RUTHFULLY YOURS

The Law of gravity has not been repealed. What has risen will, at some point, decline. But, when? Hundreds of people are paid millions of dollars to predict the unpredictable. Yet, the best advice about the direction of the market over the short term I have ever read was given by J.P. Morgan. The story may be apocryphal, but it was re-told by Benjamin Graham in The Intelligent Investor (1949); it still resonates. Asked by his lift boy, in 1901, what will the stock market do? He replied, “it will fluctuate.”

The past year has seen establishment-types in Washington, mainstream media and coastal elites trying to undo last year’s election. Has the market’s positive performance deepened their denial and made more passionate their hysteria? Would they have been so relentless had stocks done as Paul Krugman (economist and New York Times columnist) predicted when news of Trump’s election was clear? Krugman wrote as stock futures plunged early before trading began on Wednesday, the 9th of November. As to when they would recover, he opined: “a first-pass answer is never.” The DJIA rose 257 points that day.

The performance of U.S. equity markets since the election of Donald Trump has been remarkable. He came after a President who entered office following the worst financial crisis since the 1930s. Stocks were at five-year lows. Mr. Obama’s two terms saw the market (DJIA) rise 151%; he left office with an approval rating in the mid 50% range. In contrast, Mr. Trump was elected with stocks near all-time highs, and he has the lowest approval numbers in memory. However, those ratings run counter to optimism seen in polls like the IDB/TIPP Poll: Economic Optimism Index – a mixture of consumers, workers and investors. Over the first sixteen years of this century, the Index averaged 49.3, or slightly negative. Today, it stands at 53.6. During the last year of Mr. Obama’s Presidency, the number was under 48.

Benjamin Graham, considered the father of value investing, explained his concept of investing this way: “In the short term, it is like a voting machine – tallying up which firms are popular and unpopular. But in the long run, it is like a weighing machine – assessing the substance of a company.” Is a year a long enough period to measure Mr. Trump? Is the market reflecting his popularity, or is it weighing what he has accomplished, in restoring cost-benefit analysis and undoing restrictive regulations in federal agencies like the EPA, FDA, FCC, Transportation and the Department of Education? Is it measuring Betsy Devos’s focus on making public school more competitive through vouchers and Charter schools? Is it weighing Mr. Trump’s appointment of originalists as judges, ones more predictable, as they are aligned with the Constitution and less governed by politics or relativism? Does it see an end to authoritarianism at the CFPB?

I don’t pretend to know why markets have done what they have. And I know they will correct, but when and by how much? So, what should investors do? There are no simple answers. The needs of each is individual. The future is like peering through a windshield in driving rain. Clarity is confined to the past.

But, in my experience, market timing is only accurate in retrospect. What I do know is that over the long term – two, three or four decades – stocks have risen. They should continue to do so. If one had bought stocks on September 3, 1929, the day that year the DJIA peaked, one’s compounded annual return, through today, would still have been 4.8%, even though stocks did not exceed those 1929 prices until 1954.[1] If you had reinvested dividends your total compounded annual return would have exceeded 6%. On my birthdate, January 31, 1941, the DJIA was roughly one third of what it had been twelve years earlier. If my grandparents had given me a $1000 as a birth gift, and if I had been smart enough to leave it invested, it would be now worth $187,000, or a 7.01% CAGR. Over the 48 years I spent on Wall Street annual returns compounded at 6.3%, despite stocks being lower fifteen years after I got into the business.

Mr. Obama became President at a fortuitous time. During his eight years in office, the DJIA compounded at an annual rate of 12.1%. But, had you bought stocks on the dawn of the new millennium, on January 3, 2000, your compounded return would have been only 3.9%. That modest performance reflects the bear market that began in March 2000 and ended in March 2003; and the one that began in October 2007 and ended in May 2009. If one goes back 100 years, stocks, as measured by the DJIA, have compounded at 5.9% – a reasonable assumption for future prospects, considering what the last century saw: a world-wide depression, two world wars and numerous smaller ones, a cold war that lasted forty-five years, the deaths in office of three presidents (one by assassination), a bout of inflation that sent Treasuries to 20% yields, the first attack on American soil since the war of 1812, and a credit crisis that nearly sent financial markets into a tail spin. But it was also a period that highlighted American creative genius, that saw the Country land a man on the moon, and which witnessed revolutions in farming, manufacturing, transportation, merchandising, electronics, computing and communications.

