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Saturday  March 19, 2011     05:04 AM CST   
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Reminder

This being the weekend our reports are available on the $40/year www.peoplenomics.com site.  The subscription cost is modest and it's what pays for server space, bandwidth and other costs associated with this site.

 

Mr. Sardonic will be back here on Monday morning around 8 AM per normal...whatever that used to be.

 

The Winds, the Wars and the Witch

The 'public mind' is obviously focused on the follow-on to the Japan quake & radiation releases, so we begin with the International Atomic Energy Agency's morning assessment:

Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that new INES ratings have been issued for some of the events relating to the nuclear emergency at the Fukushima Daiichi and Daini nuclear power plants.

Japanese authorities have assessed that the core damage at the Fukushima Daiichi 2 and 3 reactor units caused by loss of all cooling function has been rated as 5 on the INES scale.

Japanese authorities have assessed that the loss of cooling and water supplying functions in the spent fuel pool of the unit 4 reactor has been rated as 3.

Japanese authorities have assessed that the loss of cooling functions in the reactor units 1, 2 and 4 of the Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant has also been rated as 3. All reactor units at Fukushima Daini nuclear power plant are now in a cold shut down condition.

What's an INES scale?  As Wikipedia puts it:

"The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) was introduced in 1990[1] by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in order to enable prompt communication of safety significance information in case of nuclear accidents. "

 

Well, that's easy enough with even just a little coffee.

 

The current monitor levels on the www.radiationnetwork.com site don't show anything particularly out of the ordinary, except we note that Denver had a reading of 72 - still below the  'alert level' of 100 suggested by the page and since this is such thin data could be a single out of calibration reading, so I'm not particularly worried about it.

 

The jet stream models for the next 12-hours takes a relatively long path to north/central California then dropping to SoCal at 48-hours.  So for now, put another cuppa coffee on and chill while we await more data, I 'spose.

---

Still, that doesn't defuse the predictive linguistics from www.halfpasthuman.com  which has us dropping into release language on the 25th.,  While we await that, I notice that Arch Crawford, a notable astro-econ researcher, is saying out in the march 19-26 area, we could have "something bigger than Japan" in the works...

 

The real center-of-attention for me this morning has been trying to figure out where that West Coast quake could be should the Bigger than Japan quake forecast come in sadly right. 

 

A visit to the USGS site is inconclusive, too.

Central California had a 2.8

 

Puget Sound had a 2.9 (which is just about under Clif's butt if I read the maps right - hope it didn't upset the dogs...)

 

Then there's the Mexicali/Imperial Valley shaking with a 3.3 with a 4.5 down the Gulf of Baja a ways...

 

And just to round out the randomness, there was a 4.4 off El Salvador and some shaking in the Puerto Rico area, too.

My gut (which is substantially smaller from dieting, lol) still thinks Imperial Valley because that would have huge economic/food impacts, but maybe that's just a subliminal expression of hunger pangs.

 

We shall see.

 

Another Day, Another War

With a number of years of 'prepping' under the belt, the aware observer is in a most envious position today of being able to sit back, with only moderate concerns, and watch three  potentially large events fall into place.  We are, to put it simply, in data collecting mode insofar as long term directions in human events.

 

To begin with, as I wrote previous, we see another 'war' kicking off in the Middle East with the UN agreeing to impose a 'no fly zone' on Libya.  While the UN action was being cheered in Benghazi, one of the protest strongholds, we see a larger pattern working out, as I'd told you to expect in all this:  The PTB won't let a good war go to waste.

 

And thus, while we see much blustering and posturing, we also note that in many ways the desires of plain humans are in conflict with the interests of large, impersonal corporations, and in particular those we call The Death Industries.  These are the non-human but nevertheless legal entities which are only interested in maximizing their profits.

 

Not to put too fine a point on it, but one of the points I'm presently working on in the book which my friend Howard Hill & I are writing, has to do with exactly this:  Once upon a time, humans were in charges of human affairs.

 

However, in more recent history, the interests of humans have been either fully subverted, or at least massively diluted, by the power of competing international corporations which use humans and their institutions to conduct the high-level economic warfare for which corporations are well-suited.

 

Naturally, the exploitation of humans, resources, and the opportunity to sell to both sides of human conflicts - the case now in Libya - necessarily takes a backseat to the bottom line on P&L (profit and loss operating plans) of corporations.

 

When I stories explaining how SecState Hillary Clinton has scored a "big win" in the Libya no-fly decision, I immediately grab my largest pair of ViseGrips and apply them to my already seriously bruised forearm, trying to pinch myself out of the well-supported notion that Clinton and other UN participants are no more than proxies for business model optimized stress levels which seem on the one hand like news, but when examined under the microscope of forensic economics, sure seem to support the concept of economic turnover optimization rather than simple human preservation and cooperation.

 

Tough observation to come to terms with, especially because most humans rather arrogantly proclaim their supremacy over corporations, despite the key recent Supreme Court decision that corporations can buy what they wish in the wave of political proxies through the removal of limits of corporation political spending. 

 

Here again, the deluded human response is that the Supreme Court is an independent body, yet their track record upon inspection seems widely pro-corporation as opposed to pro-human; such is the power of persuasion purchased over long periods of time at a nearly subliminal level by corporate proxies, now called justices.  As in Just Us, and not all the rest of us who have not attained corporate anointment and concurrently elevation to positions of power.

 

To my way of thinking, corporations long ago passed their inflection point in what's an obviously asymmetric warfare: That's something that becomes apparent rather quickly when comparing which is easier:  A human suing a corporation, or on the flip side, a corporation suing a human. 

 

Don't suppose you'd care to take the human side, would you?  And, when humans try to change through 'the system' we see very few Erin Brockovich or Tobacco master settlements, than we see overturning of eminent domain, expansion of corporate political purchasing power, and hiding boards of directors through reinforcement of 'the corporate veil" behind which boards of directors live comfortable lives knowing that corporate law firms tend to be wealthier than consumer-oriented firms for a reason.

 

So that's the Wars in a nutshell:  Business model vs. business model, and if a few eggs (humans), that'll be no loss, since this is all painted as a matter of 'national security' on the one side, and 'defending America's allies' on the other. 

 

The very first thing I want you to do this morning is open the hymnal here at the Church of the Almighty Profit and read today's psalm:  Do unto both that yeee may prosper. Amen. Now give me a "Hallelujah" chorus and let's talk about Triple Witching...

 

Triple Witching

A quick look at the following chart shows where the market is, in my opinion, if you follow along.

 

See that yellow circle area?  This week the market bounced off that long term support from the 2009 low, as I see it, and will likely go up today for at least a while.

 

 

The way Robin Landry sees it, one of his key proprietary indicators ( a variant in the weekly MACD) will probably be down for the week which makes a good case for a little bounce around support here and if we pop back over 12,100 (or higher) then yes, there's still a chance the bull run could continue.

 

However, if that doesn't happen quickly, then the next penetration of this long-term support could clear the way for a decline to the 11,400 area on the high side and the 10,900 area below that.

 

Won't bore you with the details, just the battles like this around key support areas are what keep tradingmind/monkeymind engaged.  In some very real sense the markets were going to drop to that long term support line and bounce anyway; it's just the Japan earthquake/radiation scare has provided a nice external-to-the-market excuse.

 

Since we're in the midst of the quarterly expirations (called triple witching) we would naturally expect to see traders do whatever they can to not pay permabears like me who have been playing the short (down) side of things.  Ergo, rally on any little bit of news, however lame.  50-100 Dow points seems in order, but over 11,900 I might bail out of short positions.

 

Word yesterday that the Consumer Price Index was running up at a 6+ percent annualized rate has sunk into the mindset of metals traders, and gold & silver consequently have popped up a bit.  More's to come, perhaps, depending on how the inflation solution percolates through markets.

 

Can't speak for you, but when the Fed doesn't get it's Industrial Production figures out on schedule I find myself saying "Hmmm..."

"Release Date: March 17, 2011

For immediate release

The Federal Reserve Board announced Thursday that it will publish the annual revision to the G.17 statistical release, Industrial Production and Capacity Utilization, on Friday, March 25, at noon EDT.

