lt cap,

In terms of actual reality, the most useful posts are the ones you're spelling out about NOK insider buying. If we have another 'downdraft' (not attributable to starting a nuclear war ;-) ) I will need to consider buying some at those/these prices.

On Russia conducting cyber-interference: I am partly bemused by the huge outpourings of 'outrage' (every news source I turn to today has people turning purple yelling about it), and partly disgusted by hypocrisy and political manner this is being used by people who not only ought to, but I believe do, know better.

Let us suppose the Russians are guilty of doing the worst of the accusations. Do people not think about that we are doing the same to other countries, and even our own allies? Did our and the Israelis' dropping the stuxnet 'bomb' on Iran that destroyed their nuclear centrifuges not be an act of cyber-sabotage? (And that the only one we *found out* about - how many things never reach the public eye - such as our spying on/hacking into phones/monitoring conversations by our *friends*, such as the recording of Germany's Merkel and other European allies' phone calls revealed by Snowden about the NSA?) 

And so we are shocked! shocked!, and outraged! outraged!  by such Russian meddling which must be punished. What??? And the really disgusting BS is that there are people who know better: The Senate oversight Intelligence Commitee surely has for years gotten briefed (or I sure hope so) on what we're doing in terms of cyber warfare, and what we plan to do going forward. I find it beyond belief that legislators like McCain never heard of such a thing, and now is howling for blood. And to top it off, the White House just made an anouncement of the evidence it has of Russian hacking, delivered by the CIA. Are you kidding me? Is even the President not briefed on what cyber-operations  we are perpetrating that probably makes the Russian interference seem puny? Was Snowden more than right when suggesting that the intelligence community is so 'rogue' as to operate on its own, informing nobody of what they're doing? I find that hard to believe. 

What I don't find hard to believe is that, slim as the chances may be of success, that the uproar over this presents the last, desperate political agenda of finding a way to de-legitimatize (is that a word?) the election of Trump, and do a 'do-over' election, presumably for 'reasons of health' dumping Hilary for Peewee Herman, as almost anybody but Hilary could defeat Trump in a cakewalk. Trump is as much a danger to the Republicans as he is to the Democrats. They both have interests in him going back to the Apprentice show. I doubt it'll work, regadless of how 'whipped up' the public becomes. But it's a shot.

Some of the anti-Trump almost universal chorus of the media might be seen in 'today's tweet': He's being whipped for questioning the cost of the F-35 plane made by Lockheed Martin. The facts are that 1. It ran waaaaay over the original budget and 2. It became an 'all-purpose' airplane - it could fill the roles of fighter/bomber/escort/etc. jet, and the fact is that being so broad-based, it does none of them particularly well, and not as well as new Russian jets that are much more focused in their roles. So regardless of what he says, he's treated like an ignorant liar. Which, in fact, he may be. And as President, he's downright scary. But discovering a plot by the Albanians to get their ancient dial-up phone network updated, so they could make 'prank calls' to American phone numbers really deserves looking into.