The market is not a thermometer it is a barometer. A thermometer gives you the temperature at any given moment whereas, a barometer predicts the temperature ahead.
Also, the market is a mixture of psychology viewing statistics and forecasts. That it went up too fast, on euphoria, was evident. When it would correct was not, nor what would trigger the correction.
We possibly were in the process of bottoming until the proposed budget agreement was released and revealed a compromise where everyone from both parties were at it again - spending your money and thus, increasing the deficits. Both sides of the aisle have spending whores in their ranks and in order to take the military off sequester, Republicans gave Democrats a bunch of cash candy for their pet transfer programs.
When the market sniffed this inability to control themselves it tanked because it fears this will lead to higher interest rates, likely passed sooner and possibly more increases than previously feared, in other words 2 rate increases may result in 4. Whether this will prove to be the case remains unknown but the psychological props,which had been positive, have now been knocked out and no longer are available to prop the market a current levels and a new lower base is increasingly likely.
The economy is strong, maybe too strong, the tax cut benefits may have been discounted but have not really begun to have much effect and we have a new Fed Chairman, so much is up in the air.
A further negative on the market are the trading algorithms that all seem to be linked and kick in at the same time. Nunzio Tartaglia was one of the first "Quants" on Wall Street and worked for my firm. He was ahead of his times.
Finally, psychology is a flimsy unpredictable thing and can turn on a dime.
Meanwhile, The Mueller Investigation continues along it's merry way and nobody really knows when it will end or what will be the final outcome so that adds to uncertainty and particularly so because Democrats are going to continue doing everything they can to destabilize Trump's efforts. Their ultimate goal is to recapture Congress and impeach him because they do not like the color of his hair, believe he is intemperate, not a suitable role model to occupy the Oval Office and his wife is too stiff and model like. Perhaps I missed a few items but I hope you get the drift.
Hell hath no fury as a scorned Democrat.
Eventually, the market will stabilize and be driven more by economic results than passion and we will look back and realize the world is not coming apart, though it will at some point, and many stocks have already reached buy-able levels. Most investors run out when they should be running in but it is emotionally difficult to go against the crowd. Being contrary is only for a few sheep.
I have no particular love for either party. I admit to being a conservative but I continue to find the behaviour of Democrats more distasteful and really get sick to my stomach when I hear the syrupy voices of Schumer, Pelosi, Durbin, Schiff, Waters, Obama nd Holder. Their hypocrisy oozes from every pore. They are creepy. (See 1 below.)
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Israel is stepping up attacks allowed, even encouraged, by Egypt. (See 2 below.)
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What is interesting is, if Hillary was not pleased with the false information provided her by Steele why did she pay him? (See 3 below.)
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Dick
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1)Counterfeit Elitism
By Victor Davis Hanson // American Greatness
Those damn dairy farmers. Why do they insist on trying to govern? Or, put another way:
Why are Republicans trusting Devin Nunes to be their oracle of truth!? A former dairy farmer who House intel staffers refer to as Secret Agent Man because he has no idea what’s going on.
Thus spoke MSNBC panelist, Yale graduate, former Republican “strategist,” and Bush administration speechwriter Elise Jordan.
Jordan likely knows little about San Joaquin Valley family dairy farmers and little notion of the sort of skills, savvy, and work ethic necessary to survive in an increasingly corporate-dominated industry. Whereas dairy farmer Nunes has excelled in politics, it would be hard to imagine Jordan running a family dairy farm, at least given the evidence of her televised skill sets and sobriety.
Republicans “trust” Devin Nunes, because without his dogged efforts it is unlikely that we would know about the Fusion GPS dossier or the questionable premises on which FISA court surveillance was ordered. Neither would we have known about the machinations of an array of Obama Administration, Justice Department and FBI officials who, in addition to having possibly violated the law in monitoring a political campaign and unmasking and leaking names of Americans to the press, may have colluded with people in the Clinton campaign who funded the Steele dossier.
“Elite” is now an overused smear. But it is a fair pejorative when denoting a cadre that is not a natural or truly meritocratic top echelon, but is instead a group distinguished merely by schooling, associations, residence, connections and open disdain. If this is supposed to translate into some sort of received wisdom and acknowledged excellence, ordinary Americans may be pardoned for missing it.