There have been structural changes in markets. Among them has been the shrinking of the number of publically traded stocks, and the concomitant increase in value of those that survived. According to the Carlyle Group, there are 3671 companies listed on U.S. stock exchanges today. Twenty years ago, there were about 7300, yet the value of publically traded stocks today – about $27 trillion – is double the value of all publically traded stocks in 1997. What happened? Private equity allows start-ups to wait longer to go public. Mergers and bankruptcies caused the disappearance of many micro and small-cap stocks. Also, passive strategies have limited the number of shares available for trading. Since the millennium, about $1.7 trillion has been invested in index funds, ETFs and other similar strategies, while funds actively managed have seen about $1.4 trillion in outflows. Equity derivatives have affected valuations, altering the nature of risk. And, over the past eight years, the Fed purchased over $4 trillion in government and agency debt. That has ended. The yield on 30-day Treasury Bills has risen from 0.26% on September 30, 2016 to 1.29% now. Over the same time, the spread between Investment Grade Corporates and the 10-Year Treasury has narrowed from 191 basis points to 137 basis points, implying a willingness to assume more risk.

In response to Mr. Buffett’s quote in the rubric at the top of this essay, I suspect people are neither greedy nor fearful. They are somewhere in between. But, keep in mind, investing is for tortoises, not hares. Avoid being cute or believing every seer. Think long term and maintain perspective.

The only addition I would add to the wisdom of J.P. Morgan quoted at the start of this essay is that over the long-term stocks rise; though returns can be negative for a decade or more. The caveat: our democracy, entrepreneurship and capitalism survive. Warren Buffett recently predicted the DJIA will hit 1,000,000 in the next hundred years. One’s first reaction is that the Wizard of Omaha is losing it; but 1,000,000 on the DJIA from the current level implies compounded annual returns of 3.7%, easily doable, as long as our democracy stays strong. My guess is that my great grandchildren will see that happen.

Power,” Henry Kissinger observed, “is the ultimate aphrodisiac.” Men, but mostly women, have been trading erotic services for access to power since time began.https://amgreatness.com/2017/11/24/power-sex-and-politics/

The ruling class’s recent carrying on over a supposed epidemic of powerful grabbers and gropers runs counter to common sense and experience. If Henry, who resembled less a prince than a frog even in his youth found his connections with power and wealth sufficient to satisfy his longings, so can anyone similarly placed.

Nor is there any evidence of a sudden increase in morality or restraint having cut into the supply of the willing. There is even less reason to believe that the very same arbiters of public behavior who, increasingly, penalize advocacy of restricting sex to men and women married to one another have become defenders of female modesty.

What, then, is the fuss about? It seems as the ruling class’s leadership experiences a major turnover, it is making a minor shift in tactics and in its list of enemies. Herewith, I try to explain.

Washington’s Trade-Offs
First, the basics. During my eight years on the Senate staff, sex was a currency for renting rungs on ladders to power. Uninvolved and with a hygroscopic shoulder, I listened to accounts of the trade, in which some one-third of senators, male senior staff, and corresponding numbers of females seemed to be involved. I write “trade,” because not once did I hear of anyone forcing his attention. Given what seemed an endless supply of the willing, anyone who might feel compelled to do that would have been a loser otherwise unfit for survival in that demanding environment.

This, I wager, is not so different from others’ experiences in Washington. Senior female staffers were far more open than secretaries in describing their conquests of places up the ladder, especially of senators. There was some reticence only in talking about “relationships” with such as John Tower (R-Texas) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.) because they were the easiest, and had so many. The prize, of course, was Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.)—rooster over a veritable hen house that was, almost literally, a “chick magnet.” Access to power, or status, or the appearance thereof was on one side, sex on the other. Innocence was the one quality entirely absent on all sides.

In the basic bargain, the female proposes. The power holder has the prerogative to say “no,” or just to do nothing. By a lesser token, wealthy men need not offer cash to have female attention showered on them. Money is silver currency. Power is gold. A few, occasionally, get impatient and grab. But taking egregious behavior as the norm of the relationship between power and sex willfully disregards reality. Banish the grabbing, and the fundamental reality remains unchanged.