The revision will be made available on the Board's website at: www.federalreserve.gov/releases/G17  "

They did, however, get yesterday's Money Stocks H.6 report out on schedule./  This is something I look at to figure out "How fast is the printing press running on an annualized rate basis?"

 

 

Compare how much money is being printed with industrial production and then look at prices...that actually tells you something about the economy.

 

Hopefully, one of these days if will tell us "Things are better, and your standard of living is going up."  We live in hope.

 

Illinois is a Disaster

No, I mean beyond Blagojevich... FEMA says so due to snow in January.  Here I thought Chicago politics would be the cause.

 

Occasionally, the Good Guys Win

Worth reading in The Register:  "MS claims credit for Rustock bonet takedown."

 

I new something was different today - the number of erectile dysfunction spams is down. 

 

(Why, that's a limp attempt at humor!)

 

(more after this)

 

 

Coping:  Right Use of Time

When we come down to looking at life from a systems view, we note that humans have three major modes.  A number of ways exist to express this, but these two will get you started thinking - which is what we do a bit of around here, only until the headaches begin, and we stop, removed the ViseGrips, and go on with life.

• Input

• Output

• Resting

Or...

• Making/working

• Consuming/playing

• Sleeping

For whatever reason, never been able to trace it back so it could be in my DNA or in my familial environment when young, but for whatever reason, this three-states mindset has always come easily to me.

 

When I'm not writing, consulting, or gardening (the making side of the equation) I can usually be found shooting Flight Simulator approaches or playing with ham radio gear (consuming/playing).  Those are my tracks if you will...the roads in my life with the biggest ruts, but always with the recognition at all times that I can rut-jump and be unpredictable as hell, should occasion arise. 

 

Predictability is a human frailty. Just as the cats show up at the north deck to be fed around 4:45 AM, regardless of whatever mouse or bunny-chasing is on their agenda, people too have habits which are the repetition ruts.

 

You should be constantly amazed at the number of people that are in line at the local Mickey D's around 12:15.  These people live lives where they don't have the sense to tell the boss:  "I'd like to take lunch at 11:20  [or 1:15] since the lines are shorter and I get more use of that time as opposed to this lockstep thinking..."

 

Not that your boss would let you, or would you go to Mickey D's, so don't get distracted with a cholesterol check; my point is most people live in very deep, deep ruts.

 

With those philosophical underpinnings, we consider this email from a reader:

Hi George,

Just wanted to give you an urgent bullet point. I live on a 1/4 lot in suburbia and have for 5 years raised veggies in 10 4 x 8 ' raised beds with three fruit trees, with 10 blueberry bushes, and a tea tree. Oh and I live in GA which has a 9 month growing season. I would estimate that if I went all out I could grow 1000 pounds of produce...at average of 120 calories a pound for that food. Average, so for all my work I can produce 120,000 calories.if everything was perfect......120,000 divided by 2500 calories per day, I can feed myself for 48 days, sustain in a emergency for 96 at ration sustenance level of 1250 calories per day.

Problem is I have a family of 4. thus calories of 12 -24 days, give thirty since there are three women in my group and they require (supposed to), less. Problem is they too eat like a hungry man.....

We are not all fat nasties, if that was what you are thinking I at 6' and weigh 205, wife 5'4" 150,( she's the piggy) lol, kids 70 and 80 pounds each girls 11 and 13.... based on what is rapidly coming down the pike, I would urge your readers to buy bulk rice asap, Costco rice, stores for ever," almost" if kept dry, and provides 75,000 calories for $15, or my whole years worth of gardening for $25....

Now I know, the garden provides fresh essential vitamins and minerals and gives a level of self sufficiency. I look at it as my natural vitamin patch instead. I would urge you to inform your readers now to store long term calories that are available for now and still cheap. Look at the garden to get up and going, but the main panic should be in having a long term solution to get to the point where you can grow something.

Also looking to stock pile anything that comes from Japan that you think you may need going forward,,,,things are out of hand and I lived there for 8 years and have family there. not good , not good at all, level 7 meltdown as we speak...

PS: those calories would also cost about 200 hours of labor and a 100 tons of additional water. Store rice and grains now while you can, Garden in the transition phase should be for vitamins and essential minerals and spice and kitchen flavors to maintain health.....and make the stored food palatable.,,,just speaking a Japanese veteran that flavoured his rice, but never grew it...

Some fine points, indeed!  More rice - on  the list along with more TP.  Can't ever have too much of that...you never know when you'll bump into a politician.

 

The weather here is just turning spring-like and already I've managed to make my first real 'mistake' with the greenhouse.  I got particularly hyper in work-mode earlier this week and managed to snuff three strawberry plants that were awaiting transplanting.

 

And, I am only seeing the absolute lamest of cabbage seedlings to far.  The corn's doing great, but that may be a function of all the local raccoons praying for a good crop in the garden and bad aim by me.  (I reckon that Mr. Deadeye with iron sites at 100-meters, Panama Bates can assist me at times when we get closer to harvest time).

 

As to the point about products from Japan, I have been watching this closely, too.

 

In fact, with my son sitting for his general class ham ticket this weekend, I promised him an HF ham radio, so he's to get either an Icom 735 or a well-equipped Icom 746.  To make room for this I bought a replacement transceiver made in a certain earthquake prone lately country where what hams lovingly call "rice boxes" are made.

 

A check of the eHam.net website here finds the outlook for radio production from the Japanese Big Three of ham gear.

 

In a conversation last week with Rob Sherwood (of Sherwood Engineering in Denver) - who I'd pick as possibly the world's leading expert of HF radio design - mentioned while we were chatting about installing their product detector mod in my R4-B (it was designed for the R4-C),  that he was favorably impressed with the new "down-conversion" transceivers like the Kenwood 590S.

 

Being no fool, that got me to wondering if now might not be the time to get one of the new series of ultra performance radios with great close-in signal rejection due to very tight roofing filters in the front-end while they were readily available.

 

I won't tell you what my decision was, since Elaine reads this column now and then, although with any luck, she'll be out shopping about UPS delivery time...

---

But seriously:  If you have any equipment that relies on spares coming out of Japan, you might want to get a few month's worth.  Not to feed into panic buying, of course, but if - as reports seem to indicate - power may be in shorter supply in Japan for a while, Japanese electronics seems to be one area where it's not just the manufacturer (as in radio gear) but their suppliers who may manufacture a critical part.

---

As to the the larger matter of time vs. return on gardens, I suppose it depends on the technique.  I'm all worked up about hydroponics as being very space-effective, not to mention that grow media is a lot easier to maintain than plain old dirt.  Since untreated wood lasts about 3-minutes before the bugs get it, I'm not sold on raised bed gardens with wood, although people claim that they use treated timbers and just line it with plastic.

 

Seems to me that a half dozen sections of aluminum gutter, some sand, a 12-volt pond pump, a 555 timer and a solar panel is higher tech but might be effective.  Hydroponic nutrients are one of the miracles of modern gardening and cheap[ if you buy the 40-pound tubs of the dry concentrate.

 

Still, the closer we get to needing to live on our garden's outputs, the more important learning to plant in concert with nature becomes.  At some point, humans had to get along as foraging critters and I'm starting to reread some of that part of the bookshelf. 

 

Along with pricing a harrow for the tractor and maybe a middle buster plow as ways to quickly get a lot of crop into the ground.  May not be able to weed it nice and pretty, but like anything else in life, things are almost always percentage plays.

 

I don't like to think more than I already have about a world where the amount of Hoppe's #9 solvent becomes highly correlated to calories available, but in a handful of Middle East spots, that seems to be where events are drifting.

 

It'd be interesting to map the concurrent use of slang in words like "hog leg"  or "piece" or "shank" to perhaps get a better bead on drift...

 

Meantime, buried in the CPI data yesterday was the biggest increase month-over-month in food prices in 37-years. 

 

Remind me to check the latest price of Hoppe's next time I'm in town.

 

 

Send Ure comments to george@ure.net

---

Last week's report is always here.

