SPY

Facts are treasonous and dangerous in an empire of lies, fraud and propaganda. It is maddening to watch the country spiral downward, driven to ruin by a psychotic predator class, while the plebs choose to remain willfully ignorant of reality and distracted by their lust for cheap Chinese crap and addicted to the cult of techno-narcissism. We are a country running on heaping doses of cognitive dissonance and normalcy bias, an irrational belief in our national exceptionalism, an absurd trust in the same banking class that destroyed the finances of the country, and a delusionary belief that with just another trillion dollars of debt we’ll be back on the exponential growth track. The American empire has been built on a foundation of cheap easily accessible oil, cheap easily accessible credit, the most powerful military machine in human history, and the purposeful transformation of citizens into consumers through the use of relentless media propaganda and a persistent decades long dumbing down of the masses through the government education system. This national insanity is not a new phenomenon. Friedrich Nietzsche observed the same spectacle in the 19th century: “In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

Ron Paul wrote this scathing assessment and prediction about the newly created DHS eleven years ago. He was outraged by the $3 billion price tag. The DHS 2014 budget is $60 billion. Were his warnings about the American people being spied on by our government accurate? Are you safer today than you were in 2002? Do you have more or less liberty and freedom than you had in 2002? Was it worth it? 

It wasn't exactly like rubbing salt into the wounds of a US population that over the past month has learned it has no electronic communication privacy left, but it was close, when last night the US government's Office of the Director of National Intelligence announced that it was granting the secret FISA court - the same 11 people who decide behind closed doors whose email, phone or browser history is of national interest and thus subject to further "examination" - an extension of its telephone surveillance program. This is one of the two data surveillance efforts by the US (in conjunction with all major private telecom and internet companies) that Snowden leaked about. Why do we know this? Because the Obama administration is suddenly serious about being the most transparent ever: "The ODNI said in a statement it was disclosing the renewal as part of an effort at greater transparency following Snowden's disclosure of the telephone data collection and email surveillance programs." In short: "we will continue spying, but at least we are fully transparent about it."

The backlash in Congress against the government’s monstrous spy program and the ridiculous notion that a secret court (the FISA court) grants any sort of oversight is growing, and it is a bipartisan effort. Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), the chairman of the committee, said he was surprised that the programs had been kept secret for so long.

“Do you think a program of this magnitude gathering information involving a large number of people involved with telephone companies could be indefinitely kept secret from the American people?” Goodlatte asked.

“Well,” ODNI general counsel Robert S. Litt said with a slight smile, “we tried.”

A few days ago, Edward Snowden made even fewers friends in the corporate tech community with his Guardian disclosures that "Microsoft Helped The NSA Bypass Its Own Encryption Software, Spy On Its Clients." This promptly got the legal team the MSFT scrambling, and moments ago, the firm's General Counsel Brad Smith posted on MSFT's blog that, guess what, the world's biggest desktop OS maker doesn't give government data encryption keys or customer data. Well... what else were they going to say? Oh yes, repeat "direct acces" 6 times in a blog post, making it all too clear the whole issue is merely about semantics.

There are over 4 times as many leveraged bulls as leveraged bears.

What is so interesting about Montana’s House Bill 603, which passed overwhelmingly the state Senate by a 96-4 margin, is that it was passed in April, or several months before Edward Snowden’s NSA revelations. Talk about some foresight. Hopefully, we will see many more such bills sweep across the nation, as “change” will have to be done at the local level. The central government in D.C. is hopelessly corrupt and we don’t see that changing. We must just decentralize away from the District of Criminals on our own.

Looks like the Russian guy who deleted his tweet earlier this week can undelete it:

• SNOWDEN ASKS RUSSIA FOR POLITICAL ASYLUM: RIA
• SNOWDEN SAYS HE WANTS TO STAY IN RUSSIA, INTERFAX SAYS
• PUTIN'S SPOKESMAN SAYS RUSSIAN POSITION ON SNOWDEN ASYLUM SAME
• SNOWDEN MEETING TO EXCLUDE VIDEO, PHOTO RECORDING DEVICES: RIA
• SNOWDEN TO COMPLY WITH PUTIN'S DEMAND NOT TO HARM U.S.: RIA

That terminal food sure must be something. Either that, or he is seriously entertaining Anna Chapman's marriage offer.

• Summers Said to Show Interest in Fed Chairmanship After Bernanke (BBG)
• Obama Tells Chinese He’s Disappointed Over Snowden Case (BBG)
• Texas Threat to Abortion Clinics Dodged at Flea Markets (BBG)
• A Peek at Trucking Data, and Then the Stock Surged (WSJ)
• China cuts growth target… or does it? (FT) - yes, it does, net of goal seeked Random () of course
• China Official Suggests Tolerance for Lower Growth (WSJ)
• Disney Says Wristband Boosts Sales in Disney World Test (BBG) - next up: implanted RFID chips
• Spain Prepares Cuts in Renewable-Energy Subsidies (WSJ)
• Bernanke Departure With Duke Heralds Cascade of Fed Appointments (BBG)

My muse today was from the movie Network from nearly 40 years ago. In this clip you merely need to substitute global central banks (Fed, ECB, BOE, BOJ and etc) and mega-banks (GS, JPM, C and etc) into the mix.

Microsoft helped the NSA to circumvent its encryption to address concerns that the agency would be unable to intercept web chats on the new Outlook.com portal; The agency already had pre-encryption stage access to email on Outlook.com, including Hotmail; The company worked with the FBI this year to allow the NSA easier access via Prism to its cloud storage service SkyDrive, which now has more than 250 million users worldwide; Microsoft also worked with the FBI's Data Intercept Unit to "understand" potential issues with a feature in Outlook.com that allows users to create email aliases; Skype, which was bought by Microsoft in October 2011, worked with intelligence agencies last year to allow Prism to collect video of conversations as well as audio; Material collected through Prism is routinely shared with the FBI and CIA, with one NSA document describing the program as a "team sport".

Update: we have isolated the reason for the ramp. The latest stop hunt in the Stalingrad & Poorski 471 is attributed to the Chinese finance minister Lou who said that China H1 growth will be slower than 7.7%. Remember: the faster the global economy goes to hell in a handbasket, the faster global equities hit infinity.

Whoever said perfectly broken and centrally-planned markets were boring.

In this space we would normally insert a chart of the S&P500 here but that would just be waste of NSA spy server space: just imagine a flat line and then a sudden vertical spike higher to new all time record highs on absolutely no news.

Snowden Is a Traitor to the Political Elite … But a Hero to the American People

Last week, in a very, very quiet release, the US Federal Court system published its annual Wiretap report to Congress. This is something that is required by law; the Administrative Office of the United States Courts (AO) must annually report the number of federal and state applications for court orders to “intercept wire, oral, or electronic communications.” The report gives a lot of eye-popping details about these official, court-ordered wiretaps, including:

• Riverside County, California is the most spied-on county in the United States
• The average cost of a wiretap order last year was $50,452
• Only 18.19% of these wiretaps actually led to a conviction

So using the numbers from this report, for every conviction they get from wiretapping, the government wastes $277,361.19 on other wiretaps that produce absolutely nothing (based on their own metrics for success).

a simple trend line approach may be the best option for navigating a market that has lots of cross currents