SAR #15238

What went up is coming down.

Officially: “The market is overreacting. The country has strong job growth, low inflation, a strongly recovering housing market, and an improving economy. Never mind the collapsing commodities market, or the currency wars, China's economic slowdown and so on. This is just a correction. It's a buying opportunity....” Right. The entire stock market bubble has been created and sustained by the Fed's free money for Wall Street and the rich, and you can confidently expect them to do whatever is necessary to save their bacon. Not yours.

Cursives! The Common Core standards have been re-written to require proficiency in typing and dropping any instruction in the ability to pick up a pen and write. Ensuring that in another generation or so the ability to read cursive will have atrophied.

Fool Speed Ahead; It is becoming obvious that raising interest rates any time soon will have... sub-optimum effects. Not only will it upset the investor class, who have a deep fondness for essentially free money, but it will stomp what little economic growth there is back into the ground. And because it is a serious error, the board of the Fed is most certainly going to do it. Not because they don't know the likely results, but because they firmly believe the job of a central banker is to say no. No to wage growth, no to full employment, no to economic prosperity for the 99%. Will it be painful for most of the country? Yes. That's one of the things they smugly like about “returning to normalcy”.

Don't Ask: A suburban Detroit-area mayor is seeking a ban on personal flamethrowers.

Creamy Nougat Center: It seems that most measures of the housing industry are reflecting “a softness” in house prices. It is, of course, “a suprise”. Some are beginning to suspect that many are not planning to buy a house any time soon.

Swift And Sure: In the UK, it is now better to plead guilty to a crime you didn't commit than to try to fight it because a new pay-to-play rule that is trying to make the criminals pay for the operation of the courts. Pleading guilty costs £150 in a magistrates' court, but the fee goes to £1,000 or more if you plead not guilty and are convicted. So for minor crimes, pay and go.

Synopsis: The major difference between Iraq and Iran is that we didn't learn enough from the first to keep us from repeating the same mistakes again. And we won't learn anything from it, either. Ask Dick Cheney.

Stupid China Stories: According to Christie, Walker and, of course, The Donald, the Chinese economic slowdown and subsequent collapse of its stock exchange is Obama's fault.

Calling George Bailey: BofA, Citi, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley and a few of their European friends have, so far, paid $260 billion in fines for swindling the public, with at least another $65 billion to come. And it has not made a noticeable impact on their profits. Or their behavior.

Dirt Box: The police departments in LA and Chicago have acquired military surveillance technology that can intercept data, calls and text messages from hundreds of cellphones simultaneously, as well as jam transmissions from selected devices. Without a warrant.

Shorty: The current year's federal deficit will be only 2.4% of GDP – the smallest since 2007 and below the 50-year average. “The Federal deficit is too small in the absence of sufficient private sector deficit spending...” Or to put it another way, you are not going deep enough in debt and neither are the Feds.

Porn O'Graph: Discriminating tastes.