 

---

Thursday March 17, 2011

Special Update

The Risks are Long Term

A number of readers have written to express skepticism at our levels of concern about the pending plume arrival from Japan.  Just to set the record straight, while the initial danger level is indeed low,  the problem is unfortunately not a singular event and - as was the case in Chernobyl - the issue is the long-term accelerated deaths which can be directly traced to mass release events. 

 

A press release issued today by the US National Institutes of Health is on point:

"Higher cancer risk continues after Chernobyl

NIH study finds that thyroid cancer risk for those who were children and adolescents when they were exposed to fallout has not yet begun to decline

Nearly 25 years after the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine, exposure to radioactive iodine-131(I-131, a radioactive isotope) from fallout may be responsible for thyroid cancers that are still occurring among people who lived in the Chernobyl area and were children or adolescents at the time of the accident, researchers say.

Recent photo of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in Ukraine

An international team of researchers led by the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health found a clear dose-response relationship, in which higher absorption of radiation from I-131 led to an increased risk for thyroid cancer that has not seemed to diminish over time.

The study, which represents the first prospective examination of thyroid cancer risk in relation to the I-131 doses received by Chernobyl-area children and adolescents, appeared March 17, 2011, in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives.

"This study is different from previous Chernobyl efforts in a number of important ways. First, we based radiation doses from I-131 on measurements of radioactivity in each individual's thyroid within two months of the accident," explained study author Alina Brenner, M.D., Ph.D., from NCI’s Radiation Epidemiology Branch. "Second, we identified thyroid cancers using standardized examination methods. Everyone in the cohort was screened, irrespective of dose."

The study included over 12,500 participants who were under 18 years of age at the time of the Chernobyl accident on April 26, 1986, and lived in one of three Ukrainian oblasts, or provinces, near the accident site: Chernigov, Zhytomyr, and Kiev. Thyroid radioactivity levels were measured for each participant within two months of the accident, and were used to estimate each individual’s I-131 dose. The participants were screened for thyroid cancer up to four times over 10 years, with the first screening occurring 12 to 14 years after the accident.

Standard screenings included feeling for growths in the thyroid glands and an ultrasonographic examination (a procedure that uses sound waves to image the thyroid gland within the body), and an independent clinical examination and thyroid exam by an endocrinologist. Participants were asked to complete a series of questionnaires including items specifically relevant to thyroid dose estimation. These items included residential history, milk consumption, and whether they were given preventive doses of non-radioactive iodine in the two months following the accident, to help lessen the amount of radioactive iodine that would be absorbed by the thyroid. Participants with a suspected thyroid cancer were referred for a biopsy to collect potentially cancerous cells for microscopic examination. If warranted, participants were also referred for surgery. In total, 65 of the study participants were diagnosed with thyroid cancer.

Researchers calculated cancer risk in relation to how much energy from I-131was absorbed by each person’s thyroid, measured in grays. A gray is the International System of Units measure of absorbed radiation. Each additional gray was associated with a twofold increase in radiation-related thyroid cancer risk.

The researchers found no evidence, during the study time period, to indicate that the increased cancer risk to those who lived in the area at the time of the accident is decreasing over time."

Read that highlighted part again.  This is a multi-generational problem and so far it's unchecked.

 

I will suggest that people who are not taking the long-term potential of this seriously do not fully apprehend the nature of the problem.

 

Just, as an example, I ordered a piece of Japanese-made electronics today because I'm concerned that will continuing power - not to mention contamination fears in Japan, that this product may not be available at the same, or lower price, in the future. 

 

Plume Arrives Tomorrow

Although some of the world's stock markets put on brief rallies, the continuing erosion of confidence in an improved situation in Japan is sure to be coincident with a continuing large-scale sell-off in global financial markets.

 

We begin with the report from the International Atomic Energy Agency:

"Based on a press release from the Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary dated 17 March 2011 04:00 UTC, the IAEA can confirm that the Japanese military carried out four helicopter water droppings over the building of reactor unit 3 of the Fukushima Daichi nuclear power plant.

According to the press release, the droppings took place between 00:48 UTC and 01:00 UTC.

---

Injuries or Contamination at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant

Based on a press release from the Japanese Chief Cabinet Secretary dated 16 March 2011, the IAEA can confirm the following information about human injuries or contamination at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.

Please note that this list provides a snapshot of the latest information made available to the IAEA by Japanese authorities. Given the fluid situation at the plant, this information is subject to change.

Injuries

2 TEPCO employees have minor injuries 2 subcontractor employees are injured, one person suffered broken legs and one person whose condition is unknown was transported to the hospital 2 people are missing 2 people were 'suddenly taken ill' 2 TEPCO employees were transported to hospital during the time of donning respiratory protection in the control centre 4 people (2 TEPCO employees, 2 subcontractor employees) sustained minor injuries due to the explosion at unit 1 on 11 March and were transported to the hospital 11 people (4 TEPCO employees, 3 subcontractor employees and 4 Japanese civil defense workers) were injured due to the explosion at unit 3 on 14 March Radiological Contamination

17 people (9 TEPCO employees, 8 subcontractor employees) suffered from deposition of radioactive material to their faces, but were not taken to the hospital because of low levels of exposure One worker suffered from significant exposure during 'vent work,' and was transported to an offsite center 2 policemen who were exposed to radiation were decontaminated Firemen who were exposed to radiation are under investigation The IAEA continues to seek information from Japanese authorities about all aspects of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. "

More importantly, Japan seems to me to be on the verge of committing crimes against humanity by continuing to understate the seriousness of the situation.  As evidence, I'd point to this ABC News piece "Nuclear Crisis: NRC Says Spent Fuel Pool at Unit Four Lost Massive Amounts of Water; Japan Disputes Claims" as evidence that Japan's assessment of things is way cheerier than the US assessment.

 

While it could be argued that a single report - the the ABC report telling US citizens within 50 miles -  that's 80 kilometers - much larger than the Japanese government's evacuation area - there'd be some questioning my assertion.

 

But even large news operations, such as this USA Today report, point out now that key data is being stonewalled by Japan.  Not exactly confidence inspiring.

 

What we're hearing from our various sources in federal and state emergency preparedness units here in the US and in the US nuclear community, is that TEPCO and the Japanese government are either not being straight and/or are lowballing the problem.  As one confidential source told me: "Shit is getting out of hand and I have this horrible feeling the Japanese officials are now knowingly lying."  Gee, 'magine that.

 

I might as well make the prediction because it's a no-brainer:  At some point the crimes against humanity concept is going to jump (and think of this as a market concept) from the death industries (defense/war-making) vertical market, to the general corpgov space where - at least to the aware observer - we already have pretty good evidence that when corpgov reports something, it often doesn't square with easily observable first-hand data;  something we'll get into in this morning's second big socioeconomic story, the questions about the purported Consumer Price Index.  But back to our main feature, first.

 

Meantime, if you read this fine explanation in lay terms of what's going on, you might catch a familiar writing style, wink-wink, nudge-nudge.  Just go read this nuclear professional's assessment of how things seem likely to continue unwinding and pay particular attention to his conclusions:

• We will watch reports closely to determine whether "the spent fuel had died out and has caught fire (unlikely but this is his big worry right now because it would lead to a big [think Chernobyl - G] release.

• Watch for containment breaches being reported at units 1,2, or 3.

• Watch the dose readings in the high millisieverts/hour range.

As long as we're shaping a well-informed opinion, you may wish to read a "paper by Alvarez et al. (2003a; see also Thompson, 2003)" at the NAP.edu site here, which considered something the nuclear industry isn't too fond of talking about, namely the loss of cooling water in spent-rod storage.  This part in particular:

"Alvarez and his co-authors concluded that such an event would lead to the rapid heat-up of spent fuel in a dense-packed pool to temperatures at which the zirconium alloy cladding would catch fire and release many of the fuel’s fission products, particularly cesium-137. They suggested that the fire could spread to the older spent fuel, resulting in long-term contamination consequences that were worse than those from the Chemobyl accident. Citing two reports by Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL, 1987, 1997), they estimated that between 10 and 100 percent of the cesium-137 could be mobilized in the plume from the burning spent fuel pool, which could cause tens of thousands of excess cancer deaths, loss of tens of thousands of square kilometers of land, and economic losses in the hundreds of billions of dollars. The excess cancer estimates were revised downward to between 2000 and 6000 cancer deaths in a subsequent paper (Beyea et at., 2004) that more accurately accounted for average population densities around U.S. power plants. "

One of the conclusions of this was that Alvarez and coauthors suggested that wet-cooled rods should be moved to dry storage within 5-years. 

