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Friday The What?

I suppose you're wondering where triskaidekaphobia (variously spelt)  came from, if you don't already know.  That's 'The Fear of the number 13" which is curious because it's a number that's always popped up in a strange way in my lift; 13-years on 1300 AM in my news days, just for example.  Oh, and my first newscast was at 13:00 (1 PM) for some of that time when I was working afternoon drive.

 

From Wikipedia we note:

On Friday 13 October 1307, the Knights Templar were ordered to be arrested by Philip IV of France. The theory has been suggested, in the book Born in Blood: The Lost Secrets of Freemasonry by John J. Robinson, that the Templars went underground among masons in England and later developed into Freemasons. Because most of the founding fathers of the United States of America were Freemasons, it is possible the memory of the terror of that day is preserved in the Friday the 13th.

Numbers are curiously human creations; neither the goats, nor cats, nor any wildlife around the ranch here see particularly concerned about the numerical

implications of the failure of derivative notional values to remain notional; an event which will destroy the world's financial systems are illiquid intangible financial assets undergo price collapse.

 

Interestingly, none of the farm animals here seemed particularly concerned with the Consumer Price Index report out this morning, either.  But, since humans love numbers and financial numerology, here's the deal:

"The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.3 percent in July on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. (Before seasonal adjustment, the all items index was unchanged for the month.) Over the last 12 months, the index increased 1.2 percent before seasonal adjustment.

The energy index posted its first increase since January and accounted for over two thirds of the seasonally adjusted all items increase. Both the gasoline and household energy indexes turned up in July after a series of declines. The food index, in contrast, declined in July, largely due to the fourth consecutive decline in the fruits and vegetables index.

The index for all items less food and energy rose 0.1 percent in July after increasing 0.2 percent in June. The indexes for shelter, apparel, used cars and trucks, and tobacco all continued to increase in July. In contrast, the indexes for medical care and recreation turned down in July and the indexes for airline fares and household furnishings and operations continued to decline. The 12-month change in the index for all items less food and energy remained at 0.9 percent for the fourth month in a row.

A few highlight numbers (unadjusted 12 months here):  Food overall up 9/10ths of one percent, energy up 8%, fuel oil up 15/1% whiole3 used cars and trucks were up a whopping 17.0 percent...which really makes sense:  What better way to hide incipient deflation than do the cash for clunkers to raise this part of the CPI higher than anything else?  I should have bought me a few acres worth of clunkers when I could have.  Might have been one of the great all time investments.

 

Of course when prices are up only 1.2% before adjustments, and the M1 figure is up 4½% and Trader Bart's M3 Reconstructed is still declining at an annual rate of 7% or so, the real pig in a poke is whether M3 double bottoms - and then if that happens, whether there will be any life left on earth following...

 

Then There's Retail

If you thought the Consumer Price numbers were fun, consider the latest retail sales figures, also out this morning...

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for July, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $362.7 billion, an increase of 0.4 percent (±0.5%)* from the previous month, and 5.5 percent (±0.5%) above July 2009. Total sales for the May through July 2010 period were up 5.9 percent (±0.3%) from the same period a year ago. The May to June 2010 percent change was revised from -0.5 percent (±0.5%)* to - 0.3 percent (±0.2%).

 

Retail trade sales were up 0.4 percent (±0.5%)* from June 2010, and 5.9 percent (±0.7%) above last year. Nonstore retailers sales were up 12.6 percent (±2.5%) from July 2009 and gasoline stations sales were up 12.2 percent (±1.8%) from last year.

 

The advance estimates are based on a subsample of the Census Bureau’s full retail and food services sample. A stratified random sampling method is used to select approximately 5,000 retail and food services firms whose sales are then weighted and benchmarked to represent the complete universe of over three million retail and food services firms. Responding firms account for approximately 65% of the MARTS dollar volume estimate. For an explanation of the measures of sampling variability included in this report, please see the Reliability of Estimates section on the last page of this publication.

Why, this is so much fun I can hardly stand it.  Wait, here's a picture:

Looks good, UNTIL you remember the auto industry took last year off and cash for clunkers program kicked in.  Oh, and let's not forget this is DOLLARS not UNITS.  So, if you have 4½ percent monetary inflation (M1) or if you want to use Bat's M3 down 7%, then the implied decline in units could be anywhere from units down 2% (plus or minus noise) to down 5% (plus or minus noise) which is what I would expect.

 

Is George full-o-crap?  Well, look at the Rail Time Indicators report from the Association of American Railroads for July:

"The Association of American Railroads (AAR) today (Monday, actually, - G)  reported that monthly rail carloads for July 2010 were up 4.1 percent compared with the same period last year, but still down 14.6 percent compared with July 2008. According to AAR’s August Rail Time Indicators Report, intermodal traffic in July was up 17.3 percent compared with the same month in 2009, but also down 5.1 percent compared with July 2008. "

Smart guys at the AAR - one of the few reports to look at two years, not this lamebrain 1-year crap most follow.  Right on...

 

Oh, and a check of the Bloomberg chart shows from year ago levels, the Baltic Dry Index is still lower, although gaining a bit in the past few weeks...

 

Down at the open?  On the Friday the 13th?  Why, imagine that.  Who would have thought...except of course for Georgie Porgy, pudding and puts, made some bucks while being nuts...  (reads better than it speaks, LOL)

 

Market Reaction

While we wait for the market to open, and I consider my roughly 10% gain for the week for today's decline, (profits from being in short-side winners) one of those Tyler Durden notes over at ZeroHedge is worth a read.  Scroll down a bit here and realize the so-called Hindenburg Omen has just gone off.

 

Quick...look surprised!

 

Bye-Bye Jobs

In case you missed it, and you may have, the Wall St. Cheat Sheet has a list of "23 Occupations that will never recover from the Great Recession".  Your's on it?

 

A reader who signed himself President, University of Retired Person (a moniker or nom de web worth filching) offered this parallel view:

"Just passing this along in case you are not aware of it. I'm sure your readers would be interested. While the rest of the US is in a depression, at least one government agency (Commerce) is offering buyouts of as much as $25,000 for people to leave their good government jobs. Usually when the government squanders tax dollars this way, its because they don't want to implement reduction in force (RIF) procedures where they can't protect their favorite employees. You know, the ones who will follow orders and not understand what they are doing, or worse."

My, how history rhymes at times...

 

Cups of Java

Oracle is going after Google for infringing on its Java patentplex.  How close the Android - mostly phones - operating system gets seems to be headed for long (read: expensive) litigation.

 

Funding the Aristocracy

Did you read the juicy details about FHA loans for the ultra rich in the story "Manhattan Luxury Condos Try FHA Backing in Sales "Game Changer". 

 

Has someone in the Federal Housing Administration lost sight of reality?  What ever happened in the marketplace to excesses being allowed to fail?

 

Big Quake Worry?

Like you don't have enough to worry about, right?  How to scrape up the dough for the Q3 tax filings due on September 15th.  Kids to soccer, and on and on....

 

But try to save some room on your worry list to look at the quake swarming in the Azores Islands region of the Eastern Atlantic.  Not just one or two, but SEVEN quakes all around 36 North, -32.9 to -33 degrees.

 

That these quakes are about 200-miles south of the Azores is not the point, nor is the activity in the Mid Atlantic Ridge.

 

Nope:  The thing to worry about is what this might do to the Island of Santa Cruz de la Palma...where the Cumbre Vieja is a disaster waiting to happen.

 

Ever read the Wikipedia entry on what happens when Cumbre Vieja slips?

"British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC2 Channel) transmitted “Mega-tsunami; Wave of Destruction”[5], which suggested that a future failure of the western flank of the Cumbre Vieja would cause a "mega-tsunami."

Day et al. (1999)[6] and Ward and Day (2001)[7] hypothesize that during a future unascertained eruption, the western half of the Cumbre Vieja - approximately 500 km3 (5 x 1011 m3) with an estimated mass 1.5 x 1015 kg, will catastrophically fail in a massive gravitational landslide and enter the Atlantic Ocean generating a so called "mega-tsunami." The debris will continue to travel - as a debris flow, along the ocean floor. Computer modeling indicates that the resulting initial wave may attain a local amplitude (height) in excess of 600 metres (1,969 ft) and an initial peak to peak height that approximates to 2 kilometres (1 mi), and travel at about 1,000 kilometres per hour (621 mph) (approximately the speed of a jet aircraft), inundating the African coast in about 1 hour, the southern coast of England in about 3.5 hours, and the eastern seaboard of North America in about 6 hours, by which time the initial wave would have subsided into a succession of smaller ones each about 30 metres (98 ft) to 60 metres (197 ft) high. These may surge to several hundred metres in height and be several kilometres apart but retaining their original speed. The models of Day et al.[6], and Ward and Day[7], suggest that it could inundate up to 25 kilometres (16 mi) inland. This would greatly damage or destroy cities along the entire North American eastern seaboard. The physical damage would take tens if not hundreds years to repair and restore. The economies of the countries affected would likewise take several years to return to the pre-inundation levels."

 Say, you don't think that would compare with your pother worriers would it?  I seem to recall the runway height at Boca Raton, Florida is only 13-feet above sea level, Miami International is only 8-feet or so if I'm reading the sectional right.

 

No point worrying, especially if you live in Florida.

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Speaking of which - several Florida folks wrote in and offered that the spate of palm trees (and other vegetation) turning brown is due to a recent cold snap...not from Gulf disaster operations.  OK...whatever.

 

 

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Coping:  How to Jump Time Lines

We've spent a fair amount of energy this week exploring the idea that local reality may - occasionally, but often enough to be noticed now and then - be subject to distortion for reasons we don't yet fully understand.

 

Whether we're talking about a set of carpenter's measuring devices which agree one day, but not the next, and then gsomehow get 'back into agreement',. or whether something larger, perhaps even a different system of reality is crossing paths with our, is not clear.

 

On this last point, however, here's a strange report - but strange only insofar as it doesn't make sense to the tighten controlled part of our thinking.  The part of our mind that is beyond control doesn't seem to have many problems with stories like this...

"Good Morning, I had to write and tell you about a strange occurrence on Monday. Previously you have heard from my wife about the shadow people doing their thing in front of the children. And then the time/space bubble out by the greenhouse. Well, she had another strange slip, but this one is very interesting and definitely worth examination. Let me preface this by saying she has always been ‘sensitive’. She see’s things and knows things that she shouldn’t. When she gets a bad feeling about something, we tend not do go near it (whatever it may be). She told me about this Monday night, but did not tell me the full details because she thought I reacted a little ‘off’ to what she saw. It was not until Wednesday night that she told me the full story. Here it is, as best as I can relay.

She was sitting on the deck watching our 2 and 3 year old play with the water toys. She started to see little black spots all around her, falling. For a while she really did not think too much of it until she started to concentrate on one of them. As she did she says it was like everything turned black and white and time slowed. To her the spots looked like ash falling. Like that from a camp fire that is taken up from the rising currents of heat, released from the thermal and slowly falls to earth. Only they were everywhere. As she has become very familiar with the ‘shadows’ she decide to try to interact this time. She reached out to touch one of the ‘particles’ on its way down. When she did everything turned back to normal. She looked to her fingers and she was holding the wing of a dragonfly.

I find this extremely fascinating! Did she just pick something out of the ether? And if so, Is there a dragon fly having a hard time getting around on the other side? Seriously though, this is strange and awesome all in one.

Carry on,"

So, as we collect various data points and try to map out what may be a larger - yet misunderstood larger phenomenology - the reports just keep coming in.

 

You may recall a while back the case of the slow-driving 1950's red Cadillac that a reader reported following in the late night/ early morning hours that at a particular bump in the road whether the driver's attention was distracted, turned into a late model Camry?

 

I suggested at the time that it is possible that accidents do occur where people quite sincerely looked, saw nothing oncoming, then looked away momentarily only to be gob-smacked by a large whatever resulting in an accident with sometimes painful evidence that something went wrong.  Could it be that accidents are sometimes caused by timeline or  reality line jumps?

 

Why, the implicates of this for the insurance industry alone are staggering.  What if, as I've suggested elsewhere, the whole field of statistics is just a 'mathematical haze' designed to keep us - and the whole of society - from recognizing the presence of some syrupy goo that pervades everything and yet seems only available for direct manipulation via certain ritualistic practices which pop out of three large sphere of humans endeavoring?  Those sphere, as you might have guessed, would be conventional religious rituals, the self evidenced rituals for certain adepts on a spiritual path, and the 'dark path' types?

 

Returning to the reality gob-smacking around cars for a moment:  If we hypothesize that 'reality can jump and cause accidents, would it now also stand to reason that an occasional reality jumps could also prevent and accident?  Just in the nick of reality, in pops an email with confirmation that yes, a neatly timed reality jump does have the potential to prevent what could otherwise be an accident with serious consequences:

"Finally have reason to write you once again. I had one of those ‘dandy’ disappearing cars the other day. I was running an errand for my wife, and decided to rush a turn on a yellow light. (Yeah, it’s kind of dangerous, and I admit that I am not the best driver in the world.) I managed to ‘cut off’ a dilapidated looking late 80’s vintage compact Chevy Chevette. The driver had his green light and I just barreled into the intersection. I thought to myself ‘oh crap’. Luckily, he was slowly starting from a stop, and I was already at speed. After completing the turn, I looked up into my rear view mirrors (and physically turned my head around)…NO CAR!!! It was as if it had never been there. George, IT most certainly WAS THERE. To paraphrase William Jefferson Clinton- SHAZAM! THE BUCK NEVER GOT HERE! - Thank goodness-"

Intervention of the Almighty Universe?  Perhaps so, but does it (meaning the syrupy goo that warps reality & time) work the other way, too? When an accident is caused, not prevented by a 'reality jump'? 