The frustration with chronic elite incompetence was a theme in the 2016 election. “Expert” pollsters assured us of a Clinton landslide. The media could not follow undergraduate rules of decorum and truthfulness. “Brilliant” Ivy League trained pundits preached that the Trump administration’s first year would be disastrous and without accomplishment. Televised legal eagles insisted that Robert Mueller by now would have indicted Team Trump on charges of Russian collusion.
Half the country no longer believes these self-appointed authorities, largely because there is no visible connection between what the self-congratulatory say and do and any commensurate discernable accomplishment.
After a half-century of “whiz kids,” “the best and the brightest,” and “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Americans finally yawned and are moving on.
Deplorables, Clingers, and Those Not Worthy of WorryOne symptom of such a played-out elite is its blanket condemnation of the supposed blinkered middle-class—usually evident in their virtue-signaling outrage and in their inclination to contrast their own supposed enlightenment to the supposed ignorance of everyone else.
You could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? They’re racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic—Islamophobic—you name it. And unfortunately, there are people like that… Now, some of those folks—they are irredeemable, but thankfully, they are not America.
So said Yale law graduate Hillary Clinton, in an incoherent, factually unsubstantiated, and politically disastrous rant that may have lost her the 2016 election.
Clinton all but wrote off 25 percent of America as “not America”—this from the 2008 primary challenger to Barack Obama who was blasted by progressives for pandering to just such a white gun-owning consistency.
Or as Barack Obama once said, Hillary Clinton is “talking like she’s Annie Oakley . . . Hillary Clinton is out there like she’s on the duck blind every Sunday. She’s packing a six-shooter. Come on, she knows better.”
Or as Clinton herself once put it, “[I’ve] found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me . . . There’s a pattern emerging here.”
It is hard to image the Yalie feminist Clinton having any sort of political career without attachment to president emeritus and spouse Bill Clinton, whose serial sexual harassment and assault she not only contextualized over four decades, but by serial defense fueled.
Yale law graduates are not dairy farmers. But those who milk cows know enough not to peddle lies that one can invest $1,000 in cattle futures, beat the one in a trillion odds, and pocket a speculative profit of $100,000, all through autodidactic study of “the Wall Street Journal”—about as a believable yarn as claiming 30,000 deleted emails on an illegal home-brewed server under government request concerned a wedding and yoga.
And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Thus spoke candidate Barack Obama about another “they.” Obama apparently did not grasp that the so-called white population voted for him in greater numbers in the general election than it did for Al Gore or John Kerry, including the very constituency he wrote off as near Neanderthal.
On what criteria of excellence did Obama in 2008 justify separating himself from the objects of his stereotyped condemnations?
His stellar Columbia undergraduate transcript? His landmark editorship of the Harvard Law Review? His dynamic career as a state legislator and U.S. senator? The ethical manner in which he conducted his Illinois senate campaign? His savvy business deals with Tony Rezko? His limitless knowledge of geography?
All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you-name-it. That that’s an entitlement . . . my job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.
So said Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney during the 2012 campaign, in a similar fashion to the condescension that lost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election and nearly cost Barack Obama the 2008 nomination.
Romney’s rhetorical sins were somewhat comparable to those of Clinton and Obama and similarly reflected an out-of-touch sense of superior wisdom and insight not always warranted. Did the multimillionaire Romney not know that many citizens of the 47 percent who work nobly as minimum-wage peach pickers or clerks understandably need assistance through health or education subsidies?
Romney was, of course, correct that someone like himself could never convince those culpable of unduly receiving entitlements to take responsibilities for their lives. But could someone else have done it through a general invigoration of the industrial and manufacturing sectors? Perhaps someone who used the pronoun “our” rather than “I,” and sought to jaw bone and persuade outsourcers and off-shorers to again create jobs in American in anticipation of a more favorable business, regulatory and energy climate, and as a way of helping “our miners,” “our farmers,” “our vets,” and “our workers”?
When a presidential candidate gives up on 47 percent of the country, or a quarter of the electorate or on an entire state, it is difficult to see any evidence of deep political insight. Elise Jordan no doubt found Romney a more fitting candidate than the raucous Trump. Yet neither a dairy farmer nor Trump so far has written off tens of millions of American as culturally hopeless.
Failure as SuccessMuch of 21st century elitism comes from the peculiar benefactions of what postmodern riches bring—a divorce from muscular labor and those who do it, an apartheid distance from the very objects of one’s affection and romance, and, above all, general worldly ignorance beneath the veneer of degrees, titles, awards, and memberships.
One thing middle America could do is to realize that no educated person wants to live in a shithole with stupid people. Especially violent, racist, and/or misogynistic ones.
