SPX went to the resistance trendline that I was looking at in my last post and we have seen a 2%+ retracement from there so far.
On the daily chart the RSI 5 has reached the 30 level and the close yesterday delivered a clear break below the first big support level at the daily middle band. If that break below the daily middle band is going to confirm today, then SPX needs a close today at or below the SPX daily middle band, currently in the 4325 area.
I was doing an intraday webinar at theartofchart.net on Tuesday after the first leg down on this move and was looking at the obvious rally target at resistance in the 4445 ES area, and on a failure the obvious next target in the 4350 area. With that rally high yesterday at 4449 and the overnight low last night at 4347 I was pretty pleased with that call. If you’d like to see that video it is here.
SPX daily chart:
At the open this morning SPX hit a key support level at rising wedge support from the March 2020, and of course this move start with the test of rising wedge resistance from that low. That could be the low for this move of course, and if we do reject back up into the highs the wedge resistance trendline would now be in the 4500 area.
SPX 60min 20Mo chart:
On the shorter term SPX chart the rising wedge support from the November 2020 low is currently a bit lower in the 4355 area.
SPX 60min 10Mo chart:
On NDX the daily RSI 5 sell signal has reached target and the first big support level at the daily middle band also broke yesterday. Same comments as SPX above in terms of a rejection candle today and the NDX daily middle band is currently in the 15045 area.
NDX daily chart:
On the NDX hourly chart the nested double top setup is starting to try to play out, with the break below the smaller double top support at the open this morning. If we see further support breaks on the indices, particularly a break and conversion of the monthly pivot at 4345 on ES, then that first double top target is in the big support area at 14430. The alternative is that it rejects back up here into another all time high retest, and we should see one or the other play out.
NDX 60min chart:
We may be seeing the start of a retracement here that would deliver the 3800 area retest scenario that I was looking at in my post on Friday 6th August. There might be a further high retest before that main move starts though.
In the short term the key resistance levels today are the daily middle bands on SPX and NDX in the 4425 and 15045 areas respectively. A close below them today sets up a retest of today’s low and a possible break lower. Rejection candles closing above them today sets up likely retests of the all time highs on both.
An hour after the close today we are holding a free public webinar on trading commodities at theartofchart.net and will be outlining the usual three possible option trades on interesting looking commodities there. If you’d like to attend you can register for that here, or on our August Free Webinars page
TOPSHOT – Taliban fighters stand on a vehicle along the roadside in Kandahar on August 13, 2021. … [+] AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
Recently, our auditors at OpenTheBooks.com reported that Afghanistan topped the list of 170 counties receiving U.S. foreign aid. In FY2018 (the latest year available), Afghanistan received $6 billion in direct foreign aid alone.
Since 2001, total U.S. taxpayer cost of all operations likely exceeded $2 trillion, according to estimates from researchers at Brown University. It is impossible to say how much of that money has fallen into Taliban hands, but it’s significant.
Those numbers pale in comparison to the 22,000 military casualties, including approximately 2,400 fatalities suffered by American servicemen and women.
But as the Taliban continues its rampage, as Afghan security forces surrender, and as the president flees the country, it’s worth noting how many of our “investments” in Afghanistan didn’t pan out.
1. Afghan Security Forces: $82.9 billion invested into the Afghanistan Security Forces Fund since inception and $3.05 billion this year (FY2021) by the Department of Defense. Those forces surrendered or were defeated by the Taliban within days of the U.S. leaving the region.
2. Anti-Narcotics Campaign: $8.9 billion spent on counter-narcotics efforts during a 15-year period (2002-2021) with no measurable results. Afghan poppy crops soared and the UN described the country as a “narcostate.
3. U.S. Embassy: $1.5 billion for the U.S. Embassy (security, construction and maintenance) plus $157 million for operations since 2001. Embassy officials lowered the American flag this week as the embassy was totally evacuated.
