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Friday December 10, 2010    07:55  AM CST   
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The Crash-Free Depression, I

Got a lot of the research done for this weekend's Peoplenomics report - wherein we'll jump into the mechanics of how to have a Crash-free Depression, which in case you haven't noticed, is what's going on around us.

 

If you still have a home, Thursday's Zillow report that US housing dropped another $1.7 trillion of value this year should be sobering.

 

Then there's the good news/bad news from this morning's Balance of Trade report from the Commerce Department:

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that total October exports of $158.7 billion and imports of $197.4 billion resulted in a goods and services deficit of $38.7 billion, down from $44.6 billion in September, revised. October exports were $4.9 billion more than September exports of $153.8 billion. October imports were $0.9 billion less than September imports of $198.4 billion.

 

In October, the goods deficit decreased $5.7 billion from September to $51.4 billion, and the services surplus increased $0.2 billion to $12.7 billion. Exports of goods increased $4.5 billion to $112.3 billion, and imports of goods decreased $1.2 billion to $163.7 billion. Exports of services increased $0.4 billion to $46.4 billion, and imports of services increased $0.2 billion to $33.7 billion.

 

The goods and services deficit increased $6.4 billion from October 2009 to October 2010. Exports were up $20.6 billion, or 14.9 percent, and imports were up $27.0 billion, or 15.9 percent.

 

Now comes the hard part, explaining how this is good news - and bad, all at the same time.

 

First the bad news:  We are still digging our own grave with the balance of trade, all today's report means is that we have slowed our previously more frenzied shovel work.

 

The good news:  Makes a 10-minute case that the US is doing better than some countries (Ireland and Greece come to mind) on controlling the balance of trade.  BUT...

 

The further bad news: Sure, the US bond picture is running into the ditch (and where goes bonds, so too may go stocks sooner than later) but fiscal restraint means a slowing need to borrow, which tends to increase the currency values, which in turn - since stocks are priced as an inflation-hedging asset as much as anything - then could put downward pressures on stocks and that in turn...oh, you get the idea.

 

Gold's getting whacked here at press time, and that sometimes means downward pressure on stocks...dollar is going up and I know of people who are expecting a rally to 0.82 Euro, but they also believe in reindeer on the roof.

 

Free Lunches Still Popular

Bloomberg has done a new national poll which concludes "Americans in Poll Want Deficit Cut With Entitlements Secured" which sounds OK, until you fire off two neurons in that direction and figure the one sorta precludes t'other.

 

Politely, Bloomberg did not publish any IQ correlations with their poll, but around here we're doing some back of the envelope scribbling....

 

WikiLeaks Hinting?

A couple of readers have noticed the rather interesting wallpaper/background image on the WikiLeaks.ch site.  If you don't have time to look, there's this archive looking room and on various shelves are topics like "Bilderberger Meeting", "Bank claims", Guantanamo manual', a JFK folder, and so forth.

 

Say, you don't think this is a message to the PTB about what's to come, do you?

 

Quote Of the Day

Here is an absolute gem:  In the Wired coverage of the WikiLeaks case under the headline "DNS Provider Mistakenly Caught in WikiLeaks Saga N ows Supports the Group..."

“We’ve already done the time, we might as well do the crime,” Mark Jeftovic, president and CEO of EasyDNS, told Threat Level about his decision. "

Do Canadians 'get it', or what?  I haven't talked to Mark for a year or so, but this for sure earns him two thumbs up....plus a paw up from Zeus the Cat, too.

 

So Much for Statesmanship

A long time ago, I stopped capitalizing the word Congress around here.  Oh, I'll do it (when I remember) and we're talking the institution but not when talking about its current incarnation.  Why?  Well, lemme see....when someone says "F*ck the President" I figure it's an indication that either they don't have a very large vocabulary, or they haven't read much on the subject of statesmanship. 

 

If you work in Washington, two items on my reminder list for the day.  One is that Washington works for the people and two, we expect people in Washington to know what this word means:  Decorum.  Goes nicely with - and is sometimes used with - this one: Modicum.

 

So Much for Statesmanship, II

The Washington Examiner piece "Obama honors (a jailed Chinese Nobel Peace Prize nominee-g) with statement about himself" can be debated.

---

I didn't read it so much as a 'me-me-me' thing by Fearless Leader, so much as a carefully crafted "don't piss off China" dodge, but then again, I suppose that's why I ain't no Washington newspaper writer...

 

Burning Down the House

Authorities in the republik of California have burned down a house that they figure was filled with dangerous chemicals and explosives makings.  All collected, so goes the story here, by a 54-year old unemployed computer consultant.

 

But here's there are two troubling aspects to this:  First is denying defense counsel an opportunity to look through the house for evidence that could exonerate this client of charges.  And then there's the question of whether the homeowner who had rented the place for four years would be entitled to insurance money?  Likely not, I'm guessing, since it was not an Act of God, except that here lately government seems to be taking up that mantle, too.

 

What's a home go for in that area?  Hundreds of thousands of dollars and where (if you don't mind me asking) does the Constitution provide for burning of private property?

 

Let's Tax Rainwater

A tip of the hard hat this morning to the folks at www.fourwindsco.com for the tip about the Obama administrations forthcoming plans to tax (got ViceGrips ready?) rainwater...  So how'd we get here, you're wondering?  Well...

The NRC released its report, entitled Urban Stormwater Management in the United States, National Academy of Sciences Press, in October 2008, with recommendations for EPA on how to strengthen the national stormwater program (available at http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/ home.cfm?program_id=6 ). The NRC found that the current regulatory approach by EPA under the CWA is not adequately controlling all sources of stormwater discharge that are contributing to waterbody impairment.

Oh!  You mean like BP pollution in the GOM?  And who gets impacted?

236115: New Single-Family Housing Construction (except operative builders);

236116: New Multifamily Housing Construction (except operative builders);

236117: New Housing Operative Builders;

236210: Industrial Building Construction;

236220: Commercial and Institutional Building Construction;

237210: Land Subdivision;

237310: Highway, Street and Bridge Construction; and

237990: Other Heavy and Civil Engineering Construction.

Initially, this is targeting larger operators of storm water utilities and such  and is about mandatory information gathering.  But these things have a way of growing.  First you do a study, then you mandate the data you want to base rain taxes (or regulations) on....and then presto - five years down the pike....

 

Just seems to me spending the $4-million on this one could be better spent on figuring out how all that crap that's bad gets into the water from chemtrails, industrial pollution and such.  Solving pollution problems at the source just makes so much more sense...but, of course, its harder to build that empire with all the lobbyists running around for industry...and every one is 'em is special.

 

Royally Screwed

We couldn't help but notice the attack on a car containing British royals Prince Charles and Camilla, all over outrageous austerity programs, including little dribs and drabs like doubling college tuition (tripling fees) and such.

 

 

 

Ever helpful, as we try to be around these parts, here's a suggestion:  The protesters would have gotten a lot more out of attacking, oh, a beer truck, know what I mean?

 

Music of GlobalRev

Don't know if you caught the recent UK Telegraph article "Motorhead beat up banks Christmas single..."  But there you have it, more linguistic fill on the 'beat the bankers' linguistics from the recent Shape of Things to Come/ predictive linguistics forecast.

 

Since we tipped into release language, there have been literally dozens of emotionally super-hot stories showing up and should be interesting to see what's going to happen - if anything - around December 25th - which seems to be a hot date in the WikeLeaks documents, or, around January 4-7-ish when there's a day of release language expected....

 

Everyone Is Royal!

With all the talk about the 'attack on Prince William and his intended, I'm pleased to report that a reader who is 11th cousin (once removed) from PW has generously bestowed on me nothing less than a royal title.  Yessir, no limits to arrogance around here:

George, In honour of your services to finance and humanity, I dub thee.........................(drum roll)...........................

2nd Baron Strathclyde

The first Baron was Alexander Ure, the title became defunct on his death in 1928.

LOL...but seriously, the world's got enough people claiming title and rights over other folks, not to mention making up 'money on the fly', so I'll just be 'simple George'...

 

This does remind me, though, that I will have to renew our membership in the world's largest army - no, not Blackwater - the Society for Creative Anachronism.   Don't know if you've heard any Leslie Fish music - just the thing for sitting around the fire at night - and increasingly relevant in today's world...

 

 

 

I know, I know...I can hear it now:  "George, what does this have to do with economics?"

 

Go replay the chorus:  "The war is coming home..."

 

 

(continues below ad)

 

 

Coping: Hangar Talk

A reader sent me a link to an AP article about the FAA's aircraft registration system, which by the report, seems to have lost track of 119,000 aircraft registrations.

 

Now, a 1-minute course in aircraft owning:  Anyone who have every looked at owning a plane knows the documentation requirements for an aircraft are summed up as ARROW - meaning Airworthiness Certificate, Registration cert., Radio license, Operating limitations (pilot or owners handbook), and a Weight & balance to remind us in small (four-place type) planes to put the heaviest people closest to the cord line of the wing ./..front seat in most planes...yada, yada, yada...

 

Maybe you haven't filled out an AFS-750 form and sent it to the FAA's Registration Branch, but seems to me that one-third of aircraft not being 'tracked' may be a bit high.  Maybe if you include people who forget to update their email address...maybe. 

 

But I'm just guessing (a wild one for this hour) that most of us who fly know about 14 CFR Part 47, 47.2 where the registration requirements are spelled out.  Not saying the story isn't right, but it has the waft of "Oh, oh, here come the fees for a whiz-bang registration system.  Can installation of catalytic converters and annual emissions checks be far off?

---

All of which is not to say that the FAA is perfect, but my personal experience with them is they do a fine job not only of rerouting general aviation users around thunderstorms, but also of keeping on top of maintenance and such.

---

Still, there's room for improvement, and in the interest of positive change I'd like to throw in my two-cents worth.

 

One thing most people do not know is that despite us closing in on ten-years-after 9/11, the FAA does not yet have a system in place to put people's photo ID on pilot's licenses.

 

But this brings up a really good point - and one which the Federal Executive Boards around the 10 federal regions might think about because it makes all kinds of sense to me:

 

The government should have a single document for all purposes.  So, for example, take someone (I'll use the guy in the mirror as the example) who has a collection of various certifications from the government.  I'd have to fess us to having two security clearances in my past (when I was younger) working for a defense contractor back when and then having a White House press card for a while.  There are two radio licenses - one commercial, one ham radio, and then there's the flying stuff.  Might want to toss in some FEMA emergency management certs, too, when I get them done (outgrowth of ham radio emergency training).  Had I bothered with my Coast Guard License, that would be yet another cert (six-pack, sail endorsement that's got the time for) to toss on the list.

