Staying After The Party is Over

The woman with a tad too much hair for her head and a business suit too bright for business chortles affirmatively and then chirps out a length of jargon. Pan to the two or three men, variously titled, garbed with or without ties, whom we will call Mavens. (If you met them at the race track, you would call them touts.) The Mavens speak in hieroglyphics, pausing every now and then to tell you what they say is ‘technical’. At the frequent commercial break, a scroll of tiny words roll--reading like the precautions of a drug—basically disclosing that our Mavens, technically, are offering prognostications divorced of efficacy.

The ownership society, a fast fiction at best, has reached its epilogue. In the end, the only people who made money at it were the people who told you how to make money at it. The people who took the advice, whatever advice it is they took, have all been cleaned out.

On the show Option Action, a fat, barely shaven man without a tie waxed poetic on how he hedged Google’s latest downturn through setting puts and calls in different ranges. Through this financial wizardry he was able to mitigate a $1000 paper loss into a $20 paper loss. Really lost but not mentioned is the real cost of the puts and calls—as well as the additional risk they entail. The too much hair lady cooed up a storm, overdubbing a CGI frame declaring our fat man a genius.

Lost, of course, was the cost of doing nothing. As opposed to incurring the real outlay of puts and calls, had our fat man taken the year off (perhaps to learn a useful trade) Google’s $1000 paper loss would have cost him nothing. If a year from now Google is still $1000 down, he can either still do nothing (at a cost of nothing) or sell at a loss and write it off his taxes. Either way he isn’t doing what we in the real world call “throwing good money after bad.” Not to be too technical about it.

Cut to commercial. A man in the dark behind a pair of computer screens. You can be taught the secrets of pattern recognition. Know the signs of an approaching statistical shoulder. Now you too can cash in on the secrets known only to the people who lost all your money for you last time. Next commercial. Forex will help you trade 24 hours a day on the variance of currencies. Currency speculation from the no doubt drunken comfort of your own home. I believe this was Charles Ponzi’s old scheme—or at least its pretext. To date, the only entities known to make money on this are the ones who charge for the transactions. Which is exactly what Forex does. Next commercial. Scot Trade. Now that you have been taught about statistical shoulders and whatnot, put it all into action without all the messy expense of a broker. Comes with free touts! Your only real cost is the transaction cost per trade, plus the cost of the stocks. (This is no fees how?) As for what these fine Scot Trade people know about money or winning: they bought the Chicago Cubs for one billion dollars. Enough said!

Twenty years ago the Japanese salary man sat calmly at his desk as the world that underpinned his existence popped like a soap bubble. He was still there ten years later, an uninvited guest at a party that had ended. He remained there, reduced to American style at-will employment and saddled with a flat wage and an increasing cost of living. His previous way of life was a result of crony capitalism. The real choice is between crony capitalism and European style social democracy. His current situation is caused by a failure to make a choice between the two, to dump more resources into the myth of a third path. His is a world controlled by zombie banks and governmental service interests, who whirl on, interested in perpetuating only themselves. His once prized social safety net is gone. His is an ownership society with nothing worth owning.

Sound familiar?

Mad Money, the most exposed tout of them all, follows Options Action. Here our tout works stag, but with a quiver of sound effects that would make a morning zoo DJ blush. On this episode the defeated proprietor gave up on his usual wind baggery and devoted the entire show to Obama bashing. (Retraining for new career in a growth field?) He advises: Sell any stock in an area Obama may limit the profitability of. Sell most of your health stocks. It is, of course, now well on record that if you took all of this man’s advice, you would be out a small fortune. He has spectacularly failed to defend his record on several tries in multiple venues. “Of course he’s a fraud,” per National Review. Even he admits he would stop bloviating if he didn’t have a show to do every day. So why believe him now? So why believe him on anything?

Why keep him on the air?

All of this is avoiding a much deeper question: Has the stock issuing trust itself overstayed its welcome?

