as a gay rights win. But look at what Wisconsin actually plans to do. The couple must be same-sex only and must live together. If they register, then they can visit each other in the hospital and make medical decisions for each other.
What is wrong with this picture? Ask my 60+ year old friend in Maryland, who is single yet cares as passionately as her coupled friends about who gets to visit her and make health decisions if she can't. And she's not even estranged from her closest living relative -- a sister 2500 miles away. Think about the gay people who move to gay-friendly areas, away from families of origin. I care that the people they consider family be able to visit them in the hospital. I care that their wishes about a surrogate health-care decisionmaker be upheld.
There ARE answers. A free, easy to use, highly publicized advance directive registry. There are models in gay-unfriendly states, like Idaho, and they protect everyone. How about a law that requires hospitals to ask who you want to visit when you've admitted? It won't help emergency admissions. But the people listed in the advance directive registry should be admitted. And a "close friend" category would help, and I didn't make up that category. Many surrogate health care decision making statutes already list "close friends" among those who can make decisions. At least when no one else is at the hospital, when a person will be without visitors, "close friends" should be allowed.
I hate to put a damper on the celebrations in Wisconsin. I just think it's wrong to conflate recognition of same-sex couples with the basic human right to health care decisionmaking by the person we choose and the chance to be surrounded by loved ones in our darkest hours.
Silver
Is something I haven't written about before. I prefer gold over the other precious metals, in part because it is the precious metal of choice in recent monetary history and is held by central banks around the world. When the poop really hits the fan, central bankers can simply declare by decree that the gold they hold is worth a boatload of paper dollars/promises. Get the end game? Instead of villifying gold, they will finally come to embrace it and use it to their advantage.
Silver is a bit of a schizophrenic precious metal, as are platinum and palladium. I say schizophrenic because it is both an industrial and monetary metal in history. Silver has a much longer monetary history and general track record compared to the platinum complex metals. I hold some physical silver as a small percentage of my portfolio. This is a core, long term holding with a time horizon of years (decades?). One of the reasons I am not as enthusiastic about silver is due to its past price behavior during credit contraction-type depressions. The best example is the last one we went through in the United States, the so called "Great Depression."
Below is a chart stolen from the Long Wave Analyst (great site and analyst by the way):
Silver also didn't do well during the previous credit contraction induced depression that started in 1873. Since history doesn't always repeat but it does rhyme, I am concerned the same thing will happen to silver this time.
Now, silver also has a few bullish things going for it and, remember, I hold a little.
1. Physical metal shortages are obvious on the retail investor side and there is a premium above spot price that is now chronic. This is an alarm bell not to be ignored.
2. The concentrated short position in silver (as with gold) on the futures market (see Ted Butler's work) is insane.
3. Silver is the "poor man's" gold and will be useful for bartering and daily transactions if our society has a significant monetary breakdown.
4. Silver has been in backwardation for an unprecedented one month now.
On the last point, see Antal Fekete's work, as he is an amazing voice of reason in the fiat wilderness.
So I prefer gold, but I understand the bullish case for silver and if it drops low enough during this deflationary wave, I will likely buy some more to be used both as a long term store of value in lieu of fiat cash equivalents and as an investment with explosive upside potential.
Decrease the deficit?!
Is a headline I saw on Yahoo! this morning. Needless to say, I am just a tiny bit skeptical. You see, what's coming next in the economy will not allow it. As job losses and foreclosures accelerate, the tax base dwindles. Bye, bye capital gains tax revenues, income tax revenues and corporate tax revenues. Hello, increased entitlements for those who lost their job or turn 65 in increasing numbers and ask for their Social Security and Medicare benefits.
As we decrease troops in Iraq, we increase troops in Afghanistan, so this one's a wash. As more and more "stimulus" is needed for a sclerotic, shrinking economy, more deficit spending will be promoted as the only available cure.
The only remedy available to Obama, since it makes no sense to cut government jobs while creating new government jobs, is to tax the rich. This won't be nearly enough to close the gap and also will discourage small business owners, thus worsening the jobs situation and eliminating any hope of new job creation in the private sector. The deficit will absolutely explode over the next few years. The promise to decrease the deficit will be rescinded as the economic crisis worsens.