4. Respect Women Campaign: More than $800 million (and maybe billions since 2001) to encourage Taliban and other Islamist groups to respect women, including $27 million from USAID to “Promote: Women’s Rights Groups and Coalitions” and $6.7 million to prevent “Gender Based Violence.” (It is unlikely that Taliban’s treatment and abuse of women in the coming weeks will be respectful or empowering.)
5. Lost Drones: $174 million on drones that were lost in Afghanistan. The drones were part of the attempt to help the Afghan National Army (ANA) defend itself. But the ANA didn’t immediately use the drones and then lost track of them.
Top 10 Countries Receiving U.S. Foreign Aid OPENTHEBOOKS.COM
6. Economic Development: $105 million to a DC-based consortium for “assistance in building Afghanistan by developing enterprises.”
8. Afghan Elections: $89 million in USAID grants to increase election participation in Afghanistan. With the Taliban in control, there will be no democratic processes.
10. Women Police Compound: $3.1 million to build a compound to train 100 Afghan women to be police officers. The compound, built by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, had structural deficiencies and was never used.
How is it that everything built collapsed so quickly?
Additional Reading:
Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), July 30, 2021, Quarterly Report to Congress and Appendix.
SIGAR drone report “Afghan National Army: DOD Did Not Conduct Required Oversight or Assess the Performance and Sustainability of the $174 Million ScanEagle Unmanned Aerial System Program,” July 2020.
USAID spending, FY2020 &2021 spending in Afghanistan, 207 grants
USAID spending, FY2020 &2021 spending in Afghanistan, 3,007 contracts
SIGAR, January 30, 2021, Quarterly Report to Congress, Page 114 “Women’s Advancement.”
Congressional Research Service, “Afghanistan: Background and U.S. Policy: In Brief Updated June 11, 2021.”
All references for this and other articles are compiled under my research project The Arc of Inquiry Bends Towards Enlightenment. The files include my statistical analysis of the impact of censorship on the search for the origin of SARS-CoV-2.
I don’t plan on ever charging a subscription fee for any of the content on my site; everything I keep here is the result of 18 months of research conducted because it needed to be done and very few were doing it. However, this has literally been my full-time job since March 2020, so any ‘subscription’ as a donation will help me continue this work uninterrupted by the real world. Plus, it’s $3 vice the normal Substack $5 monthly minimum until 9/1, which would lock that in forever.
Or, if you’re still in the recovery phase of the financial pandemic, spreading the word could be just as helpful to the cause; after all, everyone has suffered from the lack of honest & unbiased information from our leaders that would’ve helped us be clear-eyed about what we were going to face. I have no greater responsibility with this site than to keep it accessible to anyone who deserves the truth – which, of course, is all of us.
Last week, the natural-origin narrative for COVID-19 suffered two huge blows in two days; first, when US Right-to-Know published their newest findings from their ongoing FOIA efforts; and second, when Peter Embarek[the head of the World Health Organization’s [WHO] investigation into the origins of the pandemic] admitted in a documentary that China had forced a ‘compromise’ for putting the lab-leak hypothesis in their final report at all.
For those at home who aren’t following this aspect of the COVID-19 crisis as closely, Embarek’s admission might be very surprising – but only because he admitted it at all. We’ve seen a stunning pattern emerging ever since US RTK’s publishing of the Ralph Baric emails last winter, which showed clear and direct collusion amongst a high-profile collection of scientists to frame the case for a natural origin. It was that same collection of scientists that produced more than a dozen peer-reviewed articles and letters in the 2 months following a 2/4/20 email exchange that explicitly documented their efforts at collusion.
Given these latest developments, I’m beginning to wonder if there’s actually any true believers among scientists in the natural-origin camp. After all, every scientist whose emails have been released has been shown to have concerns about COVID-19 coming from a lab, even though they were writing peer-reviewed articles that claimed the opposite.
