A Shrill (But Oh So True) Take On Supplements

Timothy Egan is one of my favorite New York Times Op-Ed writers and I have rarely seen him this exercised, this eloquent and this right. Here's a little taste:

If you want to know how we came to be a nation where everyone is a doctor, sound science is vilified and seemingly smart people distrust vaccinations, come to Utah — whose state flower should be St. John’s wort. Here, the nexus of quack pharma and industry-owned politicians has produced quite a windfall: nearly one in four dollars in the supplement market passes though this state.

A Fusion-Based Bullish View of the USDJPY Cross

I, as my previous work can attest to, am primarily a technical analyst. I would also have no problem being called a fusion analyst, i.e. someone who tries to inform his technical analysis with fundamental analysis as well as sentiment analysis (which some purists see falling under the purview of technical analysis too).

All this to say that I am not above using some fundamental viewpoints as contrarian indices to reinforce some of my technical opinions. Case in point: this Saxo Group TradingFloor.com analysis of the JPY.

Using a somewhat questionable analogy to the Swiss National Bank, Max McKegg buttresses his bullish view of the JPY (therefore a bearish view of, among other crosses, the USDJPY). I venture to use this view as a misguided fundamental analysis of the situation and venture further that, being quite widespread in the trading community and going against the technical picture as I see it, it constitutes a potent contrarian indicator IN FAVOR of a continued STRENGTH of the USDJPY Cross.

A Stoic's Stand Against Abusive Comments

New York Times' opinion writer David Brooks and I aren't exactly politically close, to put it mildly.

Which makes the opinion pieces that come out of his perceptive pen with which I wholeheartedly agree all the more precious. His latest is a stoic piece on how to intelligently deal with the comment section to his pieces - a good portion of which is probably filled with hatred, blind harassment or just plainly wrong statements - and it is one of his most brilliant. A few excepts:

It’s not only newspaper columnists who face this kind of problem. Everybody who is on the Internet is subject to insult, trolling, hating and cruelty. Most of these online assaults are dominance plays. They are attempts by the insulter to assert his or her own superior status through displays of gratuitous cruelty toward a target.

The natural but worst way to respond is to enter into the logic of this status contest. If he puffs himself up, you puff yourself up. But if you do this you put yourself and your own status at center stage. You enter a cycle of keyboard vengeance. You end up with a painfully distended ego, forever in danger, needing to assert itself, and sensitive to slights.

Clearly, the best way to respond is to step out of the game. It’s to get out of the status competition. Enmity is a nasty frame of mind. Pride is painful. The person who can quiet the self can see the world clearly, can learn the subject and master the situation.