 

My point is that each of the federal agencies has grown up with its own set of paperwork agencies.  As the one-time owner of a documented boat, for example, the national documentation center was in West Virginia, for example.

 

But here's the thing now:  Everyone in America knows - or should - that Post Offices have been doing Passport processing for a good while.  This means they have a) staff, b) the fancy camera, and since there's already a single national passport office, why not have them do the handling of all federal certifications?

 

It's all moving that direction, anyway.  So it doesn't make sense to me that some super-surveillance system (secret....woo-woo stuff) ought to be built up to - in effect -cross check the multiple agencies and see who looks suspicious.

 

Seems to me (since I have to write a quarterly tax check here shortly) that it would sure be a lot more efficient to integrate all federal agencies into a single integrated system. 

 

I get a lot of flack for being a "doomer", but this is as clear an example as you'll find the makes the point we're not necessary doomed but do we have to keep playing dumb?  I realize that there may be some 'privacy concerns' by some, but I figure we've already spent untold billions to build computer systems that will report (in secret) that yes, George has been close to a President, seems trust worthy, can fly a plane, drive a car, and con a ship.  It's sure be nice to have one piece of plastic (or a passport page?) that handles all paper instead of paying...oh, let me count the ways...

 

Hey!  What about having the social security number on it, too...since I'd sure like something I can laminate or which doesn't need it!  Hello?  Anyone there?

 

Some Kind of Party...

OK, I admit ham radio types are just ever so slightly geeky.  I wouldn't admit to it so readily most days, except our local ham radio club had its annual Christmas dinner last night and our guest speaker turned out to be the head of Mass Casualties for the state of Texas. 

 

Who, but ham radio types, emergency medical services, and police agencies, would forgo the caroling and Christmas light tours to go talk about how to deal with displaced hurricane evacuees next time we get a Kat/Rita kind of event?  Time well spent...

 

On the other hand,  Santa was great and Elaine won a door prize!

 

Readers Writes

Here's a nice perspective:

"George, On CNN's Thursday, December 9th, Parker-Spitzer program, Kristy (Cristia) Freeland, the Global Editor At-Large for Reuters, commented on the riots in the streets of London, in which the vehicle that Prince Charles and his wife were in was attacked--consistent with The Shape report forecasts--saying: "...the British government is embarked on sort of an unprecedented experiment for an industrialized nation in budget cutting. The have cut nearly 20% of the budget, and these riots, you know, you ain't seen nothing yet. The main cuts are going to fall in the first quarter of next year, and you are going to see hundreds of thousands of government workers unemployed. And, actually, it is not clear if it's going to work yet. And, you look at what's happening in Ireland, some of the skeptics have started to be won over. They have said, you know what, maybe that was the right thing to do. You have to look at what the neighborhood is. And, the neighborhood is a Europe where there is a huge currency volatility where you are seeing sovereign debt crisis falling like dominoes. You've had Greece, now you have Ireland."

Stick around for next week's entry, too...

 

Madness on Bordering

Crossing a border with our friendly Canadian neighbors?  Another reader take on things as they are, not as they are commonly thought to be:

"In 2002, I dated a woman from Canada for a year.When I went to visit her, the customs agents asked what my business in Canada was, I told them about her, and all was well. When she came to visit me, our customs agents wanted to know every aspect about us, our relationship, etc. The one thing I never forgot is how she mentioned that all of the American flags flying all over the place, on cars, buildings, etc. reminded her of old WWII documentaries on Germany from 1933 to 1945. At the time, I thought it was just patriotism. Looking back, I think she may have been correct."

Well, don't blame me.  Then there's a different Canadian reader who sent this:

"Dear Mr. Ure,

You go and mention the defunct East German Stasi, and what happens? The Vancouver Police Department runs a one day relay of calls to Twitter. "...Call 9-1-1 if you see suspicious activity!" says one tweet.

I can't wait until they start patrolling Farmville.

What, you haven't seen them?  Why, I was just going through your file...say...says here you listened to Crosby, Stills, and Nash during the Vietnam War...that true?  Got any ID on you?....Here, talk to this fellow with da gloves on....

 

About Sums It Up

Say, here's a nice reader-contributed email that sums this week up nicely, in an email sent by this reader to his friends:

Some things in the news this week are very eye catching, so I thought I might point them out if you missed them.

It started on Wednesday, December 8, between approximately 6 and 11 AM there was a parabolic drop in the price of gold of about $30. That was a shocker to the gold investment crowd as there was no underlying readily apparent reason for it. Silver dropped almost $3 at the same time frame. That was very odd because bonds and currencies were both dropping in value at the same time, and stocks weren't going up. How could all the major investment avenues be flat or sharply down trending at the same time? Where was the money going?

Looking back a bit, Tuesday and Wednesday both saw major dumping of US Treasuries by investors. When T-bills are being dumped the interest rate offered for them goes up, which then drives up interest rates derived from the bond market - including the 30 year mortgage rate. The 30 year mortgage rate shot up half a point in a few hours on Wednesday morning. There were other signs of bond market trouble on Wednesday and Thursday as well, such as Build America Bonds jumped to an 11 month high interest rate in minutes (more dumping) and Germany had their fourth failed bond auction in a row - being forced withdraw an offer of $20 Billion Euros of bonds because there were no buyers.

For years now the "doomsayers", in the financial alternative press have been predicting that the next and perhaps final great crash of the world markets will be a sovereign debt crash and would first appear as open dumping of government debt, like T-Bills, etc. Well, last night the word hit the rumor mills that the Fed was terrified by the initial dumping of bonds across the globe on Wednesday, so they pulled out all the stops and used every resource they have to drive down all commodity prices in the hope of cutting off the bond rout. It worked, for now, but the surprising part is that they were unable to drive the physical metals down further. Both silver and gold hit support levels and would not fall further. Why? Because the Chinese are calling their bluff. The Chinese are buying and taking delivery of gold and silver in a big way right now through third party agents. They are laughing all the way to their bullion vaults as they cart off the last physical reserves the Fed can get hold of. In the words of one writer out of London yesterday afternoon, they consider the Fed to be like a bunch of cartoon characters - dumb and comical as all heck - and they are taking full advantage of the situation.

The Fed's response was that they had their mouth pieces out late yesterday announcing the "shocking", revelation in the financial press that the Chinese have been huge gold buyers for the last year - secretly dumping their paper dollar reserves for gold. This is hardly a revelation to insiders, but it is news to the mainstream media. Why is the Fed announcing this? Because they are loosing the battle to suppress the prices of physical metals. There is shortly going to be a market forced big pop up in the price of both gold and silver as the Fed looses control. The Fed is setting the stage to blame the whole thing on Chinese intervention in order to try to hide the fact that large investors across the globe continue to dump government bonds and move in to commodities even as I write this.

The whole world financial system is starting to creak and groan, snap and crack. We are getting close to the next great crash. Buy some physical metals with your soon to be worthless dollars while you can. Price is a real bargain for gold and silver right now. DO NOT invest in paper contracts for gold or silver. Buy and take delivery of the actual metals.

I oughta hire this guy so I can get a day off once in a while.  Maybe over Christmas.

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No, wait:  That's when I have clean the reindeer crap off the roof and repair the place where some fat guy shows up every year smashing in the ceiling every year 'cuz we don't have a chimney.  Shhhhh!   Mr. Mossberg and I are waiting this year...

 

 

Send your comments to  george@ure.net  

 

Last week's report is always here

 

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Thursday December 9, 2010

GlobalRev & Cyberwar

Lingo-Lango: First thing to notice today is a note from Clif about how language is filling in all over the place about what we've had in linguistics as 'globalrev' and 'secrets revealed' for quite some time now...

"dude...the NBC news and the ABC news and CNN are all now using our 'global war' language! only it is about the cyber wars against MC and visa! but the linguistics are there.

this is a big ass hoooray IF and it is the BIG IF....it does not turn out to be a wide meme.

HOORAY, i think? later.."

The "Hooray!" reference?  Better in our work to get just words rather than glassmaking mushrooms popping off, so this is a good thing....really....

 

All of which is filling up the language expectation sets as they relate to war, revolution, and so forth.  So while governments are trying to figure out out how to deal with Julius Assange, there's a very interesting 'battle line' emergent, which we'll get into in the Coping Section below. 

 

But first, this...because I'm working on how all this fits into the globalrev/ cyberwar going forward... grope me.

 

Virtualizing Your Money Away

A new report from an outfit you've probably never heard of -- "Federal Reserve Bank Services" --- has some eye-poppers in what's titled "The 2010 Federal Reserve Payments Study: noncash Payment Trends in the United States: 2006-2009".

 

Our consulting C-level banking source points out a couple of things from the report.  First is that by 2009, the amount of noncash transactions had dropped to only 22%  (i.e.. checks):

 

 

Source: Federal Reserve Services Report

 

What grabbed my attention is that check us has apparently dropped by 10 percent in just three years...amazing!  And as my C-level source put it:

"George,

Sure, electrons are much more secure and durable than paper payments. How easy are they trying to make it to seize up the whole works?

“All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.”

But what it brings is this huge wryrony to the WikiLeaks discussion:  The web may already be moving beyond government control, since in a very real sense, the global economic system could be held hostage...

 

So when a reader send this:

"George, The BBC's technology reporter, Maggie Shiels, said in her WikiLeaks report on Wednesday, "WikiLeaks themselves have said they'll continue leaking the documents and, if you want to stop us, you'll probably have to shut down the Internet." --BBC World News, December 8, 2010"

I send them a note back about "Got a replacement for electronic banking handy?"  This is getting just so weird....the PowersThatBe are becoming the PowersThatWere and net control is where freedom will be won, or lost...

 

Weekly Jobs Number

Bet you've been up all night waiting for this one?

In the week ending Dec. 4, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 421,000, a decrease of 17,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 438,000. The 4-week moving average was 427,500, a decrease of 4,000 from the previous week's revised average of 431,500.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.2 percent for the week ending Nov. 27, a decrease of 0.2 percentage point from the prior week's unrevised rate of 3.4 percent.

Say, this is some recovery the duopoly has spread out for us, huh?

 

Battling Bonds

No, not SMERSH, Double Oh Seven, I'm talking about the huge success the Chinese are having with their five billion yuan bond issuance  t'other day while the POMO operations in the US mostly suck.

 

So much so that the prestigious Financial Times reported "US Treasuries hit by biggest sell-off in two years" and next week if triple witching, so more battling may be expected.

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Was there a hidden message from Ian Fleming in those Bond books?  I mean about 'money' and 'penny'?