 

About here, you might be asking "OK, why not?" 

 

The answer is simple:  Real estate and access.  Money.

 

Spent fuel rods can be stored close together when in a water-moderating bath.  Put them into dry storage and they need to be spread out.  That takes real estates, perimeter control, separation from the public, and as out early reader bonus since 2001, protection from terrorism. 

 

In short the nuclear industry could have avoided this, but it would have added cost and we assume you remember that the nuclear power business is the single most heavily subsidized industry.  Big Tobacco and Florida Sugar  would be envious.

 

What more happens?  Well, let's move along to the plume, which is expected over the US Aleutian Islands today, and into Canada and the US tomorrow.

 

One of the better plume animations has been put together by Der Standard of Austria online here which shows what's feed into the jet stream.  Another is The Weather Space page here.

]

From there, you can step through the 160º E by 30º to 40º N and then take a look at the 5-day SFSU jet stream animation build here.

 

(About here I snidely ask:  Are we having fun, yet?)

 

The next place an informed person would visit would be the www.radiationnetwork.com site after reading the message from Microlab's Tim Flanegin here.  If you have a calibrated counter, contributions are important.

 

Last, but not least in our coverage this morning, we should note in passing that this event marks another major step in the doom of old-style media coverage of events.  The operant concept to watch is "crowdsourced" which shows up in places like the CBS/San Francisco story "From Tokyo to Calif., Radiation tracking gets crowdsourced."

 

Naturally, sites like this on which use unconventional sources, thinking, and writing, plus actively monitor tweets, blogs, and so forth, have (so far) developed a far more candid and comprehensive view of developing events.  We know that in the western half of the country, health response workers in government and partner groups are gearing up, although to even suggest that's happening is pretty well buried in the paradigm-defending oldmedia.

 

And it probably pisses off the PowersThatWere to a great extent that community is passing corpgov on any number of intellectual fronts from wikileaks forward.

 

[Warning:  Do NOT click the link in the following paragraph unless your computer is well-armored, since it's a site that attempts to involke an outbound malware call, ok?]

 

Such reliable community sharing via the net is in stark contrast to what paradigm defenders like South Korea's president is saying, namely that president "Lee condemns Internet-driven rumors about nuclear crisis."

 

So, looking ahead to this weekend, watch the local (even if lamestream) media because offishuldumb will pipe there rather than the crowdsource.  And you might want to stock up on Dial soap which leaves less residue we hear than other brands.  And then there's this bit from a contributing reader...

"When in the lab when we had to decontaminate from radioactive Iodine, Potassium, Carbon or Hydrogen there were two ways that worked every time. (Yes another misspent youth as a lab rat) One, plain soap and water, tide, dawn or whatever. Don't scrub hard just move it around. Hard scrubbing can etch a surface and create a hiding spot for the radioactive particles. So after they announce or you hear about the cloud use this defensively. Animals, such as cows could be soaped and rinsed off by the farmer, he does it anyway before milking to a lesser extent. Just do not let the animals or the farmer into the barns or interiors of buildings with out a scrub down. That is until you get a good rain, that's because of way two.

The second way is running water. Oh, yeah we just use to turn on the taps for really delicate equipment, getting the Prof three floors down really mad when the drain clogged and he and his precious books got rained upon. So things will be fairly normal quick in those areas that are flood prone or get a lot of rain. Midwest now, but the South will have to wait 'til June. Hurricanes create damage, but in this case and a Texas drought, they can solve lots of problems. Real problems are going to be those seldom rained on agricultural areas that are only irrigated to agriculture, that is the West and California's Central Valley. Think about it, can the US survive on food grown only in the Midwest/Ohio Valley or Eastern Seaboard until at least one hurricane washes the South or parts thereof. Now that's a scenario for folk with stored hurricane food.

Stay nosy and pet Zeus..."

Done and done...thanks for the thoughts from Aggieland...

 

Speaking of which, that reminds me of the odor of feedlots...and that odor comes from the very substance evidently employed  as a major ingredient in this morning's....

 

CONsumer Price Report

Here's this morning's steamy Consumer Price report:

"The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) increased 0.5 percent in February on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 2.1 percent before seasonal adjustment.

Though the seasonally adjusted increase in the all items index was broad-based, the energy index was once again the largest contributor. The gasoline index continued to rise, and the index for household energy turned up in February with all of its components posting increases. Food indexes also continued to rise in February, with sharp increases in the indexes for fresh vegetables and meats contributing to a 0.8 percent increase in the food at home index, the largest since July 2008.

The index for all items less food and energy rose in February as well. Most of its major components posted increases, including the indexes for shelter, new vehicles, medical care, and airline fares. The apparel index was one of the few to decline.

The 12-month changes in major indexes continue to trend upward. The all items index increased 2.1 percent for the 12 months ending February; the figure was 1.1 percent as recently as November. The 12- month increase in the index for all items less food and energy reached 1.1 percent in February after being as low as 0.6 percent in October. The 11.0 percent increase in the energy index is the largest since May 2010, while the 2.3 percent rise in the food index is the largest since May 2009. "

Hmmm...they figure gasoline is up 19.2% over the past year but we notice that the Triple A report shows gasoline presently is up 27.14% compared with a year ago.

 

What got cheaper?  Utility (piped gas) down 5.9% from a year ago and clothing was down 4-10th's of one percent.

 

Although redundant (redundant) I suppose it's worth saying again that price studies used as the basis of military retirement and Social Security adjustments  should be taken out of the hands of those with a vested interest in low-balling the data to minimize budgetary impacts.

 

No data in the report about the number of chickens counted by the foxes as being in the hen house, either.

 

To Market, To Market

...to short a fat pig...oops!  Sorry... Although the futures are signaling a modest bounce at the open, after falling down the equivalent of two flights of stairs this week, any old news item, no matter how insignificant will be seized upon by the hypesters. 

 

Oh look: Just in time for the morning hype:

"In the week ending March 12, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 385,000, a decrease of 16,000 from the previous week's revised figure of 401,000. The 4-week moving average was 386,250, a decrease of 7,000 from the previous week's revised average of 393,250.

The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 3.0 percent for the week ending March 5, unchanged from the prior week's unrevised rate of 3.0 percent.

The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending March 5 was 3,706,000, a decrease of 80,000 from the preceding week's revised level of 3,786,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,779,000, a decrease of 58,000 from the preceding week's revised average of 3,837,000.

So it goes like this:  Radioactive cloud arrives, inflation is up to 6+ percent annualized but there was a statistical flutter in the job data for the week.  Yeah, let's hype the hell outta that.... 

 

Hand me the ViseGrips.. I feel a forearm need coming on....can I wake up yet?  Pinch me again...

 

Baby Tractor Beams

Once the stuff of Sci-Fi, science types are suggesting that lasers could be fired from Earth to gently nudge errant orbiting debris from hitting high value targets, like the space station and such.

 

Particularly cool in their coverage of this is the UK Daily Mail picture of how much space junk is up there...

 

Of course, no, this doesn't explain those NASA images of ground-based somethings shooting what seem like beam weapons off into space in the ongoing alien wars, but let's not go there - my tinfoil hat is in the shop.

 

 

Coping: With New Vegetarians

This'll sound like heresy, coming from the ETex outback within walking distance of one of the states largest private cattle ranches, but a reader note raises the issue, so we need to think about it now while we have time to react:

"Hi George;

I have been thinking about this the last couple of days - Cliff's last report talks about food poisoning that is made more known over the this year and into next year. Specifically I was thinking that the food poisoning might be radiation poisoning with cows milk, meat and crops in CA and the midwest.

Just a thought (not nice thought - but a thought).

What do you think?"

What!!!???  Obviously, you haven't read Peoplenomics #246, June 25, 2006, under the heading "The Coming Protein Cost Explosion"  so let me to the piece fitting for you.