Keep in mind as well that when things get really bad, a 401(k)/IRA/403(b) confiscation will probably get thrown into the works, so protect yourself accordingly. It will be sold under the guise of protecting us, much like the War on Terror and the War on Drugs. Don't say nobody warned you...
Shiticorp and Skank of America
As Bill Maher called Citigroup (ticker: C) and Bank of America (ticker: BAC) the other night on his HBO show. Anyone who follows mainstream media investment shills and advisors needs to permanently learn their lesson with these two banks. Anyone who thinks these banks will survive in their current form and represent a good buying opportunity at current levels is unqualified to be an investor. Anyone who recommended these companies back in the spring, summer or fall of 2008 is also unqualified to be giving investment advice. Period.
The charts of these companies explain that the true, free market value of these banks is going to zero.
First a 3.5 year chart of Bank of America (daily, log scale):
Next, a 3.5 year chart of Citigroup (daily, log scale):
Want to see a recent historical example of a death spiral chart and what happens next? How about Fannie Mae (FNM):
This type of death spiral in a stock chart tells you what's coming next just like the fall crash in general markets told you what was coming next in the economy. During this time in the late fall, most of the assholes in the mainstream media were saying to wait for the Christmas season and that the unemployment rate wasn't that bad, Bernanke was acting quickly to "save" the economy, and blah, blah, blah. Meaning: the economy is fine and it and stocks will bounce back.
So, my question is this: why do people still watch television or read mainstream sources like Bloomberg, Barron's or the Wall Street Journal to get information on the economy when they never seem to see trouble in advance? Their line is the industry line: "now is the time to buy" and their line is the same every day, day in and day out, other than maybe to argue which "hot" bubble sector into which you should put money.
The other point is that chart reading or technical analysis is an important part of investing and a critical part of trading. The charts of banks tell you to stay away. These are secular turns in the banking sector, not cyclical turns. The banking landscape will be radically altered soon in the United States (and many other parts of the world).
Citigroup and Bank of America are done. Period. No one who knows how to read a chart would come to any other conclusion. It doesn't matter what Obama, Bernanke, Geithner, Cramer, Ben Stein or any of these people say. Their job is to maintain confidence and/or bring in ad revenue, not tell the truth.
So, perhaps, we may not nationalize Citi or Bank of America in name, but it's take them over, shovel trillions of dollars of welfare money into them, or watch them turn into dust. Either way, they are insolvent and non-viable corporations. In a true free market (which we have not had for quite some time), these companies would have already had to declare bankruptcy and would no longer exist. Only the most skilled of day-traders should play in these stocks, and then, only for short-term scalp-type profits.
But my point is simple: anyone who told you to buy financial firms over the past one year as an investment didn't know what they were doing or needed a bag holder so they could dump their shares. Expensive lesson for some, but it is not too late to learn to turn off Cramer, stop listening to Ben Stein, cancel your subscription to Barron's and get out of the stock market after the next decent bounce higher unless you are a trader.
Yes, stocks are ultimately going lower - much lower. No, it will not be in a straight line. Yes, you should really buy some of that kooky physical gold to hold in your possession once the next decent price drop occurs (no I am not talking about the GLD ETF). And yes, the only stock sector that is in a bull market and the only one that will be for the next few years is the gold miners. I remain short and still believe a gold price pullback is imminent and you should NOT chase the gold price at these levels, as the risk to reward ratio is unfavorable.
Poetry Friday - a very practical nursery rhyme
(Notice: When I wrote this poem, I added a note in the margin:
When I read it in public, I'd introduce it with that note. I'd see people [usually college-age males] smirking and nudging each other with anticipation. The smirks generally disappeared after I read the first few lines -- they weren't expecting the poem to be totally gay, I presume. But you know better, don't you?)
This poem is for people who like to laugh a lot in bed. It is not for people who put on surgical masks and gloves before they commence.