 

Since people spend so much time awake and driving, where their minds are not specifically trained on  a work-related task (driving being something of an automated response mechanism after a while) we'd almost expect synch-winks and reports of the phenomena to be popping up all over the place. 

 

Sure enough, as I write this at 5:40 AM, in pops another email with another reported reality jump while driving:

"I was driving to work a few days ago, & stopped at a light before turning left on to the road where my office is. The other side of the intersection was empty. Left arrow turns green, off I go & have nearly completed the left turn when I see a bicyclist immediately to my left, riding away from me on a bearing that indicated he had come straight across the intersection in front of me - but he was so close that the only way he could have done that is by riding through the front of my truck! I think I would have noticed that..."

I had one of these odd 'while driving' experiences.  Happened to me as a newsman back in the 1970's when I was chasing down the news up in the Seattle area, including a lot of time spent driving in the city.  Only once, but it was enough to make me conscious of it forever going forward, I came to a stop light and since 'free right turns' are permitted in Washington unless otherwise posted, I looked right (no pedestrians in sight) then left (no oncoming traffic) and then started to advance.

 

All of a sudden not one, but three people just appeared a few feet from my right front fender, one guy carrying a coffee who slapped my hood and called me a stupid sonavabitch, gesturing at the Walk light in his favor and yelling at me for not looking where I was going.  But I had... I was awake, alert, and had just come out of the press parking section of the Municipal Building underground parking garage, had gone up the hill a half block, and was turning south onto 5th avenue when it happened.  Truly a strange slice of life.

 

A reader suggested that we might enjoy a Tom Kenyon article under the heading "The Art of Jumping Time Lines".  But more than anything lately, I'm busily collecting all the 'smoking gun' evidence I can from a wide range of sources, on the theory that with enough data the outline of whatever will resolve into clear enough focus to turn the engineering/monkey mind loose on the problem and get somewhere.

 

There's more than a whiff of smoke to be found in a book, now several years old called Hunt for the Skinwalker: Science Confronts the Unexplained at a Remote Ranch in Utah, coauthored by George Knapp who hosts now and then on CoastToCoastAM when he's not a busy news director in Las Vegas.

 

So, too, are whiffs and hints found in Dean Radin's book Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality.  Damn Schrödinger and his cat, anyway.  Still, we're left to wonder whether we really co create reality -- in which case the 'jumps' of time & matter could be nothing more than an internal processing error (as in the Matrix) -- or whether intention works on something external in which case we oughta be able to engineer it, which in turn would get us propulsion and physical lawbreaking physics for UFO's, interdimensional doorways for star gates and a whole lot of phenomena under the 'other'.  Seen any Sasquatch, skinwalkers, or shapeshifters lately?

 

Still, before we blow up the planet (November?) seems to me one of the most important of all human projects would be a comprehensive study listing out all the phenomena, and then putting the best brains in the world into a setting away from the press, away of the limelight, with the mission "Solve it!"

 

Whether the residents of what would be the functional equivalent of Line Land could figure out the larger reality of Flat Land (along with additional layers of dimensional reality) seems unlikely.  But the religious types, the spiritual aesthetics, and even the child sacrificers of the dark side, all seem to be able to tweak a bit deeper into the mystery of this expanded reality than is common in everyday experience.  How much of this was accessed by the Druids, and other followers of the Witchery Way - and how many died at the hands of religious power-trippers anxious to lock up tithing so they simply offed the competition at the stake?  Or, is that the wrong read of the facts...however troubling it may be to remember the winning side writes its own version of history.  The work is tedious, slow, yet somehow meaningful.

 

If you've got some time this weekend, I'd invite you to line up your own evidence - all the weird stuff that's happened to you in life.  See if there's not some overlooked mechanism behind it, and if so, how it operates and more to the point, how it's manipulated besides the obvious prayer, ritual, and yogic exercises helped along by a vegetarian diet.  That much is about obvious.  But how much further along can we get?

 

Seem so far, most of the breakthroughs in manipulation of 'this stuff' have come from individuals who are then labeled enlightened.  Fine.  But what about a workbook for the rest of us, independent of the powermeisters who demand tithe and offer to sell us a peek?   And how subtle their skein woven into a mindset that includes odd concepts of property and ownership, which are expressions of control...it's all so damn complex.

 

Something to ponder, as we roll through this last bit of Summer.  Hard to come down from the rapid action buzz of high tech life long enough to blank the mind and properly frame the Big Questions.  But worth it, nevertheless, since in the end, it's the only questions that really matter, if you'll forgive the intended double entendre off the word matter.

 

As the Second Depression unfolds, the really good news from the omnihumanity part may be that we'll collectively have a lot more time for thinking since the working hours may head down 'job share road' like they did in the (first) Depression.

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We'll continue watching that particular train wreck Monday morning....or tomorrow for subscribers to Peoplenomics.  Saturday's report has a chalk talk on the charts and where we could go next, the latest FDIC data (if any is released after the market close today), and then Sunday's report digs into the delta between the government jobs forecast of 2002/2003 and the reality of 2009/2010.

 

Send your comments to george@ure.net

 

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Reader Action Department:

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Pass It On

A different take on things - that's what you'll find here most mornings.  If you know of anyone who might also like our content, simply click here and send a link to them.  Or, if you hated what you read, send the link to all your 'worst enemies'.  Like they say in Burbank, "Ain't no such thing as bad press..."

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Last week's report is always here

 

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Thursday August 12, 2010

Can We Bounce?

You want the long answer (bound to be somewhat entertaining) or the short answer (which will bum you out and) which is not part of my business model?  Both?

 

Short answer: "Not enough to matter."

 

Long answer:  In the wake of yesterday's big decline  in the market, we would normally expect a bounce of anywhere from 38.2% to the bump at 50% and the often-hit 61.8%.  BUT those numbers were the convenient stops along the way before the world was swimming in debt and before HF trading/front-running programs which overdo some moves, while fading others.

 

Oh, and talking to Clif - that messiness later in the month (August 25-28) seems to arise not out of Terra or GlobalPop entities which bring up that as a window for market collapse -- but he's still running data and working on the next "Shape of Things to Come" report so give him time (he said, blushing at the low-caliber pun).

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The idea that the market will go on to a bounce leading to a new high is a lot less probable now.  On Wednesday morning, Robin Landry sent out this to his colleagues in the investment community who follow his work:

"Hi Everyone,

This is just a quick update to alert you that the uptrend line from the July low of this year was broken on the open this morning. This says to me that the probability that the top of minor wave 2 is in, and we are now in minor wave 3, of intermediate wave 1, of primary 3. We hit my target area for the Dow as outlined in the last update and also in the middle of the time zone I have been looking at for a top. Bottom line is this. IF my count is correct, the market is starting a very significant decline that, when, over will break the lows of March ’09. There will be rallies along the way but now is the last chance to get out of the way without significant damage to your financial health. Do not listen to those who say a large decline is not in the cards due to indicators they are watching. I have said many times over the years that we are in a period of time that the things that worked well in the past will not work during this Bear Market due to DEGREE of this decline. With High Frequency Trading and all the derivatives that are being used today, the old indicators no longer give an insight into the markets they used to do. First target is July ’10 low around 9600, then July ’09 low around 8100 area. I then believe we will see a nice rally for a few months before turning down again to lower levels. I will try to keep you advised as the decline and wave structure develops. Remember that SURPRISES should be expected in this decline, and they should be toward the downside. As always questions and comments are welcome and I will answer as time allows.  rlandry@allegiance.tv

If I had to throw a dart (and this is in no way financial advice, just how I think the cards will be turned) I wouldn't be surprised to see an 'end-of-August' kind of low - maybe into early September, then the resumption of the Big Decline in mid to late October.

 

Then (in the spirit of the timing around 9/11/2001) a series of real public distractions (Middle East War?  False Flag attacks on American soil?) which would appear to be of foreign sources, yet which upon inspection will neatly serve the purpose of providing an 'other than markets to blame' explanation for what ails us this fall. 

 

IF the Israeli/US Western alliance does not attack Iran's burgeoning by the end of this month, the odds will then increase that the attack will come the week after US elections and that, in turn, sets up a kind of slow-motion chain-reaction (poor choice of words, I admit, given the topic area) which will result in global thermonuclear war lite for 2½ months in 2011.

 

Neat thing about such a war-to-come - if you don't mind all the bodies and the radioactivity, yada, yada, yada - is that it really would take the public's mind off realizing that this is the second major leg down into Depression but it won't be the economic system that's failed us - just like Leg One Down (2001) coming on the heals of the Internet Bubble bursting, swept the public's attention off the root economic cause and provided convenient 'cover' for the PowersThatBe.

 

Oh, and besides the bodies, radiation, yada, yada, there's also the little matter of a massive hyperinflation - which results from a conscious decision by government to inflate its way out of its failing currency.  Plenty of lessons on how that workout is managed, although the post- WW I German Weimar Republic and more recently, Robert Mugabe's sticking it to the banksters of the West via the great Zimbabwe Inflation of the past few years.  This is what to gold? 

 

Thanks to some mighty generous readers, I have several one-hundred trillion dollar Zimbabwe currency taped up on the wall to remind me that there's essentially no difference in hard costs of printing any fiat money, regardless of the number of zeroes on it.

 

Oh sure, the 'war' and the 'attacks' will be real enough in nominal terms, but way off in the background it will be a 'set-up' to finish off the great swindling of America's working class from the last of its lifetime savings and to beggar the upper-middle and destroy capacity worldwide in order to reset the game for another round.  Recall that wars serve a very important economic function - artificially creating demand where markets were previously saturated before and paving the way for a slightly different approach.

 

All depressions end in war - BIG WAR - for this reason.

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All of which gets us around to watching the timing of the little war (before the Big War, which is how all economic depressions end, but which of course have already figured out).  Thus, the story today on the Haartez.com website under the headline "The morning after the attack on Iran" becomes a must-read, as does the VOA report that Iran is still the top 'terror threat' in the world as "The U.S. State Department's annual report on international terrorism found the Islamic Republic of Iran is still the most active state sponsor of terrorism in the world."

 

Also - curiously timed since it could fit either timing outcome - is The Atlantic's  new analysis of how the M.E. will play out under the title "The Point of No Return" - definitely worth bookmarking if you're pressed for time this morning.

 

All of which is long-term directional, but not worth a damn for the short-term direction of the market.

 

For that we need to look at the "Number de Jour".  The main serving this morning is the weekly jobs reports:

"In the week ending Aug. 7, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 484,000, an increase of 2,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 482,000. The 4-week moving average was 473,500, an increase of 14,250 from the previous week's revised average of 459,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.5 percent for the week ending July 31, a decrease of 0.1 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate of 3.6 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending July 31 was 4,452,000, a decrease of 118,000 from the preceding week's revised level of 4,570,000. The 4-week moving average was 4,518,500, a decrease of 64,500 from the preceding week's revised average of 4,583,000.

The fiscal year-to-date average of seasonally adjusted weekly insured unemployment, which corresponds to the appropriated AWIU trigger, was 5.018 million. "

Frigging dandy.  Ya'll be sure and come back tomorrow when our "Numbers de jour" will be the monthly Consumer Price Index, retail fails...I mean retail sales and the ever popular ('cuz it's easy to dance to) Michigan Sentiment numbers.

 

In keeping with the tone of my Wednesday note "Fed In The Box" the NY Post today has an article about how the Fed is about out of bullets under the headline "Empty Chambers: Bernanke's flaccid Fed sends investors to the exits...". 

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While this talk about war and war timing may sound far fetched, consider that the problem from the macroeconomic perspective is this:  How else could do you obsolete inappropriate intangible capital to eliminated its debt drag?

 

I won't do all your thinking for you, but a first bite might be this paper by Leonard Nakamura Philadelphia Fed paper...

 

so how big is the derivatives notional value out there?  And, is it a form of intangible capital?  You see where this goes, right?

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Well, gold's getting it - on a tear this morning and up nearly $16 bucks when I looked.  Disappointed by Crisco and the jobs data, more downside action seems in store.

 

And that risky position being short with my play money paid 10% in just one day.  Maybe 15-18% in two, the way things look now.  Oh well, good thing I don't give financial advice, huh?

 

Who Got Bailed?

Oh, lots of overseas banks - you money you and I so graciously provided - over our strenuous objections at the time.  "Watchdog panel cites global impact of US bailout" makes is sound like the PTB having their way with Congress is somehow OK and that ignoring the clear will of the people to save the Richie Riches is just peach.  Well, FMTT (the last three letters mean  ...me to tears... and is a common SF / military phrase if you need a hint what it means...)

 

Banging Ecuador

Say, are big quakes working their way of the South American west coast?  This morning there was a 6.9 shake in Ecuador...backside of ther Andes...too early for damage reports.

 

Another Ugly Linguistic Fill

Several dozen readers have sent me (and Clif) links to the headline over at the WorldVisionPortal site about the emergence of the Blue Flu which may evolve into Blue Plague in the wake of the Gulf Spill(s) and all those dispersants.

 

Thanks for the links, but enough...Thanks to the miracle of a rickety time machine, we've known about this for a couple of years.  We're past the point of surprise on any of this stuff.

 

Clicking Away (tropical) Depression

I assume you've seen the headline that the "Relief well drilling to resume as tropical depression falls apart"...??  Pure accident that this happened, or is the larger level of planetary controllers a/k/a the PowersThatBe at work in plain sight?

 

A reader with an open mind on such things believes HAARP technology may be responsible for busting up this latest potential hurricane...

Another tropical storm bounces off the HAARP Gulf of Mexico High Pressure Shield and collapses. Check out the HAARP Fluxgate Magnetometer; Did you notice people were crabbier yesterday, cause I did. looks like fault lines are not the only Terra items that get grumpy with HAARP.

Use the 'previous day' function under the chart to look at yesterday's action (date below the x axis time labels).

---

By the way, a buddy of mine in South Florida called last night to notice that a lot of plants (big ones like palm trees) are dying.  "If they're dying, I'm getting out of here..." he explained. 