I’m thinking of offering a bounty to any natural-origin proponent who can provide evidence of NOT holding a different position in private. If you’re keeping score, that’s 100% of natural-origin proponents [in emails released thus far] who’ve lied repeatedly to the world about what they believe is the provenance of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Here in the US, that includes Dr. Fauci – the public face of vaccines, masks, lock-downs and mandates – which doesn’t bode well for the future of “Trust the Science” once everyone understands that he was the conductor of the scientific censorship train. Fauci even literally stated that attacks on him were attacks on science; if that’s the case, it looks like the forecast for science has taken a turn for the worst.https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/z-tfZr8Iv0s?start=291&rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
However, I don’t want to cover too much territory that’s already been explored very well elsewhere; instead, I’d like to highlight the problem from a macro perspective, as I think much can be clarified by observing the full scale of the ignoble lie.
This screenshot from my list of 703 COVID-19 origin sources shows a sampling of journals and their entire contents found on that list. The green highlights indicate authors connected to the Wuhan institute of Virology and/or those involved in the 2/1 & 2/3 meetings that formed the cover-up – discussed below
Inconvenient Truths
When I say scale, I’m referring to a scale larger than a few scientists or science writers – I mean entire institutions. 1 pillar of the scientific establishment is publicly-funded research, and that partly fuels one of the other pillars – peer-reviewed publications in journals.
If one goes to the Scientific Journal Rankings website, they can see the rankings of the world’s most esteemed scientific journals. As of yesterday, the top 6 looked like this:
I’ve sorted the journals by H-Index score, rather than the proprietary score used by SJR, because it is more widely known and accepted. Any scientist in the life sciences is already familiar with what this chart shows, because Nature, Science, The Lancetand the New England Journal of Medicine have been at the top of all academic journal rankings for a long time [in the case of Nature and Science, forever].
As I wrote in Who Watches the Watchers? Fauci’s Noble Lie, Exposed, Dr. Fauci and Kelvin Droegemeier [President Trump’s Presidential Science Advisor and director of the White House’s Office of Science & Technology Policy, or OSTP] held a meeting with these scientists below:
That meeting took place on 2/3/20, two days after the conference call exposed in Fauci’s emails, and less than 24 hours before that same group of scientists was found conspiring to write a letter rejecting the lab-origin hypothesis – despite finding the origin suspect in private. Moreover, Fauci & Droegemeier were the ones who pushed for the letter to be written, as Alexander Pope of NASEM informed those scientists on the morning of 2/4.
How do I know the orders came from the top? Because the 3 names I just mentioned were 3 of the 4 speakers at that 2/3 meeting. The 4th speaker was Chris Hassell, the man in charge of the Department of Health & Human Services’ P3CO, the US federal government’s oversight board for Potential Pandemic Pathogens [PPP or P3]. His presence makes it abundantly clear that this meeting was a follow-on to the 2/1 conference call – the purpose of which was to address the possibility of the SARS-CoV-2 virus having been engineered. He would be privy to the advanced research projects that might have ties to the lab or to the development of techniques that might be implicated in the construction of the virus, including the work of Ralph Baric at UNC-Chapel Hill.
Taken together, these scientists and officials were involved in a meeting whose stated purpose was to combat misinformation, and the next morning the attendees were tasked with writing a letter in support of that aim. There were two pillars of the resulting strategy:
1) Support the natural-origin narrative
2) Suppress any non natural-origin discussion as much as possible.
I recognize that accusing anyone of broad censorship at the highest levels of academia is a bold claim, but I’d argue that the evidence is overwhelming.
Let’s go through the Top 6 list I showed earlier and see if there’s a noticeable trend [I’d note that the color green indicates scientists involved in research with the Wuhan Institute of Virology and/or the cover-up as orchestrated by Fauci et al. The shades of tan indicate lab-leak proponents]:
#1 on the global list of most influential/impactful academic journals is Nature; each list shows origin-related articles that appeared from 1/1/20 to 8/13/21:
For those keeping score, that’s 14 anti lab-origin articles, and 0 in support.
#2 is the collection of Science publications [Scientific American is published by Nature]:
#3 is the New England Journal of Medicine [NEJM]:
#4 is Cell [shown earlier].
