A number of readers have written in with remarks like "Wow" about the latest web bot hit.  Not that the linguistics-based time predictive software  technique developed by www.halfpasthuman.com is amazing to me anymore - I've gotten sort of used to it and now expect to have a good idea of coming events well in advance - but for newcomers to the idea that the future sends subtle linguistic/language/context changes in how we communicate in advance of actual events is most times a rather hard concept for folks to get their arms around.

In the past 30-days here, we've had two rather remarkable "hits."  In other words, when we issued our pan Pacific 9.5 earthquake warning a week or so before the rumors in Hawaii of a pending 9.5 earthquake hit - causing hundreds of residents to panic and call 9-11 and other emergency services - we scored a "hit" just as we scored another one with the Nov. 22nd report that there'd be talk of "rainstorms on Mars" shortly, based on immediacy values in the language shifts.  And sure enough, that's what NASA unveiled yesterday - just about spot on with my assessment that there'd be discussion of "erosion" talk.  See yesterday's item and the NASA news conference reports for more.

But that's not our topic this morning.  There's a very long-term forecast that deals with "encounters with scarcity" and other variations of the words for "shortage."  If I can bring up a quick graphic for you to consider this from Visual Thesaurus, NOT web bot model space (it's too early in the day to even try to explain that, because you'll see how much linguistically hangs around the concept of "scarce" (as in scarcity).  Here are two views, one emphasizing the left hand side of word model space, while the other emphasizes the right (I rotated the model a bit for you):

You can try the 2-D version of the word model at www.visualthesaurus.com, but in the 3D model, you can spin the model around and I find it pretty useful while trying to sort out what the web bot runs are trying to get at linguistically.  But back to our main point of the morning.

We know, or at least think we know from past "hits" with the web bots, that the BIGGER an event is (e.g. impacting lots and lots of humans) the more lead time we get linguistically.  For example, the Hawaii 9.5 quake rumor "hit" had lots of high immediacy values, but lacked the long lead time before a real 9.0+ quake, that we saw in August of 2004 with the Banda Aceh quake.  There, we had 4+ months of lead time, specific references to 300,000 dead, and "land driven back to a previous age...'  A pretty good description.

Now, with the "encounters with scarcity" stuff, because this has been kicking around modelspace for what will be a year in February, when it arrives (presuming it will, which seems like a decent bet) it will likely be a gigantic event.  If I were guessing, I would say that it will become apparent with the huge emotional release period that comes right after mid March 2007, but not guarantees on that - there's no book on how to do this stuff and Cliff is sort of writing it as we learn.

But take a look now at what the word frequency chart for "shortage" has done since March of this year:

This is not to claim that it's anything scientifically provable, because there are a hundred and one ways the could happen out of natural events.  For example, the Google-urus could have simply changed their indexing strategy recently, or the cache for this word didn't get flushed.  Still, it's a darned interesting thing to watch.

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I've referred to Robert Kaplan's book "The Coming Anarchy" more often than I can remember, but with good reason.  If you check out the condensed version which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly's online section, notice if you will the sub-headline:  "How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly destroying the social fabric of our planet".

Other books have recently started to echo the notion that at some juncture, absent some kind of new input of raw materials or energy, there will be a gradual simmering down of the global population into something of a stew where the US would lose its economic hegemony and the rest of the world catches up.  And along in there somewhere, the whole notional of globalism/globalist capitalism goes bankrupt because that system depends on playing the spread between different economic strata.  As the prior stratification becomes more homogenous, globalism looses its edge, and we go back to making things, growing things, and trying to get along all in our own backyard.

The big issue is, however, whether we can do that without blowing each other to smithereens.  But that's another point for another morning.

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Today, I'll just leave you with a link to the "shortage" returns from Google and you can look through the list of stories which reflect, at their core, the trends which Kaplan so insightfully pointed out more than a decade back:

• Skills shortage in England.

• A DRAM shortage (Taiwan report)

• A nurse shortage (South Africa)

• A rural teacher shortage (Australia)

• ...and the list continues, although it will no doubt change by the time you get to it.

This is not to be alarmist, but I'd offer that folks are seeing more spot shortages today than they did, say, a year ago.  Steve Quayle shared an email from one of his readers that goes to the idea of food availability and prices:

"I called ****** Grains in Montpelier, Id. and asked if their list prices on the web were up to date, and was told, "until next week" when prices would change. So I began asking about shipping prices and the receptionist passed me to ****, who knew more about those things. After talking about shipping prices, we went back to food prices and how much we could expect them to go up.

