the blimp

Here in the heat of high summer, we wait uneasily for the autumn collapse, when the blimp falls out the sky in a flash of fire and a cloud of smoke.

Thou too, sail on, O blimp of state.

Commenting on our current war on two fronts (foreign and domestic) yesterday at Huffpo, Dan Froomkin, recently fired from the Washington Post for unauthorized liberalism, wrote:

As Gen. David Petraeus kicks off an extended media blitz intended to make Americans feel better about the war in Afghanistan -- or at least give him some more time to fight it -- he faces a foe more implacable than al Qaeda, or even the Taliban: Reality.

That reality, increasingly obvious to national security experts and the general public alike, is that no amount of good intentions or firepower is going to advance our fundamental interests in Afghanistan -- and that as much as Petraeus might be able to achieve in the next six months, or a year, little to none of it is sustainable and most of it is, even worse, counterproductive.

But what else can he do? He has to try to counter the Wikileaks documents dumps somehow, and prop up public support for the perpetual war, which was already sagging even before the Wikileaks revelations.

So this morning we were treated to the well-orchestrated kick-off of the Afghanistan Public Awareness Program, an informational service of the Defense Department's Office of Homeland Mood Elevation (OH-ME), which began with Petraeus as the lone guest on NBC's Meet the Press with Dancing Dave Gregory. Simultaneously, the AP published a stenographic (as opposed to "probing") interview with the general by Anne Flaherty, and a photographic montage of daily life as experienced by our troops in Afghanistan.

Who knows? They might also try dissolving a few tons of happy pills in the water supply.

This farcical P.R. campaign, worthy of Oceania's Ministry of Truth, replays the incessant muttering of war department propaganda that served as filler and background noise accompanying the screams-and-explosions sound track of the Vietnam disaster. We're led by idiots, as incapable of learning as they are of forgetting.

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Concurrent with the Defense Department's propaganda campaign, a "technical indicator" known as "the Hindenburg Omen" showed up in the stock market on Tuesday and on numerous financial pages by yesterday. Widely feared as a signal which indicates an imminent, radical markets sell-off and loss of value, or crash, the omen isn't simple, but it's fairly easy to understand, and consists of these five objective criteria:

The daily number of NYSE new 52 Week Highs and the daily number of new 52 Week Lows must both be greater than 2.2 percent of total NYSE issues traded that day.

The smaller of these numbers is greater than or equal to 69 (68.772 is 2.2% of 3126). This is not a rule but more like a checksum. This condition is a function of the 2.2% of the total issues.

The NYSE 10-Week moving average is rising.

The McClellan Oscillator is negative on that same day.

New 52 Week Highs cannot be more than twice the new 52 Week Lows (however it is fine for new 52 Week Lows to be more than double new 52 Week Highs). This condition is absolutely mandatory.

It's all pretty straightforward except for the McClellan Oscillator, an arcane bit of financial inner-temple number crunching, but all you have to know about it to make sense of this is it's always either positive or negative.

In order for the omen to be validated it must appear again within 36 days of the first occurrence. If that happens, look out below.

So, in short, our empire is crashing and we're losing all our money. What's not to like?