Nothing About The Bakken -- US Consumer Confidence Surges To 15-Year High -- T+47 -- December 27, 2016

US consumer confidence: highest in more than 15 years, highest since 2001. Reuters. Watching MSNBC "Morning Joe" and reading the front page of the The New York Times and then reading this Reuters article suggests to me that "something is happening" and the mainstream media is unable to keep up.

One can argue if all Americans had voted, Trump would have won 72% to 28%. Just saying. Or one can blame the Russians for giving the popular vote to Hillary.

The man who dissed Trump: biggest billionaire gainer of 2016, and much of that came after November 8, 2016.

Buffett was a firm supporter of Hillary Clinton during the 2016 presidential campaign, but he scored most of his gains this year, some $7.8 billion, after she lost the election in November. Buffett's fortune rose $3.6 billion in the two days following the election alone when Berkshire Hathaway stock jumped 6%.

They come in threes: George Michael, Carrie Fisher, and ...

Jill Stein: her fifteen minutes of fame are over.

For the archives. The origin of the name for a small, single-sail sailboat originating in the environs of Cape Cod, the "catboat."

For the archives and for the granddaughters who learned to sail on catboats:

A "close" reach is somewhat toward the wind, and "broad" reach is slightly away from the wind (a "beam" reach is with the wind at a right angle to the boat). For most modern sailboats, reaching is the fastest way to travel. On some boats, the beam reach is the fastest point of sail; on others, a broad reach is faster.

For the archives. From recent issue of The New Yorker: "Banned Books and Blockbusters." Key words for google search: Catch-22; Jack Kahane; Sylvia Beach; Shakespeare & Company; Rosset; Robert Gottlieb; Avid Reader -- also reviewed in The New York Review of Books.

Between the wars, Paris was home to many English-language presses. There were two basic types.

The first specialized in modernist writers. Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company, which published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, is the most famous, but there were also outfits like Three Mountains Press, which published Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and Ford Madox Ford; the Black Sun Press, run by the glamorous expats Harry and Caresse Crosby, which published Hart Crane and William Faulkner; Contact Editions, which published Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams; Black Manikin Press, which published D. H. Lawrence; and the Hours Press, which published Samuel Beckett.

The other type of English-language press had a different specialty: pornography. Pornographers are the gypsies of the culture industry. They are sensitive to changes in the legal climate, and they generally find it more convenient to move than to fight. In 1857, the British Parliament passed the Obscene Publications Act, also known as Lord Campbell’s Act, after the justice who described pornography as “poison more deadly than prussic acid, strychnine, or arsenic.” The act authorized the use of search warrants to seize pornographic materials. Subsequent acts of Parliament made it illegal to advertise pornography, send it through the mails, or bring it into the country from abroad.

Poster child for idiocy: Spriha Srivastava -- the market rally has nothing to do with Trump's victory. He obviously didn't look at the market the first 48 hours after the election results in whcih Trump won by an electoral landslide.

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The United Nations Page

The UN General Assembly has wrapped up its annual legislative session. Tally:

• 20 resolutions against Israel; and,
• four against "the rest of the world" -- one each on Syria, Iran, North Korea, and Crimea. 

And that's just this year.

Meanwhile, the UN voted / authorized monitors to oversee the refugee evacuation of Aleppo -- after the evacuation was pretty much over. I don't think UN monitors got into Aleppo at all.

Regardless of one's opinion on Obama's last act with regard to this farce -- actions have consequences.

I would like to see Congress vote on a non-binding resolution supporting the president's action. My hunch is it would be 65 against the president - 24 agreeing with the president and with 11 abstentions. The GOP needs to learn how to play hardball.