---

Getting many, many views, BTW, this Jon Stewart video called Big Bank Theory which doesn't hold much new for UrbanSurvival readers, but which explains things nicely to the newly becoming aware and the punchline is pretty good:

 

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Big Bank Theory
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

 

 

Madness On Bordering Dept.

What some have called the 'anchor baby rights bill'  - the Dream Act by others - has been helped by some Florida republicorps and is heading for the senate where its fate is uncertain.

 

Hiding the Sausage

NaturalNews is reporting that as a 'never give up' move, the Food Safety modernization Act is being put inside a Veterans funding bill, HR 3082.

 

I'm pretty sure they'd been looking for an apple pie and virgins bill, but this was probably the closest thing that could be found...

 

Entrapment or "Fighting Terrorism"?

We're reading about another story in the NY Times today - this time about a 21-year old man who was purportedly a recent convert to Islam, who was ensnared in an FBI sting operation, and is going down on terrorism related to a car bomb.

 

As in the Portland, Oregon "tree lighting bomber" case a few weeks back, which according to the Times report, almost upset this latest 'sting', to me it raises troubling questions about whether this (or the previous event) would have ever gotten as far as it did without the government's involvement.

 

Sure to be a civil liberties case going forward, it's another baby-step toward  the Orwellian 'permanent war for permanent peace' (PW4PP) scenario under which government requires an unconquerable enemy to waste a sufficiently large portion of GDP to keep its books straight.  Or, haven't you read Report From Iron Mountain yet?  It's the defining piece on how gar governments may need to press things to stay in the governing business.  Whether Iron Mountain was a satire or factual was once hotly debated, but the nearly permanent war we've become gotten sucked into...well, it's just downright discouraging.

 

As a reader commented:

"See, the more civil liberties you all give up in the name of security, we can catch more criminals we helped manufacture. And don't forget that Poland invaded Germany on 1 Sept. 1939, too. Or so the German public was told...."

Dirty Money

I really want you to read the Alex Silverman (KIRO Radio Seattle) story about how a study shows "Most money is contaminated with toxic chemical".

 

Yessir, pack up all that dangerous money you've got and ship it on down.  I'll be sure and wear rubber gloves when spending it...

 

Coping: Decentralizing the Web?

I like to sit down now and then and try to come up with a kind of Grand Unified Theory of What's Really Going On.  Not to borrow too extensively from my friend The Mogambo Guru, I think this would be the GUTOWRGO.

 

A combination of stories - linked only in a sketchy way - today presents itself almost as a ghostly apparition, but worth noting.

 

First the data points from what I think is one side of what seems to be the bifurcation (splitting in two) of the internet:

The Diaspora Software Project is now fully funded and work is underway, or so we hear on this new class of social networking software under which information will (if I follow the concept right) live at  no particular address.

 

Despite various governments, WikiLeaks keeps getting money, according to The Swedish Wire this morning.

 

And then there are reports in places like PC World and ComputerWorld about why WikiLeaks is so hard for those in officialdom to stop from disseminating its information.

 

And as perhaps the most definitive part of this ghostly thingy in the fog, there's the IT World article this morning about how the "Gov't crackdown spurs initiative to route around DNS."

 

As long as we're at it, let's not forget the eScapist report that "Copyright Lawyers Sued by Copyright Infringers" story.

Try to hold those in your might - lightly, kinda like a croissant just out of the oven and then let's do what my dentist might call a 'build up' on the other concept.  Think of this as the 'opposing party' in a great battle:

There's a story out of the UK's Guardian this morning about how China is blocking news websites ahead of Liu Xiaobo getting handed the Nobel Peace Prize.

 

A Paul Joseph Watson piece on Prison Planet Tuesday discusses the meaning of Wal-Mart putting monitors at check-out stands in 588 stores in 27-states to run commercials encouraging people to report anything suspicious about their neighbors in Stasi-like fashion; it'd make East Germany security police pleased, if they were still around.

 

Then there's the report on the Huffington Post site that PayPal was pressured by the US State Department to block WikiLeaks funding.

 

As long as we're dimensioning the battle front, let's not forget the recent Immigration and Customs enforcement action which took down 82-websites which were alleged to be selling knock-offs - counterfeit goods, according to the LA Times coverage.

 

What's contentious in this last is that not only were physical goods targeted, but some websites like Torrent-Finder which dealt - if I've got this right - in digital content were also busted.  But, Torrent-Freak reports that website is planning to fight the domain name seizure by the Feds and we see how the LA Times (rather inconveniently, I'd think) mentions that the busts were ahead of new enabling legislation (COICA) going into effect.

What to do with this second batch of stories?  Think of it as a second croissant (this one with cheese, perhaps).

 

If we hold the two of them up, just so, we can see that there's a meta data level conflict going on between the powers of structure, organization, and thus control on the one hand, versus a data set of dispersion, no 'central authority', and a specific lack of 'control' by "authority".

 

Now (if you're not driving) close your eyes and let's rename those two croissants.  The second croissant we'll call the New World Order wet dream of the PowersThatWere.  They had a pretty good run of global(ist) control from the period spanning before the US Civil War until roughly the release of the WikiLeaks documents.

 

The first croissant we'll imagine to be a new kind of mass consciousness - a kind of global super-consciousness that's trying to take-off from what's a distinctly unfriendly airfield.  The emplacements around the field are firing off with lawsuits, hypnotic messages at the grocery store, and seizures of different partisan onramps. 

 

The response of the uncontrolled mass consciousness side is to essentially try and get DNS 'up in the cloud; beyond control and seizure would be fine with most of them.  And, as long as we're at it, there's the issue of how long should intellectual property keep paying its creator?  And if it's more than a short period, the ugly question oughta be raised "How come we're not paying royalties to the descendants of the Uggg who invented the wheel?"

 

In all, it looks like a kind of global cyberwar, and the headlines around that little word are all over the place now:  Bringing down a Swedish government website,  and of course, that virtualizing of money problem for the PTW.

 

Headlines are starting to appear around the net going to the idea that the "Cyber War is On!"  And it's accompanied by videos like this one from YouTube:

 

 

 

So here's the Big Question:  Is there really a cyberwar that's gone 'game on' for control of the future of the world?

 

Not sure....but the language could be lined up that way.  Or, at least it could have been.  I'm now eating those croissants.

---

Congressman Ron Paul, from down the road a piece in Southeast, Texas, says the thing people ought to do now is "Focus on the policy, not WikiLeaks..."  A quote from the Congressman:

"In a free society, we are supposed to know the truth. In a society where truth becomes treason, however, we are in big trouble. The truth is that our foreign spying, meddling, and outright military intervention in the post-World War II era has made us less secure, not more. And we have lost countless lives and spent trillions of dollars for our trouble. Too often "official" government lies have provided justification for endless, illegal wars and hundreds of thousands of resulting deaths and casualties."

Not often will you find me disagreeing with Congressman Paul.  But I find it kinda strange that after himself being a victim of corpmedia and having tasted the sting of the American corporate duopoly reining in real liberty, that he hasn't recognized the WikiLeaks case for what it is:  The frontline skirmish over absolutely full disclosure including the freedom to disclose, and the Old World Order, which founds its business models on the axiom that 'scarcity builds demand' and 'scarcity builds price'.

 

This unrecognized fact is that the birth of networked computing - the same things that flattened the organizational charts of businesses while increasing accountability at the same time, is now coming to call on governments.

 

The problem will be finding a middle ground so that the fire department will still come to a fire, and police will come when called. 

 

But seriously, do we need a military presence in 140+ countries, 61% of GDP being Debt, and what is it?  60-times global GDP in derivatives to make things work down on Main Street? 

 

Emerging web consciousness is asking tough questions about the whole paradigm...not just singular policies.  For the Congressman not to see it, to me anyway, just pushes him back into the "divide and conquer camp'...and it should be apparent where that's gotten us. 

 

Either there's a larger context emerging, or maybe is is only a ghostly apparition after all...  they were fine croissants.

 

Browser Choices, II

Reader feedback:

"From today's column about all your computer I note you are STILL using M$IE software in various versions. Seems like you like having a bullseye painted on your sides on the net. And remember, back awhile when M$OFT had to admit there were security vulnerabilities in M$IE that "can not be fixed". Well, they still aren't fixed. Check out Steve Gibson's security site www.grc.com  for all the short comings of the various M$OFT OSes. Hmmmmmm.

I realize that you are deeply invested in M$OFT software at this point across multiple machines. I think of that as a regrettable choice, perhaps understandable, but whatever works. At least right this minute it works.

Seems to me you could benefit by at least changing your browsers to FireFox with all the nice add ons. Read about IE9 with its "tracking blocker" -- that is amusing. We have been blocking that stuff on FF for years with a free add on called Noscript. And others including Better Privacy that removes Flash Cookies.

And the horror stories about M$Outlook abound in case you have not noticed. My point being then that with some tweaking of your software selections you might have more stability and much more security. Just a thought. "

While I agree that Microsoft is not perfect, there's a dandy explanation for how I got 'into the fold'.  One of the main reasons, and it's admittedly changing now, however slowly, is the matter of drivers.  If I was to convert a machine here to Linux, I'd be faced with a daunting task of updating all the drivers, too, if I really wanted to do things 'right' - otherwise, I'd just have built a dual-boot machine, which doesn't seem like it's worth the effort.

 

It's not so much printers - they seem to be coming along - but little things like wireless cards, and even more arcade: studio gear, joysticks, and some of that ham radio  gear which controls radios - and much of it may never be moved over to Linux.

 

For now, my W7 boxes are all playing happily.  Besides, when I want security for banking transactions?  I put a check in the mail at the Post Office, or I drive up to the bank.  Hard to hack a pickup truck.

 

Ski Plans?

If you were thinking about a weekend jaunt to Iceland this weekend, keep the Gulfstream in the hangar...

"Hi George,

I am a daily reader of your blog and appreciate the time and effort you give to it. We’ve recently moved to Iceland which is 66 degress north in the middle of the Atlantic as you know and have found the winter thus far to be very mild. It’s so mild that it is predicted that the ski slopes nearby Reykjavik will not open this year. Iceland is warm because of the Gulf Current. I’ve noticed the severe cold weather in Europe as you report and wonder about the cause of this discrepancy. Any ideas? No one here whom I have spoken with seems to have a clue. "

I can think of a few million Brits who'd appreciate you sending their winter currents back to them...