 

FBI's Copyright Focus

Say, you didn't happen to catch that the "FBI Prioritizes Copyright Issues; Not so concerned about Missing Persons" over at TechDirt?

 

All of which wouldn't be too surprising, but the article suggests things like identity theft are also going down the fed's list of focal issues.

 

Time to copyright your identity, along with all use of DNA, photographic likenesses and inked impressions of body parts?  I know it sounds weird, but there's no law permitting government free use of copyright material, is there?  Thus, if you were ever caught doing something...could you be prosecuted without payment of copyright fees (couple of million bucks, maybe?) to use your name and likeness?  Just thinking out loud here...

 

The Right-Left Game, Redux

UrbanSurvival reader Chris Ross has a fine honor:  His song "Freedom" has made "The Best (or Worst) Tea Party-Inspired Music (Videos)" list.  Gotta wonder what other lists a fellow can get on for singing about quickly disappearing American values?  It ain't right-left politics, it's Up-Down...which just scares the bejeezus out of the PTB when people start giving voice to that...

 

Perseids:  Time to Shower

Might want to click over to www.spaceweather.com  and read up on the Perseids meteor shower which peaks tonight.

 

Meantime a reader sends this curious reminder:

"Ring around the Rosery ...pocket full f posey's ashes, ashes THEY all fall down!

Remember back about 6 months ago.. god of war, mars, god of war.. how come you havent mentioned how close Mars will be to aerth this month.. closest in 65,000 years.. if my understanding is correct... bound to be some gravitational pulls.. although minute..still an avalanch starts with a single solid H2.O molecule.."

Uh... I'll do my part by using a littler extra water in my evening adult refreshment.  Only one kinda shower at the ranch today, clouds are in the forecast for tonight.  Besides, the mars is closest emails have been around for years...

 

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Coping:  "Dimension Slips" II

A fair amount of thoughtful mail has popped in after yesterday's discussion of people finding trouble measuring things.

"Hey George -

There are a few of us here in Austin that read your column regularly and enjoy it. (Thanks, btw.) 

My interest, primarily, is more the predictive language and the woo-woo "strange" stuff.

I write my own column mostly relating Astrology, Numerology and what I "get" via the Tarot and the Akashic Records (a la Edgar Cayce).

Anyway, I was thinking about yesterday's column and everyone having problems with measurements.  Now you guys have gotten recently that the sun could start affecting us adversely. I have also read from other sources (Astrologers and/or channeled material) that the sun can start affecting our mental and emotional states if we are not centered/grounded and/or working on our spiritual self, what-have-you.

Now, one thing that I notice in general is that I seem to experience weird stuff before others do. I think it is partly because I've grown sensitive to stimulus and partly because it then allows me to write about it in my column and help people out - if only to validate what they are experiencing.

Well, all that being said, I've been feeling pretty crazy lately.  I am not experiencing dimensional issues (either with measuring or otherwise), but I am finding my mind not working normally.  I find it popping out memories out of no where that I haven't thought about it a long time, like it is misfiring and like a memory glitch in a computer.  Also some "patterns" from long ago seem to have reared recently (thought patterns I thought were solved).

So, let's think about Occam's razor for a sec.  What is more likely, that dimensions are shifting such that the actual lengths of physical objects is shifting, or that we are experiencing some type of mental misfiring that is causing us to handle things like measurement, time/space perception, and chain of thought oddly?  It does fit what you guys have gotten - how was it phrased, "sun disease"?

Anyway - this just popped in while waking, which is often how I get intuitive hits, so I am going to sit with this, do a Tarot reading or two, and then maybe write about it in my own blog.  But I thought I would shoot you an email about it for the fun of it...

Keep up the good stuff (let's just say all of it) & Namasté from a TX "neighbor",
David Tangredi

www.AFoolsInclination.com

An interesting site, too...which gets us back to the 'time slips' and 'dimension slip reports...like this one:

"OK, so you had that posting about weird measurements in OK. I concur. On Monday, here in NE Kansas (38.97N, 95.23W) my beloved, a mature man who has made many tape measure measurements in his life, measured our front door as we need to replace it and we were going to make the pilgrimage to Home Depot for a new one. I with pen and paper waited his numbers -- "Well, it's 75 ish... well... maybe." I said to him it was either 75 or it was not and if it was 75 and a quarter he needed to say so. He measured again. "Well, it is 74." "Dear," says I in my sweetest wifey voice, it was 75 ish but now it is 74? How is that?" He measures again. "Well, it is 74 now," he says. That was Monday. Today (Wednesday) it is 76". As you so often say, "WTF?"

Had a time slip too. This was on the one cool day in early August -- sad thing about the change in the weather in KS is that it used to be nice -- low humidity even if it was 100 degrees -- now it is much more South Texas-like with high humidities. We actually had a day a couple of weeks ago that was like the old days (three or four years ago) I have to say as a 43-year resident of Houston with it's Saigon-like humidities, moving here in the mid-90s was wonderful. No more bad hair days -- until now -- I am having to use the same humidity control stuff that I used in the Houston days. AAAAnnnnyyyyway:

Time slip. Took the doggies out for a throw. Walked our usual route which takes all of two minutes to inspect where that neighbor cat hangs out and the little rat dog next door poops. I threw the ball once, Sophie (as always) got it and ran ahead refusing to give it to me. Nine gave chase. We got around behind our house and I looked up, saw a jet, leaving what I can only imagine was a chem-trail, flying west from Topeka over Larryville. The trail was very high and if you held up your arm full length and opened your thumb and forefinger up to about 2.5" that was how "big" it was. I looked down at my dogs who had laid down in the grass on the berm behind the house, with this "uhhhhh... what?" look. I looked back up at the sky where the jet/trail was and it was simply gone. I thought "huh?" In a perfectly cloudless sky, waaay off to the north of where I'd spotted the trail was a fuzzed out long-ish "cloud". I stared. It was the chem-trail after the upper level winds had moved it well north of its original deployment. Normally it takes 20-30 minutes for something like that to happen, even on a very windy day. I looked back at the dogs. They were thoroughly bored with me and were basically napping in the cool grass. I told them there were cookies waiting for them inside and we walked inside. I know we were only outside about 5 and no more than 10 minutes. When I got back in, 25 minutes had passed since I walked outside. And again I ask you, WTF?"

Weird shows up in Hawaii:

"Aloha George,

Read your opening story on measurements this week w/great interest.

Funny thing is I had set aside an odd mishap that's been going on for about a month now..until you posted something from a reader regarding their coffee making.

I have simplified coffee making for hubby in the morning if he has to get up extra early so we could enjoy a good cup of java. You see he's the kind of guy that could take a shower 1/2 asleep & come out still 1/2 asleep so setting a routine for him if his eyes were 1/2 closed was important...for both of us :)

We order Peets. We have a Capresso machine. Needless to say I love my java, so ruining the first cup of the day is a tough awakening. For some reason *sometimes* when hubby has been making the coffee in the past month the mugs come up short -- making the coffee waaaaay too strong. Yet on other days it's perfect!

I've been scratching my head on this one as there is NO way for him to mess this up. Empty one full container of cold water from the fridge. (check) Add coffee. (check) Press start. (check)

This morning I ended up w/a 1/3 of a cup.

It wasn't that he was doing anything wrong--because it's happened to me as well. (& I'm wide awake when I make it) Heck I even turned the Capresso upside down one morning to see if there was water *trapped* in there! Nada.

Got me to thinking....maybe I'll just monitor the *time* the coffee is being made to see if there is a pattern in the morning hours. The odd thing is that is the only time of day it happens!"

And this from a reader in Chicago:

"George,

All the reader comments from the past couple days about spatial dimensions 'slipping' made me think of a strange feeling I got a few days ago--and maybe this is a new one for you (though you've probably heard/seen almost everything!). I'm a pianist, old school Russian trained, and have played since the age of 5, so my body has grown up knowing the feel of a keyboard. It's an extremely precise physical connection, a nearly unconscious one, and training has bred a high degree of physical sensitivity. So even though I'm not arthritic I can tell when the weather's changing just by the slight difference in feeling.

Practicing the other day I started to feel acute discomfort I hadn't before. It wasn't any of the number of ways that I ache from the weather changing, not being warmed up, tired, doing something wrong, etc., it hurt in strange places in my hands and arms that don't normally. It has happened only a couple of times recently (that I remember), and then a thought occurred to me last week, it felt like I was playing on a keyboard that was too small. Disconcerting to say the least. And it felt like I was compensating in every dimension, width, front-back depth, and even vertical depth (i.e. height of the black keys). The keys didn't look smaller, and measuring them wouldn't have helped since I wouldn't know the 'normal' measurements anyway. The feeling was slight, but more so than the difference that would be expected playing a different piano. Oh, and it's the same piano I've had for a few years. Definitely one of the oddest feelings I've experienced.

Not sure what that adds to the discussion, but there it is."

And not to drive the point into the ground, but there's this one, too:

"Hi George,

When I read about the strange things happening with measuring wood a chill ran down my spine. I do custom cabinet work (more as a hobby than a business) and as such precise measurements are simply part of the job, and normally I have no problem. As some of the other folks point out -- measure twice and only cut once.

Well, about six months back I suddenly found that everything I was doing seemed to be off by 1/16" to 1/8". Now that may not sound like much, but in cabinet work a 1/16" is huge, and 1/8" is a disaster. In frustration I decided to check my measurement devices -- tape measure, square, yard stick, saw fence, etc., and what I found was that NONE OF THEM AGREED WITH EACH OTHER! It was weird, but I figured that is just how far we, as a society, have slipped and I started using only one device for all critical measurements. Problem solved. Right?

Okay, here is the weird part -- after reading your report yesterday I decided to check and see if all my measuring stuff was still different....IT IS NOT! My tape measure agrees with my yard stick, which both agree with my square, and all agree with the table saw fence...NOW.

And, as I was thinking about it, I haven't had the problem in months. Just wanted to put my 2 cent worth into the discussion."

There was plenty of other email,, too - just too busy to get all of it posted.  One, for example, explained that the Racetrack Playa rocks were moved by high winds.  But, why some rocks, not others?  And why aren't they all pilled up at one end of the track, down wind from the prevailing wind?  Questions, always damnable questions.  Or maybe it's the answers becoming damned...hard telling.

 

Still, have some suggestion that whatever is slipping involves some of the following:

• Time gets wonky and periods go missing

• The disappearing and reappearing cars and such suggest reality changes in a massive way

• Dimensional shifting is reported by many people

• ...and on and on....

New phenomenology?  Or, old phenomena that a few people (Edward Leedskalnin of Coral Castle fame, for example) are somehow able to tap into and manipulate?  Darned if I know.

 

www.ki4u.com Access

Had a dandy follow-up from Shane Connor over at www.ki4u.com on the fair number of people who were unable to access his site from Australia, where he sells recalibrated radiation equipment (think civil defense here) as well as those nifty new pocket patch dosimeters.

George,
I'd gotten 9 trace routes, as a result of your request of readers, and passed them onto Kent  [their IT guy - G] to evaluate.

He tells me he can't conclusively point to any official interruptions and most look to be from risky IP's that  we had blocked. Our having unblocked some of those normally risky IP's has taken care of many of the other's that could not get through. We are still a little concerned, though, why, since we had not changed our blocked list in six years, that we'd had so many in just last six months stop being able to get through, especially from the Aussies.

We've set up a program here now to watch and track our international traffic even closer now, to catch changes in volumes quicker, hopefully before having visitors tell us first that they can't access the site.
_________________

On another note, your mention today of "Ill Winds File " reminds me that my most recent guide I'd just written, covers basically the same subject of radiation contamination coming in on the wind, from
afar, it's entitled "When An ill Wind Blows From Afar!" at www.ki4u.com/illwind.htm

You should give it a read sometime, it's pretty interesting, as I'd written it for the panic we'll likely see here when Iran nuke facilities get bombed, or Pakistan and India mix-it-up, or North Korea goes wild, and then we have their nuke contamination blowing in here to the USA on the winds. You'll be surprised how much and how often that's already happened in the past, and most certainly will again in the future. 

Keep that 'ill wind' guide in-mind for sharing it with readers when any of the above happens, as it'll be then just what they will need to know then.

- Shane

Don't even need a war, per se, to make the 'Ill Winds" worth a read, since you're no doubt aware of all the press coverage of the wildfires in Russia putting once-grounded radioactive leftovers from Chernobyl back into the atmopshere...

 

Drugged in Canada?

Then you need to keep an eye on this developing story:

"Dear Mr. Ure,

There is no official reason being given why Canadian provinces are experiencing growing back orders on 30 to 50 types of common medications. This problem has developed in the last year. Some are blaming government price controls, others are blaming ObamaCare for opening generic drug opportunities in the USA. Canadian pharmacists are rationing some patients' prescriptions. They are also reformulating medicines to act as substitutes for the missing originals.

This should become interesting rather quickly as Canadian medicare is funded federally but managed by the individual provinces. I am confident the wealthy provinces will bid whatever it takes to secure what they deem as their entitlement of product. A sick but still ambulatory population is a bane of elected officials. You really weren't joking when you advised to stock up on vodka and whisky, were you? (Disclaimer: Please consult a physician before embarking on a program of self-care!)

The reader's up in Winnipeg...

 

Monkeying Around in Washington

Here's an email making the rounds that gives keen insight into the psychology of animals:

"Start with a cage containing five monkeys. Inside the cage, hang a banana on a string and place a set of stairs under it.

Before long, a monkey will go to the stairs and start to climb towards the banana.

As soon as he touches the stairs, spray all the other monkeys with cold water.

After a while another monkey makes the attempt with same result, all the other monkeys are sprayed with cold water.

Pretty soon when another Monkey tries to climb the stairs, the other monkeys will try to prevent it.

