The Market, Energy, Political Page, T+ 64 -- October 16, 2018

Late. I was going to post this yesterday and then forgot. Yesterday afternoon, after watching the market and the news -- particularly the Khashoggi news -- it appeared to me that the US stock market (Dow, Nasdaq, S&P, etc) simply "hit the re-set button."

Disclaimer: this is not an investment site. Do not make any investment, financial, job, travel, or relationship decisions based on what you read here or what you think you may have read here.

Not late: watch this space. I'm thinking Drudge Report will link the Heidi Heitkamp "I Am Sparticus" moment by tomorrow. If not, Matt dropped the ball. LOL. If folks don't know the story, check out The Bismarck Tribune today. Wow.

The list. I am debating whether to post Heidi's "I Am Sparticus" list. My hunch is that the list will soon disappear from the web. But Heidi is going to have to talk to a lot of folks to get that list removed. Reminds me of the movie in which Meryl Streep starred, "Florence Foster Jenkins." The question not being asked: where did Heidi obtain such an interesting list? Four columns of names; each column 30 names long; cities where the women live, and in North Dakota, towns and cities are so small it won't take much googling to get mailing addresses or phone numbers of most on that list. More at Grand Forks Herald.

Boom! Making America great -- job openings hit record 7.136 million in August. Inflationary? We'll see. Job opportunities? You betcha. This should drive the market down today -- this news will encourage the Fed to raise rates in December. The Dow (irrelevant) following the news: up almost 300 points.

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They're Reading The Blog

We Are All Native Americans

I posted my note at 4:47 p.m. on October 15, 2018.

The WSJ posted its editorial late in the evening, 7:17 p.m. ET. Just saying.

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The Book Page

Regular readers probably know my reading habits by now.

If one has similar reading habits, I highly recommend Howard Bloom's The God Problem, c. 2012. One may not care for the author's writing style. I get a bit tired of it, but cutting through the chaff, getting to the barley seed, it is incredibly interesting. I'm only through page 126 of a 563-page book (with an additional 96 pages of notes) so I do not know how the book turns out but so far I am really enjoying it. But I can only read a few pages at a time; there is so much information to digest.

I've not yet gone to wiki to see the "origin" of the 12-inch ruler and I have no plans to do so. Regardless of the wiki story, I have my own myth -- it may be what others say or it may not; I don't know but ...

I thought of that when I went from the Sumerians trick of making perfect right angles, and then the Egyptians carrying the trick one step farther -- taking a rope at least 12-feet long and putting knots at 3, 4, and 5 feet. The rest is history, as they say. Brilliant.

3+4+5 = 12.

12 inches in a foot. Things don't  just happen. 

From the book, page 122:

The pyramid at Giza, commissioned by Pharoah Khufu in 2580 BC absolutely, no excuses, required perfect right angles. The pyramid required a perfect right-angle foundation. It would be the biggest such structure ever -- forty-eight modern stories tall. Two hundred and eighty arm-lengths high, two hundred and eighty Egyptian cubits. The height of roughly one hundred peasants' huts piled on top of each other. The height of seven ziggurats. The success or failure of a twenty-year-long project will depend on the precision of right angles. The pyramid will require 2.3 million blocks of stone. Blocks of stone whose smallest will be two and a half tons, and the biggest will max out at thirteen tons. It will require 800,000 workers....