 

First, the start of the article: 

You may not have considered becoming a vegetarian recently, but if my reading of the tea leaves is correct, there are several scenarios under which you might find protein becoming a luxury. I'm blessed coming from a Scottish and Danish ancestry because eating lots of protein and fairly high fat diets is what we were engineered for, especially on the Danish side of the family. Healthy hearts in spite of lots of real butter, whipping cream, and heavy gravies. My father's contribution was to stay in good shape and promote steak & eggs and a cup of strong coffee as the perfect way to prepare for a big test at school. These days, it looks like that kind of lifestyle is headed for extinction as three major forces are poised to combine and dramatically increase the price of protein over the next few years: The government's move to inventory every bit of livestock in America (NAIS), the soaring cost of agricultural inputs (feed, seed, diesel, and chemicals), and the serious issue of global protein depletion accentuated recent by the discussions of Bird Flu will probably all be involved ...

From there, I went on to question whether the National Animal Identification System - NAIS - which the government was pushing a while back as "voluntary"{ but then along came controls that were anything but voluntary.

 

So let's look at this part next, which was contributed by a Peoplenomics subscriber:

"The first is the 1/4 mile wide super highway due to start construction in 2007 extending from Mexico to Canada. The second is the need to nearly abolish private property [albeit along a continuum from some to all over a period of time] to establish the human exclusionary areas for the Wildlands Project. This exclusionary area would encompass nearly 90% of the total land mass of America. Sounds ultra fantastic doesn't it?

The Wildlands project is real. It is part and parcel of the [UN's] Agenda 21 and sustainability programs of the US government. This program IS currently being carried out bit by bit right under the nose of the American people. "

Going to fast for you?

 

Let's step back and see how the PTB/PTW will use the events of Japan to further promote the grab for control of the nation's food supply (this'll work just as effectively as though there had been a domestic nuclear or biological terrorist  event...)...

• Like 9/11 the Japanese quake & nukes will be a huge "shock and awe" deal.  If you can step back for just a moment, you can likely see this even in your own family.

• Next should come the "discovery" as our Aggieland contributed noted above) about potential for meat animals to suck up radiation and that we'll be told will somehow get into the foodchain.

• The SOLUTION, naturlich (German spelling, lol) will be to demand all animals destined for human markets to be what?  INSPECTED! 

• Thus, the NAIS program will get funding/legs under it...

• And the PTB will do their damn level best to convert a bunch of high protein consuming)  omnivores into vegetarians.

• And then what?  As the demand for ag land to raise meat animals falls (veggies are far more efficient carby sources, anyway) the once ag lands will be seized/rolled up into more wetlands and wild spaces which will be banked in Parks and Reserves.

Ah...but parked for whom and reserved for whom?  I'm sure if you've been following the outdoorsy/spelunking groups you've maybe heard that the federal government has become seriously pissy of late about people venturing onto public lands without reasons/permissions.  Why?  Well, to keep people out of looking for caves, for one thing, since a lot of prepper types are thinking in those terms should we see a pick up in radiation from either space or the Sun around 2012.

 

So, when someone, like the reader this morning asks "What do you think?"  I expect - like a Son of 9/11 event - the PTB will likely use this as a means of extending their levels of control and it wouldn't surprise me to see maybe even a bio-vector disease intro'ed about the same time, since while millions could die from radiation worldwide (depending on how bad things get) it could still be seen as a "clocking event" for a re-introduction of - wait, didn't someone mention this already today? - bird flu and claim it isn't flu - just that terrible radiation stuff.

---

Oh shit note:  This article just popped this morning.  There, bird flu just clicked a tumbler in the lock...

---

Funny how it could be spun if there really is an incredibly egotistical, anti-human group at the top of the world's socioeconomic pyramid.

 

Oh, wait!  There is.  If you don't realize that, then you probably haven't watched "The One Percent" a 2006 documentary about the ruling powers of the world in general, USApop in particular: It's good...

"It was created by Jamie Johnson, an heir to the Johnson & Johnson fortune, and produced by Jamie Johnson and Nick Kurzon. The film's title refers to the top one percent of Americans in terms of wealth, who controlled 38% of the nation's wealth in 2001.[1]

The film premiered on April 29, 2006, at the Tribeca Film Festival. It was reported to have been purchased by HBO and a revised version of the film, substantially re-edited and incorporating footage shot since the 2006 festival screening, premiered on Thursday, February 21, 2008 at 6:30pm ET/PT on HBO's Cinemax.

It was stated in the Page Six column of the New York Post that Warren Buffett had written a letter to Nicole Buffett, daughter of his son Peter's ex-wife from another marriage. In response to her participation in the film, distancing himself from her, he wrote "I have not emotionally or legally adopted you as a grandchild, nor have the rest of my family adopted you as a niece or a cousin."

Oh, and if you have time to watch the documentary, and wish to go further in your researches, please visit his website and pass along our regards to Prof. G. William Domhoff at the University of California, Santa Cruz, who updated his studies of the concentration of wealth in America this year.

 

Sadly, to borrow a single data table from his "Wealth, Income, and Power" page here, the numbers keep concentrating more and more money/control in the hands of people  - many of whom have not better credentials than being born right:

 

 

Let me put on my "good journalist hat" here and let me see if I can sum it up for you:

One camp will claim that capitalism if a miracle system which is adaptive to all kinds of exogenous shocks and that they alone are fit to rule over such a system and should therefore continue to exist in power because (they claim) it will benefit more people..

 

The other camp looks at the track record, non-movement in quality of life in linear proportion to effort and says something like "m'f'iong pricks are gonna find a way to bend us over again, aren't they?

Not sure which camp you're in, but let's go have a steak sandwich while we can and talk about it 'cuz the answer to which worldview represents, oh, 99% of regular humans(?) isn't really hard to figure out, is it?

---

By the way, Bill Gate's dad got high marks from us as we watched The One Percent (on Netflix) since he offered the reasonable view that estate taxes shouldn't be removed.  Bill Gate's Sr. wrote Wealth and Our Commonwealth: Why America Should Tax Accumulated Fortunes which he coauthored with Chuck Collins, who I interviewed numerous times in my news-chasing days - very smart guy (although he'd remember me by my radio alias George Garrett, if at all...)

---
Which gets me to this:  If I could leave more than 38¢ to each of my heirs, a steep estate tax of, oh, say 99% on any amount over $3-million per heir (exemption for genuine medical care cases with third party doc reviews)  might actually move toward busting up the phat-cat club at the top.  Zero tax below that, 99% tax above.

 

So look for events go:  Radiation > government monitoring > health risk discovery > reform of food sources > some die-off > continued accretion of wealth by the aristocracy.

 

The arrogance, conceit, inhumanity, and raw power of the top 1% ought to be evident in their "plumage" soon enough. 

 

Still got steak sauce on the shopping list?

 

---

Wednesday March 16, 2011 

Market Happy-Talk

No doubt about it, this being triple witching time, the markets have geared up the hype machine to keep from paying off on as many bear positions as possible so look for a short-term rip-snorter of a rally.

 

Part of the reason is the investment of $700-billion to keep the financial markets stable.

 

If you've got a cynical eye for such things, seems the G20 may be the ultimate in shopkeeper economics with governments buying one another's paper on the theory that they can keep the charade going indefinitely; by which I mean no one will ever have to admit being on the Titanic which has just hit a Debtberg.  Some further ruminations are summed up in a visit to www.artificialscarcity.com, especially if you don't know how shopkeeper economics works.

 

Still, not all markets are buying in.  For one thing, the conditions in Japan worsened overnight with Fukushima #4 on fire - this is the same place where a fire Tuesday lasting only a couple of hours, popped out a radioactive plume.

 

Most of the reports coming out of groups like the International Atomic Energy Agency are putting out statements which raise as many questions as they answer:

"Japanese authorities have informed the IAEA that a fire in the reactor building of Unit 4 of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant was visually observed at 20:45 UTC of 15 March. As of 21:15 UTC of the same day, the fire could no longer be observed. "

Why the fire could no longer be observed is left to the reader's imagination.