 

---

Wednesday December 8, 2010

Hidden In Plain Sight

Not to sound like the proverbial 'broken record' here, but the biggest economics stories are sometimes the ones hidden in plain sight.  This morning's example is the Federal Reserve's G.19 Consumer Credit report, which is really about consumer debt but since this is stated from the banker's perspective, they call it credit - the same way they call 'em 'credit cards' which glosses over the fact that you put on the yoke of debt every time you pull one out and use it...

 

There are two components to the G.19  report:  "Revolving" debt such as credit cards and what-have you and "Nonrevolving" debt which "Includes automobile loans and all other loans not included in revolving credit, such as loans for mobile homes, education, boats, trailers, or vacations. These loans may be secured or unsecured."

 

Other than house payments (for those still owning them) the Consumer Credit is perhaps the best gauge available to determine whether the economy is expanding or contracting.

 

Unfortunately, the report is not anywhere near real-time.  But it shows that this year's 2,408.8 billion (2.4088-trillion) Q3 number doesn't look at all good when matched up against the Q3 2009 number, which was 2,496.6 (e.g. 2.4966 trillion).

 

What's revealed is that Consumer Credit has fallen 3.5% compared with Q3 of 2009.

 

Bummer?  It gets even worse, since the number of dollars sloshing about the system is not taken into account.  In other words, the G.19 report gives us the nominal (apparent) number of dollars spent, but since they are not adjusted for inflation we need to discount their purchasing power.

 

We could be here till New Years (and not sure of which year) debating how to figure inflation.  One way would be to use the CPI (consumer price index) figures, but since the latest batch of those won't be out till next week, we'll have to use what's already been released, shown here, which gets an approving nod from our consulting economics professors, since it reflect October to October data which makes the academic types happy - something about apples and oranges...

 

The simple way to read the figures would be to use the unadjusted October 2010 increase compared with the previous year and decrement the purchasing power of the Consumer Credit number by this amount.  Just to ball park it that means Consumer spending has dropped 3.5% in the past year and in addition, consumer are getting 1.2% less, call it, for the effects of inflation, so call it an overall deflation rate of 4.7%.  See why I don't mind having a few bucks in bonds?

 

What struck me as interesting, while I was having this morning's attack of calculator crunching was it struck me as sort of odd that here lately the Labor Department has been presenting Not Seasonally Adjusted (NSA) figures with regard to CPI.  "Curious..."  Know what I mean?

 

So I decided to look at the current CPI-W NSA figures for October 2010 and compare them with the CPI-W NSA index for October 2009.  This year's number was 215.005 and the 2008 number was 211.842 (click here and scroll down to Table 5.)  So urban wage and clerical workers on a seasonally adjusted basis were down about 1.5%, not the headline 1.2%.  Figures.

 

So around here, we will use this latter figure, which when added to the Consumer Debt figure means real consumer goods are likely down - on a unit volume basis - about 5 percent.

---

MarketWatch had a dandy piece out Monday by Paul Farrell:  "10 reasons to shun stocks till banks crash".  I like Farrell's work because he's one of the few guys to adopt the word "bankster" - which is encouraging and is a tip that he 'gets it'. 

 

While Farrell's reason # 10 is "Wall Street will lose another 20% of your money by 2020", I like to think he might have listed reason #11 as the falling Consumer Debt. No growth in consumption means no profits, near as I can figure.

 

So, Where's the Market Going?

All of which would be a really boring paper to write for an Econ class, until we get to thinking about how all this may start to weigh on the stock market.

 

The obvious inference from the data is that there IS NO GROWTH going on generally in consumer goods.  The occasional glimmer of happy-talk results from statistics which use small sample sizes on which to build great pyramids of hope.  So whenever you see an uptick in this - or that - in economics you have to ask "How big is N?"  N being the number of sample points in the data from which you can calculate the reliability of the data - and you'll discover that many times the reported "increase" or "decrease" in data falls into the 'noise band' of the data. 

 

And it was right about here in last evening's ponderings (while missing the ham radio club meeting) that one of those periodic emails my friend Robin Landry sends out to colleagues in the investment field showed up with the subject line "Wave 5 Failure?"

"Hi Everyone,

I’m sending out this update due to several things happening in the markets Monday. In the update sent out this past Sunday I laid out the short term count as being we were in a wave four that would last several more days before turning up in the 5th wave of C. The alternate count was that wave 5 had already started. The market can now be counted as 5 waves up from the 11/29/10 low so I now label it as being wave 5. The fact that it topped out within 1 point of the 11/05/10 high and completely retraced leads me to ask the question. Is that all there is? My apologies to the late Peggy Lee. Did we just have a 5th wave failure and now the dreaded wave P3 is getting underway? The rest of the day the market traced out a 5-3-5 decline which could be counted as being the start of 5 waves down and we will see wave 4 and 5 early tomorrow. The alternate count is the market has just completed wave i of 5 of C, and the current decline is part of a wave ii decline, which when complete, the market will turn back up in iii of 5 to targets outlined in Sunday’s update. Adding insult to injury, today we saw the bond market drop dramatically after it was announced the latest Bond auction had a very low Bid to Cover. Can anyone say Auction Failure? Gold and Silver also reversed sharply after hitting new highs Monday and the Dollar turned back up. I have attached a 30 minute chart, along with a daily chart of the Dow which shows the counts I have expressed above. While the seasonal history hints we likely have more to go to complete wave C of P2 I felt I should alert everyone that it appears we could be at the top already. Remember I have been saying surprises will be to the downside and this could be the start of one. We shall see over the next few days. As always I will update as circumstances warrant.

Robin  rlandry@allegiance.tv

 

My first peak at the futures was negative this morning...and while the overnight results in Japan were good (up 9/10th's of one percent) there was a 1.43% overnight decline in the Hang Seng.  Trading was mixed early in Europe, but if the poor bid-to-cover in the Treasury auction becomes widely appreciated, then POMO operations have likely run their course, and we could be setting up for some serious downside action.

 

I keep reminding myself "The global economy has been predicated on a constant-growth model.  If we take away the growth, and instead have reductions in economic activity, surely the upside action which accompanied the blow-off top in 2007 will have it's blow-off downside shortly, since markets over estimate extremes of information....as seems the proper role of speculation..."

---

BTW, chatting with Robin last night, me mentioned that the bond losses yesterday may have cost the Fed up to $20-billion Monday.  I don't see a lot of folks commenting on that...yet...given 'em time, I suppose...

----

Futures have come back to almost flat...higher levels to short from?

 

A Lone Data Point

Not too much in the way of data this morning, except that the weekly Mortgage Banker's Association weekly report is out and it shows tick down for last week - not unexpected following a holiday...

WASHINGTON, D.C. (December 8, 2010) The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) today released its Weekly Mortgage Applications Survey for the week ending December 3, 2010. The Market Composite Index, a measure of mortgage loan application volume, decreased 0.9 percent on a seasonally adjusted basis from one week earlier. On an unadjusted basis, the Index increased 22.8 percent compared with the previous week, which included the Thanksgiving Holiday. The Refinance Index decreased 1.4 percent from the previous week. This is the fourth weekly decrease for the Refinance Index which reached its lowest level since June 2010. The seasonally adjusted Purchase Index increased 1.8 percent from one week earlier. This is the third weekly increase for the Purchase Index which reached its highest level since early May 2010. The unadjusted Purchase Index increased 21.3 percent compared with the previous week and was 12.0 percent lower than the same week one year ago.

The four week moving average for the seasonally adjusted Market Index is down 8.0 percent. The four week moving average is up 2.8 percent for the seasonally adjusted Purchase Index, while this average is down 10.9 percent for the Refinance Index.

So is it time to run out and buy a rental or two?  That's the topic of Peoplenomics this weekend, as we've been kicking around the idea...

 

Climate of Wryrony

With the UN Climate Change true believers conference down in Cancun, Mexico, Robert Felix' "Ice Age Now" site reports this lil gem:  "Record low temps in Cancun 3 days in a row". 

 

Who says Universe doesn't have a fine sense of humor?

 

Chillin'

The flip side to 'warming'?  Back in the days when the Gulf Stream was healthy, the British used to enjoy mild winters.  Good thing the Gulf Stream was running because London is 51.6 degrees North latitude.  Which, if you have your GPS mapping ap fired up (I'm a Streets & Trips addict, eh?) you'll see that 51.6 degrees North means London's equivalent would be more than 600-milers north of Detroit or about 400 miles north of Montreal, or 300 miles north of Seattle....just to give you the flavor of things.

 

Now that La Nina has gone large, and the Gulf Stream has slowed to in effect turn off the heat in Europe this winter, we're seeing the crap really hit the fan.  People in Ireland are having their water shut off at night in Dublin and because of all the unusual snow and ice, people in the UK are running out of both food and fuel, according to a TNT Magazine report.

 

The [ongoing] WikiLeaks War

A news tip from a colleague in India is notable:

"Hi George,

Just wanted to do some online payment for some additional silver that I bought (also online) from a Swiss Metal dealer.

However, the site of my bank was down. So I waited and tried again. Then I stumbled across this article and realized that my bank is down since more than one day. Quoting from Wikipedia

"WikiLeaks supporters and hackers hit PostFinance with Denial-of-service attacks for anti-WikiLeaks behavior. At around 12 p.m. EST, on 6 December 2010, PostFinance website went offline[2]. As of 8 December, the website is still offline.

---

Wonder how this helps to wake up customers to the fact that their savings/accounts are mere digital phantoms.

 

Seems that MasterCard and Visa are next on the "Payback" list.

 

Greetings from the orient,"

Sure enough, a check of Google's search engine shows the WikiLeaks payback program is ongoing...

 

No Big Bank Runs

Looks like the call for people to take their money out of banks on December 7th didn't exactly topple the world's economic system.  Near as I can figure, it will do itself in, but a little more slowly.  But what got my attention this morning was the headline in the UK Telegraph that one of the promoters of the bank boycott movement, "Eric Cantona scores on goal as wife appears in bank advert..."

 

Wonder where the couple will be cashing that check?

---

It's very popular to bash large national banks, but the reality (pending DoS attacks and whatever) is that millions of people use them and their related ATM networks, without which commerce would grind to a halt.  When one region of the country runs into the ditch (Las Vegas and Phoenix come to mind) the big bad national super banks can spread the pain around.  It's a good thing, and a bad...

---

Not that big national banks are perfect, though.  Take for example this story: "OCC, Bank of America Enter Agreement Requiring Payment of Profits Plus Interest to Municipalities Harmed by Bid-Rigging on Financial Products "  $9.2 million gets refunded.

 

Chavez - Again

Iran's PressTV reports Hugo Chavez has shut down an opposition TV station.  For a guy who seems to want to be a latter-day Simon Bolivar, he's missed a few fine points about liberty, seems to me...

