Did political correctness facilitate the Fort Hood massacre?

The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates isn't sure. Neither are most of his commenters. In about an hour of my life I won't get back, I took a slightly different view in the comments there.

A neglected asset class?

In an exchange with Aaron Edelheit on his blog earlier this week (in the comment thread of this post of his, "Why are you sitting in cash?"), I pointed out that, even if one were bearish on the U.S. dollar, it might not make sense to diversify out of it now if one believes that the stock market is overvalued. That's because, if history is a guide, the dollar will rally (at least temporarily) when the stock market corrects. At that point, after the dollar rally, it might make more sense to diversify into non dollar-denominated assets.

Richard Bernstein made a similar point in his column in yesterday's Financial Times ("Lessons of investing are ignored"), noting the negative correlation of U.S. Treasuries to stocks and other asset classes:

Investors should be trying to emulate their Chinese and Japanese overweight positions in Treasuries. Instead, Wall Street is striving to get the Chinese and Japanese to “diversify” like everyone else. In my opinion, the Chinese and Japanese should ignore the advice and stick with their Treasuries.

[...]

Treasuries are today’s “alternative” asset class. Treasuries’ returns continue to be negatively correlated to equities, yet they remain widely underowned because investors consider them overly risky.

Update: Yahoo! Finance's current headline: "Stocks fall for 3rd day as dollar strengthens".

Added Destiny

Picked up some more Destiny Media (OTC BB: DSNY.OB) shares at $0.305 today. I suspect they will be trading higher after the company releases its earnings later this month. We'll see.

New Mexico soccer brawler speaks

Yahoo! Sports reports that Elizabeth Lambert, star of the clip in this post, "Girl's soccer gets rough", was interviewed by the New York Times about her exploits during that game against BYU: Vilified New Mexico soccer player breaks her silence. Excerpt:

The junior was deluged with calls and letters after the video went viral. Some of those were threats, but others came from men who wanted to ask her out. She was disgusted by both.

The screen cap above, of Lampert drilling a BYU player in the back, accompanied the Yahoo! article. If memory serves though, that shot at least was in retaliation for an elbow strike. That video featured more blatant stuff by Lambert than that.

For value investors and online entrepreneurs

A couple of new products profiled by TechCrunch may be of interest.

For value investors, particularly the ones who enjoy investing in big companies everyone already knows about: Trefis might be of interest as a GUI way of playing around with discounted cash flow estimates.

For online entrepreneurs who want a more professional way to accept payments than PayPal and don't want to deal with the hassle of setting up the gateway, payment processor, security certificate, etc. from scratch (as my developers did with ShortScreen.com): Recurly (currently in "private beta"). I didn't look at all of the comments in that thread, but a couple of commenters mentioned a competitor to Recurly that's already live, Spreedly.

Never seen a football play like this

Via Yahoo! Sports. Amazing:

Business is business

This was a pleasant surprise. Fred Wilson's resident bouncer, conspiracy theorist, and occasional target of my disapproving comments Kid Mercury signs on as an affiliate of ShortScreen.com. Welcome aboard, Kid.