 

At our first check this morning, the Nikkei was up 5.68% overnight, which I'd rate akin to the silliness of shoppers during the holidays.  Japan is not a bargain yet, in my opinion, and I wonder how much of the rally was government (easy money) pumping?  We'll likely never know.

 

The action is Europe was a little less rabid:  France, Germany and the UK (unemployed kingdom) are down, but less than one percent at first check.

 

From yesterday's low (11,696) the Dow rallied to close at 11,.855 - a shade under 160- points, but whether that rally has enough "legs" under it to continue is open to conjecture until markets get through today.

 

Meantime, as we reported yesterday, the website www.radiationnetwork.com is back online...nothing even half-way to the alert level, although a reader sends this:

"George, According to the Nat’l Hurricane Center’s Northeast Pacific AVN IR satellite view, the Japan air mass making it’s way east is now at 45N 155 W. The air mass looks to be on course to intersect the jet stream west of northern California. If you have people with detection equipment ( spell that Geiger counters) in the vicinity, you may want them to set up a reporting network as I doubt that we can rely on timely PTB/W updates."

Yeah, not hardly getting ahead of events yet, are they?  If you have a calibrated meter you might want to participate.

 

(More about quakes and HAARP in the Coping Section following).

 

KI Pricing

A number of people have complained about the price of potassium iodide pills being "charged by Amazon" but, here's the thing you have to remember:  Amazon is a clearinghouse for a lot of smaller companies that use Amazon to sell their goods.  Amazon does not set the prices and when you see things like 12 KI pills for $300, that's not Amazon doing the gouging...

 

Fed Does Nothing

The Federal Reserve Rate decision on Tuesday was such a non-event that I saved it for this morning's report.  Sip coffee quickly and see if you can stay awake through this:

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

Hey!  Wake up!  If you kind yourself nervous and jittery ahead of a meeting today, the balance of the FOMC statement is nearest thing I've read to economic valium... If I read about "dual mandate"  (print money, be happy is what that means in simple terms), I'm gonna puke.  Pass the ink?

 

Bahrain Humbug, II

Worth watching, if you have time, the Al Jazeera Inside Story of the Saudi invasion of Bahrain.

 

Should clarify for you who has who by the nuts  oil.

 

Constitutional Issues

Worth a read - since the question of the Barack's citizenship just won't go away, the article "Co-opting of the President Eligibility Assurance Act" over at the Northeast Intelligence Network site.

 

Housing Still Bummer

From the Census Bureau this morning:

BUILDING PERMITS Privately-owned housing units authorized by building permits in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 517,000. This is 8.2 percent (±3.3%) below the revised January rate of 563,000 and is 20.5 percent (±3.5%) below the February 2010 estimate of 650,000. Single-family authorizations in February were at a rate of 382,000; this is 9.3 percent (±1.2%) below the revised January figure of 421,000. Authorizations of units in buildings with five units or more were at a rate of 121,000 in February.

 

HOUSING STARTS

Privately-owned housing starts in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 479,000. This is 22.5 percent (±9.8%) below the revised January estimate of 618,000 and is 20.8 percent (±9.0%) below the February 2010 rate of 605,000.

Single-family housing starts in February were at a rate of 375,000; this is 11.8 percent (±10.0%) below the revised January figure of

425,000. The February rate for units in buildings with five units or more was 96,000.

 

HOUSING COMPLETIONS

Privately-owned housing completions in February were at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 581,000. This is 13.9 percent (±16.8%)*above the revised January estimate of 510,000, but is 13.0 percent (±14.9%)* below the February 2010 rate of 668,000.

One thing's fair to say about big earthquakes: they immediately defibrillate the construction trades.

 

Something to Cheer?

Press release from BNA which is an information collector/provider:

Workers in the private sector overall likely will see higher annual wage increases in the coming months, according to the revised first quarter Wage Trend Indicator™ (WTI) released today by BNA, a leading publisher of specialized news and information.

 

The WTI stands at 97.99 (second quarter 1976 = 100), up from 97.42 in the fourth quarter of 2010, marking the forward-looking indicator's third consecutive gain.

 

"For the most part, the employment situation has stabilized and is getting a little stronger," said economist Kathryn Kobe, a consultant who maintains and helped develop BNA's WTI database. "The latest WTI reading shows some upward pressure on wages is expected to follow," Kobe said.

Wanna lay a side wager that even though wages go up, the effects of tax indexing and those non-existence cost of living increases eat up more than the higher wages?

 

Wednesday at the WuJo

Coping: With Nonmeaningful Coincidences

Remember the old TV show, Columbo with Peter Falk, where Falk would often be leaving the scene of the crime and would stop, turn, and say - heavily accents with a lower-class brogue -  something like "Escuse, shir, but there's just one shing dats bothering me..."

 

I have days like that - like this morning, for example, where there's just one thing bothering me.

 

Proof seems to exist now that not all earthquakes are created equal. 

 

At least, insofar as the magnetometer readings about the government/University of Alaska High Altitude Atmospheric Project, a/k/a HAARP which, as you may recall from our earlier discussions, uses a huge steerable HF radio transmitter system which is powered with a roughly 2-megawatt powerplant which, given the size of their antenna array, pumps many megawatts (if not gigawatts) of effective radiated power (ERP) into the ionosphere for "research".

 

So powerful is the radiation off the HARP site, that they even have their own local radar to augment other radar coverage so that aircraft in the area aren't inadvertently damaged.  In other words, lotsa, lotsa power.
 

Over the years, a lot of crackpot theories have developed around HAARP, but it's always been conjecture based on the magnetometers since I've been unable to locate the critical data needed to interpret whether HAARP was causative to some of the odd phenomena afoot in the world today, like bird kills, out-of-place earthquakes, and the like, or whether it was coincident to anomalous events.

 

The date which would be required in order to make such an assessment necessarily include:  Effective radiated power (ERP) the directional heading of the array - since in high frequency (HF) radio, there are always two paths to anywhere on earth (the short path and the long path which is the reciprocal direction from the antenna heading) as well as take-off angles, since the take-off angle of a radio wave may be varied.

 

Just to give a simple example, if I wish to contact someone in Europe on ham radio from my home QTH (location), I point my directional antenna, a 3-element yagi beam, off at about 45 degrees to hit Italy, for example.  The tower goes up to the 60' foot level and "Ciao", "bon journo", or whoever comes back.
 

For closer-in communications, say with a ham  in New Mexico, I'd lower the beam to about 30-feet (causing a more acute (higher) take-off angle which would come down sooner off the F2 layer, if I was playing that bank-shot, and I'd head out at 285º, being constantly careful never to exceed the FCC limit on ham radio operations of 1.5 kW Peak Envelop Power (PEP).  I always keep to about 1.2 kW PEP just to be safe.  And yes, hams have RFI compliance statements about exposure to the general public in uncontrolled areas) and controlled areas, such as their own property and yes, there is signage at the entrance to our property which spells out that high power RF may be in use.

 

Back to point: HF antennas have power, direction, and maximum take-off angle  lobes which dyed-in-the-wool hams (verging on geekly types) like me model using antenna modeling software such as W7EL's fine EZNEC program to see what's going on with their antennas...

 

Which gets me back to HAARP.  Since the public doesn't get access to transmitter logs with frequency, pulse type, power, direction, and take-off angles the only thing we know is that yes, HAARP's magnetometers were on and working at the time of the 9.0 quake off Honshu, but follow me here: this is where things get interesting: 

 

I plotted out the times of the Japan quake plus a few other quakes (6.0 and above) that were temporally adjacent, and put a few of them on the magnetometer timeline from HAARP's database and this is what we get:

 

 

See that big spiky thing around 07:00-08:00  UTC on March 10?  Guess what's there?  A 4.8 off Honshu...  That's the big black spike which is followed by the next big black spike smack dab coincident with the 9/.09 quake!

 

The 6.1 off Honshu didn't do anything yet a 4.8 is coincident and then the 9.0?  Like wait for something then pump it maybe?  Of course not!  Why, such thinking would verge on conspiratorial, would it not?  But then again, there's the data to mull...and certainly a mechanism might be postualated.

 

You're welcome to perform the same work yourself (better do it today, since the USGS data for the 9th of March is about to roll off the USGS recent quakes list here. 