 

Jail Disaster

A prison fire in Chile overnight has killed at least 81 according to reports from Reuters and elsewhere...

 

Investing In The Security State

"Your security state - on the march!" might be a good headline.  Already this week we've seen the head of DHS move ahead with a joint promotion with Wal-Mart.  Then there's the latest from UPS which is planning to require a photo ID in order to be able to ship a package.  FedEx has to love this, but I expect any minute they're be forced to follow suit along with other carriers like DHL....

---

I should have seen  The Security State coming when in 2002 (or was it 2003?) the software company I was with down in Boca put in security access control to the software development area. 

 

The absolutely profound thing I missed (and this is THE single best investment tip I can share with anyone) is that when you see a change in your personal environment, extrapolate and invest!

 

If I'd done so, there was a small card-reader access company in Florida that could have made me a gazillionaire.  Or, I could have invested in an ID Card Laminating business...or... lemme see: video companies, facial recognition software, traffic cameras, body scanners, magnetometers, pee-testers....well, you get the idea.

 

See something as a state-changer before everyone else 'gets it' - then run out and invest like crazy in it.   It's like getting word in advance where a new freeway is going to be put in.  All you need to do is figure out where the middle of the northbound lanes is...and eventually something will run over you.

 

Link a Brinks truck.

 

Coping:  Time to Change Browsers - Again!!!???

An amazing number of people use more than one computer these days - having one or two at home is no big deal - one for the kids, one for the grown ups, since you don't want the kids to wipe out three years of tax records, for example.  And then there's the one at work.

 

Here lately, I've been trying to figure out whether the new browsers coming along are going to be worth changing out our existing fleet of IE8 (MS Internet Explorer V. 8).

 

Part of me thinks the anti-tracking tool coming in IE9 might be interesting, although I'm sure there's a backdoor for security agencies, and that leads to a question about whether that in turn might make it only be a matter of time until it's exploited by others.

 

Google keeps adding to whiz-bangs to its Chrome 10 platform and over at Tom's hardware there's a good discussion about the latest changes to use some of the horsepower called "crankshaft" to speed up by using some V8 JavaScript VM calls...  Being a type A personality, I've noticed there's a near-perfect inverse correlation between my page load times and blood pressure.

 

Then there's the whole list of improvements coming with Firefox 4 which is nicely captured for Mac users over at eSecurity Planet where Kenneth van Wyk puts IE9 and Ff 4 through some testing.

---

My problem is that every machine here at the ranch has a different purpose to it.  The main computer in my office is optimized for multiple monitors - four at the moment.  Until a new browser shows me its stuff on an extended desktop X4, I'm not going to put it there.

 

Panama's computer (since he does lots of Spanish language work) does fine with the Spanish versions (goes with his keyboard, eh?) yet that's not often mentioned in new browser reviews.

 

Elaine's computer is the nearest to a general-purpose platform with just Office & Outlook for 99% of its use.

 

The TV's computer (media server 2) has to be Starlight  compatible for NetFlix and such, and not sure how IE9-Starlight goes...I assume it will be no problems, but these kinds of assumptions have cost me weeks of tweaks with other software, so I'm more than wary - downright gun-shy.

 

Media serve 1 is where I do audio and the production - 18-track FireWire, Sony video editor/QuickTime and all that kind of stuff.  Small - but non-zero risk that a browser change could ripple out there.

 

Then there's the ham radio computer, which is the lone XP box remaining, and that one has so much I/O stuff on it  (USB radio interface, Serial radio control, and so on) that I wonder how much memory will be left for the important stuff with these new browsers...

 

The checklist for each computer doesn't seem like much, but by the time all the computers are updated - seven of them counting the one in the guest room - there's actually a lot that could go wrong.

 

At the moment, everything is working - and very smoothly.  Tempting though some of the new features are, there's something to the old saying "If it ain't broke, don't fix it..."

 

It's one of those tipping points in Life:   Young enough to want the latest and greatest feature set.  Old enough to know there's nothing free...and computers have their own kind of corollary to the Newtonian "For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction."

 

Except in computers, it's often:  "For every upgrade or install there's an equal and opposite system restore point."

 

Revolutionary Notes

Every so often I get an email which takes the blinders completely off and gets right down to the heart of the matter.  Here's the latest entrant:

"I am sick of this shitty Mexican dirt weed. If they don't start feeding us with good green bud Im just going to quit. I am making a stand right now today, thats it no green bud no sale. I am sick and tired of shitty Mexican weed. Brown dry dusty seedy no buz waste of propane to light it. ahit weed. Now talk you your peoples and let em know, we have reached our "Tipping point". Stupid California

Now comes the sage investment advice.  Have you checked falling real estate prices in some of the less densely populated parts of the country?

---

Maturity is when you figure out you don't have to be buzzed to live...

---

Speaking o de ganj...Don't know if you read the article on the Boston Herald website this weekend - "New Research shows marijuana's medical perils, promise".  With seemingly contradictory results, we have to wonder about whether some of the 'complexities'; would be more easily defined with lab-grade sources...although I'm sure they take all that into account.  Still, not as consistent as say green peas from the store, know what I mean?  Er...so I hear anyway...

 

 

---

Tuesday December 7, 2010

Money To Burn

We commence on a positive note:  Know what would be cool?  To have unlimited money to spend.  As a practical matter, I notice that the people who have something near 'unlimited money' tend not to spend it the way you and I might; almost never hear about Bill Gates playing Nintendo (lol) or George Soros hanging out on the beach somewhere waiting for The Big Wave...or, just up the road a short piece, I don't hear about Warren Buffett going to the local ham club meeting (which is tonight here).  Nope; the guys with tons of dough don't spend it like you and I might.

 

The point?  Well, the US Treasury has money to burn at the moment - about $100 billion may be destroyed, and maybe right here in Texas.  The reason is there are so many security features in the new $100 bill that the buggers are near impossible to print.  They've printed a bunch and found they don't pass due to quality control issues.  So they'll have to be destroyed.

 

What's even more important (he said, smoothly transitioning into the bad news of the day) is that the story reveals that the cost of printing up $100 billion was just $120 million.  That's right, just over 1/10th of one penny ($0.0012 to be precise) to 'make' a $100 bill - even if badly.  But even this is too much, hence the headlong rush into digidollars, which as customers of the National Australia Bank found out recent aren't totally reliable, but harder to burn electrons, we supposed.

---

A lot more enduring is the price of gold and silver which is heading for new  highs and was just under $1,430 an ounce when I looked this morning, but even more interesting is silver being over $30.

 

What do you think would scare people out of currencies and into gold in such numbers?  Ahead!  Next story, please...

 

Assange Jailed

There are thousands - I mean over 4,000 reports - you can flip through to pick up the details of the arrest of WikiLeaks found Julian Assange who is in custody in London this morning.

 

Near as I have it figured from reading the multiple reports there may very well be not one WikiLeaks bombshell to come, but two.  One is said to involve a large US bank while the other is thought to be even more information of the type released already; arguably stuff of historic scale. 

 

There's been some speculation about the reputed "big US bank" might not be one of the big corporate banks (e.g. something like a BoA, JP, of Citi) but might instead might  involve the NY Fed.  Say, wouldn't it be interesting to read an inside out list of the goings on there about the NY Fed's cozy relationship with Wall Street's biggest over the past, oh, 30-years or so?

 

Then there's the matter of that 1.6 BG file which was distributed by WikiLeaks back in mid summer as a kind of ultimate poison pill.  All that's needed is for physical hard to come to Assange and out goes the WikiLeaks access code to this extremely tightly encrypted file. 

 

Say, I don't suppose that you noticed that all this WikiLeaks stuff dating back to late spring/early summer with the 'poison pill file' fulfills a largish chunk of the "secrets revealed meme' we've nattered on and on about?  And I don't suppose you've kept track of how the release of still more Wiki secret has contributed to the tipping point?  Why, of course not.  But, check history books, Assange will likely be mentioned prominently for this period before it's all over.

----

Ever think the health of one fellow in a London jail - for failure to put on a fresh condom -  might collapse the global economy?

 

And you wonder why I keep several pairs of ViceGrips handy with which to pinch myself?  I keep swilling coffee by the gallon, too.  "I know I'm gonna wake up any second..."

 

Consumer Debt

Be sure and drop by tomorrow morning for a little coffee-side chat about the Consumer Debt report due out this afternoo0n from the Federal Reserve.  Last month consumer debt was reported up 1.1 percent overall, but that was because things like non-revolving debt was up 7.9 percent (student loans and such) while revolving debt (credit card use etc) was down at an annualized 12.1 percent.

 

Just tossing a dart, I'd say down a few billion overall and as a result, in coming months, the double-dip of Depression Two should become even more obvious.

 

Controlling the Internet

A North American reader - dosed up on too much coffee has spied this:

"With under 6 hours to the Irish budget vote, a webcam covering Dublin protest thoroughfare O'Connell Street is broadcasting a fixed December 2nd image. City traffic monitoring webcams are not displaying time and date stamps due to a technical fault."

No telling whether that's blocking at the national level in Eire, or keeping North America in the dark, either way, we'll pass on word as the Irish vote on whether to bail out the bankers comes in.

 

Weather Tales

While the UN has a panel debating 'rising sea levels' (when the real issue may be continental-level subsidence, lands rising elsewhere) it's almost comical - but not quite - to read about how people are riding busses around in Europe trying to keep from freezing to death due to the bitterly cold winter.

 

Some quick!  Get Old Man Winter on the line and remind him he's failing to maintain political correctness!

---

Still, warm enough in Cancun for the climate delegates to debate "What do you call an island nation which vanishes beneath the seas?"

 

How about....Wet?

 

The Blame Game

If you're not doing anything today, a trip to Houston to watch the federal panel looking into who'll get the blame for the Gulf Oil Spill may be decided.  Houston Chronicle coverage and backgrounders are worth reading.

 

Friends down in the Oil Patch tell me the long term damage which people aren't talking about is about all the exploration resource which has moved on to other parts of the world to look for energy reserves.  Blame only gets you so many miles per gallon.

 

Where My Dividend Check? 

Take a message to Tim Geithner at Treasury:

"Dear Secretary Geithner,

 

I was pleased to read that Taxpayers made $12-billion on the Citigroup Bailout as reported by AP.

 

Assuming about 155-million taxpayers in the workforce, I've penciled it out to about $77.42 each.

 

Would you (or your fine staff) please advise me when we might plan on receiving our 'dividend' and in what form?  Either a check drawn on your office, or as a tax credit on my 2010 - I'm good either.