#5 is PNAS [Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences]:
[Additional note: I can’t guarantee that these lists are all inclusive, but any missed articles would likely have little impact upon the overall distribution]
The final count from all of the top 6 journals is 35 articles in support of a natural origin for SARS-CoV-2, and 1 article in opposition. In truth, the 1 article is an open letter that simply states that both possibilities deserve equal treatment, and it only appeared in May of this year in Science.
Digging deeper, we discover that nearly half of those 35 articles were written by authors involved in the collusion meetings during the first 4 days of February. And the kicker? Those 6 journals are the top 6 of 25,232 – across all academic disciplines.
How big is the advantage? My ‘Noble Lie’ article was read more than 250,000 times – which is only 1/22nd of the readership of Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2. It’s a steep hill to climb.
This is a problem, but there’s still one more piece to this puzzle.
Doubling Down
By now, an intrepid reader might be asking themselves why a significant percentage of the world’s leading virologists & microbiologists would have been so flippant in rejecting an obvious possibility so early on in the pandemic [in fact, they began crafting the narrative six weeks before the WHO officially declared that COVID-19 had become a pandemic]. Or, perhaps others would ask the question the way I did: “Why did so few scientists speak out about the obvious possibility,” one that even my most junior Marines would’ve considered first?
The piece de resistance isn’t going to surprise anyone, because it’s money.
How much money? The answer may not sound that imposing: $3.1 billion a year in grants. However, in 2013/14 [the most recent year with solid global numbers-& only because someone published a paper about it] $3.1 billion represented 7.15% of All biomedical grants awarded by 41 of the largest public or non-profit organizations in the world. Fauci’s slice just at NIAID was just slightly below the entire European Union [27 countries at that time], good enough for a clear third place. 1st place belongs to the NIH as a whole, although the remaining $23 billion was split between 40 other Institutes:
After being in his position for 37 years, Fauci can advocate beyond his fiefdom, and that doesn’t take into account that the NIAID’s budget has been much closer to $4 billion in the last 3 years.
The picture certainly becomes clear when viewed through that telescope; from 2/1-2/4 of 2020, Jeremy Farrar, Anthony Fauci & Francis Collins [NIH Director] presided over an examination of evidence and then a discussion of how to respond. No one should be surprised that afterwards, most scientists stayed quiet about COVID-19’s origins – the attendees held sway over 61% of global public biomedical research funds, controlled the GOF oversight board that had been ignored for the WIV’s research [Hassell], a dozen of the world’s leading virologists who flooded the most prestigious journals with natural-origin propaganda, and direct links to Science [Pope] and NEJM [Farrar, an editor for the journal]. On March 1st, 28 days later, there’d already been 14 published and peer-reviewed papers/letters that rejected the possibility of a lab-origin for COVID-19 by connected scientists.
It’s amazing that we’ve even made it this far – but don’t worry, we have still have some time before the ivory tower falls. Just 3 weeks ago, Dr. Peter Hotez’s Mounting Anti-Science Aggression in the United Statesopenly called for hate crime legislation from Congress to combat those who question scientists. He even ended with a comparison to 1930’s Nazi Germany, which seems odd for someone whose favored political party is in control and already suppressing free speech. What a perfect microcosm of pandemic-era science –
– a scientist whom already has Big Tech smothering the truth on his behalf, writing in a peer-reviewed journal, arguing that questioning the merits of vaccines or masks or natural origins should be punished with a felony. If Dr. Hotez can’t see which side is currently ‘burning books,’ then he’ll be really surprised when his fellow scientists are testifying under oath before Congress about their cover-up activities.
The White House shared an image (below) of President Joe Biden meeting via video conference with Vice President Kamala Harris and other national security officials to discuss the on discuss the ongoing crisis in Afghanistan.
This morning, the President and Vice President met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of SIV applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul. pic.twitter.com/U7IpK3Hyj8
But many on Twitter noticed that the White House may have accidentally outed CIA operatives in the process in the boxes labeled “CIA” and “Doha Station”.