 

Frankly, I don't expect the data magnetometer data to disappear off HAARP, but who knows in this world, eh?

 

But seems evident to me that if nothing else, HAARP which has cost hundreds of millions of your tax dollars and mine, seems to conclusively demonstrate that not all earthquakes are created equal at least in terms of magnetometer readings in Gakona, Alaska, and you just know that there's a lot more to this for the government to have spent the hundreds of millions, since the Department of Defense is running projects using the equipment at the site and warns against any improper use of the site on that account.

 

If you want to have a ton of fun, you could go into the magnetometer chain and look up the data for the magnetometer chains in the general direction of Japan, and what do you find?  Missing data for places like Trapper Creek and Anchorage which, although they are in the general (short path) direction of Japan, is only coincidental....we're sure....try to fake a look of surprise right about here....

 

And now we get to the "One ting dats bothering me...."

 

Again, this is highly coincidental, George tilting at windmills stuff, but Japan as you probably know has a huge unfunded pension liability.  Nearly a quarter of a trillion dollars in 2009 and still growing according to this Bloomberg report from January of 2010:

Japan’s top 278 companies were a combined 21.5 trillion yen ($235.7 billion) behind on their pension funding in fiscal 2009,

A fair-minded business reporter would be looking - about now - for the PTB to tip their hand on what happens to those pension liabilities...national emergency - that kind of thing.

---

I don't know about you, but I'd sure like to see HAARP open up and report all of it's transmitter operations and array headings for the week prior to the Japan quake.  Not that I'm asserting any wrongdoing, of course.  BUT I am bothered down at the soul level level what jumps out of the magnetometer readings.

 

That all earthquakes are not equal.

 

And that's got some huge scientific ramifications, including perhaps, hints about the expando planet idea, just for openers.

 

Oh, and if you see a modest quake in the Pacific Northwest or New Madrid area later this month?  Tighten the seat belt just in case.  How is it a 6.1 does nothing to the magnetometers and a 4.8 follows a ramping pulse-stepped kind of pattern, again?

 

Minor Non Sequitors

Which are do-not-follows:  Elaine came over to the office yesterday with a bewildered look.

"I just saw on a live feed on TV that officials were telling people who might be exposed to radiation to go back to their homes and close their doors and windows..."

And your point, dear?

"Well, don't the officials realize that for most of these people the doors and windows were broken by the quake if their homes are standing at all?"

Well, I guess when you put it that way.  Maybe government officials being out of touch is systemic?

 

 

---

Tuesday March 15, 2011

www.RadiationNetwork.com Back On Line

I just got off the phone a few minutes ago with  Tim Flanegin, head of Mineralab - the company which runs www.radiationnetwork.com (and www.geigercounters.com ) and he reports his monitoring site is back up and in normal operation.

 

The site went down early this morning, but turns out - it was nothing nefarious - just a programming error in house at their end (no conspiracy grist there).

 

The site has apparently gone viral and so far - now that it's back up - no sign of server overload.

 

Two things about the site you may wish to be aware of:  First, the Japan monitoring site shown on the small map (link at the bottom of their page) is not curretnly on line and they are hoping to get data from there as soon as possible.  In the wake of the quake, a lot of telecom systems were damaged...

 

Second thing to be aware of is that the map of the US shown on the monitor site is really just a small peek into the large version of the software, which though it costs $79 has a lot of additional features such as being able to chat with other users online as well as development more detail about reporting stations.

 

At press time, readings of 42 in Washington state and 58 in Colorado are (more or less) down in the noise, but we'll be watching the reports on an ongoing basis.  Meanwhile, a hats off to Tim Flanegin and crew for what seems a much more complete near-real-time picture than others (like a federal government near you) seem interested in reporting to the curious-minded public.

 

Melting Cores & Failing Markets

The world is, hate to say it, being 'snookered' by Japan.  As in "bamboozled, beguiled, bluffed, buffaloed, burned.. and the list goes on here.  The charade of "everything is normal" is just not so and much of the media is complicit in the act by failing to demand lots of data - not just the government sanitized figures.  Reading at altitudes would be nice, for example, because that way the "winds pushing stuff out to sea" which runs the risk of entering the jet stream, could be properly evaluated.  The markets today are starting the discounting process to factor that possibility into market prices.

 

Understating the seriousness of three reactors in meltdown alert is unconscionable.   The data from the International Atomic Energy Agency is this (pay attention to the highlighted data):

"At 00:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 11.9 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed. Six hours later, at 06:00 UTC on 15 March a dose rate of 0.6 millisieverts (mSv) per hour was observed.

These observations indicate that the level of radioactivity has been decreasing at the site.

As reported earlier, a 400 millisieverts (mSv) per hour radiation dose observed at Fukushima Daiichi occurred between units 3 and 4. This is a high dose-level value, but it is a local value at a single location and at a certain point in time. The IAEA continues to confirm the evolution and value of this dose rate. It should be noted that because of this detected value, non-indispensible staff was evacuated from the plant, in line with the Emergency Response Plan, and that the population around the plant is already evacuated.

About 150 persons from populations around the Daiichi site have received monitoring for radiation levels. The results of measurements on some of these people have been reported and measures to decontaminate 23 of them have been taken. The IAEA will continue to monitor these developments.

Evacuation of the population from the 20 kilometre zone is continuing.

The Japanese have asked that residents out to a 30 km radius to take shelter indoors. Japanese authorities have distributed iodine tablets to the evacuation centres but no decision has yet been taken on their administration.

Not time to take potassium iodide by any stretch, but having a stock is a good thing.

 

We have a source, who we can only identify as an expat highly placed editor in Japanese media who has informed us of the (criminal) charade going on. 

 

On Tuesday, his key Japanese media outlet, while reporting on the "situation being in hand" was quickly evacuating its staff to either Hong Kong, or Sydney, Australia.  He was given a timeframe in which to gather critical data for the media's product and was to be helicoptered to an island in southern Japan where a corporate plane would move him - and other members of this key media outlet - to foreign shores.

 

All the while his publication was reporting "normal" conditions for the populace.  So first point:  Japanese media are complicit in the cover-up of the data.

 

Yet, even this morning, there are reports from the MSM that parrot government official claims that radiation levels at the plant's front gate would not harm humans.

 

Yet, as anyone who has studied plumes knows, radiation is not an upwind phenomena and the Japanese have not released levels on all sides of the plant.  It would be like having a forest fire in Utah, reporting upwind of it in Nevada, that the situation is well in hand, while the smoke chokes people in Colorado or New Mexico!

 

The lack of believable reporting is wearing thin.

 

Our next data point is what we light-heartedly call our "consulting reactor engineer" who runs a small-medium research reactor here in the US and offers this:

"Hi George,

Not telling you anything you don't know, but we have entered worst-case territory for the reactor types at Fukushima Daiichi. For those of us in North America, this does not mean it is time to take those KI tablets, but here's hoping your Japanese readers had heeded your call to stock up.

FYI, here is a quick reference for you when discussing radiation dose. We in the U.S. use the term "rem" or, more commonly, "millirem," to describe dose. In Japan and Europe their unit for absorbed dose is the "sievert" or more commonly the "millisievert." Also, be aware that most of the numbers being reported are in amount of dose per hour - this is important.

1 sievert (Sv) = 100 rem (100 rem is a very large dose to take all at once) 1 millisievert (mSv) = 100 mrem

For reference, most studies show that the human body shows noticeable changes in response to radiation at ~10 rem (0.1 sv or 100 msv). In the U.S. radiation workers can take 5 rem total dose over the course of a year (during normal work conditions).

For reference, at the plant, there was a reading of 400 mSv, so equating to 40 rem in an hour. Not good.

This has gone deep into "worst case" territory. Far deeper than I expected. The language for Clif's "radioactive volcanoes" is certainly in place.

Confirming our claim that contamination aloft is key is a report that units of the US 7th Fleet have pulled back to keep down exposure levels.  Oh, and 17 crewmembers off helos have been contaminated. Contamination aloft is critical data.