The Sins of Others
What, then, are our powerful rulers’ claims of zero tolerance for sexual harassment or sexual commerce about? First, they do not involve the ruling class giving up any of their privileges, never mind what are effectively their harems. They are confessions—not of their own sins, but of the sins of others. The others whose sins they confess are not the friends of those doing the confessing—at least, not their current friends. Yet again, they implicitly validate their own behavior by signaling their own virtue vis à vis others.

The humanitarian hoax is a deliberate and deceitful tactic of presenting a destructive policy as altruistic. The humanitarian huckster presents himself as a compassionate advocate when in fact he is the disguised enemy.

Unconditional love is the Holy Grail for millennials. They talk about it, dream about it, want it, need it, and are outraged if anyone dares to question its value. Unconditional love is, after all, “settled” science among millennial “experts” whose opinions are accepted and observed with religious conformity by their devotees.

Wikipedia defines unconditional love as “affection without any limitations or love without conditions.” The current demand for unconditional love is consistent with the left-wing liberal campaign to value feelings over facts and effort over achievement as metrics for what is good in society. So, let’s examine unconditional love.

First, an appropriate season for unconditional love exists during infancy and early childhood. Parents accept anything and everything that babies do – we love them for just being. Babies and young children lack the ability for any self-control so we do not expect standards of behavior – anything goes. Unconditional love separates the individual from his/her behavior which is entirely appropriate for infants and young children. When the demand for unconditional love is extended into adulthood the individual inappropriately demands to be loved without regard for his/her behavior in the same way an infant is loved.

Relationships are structured with written, spoken, and unspoken rules and standards of behavior. Family relationships, social relationships, business relationships, professional relationships, sexual relationships are all organized on some level by rules that participants are expected to follow. Societies are similarly organized by their infrastructure of rules/laws that citizens are expected to observe. What makes infancy and early childhood so exceptional is its distinguishing “no rules” formula. Society temporarily accepts the separation of the individual from his/her behavior. What happens when a society refuses adulthood and instead strives for permanent childhood?

When the no rules formula is protracted and adulthood is rejected the result is an infantilized population and social chaos. Consider the societal implications of adults who refuse to abide by laws – traffic laws, property laws, environmental laws, civil rights laws, family laws. All rules and regulations are considered anathema to chronological adults living in the subjective reality of “no rules” infancy including college campuses that no longer respect Constitutional guarantees of free speech. Fragile infantilized students require safe spaces and trigger warnings to protect them from ideas that they disagree with. College students have historically been considered future leaders. How can a leader be a leader in a pluralist society if he/she cannot even listen to an opposing point of view?

He is the offspring of the unhappy marriage between feminism and the sexual revolution.
https://spectator.org/the-rise-of-the-beta-male-sexual-harasser/?utm_source=

The winds of what the New York Post calls Pervnado continue to gather strength, carving a hole through the beta male worlds of NPR, PBS, Hollywood, the New Republic, Vox, the New York Times, and MSNBC, among others. What emerges from this storm of scandal is a clearer picture of a culture that trained men not to respect women but to respect feminism. In many ways, the Beta Male sexual harasser is the squalid offspring of the unhappy marriage between feminism and the sexual revolution, from whose chaotic household he learned virtue-signaling without virtue.

The growing pile of confession notes — which combine ostensible empathy and promises of sensitivity and submission with strategically placed, lawyerly denials — testifies to the grimly comic dishonesty of the Beta Male sexual harasser. He thought that he could continue to indulge his appetites as long as he adjusted his attitudes, a view that all of the prattle about “systemic change” confirms him in, insofar as it treats his misbehavior as an ideological problem rather than a moral one. Implied in many of the confession notes from the harassers is the ludicrous suggestion that with a little more “education,” with a few more training seminars, with a little more consciousness-raising, they would have behaved virtuously. This pose allows them to escape moral responsibility and painlessly join the “solution.” The sexual revolution’s massive crisis of unchastity is thus turned into a “problem of power” that can be remedied by the hiring of more female executives, the expansion of HR departments, and “better” education.

For sheer pomposity, perhaps nothing beats Richard Dreyfuss’s non-apology apology, chalking up his misbehavior to the “performative masculine man my father had modeled for me to be.” But, no worries, he is enlightened now: “I have had to redefine what it means to be a man, and an ethical man. I think every man on Earth has or will have to grapple with this question. But I am not an assaulter.”

Al Franken, trading in the therapeutic, I-stand-ready-to-listen babble of his SNL character Stuart Smalley, says he is going to commit himself anew to believing “women’s experiences.” Never mind that he denied his accuser’s experience. He doesn’t “remember the rehearsal for the skit as Leann does,” but women “deserve to be heard, and believed.” For this act of blatantly dishonest and contradictory atonement, he is receiving praise for his “honesty” and now — in a reminder that feminism will always put politics ahead of the protection of women — a concerted effort is underway to save his career. Thirty-six women from Saturday Night Live have penned a letter saying that his behavior “was stupid and foolish” but that shouldn’t detract from his status as “an honorable public servant.” Michelle Goldberg, writing in the New York Times, says that she is hedging on her call for the ouster of Franken, offering this look into the quality of her reasoning: “It’s easy to condemn morally worthless men like Trump; it’s much harder to figure out what should happen to men who make valuable political and cultural contributions, and whose alleged misdeeds fall far short of criminal.”

Other figures who see themselves as male feminists, such as Charlie Rose and Glenn Thrush, have adopted a similar stance to Franken’s: apologize for making women feel “uncomfortable” while treating the underlying charge as a subjective difference of opinion. Michelle Goldberg treats these phony apologies as a sign of progress:

It’s not a coincidence that the post-Harvey Weinstein purge of sexual harassers has been largely confined to liberal-leaning fields like Hollywood, media, and the Democratic party. This isn’t because progressive institutions are more sexist than others — I’m confident there’s at least as much sexual abuse in finance as in publishing. Rather, organizations with liberal values have suddenly become extremely responsive to claims of sexism.

One can see in such deluded musings why the feminists prefer Beta Male sexual harassers to the Mike Pences. Whether one is “responsive to claims of sexism” is determined in their eyes not by the person’s virtue but by his politics. They will take a goatish Al Franken over a chivalrous Mike Pence. Or take Al Gore, one of the leading Beta Male pols of his generation, who has completely escaped notice during this frenzy, despite credible reports of his having lunged at a masseuse. You won’t see his face in any of the mainstream media’s montages of sexual harassers, lest that set back the cause of climate-change activism. For all the talk of a Clintonian “reckoning,” the feminists still agree with Nina Burleigh that the advance of liberal politics, or as she put it “keeping theocracy off our backs,” is worth “kneepads.”

In the coarseness of that remark, in its shameless admission that feminism seeks power not decency, one could hear the rumblings of today’s scandal. In a culture that rejects chivalry, chastity, and the countless prudent safeguards previous generations adopted in light of real differences between the sexes — in a culture that in effect reduces “goodness” to a set of political attitudes — the rise of the Beta Male sexual harasser was inevitable. From the sordid bed of the sexual revolution and crass feminism has come a new creature — the male feminist pig.

HAPPY THANKSGIVING DAY  TO ALL

I have a vivid memory of putting on my mother’s high heels and covering my head with the veiled hat she wore on special occasions. All decked out, I made my way up The Boulevard in New Haven to our neighbor’s home about four houses away.

And on that sojourn, I have an equally vivid memory of a man sitting on his porch and stopping me in my tracks with his comments. “Well well well, Missy, don’t we look pretty! And where would you be going today looking so beautiful?”

It was a single moment in time, but in that instant, I knew that it felt very good to be noticed and called attractive.

Where was leftist lawyer Gloria Allred all those years ago to represent me and accuse Mr. Porch Guy of sexual suggestiveness, intimidation, even harassment?

She was nowhere because even as a little girl I knew the following:

I dressed up fancily precisely so people would notice.
I enjoyed the fact that people––in this case, Mr. Porch Guy––noticed.
I continued all my life––and to this day––to attend to my appearance because the feedback (from both women and men) is so affirmative and so sweet.

Of course, that puts me in the same category as the multimillions of people around the world who spend multibillions of dollars on cosmetics and clothing and hair and nail care for exactly the same reason––to appear attractive and by doing so to inspire people to smile at them, accept them, hire them, promote them, flirt with them, or approach them with romantic interest.

It’s called human nature. It’s hard-wired into our DNA. And it’s been going on since the Garden of Eden when I’m sure Eve squeezed berry juice on their cheeks and lips and Adam bedecked himself with that famous fig leaf.