When I read it in public, I'd introduce it with that note. I'd see people [usually college-age males] smirking and nudging each other with anticipation. The smirks generally disappeared after I read the first few lines -- they weren't expecting the poem to be totally gay, I presume. But you know better, don't you?)
a very practical nursery rhyme
a fuzzy boy
bounced in my arms all nite
much more practical than a teddy bear
covered from head to toe
with little brown and golden hairs
hairs on the sheets
hairs in our mouths when we kissed
the breeze from my window fan
teased our wet fur
while we played together
like puppy seals
all next day
his smells clung to me
rising smiling from my shirt
on my sheets
on my cheeks
like cotton candy
melted on my face and hands
now that fuzzy boy
lingers on the page
the same way
and though words are to hairs
like hairs are to cotton candy
(they don't melt
you must keep picking them off your tongue)
they linger longer in your mind
like a fuzzy boy,
much more practical
than a teddy bear
4 September 1977
Poetry Friday - a very practical nursery rhyme
(Notice: When I wrote this poem, I added a note in the margin:
When I read it in public, I'd introduce it with that note. I'd see people [usually college-age males] smirking and nudging each other with anticipation. The smirks generally disappeared after I read the first few lines -- they weren't expecting the poem to be totally gay, I presume. But you know better, don't you?)
This poem is for people who like to laugh a lot in bed. It is not for people who put on surgical masks and gloves before they commence.
When I read it in public, I'd introduce it with that note. I'd see people [usually college-age males] smirking and nudging each other with anticipation. The smirks generally disappeared after I read the first few lines -- they weren't expecting the poem to be totally gay, I presume. But you know better, don't you?)
a very practical nursery rhyme
a fuzzy boy
bounced in my arms all nite
much more practical than a teddy bear
covered from head to toe
with little brown and golden hairs
hairs on the sheets
hairs in our mouths when we kissed
the breeze from my window fan
teased our wet fur
while we played together
like puppy seals
all next day
his smells clung to me
rising smiling from my shirt
on my sheets
on my cheeks
like cotton candy
melted on my face and hands
now that fuzzy boy
lingers on the page
the same way
and though words are to hairs
like hairs are to cotton candy
(they don't melt
you must keep picking them off your tongue)
they linger longer in your mind
like a fuzzy boy,
much more practical
than a teddy bear
4 September 1977
This Blog Is Not a Safe Space, part 2
A few years ago our campus GLBT group began producing and distributing Safe Zone stickers, which declared that "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance will not be tolerated" anywhere they were posted. The word "ignorant" bothered me, because everyone is ignorant, not least the people who designed the stickers. People who believe that they aren't ignorant may be among the most dangerous.(I haven't got an image of the local Safe Zone stickers, but I've found a number from other universities around the country. I was struck that most of them promise safety explicitly -- and exclusively? -- for gay people, as though other people didn't have problems and weren't entitled to be safe too.)
The same organization sponsored a showing of If These Walls Could Talk 2, a lesbian themed made-for-TV movie. The showing took place in the campus Latino center, which was well-papered with Safe Zone stickers. The audience was about evenly divided between male and female undergraduates, almost all presumably GLB. As the video rolled, several of the young gay men in the room began groaning loudly in disgust whenever two women kissed on the TV screen, or when a bare female breast was exposed. Among these young gay men was the newly-elected president of the GLBT organization, a fervent booster of Safe Zone stickers. No one spoke up, no one intervened -- including me. At the time, I found their behavior merely childish and annoying. Only later did I realize how homophobic it was, and how incompatible with the Safe Zone in which we supposedly were sitting. In any case, it was the officers of the sponsoring organization who should have spoken up. But none did, and of course one of them was one of the offenders. Who guards the guardians? Who will protect us from our protectors? This same organization later sponsored viewings of Queer As Folk, the soft-porn cable TV series about gay men. I wonder if anyone made disgusted noises at the series' male to male kissing and exposed male skin -- and if so, if they got away with it?
Some readers might object that the people I'm discussing had no qualifications or training to create a safe space. That’s right, and that's the problem. "Safe Zone" stickers were distributed promiscuously to anyone who would accept them. To put a Safe Zone sticker on one's door is to declare oneself a person for whom enforcement isn't needed. On the night I just described, "bigotry, harassment, and ignorance" were not only tolerated, they were perpetrated by the very people who proclaimed themselves to be above such things.