Now, put the cold water away. Remove one monkey from the cage and replace it with a new one.

The new monkey sees the banana and wants to climb the stairs.

To his shock, all of the other monkeys beat the snot out of him. After another attempt and attack, he knows that if he tries to climb the stairs he will be assaulted.

Next, remove another of the original five monkeys and replace it with a new one.

The newcomer goes to the stairs and is attacked.

The previous newcomer takes part in the punishment with enthusiasm. Likewise, replace a third original monkey with a new one, then a fourth, then the fifth.

Every time the newest monkey takes to the stairs he is attacked.

Most of the monkeys that are beating him up have no idea why they were not permitted to climb the stairs

OR even why they are participating in the beating of the newest monkey. Finally, after replacing all of the original monkeys, none of the remaining monkeys have ever been sprayed with cold water.

Nevertheless, no monkey ever again approaches the stairs to try for the banana.

Why not?

Because as far as they know, that is the way it has always been done around here.

And that, my fellow monkeys, is how Congress operates -

And precisely why we need to REPLACE all the original monkeys this November.

My apologies to small simian types.  Terrible thing I've done here, posting this comparison of your part of the family tree with sitting members of Congress.  Sorry.  Or at least nearly so.  -Curious George

 

---

Wednesday August 12, 2010

Fed In The Box

The Fed is running out of 'wiggle room' and the Balance of Trade isn't helping. That's where we start today.  While the Fed decision to hold rates steady is being assessed by investors, the markets in Asia were mostly down last night and in Europe this morning much the same.

 

For the US marts, this  could be a watershed day.  The reason?  Technically we've been in an ascending triangle.  Technical analysis (theory) holds that if a triangle formation points up the market will head down in a major way when the triangle is complete.  Conversely, a downward pointing triangle often results in an upward move.

 

Of course I'm loaded to the gunwales on the short side, expecting any minute for the market to roll over and play dead...except it may not be play.

 

Although the Fed gets a lot of attention, there is a lot of other news going on in background which could make markets nervous.  Congress is going back to work (or whatever it is they do, if'n you follow).  The democorps have plans for a second stimulus bill which has given the republicorps reason for lots of news names for it such as "Frivolous Acts of Ineffective Largess" - the FAIL Act.

 

On the other hand, we have to give intellectual honesty points to one-time Reagan administration Office of Management and Budget Director David Stockman who is willing to stand up and place much of the blame on the Bushies, saying the Bush administration's tax cuts will drive America into bankruptcy.

 

Of course, we've been nattering on about the pending 'death of the dollar' in November for years - when something is going to be as big & widely impacting as that, it's hard to get the year right, so it turns out.  Still, infinite debt loads can't work forever.

 

A friend of mine, Bob Bronson, in a note to colleagues noted this:

"…our work shows the 5.5-week, 11.6% advance (so far) from the Jul 1 S&P 500 (SPX) index’s intraday low of 1011 up to yesterday’s SPX intraday high at 1129, which was near the lower end of the normal retracement range of between one-half and two-thirds of the preceding 17.1% decline from the Apr 26 SPX high at 1220 down to its Jul 1 intraday low at 1012, will now be likely followed by a much larger decline probably much closer to 30%, if not more. "

Couple that with Robin Landry's outlook, the August 13 cycle turn in Robin Handler's work (and scads of others edging toward the bearish side) I would sure consider doing a switch of any money in stock funds into treasuries or money markets till this sorts out.  But THIS IS NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE - just what I'd do with my own money. 

 

FWIW I'm only 8% of personal M1 (cash, treasuries, gold, silver, stocks, etc) in stocks and that's all on the short side.  When the drop happens, I will take dough off the table to get stocks back under 10% of personal M1.

 

If my outlook is right, we will drop to the 8,500 Dow range, then pop up to 9,500 or maybe 10,000 and then I may go in short with a higher percentage (20%) expecting a triple there on the next leg down, but we shall see. 

 

The economic long wave is alive and well.  The tough decision for all investors is staying in to play the potential train wreck, or flee to safety of a TreasuryDirect account, bond fund, or money market.  Your call, rotsa ruck.

 

Fed's no 'in the box' anything they do is going to be wrong and the market declines to come will just amplify that concept.

 

BoTrade: The Gap Is Back

Statistical train wreck of the day?  Balance of Trade report just out:

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that total June exports of $150.5 billion and imports of $200.3 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $49.9 billion, up from $42.0 billion in May, revised. June exports were $2.0 billion less than May exports of $152.4 billion. June imports were $5.9 billion more than May imports of $194.4 billion.

 

In June, the goods deficit increased $7.7 billion from May to $62.0 billion, and the services surplus decreased $0.2 billion to $12.1 billion. Exports of goods decreased $2.3 billion to $105.0 billion, and imports of goods increased $5.4 billion to $167.0 billion. Exports of services increased $0.3 billion to $45.5 billion, and imports of services increased $0.6 billion to $33.3 billion.

 

The goods and services deficit increased $22.8 billion from June 2009 to June 2010. Exports were up $22.6 billion, or 17.7 percent, and imports were up $45.3 billion, or 29.2 percent.

 

Goods (Census basis)

The May to June decrease in exports of goods reflected decreases in capital goods ($1.4 billion); industrial supplies and materials ($1.0 billion); and foods, feeds, and beverages ($0.3 billion). Increases occurred in automotive vehicles, parts, and engines ($0.2 billion); other goods ($0.2 billion); and consumer goods ($0.1 billion).

 

The May to June increase in imports of goods reflected increases in consumer goods ($3.1 billion); automotive vehicles, parts, and engines ($1.3 billion); other goods ($0.6 billion); and capital goods ($0.5 billion). A decrease occurred in industrial supplies and materials ($0.2 billion). Foods, feeds, and beverages were virtually unchanged.

Rather than write a thousand words about economic peril, try this simple picture which summarizes my outlook:

 

 

March To War

Cruising for a Bruising?

The well-connected Middle East news service Debka.com has notes this morning on how the USS Truman is being posted opposite the Strait of Hormuz  as the chance of war with Iran continues to escalate.

 

Likely reason Israel (& the US) will attack Iran sooner than later may be found in reports from the International Atomic Energy Agency report that Iran has bumped its uranium enrichment program up to the next level of purity - which means they continue getting closer to weapons grade material.

 

Iran is throwing gasoline on itself with headlines like "we have dug mass graves for your soldiers".  WTF?  For normally smart people doesn't Iran have even a basic book on Western Public Relations tactics?

---

As we watch this develop, with a little knowledge of what predictive linguistics look like this fall, seems we have two possible paths here:  One would be an Israeli-US preemptive attack late this month, in which case tghe global war to follow (November 8-12'ish) would only last four days.  OR, the attack on Iran's nukes is carried out in the aforementioned November window and that leaves the global nuking going on for 2½ in to 2011.

 

Pick your poison...

 

Relosing Iraq?

Not sure if that's a word, or just a concept, but what would you call backing a bunch of Iraqis who then turn tail and join up with al Qaida?

 

Politics and Humanitarian Aid

Militants in Pakistan are trying a really hard sell:  Trying to keep the 14-odd million impacted by floods from getting/accepting Western aid. 

 

I've never been a fan of martyrdom, but even less so if it involves missing a meal.  I'm a big fan of repetitive tasks, too...

 

Ill Winds File

The forest fires in Russia have now hit the contaminated lands around Chernobyl.

 

Reader note from Eastern Europe:

"Note the " It may therefore contribute to the so-called secondary contamination of populated areas outside the zone. In this case, the authorities should notify residents as soon as possible risk areas and to consider the possibility to take their deactivation or resettlement." section. Resettlement?Diaspora???

We have kinda nervous day here in Eastern Europe."

New Orleans Blow

National Weather Service has a warning out for a tropical depression moving up out of the Gulf:

SATELLITE AND SURFACE DATA INDICATE THAT THE DEPRESSION HAS LOST SOME ORGANIZATION AND COULD BE DEGENERATING INTO A BROAD AREA OF LOW PRESSURE.

AT 700 AM CDT...1200 UTC...THE CENTER OF TROPICAL DEPRESSION FIVE WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 27.1 NORTH...LONGITUDE 85.8 WEST. THE DEPRESSION IS MOVING TOWARD THE NORTHWEST NEAR 12 MPH...19 KM/HR. THIS GENERAL MOTION IS FORECAST TO CONTINUE TODAY...WITH A DECREASE IN FORWARD SPEED EXPECTED ON THURSDAY. ON THE FORECAST TRACK...THE CENTER OF THE TROPICAL CYCLONE WILL BE APPROACHING THE NORTH CENTRAL GULF OF MEXICO TONIGHT OR THURSDAY MORNING.

MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS HAVE DECREASED TO NEAR 30 MPH...45 KM/HR... WITH HIGHER GUSTS. ALTHOUGH THE DEPRESSION HAS WEAKENED...SOME STRENGTHENING IS POSSIBLE BEFORE THE CENTER REACHES THE COAST ON THURSDAY.

ESTIMATED MINIMUM CENTRAL PRESSURE IS 1008 MB...29.77 INCHES.

HAZARDS AFFECTING LAND ---------------------- RAINFALL...TOTAL RAIN ACCUMULATIONS OF 3 TO 5 INCHES WITH ISOLATED MAXIMUM AMOUNTS OF 8 INCHES ARE POSSIBLE FROM SOUTHEASTERN LOUISIANA TO THE WESTERN FLORIDA PANHANDLE THROUGH FRIDAY MORNING.

We could use some rain up this way in East Texas, too, but doesn't seem likely Tropical Depression Five will do anything...at least for now.

 

This is Sick Dept.

Worse than MRSA?  A new 'superbug' has been found in Britain coming from India and it's got the doctor types weirded out because there's nothing in the pipeline to treat it.

---

"Au contraire!" says the People's Economist.  "End globalism and turn off those 8-thousand mile supply lines....that's stop it cold..."

 

Of course, no one will listen - too much cash for the elites on the table.

 

Washington Drug Testing

Now that press spokeser Robert Gibbs says leftwing critics of president Obama 'ought to be drug tested' I don't suppose anyone would mind if everyone in Washington wad drug tested?

 

Seems to me that since many of us regular human types need to pee in a cup to drive a truck, fly a plane, or whatever, that maybe the people who have a hand in spending all of our damn money oughta be tested, too? 

 

Hell, even publish all their personal financial information real-time, too.  What happened to transparency?

 

Is it November yet?  I've been punching holes in paper for the last two weeks every time I read one of these political stories...

 

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Wednesday at the WuJo

Coping:  Those "Dimension Slippage" Reports

Part and parcel of the arrival of 2012, and it's accompanying woo-woo, I started periodic postings a year, or so, back where we open up the mats down at the intellectual Dojo (martial arts center) so that common sense & logic can do battle with anomalous observed reality which every so often gets out of place.  We call it the WuJo.  Woo-woo meets science.

 

A further reason for such discussion is my friend Clif over at www.halfpasthuman.com [yes, he's working on the long-term values sets for the next Shape of Things to Come" reports that he produces, but don't ask me when again, or I'll slap you] observed in the data he gathers about the future a whole bunch of oddities that together form an ad-hoc data clump called 'space goat farts' - a kind of macro bit bucket where oddities coming down the road are cast for later analysis.

 

All of which would be fine, and simply an artifact of processing, except that there has been plenty of High strangeness (yeah, early, poor puns is all I do till noon on Wednesdays) observed in this data that demands rigorous intellectual inspection.  Such a meta set of data within a larger data set) manifested itself a while back which might be described as 'time slips, TimeCreep, or the new word that encompasses the problem - hyperchronism, which is so bothersome that Clif posted a whole paper on it over here at his site.  With me so far, or do you find yourself clinging to that cup of coffee like an intellectual life preserver?

 

There's a problem within the weirdness that then comes along which was brought to my attention two days ago with a PhD buddy up in Oklahoma who reported that not only had he experienced the phenomena first-hand, but so had his daughter.

There seem to be two manifestations of 'dimensional slippage'.  One where a measurement 'known' good at one location, changes at another and maintains the change when returned to the original location.  OR, a second variant is something of a known dimension at a specific location seems to become elastic - either getting longer, or shorter, much to the consternation of the humans involved.

 

This may sound like a whole lot of foreplay to get to the following reader reports, but it's just damn interesting as I think you'll agree as we review the submissions in response yo our call for reports.

 

Tinfoil hat on?   OK, here we go...off to the mats in the WuJo...

Hey George, I am a leadman at [deleted] Industries in a shop where we build light poles, communication poles and such. Haven’t really noticed any uptick in rejects, and our dimensions need to be within a 1/16th of an inch. Actually the opposite has happened in the last 2 weeks. Hmmm, maybe everyone has gotten used to the change?

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Maybe its just barns. I’m in the process of building a barn to hold my tractor and miscellaneous attachments. I asked for a quote from a local construction company for the barn — the barn is to be 30’ x 40’. They came out to look at where it goes and to drop some marker flags on the corners of the barn so that we could get a building permit. They measured and placed flags on the corners. We moved the barn once and measured the corners a couple of more times before we were all happy with the placement. It was my job to level out the ground before they could start the job.

I got right to work with my John Deere 4320 with the CX400 front loader and drug the foundation out flat, being careful to leave the original flags in place till the very last few scoops of dirt. Once removed them, I went back to measure and drive in some corner stakes. Funny thing was, the pad that I dug was about 24’ x 30’ --> way off. The thing is, two profession builders had measured and placed those original flags that I used as guides to dig the pad with. I measured them as well. How could the dimensions be off that much? Its easy to ‘see’ 6-10’ of error. I’m an engineer by trade and I can normally guess distances within a couple of inches. I’m totally baffled.