National Enquirer News

In the National Enquirer’s last issue they ran an expose on how Octomom might have actually planned to have the monster birth she wound up having. Her previous story was that she had ‘only’ six eggs implanted into her oven and that two subdivided. New information reveals that she had eleven eggs implanted, more or less insuring the spectacular womb product. All of this, it is reported, was part of her scheme to become wealthy by becoming famous. Thanks for the public service, National Enquirer!

Wait. Hold your thanks. In this month’s Star Magazine (the National Enquirer’s entry into the People Magazine clone segment) is a cover story on how Octomom got her new Bikini Bod. Complete with ass shot.

It’s one thing to expose a monster, it’s another thing to feed it. Worse, the whole Bikini Bod thing is part of a recent trend in Revenge Bodies that have been dominating the People Clone slicks. If the best the National Enquirer can do for a celeb with a new bod is Octomom, then perhaps it is time to pack Star Magazine in.

National Enquirer has also quietly re-entered the pulp digest market. (Hil-gle.com will be covering the evolution of digests in the forthcoming piece on Alex Hillman.) The new offerings are being labeled as ‘Complete Idiot's Guide To’ various subjects. Four have been released so far, under the American Media imprint. (American Media is the National Enquirer’s corporate name. It has not previously been used as an imprint on its own.) This is following up on the firm’s recent return to issuing minimags similar to the old Globe Minimags. In many cases, the new minimags are using the old one’s supermarket check out slots. Per Publisher data found in the digests, this new ‘Idiot's’ series is shovel-ware from previous Penguin paperback releases. (Some may be re-titled and some abridged.) Whether this is going to be the pattern going forward is unclear. As noted here previously, the stand alone trend is hot and will likely only expand as long as the advertising glut continues.

J-E-T-S, Jets, Jets, Jets…

It was all fun until Peyton Manning woke up. After that, it became target practice, with the boys in green looking more like caddies than defenders. The Jets’ desperation throw it deep and catch them sleeping offense had the magic smoke leak out of its hind quarters even before half time. I think halting the Colts in the red zone on their first two drives just made them mad. If the Jets’ game plan was to get into a shoot out with the Colts, then their game plan was to lose. Not that I have anything against Peyton Manning (who could?), but I was hoping for a competitive Superbowl. Now it looks as if this year’s Superbowl party will again become food-oriented by the second quarter. Might as well have the Colts take on Tiger Woods and his mistresses. The Saints? Barring a tragic plane accident involving a professional football team that is not the Saints, they don’t have a chance.

Ray Bradbury Doesn’t Get It.

I personally think the internet has a lot of potential as a medium in and of itself. Beyond the democracy of publication, its interactive abilities and mix of hot and cold types of sources seem to have a great upside. It very well could become the only medium that counts. Or it could now be what it is to become what the CB radio was to the Cell Phone.

Logging in clear on the side of CB forgettable is futurist and pulp author made good Ray Bradbury. Per the New York Times, Bradbury called the internet “a distraction,” going on to say “It’s not real. It’s in the air somewhere.”

To cut Bradbury some slack, he was speaking at a fund raiser for the H.P. Wright library. He was out to extol the virtues of public libraries, which provide free access to literature for the masses. That they also generally provide internet access to the masses seems to have escaped his notice.

By context, it seems much of the context of the internet has slipped Bradbury’s notice. He reported “Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! (sic) You know what I told them? To hell with you. To hell with you and the internet.”

Unless I have missed something, Yahoo is not really in the business of posting fiction. Bradbury may have cut them off before they could explain themselves, but it sounds more like grandpa cursing the microwave because it won’t fry hamburgers. Or just cursing the microwave, because that’s what grandpa does. In any case, using one’s position on a stage to comment on something you know little about dangerously undercuts your authority, plausibility and relevance. In the same breath, Bradbury reportedly went on to rant “I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries because most students don’t have any money.”

It sucks to get old. God willing, we will all get there. God willing, the New York Times won’t be there to record us on our bad days.