Updated:  Saturday, November 1, 2003

Is the Third Horseman Here?

As you know from reading this site for any length of time, I'm about as skeptical and cynical as they come.  However, I've also been the first to tell you that when something Biblical begins to line up with either a) science of b) news events, then you have to stop and ask yourself some very hard questions.

We know from a few sources, mostly picked up by web bot runs and the like, that George Bush may actually believe that he'll be the president when all Biblical forecasts of the End Times come true.  While that may sound like a wild assertion, there's a way to read the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse in such a manner as to build such a case.

In case you've forgotten, the four horsemen are:

• White Horse, Conquest, opening of the first Seal.

• Red Horse, War, opening of the second Seal.

• Black Horse, Famine, opening of the third Seal.

• Pale Horse, Death, opening of the fourth Seal.

At the opening of the fourth Seal, 25% of humanity is killed through a combination of sword, famine, and plague.

Now, close the Bible and try to generalize what Revelations seems very specific about.  Is there a way that we could look at world history and see Conquest?  Oh, you betcha!  One could say that since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, mass consumerism and the cult of excess consumption has pretty much conquered all there is to conquer.  Corporatism has stolen water supplies and food channels in Third World countries right and left.  One could speculate that perhaps - just perhaps - this could fulfill the role of the White Horse - Conquest.

If we continue the thought exercise a big longer, we then ask ourselves, what would be the Red Horse of War?  Could it be the evolving hardening of positions of Judeo-Christian countries and Islamic countries?  Is there some way that without stretching our imaginations too far, we could see a Second Horseman?  In places like Iraq, Afghanistan, and with the recent news that the Saudi's are getting nuclear weapons from Pakistan?

Then on this Third Horse, Famine, we're beginning to see the failure of crops reflected in prices.  As you'll see below, soybeans have gone up about 20% in a single month - and the harvest in Eastern Europe, which is usually the breadbasket for that part of the world, has been terrible.  And when I'm asking myself this question, up pops and email this morning, that I think you should read:

George, about the soybean rally. I am a hog farmer in NW Iowa and try to have feed cost and feed supply laid in or price covered this time of the year. My feed supplier will not commit to any deliveries of soymeal past the first of June because they don't know if the soybeans will be there to crush into meal. Second, at the rate of usage, there is not enough beans left in the US to meet our domestic soyoil needs. US price of soybeans today is $8.00 per bushel, in China it has topped $11.00. Three guesses in which direction soybeans are going in price and location and the first two guesses don't count.

 Next, to find labor to work in a hog building is an ongoing trial. We usually end up with the lowest members of the jobforce which is the reason our family has decided not to hire any labor. Talked to a neighbor who just ran a help wanted ad and she said that they had  3 times more applicants than ever, higher quality people and most of them had previously had 11 dollar per hour jobs but were now ready to settle for 8 dollars because there are no jobs to be had anywhere.

 In closing I have been reading Urban Survival for three years and enjoy your insights

I'm not going to make any claim that the Third Horse is on the horizon.  But another year or two of extraordinary heat and crop failures and you might be hearing the hoof beats yourself.

Friday

...If liars can figure...

Lies:  G.D. Pee!

Auto sales down 6% compared with last year!  Oil imports up 23%  Defense spending up over 15%!  These are the real headlines from the GDP report yesterday, but you're not seeing the real numbers of corporate media.  Instead we get happy talk and a Hooveresque "good times are right around the corner." 

Holy smokes, is this embarrassing.  After spending 15 years as a reporter, I would have given more credit to my one time associates.  Brother, was I ever off.  Yes, the GDP numbers are completely hosed and in a moment I'll show you where the lies are buried and ask whether reporters can read (or they have no clue how to operate Excel).  Or, more likely, they're just parroting what a ratings maven tell's 'em to or what the presidential "briefer" whisper in the media's ear.  But let's not get personal. Let's dig up a few facts, shall we?

First, let me give you the link to the underLYING data before I give you a lesson in how to read the numbers: http://www.bea.gov/bea/newsrel/gdp303a.xls

Now let's go through the spreadsheet page by page and see what we can discover, OK?

• The first page is the contents page.  It's a contents page -hard to screw this up.

• Table 1 shows the percentage changes for the most recent years and quarters.  It's here that I first sniffed a rat.  Long ago when managing companies I learned to always double check my spread sheets.  They can be complicated and it is always worthwhile to turn on the "trace precedents" command  which shows you where a particular number came from so you can audit your own work.  Keeps out mistakes, right?  Well lookee here:  In this spreadsheet of "percents" there is NO LINKAGE SHOWN - so we can't trace back and see which number comes from where.  You follow my point, right?  If you come up with a BIG 7.2% headline  increase that is way over expectations, I would like to know where the hell that came from.  Table 1, cell T7 is just a number with no links - in fact none of this table is linked, so we can't look at round off errors - none of that.

