You didn’t think the surveillance state would give up that easily did you? Of course not. Unsurprisingly, fresh off the heels of the Paris terror attacks, the usual authoritarian suspects in the U.S. government are running around exploiting the tragedy in a bid to further erode privacy and civil liberties.

Even if nothing else doomed the status quo, the widening gap between household incomes and costs will push the corrupt contraption over the cliff by itself. The status quo (whatever you wish to call it) requires "growth" to sustain itself--growth in consumption, spending, sales, debt, asset valuations, profits and of course taxes, and ultimately all of those "growths" depend on household incomes. Incomes even for the most highly educated workers are stagnating..

Perhaps even more stunning than the photo of the alleged bomb contained in a beer can, which ISIS says was used to blow up the Russian airplane, is its admission that it would have used the explosive  to bring down "a plane belonging to a nation in the American-led Western coalition against the Islamic State" only to change its mind in the last minute.

"The signals across asset classes are diverging incredibly," warns Macro Risk Advisors' Dean Curnutt, "and we should all be afraid." All of that commodity volatility is rolling back into corporate credit and that, inevitably will dramatically impact equity markets (explicitly through higher funding costs weighing on earnings or implicitly through lower buybacks and higher risk premia), "the illiquidity and implied defaults that we are seeing in credit markets are not at all priced into a 2060 S&P."

Following President Obama's 'promise' this morning to "provide refuge to to at least 10,000 refugees fleeing violence in Syria over the next year after they pass the highest security checks," we thought some help with the "highest security checks" form may be helpful...

While await a full blown European version of the Patriot Act, we can say that the second part of the forecast just came true, because this morning The European Commission announced it had adopted a package of measures to strengthen control of firearms across the European Union and meant simply to make it "difficult to acquire firearms."

According to Reuters, the suspects targeted in a pre-dawn raid in France were planning to attack the Quatre Temps on Thursday, the busiest mall in France located in the business district at La Defense. Meanwhile, WaPo, citing European intelligence officials, says Abdelhamid Abaaoud was killed in Wednesday's operation.