Nothing like a slightly off-kilter Monday (Daylight hangover, more in our Coping section) to start things out on one foot, or the other.
As usual, we see the latest reports about how sticker shock is hitting people all over the place on Obamacare. And the Wall St. Journal this morning has a fine read about how the new law’s lies about keeping your own doctor are rolling through society.
But wait! What, exactly, is it about members of congress and the president lying that is so surprising? Or, were they not lying…just misinformed?
Or, is the agenda in plain site when CBS quotes “Obama: ‘I want to put the Fear of God in all of you.”
We may see some answers on Wednesday morning when the results of the Virginia governor’s race results clarify…but for now, it looks like a real ballot box test for Obamacare.
So that’s one data point to look forward to.
I mean besides the site being offline and users getting other people’s eligibility letters.
The rest of the week’s data is more predictable: We get a factory orders report this morning, ISM services data tomorrow, blah, blah, Leading Indicators Wednesday.
Blah, blah, Challenger job cuts Thursday along with another whack at GDP which means we can look forward to decrypting another one of the most self-referential percentage clusters on the planet.
And then Friday we get to see what unemployment is, but since that figure doesn’t count so many people who are out of benefits, we can look at percentage of labor in the workforce.
Of course, being well-schooled in matters economic, we already know where that has been heading in recent years.
What is more telling is when we look at the recent print rate from the Fed, we notice that the three months annualized rate of M1 printing is now running 8.4% and the three-month M2 annualizes out to 8.2%
So for the rest of the week (as long as a lid’s on the Middle East for a few days) why not just kick back and enjoy the illusion some more?
That’s how Wall St. is reading it with the futures up 48 on the Dow and up 6 on the S&P: Oil is still going down, too…down to $94.19 when I looked earlier.
Deflation afoot, employment participation cratering and printing like a house on fire? At an earlier time in my life I would have called such discontinuities mindless. But now, I have another word for them:
Monday.
More After This…
Middle East: Made It Through the Weekend
I wasn’t the only one looking at the calendar, moon phases, and inspecting red lines in the sand, as last weekend wound up. Apparently, the Obama administration was looking at the same problem and so, as a stalling tactic, we read this morning how SecState John Kerry is off to Israel.
It’s a kind of article of faith that countries don’t go starting wars with an American Big Cheese coming to visit. Ostensibly, the trip is to present a WTF? to the Israeli government over plans to add 3,500 more homes in occupied areas.
Ore, if you’re Chinese, it’s to ask Jerusalem how it is they figure to keep building in disputed territories and still have a ghost’s change in hell of keeping the Palestinian peace process going.
What we need to ponder now is how long Kerry can stay in Israel after he arrives tomorrow. And as our resident war-gamer notes:
The last line of this piece, quoting Bolton, sums up my sentiments rather nicely. (US military support of an Iran strike isn’t going to happen.)
First Leon Panetta, now Bolton think the Iran-Israel war-timer is rapidly running down to zero! The leaks remain eerily consistent across otherwise divided party lines.
Oh, and Iran’s Revolutionary Guard voted to keep “Death to America” as their official slogan. I think it’s rather nice that the U.S. can still bring people together.
Better living through weaponry, that’s the way the death industries work. Iran is not too dumb to realize that a good internal defense against change to is to have a huge external enemy, and we are, at some level, trying not to be one of those. But that’s not how it plays in carpet country fellow infidels.
“Supreme Leader: US Politician threatening to nuke Iran should receive slap in mouth.”
Oh, and from our news analyst fellow up in Winnipeg:
Perhaps you are aware of recent commotions near the Hindu holy centre of Tirupati, India, as a new Islamic womens’ college shrouded in mystery readies for business. Apparently it may be a part of the Heera Group conglomerate.
Fortunately the Group’s interest-eschewing owners have chosen to place last month’s training videos into the public domain via YouTube. From this one may perhaps discern how their earthly works are advanced one sale at a time to stake out new territory. Those interested in a musical connection the page offers likely will find themselves closer to home than they imagined.
Please dine lightly while viewing as I can’t be held responsible for disturbed digestion.
All of which gets us to a very interesting question of how world governments coexist with major religions (some of which of violently expansionist, as in “covert or die”) on the one hand alongside immigration of people from one part of the world to another.
A very insightful piece is to be found in the Russian Pravda recently, which looks at how France, one a liberalista/socialist place, is starting to reap some of the fruits of past policies on issues like immigration.
Seems one of humanity’s greatest problems is laws are written by populists and lawyers, when historians might have a keener take on things.
Police State Chronicles
Worth a read: NSA Files Decoded at the UK’s Guardian website here. Reader Michael has been thinking about this and figures…
You don’t need to be talking to a terror suspect to have your communications data analysed by the NSA. The agency is allowed to travel “three hops” from its targets — who could be people who talk to people who talk to people who talk to you. Facebook, where the typical user has 190 friends, shows how three degrees of separation gets you to a network bigger than the population of Colorado. How many people are three “hops” from you?
LAX Shooting Follow-up
No small number of readers are asking if we noticed that the name of the purported perp at the LAX shooting spelled their name CIA n CIA?
No, of course not…I’m a complete idiot. So I read reports like this one over at BlackListedNews that patiently explains “Los Angeles Airport Shooting Appears To Be Another Psyop Hoax…”
Extra meds, this morning? Prozac and fluoride…breakfast of champions…
Texas Voter Control
A buddy of mine sends this:
Turns out having two state-issued photo ID’s and being the former third in line for President of the US is not enough to vote in Texas. But at least you have six days to get your original birth certificate or a certified copy and bring it to the office. Kind of hard to do if you’re working two jobs and don’t own a car.
The Movie is the Message Dept.
Dragon Day – see the trailer here.
The showing tonight in Austin in sold out, and only a few seats left for a showing in Dallas Wednesday night… reader reviews are welcome.
You can find the usual box office scorecard stuff over here, but no mention of Dragon Day in this report.
With the huge strength of the prepper movement it’ll be interesting to see how this becomes an underground hit…if it does. And, if you see it before the real thing shows up.
And in the meantime, our our list for viewing tonight is the feature-length documentary Four Horsemen which seem to be making some clattering about these days.