• We go to Table 2 and we find the same thing - no links!  Just numbers that could have come off a roulette wheel for all we learn from this spreadsheet. If an accountant prepared a document like this and presented it to me, I'd fire them.  I want to know more than "what's the number?"  I want to know "Where did that come from?"

• Finally at Table 3, we get to some useful numbers - and here's where the real fun begins. I decided to add a worksheet after Table 3 called George's math to see if I could smoke out a little economic truth, because I was beginning to suspise that the people who built this data monster were smoking something else. 

  • The first thing I did was wipe out all but the Billions of current dollars. Everything in column H and to the right is gone.

  • Then I eliminated column B called "2002"

  • I kept 2002:Q3 numbers because I want to compare them with 2003 Q3 numbers and see where we get, OK?

  • So everything else goes bye-bye

  • So now, we can look at Current dollars - side-by-side, got it? 2002:Q3 right next to 2003:Q3

  • Now I'm going to add two columns called Delta (2003 minus 2002) to show growth  if unsigned, or shrinkage if a - (minus sign)

  • Then we're going to run out the percentage change ((2003/2002)-1) and call it two places to the right of the decimal point. 

Ready for the Eye Poppers that will astound you?  

Let me roll 'em out for your dining and dancing pleasure.  Remember now, this is Year-on-Year change in current dollars, seasonally adjusted.  Off we go:

Whatever the hell happened to the 7.2% happy-talk headline?  OK, so the sleight of hand was that the 7.2% was only for the quarter.  But let's dig down a bit further and see where the growth was, shall we?

Personal consumption expenditures didn't do much better than our "official 3 1/2% inflation rate which is really more like 8% on a monetary basis...

Hmmm...it was a banner year for "other", but I haven't looked up what that growth was made of. so let's go on to nondurable goods:

OK, what we see here is that there has been a huge increase in fuel oil and coal, while the rest of the increase in the oil patch was over 16%.  That's the first headline that didn't make primetime that should concern you.  Moving on to the Service Sector:

You'll see that Electricity and Gas prices went through the roof...up almost 12%.  Medical was up 7%.  See what I mean about interesting?  Oh it gets better...

When you take out monetary inflation, which is running in the same range, you'll see that the amount left over for private investment didn't go anywhere!

These figures speak for themselves, but with investment dropping in utilities, down 18%, we shouldn't be surprised.  Surprisingly, there was a good pop in residential construction.  Of course you have to take out exports, which seems to have improved a bit (we exported 432.9 in 02 and that was up to 488.6 this year, which looks like an improvement, but the trick shot here is that a lot of that probably went to which small Middle East country that we presently occupy?  We'll probably never know...

The breakdown behind exports goes like this:

Imports were way up - more than 5% but more important look at energy imports! Up 23.31%...Yikes!:

The services imported is going up like crazy because of jobjacking...all those telemarketers in India and the customer service reps in the Philippines..

Now here is the whole point of the so-called recovery:  There hasn't been one for most people.  The "recovery" if you want to call it that, has been fueled by government spending.  Check out the percentage changes:

You got it:  Defense spending is up nearly 16% and non-defense spending is up 7.22%.  States are getting screwed.

Now think about this:  The Federal Reserve has been printing money like crazy.  From September 2002 to September 2003 M-1, the narrowest measure of money printed is up 8.11% . With real GDP (less defense spending) up less than 5%

Our colleagues at HalfPastHuman come up with a brand new way of polling public opinion called the "TakeRake" which shows almost no one believes the GDP numbers out yesterday (see http://www.halfpasthuman.com/takerake103003.htm) So although the national financial press corps has either no brains or balls (or both), most common sense folks can see through this latest wool pulling very clearly.

Well, that's the Friday morning rip and rant.  I got up at 5 AM to ponder the numbers and that's how they look.  Not only do average people see the truth, but if the recovery was anywhere near as robust as the headline number, the market would have popped more than a dozen points, that's for damn sure.  If it was real, the market would have charged up 200 or 300.  Didn't happen because at least a few folks can still read.

This, my friend wraps up the scariest thing I could think of for Halloween.

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Planet X - A Summary

One of our readers wrote in and asked about Planet X - "What's that?" he wondered.  Fair question, because not everyone is up to speed on planet X.  Let's begin the story about 12-thousand BCE.  If you piece together the common elements of Biblical history, along with writing and hieroglyphs from both Egypt and Mayan ruins, you get the pick that about 14-thousand years ago, a large comet in its pre-planet formation stage, was seen coming into our solar system.  It's written as having done a couple of things:  First, on its way past Mars, one interpretation is that it literally sucked the atmosphere and water off Mars on the way by.  For a 56-year period, this newcomer to our solar system caused all kinds of havoc - and this includes the Biblical Flood.  Eventually, the newcomer settled down and became the planet Venus. 

