“An historical error.”
That’s how Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, described his nations’s decision to be a signatory to a U.N. Resolution 50 years ago to eradicate the coca leaf within 25 years, as it was designated as an illegal drug in that resolution.
You may better recognize the coca leaf as the precursor to cocaine, crack and Cocoa Pebbles cereal.
Now Morales wants to legalize the coca leaf while at the same time seeking funding for helicoptors and aircraft to crack down on its illegal cultivation.
That previous sentence has a nuance in it, and no, it’s not the use of the word “crack.”
The nuance is in the definition of “illegal.”
In fact, Morales renounced the resolution last year and coca leaf growing is legal in family plots and its use is legal if done so in traditional ways.
Nice. At least there’s an operational definition for the “traditional family,” as we see its definition undergoing many permutations in the United States.
A family of any size that grows its own coca leaf and uses it in a fashion from the past.
That works for me. There’s no dogma. There’s no misogyny and it’s all inclusive, offering a big tent and welcoming all.
I believe in double dipping when it comes to taking in dividends and option premiums, but Morales has definitely put a new spin on the art of “Double Dipping.” Make it legal, but give us the money to ensure that we can eradicate what is no longer an illegal activity.
I can certainly see great demand to bring back the “extended family” to fit into that big tent and adopt compound style living situations to get that family plot to a nice and healthy size to support those “traditional” uses that had previously not been widely divulged.
Forget about “Branch Davidians.” Take it right down to the end unit, the “Leaf Davidians.”
Certainly, some family units can proudly point to their traditional use of freebasing since the 1970’s as a vibrant expression of their cultural heritage.
I know I do as I pray at the Pryor Altar.
Applying the law of our land, as corporations take on the rights of people, there’s no reason why the equivalent of corporate family lots shouldn’t be popping up all over Bolivia. There would certainly be no need to waste money on funding a Super-PAC to lobby President Morales to allow that situation.
He’s on already on board as the Chewer-in-Chief.
There aren’t many ways that I might find myself agreeing with Ron Paul, but he and Morales are onto something here, that I think should be extended to many aspects of our modern lives.
I won’t include polygamy into the mix, as I’m certain that’s going to be addresed by our next President, whoever that might be, as both Moslem and Mormon societies have had such traditions in the past.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, as some of my best friends come descended from a patriarchal culture that allowed polygamy.
Of course, if Mitt Romney answers yet another idiot Pastor’s demand that he renounce his faith or if President Obama turns out not to be a Kenyan Muslim, then we’ll just have to wait another 4 to 8 years to get the issue back on the radar screen.
In the meantime, why are there so many unnecessary regulations in the stock markets?
I’ve already pointed out the insider trading is a victimless crime. It’s no one’s fault but your own if you don’t have information that other people have.
Naked short selling? Limits on leverage? Free-riding? Standardized accounting principles?
Upticks. There’s a rule for upticks.
Rules, rules everywhere rules.
Who knows what would have eventually happened with Arthur Andersen, Enron and WorldCom if only natural market forces were allowed to play themselves out? There would still be Crazy Eddie stores, too.
Or at least empty boxes.
That’s a frightening Ron Paul like dream, although if we were to fall back on allowing tradition to be lawful the wild, wild west would be back on Wall Street, instead of it being governed by mindless algorithms and emotionless movements of billions of dollars in a nano-second.
I think that I may have been chewing on coca leaf.
How else am I going to explain to my financially bereft heirs that I actually pulled off that silver versus anti-silver hedge after falling helpless prey to Ron Paul’s twirling that shiny silver dollar among his fingers, almost as if he had David Copperfield powers.
To my credit, I didn’t have very much to commit to that bizarre effort of making an iShares SIlver ETF purchase and subsequently selling weekly call options on the shares, while I also simultaneously held the ProShares UltraShort Silver ETF and sold calls on those shares.
Did I mention that I also sold puts?
Sort of like Sybil, only in a quantitative manner.
But as I was questioning the sanity of moving in so many directions with an asset that can easily get bruised and tarnished, there was a great cartoon in the New Yorker that Paul Kedrosky linked to earlier today that put me at peace.
Finally, someone who understood me.
Not Kedrosky, but the cartoonist.
I’m not certain what Kedrosky understands, other than to know he may be the most eclectically read person in the world. If that’s not entirely accurate, then he is by far the most eclectically link sharing person in the world. I don’t click on many links. Mostly because it may end up being a parole violation, but I do take my chances with Kedrosky’s links.
They’re usuallly interesting, if not altogether “good stuff.”
The rendering of the cartoon is entirely superfluous and employs 1950’s bohemian hairstyles so favored bythe establishment elite that wanted to show their “bad boy” side.
It’s the caption: “Sometimes I sell puts. Other times I sell calls. It’s a full life,” that has meaning.
Still, the strategy is not really a strategy at all, because I haven’t done my due diligence, which is pretty unlike me, but the bet was pretty small in this case. I’ll prospectively follow the positions and see if it ever makes sense.
I could just skip all of that and search the science fiction annals for stories about matter and anti-matter. Maybe a meta-analyis of those stories to see whether matter or anti-matter is ultimately victorious.
If the silver versus anti-silver strategy does make sense, I’ll bemoan the fact that I had so little freed up cash coming from the previous week of almost no call assignments or put expirations.
But even though the scale was small, I did what I set out to do for the day with the little I had to play with.
I sold Green Mountain Coffee Roaster puts and bought shares of the iShares Silver ETF and immediately sold calls on the shares.
It’s just the number of shares that was small, but at least I felt as if I justified my day on the basis of those trades.
There was obviously nothing illegal about what I did. Maybe just a bit of stupidity.
As Szelhamos used to say, if you want to act like an idiot, go ahead “its a free country.”
I’m not certain that he was thinking about Bolivia when he said that, as he did, many many times, but I am pretty certain that he never thought about Bolivia at any stage in his life.
Unless he was chewing on coca.
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