He asked, "have you been keeping up with the prices of wheat and barley, on the radio" I told him not really. He said they are at an all time high because we are exporting all of our wheat overseas. He said that Australia usually exports its wheat to the nearby Asian nations, but because of their crop failure they were importing from us, as are the other countries. He said they are getting all they can get. (I took notes on what he said), and that the United States has no stockpile of grains.

Then he talked about milk and said all of our milk in powder form is going overseas, and especially the instant. I said we were getting whey, and he told me that whey comes in different grades, the highest being sweet whey, on down to edible whey that they sell to the bakeries.

He said they can get the baker whey but nobody can get the sweet whey and said "everybody else is getting what is left on the tail end" (whatever he means by that). He said the other two things there will be shortages on are potatoes and sugar."

To be sure, some of the shortages are minor - and most certainly not life impacting - but they're curious, nevertheless:

"Was just reading another reader's letter about Helium shortages.

Here's another shortage, trivial no doubt but since you track shortages, I thought I'd mention it.

The other day I went to get some No. 4 whipping twine. Whipping twine is what sailors use to tie around the ends of rope so it doesn't fray. I usually get it at a chandlery near my house but since I was closer to a **** Marine, I stopped there. They directed me to the aisle where it was supposed to be. They had bins for various sizes of whipping twine. Four out of five were empty and all they had was some twine that was too heavy for my needs. So off I went to my usual place. Lo and behold, they were all out as well. They did have some no 4 whipping twine, but it was green, not their best seller and not what I wanted. All the white was gone and back ordered.

Ok, our economy isn't going to collapse because sailors can't whip the ends of their lines (ropes), they can always duct tape them if they have to, but it's like one of those stories from the former Soviet Union where you can never get what you want but have to buy what you can get because down the line you can trade it for something you really need. So anyway, I bought three spools of the green whipping twine."

Whipping the end of your mooring lines (or jib sheets) with a second-choice color may not seem like a big deal, but it points out how complex the JIT delivery system has become.

As I wrote not too long ago in the paper "Death by JIT" companies are trying wherever possible to reduce inventory levels to near zero because they represent money at rest.  Of course, when the inventory systems are not properly anticipatory of future events, spot shortages of things like whipping twine occur for our mariner/reader, or on a larger scale, we see high demand for grains because of the Australia drought and the emergent hype about ethanol fuels.

Going forward, you might want to look through Kaplan's article and reorder your thinking a bit about what's important and what is not. Tomorrow I will get back to a more "headline oriented" approach to our morning reports and save the longer views for the Peoplenomics subscribers. But I think it's important now and then to step back from what passes as "news" to try and get a handle on what's BS/filler/cult of personality pabulum for the unaware masses, and what's really important and helps you prepare/restructure your life as events allow.  And don't plan on fish and chips or surf & turf after 2048...if we make it that far.

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My quirky outlook on life probably got started growing up in a predominantly Asian neighborhood in Seattle.  Asians have a different, and at times brilliantly insightful way of looking at things.  I wasn't the only one in my impacted, apparently.  My younger sister who works for a company in Seattle than makes things that fly, uses as her email tag line: 

"If all is not lost, where is it? "

(You're welcome to use it, but give her credit...)

The rest of the day's news is the usual mix of stuff, moving at mostly glacial speed, which I'll distill down for you this morning for you as "Brilliance of Humans."

• We read that British authorities have now labeled the death of an ex-spy as a murder. And this country produced Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? What do you think their clue was?

• The headline at Canada.com "Iraq risks a "slide toward chaos"  Eh?

• Now that the Iraq Study Group has discovered that the war in Iraq is not working (eh?) George Bush and Tony Blair will meet today to talk about things. Or, the headline might just as well read "Tweedledee to meet you know who..."

• Woman on airplane lights match to cover passing of gas.

A few point out that CNN's Miles O'Brien fell asleep during the senate discussion of global warming this week, but my take is that he has good sense and he might as well be Rip van Winkle: The senate is one of the few things that moves slower than glaciers.

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That said, the National Center for Policy Analysis says the public is vastly uninformed on Global Warming.  "Free fish & chips for them all in 2048," I sez I, arghhh..."Now where's my whipping twine?  No, the white whipping twine!"  But seriously...

65-years ago today, America was attacked at Pearl Harbor.  America rose to the challenge and defeated those who would have enslaved free people.  A remembrance today for those who paid freedoms highest price.

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Japan thanks to US help rebuilding their country, is now the world's largest hold of foreign exchange reserves although China is coming on strong.  The US by 2005 had fallen to eighth in the world. That's a hell of a change in 65 years.