Corporations do not want to locate “call centers, factories, development centers, etc.” because they must also deal with the fact that small towns “have nothing going for them. No infrastructure, just a few bars and a terrible school system.
Thus spoke Melinda Byerley, an obscure founder of the Silicon Valley company Timeshare CMO. She became infamous for five minutes for this Facebook posting that served as a sort of credo of why coastal elites hated those unlike them
Of course, Silicon Valley’s vaunted infrastructure is a mess of congestion, decrepit roads, and corroding bridges. Google workers sleep in Winnebagoes. A muscular class from Mexico and Central America lives in sometimes deplorable conditions in places like Redwood City, juxtaposed to Atherton or Woodside. The tech elite have often fled the apparently “terrible” public schools. Bay area private academies have grown exponentially, in the fashion of Southern academies following court-mandated desegregation orders during the 1970s.
Saintly Illegal ImmigrationOne strange manifestation of elite contempt is a romance with illegal immigration—usually by needs conflated with legal immigration to caricature its opponents. Illegal immigration is often idealized in the abstract but rarely lived with in the concrete, and also is useful as a surrogate club with which to beat down the proverbial white working class.
These rural places are often 95 percent white…Are these counties marked by high social cohesion, economic dynamism, surging wages and healthy family values? No. Quite the opposite. They are often marked by economic stagnation, social isolation, family breakdown and high opioid addiction. …It is a blunt fact of life that, these days, immigrants show more of these virtues than the native-born.
So wrote New York Times columnist David Brooks.
Few in the supposedly white sinkholes oppose measured, meritocratic, diverse and legal immigration. What they “resent” is the antithesis: influxes of those who arrive, in illegal fashion, and often in need of expensive social services, who are used cynically by Democratic Party elites as future constituents. In other words, like Democratic Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama prior to 2012, the white middle and lower classes want secure borders, some protections for entry-level U.S. workers from cheaper imported labor, conditions that facilitate the melting pot, and a return to obeying the law.
Brooks seems disingenuous in his references to “immigrants” without distinguishing legal from illegal. In Arizona, illegal aliens commit crimes at a much higher rate than do the native-born. Immigrant households from Central America and Mexico have the highest welfare costs ($8,251)—some 86 percent higher than the costs of comparable native-born households. Of the so-called “Dreamers,” about 5 percent graduated from college; about 20 percent dropped out of high school, and about one in a thousand served in the military. Such figures are not cited to demonize illegal aliens, only to remind Brooks that his unsympathetic white working class has genuine concerns about illegal aliens and no demonstrable opposition to measured, legal, and meritocratic immigration.
Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in? …You can make a case that America has been great because every—I think John Adams said this—basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work, everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled—whatever.
Thus spoke Weekly Standard editor-at-large Bill Kristol, who likewise does not differentiate illegal from legal immigration, but who does seem intrigued with the idea not of just supplementing but replacing a supposedly played-out white working class beyond redemption.
But surely if there is decadent, lazy, spoiled white class it is not in places like Bakersfield or Dayton, but more likely on tony college campuses. There a new generation of “spoiled” elites is increasingly poorly educated but strident in its indoctrination. They are zealous about their claims on behalf of wisdom, but ignorant of any broad knowledge that might substantiate that zealotry.
Entry into the nation’s elite universities for mostly qualified applicants is enhanced by two avenues: minority status and elite white networking. The white working class lacks both, though caricaturing its imagined illiberality is a useful trope for elite whites to showcase their empathy to fellow minority elites and the gatekeepers who demand orthodoxy on these questions.
Our best and brightest, with the most impressive resumes and degrees, not the “decadent, lazy, spoiled, whatever” of Middle America ran up $20 trillion in national debt. Our best failed over a decade to achieve 3 percent economic growth. The supposedly smartest warped the health care system. The brightest could not translate overseas interventions into a strategic or cost-to-benefit advantage. The anointed eroded the border. The most knowledgeable gave us state nullification of federal law. The purportedly most ethical weaponized the IRS, the FISA courts, the DOJ, and the FBI, undermined the idea of free-speech in the university, and politicized everything from the eroding NFL to the increasingly irrelevant Oscars.
Our so-called elite, not the middle classes, has made a desert and called it success.