In addition to the Afghanistan disaster Biden has now blown the CIA's cover in Qatar. https://t.co/e1qTjcBnkg
“Heck of a job, White House communications shop. I figure you would want to crop out the teleconference screens labeled “CIA” and “Doha Station.” You panicking amateur idiots,” said a senior political correspondent Jim Geragthy.
There were also calls for those responsible for tweeting the information to be fired for potentially compromising operational security by not blurring out locations on screen.
Econophysics2020: I already know what they’re going to say – “it’s all Trump’s fault.”
With progressives, their intentions are good and it’s always someone else’s fault.
But wait – it gets better.
Take a look at the times
Note the time in London and Moscow on the clocks. Clocks show 3 hour time difference. However, there is currently only a 2 hour difference. Before March, London and Moscow have a 3 hour time difference because of daylight savings.
The original statement from the White House, dated Sunday, said, “This morning, the president and vice president met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of … applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul.”
President Joe Biden sits alone as he meets with his national security team and senior officials by video to hear updates on the draw down of U.S. civilian personnel in Afghanistan and the ongoing security situation in Kabul, Afghanistan. Sunday, Aug. 15, 2021. (Official White House photo)
An online posting that looks closely at a recent image released by the White House – of Joe Biden in a situation room, sitting alone at a large table, with a series of screen images on the monitor on the wall, is raising questions about photoshopping.
You know, that computer trick where you can insert the image of a person in a room where he actually isn’t. Or you can remove someone from a picture of an event where he actually was.
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Under the headline, “Did the White House use photoshop in Biden image?” the commentary openly wonders how much about the image is accurate.
(Courtesy Citizen Free Press)
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Because the image shows London time at 16:29, and Moscow time as 19:29.
Of course the two cities are not in the same time zone.Is the photo of Joe Biden accurately depicting events involving Afghanistan at the time purported by the White House?Yes No Completing this poll entitles you to WND news updates free of charge. You may opt out at anytime. You also agree to our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Nor are they three hours apart, the Citizen Free Press explained.
The original statement from the White House, dated Sunday, said, “This morning, the president and vice president met with their national security team and senior officials to hear updates on the draw down of our civilian personnel in Afghanistan, evacuations of … applicants and other Afghan allies, and the ongoing security situation in Kabul.”
Which triggered online commenter, an anonymous “Aldous Huxley’s Ghost,” to ask, “Hi, @WhiteHouse, can you please explain why the clocks above the television show Standard Time rather than Daylight Savings Time? Moscow will not be three hours different than London until November 7, 2021. This isn’t a pre-March picture that’s Photoshopped, is it?”
The commenter also pointed out that the screens that illuminate when the president’s microphone is on were unlit, meaning if Biden was interacting with others electronically, he wasn’t being allowed to speak to them.
Commentator Jack Posobiec wondered, “Guys I’m starting to think the government has been lying to us this whole time.”
The “nation building” script is straight out of the progressive/neoliberal playbook. Something about blind belief in the unlimited plasticity of the human psyche.
“Rational man” in political systems gave us the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Third Reich, and the Progressive Century – with all the pointless terrors and horrors.
Yet, there is nothing inherently wrong with individual rationalism seeking focused objectives. Seems more associated with increasingly centralized rationalism, particularly when aimed at restructuring society.
Nation-building.
“Re-imagining capitalism”.
Entering Afghanistan in the hunt for Bin Laden was a rational mission. He organized an attack on the United States, sought sanctuary from a vengeful nation, and the Taliban gave it – refusing to turn him over.
The proper military mission would be to hunt him on our terms until he was dead, captured, or no longer in Afghanistan – and suppress or confront the Taliban if they got in the way – especially those who gave him sanctuary.
Once that mission was deemed over (successfully or not), pack up and go home.
If the Taliban become a direct threat again sufficient to mount another more crushing raid, so be it.
That’s the history of war. If need be, you destroy the threat as Roman destroyed Carthage.
As Carl von Clausewitz wrote: “Pursue one great decisive aim with force and determination.”
He also wrote: “War is not an exercise of the will directed at an inanimate matter.”