“Sxandals” are everywhere with dominoes falling among legislators and celebrities. Remember this “sexcapade” by two Democrat Senators in 1985 while they served in the Senate:

Daniel Greenfield reminded us:http://www.frontpagemag.com/point/264466/heres-how-ted-kennedy-sexually-assaulted-waitress-daniel-greenfield

Ted Kennedy was United States Senator from Massachusetts for over forty years from 1962 until his death in 2009. Christopher John Dodd served as a United States Senator from Connecticut for a thirty-year period from 1981 to 2011

1985-

“It is after midnight and Kennedy and Dodd are just finishing up a long dinner in a private room on the first floor of the restaurant’s annex. They are drunk. Their dates, two very young blondes, leave the table to go to the bathroom. (The dates are drunk too. “They’d always get their girls very, very drunk,” says a former Brasserie waitress.) Betty Loh, who served the foursome, also leaves the room. Raymond Campet, the co-owner of La Brasserie, tells Gaviglio the senators want to see her.

As Gaviglio enters the room, the six-foot-two, 225-plus-pound Kennedy grabs the five-foot-three, 103-pound waitress and throws her on the table. She lands on her back, scattering crystal, plates and cutlery and the lit candles. Several glasses and a crystal candlestick are broken. Kennedy then picks her up from the table and throws her on Dodd, who is sprawled in a chair. With Gaviglio on Dodd’s lap, Kennedy jumps on top and begins rubbing his genital area against hers, supporting his weight on the arms of the chair. As he is doing this, Loh enters the room. She and Gaviglio both scream, drawing one or two dishwashers. Startled, Kennedy leaps up. He laughs. Bruised, shaken and angry over what she considered a sexual assault, Gaviglio runs from the room.”

When considering moderation in politics, we must differentiate between outcomes and process – ideologies versus behavior. The French political philosopher Montesquieu claimed humans naturally migrate toward the center – that policies are best that accommodate the greatest number. On the other hand, Adam Smith, in his The Theory of Moral Sentiments, suggested it is moderation in social interactions, regardless of political opinions, which allow people to relate to and understand one another.

Most Americans believe in a mixture of government and personal independence – an equilibrium allowing the country to prosper, while preserving the obligations society demands. Politics is the search for that balance, but it is a Sisyphean struggle that never satisfies everyone. Polarization is today’s political nemesis. Mainstream media argues that extremism, especially from the right, has made people yearn for moderation. As well, blame is laid on social media that gives expression to myriad views and inspires populist politicians to take advantage of the resulting (seemingly) broken system. Blame is also attributed to media outlets like C-SPAN, venues for posturing politicians playing to their ideological bases.

Those desirous for moderation in politics often hark back to the 1950s, a period seen as relatively quiet – a time of normalcy, to borrow a word from the 1920s. But that era of uniformity, in the long history of our country, was atypical. The number of newspapers had declined, and was still falling. Talk radio did not exist. Television was in its infancy, with only three network television stations, each with fifteen-minute or half-hour news segments. There was little difference between John Chancellor of NBC, Walter Cronkite of CBS and John Daly of ABC. There were no forums for alternative views. We were trapped in a monolith, with little option but to conform. But that is not as it always was. Pamphleteers and writers of broadsheets, in the early years of our republic, provided thousands of people the opportunity to vent individual opinions, much like bloggers today.

How is it that the people who want to remove a statue of Robert E. Lee because it evokes the painful legacy of slavery give Larry David a pass on his crude riffs on the Holocaust? Here is an article that states it well:
Larry David Goes One Cringe Too Far BY Thane Rosenbaumhttp://jewishjournal.com/opinion/227019/larry-david-goes-one-cringe-too-far/

With his appearance on Saturday Night Live this past weekend, Larry David, the undisputed king of cringe-comedy, may have finally crossed a line. It is a symbolic line, admittedly, one that artists draw for themselves both morally and aesthetically. But it is a line nonetheless.

Of course, it’s not a line David would ever hesitate crossing again. He’s taken that same devilish step many times in the past—all for laughs.His monologue on SNL, however, doubled down on a theme that properly deserves to be forever buried and left alone. That’s what we do with the dead, especially the victims of mass murder. A certain amount of piety is expected, and one never dreams of desecration with such nightmarish events.
David pivoted from the recently disclosed sexual predations of certain men in the entertainment industry, making the unpleasant association that many of them happened to be Jews, to his own unseemly wolfish behavior. Apparently, so indiscrete are his sexual urges that he can imagine checking out Jewish women in a concentration camp. In fact, he gave a national audience a glimpse of David hypothetically approaching an attractive woman with death in her immediate future, and testing out pick-up lines.

Appalling, but perhaps not surprising. David has been flirting with the Holocaust for many years. And he keeps coming back, not taking no for an answer, a nebbish with a libido for bad taste. Except the Holocaust is not a love interest. It is an unsightly atrocity, incapable of attraction of any kind, and on any human scale.

This is the same man who conceived a Seinfeld episode in which Jerry was making out with a girl during a screening of Schindler’s List. And another in which a disagreeable fast-food proprietor was renamed “The Soup Nazi.” An episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm riffed on the Reality TV show, The Survivor, in which a winning contestant squared off at a dinner party with an actual survivor of a death camp, comparing their relative suffering. In still yet another, a man with numbers tattooed on his forearm turns out not to be a Holocaust survivor, but rather just someone who temporarily inks his lotto ticket number each week so as not to forget.

This column is from and about Australia but applicable to all the nations of the Anglosphere -America, Canada and England…….rsk

Even the most cursory inspection reveals the integrity of institutions and mores is coming apart. From a failing yet ever more costly education system to defence policies crafted to achieve electoral advantage, rather than national security, the strands of what once held us together are rupturing.

A wire rope is made to support a load under tension and composed of many woven steel strands. But wire ropes sometimes break, the best policy being to conduct regular examinations and, just in case, never to place any part of your body near the rope in case it fails. When the first strand goes the load and strain on the remaining wires intensifies until, most likely sooner than later, the next-weakest wire fails, and so on. There is nothing that can be done to stop the deterioration or, eventually, the catastrophic failure that sees the severed rope become a whip-lashing peril to all unlucky enough to be nearby at the time. Many a tilt-truck driver has been grievously injured when his winch rope’s unnoticed deterioration became suddenly and catastrophically apparent.

You’ve probably guessed that I’m invoking a metaphor about society. In Australia right now even the most cursory inspection reveals strands whose integrity is either partially or wholly gone. Let me identify some of these strands; I am sure readers can add their own.

Discipline: Today, discipline appears to be absent or marginal in many areas: the schoolroom, the home, public behaviour, even our parliament. Don’t like a former prime minister? Well head-butt him because, well, why not! Arguing your case requires thought and effort and logic. It’s so much easier (and far more satisfying) to make your case with a forehead to the nose. Yes, you might end up in court, but it will be to the cheers of your Twitter admirers and urgers.

Respect: This seems to be regarded as one of yesterday’s virtues, as we see in almost all areas of public and private life: customer service, attitude to the elderly, simple gestures such as opening a door, road rage. Or think of it this way: you are Australia’s greatest tennis player but hold unfashionable views about re-defining the word “marriage”. Expect your center court achievements to count for nothing as activists push to remove your name from the stadium built to honour your sporting achievements. Why extend respect when a public burning is so much more fun?

Education: Where does one start? In no particular order: lack of emphasis on the three Rs; the inclusion in the syllabus — indeed, elevation – of lifestyle advocacy. Even as Australia slips ever further down the international rankings, the amount poured into “education” grows, yet teacher unions and bureaucrats insist it is still not enough. And it gets worse at the tertiary level. Universities now focus on generating revenue rather than promoting academic excellence. To be fair, this is all they can do, as the schools system delivers every year a fresh crop of minds either half-formed or so polluted by approved doctrine that the critical thought once seen as the essence of university life is beyond them. Ever wonder about the popularity of gay studies, womens studies and all the other make-it-up-as-you-go-along “studies”? The explanation is simple: useless courses are the perfect vehicles to keep the fees flowing and bums on lecture room seats. That a degree in, say, feminist film studies is unlikely to enhance job prospects is never mentioned.

Law and order: In Victoria almost one billion dollars every year is shaken out of motorists who travel just a whisker over the speed limit — respectable citizens for the most part whose only crime is to have money in the bank the government thinks should be better used underwriting its education system (see above) and other follies. Meanwhile teen gangs rampage through the late-night suburbs and police warn that any homeowner who defends home, life and property against push-in invaders risks being charged with vigilantism. Nevertheless, sporting goods stores sell out of baseball bats.