Market Doldrums

Things were about flat when I checked this morning.

Gold has clawed its way back up to $1,100.   Everyone and his uncle is now playing the stupid game of “who can make the most inane forecast” now.  The winner says $250 gold is out there in our future, but so is the Sun blinking out.  Just not in our lifetime, in any event.

Oil is back up to almost $50 on the international markets.

When oil begins to firm, I look around for ISIS hype and sure enough, there it is this morning in the report that “ISIS Poses a Bigger Threat to U.S. Than Al Qaeda, FBI Chief Says.”

Yes sir, we’d like to thank UncleGov for such generous funding of these dangerous start-ups.  People don’t like to be reminded that we funded AQ to fight Russia (and oh, by the by so Western mobs could get the heroin crop) and ISIS was funded to bring down president Assad in Syria.

And SecState John Kerry is facing some questions about reported “side deals” with Iran as part of the woefully bad Iran deal.  I mean a 21-day notice for a snap inspection?  Who’s kidding who?

I expect some big breaking news will have to happen not later than the early east coast news shows today, though..

That’s because Barack Obama is where?> Off to Kenya…ancestral homelands.

Which leaves us where?

Well, going back to bed, frankly.

Global markets are acting nicely and even the Athens composite is up, and that’s a market which lost half its value in the last year.

The Greek parliament has completed a second round of “stick your head in the noose” for the bankster class.

Meantime, the most influential  think tank is Greece says thanks to all this hosing of consumers, look for Greece to fall back into recession.  I should send these guys my resume…since that’s been clear since round one of the bankster demands and hold-up.  Figure they could use my help.

New weekly jobless claims hit the lowest level in 40-years today.  Didn’t move the market though, since everyone and their pet cat knows this is a terribly noisy data series.

When in Doubt, Legislate

I love stories like the one about how a bipartisan bill has been introduced to make it more of a crime to mess about with .gov internet assets.

Just one problem:  We’ve already seen 22-million OPM records hacked, so WTF?

Leading from behind, eh?

The Daily Distractomat

Lemme see:  Sandra Bland is still dead.  But no one has figured out why she died in jail, though there’s this voicemail now…

Cos in L.A. are trying to figure out what the deal was with the guy who was found dead in his SUV and has 1,200 guns and over six tons of Ammo in his GFs condo.

Citizens are now guarding military facilities in the US since the idjits in Washington took arms from on-duty dot-mils stationed in the USA.

And Now the REAL News

In 2003 when we bought this-here place in the woods, I’m sure a lot of my friends in tech thought I was nuts.  (They were right, but that’s beside the point.)

I insisted that Big Cities were past the point of hopeless and sure enough (tah-dah!) along comes a report on why people are ditching big cities to live the more chilled life.

Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Detroit, Memphis?  All hitting the exits.

Each city has a different angle.  El Paso is on the list.  Reason there?  Property taxes are insane…something like $6,000 a year on a $250K home.  Go look on Trulia.com and see for yourself.  Here in the outback we’re at $865 per YEAR.  Of course, the county doesn’t maintain roads for crap…but we’ll get into that next week.

Second REAL story involves the question for extraterrestrials.

Smart Australian dude says the history of weak civilizations meeting strong ones is (how to put this mildly?) poor.

One of my all-time favorite Twilight Zone epi’s is To Serve Man about just such an encounter.

LBNL  (Last, but not least)

Lindsey Graham’s cell phone destruction is doing something his presidential campaign couldn’t do:  Going viral on YT: