AlexKeto.com

More on the greatest IPO in history (or at least the greatest so far this year):

So the numbers are rolling in and Morgan Stanley ate 162 million shares of Facebook on Friday. This stake is valued at $6.16 billion at the current, absurd price of $38.23 per share.
Goldman Sachs chowed down on $3.2 billion in shares and JP Morgan bellied up to the bar to take a $2.4 billion swig of this rotgut stock.
The fees these folks earned from rolling out the stock? $176 million.
Whoa, talk about a Maalox moment! I bet there's going to be a lot of heartburn in those companies when the market opens Monday,
Just remember what Wall Street keeps saying when it comes to regulations. "We're too smart to need 'em, folks!"
Yeah, and if you believe that, they just happen to have about $10 billion in a deadbeat stock they'd like to sell you at $38.23 a share.

Let me see if I can get this right. Wall Street offered Facebook shares to wealthy insiders and institutional investors at a price of $38.00 at the IPO. These people, who are already loaded, are offered a slice of IPOs so they can turn a quick buck on the public when the shares are, theoretically, supposed to sky rocket. But Morgan Stanley wound up being forced to eat most of the shares when they started to plunge below $38.00. So the fat cats made no money, institutional investors made nothing, and Morgan Stanley got screwed, for once, instead of the public.
And people are calling this IPO a disaster? It seems to me it is one of the few that turned out right.
Watch out for Monday and Tuesday, though, because this turkey stock is going down. (I am aware of the irony of posting this on Facebook, don't bother pointing it out)
I bet at Morgan Stanley they are calling it "In Your Facebook" now.

The news this week that the Saudi intelligence services ran a double agent of some sort into Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula doesn’t surprise me. It’s been done before. In fact, we’ve seen groups like Al Qaida before also, and not just the Assassin sect that reined in the Middle East nearly a 1000 years ago that most people point to.

While working on a book on the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, I was often struck by the similarities between the Mau Mau and Al Qaida. The flipping of an al Qaida operative makes the parallels just that much stronger. Of course, the news articles don’t say the Saudis flipped a member of al Qaida. They say they recruited an outsider who penetrated al Qaida. I doubt it. But we’ll never know for sure until the intelligence files are released sometime in the next century so it’s probably not worth arguing over.

But back to the parallels between al Qaida and the Mau Mau who fought the British in Kenya from 1952 to 1954.

To start with, both movements never have been overwhelmingly popular even amongst their own base. Yes, 19 of the 9/11 hijackers were Saudis but the vast majority of Saudis aren’t members of al Qaida. The same was true of the Mau Mau. Most Mau Mau were Kikuyu but the majority of the Kikuyu were not active members of the Mau Mau.

Just as Al Qaida has alienated a huge swathe of the Muslim population through the indiscriminate slaughter of civilians, the Mau Mau alienated the Kikuyu through their rampant murder of their fellow tribesmen. Towards the end of the Mau Mau rebellion, the British recruited large numbers of Kikuyu to hunt down the remnants of the Mau Mau.  

Both movements based their ideology in part on retreating to some point in the past where they were dominant and both use religion as the way to do this. And both created myths about this religious past. Osama bin Laden called for a united Muslim world based on the recreation of the Caliphate while ignoring the fact the Islamic world has never been unified. The Mau Mau called for reinstituting a fundamentalist version of the Kikuyu religion based on the worship of Ngai who lives on Mount Kenya.

Both movements are or were fond of beheading which not only kills your enemy but also desecrates their corpses. Both the Mau Mau and al Qaida were/are not satisfied with the military defeat of their enemies or a negotiated settlement. Their enemies must be annihilated. The Mau Mau vowed to drive the white settlers in Kenya into the sea. Al Qaida vows to destroy the U.S. as it currently stands and transform it into a Muslim state.

Al Qaida and the Mau Mau are/were insurgencies that are weak in terms of conventional military forces and they both relied heavily on hiding out in some of the most inhospitable terrain possible for outsiders. For the Mau Mau, their refuge was the Kenya rain forests on the Aberdares and Mount Kenya.

A British sodiers captures Mau Mau fighters.

We are also seeing variations of three of the most devastating tactics the British employed against the Mau Mau in the fight against al Qaida. In the 1950s, the British didn’t have high-tech drones but they had Cessna spotter planes whose pilots called in the coordinates when they spotted Mau Mau formations. The Harvard bombers dropped the equivalent of our hellfire missiles.

The British became adept at “turning” captured Mau Mau fighters within 24 hours and then convincing them to lead British troops to the Mau Mau hideouts where their comrades were wiped out. Sounds strange that a soldier would turn on his fellow fighters, but the Mau Mau were notoriously brutal towards their rank and file. I doubt al Qaida’s leaders are a bunch of kittens. Also, the British learned that a lot of Mau Mau foot soldiers weren’t all the ideological. They were just bored young men who liked to shoot guns and wanted the sense of power the guns gave them. I wouldn’t know, but I suspect this description matches some al Qaida fighters.

Finally, the British created units of Kings African Rifles – their African soldiers -- and outfitted them to look like Mau Mau fighters. While under the command of British officers also outfitted like the Mau Mau, they walked into Mau Mau strongholds and wiped out their enemies. Not only did these attacks bloody up the Mau Mau, but very quickly legitimate Mau Mau units were fighting each other because they no longer knew who to trust.  

Of course, nothing in history repeats itself exactly. The Mau Mau never had anything similar to suicide attacks. I’m sure there are other crucial differences. Even so, while history doesn’t repeat itself, it sort of rhymes.       

Don't bother worrying about the upcoming Apocalypse on December whatever. The real threat is here right now and it is coming from cloddish photographers. In the past ten days, there have been three stories about how photographers who were assigned to shoot priceless objects managed to smash them. In the photo below (at least they got that shot, eh?) are the remains of a 2,600-year-old African terra cotta statue after getting the old butt bump. Then two days ago came word that some other camera types dropped a $20 million Stradivarius viola. D'oh! Now today, a German photographer dropped a "magical" skull made out of volcanic rock that the Nazis swiped from Tibet. Coincidence that photographers are smashing every piece of cultural heritage they can get their hands on? I don't think so. They seem an odd breed to me to start with. But whatever anyone does, don't let anyone armed with so much as a point and shot anywhere near Michelangelo's "David."

A pricelss work of art... not anymore.

The phrase "untold riches" caught my eye as I was reading today and got my inner English teacher overexcited. This is a totally ridiculous phrase that is supposed to connote a large amount of money. But it says exactly nothing. If you were selling your house, would you settle for "untold riches?" Personally, I would like to see a couple of digits written down with a whole bunch of zeros after them. The more the merrier. Where do these phrases come from and why do the stick around in the language?

Untold riches until you count 'em