kristallnacht

Kristallnacht (German pronunciation: [kʁɪsˈtalˌnaxt]; literally "Crystal Night") or the Night of Broken Glass was an anti-Jewish pogrom in Nazi Germany and Austria on 9 to 10 November 1938. It is also known as Novemberpogrome, Reichskristallnacht, Reichspogromnacht or Pogromnacht in German.^[1]
Kristallnacht was triggered by the assassination in Paris of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew. In a coordinated attack on Jewish people and their property, 91 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps. 267 synagogues were destroyed, and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, the Gestapo and the SS.^[2] Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews.^[3]
While the assassination of Rath served as a pretext for the attacks, Kristallnacht was part of a broader Nazi policy of antisemitism and persecution of the Jews.^[4] Kristallnacht was followed by further economic and political persecutions. It is viewed by many historians as the beginning of the Final Solution, leading towards the genocide of the Holocaust.


further reading

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristallnacht

A mathematician plays the stock market by John Allen paulos

The book touches many aspects of the stock trading and the author show it by referring to his own experience of loosing money in WCOM during the 2000 crash. He shows the deceptiveness of the media, chatrooms, technical analysis, fundamental analysis and the common fallacies of the masses. But the author being a mathematician tries to find any mathematical correlation with stock market reality. The author agrees that there is more to stock market then the random walk theory and efficient market hypothesis. Though each of these theories have their partial truths and moments when they can be applied, exact timing of which hypothesis will work in the future is impossible to be certain of.

It is a fine book but i found that he as underestimated the technical analysis. Indicators such as the volume of stock traded can show the starting of a pattern of upward movement or downward in technical analysis. It has been nicely explained in Secrets for profitting in bull and bear markets by Stan weinstein. This book that i mention has gotten less attention as i would like but it shows how volume and 30 day average can really show the tread for atleast a couple of months.

I also found that there are select periods of stock growth that make the major moves in stock markets either upward or downwards. These are the periods when people really make money or loose everything. And it is during these times of collapse or exuberance that one needs to know what to do and one also needs to when to
ride with the boat of mass hysteria and when to get off the boat and go against the mass opinion.(shorting)

Over all from the mathematical point of view the author agrees that though math as a science is accurate its application to stock movements cannot be accurate. It can happen sometimes but not always. There are too many forces in play in the stock market. It is a chaos but during certain periods the mass psychology moves in certain directions such as the uptrends and downtrends. The downtrend of the recent collapse of the stock market( 2008) the DOW reached 6500  from 14000 and the uptrend of 2009 the DOW came back to 10500. These are the major movements when real profits or losses incur. And it is during this time that technical analysis and knowledge of trend following and indicators is useful. Even otherwise volume indicator is in my opinion a very useful tool in technical analysis and trend following and also the 30 day average as mentioned in Stan's book.

The back logic is to identify these trends and use it for our advantage. Everything in the market cannot be understood because it depends a lot of factors some rational some irrational.

Overall its a good book to read to know the basics of the current theories and speculations in stock market.
It may help the beginner to understand the forces in play and a precaution before losing one's shirt.

Behaviorial finance psychology terms and common errors

1. Conformation bias: refers to the way we check a hypothesis by observing instances that confirm it and ignoring those that don't.

2. Anchoring effect: example is the 52 week high and making sell or buy decisions based on that.

3. Availability error : is the inclination to view any story, whether political, personal, or financial, through the lens of a superficially similar story that is psychologically available.

4. status quo bias: not doing anything in an uncertain situation even though one is losing.

5. endowment effect: is an inclination to endow one's holdings with more value than they have simply becuase one holds them." its my stock and I love it."

1.  passively endured losses induce less regret than losses that follow active involvement.
2.  people feel considerably more pain after incurring a financial loss than they do pleasure after achieving an equivalent gain. In the extreme case, desperate fears about losing a lot of money induce people to take enormous risks with their money.
3. It's not only in casinos and the stock market that we categorize money in odd ways and treat it differently depending on what mental account we place it in.

stock analysis 3/24/10

I went to max losers list on google and searched for the sector that is loosing. If only one stock is loosing and the rest in the sector are doing well or just moving side ways then, shorting should not be done.

The gold sector is on a decline. GRS, GAM,  and many in the sector are in a decline. they have passed the 30 day average line and are on a decline. I can probably invest 2-3k and see how that goes. I have to find the worst stock that is declining or the the stock that has just crossed the 30 line. Also look at the fundamentals with the worst fundamentals. Gam and Grs have the worst pe ratios and eps.

Now the buy should be put on the 30 day average line. 

