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Rich losers, Apple mind-readers, Cuban missiles, and the alleged Islam/sex abuse correlation
A great many of the things done behind the backs of the citizenry are not entirely the fault of the politicians and their crooked allies in the Cathedral of Mammon: quite often, the lack of awareness is down to lazy hacks, or their owners who spike anything off-message. I rely on the eyes and ears of skilled Sloggers, and a dwindling corps of contacts who sympathise with this site’s aims. Special hat-tips in the stuff that follows must go to Archie X in Athens, Kf in the ether, and Christo from Ireland.
Not many of us will be surprised by this first nugget, but if nothing else it does confirm the seven-faced hypocrisy of the Berlin élite: Germany’s BND intelligence agency has resumed joint internet surveillance with the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA). You may remember that Wolfie Wheelchair was shocked I tell you shocked the the very core by the discovery that he was using US data to harass all those he dislikes (it is one helluva list) and not telling Mutti about it. He must’ve mistaken names like Obama and Clinton for Schmidt and Schweinsteiger – it could happen to anyone – although in the days of Nixon his claim would’ve been a lot more credible with White House staffers like Haldeman and Ehrlichman around.
The problem unsere geliebte Geli has with Schäuble is that he knows where a lot of East German bodies are buried. Frau Doktor Merkel also has a ready supply of incriminating evidence about jiggery-pokery during 2010 involving Wolfie and Papa down there in Greece….so both of them need a keen eye and a wary attitude to leaks. Good Queen Angela meanwhile is sticking to her decision not to share any intelligence at all with Erdogan the Democratic Reformer, but Recep can get everything he needs from NATO anyway. The web of refugee/migrant deceit in which all these arachnoids are entangled is perhaps among the most amoral in modern history. One wonders how they all keep track. One suspects they can’t.
For example, Germany’s main bourse index the Dax lost 8.3% of its value last week. Germany exports more baubles to the Chinese élite than any other nation, and so that seems logical. But the BundesRepublik retains an unshakeable triple-A Fitch rating, and has better-ordered public finances than any other exporter on the planet. After being given a steer, I communicated with people in Frankfurt last week who felt the Dax had been attacked for reasons beyond normal market considerations….whatever they might be these days. But as it happens, although China is spending foreign reserves at an unhealthy rate, it is at the same time rapidly reducing the percentage of $US in those reserves.
Although Jim O’Neill believes there is no such thing as ‘currency wars’, I would argue that all this sort of stuff would suggest that is exactly what’s going on. Vlad Rasputin is probably involved in this somewhere – for both Moscow and Beijing want to investigate every possible way they and the Brics can amputate the long arm of Washington in order to stop them leveraging Dollar influence.
Angela Merkel’s career is based on keeping ALL options open until the very last moment….and then leaping onto what she sees as the winning horse. Perhaps an attack on the Dax was the Wall St/State Department way of saying ‘just remember who has the power here’. If so, then it was very ill-judged: the US is, after all, the Nation that had to introduce ‘Friendly Fire’ into the language as a euphemism to excuse its mistakes.
Well, the US Jobs data came out last Friday, and the number was – drum-roll – 300,000. You don’t have to be mad to believe this bollocks, but it helps. A round robin of European, British, Asian and American market-savvy people I emailed produced a reasonable degree of expectation consensus at between 100-150,000 – although several mainstream business sites quoted US Fed sources as suggesting 200,000.
As longtime experienced sceptic Paul Craig Roberts wrote over the weekend:
‘the equity market did not believe the report, with the averages moving down today.
As I have pointed out almost monthly for what I think could be approaching two decades, the alleged job growth always takes place in nontradable domestic services, that is, in areas that do not produce exports and have no competition from imports.’
Slog veterans will know that it would be hard to force a rice paper between PCR and me on this issue. Further, I do not know a single economist or statistician I trust who thinks these data are anything other than ingredients bent and pulped before being cooked up in a mendacity stew.
Since at the very latest Spring 2010, the Black Dude has been trying to convince his largely passive constituents that the American recovery has begun. Setting aside for a second the obvious nonsense of including QE in the definition of ‘economic activity’, there are simple empirical realities that condemn this attempt to place fancy above fact out of hand. The simple truth – for anyone who dares to go there – is that during December 2015, there were a million less Americans engaged in the US economy than the same period a year earlier….and as I must’ve written a hundred times, December is a totally artificial Christmas economy: once Christmas is over, most of the casual jobs disappear again.
Such is not the stuff of which real recoveries are made. Along with tens of thousands of others, The Slog has been repeating this bad odour like a man in the aftermath of a pulses banquet…to which the representative selection of posts below will attest:
28.2.2012 – The fantasy recovery
6.7.2012 – Slog recovery ‘fakery’ charges vindicated
10.2.2014 – President Obama is lying about recovery
And finally, some other miscellaneous but important things missing from the urgency of your news sites and newspapers last week…but nevertheless sourced from the also-rans of MSM news. Analysis of ramifications was, needless to say, absent:
* A good measure of the deeply disastrous start to 2016 market trading is that the 400 richest people in the world lost eight times what they did in the same period last year. Expect corrective measures very soon.
* Apple has purchased Emotient, a fairly young startup that uses artificial-intelligence technology to read people’s emotions by analysing facial expressions. Another element to add to the armoury of all those who can’t imagine anything better than 24/7 monitoring of everything we say, do, visit, write, hear and think.
* A U.S. Hellfire nuclear missile sent to Europe somehow wound up being redirected from there to Cuba two years ago. Not that I have anything in particular against the Cubans, but perhaps I might be forgiven for wondering just how skilled their bomb disposal people are.
* The Top 5 highest scores for abusive/sexual attacks on women are Belgium, the UK, Germany, France and the Netherlands. These are also, Bloomberg notes, the Top 5 highest Islamic populations in the EU. I’m not saying these data are causal, just explosive.
The Slog 