NEW YORK (CNN/Money) - Another seriously negative day. Yup! This is what your mother warned you about! This is what a bear market feels like! You get little hope rallies like last week. Then FLURP! Stocks just go south day after day. More terror (twilight) fear in New York, and an absence of good news.

The markets dropped rather precipitously, the Dow falling 123 to 10,105, while the NAZ was off 37 to 1,664 (2.2 percent). Back to the Pilgrims! Hey watch me, Edmund Andros (Hey, he was a late 17th century guy! No relation to Dwayne and ADM, right?), I mean Andy Serwer on CNN, CNNfn, and Headline News. Read Loose Change for some heavy stock tradin' news! Here's wazzup:

TERROR AND STOCKS...If. When. The terror comes back to NYC (NYC is the easiest target and makes the biggest impact, why would they go anywhere else?) the markets will tank again. Come to think of it, they already are tanking because of terror, or fear of terror. So what if renewed terror leads to permanently lower stock prices? (Don't worry about me giving the terrorists ideas. They don't have time to read this, too busy reading Drudge!) Maybe we are already seeing that?

In other words, all things being equal, which market should have a lower P/E -- the U.S. or Israel? Why Israel of course, because of all that terror. So with us, which market would have a lower P/E? The U.S. without terror and the associated fear, uncertainty and real economic cost? Or the U.S. without terror. Not too hard to figure, I say!...

Interestingly, Deep Blue points out that Grant's Interest Rate Observer (Hey Jim, you big bear!) says that Warren Buffett's "Berkshire holds an options-related investment on which it stands to gain $600 million if the S&P closes below 1,150 on June 3."... S&P closed at 1,079 today! Um, he is smart...Aqualung my friend, don't you start away uneasy..."

MERRILL LYNCH....$100 million is peanuts! It's Dave Komansky's lunch money! I'm surprised that Eliot (Ness!) Spitzer settled for such a song. I dunno, maybe it's a lot of money as far as these things go, but it doesn't seem like much. Does it guarantee no further government action? What about civil suits? Doesn't this settlement make it worse because it implies that the company DID do something wrong? So they are separating research and banking pay? Yawn. Goldman is doing it, too? So what. Should have been there all the time! You want me to congratulate you for this! How about a Bronx cheer! Still, Merrill stock was up 47 cents today to $43.85...."Girls, ROCK your boys!"

FLY AFGHAN AIRWAYS!...(Gets you there on time!) You hear a lot of whining from big U.S. airlines about the state of their business. No passengers since 9/11. Higher fuel costs, stepped-up security. And indeed, U.S. Air is (again!) at the brink. But let me tell you something, the U.S. carriers got nothin' and I mean NOTHIN' to complain about, compared to what Ariana, the official airline of Afghanistan must cope with now.

Here's a description from the company's Web site: "Afghanistan has probably one of the worst set of operating conditions that can be found anywhere, and Ariana is proud that it operated successfully, notwithstanding high altitudes -- Kabul airport is 6,000 feet high in the mountains... -- high temperatures in the summer time...[and] very cold ones in the winter. Also contended with are dust storms rising over 20,000 feet in the summer on the northern plateau, and sand storms in the Kandahar area."

Many of the airports in the country have no fuel, no facilities, no windsox, and bombed-out runways. Actually, Ariana used to be a pretty good little state-run airline; it was set up with help from Pan Am back in the 1950s. Slowly grew, flew all over the place.

Then came civil war, then Soviets, and then the horror of the Taliban. Taliban banned stewardesses and made pilots grow long beards. Pilots couldn't fit oxygen masks over beards! One pilot said he lost pressure over Pakistan and had to hold mask with one hand and fly with the other! Gradually airline was restricted from flying outside of the country...

Then U.S. bombing destroyed six out of eight planes. Airline now has one 727 and one vintage Russian Antonov 24. Gradually Ariana is going to foreign cities: It now goes to Dubai, Delhi and Islamabad, and as of yesterday, Amritsar! Indian government may lend it three A-300s. Ariana wants to resume flights to Europe. Well, we'll see....

MSFT fell $1.82 to $52.19. Whoa! Remember, $50 was the September low...Ford moved up 85 cents on an upgrade by Merrill...Home Depot posted great numbers but was hit by profit-taking. HD fell $3.60 to $44.90...Qualcomm's numbers were good. CDMA forever, right Irwin?!...Nortel bounced up!...AOL: Dude named David Corcoran who calls himself "an AOL stockholder" was handing out a letter in the NYC subway the other day. Talks about Panic in the Halls at AOL Time Warner, and Phoney Baloney Accounting...Here's to the editors, yes their ears are tin and the pens are leaden...Answer: Bono, Paul O'Neill, and Daryn Kagan. Question: Who are the singer, the winger, and the zinger?!

Andrew Serwer is editor-at-large of Fortune magazine.

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