The New Rove-Cheney Assault on Reality

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/14/opinion/14rich.html?hp

THE opening salvo, fired on Fox News during Thanksgiving week, aroused little notice: Dana Perino, the former White House press secretary, declared that “we did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush’s term.” Rudy Giuliani upped the ante on ABC’s “Good Morning America” in January. “We had no domestic attacks under Bush,” he said. “We’ve had one under Obama.” (He apparently meant the Fort Hood shootings.)

Now the revisionist floodgates have opened with the simultaneous arrival of Karl Rove’s memoir and Keep America Safe, a new right-wing noise machine invented by Dick Cheney’s daughter Liz and the inevitable William Kristol. This gang’s rewriting of history knows few bounds. To hear them tell it, 9/11 was so completely Bill Clinton’s fault that it retroactively happened while he was still in office. The Bush White House is equally blameless for the post-9/11 resurgence of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iran. Instead it’s President Obama who is endangering America by coddling terrorists and stopping torture.
Could any of this non-reality-based shtick stick? So far the answer is No. Rove’s book and Keep America Safe could be the best political news for the White House in some time. This new eruption of misinformation and rancor vividly reminds Americans why they couldn’t wait for Bush and Cheney to leave Washington.
But the old regime’s attack squads are relentless and shameless. The Obama administration, which put the brakes on any new investigations into Bush-Cheney national security malfeasance upon taking office, will sooner or later have to strike back. Once the Bush-Cheney failures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran again come home to roost, as they undoubtedly and explosively will, someone will have to remind our amnesia-prone nation who really enabled America’s enemies in the run-up to 9/11 and in its aftermath.
There’s a good reason why Rove’s memoir is titled “Courage and Consequence,” not “Truth or Consequences.” Its spin is so uninhibited that even “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job!” is repackaged with an alibi. The book’s apolitical asides are as untrustworthy as its major events. For all Rove’s self-proclaimed expertise as a student of history, he writes that eight American presidents assumed office “as a result of the assassination or resignation of their predecessor.” (He’s off by only three.) After a peculiar early narrative detour to combat reports of his late adoptive father’s homosexuality, Rove burnishes his family values cred with repeated references to his own happy heterosexual domesticity. This, too, is a smoke screen: Readers learned months before the book was published that his marriage ended in divorce.
Rove’s overall thesis on the misbegotten birth of the Iraq war is a stretch even by his standards. “Would the Iraq war have occurred without W.M.D.?” he writes. “I doubt it.” He claims that Bush would have looked for other ways “to constrain” Saddam Hussein had the intelligence not revealed Iraq’s “unique threat” to America’s security. Even if you buy Rove’s predictable (and easily refuted) claims that the White House neither hyped, manipulated nor cherry-picked the intelligence, his portrait of Bush as an apostle of containment is absurd. And morally offensive in light of the carnage that followed. As Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, Colin Powell’s former chief of staff, said on MSNBC, it’s “not a very comforting thing” to tell the families of the American fallen “that if the intelligence community in the United States, on which we spend about $60 billion a year, hadn’t made this colossal failure, we probably wouldn’t have gone to war.”
Rove and his book are yesterday. Keep America Safe is on the march. Liz Cheney’s crackpot hit squad achieved instant notoriety with its viral video demanding the names of Obama Justice Department officials who had served as pro bono defense lawyers for Guantánamo Bay detainees. The video branded these government lawyers as “the Al Qaeda Seven” and juxtaposed their supposed un-American activities with a photo of Osama bin Laden. As if to underline the McCarthyism implicit in this smear campaign, the Cheney ally Marc Thiessen (one of the two former Bush speechwriters now serving as Washington Post columnists) started spreading these charges on television with a giggly, repressed hysteria uncannily reminiscent of the snide Joe McCarthy henchman Roy Cohn.
This McCarthyism has not advanced nearly so far as the original brand. Among those who have called out Keep America Safe for its indecent impugning of honorable Americans’ patriotism are Kenneth Starr, Lindsey Graham and former Bush administration lawyers in the conservative Federalist Society. When even the relentless pursuer of Monicagate is moved to call a right-wing jihad “out of bounds,” as Starr did in this case, that’s a fairly good indicator that it’s way off in crazyland.
This is hardly the only recent example of Republicans’ distancing themselves from the Cheney mob. The new conservative populist insurgency regards the Bush administration as a skunk at its Tea Parties and has no use for its costly foreign adventures. One principal Tea Party forum, the Freedom Works Web site presided over by Dick Armey, doesn’t even mention national security in a voluminous manifesto on “key issues” as far-flung as Internet taxes and asbestos lawsuit reform. Ron Paul won the straw poll at last month’s Conservative Political Action Conference after giving a speech calling the Bush doctrine of “preventive war” a euphemism for “aggressive” and “unconstitutional” war. Paul’s son, Rand, who has said he would not have voted for the Iraq invasion, is leading the polls in Kentucky’s G.O.P. Senate primary and has been endorsed by Sarah Palin.
In this spectrum, the Keep America Safe crowd is a fringe. But it still must be challenged. As we’ve learned the hard way, little fictions, whether about “death panels” or “uranium from Africa,” can grow mighty fast in the 24/7 media echo chamber. Liz Cheney’s unsupportable charges are not quarantined in the Murdoch empire. Her chummy off-camera relationship with a trio of network news stars, reported last week by Joe Hagan in New York magazine, helps explain her rise in the so-called mainstream media. For that matter, Thiessen was challenged more thoroughly in an interview by Jon Stewart on “The Daily Show” on Tuesday than he has been by any representative of non-fake television news.
What could yet give some traction to the Keep America Safe revisionism is the backdrop against which it is unfolding: an Iraq election with an uncertain and possibly tumultuous outcome; the escalation of the war in Afghanistan; and an increasingly cavalier Iran. If any of these national security theaters goes south, those in the Rove-Cheney cohort will claim vindication in their campaign to pin their own failings on their successors.
Obama may well make — or is already making — his own mistakes. And he will bear responsibility for them. But they must be seen in the context of the larger narrative that the revisionists are now working so hard to obscure. The most devastating terrorist attack on American soil did happen during Bush’s term, after the White House repeatedly ignored what the former C.I.A. director, George Tenet, called the “blinking red” alarms before 9/11. It was the Bush defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who lost bin Laden in Tora Bora, not the Obama Justice Department appointees vilified by Keep America Safe. It was Bush and Cheney, with the aid of Rove’s propaganda campaign, who promoted sketchy and often suspect intelligence about Saddam’s imminent “mushroom clouds.” The ensuing Iraq war allowed those who did attack us on 9/11 to regroup in Afghanistan and beyond — and emboldened Iran, an adversary with an actual nuclear program.
The Iran piece of the back story doesn’t end there. As The Times reported last weekend, Dick Cheney’s former company, Halliburton, kept doing business with Tehran through foreign subsidies until 2007, even as the Bush administration showered it with $27 billion in federal contracts, including a no-bid contract to restore oil production in Iraq. It was also the Bush administration that courted, lionized and catered to Ahmed Chalabi, the Machiavellian Iraqi who lobbied for the Iraq war, supplied some of the more egregious “intelligence” on Saddam’s W.M.D. used to sell it, and has ever since flaunted his dual loyalty to Iran.
Last month, no less reliable a source than Gen. Ray Odierno, the senior American commander in Iraq, warned that Chalabi was essentially functioning as an open Iranian agent on the eve of Iraq’s election, meeting with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other Iranian officials to facilitate Iran’s influence over Iraq after the voting. (Dexter Filkins of The Times reported on Chalabi’s ties to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2006.) As the vote counting began last week, fears grew that he could be the monkey wrench who corrupts the entire process. It’s no surprise that Chalabi, so beloved by Bush that he appeared as an honored guest at the 2004 State of the Union, receives not a single mention in Rove’s memoir.
If we are really to keep America safe, it’s essential we remember exactly which American politicians empowered Iran, Al Qaeda and the Taliban from 2001 to 2008, and why. History will be repeated not only if we forget it, but also if we let it be rewritten by those whose ideological zealotry and boneheaded decisions have made America less safe to this day.

