As a species we have tremendous talents. Our scientific achievements are incredible; our advances in medicine and technology are stunning. So let us give our ingenuity and imagination a free rein to think beyond our borders. Let us work together to face climate change in a spirit of fairness and justice, guided by our shared humanity regardless of where we happen to live.

While we await the government's retail sales data on December 11, the last official economic report the Fed will see before its December 16 FOMC decision, Bank of America has been kind enough to provide its own full-month credit card spending data.

Washington's strategy so far is injecting the proverbial Empire of Chaos logic into Syria; feeding the flames of internal chaos, a pre-planned op by the CIA, Saudi Arabia and Qatar, with the endgame being regime change in Damascus. An Iran-Iraq-Syria pipeline is unacceptable in the Beltway not only because US vassals lose, but most of all because in currency war terms it would bypass the petrodollar.

This article points out that humans are mostly driven by instinct rather than intelligence as with the rest of the animal kingdom. Unless we become conscious and aware of our instinctive unconscious nature and question our primitive natures and motivations we are fated to be ruled by them rather than by our intelligence.

Submitted by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

Now that Kinder Morgan has come out with a massive dividend cut, I think it will get harder to ignore that this isn’t just about crude oil prices and the death of “transitory.” There is a financial element here that is perhaps even more important.