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We had a similar experience with horse equipment, but on Sunday. This was in Southwest NH. A friend & I ride her 2 horses at least once a week during the summer. Sunday I put on my helmet and the fit was very tight. I loosened the chin strap and took it off/on several times before giving up on it feeling right. I commented on it at the same time that she noted the bridle on her horse wasn't fitting right. We speculated on reasons: big hair, humidity changes in the air, but came to no solid conclusion. I can't wait to tell her about the OK reader's experience.

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[this is more a time-slip] George, it is crazy that you mention this today. I was returning from a family emergency this weekend and had a connection in Chicago. I landed around noon and had an hour before my next flight. I went straight to the gate and got there without any problems. It was about 20 minutes before I was to board my next flight. I picked up a great new book, Glenn Beck’s Overton Window, and started reading. Before I knew it it was 1:15pm and I’d missed my flight! In all the years I’ve been flying I have NEVER missed a flight due to my own mistake. I’ve missed connections before due to things outside of my control. I never heard any announcements for my flight. I never saw any passengers get up. I never heard the “Last call for Mr. XYZ” announcement for me. I figure I lost about 15 minutes where I was completely zoned out. Well, I had plenty of time to read now, and decided to time how long it took me to read 30 pages. It took about 30 minutes give or take. In the estimated 35 minutes from the time I’d started reading to the time that I figured out where I was, I’d read 22 pages. Just too weird.

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Yesterday while pouring coffee from a fixed volume coffee pot into a fixed volume carafe, which happens every morning, i ended up with an extra half cup of water that would not fit into the coffee pot. This morning, the carafe took all the water - my second cup is on the way down.

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Saturday my daughter found my ex’s measuring tool (it’s for measuring wood and folds ups) I told her to put it back in the garage and forgot about it. Sunday I find it broken in pieces…I was a little annoyed but no big deal……..

Yesterday my nephew comes over and suddenly I find him playing with my tape measure (no idea where he got it from) And he BREAKS it. Not really a big deal…but something struck me as odd. No one ever plays with tools etc b/c I keep them put away…suddenly two down in three days..

I come in and read your site today and voila. I can only take a stab at what it means…the grids are “breaking” or perhaps the distance or separation between levels is going to “break”.

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The golden rule of carpentry, "Measure twice cut once" hasn't worked well for me either these days. Glad it's not just my imagination.

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And here I thought I was going completely out of my mind. I was putting in some new floors for our rabbit cages a couple of weeks ago, ½” plywood just cut to size and slide them in - no problem. My dad was an industrial arts teacher and taught me how to measure twice cut once ever since I was 5 and it’s always stuck with me. Anyway I cut the three floors out and they were all a ½” too long…hmmm. Now here’s the strange part, I cut the ½” off and low and behold they were still ½” too long…WTF! At this point company arrived and I put everything down and declared work in progress, when I returned later I cut off the ½” again and everything fit perfectly. Next project was Sunday evening, put a wall mount kit up for the flat screen TV. Measure for the stud center, drill a pilot hole and yup about 1” off the stud. Second try was bang on. Now I know I can blame Universe for my incompetence. Glad to know I’m only half way out of my mind.

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Hi from Costa Rica,

On Tuesday August 3 I measured four pieces of 1 x 2 inch metal to reinforce a greenhouse roof in my garden. I remember I was annoyed that all four pieces were different because the people who originally built the greenhouse had made it so out-of-square, and measured several times to make sure the pieces would exactly fit between the existing roof structure. I had the pieces cut to measure at a local hardware store and rechecked my measurements before I left. When the welders came later that day to do the work, I was extremely embarrassed because all four pieces were approximately 1 inch longer! My wife was entertained by such a stupid error but neither the workers, nor I thought it was so funny.

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Ok, George, my mouth dropped open this morning while reading your report about measurements changing! Over the past several weeks I've experienced a problem with a simple measurement, and it's had me thinking I was either losing my mind or going blind.

I recently finished building a new stand-alone garage, and since I live in southeast Kansas where temperatures go to both extremes, I wanted to install a window air conditioner/heater unit. Simple, right? Well, I go out and measure the opening in the window (15" x 30"), then get online and start looking for units that will fit my window. I found one at Sears that I thought would be perfect, but before ordering it I thought I should measure the window again just to be sure. My second measurement was 15" x 33", and I thought WTF? So I go back inside and make sure the AC I had picked out would still fit, and it would, but at this point I've really begun to question myself, so I go out and measure again before placing the order. This time I get 14.75" x 29.5", and it's at that point I think I've completely forgotten how to read a tape measure, so I ask my wife to come out and watch me measure again. With her watching, I get 15" x 30". We write down the measurements and go back inside, then come back out in a couple of hours to measure again.....14.5" x 30.5". I still haven't ordered the damn AC because I'm afraid of my tape measure! George, I'm a 56 year old with an engineering degree, and had just finished building a new garage from scratch, with no known errors. Until reading your report this morning I thought I was really losing it!

Taken individually, each of these reports seems to be explainable.  But taken as a whole - plus the time and physical location slips - there's the outline of a new class of phenomenology.   Seems to involve place, measure, and time in the very limited sense that we 'know' it.  Might involve animals of one type, or other, too, since in a couple of cases horses were involved.  Horses as consorts of a larger reality?  Kinda like black cats (like Zeus)?

 

The phenomena (dimension slips) seems like it may apply on any number of 'axes' of reality; height, width, breath, time/persistence.  Yet, it's also subtle.  Nevertheless, we may have caught a 'wave' here in the past week.

 

But there may be more evidence of waves ( of a 1.5 to 2-week duration) staring us right in the face.  It's just because we don't specifically look at supposedly random data since we assume there'd be no point, since our perception limits our ability to see.  Show yuou what I mean in this email from a fellow with a high-end audio company out in Portland, Oregon:

"Other than my beltline, I have no dimensional disparity to report.

I do, however want to comment on a trend I have noticed in my line of work. What I call Failure Waves, lasting about 1.5 to 2 weeks.

I answer tech support phone calls as part of my duties here at the audio company. We make and sell amps and speakers for home audio. The tech support calls come from all over the country and they come in waves.

I am right now in the middle of a “intermittent failure” wave. I get call after call where my trouble shooting and explanations are the same, over and over. Right now people are calling because their amp is cutting out for no reason. We go over reason X, no, then Y, no, then Z, no. So far about 10 of these in the last week, out of about 20 calls.

Different models, different circuit topology, different areas in the country, different factories in China, different build dates (by years!) essentially the same exact failure and same exact trouble shoot to diagnose it, with no connection other than the call to me.

Other recent “waves”: Fuse waves- where the amps have fuses blowing and for some reason nobody knows what a Timed Action fuse is. EQ waves- where every audiophile with one of our EQ’s calls about the silliest complaints like a bad LED on a slider. No Question waves- where a preponderance of the calls are from guys who know what they are doing, yet call for really simple advice.

You’d think that solar storms or summer heat might explain some of these trends, yet, the EQ wave had no real geo-significance other than freaky audiophiles from around the world all called in a 2 week span regarding their older equipment and their “perceived” problems. I haven’t had an EQ call in months."

Having been senior VP of an international jet airline, we always worried about aircraft accidents which seemed to come in threes.  Was this more than just a speculation in the airline industry?  Might it relate to failure waves?

 

It's well documented that 'waves' arising from unknown causes impact sales departments, since I've managed groups of people with very accurately measured (via sales reports) waves of sales going high and then a sales drought.  Yet, in each case, it was - as best I could eliminate it - not a function of the salespeople.  It was a function of something else.

 

Can runs of numbers occur and give the appearance of some organizing principle just beyond our perception?  Of course.  In fact so much so that Thomas Gilovitch's book How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life is still selling well at Amazon nearly 10-years after publication.

 

The really hard question is at what point does Gilovitch's work (applied statistics and variances) become a cover-up for a deeper and well-hidden phenomenology? 

 

It makes intuitive sense when you think about it:  The near Holy 2-standard deviations in statistics may result at a profound level as evidence that we are nothing more than energy patterns (I assume you saw The Matrix, right?) and that those two standard deviations we hold so dear (along with its ugly half-brother the normal distribution) are nothing more than seriously contrived mathematical excuses because at some level we took a bad turn in our understanding of the world and only a few geniuses like Maxwell were able to pierce the veil of that finer level of thinking to get past what now stand as nearly insurmountable barriers.

 

What becomes apparent to researchers like Tom Bearden who are looking for 'free energy applications' from the missing works (see: http://www.cheniere.org/   ) is that there's an inconsistency between James Maxwell's original works and the Heaviside reinterpretation (along with William Gibbs) of Maxwell's original work, which is discussed in greater depth at the Enterprise Mission website of Richard Hoagland.

 

All of which goes far afield from the problem of our missing measurements and 'failure waves' but when the broad expanse of 'odd stuff' pops up in emails - day after day - it's hard not to openly speculate a bit.   Here's another one - related but this one is in the class of 'location slippage':

"I have a 3,000 gallon pond in my back yard in Lincoln, Nebraska (not earthquake central). My brother dug up reeds from a creek and planted them in a 5-gallon bucket that I put directly into my pond in a place where the reeds would be growing out of the water, but you cannot see the bucket. This 5-gallon bucket with soil and gravel covering the soil where the reeds are growing is placed on a level portion of my pond.

I have to literally go into the pond and move this bucket if I want the reeds to be in another place in my pond. There is NO WAY this bucket can 'slide' to another location.

I have sat since MAY of this year, in the same chair at my patio table in the evenings enjoying my fish swim and in and out through the reeds.

Yesterday in the evening, I once again sat down in my patio chair and observed my REED BUCKET was now in a different location in my pond!

I am a single 60 year old woman who designed and built my pond and I know that pond like the palm of my hand. I wanted to call one of my four adult children and tell them about my reed bucket being in a different place - but, they would have thought I had totally lost my mind."

No, place slippage is NOT something confined to this woman's backyard pond in Lincoln, Nebraska, although I'm sure she's a bit freaked about it.  The phenomena has been studied at famous places for such oddities, such as the moving rocks at the  "Racetrack Playa" in Death Valley, written up over at www.geology.com.  

 

I suppose that there's a logical reason for these rocks to move.  Maybe micrometeorological effects, but no, that would leave soil disturbances and none are seen.  Or, maybe it's just that 'all the molecules gathered on one side of the rock' however briefly and moved it, because under statistics, we could argue that would be an extremely improbable event, yet perhaps viable.

 

It's here we step back off the mat and look at our two combatants:  Our visual and other sensory inputs versus our application of mathematics & statistics to complete the reductionist's illusion that all's well-ordered in Universe, and as such, may be completely known and understood.

 

Sitting here with an MBA I'm supposed to have a fair comprehension of statistics, and yes, I suppose I have an idea how they work.  But I've also read enough reports of when they don't work to realize that there may be something else going on.  Maybe statistics is the "science" by which we blind ourselves to that 'something else' that's going on.

 

Maybe - just maybe - statistical deviations are not measuring 'probability' as we currently define it.  Maybe they measure 'reality noise' which is a different concept indeed.  If that were to be the case, until "science" opens its collective head up a bit more to encompass that concept, we'll be stuck here we are, unable to get much further.

 

Maybe there are no 'standard deviations' from the properly perceived whole of the Total Reality which we know to be only energy.  I'll grant you that it seems to work most of the time but always?  Maybe no.  Perhaps at the level where statistics becomes secondary to observer expectations (see Erwin Schrödinger's cat for example) we'll find the next set of tools to move forward as humans.

 

Or, maybe it's already been found - which would explain the power of certain secret societies...maybe through rituals and what normal folks would label as deviant behaviors, they can so dramatically impact observer expectation sets that they can occasionally override 'statistical probabilities'.   Or, worse, statistics has been invented to hide a powerful aspect of reality from the masses.  Which would explain why Heaviside had to rework Maxwell, wouldn't it?

 

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Tuesday August 10, 2010

Fed Decision

No Change!

We start with the text...Read 'em and weep...

Release Date: August 10, 2010

For immediate release Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months. Household spending is increasing gradually, but remains constrained by high unemployment, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Business spending on equipment and software is rising; however, investment in nonresidential structures continues to be weak and employers remain reluctant to add to payrolls. Housing starts remain at a depressed level. Bank lending has continued to contract. Nonetheless, the Committee anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability, although the pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.

Measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters and, with substantial resource slack continuing to restrain cost pressures and longer-term inflation expectations stable, inflation is likely to be subdued for some time.

The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.

To help support the economic recovery in a context of price stability, the Committee will keep constant the Federal Reserve's holdings of securities at their current level by reinvesting principal payments from agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in longer-term Treasury securities.1 The Committee will continue to roll over the Federal Reserve's holdings of Treasury securities as they mature.

The Committee will continue to monitor the economic outlook and financial developments and will employ its policy tools as necessary to promote economic recovery and price stability.

Voting for the FOMC monetary policy action were: Ben S. Bernanke, Chairman; William C. Dudley, Vice Chairman; James Bullard; Elizabeth A. Duke; Donald L. Kohn; Sandra Pianalto; Eric S. Rosengren; Daniel K. Tarullo; and Kevin M. Warsh.

Voting against the policy was Thomas M. Hoenig, who judges that the economy is recovering modestly, as projected. Accordingly, he believed that continuing to express the expectation of exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period was no longer warranted and limits the Committee's ability to adjust policy when needed. In addition, given economic and financial conditions, Mr. Hoenig did not believe that keeping constant the size of the Federal Reserve's holdings of longer-term securities at their current level was required to support a return to the Committee's policy objectives.

Quick - look surprised!  The market, which was down about 106  by the Dow just before the announcement, popped up to about -35 briefly and now seems to be headed back down, but wait, coming back...but wait....  Sadly for the rational: this is a "Who knows?" world and the safest way to play is to stand on the sidelines and let the craziness of markets run amuck.

 

I apologize (or nearly so) for the earlier headline "ream 'em and weep" - really meant to write 'read 'em and weep".  Sometimes truth just leaks unintended.  So the faction going for the free money to set up a dollar gold carry trade lost.  Now what?