Passage from Essay on the Gita: The Three Purushas

The difficulty which baffles our intelligence is that these two seem to be irreconcilable opposites with no real nexus between them or any transition from one to the other except by an intolerant movement of separation. The Kshara acts, or at least motives action, seperately in the Akshara; the Akshara stands apart, self-centered, separate in its inactivity from the Kshara. At first sight it would almost seem better, more logical, more easy of comprehension, if we admitted with the Sankhyas an original and eternal duality of Purusha and Prakriti, if not even an eternal plurality of souls. Our experience of the Akshara would then be simply the withdrawal of each Purusha into himself, his turning away from Nature and therefore from all contact with other souls in the relations of existence; for each is self-sufficient and infinite and complete in his own essence. But after all the final experience is that of a unity of all beings which is not merely a community of experience, a common subjection to one force of Nature, but a oneness in the spirit, a vast identity of conscious being beyond all this endless variety of determination, behind all this apparent separativism of relative existence. The Gita takes its stand in that highest spiritual experience. It appears indeed to admit an eternal plurality of souls subject to and sustained by their eternal unity, for cosmos is for ever and manifestation goes on in unending cycles; nor does it affirm anywhere or use any expression that would indicate an absolute disappearance, laya, the annullation of the individual soul in the Infinite. But at the same time it affirms with a strong insistence that the Akshara is the one self of all these many souls, and it is therefore evident that these two spirits are a dual status of one eternal and universal existence. That is a very ancient doctrine; it is the whole basis of the largest vision of the Upanishads,- as when the Isha tells us that Brahman is both the mobile and the immobile, is the One and the Many, is the Self and all existences, atman sarvabhutami, is the Knowledge and the Ignorance, is the eternal unborn status and also the birth of existences, and that to dwell only on one of these things to the rejection of its eternal counterpart is a darkness of exclusive knowledge or a darkness of ignorance. It too insists like the Gita that man musk know and must embrace both and learn of the Supreme in his entirety- samagram
mam, as the Gita puts it- in order to enjoy immortality and live in the Eternal. The teaching of the Gita and this side of the teaching of the Upanishads are so far at one; for they loo at and admit both sides of the reality and still arrive at identity as the conclusion and the highest truth of existence.