 

Sincerely,  or nearly so... yada yada....

 

Errors and Omissions Dept

An Update on Cholera in Haiti

A note from our consulting microbiologist which dispels a lot of the 'conspiracy theory' on the net about human-human cholera which is floating around the net:

"The cholera info you quoted was wrong. I don’t know if the problem is when we translate from French to English, or the person was misquoted or it was fabricated by that site.

The bacterium Vibrio cholereae is NOT transmitted from human to human; that’s precisely why we cannot have a pandemic of cholera. It IS found in some environments. It takes 1,000s of bacteria to typically make a person sick. After every major flood, earthquake, whatever, that might cause the drinking water & sewage to mix; or sewage to get into streams or rivers it can cause cholera. It is hard for one person to be so contaminated on their skin with fecal contamination to spread it.

Water & seafood are the main sources of contamination. Sometimes food gets contaminated when washed with dirty water. It is irrelevant that they have never had an outbreak in modern times; they’ve also never had a 7-something EQ in modern times. If you check the original media coverage, cholera fears were mentioned within a couple of days of the quake. The when it spread to the Dominican R., it seemed to be more quickly contained than in Haiti, for whatever reason. I’m NOT saying the suspicions are warranted or not warranted. My opinion is pretty irrelevant. Just correcting a horrid error about the mode of transmission on the part of that site that you cited.

We sit corrected.  And yup, just like city-slicker's news operations, out here in the outback we occasionally will get things wrong, too, and when we discover such errors we try to pass them along.

 

Oops, here's another:

"Today you wrote : "The real problem, that comes into focus in his CBS 60-Minutes interview is that POMO is not working and as a result, they are now looking at spending event more than the $600 million of bond purchases already underway."

Wasn't that $600 BILLION ????????"

Well, yes, it was.  But, an alert reader such as yourself should have 'self-corrected' that one since the word million hasn't been used in Washington or economic stories for 25-years now.

 

Oddly Timed Quake

The 5.5 quake in the Sandwich Islands area just ain't right I tell you.  Happened about 4:30 AM at the epicenter.  Hour after an earlier one.  Everyone knows the sandwiches are for lunchtime...this is most uncivilized.

 

Remembering Internment Camps

There's an interesting Associated Press/ Michael Graczyk piece about how the Texas Historical Commission is working on preservation of WW II era internment camps.  Grim reminder that both sides in WW II were locking up people in camps. 

---

Curious timing of such a story?  No, not when you consider the US was attacked at Pearl Harbor on this day in 1941.

 

Finance and deception play a much larger role than many care to think when it comes to wars; WW II in particular.  For example, you can find on some sites, like this one, evidence that the US deliberated goaded Japan into the war.

 

If that's true (and its still debated) then would a modern analog of sacrificing Americans to promote another war be so unthinkable, if it's already happened once?  Tough questions for any patriotic citizen to ponder.

---

This being December 7th and all, I'd be remiss if I didn't remind you that money is a major component of war.  If you haven't read it, the New Hampshire Gazette story by John Buchanan from October 10, 2003 titled "Bush/Nazi Link Confirmed" is a fine piece of historical journalism.  There's a second part to the story which may be found here.

---

What comes to mind on this particular day - one that still rings with infamy - is that not only is history written by the winners.  It's also rewritten as well.

 

All Hail the Mogambo!

Reader note:

You were mentioned by none other than the Amazing Mogambo Guru (AMG) in his column yesterday!!

And I quote:

"...And this does not even mention inflation in the prices of food and energy, which are going up in alarming rates, and I predict will go up Much, Much Higher (MMH) from here, as George Ure at UrbanSurvival.com reports that the energy input we have been receiving from the sun has been unusually low, with the results that “Since we had such a long-lasting solar minima recently, the winter this year is going to be unusually cold....”

You are definitely moving up in the world - lol The only glaring difference between the Mo Guru (and myself) and you is that you still seem to think deflation is an issue going forward

Bubbles Ben will do all he can to prevent that...

Er....not quite, my dear slightly misled Mogambo Junior Ranger (MJR) I think he calls your ilk:  What I've been 'splaining is that the Fed knows that incipient deflation is what happens when the world's imploding in a deflationary heap (about now) and that what they are trying to do is step on the gas pedal of money printing in order to keep up the 3-4% annual watering down of the purchasing power of the dollar (which presents as inflation). But not to hard as to push us into hyperinflation.

 

To reiterate: What they're hoping is that by stepping on the printing presses just right they will be able to maintain the precisely correct mix of money printing (inflation) to balance of the Housing Bubble Collapse, and pay for that Internet Bubble Collapse and offset the end of the Cold War and however far back you wanna go with past economic sins.

 

ALL of which might have a chance of working if it were just one guy trying to drive the car and make the decisions.  But, unfortunately, that's not what's going on....

 

What we have instead is the analogy of Ben Bernanke trying to drive the US Financial car down a narrow, twisty mountain road.  (Think of the 127 curves on the mountain road to Jerome, Arizona if you're having trouble picturing this...) The brake lines were cut (nominally when Nixon slammed the gold & silver convertibility window closed in 1974) so Ben's at the wheel of this wildly careening car with a gearbox and gas pedal and that's it.

 

Uninterrupted, he'd have a chance of successfully getting down the mountain (of debt, got the picture?) without smashing through a guard rail, and going over the edge, which would be a global economic accident.

 

For some reason, I picture this "Ben-mobile" as a Nash Metropolitan, like the one pictured at right (from Wikipedia...who deserves a contribution from your wallet for Christmas because it'll do more good than all that junk you buy for the kids, but I digress...)

 

So picture Ben trying to drive the economy and periodically, depending on which day of the week it is, other people appear in the right seat and try to grab the wheel from him, preferring their path down the mountain to his. 

 

So, today, for example, we've got Irish people grabbing at the wheel.  Tomorrow, it may be the Bank of Japan grabbing the wheel, and the day after that, congress will make a grab at it.  China will be yelling in driving tips...

 

Then along comes the federal debt commission and they tell us  - in so many words - "Ya'll seem to be stuck in the mountains (or Debt) but we have a plan too, but it'll take a four-wheel drive with brakes..."  But, since any damn fool knows, there's no brakes on public spending, there's just Ben and the Fed driving, and next thing you know, the guys at the IMF are grabbing at the wheel, and so it goes.

---

I am not as medicated as my friend The Mogambo, and I insist that bruises on my forearm are from grabbing myself with ViceGrips.  But I think that we're both watching this old Metropolitan of an economy careening down the mountain road and I give it only a 25% chance of making it to the bottom in running condition.  Ergo, 75% of my net worth is in non-financial instruments.

 

We could speculate all day as to what portion of his assets The Mogambo hisself would have in non-paper assets of the glittery type, and perhaps he'll share that knowledge with Mogambo Junior Rangers who know he hangs out at the otherwise respectable The Daily Reckoning site.

 

I could wax on for hours -- I love this analogy so much.  But, as you know, I've always been a rambler.

 

Coping: Outing My Accounting Dream?

In yesterday's column I mentioned a couple of strange dreams.  Several readers suggested the one about 'auditing copiers' was trying to tell me something about the 'hidden costs' associated with just printing up paper to buy our own bonds. Typical reader note along this line:

"Here is a thought about your "accounting" dream. Accounting is about Money. Copiers are about Paper. Copies exceeding their budgeted limits sounds to me like you were dreaming about the Fed printing more paper money. The audit angle is that you are a reporter checking out the story. Happy Inflation!"

But another readers thinks something even deeper may be working on our collective mass consciousness:

"While reading your ‘accounting dream’ this morning (12/06/10), a strange thought popped into my mind and that is that the copying machines you were dreaming about all have hard disk drives in them which store a file of each copy made. For some reason, the notion of these hard disks existing as potential ‘WikiLeaks’ gold mines came to mind. Could there be a concerted effort underway to either reveal or destroy this information source, and this is what entered your dreaming stream? Just a thought."

Yeah...now that you mention it, I wonder how many people in the State Department realize that many copy machines really do have built-in hard drives?

 

Worse?  If I were a foreign country that did a lot of stuffing and soldering of PC boards, I would pop in a small wireless antenna and an build copiers that had built-in wireless devices that would send photocopies real-time to some big computer center for analysis...  remember where you read it first.  Wanna bet a wireless scan of all copiers in the US gov't wouldn't find at least some wireless spying?  Won't emerge for years, but still....where there's a wifi there's a way...

 

Plane Foolish

Reader note about TSA:

"wow, I'm really getting pissed at the stupidity of people now. every day you hear some new quote from a lemming, or see one on a news article, or even quoted by you, to the effect of "oh boy, at least the TSA is keeping us safe from bomb!" or "with the scanners shut down it sure would be a good time for a bomber to get through."

when will people learn? TSA HAS NEVER IN ITS HISTORY thwarted a bomb or threat on a plane. EVER! I don't need to source this, anyone can google to find out for themselves! THE WHOLE POINT of the TSA, is **NOT** to protect us from terrorists, and they never ever said they were! The whole purpose is to control EVERYONE ELSE that gets on a plane. Why? Well, I suspect the root of it all can be found in the financials of the major air flight suppliers.

it's so annoying to hear people still talk about it like this. "at least I can get on a plane without fearing for my life..." stupid, stupid idiots, all living in fear. ARGH"

Shhhh!  You'll wake t'other sheep...repeat after me: Deterrence...

 

Curious Readers

Here's  and easy one:

"George,

I was wondering considering that Wikileaks is releasing everyday more information basically a week after the tipping point and are expecting to release the Bank file in Jan 2011 it seems to coincide with Cliffs HPH of 63 days of release.

Any thoughts?"

Nope.  I try never to think before noon on weekdays, and not at all on weekends.  I do wonder if the kids working fast food in Florida are talking about WikiLeaks, though...suspect they're aware of it, you know?  Wanna bet the key goes out around Jan 7?

 

Tuesday at the WuJo: Hawaiian Style

Say, here's a science experiment that I would love to see some students taking physics perform since it would be an amazing outcome if true.  Read this account of some weird goings-on in Hawaii and see if you can guess the experiment:

"george

on thanksgiving my wife and i went to have dinner at her mother's 'retirement home'. we were at a table with half a dozen other people who were in their eighties. the facility has about 120 folks, most over eighty. after being there about fifteen minutes, i noticed my timex electric watch was behind. the second hand was moving about once every five or so seconds. i just assumed the battery was getting bad. by the time the two hour party was over and we were leaving, i was about 1:15 behind... or maybe not. because when we left the place, i noticed my watch was ticking along fine. i reset it and it has been perfect since then. maybe so many older folks all in one place have unconciously ganged up to make time go much slower so they can have more of it?:)

here in hawaii, we always have plenty of time. like we say, 'take it easy, this ain't the mainland.'

aloha

You see the phenomena to test, right?  It would be to see if local time moves differently in the proximity of a lot of elderly people - as in a nursing home setting.   Collect enough old people in one place and they impact the passage of time?

