Yeah yeah the world got terribly excited by the first Obama sighting after his post-Presidency vacation, and the focus was on just how excited the crowd in Manhattan was, and how calm and happy Mister Forty-Four looked and behaved.
Business Insider's coverage was typical:
A large crowd gathered outside, trying to catch a view of Obama as he left 160 Fifth Ave. in Manhattan.
It was not immediately clear what the former president was attending to during his stop. A representative for the president's foundation declined to comment.
Chris Hayes in the video above said the same thing. "It isn't clear" why he was in Manhattan.
Please. You'd think we didn't have the Google.
160 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan is a public office building. As such you can look up the tenants in that building in a matter of moments.
Of course, any office in any city anywhere would likely be happy to host a private meeting with anyone Obama decided he wanted to meet. But he could do that at his rental house or by phone.
So let's assume 160 Fifth Avenue isn't random. It's possible he went to talk to some folks at the Simons Foundation, a funder of programs promoting math and science. They live there.
"Science Sandbox" encouraging elite math and science classroom access to students of color and "less privilege", looks right up Obama's alley.
But that possibility is out-weighed by the other possible tenant in that property, Euclidian Capital. What does Euclidian Capital invest in? Democrats. Just Democrats.
Then you dig just a bit further and find out both Simons Foundation and Euclidian are projects of Jim Simons, a retired hedge fund guy known as the "world's smartest billionaire," as he is also a renowned expert on theoretical physics.
Simons not only entered the prestigious university at the age of 17, in 1955, he finished the four-year program in three years before heading for UC Berkeley where he received his Ph.D. in mathematics in 1962 at the age of 23. A few years later, he was hired and then fired as a code cracker for the Pentagon’s secretive Institute for Defense Analysis (IDA) at Princeton. By 1968 he was chair of the math department at Stony Brook University, where he created one of the top geometry centers in the world. While there, he and Shiing-Shen Chern, who was at Berkeley, published what is now known as the Chern-Simons Invariant, which later had a huge influence on theoretical physics.
Simons left academia in 1978 to start what became Renaissance Technologies, an early pioneer in quantitative, or model-based, trading, primarily in commodities and currencies; the Medallion Fund he managed there is one of the world’s most successful hedge funds. Forbes has listed him among the top 100 richest people in the world, and he has been called “the world’s smartest billionaire.”
For the last seven years he has ostensibly been retired and now oversees the Simons Foundation, which has invested millions in math and science research and education, including groundbreaking work in the study of autism, and special projects such as Berkeley’s $60 million Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing.
He's also a huge Democratic donor. Please note that in addition to Hillary Clinton, the other two candidates on that list above are both, like Hillary herself, Democrats from Obama's home state of Illinois.
Simon himself found a way to get more than 7 million dollars to Hillary's campaign.
I'm not suggesting any cover-up by the mainstream media here, just that in the big world of former presidents, it's not hard to figure out what they're doing. Obama hasn't left the political arena, and proof positive of that? He is chatting up Democratic mega-donors. Of course he is.