Ignoring Clausewitz, we got the Afghanistan adventure – a bipartisan attack on inanimate matter, start to inevitable finish.
Nation-building, Vietnam 2.0.
Trump tried to end it but was ignored by the Defense Department and State Department he commanded and the Deep State that squats in DC.
So much for a Constitution in which the elected President is commander-in-chief. He should have immediately fired every person in the chain of command who defied his order, starting with the Secretary of Defense.
The sexual predator Sock Puppet installed as President last fall was the perfect goober on whose watch this long-standing trainwreck should end.
And count on a goober to make this statement a mere days before our puppet government collapsed.
This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President. pic.twitter.com/j4kKwyPDVm
Anyone with a brain knew this corrupt tool is clueless. Anyone with a brain knew or should have known that last year.
That so many Americans are clueless simply highlights our national sense of historical perspective goes only as far back as the last meal we ate.
We now know that Biden’s advisory team and the US intell community that advised them are just as clueless. No surprise – have you listened to our Secretary of Defense or the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs?
“This may become the most infamous — and devastating — press conference ever held by an American President,” wrote CIA foreign operations veteran Bryan Dean Wright on Sunday.
The inevitable collapse of the Kabul puppet is not a basis for the Sock Puppet to resign – the corrupt 2020 election was.
If Biden was an honest man (alternatively, if a corrupt politico who uses his family as bagmen), he would have joined with Trump before the Electors met in January and pursued a transparent audit of the irregularities. If those irregularities were could not be ruled out, he should have asked the Congress to decide the election.
We might have had one as president and the other as vice president consistent with the protocols at this country’s founding. That would have given us more of a united country than we have today.
Everything since has shown Biden to be the corrupt hack he’s been for almost 50 years.
But this press conference makes Biden’s resignation inevitable.
What little credibility this Sock Puppet had is gone.
In 6 months, Biden has thrown the US fiscal state into deep red, opened the southern border to an invasion at the rate of 2 million per year (~15-20% Covid-infected), mismanaged the vaccine roll-out, destroyed our energy sector and independence, and now has lost all credibility as a national leader.
With a sexual predator as the Sock Puppet president, it follows that psychopathic policies will mount.
ICE has been transformed into a “customer service” agent for invasion along the southern border it used to protect and facilitator for the 10X increase in opioid traffic.
The US military’s mission has gone from protecting the nation from foreign threats to “fighting climate change.”
DHS Bulletin Says Opposition To COVID Mandates Is Potential “Domestic Terrorism Threat”
On Friday the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) issued an almost unbelievable new “terrorism” alert contained in a so-called ‘awareness bulletin’. While focused heavily on the threat posed by “false narratives and conspiracy theories about the 2020 election” – clearly making connections to Jan.6, the bulletin pivoted to unprecedented territory.
It’s nothing new for the Biden administration to warn and hype about “calls to violence” related to the “Capitol insurrection” – but what is new and unprecedented is its warning about potential “attacks” by “violent extremists” related to COVID-19 “conspiracy theories”.
The document was the result of a DHS meeting held with top officials and high ranking intelligence officers across multiple agencies from departments in New York, Washington, and Las Vegas, NBC News reported.
The threat bulletin describes that extremists “may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks.”
This is the first time to our knowledge that “terrorism” is linked to the movement among large groups of skeptical Americans to push back against local, state and federal efforts to impose drastic mask, vaccine, and so-called ‘COVID passport’ mandates.
Interestingly the DHS document is heavily focused on such “extremism” initially manifest online in social media and chat forum groups.
Presumably, given the demographic breakdown, this means DHS is accusing young black folk of being “domestic terrorists?
The following warning now appears directly on the official DHS website, as contained in the newly published bulletin:
Through the remainder of 2021, racially- or ethnically-motivated violent extremists (RMVEs) and anti-government/anti-authority violent extremists will remain a national threat priority for the United States. These extremists may seek to exploit the emergence of COVID-19 variants by viewing the potential re-establishment of public health restrictions across the United States as a rationale to conduct attacks. Pandemic-related stressors have contributed to increased societal strains and tensions, driving several plots by domestic violent extremists, and they may contribute to more violence this year.