Wednesday Dec. 6, 2006

Another web bot hit

Rainstorms of Mars

I don't think the folks at www.halfpasthuman.com will have a problem with me letting this one out a few hours ahead of the actual event, but back on November 22 in part one of the current future predictive technology (web bot) run (ALTA 907), the time monks sent out an advisory about some odd linguistics that seemed to point with some fair immediacy impacts to "Mars - A Dark and Stormy Night."  In part, they offered this:

"In the past we have come across strange lexical groups which went to the idea that 'Iapetus is Alive!' or rather, 'iapetus is awakening'. Hmmm. Ok, and now we have a small set, completely and correctly {ed note: referential integrity checks out for the set} populated which is headed by the aspect of 'mars' as in the planet, and which has supporting aspects suggesting the very outlandish idea of a 'rain storm'.

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So we thought to let you know of the possibility for 'inclement weather' should your winter vacation plans include a trip to 'mars'. Though we do note that 'after the rainstorm', the resulting 'lakes/rivers', and such waters will be quite 'clear/clean' and apparently 'wind driven'. There are also some other cautions offered within the data set for those hardy persons taking the 'mars' grand tour this winter in that the modelspace suggests that 'refuge in a cave' will *not* be wise, likely due to the rising waters from the rainstorm. And further that the 'engaging/grasping vines/pipes' should be avoided as they are 'without integrity'. Or as the aspects/attributes would have it, are 'lying about their elevations, {and} sweet air'. Hmmm. Lying pipes...imagine that. My how advanced, down here it is just the politicians that lie.

We offer these snips from the technology that let's up "peek into the future down at the archetype level" so you can do three things. 

First, we will see if the future scanning technology got close in making its prediction 14-days in advance of today's events.  And those events are what?

Dec. 4, 2006 MEDIA ADVISORY: M06-186

NASA Schedules Briefing to Announce Significant Find on Mars

WASHINGTON - NASA hosts a news briefing at 1 p.m. EST, Wednesday, Dec. 6, to present new science results from the Mars Global Surveyor. The briefing will take place in the NASA Headquarters auditorium located at 300 E Street, S.W. in Washington and carried live on NASA Television and www.nasa.gov. 

The agency last week announced the spacecraft's mission may be at its end. Mars Global Surveyor has served the longest and been the most productive of any spacecraft ever sent to the red planet. Data gathered from the mission will continue to be analyzed by scientists.

Panelists include: - Michael Meyer -- Lead Scientist, Mars Exploration Program, NASA Headquarters, Washington - Michael Malin -- President and Chief Scientist, Malin Space Science Systems, San Diego, Calif. - Kenneth Edgett -- Scientist, Malin Space Science Systems - Philip Christensen -- Professor, Arizona State University, Tempe, Ariz.

Reporters at participating agency field centers will be able to ask questions. For more information about NASA TV streaming video, downlink and schedule information, visit the web at:

http://www.nasa.gov/ntv 

Your second task will be to try and put together what the web bots seem to be saying about Mars.  To me, it sounds like not the discovery of water itself on Mars, although it could be that, but rather that erosion (as in caused by falling rain) is likely to be the central topic as well as some discussion about "wind driven"  and maybe a reference to 'caves" along in the discussion somewhere.

Third thing?  I mean if the boss isn't cracking the whip too hard today:  Whip out your copy of Immanuel Velikovsky's book "World's in Collision" or at least read the summary at Wikipedia:

"The book proposed that around the 15th century BCE, a comet or comet-like object (now called the planet Venus), having originally been ejected from Jupiter, passed near Earth. The object changed Earth's orbit and axis, causing innumerable catastrophes which were mentioned in early mythologies and religions around the world. Fifty-two years later, it passed close by again, stopping the Earth's rotation for a while and causing more catastrophes. Then, in the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, Mars (itself displaced by Venus) made close approaches to the Earth; this incident caused a new round of disturbances and disasters. After that, the current "celestial order" was established. The courses of the planets stabilized over the centuries and Venus gradually became a "normal" planet. "

A simplified version of events in Venus as either comet or wandering small planet gets captured by the Sun's gravity.  It comes trucking into our solar system and goes near-missing Mars, but the gravitational fields are such that the water is sucked off Mars and whipped into space as Mars goes truck about.  Fast forward a few years and earth goes through the clouds of water in space and it rains for how long?  Care to guess 40-days and 40 nights?

Today's NASA conference is not likely to carry the discussion anywhere near this far, but if you sort of read between the lines, the implications for religion are interesting, as humans fill in with "science" some of the history written of in Old Testament events.

Next thing you know, we'll find out that some of the passages in Ezekiel are talking about UFO's and that demons, trolls, and elves from our mythological past were captured in current myths in caricature form.  Nothing would surprise me less. And thanks to the time monks, neither would a discussion of wind-driven rain caused erosion on Mars.

Peak Oil Real?