 

And why would we ask that question?  It is possible - and this is pretty wild to think about, but please do - that TIME and AGING are group consciousness events.  In other words, since Elaine and I have lived more than many people separate and part from others.  Is that why we look (and feel, seemingly) like people who are 10-20 years younger than we are? 

 

In other words....is aging contagious and some misunderstood way The Field operates on a 'like-attracts-like' basis?

 

WuJo 2

Nostradamus Watching

Expert on Nostradamus G.A. Stewart sends occasional fascinating notes on what may be ahead...

George,
 
I have a theory I'm proposing based on your suggestions. As you know I've made several interpretations of Nostradamus' Sixains that seem to indicate two nuclear terrorist incidents will occur in 2010: one in Israeli occupied territory and the other in Italy.
 
Nostradamus Sixain XIX
Six Hundred and five [2010], six hundred and six [2011] and seven [2012],
It will show us up to the year seventeen [2022],
The anger, hatred and jealousy of the incendiary [nuclear weapons],
For a long enough time hidden under the olive tree [Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty],
The Crocodile [Egypt] has hidden on the land,
That which was dead will then be alive.
 
Nostradamus Sixain XLV
The entire world astonished by a blow of steel,
Strangely given by the Crocodile [Egypt],
To a very great one, relative of the leech [Palestine/Israel],
And shortly after there will be another blow
By foul play [terrorism], committed against the wolf [Italy],
And of such deeds one will not see the result [source].
 
Nostradamus Sixain VIII
Shortly before the opening of commerce,
An ambassador will come from Persia (Iran),
To bring news to the Frank (German) land:
But unreceived, vain hope,
It will be an offense to his great God,
Pretending to desire to abandon him.
 
You and I both understand the synchronistic workings of the universe. And so I definitely see some of the inner workings of the universe in the following recent stories.
 
Egypt calls in experts over shark attacks in Sharm el-SheikhMost watersports at Red Sea resort suspended following death of 70-year-old German woman:
 
Israel battles forest fire with foreign help:

Analysis: Euro debt crisis - Italy no longer quite so safe:
 
Chief Iran nuke talks negotiator: Don't expect much:
 
My theory is this, nature and current events will present us with symbolic signs, as in the Emotional Release points and news stories you have cited concerning the release of whatever.
 
We'll know in a few more weeks.

 

By the way. I just learned that Italy and Russia are becoming closer militarily. Below these links is something I wrote in my book from Chapter Ten in reference to the quatrain cited and some others mentioned in that chapter.

 

Think of what a nuclear terrorist incident would do in Italy. Italy's debt problems will sink the Euro. I believe the outstanding debt is close to one trillion.

 

You have a scapegoat with the terrorist bogeyman and you pretty much sink Putin's plans for Italy and the European Union. Just food for thought.

 

Russia, Italy, plan military exercises:

 

Russia, Italy to stage Navy, Army drills in 2011:

Nostradamus Quatrain VI-38

The profligates enemies of peace,

After having subdued Italy: T

he black king bloodthirsty, red [A Moslem], shall be exposed,

Fire, bloodshed, water the color of blood.

The quatrains above seem to indicate that the Black King will be exposed in some kind of scandal. “A new King great scandal, the black king bloodthirsty, red [Moslem], shall be exposed”.

 

Is having subdued Italy a reference to the nuclear terrorist incident that I cited in the previous chapter?

 

Kindest Regards, Stu

Stu's website is http://theageofdesolation.com/

 

How Many Breakfasts?

Not the general, run of the mill, thing to write about, but an interesting came up at breakfast here at the ranch on Monday which emphasizes to me some of the long-term impacts each of us has on the planet - thought you might find it interesting.

 

So there we were - having a typical cool weather-gonna work outside - breakfast.  Eggs, sausage, toast, milk or cocoa, and so on...and Elaine asked her brother (Panama Bates) how he'd like his eggs done.  Wouldn't you know it, one thing led to another and pretty quick we got to wondering how many breakfasts Elaine has cooked in her lifetime....and that got us on to the general matter of how many breakfasts does a woman - any woman - cook between birth and a given age - for the sake of discussion of the point, let's use 65...

---

First we did the simple math:  Women don't generally cook breakfast until they are what, 12 to 16?  Depending on household and whether there was a grandparent around to coach/supervise/teach such things.  We were lucky when I was growing up to have my Danish-born grandmother with us, since all three of us kids had to learn to cook not just passably well but very well...and on top of that, if the kitchen wasn't spotless within 15-minutes of the meal being done, we were 'dogging it'.

---

 

My grandmother, who lived with our family up through our teenage year before going on to the big Bingo Hall in the Sky, taught us how to cook and did a lot of the cooking herself.  She'd started cooking at about age 12 in Odense, Denmark before coming over on the last westbound trip of the Lusitania...

 

So I run the math on her: 45-years of cooking (not counting leaps) is about 16,425 breakfast days.  Then you have to multiply by the number showing up to eat.  That's 98,550 breakfasts.  Two eggs per person?  197-thousand eggs.  200-thousand pieces of toast.

 

Not Mickey D numbers, but no deep fryer and spacious grill, either...

---

Kinda puts in perspective the size of undertaking making breakfast is.  Sure, one by one, it's just a couple of eggs here, toast down over there.  But over the course of time it adds up to one hell of a footprint. 

 

For example, Danish people eat a fair bit of bacon, sausage, and of course we can't overlook Danish Ham, right?  So just one Dane with a working person's appetite  over the  course of a 50-year work life might eat a couple of tons of just breakfast meats.

----

"Aw George, wouldja just get to the point?"

 

OK, here it is:  If you're north of 50, let's assume you have had somewhere close to 60,000 meals in your lifetime.  (365 X 55 X 3).  Oh, that's 30 tons of food at one pound per meal and remember, milk weighs a lot...

 

Amazing numbers, huh?  But how many of these can you remember and re-enjoy in detail?  Humbling to remember this kind of 'living in the moment' stuff....

 

I'll just be quiet now...I'm trying to figure out how many pounds of coffee I've consumed over 61 years....hoping to live long enough to put down another 15-20 tons of chow, too...which may explain my interest in greenhouses.

 

May also have something to do with why I have a semi-permanent one or two week supply of food installed conveniently under my belt.

 

---

December 6, 2010

Week of Troubled Banks?

We ought to see a lot of fancy footwork today since tomorrow is the day in Europe with the Bank Stop movement is hoping to cause a run on banks there.  Not that deliberately bringing down the global financial system is a stated goal, more like trying to bring banks to serve the people....

 

But nevertheless, we can see in the headlines this morning what might be called 'front-running the problem' as a story crossed earlier this morning about how Ben "Bernanke Says Fed May Take More Action to Cub Joblessness".

 

I must be a simple-minded old cuss, since I can't for the life of me find how the Fed could think if the US congress can't keep the money turned on for the 27-99 week unemployment benefits, and if they managed to spend all of a Stimulus Bill without putting a major dent in unemployment which popped up to 9.8 percent in last week's report, why we would think the Fed could fix the problem...

 

The real problem, that comes into focus in his CBS 60-Minutes interview is that POMO is not working and as a result, they are now looking at spending event more than the $600 million of bond purchases already underway.

 

True, the performance of the stock market was pretty good, but aside from maybe funding some home remodelers on Long Island and in the Hamptons, I still don't see how the homeless in Detroit are going to benefit from POMO.

 

I must be near-sighted, huh?  I thought when the right pocket started borrowing money from the left pocket with IOU's that a country was in trouble.  I'm apparently wrong.  The answer, if I'm following it, is we just need bigger pockets...

---

There's an ugly Constitutional question here, if you think about it: 

Since Federal Reserve policy directly impacts bracket creep - whereby inflation effects push people into higher and higher tax brackets without any actual increase in their purchasing power - shouldn't the Federal Reserve be subject to direct election on the basis of "No Taxation without Representation"? 

Seems to me they're taxing via inflation and we didn't get to vote on 'em...

 

Proper Leverage

The Obama administration may be doing something right here:  Making passage of an extension of unemployment benefits a precondition for doing anything on extending tax cuts...

 

Speaking of Banks

It's long, but tons of information in the documentary "The Secret of Oz".  Once you watch it, your understanding of why I use the phrase "papered over" will be greatly enhanced, I'm sure:

 

 

 

The Gulf Still Dying

This is discouraging, so if you're in happy-land, skip this one.

 

Curiously Times Epidemic

From our 'Inquiring Readers Report" files:

"Last year's flu vaccine panic stockpiling has given way to this year's pushing of cholera vaccine. Noted doctors and the International Vaccine Institute (IVI) sounded alarms in the November New England Journal of Medicine. The IVI's Indian arm rolled out its cholera vaccine Shanchol in 2009. It is considered the cutting edge product for administration in post-crisis locations such as Haiti. Profits should be vigourous?
 
Here is a curious link from the "Haiti Progres" newspaper explaining that a French expert is baffled why the epidemic started so broadly from water supplies rather than spreading through person to person transmission. "

Well, you see, cholera spreading from person-to-person is not nearly so scary to stampede folks into spending some long green on an emergency stock of vaccine.  Follow the money!

 

Earthquake Trends

Our "prince of macros" has updated the long-range earthquake data.  The short way to think of this is number of quakes going down (for now) but the number of 7.0's per year seems to be going up:  All in Two charts from Jan '73 to present:

 

 

 

By the way, I seem to be noticing (could just be me) a little uptick in the activity north of San Francisco...

 

If we look at the long-term earthquake data - a decline in small quakes, an increase in the biggies of 7+, and the deepening, it might suggest as scientists have been wondering lately, if all the tectonic plates are getting into lock-up mode.  And, if that's the case, we could be building toward some really big events as pressure builds.  Bound to be unleashed sooner, or later...a hundred years later would be fine with us....

 

Police State Blues

Kansas City has long been revered as town where 'the blues' really mean something.  Maybe it's the stockyards, or maybe its....ah, here we go:  sending in a swat team with a flash-bang to capture a cell phone?  

 

Myth Busting

See the story in the UK Mail Online this weekend about the follow-up to the guy who grabbed a couple of "suspicious packages" and proved it was just dirty clothes --- not a 'terrorist device'?  (slow loading)

 

Maybe the public is supposed to myth the point...