However, nothing specific is mentioned of the “several plots” which DHS seems keen on associating with resistance to “public health restrictions” – i.e.: mask and social distancing mandates.
Officials seemed to later admit in a follow-up by NBC to not actually knowing of any “specific” plot in the works: “Currently, DHS lacks specific or credible reporting indicating that violent extremists are planning to target specific events,” a DHS spokesperson said.
All of this is made further interesting and alarming for Americans’ Constitutional rights by the bulletin’s attempt to tie these trends into pro-Trump movements related to the last election:
A second DHS official told NBC News that the agency has watched conspiracy theories about the 2020 election migrate from obscure internet forums to more mainstream ones, and “we are concerned about calls to violence.”
Meanwhile, this was actually discussed at the White House within the Biden administration:
This further comes in context of far reaching censorship on the part of major US social media companies like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube – which have long been banning “non-CDC approved” information and discussion of vaccines and other pandemic-related matters.
On the road from stirring symbol of hope and change to the Fat Elvis of neoliberalism, birthday-partying Barack Obama sold us all out
“Even Scaled Back,” wrote Vanity Fair, “Barack Obama’s Birthday Bash Is the Event of the Season.” Not even the famed glossy Bible of the unapologetic rich seemed sure of whether to write Obama’s Birthday bash straight or as an Onion headline: what did the “Event of the Season” mean during a pandemic?
A former president flying half the world’s celebrities to spend three days in a maskless ring-kissing romp at a $12 million Martha’s Vineyard mansion, at a moment when only a federal eviction ban prevented the outbreak of a national homelessness crisis, was already an all-time “Fuck the Optics” news event, and that was before the curveball. Because of what even the New York Times called “growing concerns” over how gross the mega-party looked, not least for the Joe Biden administration burdened with asking the nation for sober sacrifice while his ex-boss raised the roof with movie stars in tropical shirts, advisers prevailed upon the 44th president to reconsider the bacchanal. But characteristically, hilariously, Obama didn’t cancel his party, he merely uninvited those he considered less important, who happened to be almost entirely his most trusted former aides.
Cast out, the Times said, were “the majority of former Obama administration officials… who generally credit themselves with helping create the Obama legacy,” including former top aide David Axelrod, who’d just called Obama an “apostle of hope” in the Washington Post and sat for a three-hour HBO documentary deep-throat of his ex-boss. Remaining on the list were celeb couples Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, as well as Dwyane Wade and Gabrielle Union, along with Steven Spielberg, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Bruce Springsteen, Questlove, Jay-Z, Beyoncé, Don Cheadle, and other Fabulous People, who drank “top shelf liquor,” puffed stogies, and hit the links at the Vineyard Golf Club (membership fee: $350,000). An early report that Pearl Jam had been hired to perform was later refuted. Eddie Vedder would just be there, but not to play.
One attendee called it the “party of all parties,” while another added, “Y’all never seen Obama like this,” by which he might have meant Obama reportedly dancing as Trap Beckham, performing live, substituted “Prez” for “Bitch” in this classic:
It’s all about you Girl tonight it’s about you… Fuck it up if it’s your birthday bitch!
There’s a glorious moment in the life of a certain kind of politician, when either because their careers are over, or because they’re so untouchable politically that it doesn’t matter anymore, that they finally get to remove the public mask, no pun intended. This Covid bash was Barack Obama’s “Fuck it!” moment.
He extended middle fingers in all directions: to his Vineyard neighbors, the rest of America, Biden, the hanger-on ex-staffers who’d stacked years of hundred-hour work weeks to build his ballyhooed career, the not quite A-listers bounced at the last minute for being not famous enough (sorry, Larry David and Conan O’Brien!), and so on. It’d be hard not to laugh imagining Axelrod reading that even “Real Housewife of Atlanta” Kim Fields got on the party list over him, except that Obama giving the shove-off to his most devoted (if also scummy and greedy) aides is also such a perfect metaphor for the way he slammed the door in the faces of the millions of ordinary voters who once so desperately believed in him.