 

Don't Go Blaming China

Lots of stories about this morning hinting that one reason for a bit of overnight weakness in  markets is because of a small slow-down in China's growth. What's really going on seems to be FOREX traders dropping anti-dollar bets a bit on the thinking the Fed session today will be good for markets.

 

Which gets us around to the 900-pound gorilla:  Drop by this afternoon at about 1:20 PM Central time for the first post of the Fed decision and probably a wise-ass comment, or two, about 1:30 Central aftert we begin to see market reaction.

 

I think it was Rick Ackerman who safely observed a number of years ago that if the market moves in reaction to a Fed decision, you'll usually see an initial move in the longer-term direction.  Then, the market will pause and go the other way briefly as the pro's load up for the larger move, and then the real trend move will get underway.  Not always, but Rick's an astute guy and he's been a trader, so I've always taken that to heart.  No point expecting anything to change in how the mechanics of the announcement work out.

 

As to what the Fed has to say, that'll be the hard part.  The Boston Globe has a good story on it under the headline "Weak recovery challenges Fed" - but that's a pretty generous assumption being made about 'recovery'; namely that there is one.  

 

About the biggest change I've seen in the Fed is that Alan Greenspan used the word "judgment" a lot, while the Bernanke Fed seems to favor the word "estimate".  Might seem like a fine point but lingo/lango is a subtle framer.  If Greenspan made judgments, the framing is that he was somehow a fit 'judge'.  "Estimate" on the other hand is close to "guesser".

 

If you have a copy of The Visual Thesaurus, Version 3 you can visualize "estimate" this way:

 

 

Not to run the point into the ground, but Greenspan's 'judging' brought with it words like evaluate, decide, adjudicate, pronounce, and gauge.  A junior wordsmith in training, I'd sure like to see Bernanke et al get more into "gauge" since that would be compatible with works like 'determine', measure, quantify, ascertain, caliber, bore; or the word assess which is associated to words like tax, bill, charge, and what the Fed's cohorts are all about up on the Hill.

 

Whatever.

 

Futures are down but productivity is dropping (next story), so don't go blaming China.

 

Productivity

A couple of 'last minute' numbers for the Fed to ponder going into today's FOMC meeting:  Productivity just out:

"Nonfarm business sector labor productivity decreased at a 0.9 percent annual rate during the second quarter of 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today, with output and hours rising 2.6 percent and 3.6 percent, respectively. (All quarterly percent changes in this release are seasonally adjusted annual rates.) The decline in output per hour follows five quarters of strong productivity growth. The second-quarter gain in hours worked was the largest since the first quarter of 2006 when hours rose 4.1 percent. From the second quarter of 2009 to the second quarter of 2010, both productivity and output increased 3.9 percent; hours were unchanged (tables A and 2).

Labor productivity, or output per hour, is calculated by dividing an index of real output by an index of hours worked of all persons, including employees, proprietors, and unpaid family workers.

Unit labor costs in nonfarm businesses edged up 0.2 percent in the second quarter of 2010, the result of productivity declining more than hourly compensation. Over the last four quarters, unit labor costs fell 2.8 percent as output per hour increased faster than hourly compensation (tables A and 2).

BLS defines unit labor costs as the ratio of hourly compensation to labor productivity; increases in hourly compensation tend to increase unit labor costs and increases in output per hour tend to reduce them.

Boy, that's sure exciting, isn't it?  Why just has me on the edge of my chair waiting for Q3 numbers in...er....November? My butt will get sore waiting, for sure...

 

Later on this morning, wholesale inventories will be announced and the big question will be ,"How much sell-through?"  Answer, just based on the uptick in Consumer Debt figures out last week shouldn't be too bad, but still down compared with previous year levels.

 

Asia/Diaspora

While Time magazine is asking in a headline "Will China's bad summer make it clean up it's act?"  I've got to note that the death toll in China is only around 700 with 1200-odd still missing.    But in terms of human impacts, the UN say Pakistan flooding has impacted almost 14-million people so far and no, no reliable death estimates yet, but we've been watching this unfold on the foreign video services and it's possible Pakistan's losses (over 1,500 so far) will far surpass China's. 

 

And Pakistan's president Zardari is getting a lot of heat for being out of pocket traveling instead of leading his peeps, calling it Zardari's Katrina some places.

 

All of which circles back to our theme of the day: Don't blame China.

 

Going Bump In the Night

A 7.3 quake down in Vanuatu.

 

Smokin'

Russia's fires continue edging toward more nuclear facilities.

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A great reader email:

We're basically in a media blackout (effectively) concerning anything really meaningful, so here's a snapshot of what's really going on in the world:

• August 9: Katla Volcano, Iceland - Twelve earthquakes in the past 48 hours.

• August 9: Deadly Russian Heat Wave Gravest Over Millennium

• August 6: Sacramento running 10 degrees below average

• August 5: Snow in Brazil, below zero in the River Plate, tropical fish frozen.  For a second day running it snowed in Southern Brazil and in twelve of Argentina’s 24 provinces including parts of Buenos Aires.

• August 3: Coolest July in San Francisco since 1971

• August 3: More than six million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles, dolphins and other river wildlife are floating dead in Bolivian rivers, the cruel aftermath of the extreme cold in South America.

• August 3: Argentina colder than Antarctica

• August 1: Peru declares state of emergency

• August 1: Worst flooding in Pakistan history

• July 31: July rainiest month in Mexico history

• July 29: Record cold in San Diego

• July 10: Record cold at LAX

Hard sell in Moscow, though.

 

Good To Be Bad?

Outgoing HP CEO Mark Hurd will get a payday of around $40-million after stepping down over revelations about expense reports and a female contractor and allegations of sexual harassment. But I wonder how much will be left after the lawyering on this one?

 

When In Doubt:  Time to Leave?

Reports that space/math whiz Steven Hawking figures its time to head for space, or perish on the limited earth has me scratching my head.

 

Seems to me if there was anything like a Galactic EPA, they'd confine us to Earth as toxic waste generating bad humans. 

 

Why, if we can't get along here with one another, what evidence do you suppose exists to support the notion we could get along with three-legged Rumpoons from GaZonik 3?  Let alone a Klingon?  Just differences of color and religion will get you killed most places, let alone if you had a couple of extra ears, or something...let alone some vision of the future and a relation with Universe that's not in the 'right' book.

 

Look: We can't even trust white, majority, overweight democorps and republicorps in the same room without a special prosecutor on standby most of the time or they screw us all  - six-ways to Sunday - for corporate payoffs via under-the-table bidding and the ubiquitous campaign contributions and sleazy PAC money...

 

What the hell is Hawking thinking?  Pollute Earth, then the Solar System and let's see if we can wreck the whole Milky Way?

 

As below, so above, but making more slaves to get the PTB off the rock and leave the rest of us here as collateral damage?  Bullshit - Screw that... meek and righteous first?  Well, THEN maybe...but that ain't never gonna happen no how so let's no kid the kidder, here.

 

Near as I got it figured, The UFO Dudes  would have told Ike & others at the Big Visits in the 50's: "Ya'll are welcome...just as soon as ya got'cher shit together...but we ain't holding our breath...We've sent representatives from On High before and look at what you did to all them."

 

Can't say they'd be wrong, neither. We'd do the same thing again...

 

61-year into it, I see people working harder than ever and less progress than in the 1950's through 60's.  But somehow the power trippers keep us on this rock, more sparklies, more debt.  "We'll put a palm sized microwave in every cell phone...and next year a beer cooler..." and other useless features and we just suck it up.  sheep.

 

Lock up our food?  Shoot the real change agents?  Foment revolution?  Profit from death?  That's us...makes you proud to be an Earthling, huh?

 

In one of Jack Lessinger's econ books, there's a brilliant summary of Boccaccio's Decameron Tales that goes to the idea of "Those trying 'escape the plague take it with them..."  We could argue, I suppose, over whether space in the equivalent of the countryside at the time of the Black Death.

 

But it's like I told Elaine the other night:  "The first victims of any war ought to be those promoting it."  Might clean up the playing field a bit.

 

Getting off this rock is just the new giant-sized & improved version of running away from the ugly reality we have only to hold ourselves accountable for.  Maybe Hawking's missed the point.

 

One day, more than just the few of us might wake up and look this Life in the eye and call it what it is.  When that happens, why, we might even get invited  off this rock.

 

===== Snip and Save Section ====

 

Coping: Quality of Higher Ed

The other morning I reported on the pressure one of the bigger for-profit schools was under and opined that for-profit schools are held to a different standard than the not-for-profit and state-funded schools.  As a result, I received a very thoughtful email which is worthy of your notice:

"Hi George,

I read your post today on the for-profit schools coming under threat due to government funding changes in higher education, and thought I'd comment since I currently work for public, private and propriety schools as an adjunct instructor.

The current state of most for-profit schools is horrendous. In the past I worked in administration as an academic advisor for a for-profit art school. The recruiting techniques used by the enrollment advisors were criminal. I would say about 35% of the students enrolled had no hope of graduating. One of my jobs was to read over the entrance essays and gauge potential students writing skills. If I sent an essay back to the enrollment advisor with a poor score, I would get a new one back a day or so later that was magically the best essay I had ever read - as far as entrance essays go. It was very easy to tell that the recruiter wrote the essay.

Recruiters were pressured to get bodies in seats to keep their jobs. Though it is illegal, their pay was definitely tied to their numbers. The recruiters were only responsible for the student for a week after classes started, and then it became the job of the Academic Affairs department to keep the student. Of course, if the student was not qualified to be a student, there was no way we could keep them. If students dropped, we took the blame.

I now work as an instructor for another proprietary school. While it's not Kaplan, it is one of their major competitors. I would say that a good 40% of the students have no hope of obtaining their degree. These students are so ill prepared for college, that the school just instituted a first year sequence for them. This would be great, except that this first year consists of courses most of us took by the 6th grade. I took the training course so I would be able to teach these classes, and found that subjects being taught were all things I learned by the time I left grade school. The sad thing is, these students need it because their grade schools and high schools failed them.

The propriety schools should not be accepting these students at all. It would be one thing if they acknowledged they were trade schools, but because many of these schools have obtained regional accreditation status, they need to start acting like regionally accredited schools. Had they stayed with their national accreditation, they wouldn't be under this pressure today. Students would then only have to do well in their desired trade rather than worry about a well rounded liberal arts education.

I think the main trouble is the perception of education in the US. There are students that are well suited for liberal arts and students that are well suited for trade schools. There's no shame or higher glory in either of those. Both are needed in our society. For some reason, it's in our heads that trade schools aren't as good as liberal arts schools. You currently need a bachelor's degree from a regionally accredited school to get the simplest of jobs. This means you have to take on huge debt for schooling for a very low return on pay after graduation. This is absurd, and it makes me wonder if there is some agreement between the new job criteria most business impose that requires a college degree and higher education.

Propriety schools also boast their job rates after graduation. I think if they advertise this, which they all do, then they need to deliver. The art school I worked for had an excellent career center and help graduates find work for life. While it was becoming more difficult for them when I left in 2008, I can attest that they were doing all they could within reason to help. The art school maintained close ties with the business community and even had groups where the chairs from the departments met with hiring businesses to discuss new industry standards and what they're looking for in new graduates. Courses, projects and equipment were updated to meet what graduates needed to obtain jobs. This is reasonable and responsible to me.

Unfortunately, this is not what goes on with the propriety school I currently work for today. The curriculum is static. Because the classes are all predesigned, you can go on the internet and find websites where students can purchase entire classes for $10. Plagiarism is so pandemic, I have resorted to using the plagiarism software for every single student paper I receive, which adds hours on to my workload. The school does not get input from the instructors or from businesses that will later hire (or reject rather) these students. It is so machine like, that there is no room for bending. I don't even know who I actually report to, and I've been with this school for three years. I only continue teaching for them because there are very few jobs out there for higher ed teachers today. I have to work for three different schools, teaching 5-6 classes per session (anywhere from 7-10 weeks), in order to survive. For some reason, our society values education very highly, but not the people who actually deliver it.

Proprietary schools willfully jumping into the liberal arts gig was a bad idea. You simply can't mix liberal arts with corporatism and get a good result. Students become nothing but a consumer, and the bottom line is in direct conflict with the best interest of the students.

I can tell you without at doubt in my mind, that the state and private non-profit schools I work for have a much higher quality in education. Teachers maintain academic freedom and the curriculum is far more rigorous and dynamic. I also don't think that state and private non-profit schools should be tied to job statistics, as the purpose of the college and university is for students to obtain knowledge and become free thinkers, not learn how to get a job and be a good employee (though it may be going in that direction...). Proprietery schools, on the other hand, are specifically training students for future employment. It's apples and oranges.

Thanks for reading,

No, than YOU for writing.  Understanding the higher ed situation is incredibly important, especially since the federal application for student aid (FAFSA) is way more intrusive than anything else government does except maybe for a top secret security clearance, LOL.  It's more binding than a mortgage.  Student loans are much more dangerous than mortgages since you walk away from a mortgage but not from a student loan.

 

As a former proprietary school president, I closely watched the transition take place and while many of the sins of the 'for-profits' you note are real, we also have to be honest and recognize that the other side of the coin is the state-run schools are vastly more expensive in ways that are invisible to most.  Just for example, for-profit schools pay B&O taxes and, if they own property, they pay property taxes on it.

 

On the public side, there's no property tax, no B&O tax, and in many states the true cost of facilities is buried because building funds are sometimes not included in the cost of delivering the education.  Just an operaqting budget.

 

As I see it, all the schools are guilty of the same kind of 'over-building' that we saw in the housing industry.  The NFP's (not for profits) and state schools claiming people go to school to get 'educated' but if you ask most students on a state or NFP campus (I have) why they are in this particular state or NFP school, and they invariably answer "So I can get a job." 