The debate continues about Peak Oil.  Some argue that it's a "made up" deal by oil companies.  Others, like one reader who sent this in, think one way or the other, the end will come:

In bold below - this is what has been bugging me for a while; George, we have modified the bell curve into a plateau, borrowing from the future. If this is correct, then We Will Crash; period. So our decent into totalitarianism, our manipulation of the markets, etc. is with this Reality in mind. Not so much a diabolical plot or conspiracy, just the box canyon result of prior decisions. The shit is going to hit the fan. And everything points that direction from fundamentals (which we are all starting to doubt) to geo-political changes to web-bots.

 

following your oil drum link from this morning - mcgowanjm on Saturday January 28, 2006 at 10:13 AM EST Backward induction Backward induction is a technique to solve a game of perfect information. It first considers the moves that are the last in the game, and determines the best move for the player in each case. Then, taking these as given future actions, it proceeds backwards in time, again determining the best move for the respective player, until the beginning of the game How much does it take to push people away from their natural strategies?

I have a suggestion for the geologists and petroleum engineers. Figure out what the heck your measurements and estimates mean, and then perfect the formula to eliminate the magical guess work. The more I look at it, the more I seriously think that no one has figured out how to do estimates of oil reservoir volume correctly It almost sounds as if no one wants to admit that a parabolic growth law has any kind of importance.

 

And FSU Oil Shock Model here

However, if you discount OPEC reserves by 50%, it becomes clear that we are WELL past that half-way point. So production should have already begun to decline. This suggests that, as widely feared, only the use of water injection and water flood techniques to keep reservoir pressure artificially high have kept production rates up for the past several years. The problem with this is that when a field who's production rate has been artificially sustained beyond the half-way point finally does begin to decline, its rate of decline tends to be very, very high. 10-18% has been suggested (by Simmons and others) as the decline rate for fields that have been pressed to the limits with injection technologies. This is critical, because while Peak Oil may be a quite manageable problem at 2% depletion, 10%+ depletion means that world production will fall by half in less than 7 years. That would be absolutely catastrophic. No wonder this story isn't available on CNN.

It is absurd not to believe that Peak Oil will happen sometime. You can't have growing consumption from a finite resource any other way.  The question then boils down to one of timing.  And the $64 trillion dollar question is:  Who out there has anything to gain from telling the truth - and then, how would we recognize it when it came along?

Heavy Helium Thoughts

I recently reported that there seems to be a national helium shortage here and they - and now comes an interesting email from a reader whose family has bumped into it head-on:

Hi George, ***** ******** here. I just thought you might like to hear about the confirmed helium shortage that you eluded to earlier this year.

 

My wife is a balloon decorator. She does parties and events of all kinds and of course uses helium in many of her jobs and creations. I told her about the coming helium shortage when you first mentioned it about 6 months ago. At the time, we checked around with her wholesale supplier in Dallas (All American Balloons) and a local supplier here in Mount Pleasant, Texas (Red Ball Oxygen). No word or news at that time from people we thought would be in the know.

 

Well, things have certainly changed and not for the better. The local price of a large tank of helium is going up from about 15 FRN's to about 25 FRN's. This was just announced a few days ago.

 

What I found extremely interesting is this...

My wife just got back from her Dallas supplier and they were in the warehouse portion where the supplier stores their helium for deliveries. My wife saw about 100 tanks of helium in a storage area, but not in the delivery area as it was also full.

 

When she remarked about how the supplier had increased their volume in helium tanks for deliveries, she was told by the supplier that what she saw was their "hedge" against a rising helium price and a definite shortage in the future that they said was affecting their supply ability.

 

Obviously this is a confirmed "hit" because of how it directly affects our livelihood. This isn't mere rumor or conjecture, but actual first hand knowledge from my wife's own experiences.

We don't hear much about the helium shortage - at least since the Macy's T-Day parade...but at some point, I will likely be shopping for some for our welding rig.

Rubber Stamp

Senate Armed Services Committee gives it to SecDef nominee (and shoo-in) Robert Gates. How many ways can you rewrite that?

The Rich Get Richer

If you're keeping track (like you have time, right?) the richest one percent of humans own 40% of the world's assets. And the richest 10% own 85% of the world while the bottom o50% of humans own barely 1% of global wealth.

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Pretend for a moment you just popped into this dimension after zipping hundreds of light years to check out this recently radiating planet (nuke bombs since 1945, and cell phones since you bought one).

The Prime Directive (from Star Trek's "do not interfere with native cultures) kick in, so you can't just go smashing down doors to interview people - you'll have to make due with cattle sampling.  But you have to complete an assessment of the planet to see if it qualifies as an "advanced civilization."  So you fill out the check list:

____Planet ecology stable and healthy:  (   ) Yes   ( X ) No.