Who, however, is qualified to create and maintain a safe space? Who is qualified to train others to do so? How are safe spaces enforced, and by whom? On another occasion, the GLB speakers' bureau I coordinate received a request for ... not so much a speaker as a sacrificial victim. The event was a weekend-long workshop on homophobia, sponsored by the campus gay-straight alliance. The workshop leader, a graduate student in counseling, wanted the subject to be present while the participants thought of anti-gay epithets, which would be written on slips of paper, and the slips of paper would be attached to the subject's clothing. Processing would follow. No rationale was offered for this bizarre exercise, but we were assured that it would be "facilitate[d] in a safe, caring way", in a "safe environment," and all participants were "already very sensitive and empathic." I was very uneasy about asking our volunteers to consider it; fortunately the other coordinator thought it was a great idea and offered to be the victim.The word "doublethink" comes to mind. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. Bigotry is sensitive and empathic. Abuse is safe and caring. Given the nature of the exercise, why not use a heterosexual volunteer as the victim? Why was a gay person even needed? In the years since this request came before me, I've seen numerous announcements of programs on various hot topics, at IU or connected to it, assuring prospective participants that they will be in a "safe space", and I wonder if the term is being used in the same Orwellian sense. That's apart from the hubris involved in anyone's thinking they can deal with religious or sexual issues without offending or upsetting someone.
The core problem with totalistic safe space is that no one is capable of maintaining one. No one is so enlightened or free of prejudice as to be able to guarantee a space where no one will be offended. I'm probably better informed and more thoughtful than most of the diversity managers at my university, and for that very reason I would not presume to designate myself as an authoritative arbiter and enforcer of safety. (Indeed, I want the world to be less safe for bigotry.) Those who do so are not people I trust. Totalistic "safe zones" tend, from what I've seen, to produce complacency and self-righteousness in those who claim to know how to create them.
Diversity management professionals naturally present themselves as proponents of reason and tolerance against the superstitions of the ignorant many, but professionals don't have such a great track record. Professionals conceived and ran the Satanic Ritual Abuse witch hunt of the 1980s and 1990s; professionals think they know what proper sex roles are, and feel competent to force them on small children, even unto surgery and electroshock treatment (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “How to Bring Your Child Up Gay: the war on effeminate boys” in Tendencies [Duke, 1993]; Phyllis Burke, Gender Shock: Exploding the Myths of Male and Female [Anchor Doubleday, 1996]). Psychiatrists and psychological professionals have embraced the belief that homosexuality is "genetic" or "biological," just at a time when the scientific evidence for that position is collapsing. More whimsically, I still recall with amusement how an education professional, my first-grade teacher, ordered me to use a red crayon to color Robin Redbreast's breast. Not knowing any better, I insisted that an orange crayon was closer to the actual color. Fortunately my mother backed me up, and I was allowed to be diverse.
From castration and sterilization of the mentally ill and retarded in the US before (and even after) World War II, to the abduction of "half-caste" children from their aboriginal families in Australia and North America, to lobotomy and electroshock, to infant genital mutilation in the US today, to the unnecessary institutionalization of children with Down Syndrome to the "war on effeminate boys", professionals have shown that they don't always know what is best for the people who are put into their care. The word "ignorant" is a popular term of derogation for those with views we dislike -- see above on the IU "Safe Zone" stickers -- but I am talking about programs conceived and implemented by educated people with advanced degrees. There is evidence, in fact, that professionals tend to be less tolerant of difference than the general population.
I'm not saying this to demonize all professionals, let alone teachers. And compared to lobotomy or electroshock, totalistic safe space is fairly tame stuff. I am saying that professionals, including teachers, should be very tentative about imposing anything on their students, no matter how innocuous or even noble it may seem. A great deal of intolerance and hostility leaks out from the paternalistic façade of safe space, and I think that's cause for concern. And simply from an educational standpoint, totalistic safe space is counterproductive. Far from teaching kids how to live in a diverse society, it will stifle diversity by refusing to acknowledge it.
Though the professionals who want to produce safe spaces generally seem to see themselves as progressive, and some of their values may be so, their approach is profoundly conservative. It fits into a familiar educational tradition which sees children as empty vessels, to be filled with knowledge by the wise. But there are other traditions. One approach, advocated by Gerald Graff among others, is "teaching the conflict." This recognizes that students are capable of reflection on issues that affect their lives -- and also that teachers not only may not have all the answers, but are not themselves impartial, outside the fray.
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