 

This wrong-headed concept (that job equals going to college) is ground into young people's heads all the way from kindergarten to the senior prom.  And it's wrong.

 

I'll admit to being a little prejudiced here, since I started working in my profession (broadcast engineering) at age 16 and didn't finish a degree until my 30's.  But that provided me with an incredibly valuable lesson:  Employers don't hire pieces of paper, they hire people who can do a job.  The current system has a terrible education problem laying that simple truth out for people, especially when there's a dearth of jobs to be had regardless of one's level of education. 

 

The number of over-50, majority males with MBA's (just to throw a dart at myself) is staggering these days.  The MBA - once a ticket to a solid six-figures - is now just a check-off; nearly a dime a dozen. 

 

The hidden reality of which educators don't speak is that employers are into least-cost solutions for all kinds of workers and neither the publics nor for-profits adequately explain the modern jobs battlefield, let alone discussing outsourcing.  The fact is this:  Today's graduates are competing with much cheaper China, India, and Singfapore labor.  Instead US students and parents are pitched yesterday's paradigm -  trying to 'spin' the prospective student to their course offerings.

 

One of the drivers (again with the disclosure I was a for-profit manager) was that the private schools did bang-up job training but the government then failed to deliver expected narrow vertical market job growth to their own forecasts and the broader overall economic growth forecast itself stalled out - which is what the for-profits built out facilitates for.  Let me see: High fixed costs, Jobs placement stats crashing...the ONLY survival strategy was to move to the liberal arts pool where job placement was NOT the key metric.

 

Is it any wonder they went to regional accreditation and 'degrees' in order to slide out of the strict curriculum to placement job accountability which state and NFP schools already enjoyed?  Nope: That's just how survival strategies evolved in the complex higher ed market with multiple options for students.

---

W sincerely appreciate your report from the front line.  That said,  in my judgment public higher education has escaped the economic scalpel much more effectively than, for example, tradespersons in the housing sector and assembly workers in Detroit. 

 

Yet even with the tricky accounting, which often doesn't include the longer terms costs of retirement liabilities, property removed from tax rolls, the 'building funds' along with higher property taxes and so forth, the public school's tuition has pretty consistently managed to blow the doors off the prevailing rate of inflation in most communities. 

 

What evolved into complexity from various socioeconomic forces - especially the echo Baby Boomers hitting prime demographics for enrollment - precipitated the present mess.  My guess is it is now almost certain to implode as there's not room for several economic models when each is overbuilt thanks to the feds not having a reasonable method to allocate between models.  It's been a free-for all at the student aid funding office with each claiming highest economic performance.  As you noted so rightly in your email tag line: "Entropy requires no maintenance."  I think that ship left port long ago.

---

The solution comes back to the core issue of a lack of leadership at the national level, and with that, the lack of a National Vision that we can all stand up and salute.

 

What we need is the commitment to new infrastructure and a national fiber plan that could remake America.  Toss in a commitment to the 25-hour work week, retiring at 60, not 65, so the oldsters will make more room at the bottom...and so on.  A commitment to a solid dollar not watered down each year doesn't seem like a bad idea, either. Just for good measure, let's toss in a commitment to solvent national, state, and city governments.  Would we have healthcare taxes if we slowed down our war-making by, say,  50%? 

 

Until that kind of fundamental rethinking happens, there can not be an economic recovery.  Plain & simple. Schools can only prepare people for the workforce.  Political leadership's responsibility is to articulate a set of core values, outline the New Vision that we can all get behind and in which society there will be a demand for both liberal arts  and the skilled tradespersons.  If the New Vision was real, there's be a website we could all look at that would benchmark our progress.  T'ain't no such animal.

 

Unfortunately, our political leadership has failed miserably which is how we got into this mess in the first place.  It's the stuff Second Depressions are made of.  And it's why depressions last 10-year or longer.

 

Them "Holes" in the Web

You may recall that in Monday's column I mentioned that I was wondering who else - besides one reader in Oz who mentioned it - was not able to reach Shane Connor's site, www.ki4u.com?   Wow - what an eye-opener...

"Ok well I tried to go to site and no such luck ,so it seems that yes we are censored. "

---

"As you requested, i'm in Oz and yes, ki4u.com fails to load. It has an unusual timeout pattern when attempting contact. Even after running a few network diagnostics, the packets seem to go nowhere. I can access it through an anonymous proxy server tho. And now that i can see it, i do remember looking at this site about a year ago after following a link from urban survival. Which means this blockage is somewhat recent. "

 

Good on whoever picked up on this. I wonder what else the bastards are hiding."

---

"I'm a subscriber from the wonderful land of Oz and I have too have tried to access the ki4u.com site on a number of occasions without any success. I keep getting a message that the 'server where the page is located isn't responding'. Doesn't matter what time of day or night I try I can't get through (and I tried again just before sending this message). I've also noticed in the last couple of weeks that access to the internet is generally getting slower (with the exception of the mindless drivel on celebrity gossip sites and the time wasting mind numbing games such as 'farmville' and 'cafe whatever' via facebook)"

---

"Can't access it either, oddly enough"

---

"I live in Western Australia. Just right clicked on Shane Connor's site, and it didn't work. Then I opened a new webpage, and typed in the address, and it opened. "

---

"The connection to the server was reset while the page was loading."

---

"I am an Australian reader and cannot access directly www.ki4u.com  and the goodnews page as well but can access both through google cache. Thank you so much for the heads up on this. What is the government up to?"

---

"No go on the above sight either George..... [name withheld] from Sydney oz"

---

"I also can't access the ki4u site in Australia. Seems censorship is happening."

---

"No joy in Melbourne"

---

"Hello from Kathmandu Nepal, cant open www.ki4u.com/goodnews.htm from here as well."

---

"I cannot access the ki4u site from Ecuador"

All of which leads us to wonder whether the blocking is being done by Australia which has at least two blacklists of banned web sites, or whether the blocking is being done by our own US government.  I raise this latter possibility not only because of the Nepal and Ecuador reports, but others like this one:

"George, Just for your info. I can only access their site when I disable my hong kong proxy & use my real usa proxy. I know other world proxy will work, but not sure which ones they are."

So, if couldn't get to the www.ki4u.com site yesterday - and you still can't today and you'd like to help with our research, please open a command lined, type in at what's usually the c:> prompt, type in tracert www.ki4u.com [enter] and let the computer do its thing.  Should give you where the time outs are occurring.  Paste it into an email and send a copy to  webmaster (at sign)  ki4u.com  That will facilitate drilling down to find...well, whatever they find.

 

Shane Connor who owns www.ki4u.com  BTW doesn't think the problem is on the US side:

"We have a very, very robust server set-up.  Here's the bottom line:  We have eight servers with load balancing and we're set up to handle advertising hits from the Drudge Report and other high traffic sites.  So I know it's not on our end...."

I'll skip the hot lingo part and leave that to other sites.  But our UrbanSurvival readers are catching the odd scent of something more than 'normal'  'business-as-usual' in the wind...help from Australians who are blocked - specifically, the trace route function reports - will really help.

 

'Nuff to weird you out yet?  Well, let's go down the rabbit hole just a wee bit further, shall we?  Might be all kinds of critters down there...

-----

 

Ah...here's another nifty outlier from the email dept.:

"What the linguistics has in the works for November matches up scarily with the weird slide show that telegraph.co.uk posted to it's website without explanation in early 2009. Clif says the PTB show their hand before they play it, was this their wink to us? "

By the time you get through watching the 5-part 'Blackjack" series, you no doubt will be able to come up with your own set of guesses why certain interest groups would not want we the people to have their own radiation measuring devices, radiation treatment options, or knowledge about civil defense.  Knowledge is power, and power trippers aren't anxious to share power.

 

Yeah, nuclear war is ugly, and radiation poisoning is not the best way to go, but then again, nothing comes to mind as a 'best way' to die except going to sleep and not waking up...But the fear mongering around the topic of nukes and Shane's company being a no-nonsense here's the facts, tools, and such...that might be stepping on an agenda somewhere.

 

Might even explain why - under color of law - legal websites are so readily banned by those who have made a deal with the devil and their payment due is the further theft of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness from few good and free humans left in the world.

---

OK, if UrbanSurvival now disappears, remember the following alternate access methods:

https:www.urbansurvival.com   (our SSL layer)

www.urbansurvival.co  (our new .co site addressing)

http://72.52.163.140/

The content mirror at www.independencejournal.com

or the mobile page at www.urbansurvival.com/Mobile/week.htm

or the archives at the www.peoplenomics.com site...

And if all that fails, send me an email and we'll email the daily report after we find the blockage so we can get our legal folks on it.

 

Sheesh...

 

Pants On Fire?

Making the rounds on the net at the moment?  Video of our president says in this YouTube video:

"We're betraying what I think is a solemn pact that we make with our veterans. My father served in World War II and when he came home, he got the services that he needed..."

All of which is fine until you work out the facts  (this'll frost yah...).,  His father, Barack Obama, Sr was born in 1936...so one might ask "How'd he serve in WWII if he was five years old when the war broke out?

 

Or, his stepfather Lolo Soetoro who was...check it out - born in 1935 so he was six years old when the War started.

 

I'm sure someone has explained this somewhere under "the Presid3ent misspoke..." about his own Dad?  Or, is this a re-edit of the event?  Or...WTF? 

 

The right/left politics are amazing, aren't they?  Up down is what matters, try to keep that in mind...  And was that video overdubbed?

 

No, several readers say it was a misspeak about his grandfather.

 

Tuesday At the WuJo

But wait!  It gets even stranger...it's possible?

 

Oh yeah: A buddy (PhD type) calls from Oklahoma and asks "You been noticing anything strange about measurements lately?"

 

"Like tape measures and such?  Hmmm...No, can't say as I have...just the usual hyperchronism /time getting shifty stuff.  Why?"  This gets deep here...

Well, I was finishing up a barn for our horses (Oklahoma, right?) and I noticed all day Saturday I was making measurements and careful as I was - even measuring 3 & 4 times, I was coming up coming out with things like 4-by-4's which were off by about an inch!  You know, needed 13 7/8th and I was cutting 14 7/8th - consistently and after measuring 3-4 times!

 

Not only that but my daughter's new horse whose bridle is normally on the 2nd hole on the buckle?  It was on the 4th Saturday and she was really upset about that....  I know, I know, I told her she was doing something different in how she was putting it on, but she's in 7th grade and she's been putting bridles on horses for years and all of a sudden, one day, the bridle doesn't  fit....and here's the really strange part... I tried it too and she was right...

"Can't get much stranger than that..."

"Oh, it does!...I tried it myself and the next day guess what?  It was back on the second hole and the difference was about an inch...same problem I was having with the barn roof 4-by-4's!

 

So not only is there this hyperchronism stuff Clif has been writing about, but there may be something going on dimensionally, too."

We then had a conversation about how things are really starting to change in the world. 

 

Question of the Day:  If you have noticed any drift of measurements cases, pleaser send them along - weird thing, but worth keeping track of...seems if time can get wonky, no reason why dimensions can't too...  Send along reports here.

 

You know, if we're going to 'cross dimensions' somewhere around 2012 wouldn't it be interesting if all kinds of elasticity of time & dimensions takes place?  Hot/cold, long/short, in/out/ and time?  Hmmm...

 

Maybe I'll just get out my UV LED diodes and function generator and make my own time warp...very Rocky Picture Horror Show of me....let's do the time warp again...

 

Synch-Wink, Deluxe

So Sunday evening, Panama, Elaine, & I are looking for an oldie but goodie after-din-din movie to watch off NetFlix while the spaghetti settled down and the red wine went to work on it  (none for Bates, tho...).

 

"Panama, you even seen Billy Jack?"

 

"Yes, I have..."

 

"I wouldn't mind seeing it again, one of these days...."  We went on to something else (old Dean Martin  Matt Helm flick with Anee Strumpet).

 

Fast forward to Monday morning and the mail - an envelope with a couple of audio CD's and a single DVD in a box with a note from reader "Joe in Colorado".  "if you already have this pass it on - if not , then enjoy!"

 

You guessed it...the lone DVD was the movie Billy Jack...which we didn't have in our collection...thank you!

 

This was just outright weird...but then again, anymore, I'm not sure what weird is...

---

Monday August 9, 2010

Special Update

Simmons Silenced

Numerous reports from the Northeast have it that nationally recognized energy investment banker Matthew Simmons died of a reported 'heart attack while in a hot tub' this weekend.

---

Those with a good memory may wonder about the timing of this since Simmons on multiple occasions announced that there were other seabed leaks some distance from the BP spill in the Gulf...

 

Is This Where "We Blow It"?

Tomorrow is a biggie - the Federal Reserve will be meeting to talk about rates amidst headlines like "Fed set to downgrade outlook for US" and our own "Unemployment: WTF?  Unchanged???"  As usual, tomorrow afternoon I'll post the Fed FOMC rate decision and their notes, but the odds of the Fed actually lowering rates is unlikely because to do so would be a tactic admission that the stimulus hasn't worked and that rates near zero will be the only way to kick start the economy into a high enough level of job creation to prevent the wholesale removal of Congress and a large chunk of the Senate this fall.

 

To be sure, it's a close call.  The right wing has been having a field day with Michelle Obama & kids are off doing Spain and lunching with the royals, with big headlines about how much that is costing US taxpayers.  Today, the president will be in Austin, Texas talking about higher education and to do a little fund-raising.  (Austin coverage here).  One of his topics (per the NY Times) will be school graduation rates, but the right-wing has been suggesting basic math might be a nice start...

---

Speaking of higher ed, There's an AP story out that share in the Washington post may come under pressure due to proposed changes in higher ed funding might hurt the for-profit schools, like the WaPo Kaplan unit, since as you may know (or may not), the for-profit sector of higher ed is held to a much higher standard of performance than the private sector when it comes to job placement.