This is a controversial view, but astronomical records of the period don't seem to show Venus before that time, and they do show Venus after that time.  By the way, in the drawings of the era, the wanderer is shown with a leading spike ahead of the pre-planet, and this is one interesting point that supports the planet-sun electrical connection work of James McCanney, whose web site you can read at http://www.jmccanneyscience.com/ and who has a radio program on tonight at 9 PM Eastern time.  McCanney has continued to work on the theory that not only do large planets (comets he says are not just the "dirty snowballs" that NASA passes the off to be) come by from time to time from hyper extended orbits, but he also sees a tremendous correlation between periods of high solar activity and extreme weather on earth.  But I digress.

The Bible mentions Wormwood as heralding the coming of the End of Times, and indeed, with some historical pointers that suggest it's already happened once previously with Venus, we should keep our eyes to the heavens.  Indeed, as one reader reminded me in an email this morning (thanks Jack!) A Hopi Indian by the name of Robert Morning Sky was on the Art Bell program back in 1997 talking about how the Hale Bopp comet was (the blue Kachina) the precursor to the world bending red Kachina, which he and others visioned for mid 2004.

All of this would not be much more than an idle speculation, except for a quiet series of rumors that I picked up that a number of NASA scientists, and I have to be careful how I write this to protect some sources, who are in the business of looking at deep space pictures, have resigned and have moved to high ground in places like Colorado (and other mountain states).  The persistent rumor is they have seen "something". 

Supposedly, the powers that be (PTB) are aware of this and it's why a large amount of government money which has been appropriated for all kinds of projects has not been released to contractors.  The number is apparently huge, but I've had reports that lots of defense contractors, for example, have had projects approved and funded by Congress, yet the money has not been released - so certain projects languish - but this leaves the unresolved question "Where's that money going?" 

Then we have the recent crash of Shoemaker-Levi 9 into Jupiter.  The problem with that event is that it shows there really are big things floating around in space, and they are not small.  Again, depending on who you listen to, Shoemaker-Levi was reported much bigger than the "official" size estimates given.

Then there is the case of purported mis-information.  According to this theory, because of the early NASA work, the highest levels of government knows of the alleged Planet X and even went to far as to set up a deliberate misinformation (disinformation) campaign to put into the public consciousness that Planet X = "aliens" = foolishness.  The disinformation theory goes something like this:  The government knows that Planet X would be coming in at some point, so they set up a disinformation campaign to talk up Planet X, with an arrival date over a year in advance, before any real symptoms would be noted.  You might recall, for example, that www.zetatalk.com was promoting the idea that Planet X would arrive in May of 2003. Some skeptics have alledged that site was a disinformation effort.

 Whether ZetaTalk was a disinformation effort is something you can find plenty of debate on around the net, but I did get a first hand taste of  the Planet X equals "aliens" the other day when I was talking to my younger sister.  I mentioned Planet X in passing and her response was "Oh, you mean like Planet X and aliens?"  She spends a normal amount of time on the net so it was extremely interesting to me that from a marketing and psychographics standpoint, she had already linked Planet X with Aliens - which means hokum in her mind.

Lately, there are many data points that seem to support the notion that a Planet X could be real, although we're as skeptical as anyone could be:

• The Russians have according to our sources, identified at least 4 and perhaps as many as 7 objects that should arrive in our neighborhood of space from the opposite side of the sun, in the May 14-20 range of next year.  The reason for the variance in dates is that the objects (and the biggest in particular) seem to be of varying trajectory. 

• There does appear to be some emphasis on observatories which can view that far southern sky, where the "whatever" supposedly will make its first appearance.

• The recent outbursts of the sun are out of character and give some credence to the idea that something is coming into our solar system which is beginning to upset the equilibrium.

• The number of NASA scientists who are on high ground is interesting.

• The freak number of people killed by heat in Europe this year, the melting of glaciers worldwide way beyond global warming and skyrocketing grain prices due to failed crops are all the kinds of weather impacts McCanney's sun-earth-weather connection would cause if the Sun was perturbed.

• Then there's the increase in the number of earthquakes.  There seems to be a very slow trend toward larger and more frequent quakes, although the human brain, wired as it is, is perfectly able to create patterns where there's only random data.

So that's Planet X theory in a nutshell.  Is it worthy of more than passing interest?  Well, it will be hard to get real excited.  Our current interest in the activity of the sun is very high because this meets a lot of our criteria for basing our future actions.  First, it is measurable.  Second, it is observable, and third, it's to a large extent, beyond government "spin". 

So what we'll do is dust off our copy of "How We Know What Isn't So" (about making patterns to fit random data) and watch the sun spot activity.  If the sunspots continue to increase gradually through the end of the year, then we will start building a bug-out plan based on our Texas ranch. But buying generators and food storage is way premature right now. 

Still, there's a chance that Planet X is real - and although a small chance indeed, it fits with the Biblical prediction of Wormwood, so when science even begins to look like it might line up with the Bible, I think one has to at least look up once in a while.

George Ure

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All contents (c) 1998-2003 by George A. Ure, MBA, except authors as linked or noted