krishnashtakam

The women in red

"I was waiting in the parking lot for the new date. It is almost 9 pm now and she asked me to get there by 8 pm. what must have happened to her. Her voice was so sweet on the telephone unlike any other women I talked before. I think I will marry her and give her whatever she need all her life. I would satisfy her to the utmost", thought vishaal.

It was a busy street and there were several restaurants,boutiques on this street. The traffic was not as bad as it usually is on this street during sunset. Vishaal was standing in front of the VICTORIA restaurant. People who passed by him gushed through him as if he never existed.

Vishaal thought, "where were all these people heading to? may be they all have a family to return to, a girlfriend or just a sweet home. Everybody goes home after work whats wrong in it. Where else can they go otherwise. all souls want to go home after wandering outside. They feel relieved when they get home this separation from home and getting back after work gives unrewarded satisfaction. 

she also said she would be dressed up in red gown. Vishaal's eyes now concentrated on everything red visible on the street. Vishaal thought," I should not miss anything red today. What a fool I would be if she came here today and I missed her because I was lost in some other lousy thought or distraction.

I cannot miss her in my life. She is the only train to the other side of my life. How great is married life indeed no one should miss the pristine pleasures of it.

Is it not the right age for me to get married? All the women I talked to were either too proud or too gullible. I want someone who is smart and intelligent. A women who can keep me happy either by honesty or trickery. I do not care. I only want happiness. When we are all dead who cares if we were happy for the right reasons. Life is too short to ask these questions and even if we ask them who cares for the answers. Just be happy by whatever means".

Now vishaal was looking at red color like never before in his life. Red was the only color he liked now or probably for rest of his life if his love showed up in her pretty dress.

People who went into the restaurant were coming with happy faces. Everybody looked happy and satisfied to him and he is the only one gloomy and lost. His future was in jeopardy now.  How sweet she was talking to him on the telephone. This telephone conversation was going on from a month now. He thought that no matter how a women looks she has to talk properly to a man. She has to know how to joke when he is upset or turn around his mood to happiness. Women was made to do that after all by the almighty. Who cares how she looks as long as she knows the art of mood uplifting"

Now it was getting too late may be 9.30 pm. Every minute was a long year for him. He was loosing confidence now.
How could she do that to him. He has given whatever kind of emotional support on the telephone as possible. There could not be anybody else who can be more decent and supportive of her future desires like him. Then after all this month of sweet talk why has she not turned up on time?

Life is a mystery he thought and time is another mystery. It drags when you really want it go fast.
He thought of giving one more concentrated and patient look to everything red in the area including the windows,neon lights, walls and people. when he has lost all hope he hid his face down and was looking at the square tiles on the footpath.

Suddenly a women came from his back and asked him if he was vishaal. Vishaal turned around in excitement, the kind that happens once in a lifetime. He stared at the women in Red for a long time. All the while she was making some gestures and talking to him but he could not hear her. when at last he woke up from this blankness and daze he could now hear some faint and wavering sounds in the air.

"Vishaal can you hear me? what is wrong with you?" said the women

Vishaal woke up and said that his name was not Vishaal and left her immediately.

when he came back home, he thought how could he get married to a women who does not look good even if she paints herself with red color. A man needs a women who looks good. Who needs a women who is intelligent and nice talking. A women has to look good and the man should feel that her beauty would not fade away like the everlasting mountains. he never picked up the phone calls again from this sweet talkie girl.

science fiction introduction

Robert Heinlein

Arthur Clarke

Isaac Asimov

Jules Verne

I found that Heinlein,Robert would suit my interests in philosophy and science. I am thinking of reading Stranger in strange land.

Microeconomic principles in one song

stock analysis 3/1/2010

I dropped out of berkshire since i felt the rally is a short one and there is resistance at 80. I feel the restuarant industry shows better promise. Berkshire is at 79.2 now and the all time high was 100. I feel the upward movement is limited to 20 percent.
Restaurant industry is show good promise. CMG and DPZ have done well after i bought them. I will invest more in those two shares when the market goes down in a couple of days. I am guessing there will be good returns in 3-4 months.