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2) Israel Steps Up Fight Against ISIS, as Terror Group Wages 'War' for Control of Egyptian Border, WASHINGTON FREE BEACON, Adam Kredo
Israeli military forces are quietly conducting operations to counter the threat of Islamic State terrorists along the Sinai border area with Egypt, according to senior Israeli defense officials who described ISIS as the “most quickly advanced threat we've ever had.”
ISIS terrorists have been locked in what Israeli military officials described as an “ongoing war” along Sinai Peninsula, as they attempt to wrench control of the key territory along Israel's southern border from Egyptian hands.
The daily battle, which has received little coverage in the Western media, has become a chief concern for Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) personnel operating along the Jewish state's southern border, eclipsing even Hamas terrorists in the region.
Officials estimate that there are anywhere from 1,000 to 2,000 “active members of ISIS” operating in the Sinai region, a sizable force in an area that is largely lawless and has been seen as a primary terrorism tension point for some time. ISIS orchestrates terror attacks nearly every day of the week along the border, Israeli military officials disclosed.
With the rise of ISIS—an extremely well-funded and inter-connected network of some of the globe's most vicious Islamic terrorists—the threat along the Sinai has significantly increased, becoming a primary focus for the IDF, which has been conducting intelligence gathering and military operations in a bid to prevent ISIS terrorists from crossing the Israeli border.
“ISIS is the most quickly advancing threat we've ever had,” one IDF officer working in the region told the Washington Free Beacon. “The rate with which they advance in resources and both capabilities and civil military training far outweighs and outpaces” the threats posed by Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists in Lebanon.
“There is what can be considered an ongoing almost war in the Sinai Peninsula now,” said the officer, who was not authorized to speak on record when discussing Israeli operations to counter ISIS.
“Not a day goes by where there is not an attack against the Egyptian army or Egyptian civilians by the faction of ISIS that is in the Sinai Peninsula,” the official disclosed.
ISIS conducts anywhere from five to seven terror attacks per week in the region, including sniper attacks, road side mine attacks on Egyptian military convoys, and improvised explosive device (IED) attacks, the official said.
ISIS terrorists in Sinai also are in possession of advanced military technology, such as anti-tank missiles, mortars, and long-range rockets, according to Israeli assessments.
“We're talking about 10 casualties a week” as a result of ISIS, according to the Israeli military official.
One senior Trump administration official praised Israel's efforts to combat ISIS, telling the Free Beacon that the president is encouraged by the Jewish state's renewed efforts to work with Egypt and other Arab nations that often have had chilly relations with Israel.
“Of course it benefits the United States when our close partners and allies like Israel increase their capacity to defeat ISIS—but Israel's long experience combating terrorism is also one of the things that is bringing Israel closer to our Arab friends in the region,” the administration official, speaking on background, told the Free Beacon. “That was one of the key messages from President Trump's recent trip.”
Despite the amount of violence in the contested border region, the Western media has largely ignored the battle.
The threat of ISIS has fostered increased cooperation between Israeli and Egyptian military officials.
Israeli military officials are conducting scores of intelligence gathering operations along the border in conjunction with Egyptian officials, sources said.
Israeli officials enjoy a very good working relationship with the Egyptian army, sources said.
Israel also has offered Egypt various military technologies to help combat the threat.
ISIS is a particularly nefarious terror force that wholly embraces violence, making it more dangerous than even Hamas and Hezbollah, which tend to be more calculated in how and when they sponsor terrorism.
“Both Hamas and Hezbollah in Lebanon have outgrown being regular terrorist organizations and are almost governments,” the military official explained. “ISIS in the Sinai Peninsula has not reached that level yet so they have a lot less to lose and lot more to gain by carrying out bolder and stronger terrorist attacks. They most definitely have more of an edge.”
ISIS's ability to galvanize support over the internet on social media sites such as Facebook and YouTube has made it a particularly virulent threat.
ISIS operatives routinely conduct intelligence-gathering operations using Facebook and other social media sites. Terrorist operatives are known to pose as Israeli and attempt to strike up online relationships with military personnel and other officials.
ISIS also is locked in a battle with Egyptian smugglers who have long operated a drug trade along the Sinai border. The terror group is attempting to wrest control of the trade from the smugglers who deal in drugs.
The money helps to fund ISIS's operations, but could also arm them with highly coveted smuggling routes that would enable the group to funnel arms and even terrorist forces into Israeli territory.
“This is one of the major issues and struggles going on right now,” according to the Israeli military official. “That's the major fear of the Israeli military down south, this skirmish going on between ISIS and the Bedouin smugglers. When it comes to a head we'll suddenly start seeing a lot less hashish and heroin, and a lot more guns and even road side bombs right on the border.”