 

Happy Travels

Readers out and about:

"well George im back from my cruise. Lets see, in cincinnati i got scanned and felt up. on the way back from Miami the scanners were shut off, no fill-up procedure. The reason they were shut off was probably due to over load of passenger boarding flights. Well if i was a terrorist wouldn't that be the time to bring in a bomb, when they airport is overloaded with passengers and they are not checking. just a thought George"

Stop thinking!  We don't want to start any dangerous trends. 

 

Who is Funding Terrorism

Story in the NY Times this weekend under the headliner "Cash Flow to Terrorists Evades U.S. Efforts"  is no doubt why the iCasualties site keeps reporting more and more military deaths.

 

And the country that's funneling the most money to terrorists (of the al Qaeda stripe in particular) is what?  See if you can work it out from this hint in a headline from the Australian Broadcasting Company:

 

"Saudi Arabia, worst for terrorism funding".

---

Now, I don't claim to be as smart as Hillary Clinton, or those Ivy leaguers in the State Department, but seems to me that we ought to turn off $1-million in oil purchased from the Saudis for every $1 they leak to terrorism.   

 

Of course, that's just too damn simple, and that would whack some serious campaign money on both sides of the US political aisle along the way, too...but tough sh*t - that's the kind of collateral damage we need to afford.

 

Let me ask you this:  How many people have to die because policymakers aren't willing to cut their own purse strings?  What's the cost of a G.I.  lost in action compared to getting reelected?

---

Yup.. I must sure be one of them prepper/nutters to even ask...  I know the answer, though:  It's why I didn't vote for a single incumbent in November and why only a very few people in Washington get their titles capitalized around here.  Congressman Ron Paul and Senator Bernie Sanders are the only two that currently deserve the honor of distinguished punctuation...

 

Freedom Ringing

A reader up in Winnipeg writes:

Dear Mr. Ure,
 
Curious. I am blocked in Canada from accessing Freegate, the USA portal promoting web freedom to China and Iran. I read anecdotally that Chinese web usage is 2 billion hours per week whereas USA usage is 129 million hours per week. Since I haven't heard a peep from my ISP concerning the pending IPv4 crisis, I am perusing this free IPv6 onramp site. When CNGI (China Next Generation Internet) goes global, I don't want to be left behind.

If you're an IT type and want a summary, try this one.  If you're a consumer, more interesting to translate a bunch of Google pages, like this one, to see what's going on...

 

Coping:  News Control

Sounds like a lesson plan for teaching for one of the chapters in Daniel Yergin's book The Commanding Heights : The Battle for the World Economy:

"Dear Mr. Ure,

I read an interesting observation from columnist Eric Margolis that the Wikileaks cables may be undergoing a cherry-picking to direct popular sentiment towards a war with Iran. In fact it does seem rather peculiar that while TPTB apparently know Assange's exact location, it is serving some part of their purpose to leave him cloistered and permit ongoing daily Wiki-leakages to the attending media mobs."

I find it very interesting, indeed...

 

Several readers have asked me whether I think Assange is 'real' or not and I've been giving it a good deal of thought.  I have a hard time believing that one enlisted man in the US Army could really have access to all of the information purported.  So that doesn't seem right.

 

On the other hand, as my consigliore pointed out, "If he did George, then pretty clearly Assange did the USA a favor because any intelligence outfit of any other country out there that's worth its salt would have way deeper intel that this stuff..."  A good point.

 

Moreover is he sincere?  I think the answer is absolutely Yes!  But does that mean that he and WikiLeaks is above manipulation?  No, not necessarily.

 

That there's likely some interest group feeding Assange/WikiLeaks information took a huge upward spike when they threatened to trash a big bank next:  Is trying to bring down corruption by threatening to bring down the whole global financial system, the kind of thing that a man of conscience does?

 

Maybe - but I think it's at least an equal possibility to be considered that Assange is well-intentioned, but that the interest group that is feeding him information for release, is likely a partisan in a battle whose dimensions are not clearly visible to the public.

 

However, if you think about a global struggle between financiers on one side and defenders of this political paradigm (or that), then WikiLeaks becomes an important tool for moving the discussion in the general press to this level, or that, which is how asymmetric info-wars are fought.

 

And then comes the logical question:  Can we believe that a single source could have compiled the massive "Insurance file" which WikiLeaks is threatening to pop out if there's any retribution against Assange, et al? 

 

No, common sense argues this is way beyond the resources of a lone operative in the 'Stans working with a guy who has enough time to go out and get laid...at least that's my take on it....look for a state-level player, as I said last week.  Not that Assange is complicit...just that he might be being played.

 

Oh, and whoever that is will, I expect, be found to have made a huge mistake.

 

Moving To Metals

Say, don't know how many people have asked me about moving their retirements money to precious metals, but if you have, there's a dandy in-depth piece by Catherine Austin Fitts and Carolyn Betts at the Solari.com website on point...

 

Monday at the WuJo

The Accounting Dreams

A couple of very unusual dreams I've had in the past week that may (or may not) be worth mentioning, but they certain have some interesting messages to them:

 

The first came about a week ago - and it involved a person who I knew from my news chasing days in the big city up north.  He was (and still is, so far as I know) a political strategist.

 

What makes this dream so interesting - because we had many conversations in the 1970's about how politics really works, was that this fellow shows up in a dream and proceeds to tell me what present day reporters are completely missing:

"George, it goes like this:  Look at this typical discussion that's going on..."

...then in the dream I see a couple of politicos arguing about how much the 'pay off money' should be sent to former legislators who were promised a long term, (after office pay off) for this piece of legislation, or that...

"I say they should get 4-million this year for their contribution..." one of the people (a guy on the left) was saying.

 

"No, look: What they did for us was very important and they should really be paid their full $25-million this year..." the fellow on the right was saying...

The political strategist then explained

"You see George, here's how it works:  People have their backgrounds gone through with a fine-tooth comb on the front end, and because of the annual disclosure filings, there's not much that can be done while people are in office.  But what about the back end? 

 

No one ever looks at the people who come in, hold office for a while, and then quietly fade into the background after two or three terms. 

That's where you ought to look next - for people who made key decisions, have retired from public life, and are enjoying the fruits of their "friendships" made in that time...

Like I said, a strange dream - hadn't thought about this political guy for literally years but to have this pop up was kind of interesting, to say the least.

---

The second dream - and this one was just this morning - and which also had to do with accounting was even stranger.  I was somehow involved in doing an audit of a big national company and it was my job to check the reported use of copiers.

 

Well, in the dream, I noticed that all the copiers which had been leased on a "no more than xxx copies per month basis had many times that amount being run, yet in the accounting system there was no provision for a use overrun in the copiers.  Have no idea why - these were big copiers and 100,000 copies per month was the baseline and the machines were being used up in the 150-thosuand copies per month area with no lease reserve.

---

Strange things to think about, since dreams about accounting are NOT my usual fare...  The one about former (I assume) state legislators enjoying 'gifting' once out of office was interesting...but the accounting for copy machines?  Holy smokes.  Just strange dreams to be having, for sure...

 

Word From the Oil Patch

Our source down in the oil patch has a pretty realistic view of things environmental and his comments on the Washington Post story "World is running out of places to catch wild fish, study says" are worthy of note:

"This is a great example of hoe the media does it's thing George....

We all know that fisheries and species are declining across the world. We all know who the players are decimating them.

But please notice the headline in this WP article - "places to catch " not running out of fish....

As Pablum-addled as my wife is, even she asked, "Does that mean they are running out of fish too?"

Just thought you might want to pop this one out there because it is just so sweetly twisted..."

Just so.  We continue accepting entries for our pool "When will the last order of fish & chips be served"?

 

Lingo-Lango

Linguistics reveals a lot...especially when we turn it on ourselves...as a reader has done with me...

"i have found that in repetitive statements and shifts in language, there is the clue to future.. subconsciously you state "burst your bubble." in fact in the last 3 weeks. you have used the term "bubble" best estimate, 27 times. There is a shift in your subconsous that is telling you something, head up! Bubble bursting coming. bubble bubble, bubble.. most of the refrences you use that term have nothing to do with economics.. just a "Figure" of speech.. stated another way, a calculation of linguistics?? shifts in subconsousness.. are very noticeable. so do take note."

Hmmm...  Say, you don't think it's because Panama Bates has been making a lot of root beer with his new  Sodastream Fountain Jet Soda Maker Starter Kit do you?  Bubbles, carbonation and all that?

 

Mr. Science has been pondering how I can make quarters of bottled rum and soda with it....

 

Not really Ham Radio Notez

Meteor Scatter Work

Don't know when I mentioned it, but I think a couple of weeks back I was whining about the pulse noise that seemed to be coming in from over the pole (north) from Europe on HF radio ham bands above 14 MHz.  Seemed to be maximum on a beam heading of about 030 (true) from this part of East Texas.

 

Well, there may be an answer from a most astute reader who hangs out in places like the declassified NSA papers archive and read "Cryptologic Quarterly"...

I hate to bring this up so long after you brought it up, but... That single mysterious tone that you mentioned, I think it was said to be a Russian source, is identified if not directly by the NSA. I am giving you a link to the file. It is the communication tone given between a transmit and receive station to know when it is ok to send a data burst off a meteor trail. The file says there are 60 mbc stations still operating to monitor and communicate about snow levels. Read the file quite interesting that it is generating renewed interest for infrastructure.

So it's possible that there is still some work being done on meteor scatter - and that would explain why the noise was where it was - above the Maximum Usable Frequency (MUF).  But was it part of meteor burst communications (MBC) program?  Not sure.  Now, if you start asking why I haven't built up an elliptically polarized re-refingement optimized directional antenna for such work, I'll have to slap you.  What do you think I am, a geek?  Leave that to the kids...

 

Like Father, Like Son

As you may have guessed from reading this site, my interests are (in no particular order) electronics, business process modeling, managing profitability, and writing.

 

My son, on the other hand, has a laser-like focus on emergency medicine.  This weekend he managed to ace his written and scored perfect on his practicals for getting his Advanced Cardiac Life Support  (ACLS) cert.  Only other guy in his class throwing aces was a 25-year old paramedic doing a re-cert.

 

Talking to him about when to push epi (nephrine) is even more geekly than talking the fine points of tube-type radio gear with me...what's the old saying?  Nut doesn't fall far from the tree...

 

Well done, son!

 

Thought for Monday

From a reader's email tagline - but worth sharing:

"If you have a pulse, you have a purpose..."