Obviously, getting rich and not giving a shit anymore is the birthright of every American. But this wasn’t supposed to be in the script for Obama, whose remarkable heel turn has been obscured by the Trump years, which incidentally were at least partly his fault. The history books and the still-starstruck press will let him skate on this, but they shouldn’t.
Obama was set up to be the greatest of American heroes, but proved to be a common swindler and one of the great political liars of all time — he fooled us all. Moreover, his remarkably vacuous post-presidency is proving true everything Trump said in 2016 about the grasping Washington politicians whose only motives are personal enrichment, and who’d do anything, even attend his wedding, for a buck. Trump’s point was that he, Trump, was already swinishly rich, while politicians have only one thing to sell to get the upper class status they crave: us.
Obama did that. He sold us out, and it’s time to start talking about the role he played in bringing about the hopeless cynical mess that is modern America.
Econophysics2020: Seriously, Matt? Did it take you that long since such a blatant grifter first oozed his way to the Democrat National Convention podium to figure it out?
This sociopath’s entire biography is that of a sociopath.
Shocked that Obama “sold us out?” The con-man’s “mark” is always shocked.
A delusion is a belief that is clearly false and that indicates an abnormality in the affected person’s content of thought. The false belief is not accounted for by the person’s cultural or religious background or his or her level of intelligence. The key feature of a delusion is the degree to which the person is convinced that the belief is true. A person with a delusion will hold firmly to the belief regardless of evidence to the contrary. Delusions can be difficult to distinguish from overvalued ideas, which are unreasonable ideas that a person holds, but the affected person has at least some level of doubt as to its truthfulness. A person with a delusion is absolutely convinced that the delusion is real. Delusions are a symptom of either a medical, neurological, or mental disorder. Delusions may be present in any of the following mental disorders: (1) Psychotic disorders, or disorders in which the affected person has a diminished or distorted sense of reality and cannot distinguish the real from the unreal, including schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, delusional disorder, schizophreniform disorder, shared psychotic disorder, brief psychotic disorder, and substance-induced psychotic disorder, (2) Bipolar disorder, (3) Major depressive disorder with psychotic features (4) Delirium, and (5) Dementia.
Kiran and Chaodhury (2009)
Well, Americans bought the sociopath. And, as Matt observes, America is a “hopeless cynical mess”.
That “hopeless, cynical mess” is the product of our progressive neoliberal philosophy.
Matt suggests we revisit Obama’s scams.
Not a bad idea.
But maybe the higher priority is we seriously investigate how a senile, corrupt, sexually predatory Sock Puppet using his son and brother as bagmen could be installed as President relying on the help of the same oligarchs and the foreign actors that helped put Obama into office in the first place.
Marx said: “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce.”
“There is no delusional idea held by the mentally ill which cannot be exceeded in its absurdity by the conviction of fanatics, either individually or en masse”…Hoche
Excess liquidity is the ratio of a monetary aggregate to nominal GDP. It is often referred to as the “Marshallian K”, which is equivalent to the inverse of the “velocity of money.”
The Marshallian K fell below zero in 2010, a year when the S&P 500 Index suffered a 16% correction. A similar dip in 2018 portended a selloff that almost killed that bull market.
The index for final demand services rose 1.1 percent in July, the largest one-month increase since data were first calculated in December 2009.
Final demand goods up 0.6 percent in July following a 1.2-percent jump in June.
Nearly half of the broad-based advance in July is attributable to margins for final demand trade services, which jumped 1.7 percent. (Trade indexes measure changes in margins received by wholesalers and retailers.)
Core PPI (ex Food, Energy, & Trade Services) rose 0.9% MoM (almost double the expected pace of inflation) sending it up a record 6.1% YoY
Source: Bloomberg
Companies margins are likely to come under serious pressure as the spread between PPI and CPI grows dramatically…
By 
Econophysics2020 
