Video: Peregrine falcons can fly at more than 200 miles per hour Boing Boing Poland lightning strike kills four, injures 100, in Tatra mountains storm BBC Scientists detect a black hole swallowing a neutron star EarthSky (Chuck L) Are farmers setting the Amazon ablaze in support of Bolsonaro? Grist Evil. Amazon fires an ‘international crisis’, […]

What could be more lovely on a summer’s day? A V-12 engine, 2 valves per cylinder, 3 Weber carburetors, mated to a 4-speed manual transmission, making 240HP in a light (2,646 pound) spider equals a fun, fast ride. The design by Pininfarina is one of the most spectacular ever. Gorgeous from every angle, the covered […]

Fed spokescritters are saying the US economy is in decent health. From Bloomberg: The U.S. economy doesn’t appear to be headed toward a recession, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco President Mary Daly said. “When I look at the data coming in, I see solid domestic momentum that points to a continued economic expansion,” Daly […]

Yves here. Yet more tired arguments for not just “Why you can’t have nice things,” but “Why you must wear the austerity hairshirt.” Peter Dorman is likely correct in seeing that this scare talk is being revved up for 2020. Can’t have Sanders or Warren, now can we? By Peter Dorman, professor of economics at […]

Starbucks has around $1.6 billion in stored value card liabilities outstanding. This represents the sum of all physical gift cards held in customer’s wallets as well as the digital value of electronic balances held in the Starbucks Mobile App.* It amounts to ~6% of all of the company’s liabilities. This is a pretty incredible number. Stored value […]

From the unusual products flogged on health and wellbeing site Goop to her one-of-a-kind beauty habits, Gwyneth Paltrow never fails to surprise us. Case in point: she once hired a ‘personal book curator’. Back in 2001, the former actress decided to redesign her Los Angeles home and realised that to complete the gram-worthy look, she needed a good five […]

Yves here. In the meantime, the WHO says not to worry about plastic in the form of microplastics, while admitting they don’t know much about the health impact. From European Scientist: So far, there is no proof that microplastics in drinking water pose a risk to human health, according to a new safety review into […]

Authored (satirically) by C.J.Hopkins via The Unz Review, If the neoliberal ruling classes expect to keep the American masses worked up into a white-eyed hysteria over “fascism” until November 2020, they’re going to need to get some better Nazis. The current Nazis are just not going to cut it. They are neither scary nor Nazi […]

The Hong Kong consulate employee who vanished two weeks ago after attending a conference across the border in Shenzen was reportedly detained after visiting a prostitute, according to a report in a Chinese newspaper that was cited by Bloomberg. Simon Cheng, the 28-year-old employee at the UK consulate in Hong Kong, mysteriously vanished after alerting […]

Convicted felons in San Francisco may have broken the law, but they’ll get to keep their dignity after the city’s Board of Supervisors adopted new, sanitized language describing them as ‘justice-involved persons’ or ‘formerly incarcerated.’  Under the city’s new “person first” language guidelines, the words “felon,” “convict,” “addict,” “offender,” and “juvenile delinquent” are no-no’s. Instead, those […]

Cryptos, bad; crypto-users, “drug-using terrorists”; USDollar, good; USDollar-users, patriots. That appears to be the message in a new statement from The White House on the links between America’s opioid epidemic and cryptocurrencies. As CoinTelegraph’s Liam Frost reports, on Aug. 21, the White House issued two advisories regarding illicit drug purchases in the United States that […]

Another Hong Kong protest ‘sit-in’ turned into a violent scrap with police as on Wednesday night thousands of black-clad youth and others set up barriers and occupied the Yuen Long station of the city’s MTR metro.  The protest was to mark the one-month anniversary of what anti-Beijing demonstrators are calling the the ‘Yuen Long attack,’ which […]

Authored by Lance Roberts via RealInvestmentAdvice.com, Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning) refers to a learning procedure in which a potent stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. a bell). What Pavlov discovered is that when the neutral stimulus was introduced, the dogs would begin to salivate in anticipation of the potent stimulus, even though it was […]

When, for the first time in 11 years, Jerome Powell cut the Fed Funds rate by 25bps on July 31, something unexpected happened: the dollar spiked (in fact, the trade weighted dollar soared to a record high). And not only did the dollar spike as a result of a market that screamed to Powell “long […]

On the eve of the Jackson Hole meeting, this week’s big event, investors are watching closely, as prices for the various types of risk assets are expected to rush sharply up or down depending on what comes out of the meeting. Considering these event-driven risks, Nomura’s quant team led by Masanati Takada lays out its […]

Authored by Rusty Weiss via The Mental Recession New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez claims the Electoral College is a racist scam meant to benefit middle America according to an Instagram video posted earlier this week. Demonstrating a breathtaking lack of intelligence regarding history and government, the Democrat communist took a video of sprawling fields and, […]

President Obama’s FBI, ran by disgraced former director James Comey, knew about – but purposefully ignored – “highly classified” evidence in the Hillary Clinton email investigation before they downgraded their initial assessment of her crime from a felony to a “grossly negligent” mistake.  As The Hill‘s John Solomon reports, a Senate staff memo updating an ongoing inquiry by Sens. […]

PredictIt, accessed 4pm Pacific today: Why the recent movement? One piece of information, the Manufacturing PMI: Source: TradingEconomics.com. Below 50 indicates contraction. In addition, despite the assurances of the administration, markets do not seem to believe in an incipient turnaround: Figure 1: 10 year-3 month Treasury spread, (blue), 10 year-2 year (red) and 5 year-3 […]