Hindenburg Omen
August 16th, 2010WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
Many people are submitting the Hindenburg Omen thing, so this is mostly to let you know: Yes, I’ve seen that information.
As for what I think about it: I’d refer to what I wrote about the recent Cisco caper, which applies to holding stocks in general:
You should be extremely concerned if you have more than pocket lint riding on stock market. This isn’t a functional market, where buyers and sellers are efficiently determining prices by their activities. This is machines juggling chainsaws.
As for the signal itself, it was roughly right in 2007. You would have had to take a pants shitting drawdown before it went your way, though. This line from the Wall Street Journal should be kept in mind, “The Omen was present at every market crash since 1987, but has also occurred many other times without an ensuing significant downturn. Market analysts said only about 25% of Omen appearances have led to stock-market declines that can be considered crashes.”
My guess is that the INDU high of 11,258 on the April 30 weekly candle represents a pretty strong overhead resistance. (There’s multiple overlapping woowoo there.) If they can crank it back up to around that level, it would make for a delicious shorting opportunity. I might try some deep out of the money puts on DIA if they squeeze it back up around there. As for chasing short, based on mainstream news stories… *shaking head* Retail investors bring the money, the squid brings the matches.
Afghanistan Says Finds 1.8 Billion Barrel Oilfield
August 15th, 2010Via: Reuters:
Afghanistan said on Sunday it had discovered an oilfield with an estimated 1.8 billion barrels in the north of the war-ravaged country, where U.S. and other foreign forces are trying to tame a Taliban-led insurgency.
The discovery of the basin between northern Balkh and Shiberghan provinces was made after a survey conducted by Afghan and international geologists, said Jawad Omar, a spokesman for the ministry of mines.
Related: Afghan Mineral Deposits Actually Worth $3 Trillion, Not $1 Trillion
61 Trucks Loaded with 300 Tons of Explosives Missing in Central India
August 14th, 2010Via: Xinhua:
Some 61 trucks loaded with over 300 tons of explosives have gone missing in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh, a senior police official said Friday.
“The trucks were sent from a state-owned factory, Rajasthan Explosives and Chemicals Limited, in Dholpur to a private company called Ganesh Explosives in the state’s Sagar district. But it never reached there,” the official said.
A massive search is on to track down the trucks as fear is mounting that if the explosives, including detonators and gelatin sticks, reach the wrong hands it could be devastating, he added.
But Will It Make You Happy?
August 14th, 2010In the “normal” world, in our “normal” careers, we would have an annual combined income of roughly US$100,000. What horror would the U.S. government commit with the portion of the taxes it would demand from us? We now live well on a tiny fraction of what we would make in our “normal” careers. We have no debt. We own our small farm and our vehicles outright. We convert what’s left over at the end of the month into cash savings and gold. We also give money to people who are doing good work.
Whether you decide to leave the U.S. (like we did), or not, doesn’t matter. Living well on very little, encouraging others to do the same and actually funding people who are doing good work (allocating resources to values) are the main tactics of the frugal insurgent.
—We’re Inching Dangerously Close to the Point Where Consumers Run for the Hills
My take on frugal living is that it is a better response to the situation we’re facing than armed insurgency. Obviously, framing it in those terms doesn’t maintain the right appearances for publications like the New York Times and other dying bastions of polite circledom. Have no doubt about it, though, taking fiat confetti out of circulation hurts this thing bad, far worse than trying to kill it with fire, bombs or bullets. Things like consciously earning less taxable fiat confetti, keeping your fiat confetti “in a mattress” and buying precious metals (physical, not paper based) with previously accumulated fiat confetti are all weapons of mass destruction to the fascists of finance and the maniac vampire state that have built this concentration camp of a system.
If all of this sounds too frightening, here’s a vaguely hip, new black, new normal, cool kids spin on voluntary simplicity.
Via: New York Times:
A two-bedroom apartment. Two cars. Enough wedding china to serve two dozen people.
Yet Tammy Strobel wasn’t happy. Working as a project manager with an investment management firm in Davis, Calif., and making about $40,000 a year, she was, as she put it, caught in the “work-spend treadmill.”
So one day she stepped off.
Inspired by books and blog entries about living simply, Ms. Strobel and her husband, Logan Smith, both 31, began donating some of their belongings to charity. As the months passed, out went stacks of sweaters, shoes, books, pots and pans, even the television after a trial separation during which it was relegated to a closet. Eventually, they got rid of their cars, too. Emboldened by a Web site that challenges consumers to live with just 100 personal items, Ms. Strobel winnowed down her wardrobe and toiletries to precisely that number.
Her mother called her crazy.
Today, three years after Ms. Strobel and Mr. Smith began downsizing, they live in Portland, Ore., in a spare, 400-square-foot studio with a nice-sized kitchen. Mr. Smith is completing a doctorate in physiology; Ms. Strobel happily works from home as a Web designer and freelance writer. She owns four plates, three pairs of shoes and two pots. With Mr. Smith in his final weeks of school, Ms. Strobel’s income of about $24,000 a year covers their bills. They are still car-free but have bikes. One other thing they no longer have: $30,000 of debt.
Ms. Strobel’s mother is impressed. Now the couple have money to travel and to contribute to the education funds of nieces and nephews. And because their debt is paid off, Ms. Strobel works fewer hours, giving her time to be outdoors, and to volunteer, which she does about four hours a week for a nonprofit outreach program called Living Yoga.
“The idea that you need to go bigger to be happy is false,” she says. “I really believe that the acquisition of material goods doesn’t bring about happiness.”
While Ms. Strobel and her husband overhauled their spending habits before the recession, legions of other consumers have since had to reconsider their own lifestyles, bringing a major shift in the nation’s consumption patterns.