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3) Who Is Christopher Steele?
By Kimberley A. Strassel
3) Who Is Christopher Steele?
The man who revealed a vast international conspiracy but didn’t know his own client.
By Kimberley A. Strassel
America has been inundated by the words dossier, memo, collusion, FISA, Carter Page. They all come back to the actions of one man: Christopher Steele. Which is why the only news that matters this week is that the former British spy’s credibility has been dismantled.
To the extent the U.S. press has focused on Mr. Steele, it has been to portray him in heroic epic style. A Washington Post profile told how Mr. Steele, a former MI6 agent who left in 2009 to start his own firm, felt “professional obligations” to take his dossier to the Federal Bureau of Investigation. That’s how “worried” and “rattled” and “alarmed” he was about the Trump -Kremlin “plot.” The FBI welcomed this “well-trusted” source, who had provided information in the past, as a “peer”—only later to let our hero down.
This is the narrative put forward by Mr. Steele and his paymaster, Fusion GPS. They and their press friends have an obvious interest in propagating it. But the new facts about Mr. Steele’s behavior destroy this tale, and show how badly the FBI got snookered.
To be sure, the FBI should have known better. Even if Mr. Steele had previously been helpful, the bureau had every reason to be wary in 2016. This wasn’t like prior collaborations. He was coming to the FBI as a paid political operative, hired by Fusion, as a subcontractor for Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Opposition researchers are not retained to present considered judgment. They are retained to slime an opponent and benefit a client.
The FBI also had reason to view his research with skepticism—on grounds of its tabloid-like allegations, and also on the near-fantastical claim of skill that underlay it. To wit, that a man who had been out of official spy rings for seven years was nonetheless able, in a matter of weeks and with just a few calls from London, where he lives, to unravel an international conspiracy that had eluded the CIA, FBI, MI6 and every other Western intelligence agency, all of which have access to the globe’s most sophisticated surveillance tools.
But rather than proceed with caution, the FBI swallowed the whole package. According to Sen. Chuck Grassley’s declassified criminal referral, former Director James Comey testified that the bureau couldn’t meaningfully corroborate the dossier, but used it in Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court proceedings anyway because Mr. Steele had previously provided “reliable” information.
Mr. Steele and Fusion GPS’s Glenn Simpson immediately proceeded to use the bureau to advance their client’s interests. They went to the press with a stream of briefings about the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign. Thanks to the FBI, Mr. Steele didn’t have to present the media with crazy-sounding oppo research about sexual perversion; he got to point to a full-on government investigation. The resulting stories were awesome for the Clinton campaign—but not so much for the FBI, since the Fusion crew had publicly tipped off the targets of its probe.
There is no excusing these actions. The FBI had expressly told Mr. Steele not to speak to anybody outside the bureau about the dossier. And Mr. Steele failed to disclose these briefings, or perhaps lied about them, since the FBI assured the FISA court that he was not talking to the press.
Mr. Simpson has claimed he never told Mr. Steele that Fusion was working for Mrs. Clinton, and maybe the ex-spy didn’t know. Though this requires us to believe that the man who unraveled an international conspiracy could not discover the identity of his own ultimate paymaster—or didn’t care. Our super sleuth also didn’t bat an eye over sucking up information from two notorious Clinton political operators, Sidney Blumenthal and Cody Shearer. Either Mr. Steele knew and actively worked to help the Clinton campaign, or he didn’t and was nonetheless willing to undercut the FBI at Mr. Simpson’s behest.
Some Steele supporters have suggested that the motive for his press briefings was his worry that the FBI was not taking his claims seriously enough. Yet by Mr. Simpson’s own sworn testimony, that disillusion didn’t hit until a few days before the election, when the FBI reopened its probe into Mrs. Clinton’s negligent handling of classified emails. At the time of his September and October press blabbings, Mr. Steele was still working with the FBI and even talking to the bureau about a financial arrangement.
Is a reliable and credible source one who defies FBI orders, meets with the press, undercuts a probe, and lies about it? Is a professional someone who refuses to answer questions from congressional investigators, but is happy to spin a tale to friendly journalists?
Watch for the House Democrats, in their memo, to continue defending Mr. Steele despite all this. They have to. No credible Steele, no credible dossier. And no credible dossier means even more reason to worry that the FISA court and surveillance authority were abused in the election.
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