 

In short, the pubic and not-for-profit schools aren't held to a measured job placement rate, while the for-profit schools are.  Which causes problems on the for-profit side, especially when government's idea of stimulus seems to be arrow makers, casino projects and little in the way of fundamental infrastructure improvement. 

 

More on this next weekend for Peoplenomics subscribers as we ask a very embarrassing question:  If higher education takes a government forecast of job creation for a particular sector - and private higher ed trains people for those jobs that are forecast to be there at the other end of the pipe, who is at fault when the pipe turns out to be empty?  Should the educators be held to account, or should the government be held accountable for failure to keep the economy headed in the expected direction?

 

Point is:  Public schools have virtually no accountability for placement while the for-profits do - and since the Clintons, Bushies, and Obamanistas have run real growth into the ground - causing the Occupational Outlook to be DFR (dead frigging wrong) in many cases, so who oughta pay?  I'd venture the government has a fair bit of liability exposure for blowing the forecast and the student loan liabilities shouldn't come back on students or schools, but should come back on job forecasters who believed the Washington hype job expansion via the house-flipping and infinite services sector as a viable future. 

 

Time to take a blood pressure pill and set that aside for next weekend's report.  Where were we?

 

Home Values

Good news - and bad - in the latest report from online real estate's Zillow.com which has released its second quarter market report.  The headlines?

• U.S. home values fell 3.2 percent year-over-year, and declined 0.6 percent quarter-over-quarter, marking the 14th consecutive quarter of year-over-year declines. Home values declined year-over-year in 99 of the 144 metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs) tracked by Zillow.

• Negative equity dipped in the second quarter, with 21.5 percent of all single-family homes with mortgages underwater, down from 23.3 percent in the first quarter.

• Home values in 20 of the 26 California markets tracked by Zillow showed quarter-over-quarter increases in home values, and 10 showed year-over-year increases. Five MSAs, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego, marked their fifth consecutive quarter of increasing home values.

Besides a few tons of useful information you can also put in your address and see what prices are on property around where you live that's on the market.  Eye opener:  House I bought in 1974 for $43,950 is still worth $344,000 up in the northwest...tell me there's not a profound lesson about inflation in there?

 

It's also cool because having the neighborhood prices in hand, you can go to the year you bought your home ('74 in my case) and put in the house price and what it should cost presently just based on 'offishul inflation'  and that's only $195,858...so in spite of anything anyone says, I'm convince that there's another 43% yet left on the downside of real estate just to get back to 1974 affordability levels..  Your results may vary, but you got the idea?

---

While the headlines are about the "Fewer U.S. Mortgages 'Underwater' in Second Quarter" may be technically accurate, old cynical me is wondering about mortgage fraud levels, since they are headed up in the UK...

---

China, meantime, is telling key banks in hot markets to test for a 50-60% drop in prices...which, gee, gosh, seems to coincide with my back-of-the-envelope guestimate of how much downside is left in the US bubble.

 

The Trading Joke

Yes, I am back in my short positions in spite of the futures being up a tad based on trading in Europe.  I trust you saw the Atlantic outing the robot trading systems in play these days?  Idea is simple:  If the robo-platforms get even a few milliseconds head start, they can cream a fraction of a cent off every share traded - which is what they do (and why front-runners by trading firms) and in spite of the SEC's happy-talk that all's peaceful and light, there's so much money made in front-running systems that the SEC realistically can't afford to take it on.  It'd be political suicide. Too much money coming in from campaign donors, I reckon.

 

Nevertheless, if you're wondering why all those huge volume spikes happen at the end of the trading day, I'd go there for answers.  Of course, the NYSE has been complicit in helping install these systems.  They used to report each program trade.  Nowadays, according to the NYSE site:

Program Trading as a percent of NYSE volume was formerly calculated as program buy volume + program sell volume as percent of NYSE volume. A more accurate calculation would be program shares bought, sold, and sold short as a percentage of NYSE shares bought, sold, and sold short.

Think last week there was really only 28.4% program trading as noted in the NYSE program trading press release?  LOL, of course not!  Know why?  Devil's in the details:

"Program trading encompasses a wide range of portfolio-trading strategies involving the purchase or sale of a basket of at least 15 stocks..."   [emphasis added]

Since computers are super fast and can front-run individual stocks, the whole thing comes down to a laughable soufflé.  So when one of us 'civilian' day traders makes a move, who knows how much leverage we really have.  My best guess is program trading plus unreported HF front-running systems are 85-90% of big board volume.  They're not saying.

 

These days, you aren't trading another trader so much as you're trading against an algorithm and maybe two (one on the buy side, one on the sell side)...which means you might do just as well at Atlantic City or in Vegas.  But it's your retirement dough.

 

Sweating Moscow

Combination of high heat plus wild fires is blamed for the death rate doubling over the past several days in Moscow where even the US embassy is putting some operations on hold till things break.

 

Swimming in Asia

A while back - what, six months? - we were talking about the huge Diaspora which was expected in Asia with many 'millions' on the move this year.  Slow getting here, but at current rates, we're on target for the predictive linguistics to fill out.  Now, with reports that 12-million have been impacted by flooding in Pakistan along with the millions homeless in China, the path for some fill of expectation sets is ongoing.

 

 

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Coping:  Cool Software Department

Remember Chris Malcheski?  He's the guy who did the really neat software that lefts us flip graphics (like crop circles...rining a bell there?) around to look for embedded information. 

 

Well, he's got a new one coming out this week - or next - which is being called ModAlert.  What it will do is let you install this simple (spyware free, BTW) piece of software which will then monitor sites that you have an interest in - and will pop up when sites are modified.

 

From my standpoint, this is great - because I will be able to set it to pop up when the Federal Reserve (or Treasury, or whoever) modifies something on their press pages.  But, it will also let you set up your favorite sites, too.

 

Initially, it will ship with alerts set for the Drudge Report, Faux News, Clif's www.halfpasthuman.com, UrbanSurvival, and Formation Research (the crop circle collectors).  But, you will be able to add as you like.

 

Which to my way of thinking is tres' cool.  I can hardly wait - remind me to ask him what the limit is on how many sites I can preprogram...I'll let you know tomorrow as we get close to release date on this.

 

Yeah, you can get part way there with RSS reader programs, but the problem I've found with RSS is sometimes the sites of interest don't have feeds for the kind of information I'm after - like the current weekly unemployment numbers out on Thursday mornings...

---

Another site I've been playing with - and it's pretty cool, as well, is www.finviz.com.  The neat thing about this one is they have all kinds of graphics horsepower, so the various quotes and such are relative to trading volumes and such.  Sample mapping here.  They have an Elite service which I'm thinking about just because it does that look at things for the pre-open and since stock trading is very much like a video game where 'first look, first shoot' usually wins, the idea of such a graphics front end is pretty interesting.

 

It'd be even more interesting if you could tie it directly to a trading account at one of the big discounters, so that you'd be able to click right into a trading screen and go, but not sure that's a good idea...again hard telling if there's a trader out there or you're trying to outgun an algorithm. Still, neat display.

 

Coming To Get Your Food

In case you haven't noticed, there's a bums rush on by the federal government to get more control over the nation's small farmers and this may even extend to home gardening as Senate Bill 510 is being pushed along under the guise of 'food safety". 

 

What it really seems to be is setting up one more avenue for the one-worlders to clamp down controls of what were once independent nations.  For example, one part of the proposed bill says:

"Section 404 - Declares that nothing in this Act shall be construed in a manner inconsistent with the agreement establishing the World Trade Organization or any other treaty or international agreement to which the United States is a party. "

Don't know about you, but the problem I have with these one-worlder groups like WTO is they give blanket authority to non-elected officials.  There's been a massive explosion of government in the whole sector of Administration Laws by people who are not elected and it's been a horrible, progressive disease of democracy.

 

Not to go into a book-length treatment here, but this Government 2.0 unelected stuff is - in my opinion, a sorry sack of cow dung and it's NOT in the Constitution.  I know, that's one of the arguments why the one-worlders want even that rewritten, but let's not go there.

 

Point is, I expect within five year or less, we will have food police and even trading or sharing privately grown food in America will be made illegal. 

 

This is the same kind of thinking that would make a rural farmer's water well; subject to federal jurisdiction by Government 2.0 agents - under the pretext that it's somehow extensible as part of the navigable waters of the United States.

 

I must not be doing enough drugs...maybe I could get some doggie downers so some of this stuff would make more make sense.

 

Censor the Web, Censor the Thinking

Say, here's an odd one which I'd like to ask on behalf of Shane Connor over at www.ki4u.com...is this the only reader in Australia who can't get in to the KI4U.com site?

"Can't get "The Good News About Nuclear Destruction!" at www.ki4u.com/goodnews.htm  here Down Under. Luckily I have other literature on the subject, but I'm keen as mustard to find out what the Minion Ranga's boss don't want me to read. Mirror site available?"

So, if you live in Australia and CAN'T get in to the www.ki4u.com site, would you drop me a note here, please?

 

One reason I'm curious:  The Oz gov't said recently that they were not censoring Australian internet use, yet Clif tells me that our spiders are telling a much different tale.  So, here's the question:  Is the gov't of Oz lying about the queenies subject down under having unfettered access to the worldwide web, or just what they reckon to be the blessed and sanctioned and sterile parts?

 

The Texas Shakes, Irwin Allen's Latest

Say, that little 3.4 Earthquake up in Western Texas (stand up when you read that) this weekend has a lot of readers wondering if we're worried about it:

"I know you have probably though of this but the oil field in the gulf probably extends under Texas and OK, maybe even MO as they have a lot of oil drilling when I lived there. The loss of oil from the large reservoir probably will lead to some displacement/sink holes above these states. Some say its tunneling going on but my explanation could also be true. Just a thought."

I guess the answer is yes - and no.  Another writes:

2.5 in Oklahoma... oklahoma is o.k. Not sure if your following me or not... but every time there is a tiny shake in that mountain range... leads to a big one some where else. High-end-zero.. Hmmmm. anyway.

Should be a biggen.. today? not sure.. give or take a few days. If I was controling all that.. i would have a better idea when shit was happening. right? i am nothing soo there is nothing i control. Just HIM and well. all the rest is an illusion. Control like time is just a silly illusion

OK, and here's a personal weird one - this had only SOME of the aspects of my "Irwin Allen Dreams" have have occasionally preceded large events in the global consciousness, like the dream the day before the Gulf Oil Disaster.

 

This one was about a huge earthquake in South Africa (southern Africa) and the magnitude was in the 9.0-9.2 range and there was some aspect of it which involved the letter "C" - wasn't sure if that was a city name, a region, or what, but I remember several times looking at the news item thinking "Wow...what a quake!"  And then going and looking again to see if that was a 9.0, 9.5, 8.6 or 9.6 shake...really odd. 

 

My 'Irwin Allen's" seem to come in best between the New Moon and a few days after first quarter and since we are close to that window now, thought I'd mention it. I'll let you know if I get more details later in the week...

 

Probably nothing, since it wasn't as vivid as my normal "Irwin Allen" type dreams that do occasionally get things right (in advance of events) but still, I'm keeping a watch on the southern part of Africa over the next day or two for a largish quake just in case. 

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Also had a weird dream about looking at an important Google Search result page that was really important, but strain as I would, I could never focus on the term or the results in the dream.  Must mean I need to nap more...cool thinking about accessing the global consciousness without an internet though...maybe a metaphor in there.  Which would sure explain the control worries of the PTB.

 

Kid Needs Help

OK, so I get an email from daughter Allison:

"my phones on the fritz Please call."

...but then she explains "The screen is messed up..."  Odd one, huh?  She really has the smarts to take out her battery, wait a few minutes and put it back in, and failing that, take the sim card out and get a new phone.  But gotta wonder about the 'my phones on the fritz please call" part, LOL...

 

Fat As An Allergic Reaction

Had some interesting follow-on to last week's piece on how a lot of obesity may be simply a low-level allergic reaction that causes people to get all puffed out /retain water and so forth - and my #1 suspect is GMO high fructose corn syrup.  But our one-time Houston Bureau Chief, now down making his fortunate in Indonesia, has some thoughts on the matter, too, sending this...

"Hey George,

I have a couple of items to add to the discussion on fat. When I arrived in Indonesia, I weighed in at a hefty 270 lbs. After six months, I had shed 80 lbs. and 10 inches off the waste. Before I give you the reasons I think that happened, let me just say that I have known several people to have rather dramatic results with thyroid treatment, as well.

OK, here's how I think I did it: 1) eating five small meals a day with the last one being just soup, rather than one big one at night and lots of snacks; 2) walking 10 kilometers a day; 3) eating only fresh, unprocessed foods; 4) a severe drought in the area of distilled spirits.

I have since gained back about 10 lbs., mostly due to the end of the drought.

I think the five small meals a day is the key. Most Americans eat one large meal at night and only snack or eat McPlastic during the day. Of course, the walking helped, I'm sure, but I've tried exercise before with little or no effect. My diet here has almost no processed food. It's all farm-fresh and recently killed. There are no colors, preservatives or additives of any kind, nor any anti-biotics or growth hormones.

Most Indonesians are slim and there are few cases of heart disease that I hear about. The diet is full of starches (rice, potatoes and bread) and a large amount of food is fried, so it's not a carb or cholesterol issue. So maybe there is something to the allergy idea, or maybe it's just eliminating all the chemicals and crap, and eating sensibly by spacing meals out over the whole day, when the energy can be used.

Hope that helps a few folks. Worth a shot, at any rate.

Sampai jumpa,

Make that a double shot...ooops....

Quip-O-The-Day Dept.

So, a reader spies the story in the UK Telegraph about the "Sewage power VW Beetle hits the road in Bristol" and wonders...

"Is this a dung beetle?"

Can't say, but if it works,  seems to me it would eliminate the need for gas stations within a 150-mile radius from Washington, wouldn't it?