“We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption — which is ‘buy without regard’ — to a calculated consumption,” says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at the NPD Group, the retailing research and consulting firm.
Experts Urge Full Inquest Into Death of David Kelly
August 13th, 2010Via: AFP:
A group of prominent experts on Friday called for a full inquest into the death of government weapons inspector David Kelly, whose apparent suicide in July 2003 plunged then prime minister Tony Blair into crisis.
The eight senior figures said in a letter to The Times newspaper that the official cause of death in the Kelly case, haemorrhage, was “extremely unlikely” in the light of evidence since made public.
The signatories included a former coroner, Michael Powers, a former deputy coroner, Margaret Bloom, and Julian Bion, a professor of intensive care medicine.
Kelly was found dead in woods near his home in Oxfordshire, in 2003 after he was exposed as the source for a BBC story that alleged that Blair’s government had “sexed up” intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.
The then Lord Chancellor, the government’s chief law officer, Charles Falconer, suspended an inquest into the death before an inquiry began, and the inquest was never resumed.
The inquiry by Lord Hutton concluded “the principal cause of death was bleeding from incised wounds to his left wrist which Dr Kelly had inflicted on himself with the knife found beside his body”.
But the letter’s signatories argue that the conclusion was unsafe.
They insist that a severed ulnar artery, the wound found to Kelly’s wrist, was unlikely to be life-threatening unless an individual suffered from problems with blood clotting.
“Insufficient blood would have been lost to threaten life,” they wrote. “Absent a quantitative assessment of the blood lost and of the blood remaining in the great vessels, the conclusion that death occurred as a consequence of haemorrhage is unsafe.”
Kelly was the most experienced British expert involved in UN inspections in Iraq intended to prevent Saddam Hussein from acquiring weapons of mass destruction.
Ahead of the March 2003 invasion, Blair’s government published intelligence about Saddam’s purported weapons of mass destruction in a bid to strengthen its case for going to war, including a claim that they could be deployed within 45 minutes.
The government was furious and sought out the source of the claim.
Suspicion fell on Kelly after the BBC’s then defence correspondent Andrew Gilligan said a British official had told him that Downing Street had altered the intelligence dossier to make it “sexier”.
In the wake of the US-led invasion, no such weapons were found.
The Hidden Tragedy of the CIA’s Experiments on Children
August 13th, 2010Via: TruthOut:
Shortly after deciding to initiate her own LSD experiments on children, Bender attended a conference sponsored by a CIA front group, the Josiah Macy Foundation. The conference focused on LSD research and featured Dr. Harold A. Abramson as a presenter. In 1960, Abramson conducted his own LSD experiments on a group of six children ranging in age from five to 14 years of age. A few short months after the Macy Foundation conference, Dr. Bender was notified that her planned LSD experiments would be partially and surreptitiously funded by the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology (SIHE), another CIA front group then located in Forest Hills, New York. The Society, headed by James L. Monroe, a former US Air Force officer who had worked on top-secret psychological warfare and propaganda projects, oversaw about 55 top-secret experiments underwritten by the CIA. These projects involved LSD, ESP, black magic, astrology, psychological warfare, media manipulation, and other subjects. Apparently, Bender’s work with children and LSD raised some concerns at the CIA’s Technical Services Division (TSD). A 1961 TSD memo written to Monroe questioned the “operational benefits of Dr. Bender’s work as related to children and LSD,” and requested to be kept “closely appraised of the possible links between Dr. Bender’s project and those being conducted under separate MK/ULTRA funding at designated prisons in New York and elsewhere.”
Radioactive Smoke from Fires in Chernobyl Fallout Zone
August 13th, 2010Via: Independent:
Radiation levels near Chernobyl could rise and pose long-term health dangers as deadly forest fires spread to land contaminated by the world’s largest nuclear-reactor disaster, Russian environmentalists said yesterday.
2010 Bohemian Grove Membership List and Maps
August 13th, 2010Via: NorCal Truth Upload to ScribD:
To view clearly, you must downlaod this document.
This list is now available for public research. Not all who visited the Bohemian Grove in 2010 are listed, only members.
Example: Arnold Schwarenegger is not listed – yet visited and gave a lakeside talk.
—
Pat Tillman’s Father To Army Investigator: ‘Fuck You… And Yours’
August 13th, 2010Via: Huffington Post:
“You are a General,” Tillman’s father writes Jones after being presented with a briefing book of his findings. “There is no way a man like you, with your intelligence, education, military, experience, responsibilities (primarily for difficult situations), and rank… believes the conclusions reached in the March 31, 2005 Briefing Book. But your signature is on it. I assume, therefore, that you are part of this shameless bullshit. I embarrassed myself by treating you with respect [on] March 31, 2005. I thought your rank deserved it and anticipated something different from the new and improved investigation. I won’t act so hypocritically if we meet again.”
“In sum: Fuck you… and yours.”
Georgia: Thirty Thousand People Show Up at Shopping Center for Chance at Government-Subsidized Housing
August 12th, 2010Holy shit.
Via: Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Thirty thousand people turned out in East Point on Wednesday seeking applications for government-subsidized housing, and their confusion and frustration, combined with the summer heat, led to a chaotic mob scene that left 62 people injured.
At the Tri-Cities Plaza Shopping Center, emergency vehicles passed each other, transporting 20 people to hospitals. Medical and police command posts were set up on scene. East Point police wore riot gear. Officers from four other agencies supported them. Yet no arrests were made.
All of this resulted from people attempting to obtain Section 8 housing applications and, against long odds, later securing vouchers for affordable residences. Some waited in line for two days for the applications.