---

Since we are not getting the "straight scoop" on the potential for the linguistically predicted  "radioactive volcanoes" to go off, should cores continue to melt - now a high probability circumstance - we see in overnight trading across global markets stark confirmation that our "worst-case" financial outcome we've been discussing since the event occurred is slowly, but continuously, evolving.

 

In Peoplenomics last weekend, I asserted that things would turn worse than reported and today we can see that in overnight trading the Japan Nikkei 225 droped nearly 11 percent.

 

Apparently, traders in Japan have the same kinds of sources we do - so while the Japanese public is being snookered, the big money is cashing out and blowing town in droves. 

---

We can also see in this event, evidence of Gary Lammert's predict "Albino White Swan" beginning to appear.  Or, if you don't want to admit to the possibility of a working fractal macroeconomic predictive method, it may be a little more comforting to think of this as a distant outlier event that is driven by the meltdown issues, not by global system instability caused by excessively high debt levels and the problem of nonlinear compounding.

 

Whatever it takes to cope, huh?

 

Either way you choose, every market in Asia was down overnight and big ones that hatter hugely in the US - like the benchmark Hang Seng, was down 2.86 percent which sounds like a small thing, until you pencil out that would be equivalent to the Dow dropping almost 350 points.

 

Similarly, the nuclear contagion is raging in European markets this morning with France and Germany down three and one half percent and four point seven percent, respectively.  Even the sometimes staid Brits have a knot in their knickers with the Footsie down more than 2½ percent earlier.

 

With these data point in hand, we can estimate that the US will go through something of a drop when markets open today.  Only hype festival in the last half of Monday's action in US markets held the Dow to a 51 point loss.  Today, I think there's a good chance of having lows of triple that - if not four or five times that.

 

Say, who mentioned last week the reasonableness of moving 401 money out of stocks and into bonds?  Not investment advice - that you ought to use better sources for - think I mentioned it in terms of if I had a 401k. 

 

Still, with the reports coming in, seems that anyone who made such a move prior to today's action would likely stand a better chance, at least in the short term - of holding on to net worth in nominal terms.

 

The AP report about the "Third explosion rocks Japanese nuclear plant" is a clearer look and to the aware, the variance between the AP and corpmedia is apparent.

 

Fed Meeting

I'll have an update this afternoon when the Federal Reserve rate decision is handed out.  Should be an interesting decision to watch:  If they leave rates low, that might be good for US business, but if Japanese interests start selling a lot of bonds (or whatevers) they may offer a higher yield, which in turn would shrink the US bond buying pool.  Steady with tough-talk seems a good guess.

 

By like the old saying that "A man's life and property are never safe when the state legislature is is session," the corollary is that's doubly true when congress is in and quadruply so when the Fed meets.

 

Gold/Silver Falling

Not without mention is this morning's collapse of the silver and gold prices.  Earlier today (chart at top of this page) gold was down more than $45 and silver was down $2.30.

 

As we've talked about before, when there is a massive correction in the stock markets, people will get margin calls and have to sell all asset classes - even the solid ones - to make ends meet.

 

Which just creates a better entry point for the long-term players who recognize that global systemic inflation will be the eventual chosen course by governments and as that arrives, leveraged via hard assets should return.

 

Oh - bonus time:  makes that house you may be upside down in, get profitable, looking again at least on paper.  Assuming, you're not bothered by $10, $8 gas, and the general decline in the US standard of living...

 

Bahrain Humbug

The march of the Saudis into Bahrain is being met with little world reaction.  Perhaps because so much of the world's oil supply from the Saudis is as close as 75-miles from the protest sites.

 

The Pentagon is saying that they were not warned of the Saudi moved into Bahrain, but around here, we know full well that "national technical means" of course saw things forming up on the ground.

 

Another fine example of how the American public are treated with disdain and as though we're idiots by those in command positions.  Can't speak for you, but I'm deeply offended, although judging by election results, maybe their position isn't completely wrong.

 

Web Winning

Naturally, with this kind of offensive treatment of the American public, aided and abetted by corpmedia that doesn't have the balls to ask "WTF?  What about your satellite systems?" we're somehow NOT surprised to lean in last night's UK Mail Online that the "Internet will soon be top choice to get nerws in America as it overtakes newspapers for first time."
 

Bummer Poll

As we've been reporting here, much to the consternation of the medicated non-thinking class, there hasn't been much - if any - wide improvement in economic conditions in the US.

 

Although they don't say "George told you so" (surely an error by their PR department?) a new Harris Poll released today shows this:

"The last few months have produced some more cheerful economic news, with strong corporate profits, modest increases in consumer confidence and rising stock market indices. However a new Harris Poll finds no change in the steps that people are taking to save money and reduce their spending. Many people continue to economize, and there is no evidence of consumers' spending behavior being more relaxed. The recession ended many months ago, but the psychological impact of the financial and housing crisis is still very strong.

 

These are some of the results of The Harris Poll of 3,171 adults surveyed online between February 14 and 21, 2011 by Harris Interactive. "

But wait!  Here's another news release about the American Dream blowing up:

"Despite a declining unemployment rate, rebounding stock market and other short-term improvements in the economy, Americans continue to grow more pessimistic about long-term retirement prospects, according to a new COUNTRY Financial survey. Less than one-in-three (28 percent) believe it is possible for a middle income family to save for a secure retirement. This number is down two points from this time last year and more than nine points since 2007.

Lingering doubt about middle income retirement might be symptomatic of Americans' overall uncertainty about their retirement savings. Four-in-ten (43 percent) are not confident in their current retirement savings plans. The same number indicate they are decreasing the amount they are putting away for their golden years. Despite these sentiments, 50 percent say recent economic events will not cause them to delay retirement. However, this number is down slightly from this time last year (53 percent).

"It's understandable people are still uneasy about retirement given the length of economic unrest. But, regardless of your income bracket, it's important to continue setting aside money for the future," says Keith Brannan, vice president of Financial Security planning. "Building your retirement nest egg starts with creating a tangible financial plan based on your own unique situation and plans for your golden years. Having a target to save for is an important motivator for any long-term financial goal."

Amazingly, this one goes on to report that only 31% of Americans have sought profession retirement advice, though as a simple rule-of-thumb, you'll need about 75% of working income to be doing retirement up right.

 

Of course, that's where we step into the mine field:  Only takes a single "albino black swan" to eff things up.

 

Valuing Unpaid Alzheimer's Care

Ever wonder what the value of care given by relatives and friends of Alzheimer's victims adds up to?

"According to 2011 Alzheimer's Disease Facts and Figures, released today by the Alzheimer's Association, there are nearly 15 million Alzheimer's and dementia caregivers in the United States. This new report shows that there are far more Alzheimer's and dementia caregivers than previously believed – 37% more than reported last year. These individuals provided 17 billion hours of unpaid care valued at $202.6 billion. If Alzheimer's and dementia caregivers were the only residents of a single state it would be the 5th largest state in the country."

Number of people with Alzheimer's in the US is placed at about 5.4 million.  Maybe a tad higher, since I had to write down the figures...

 

Harem Market?

Say, maybe this will quiet things down in the Middle East:

"Frederick's of Hollywood Group Inc. (NYSE Amex: FOH) ("Company") announced today that it has entered into an exclusive multi-year licensing agreement with Abu Dhabi-based Emirates Associated Business Group (EABG) to build and operate Frederick's of Hollywood retail stores in the Middle East.

 

The agreement provides for EABG to open at least 10 Frederick's of Hollywood retail stores in six Middle Eastern countries over the next three years, with additional store openings based on a mutually agreed upon expansion plan. In addition, a flagship store in Abu Dhabi is scheduled to open in April 2011. "

Of course, my "news nose that knows news" wonders if this story will be adequately covered...

---

You know it's a busy news period when we talk about driving snakes from Ireland (Thursday is St. Patrick's Day) in the same week we talk about driving lingerie sales in the Middle East.

 

Have we got our priorities right around here, or what?

 

Coping:  Helpful Writing Hints

I love writing.  But being marginally ADHD, short of being medicated, the idea of actually sitting down and proofreading is about like volunteering the scratch fingernails on the blackboard.  Or, worse, listening to Fearless Leader speeches reassuring us that everything is fine.  Yep.

 

One of my better ones was in Peoplenomics this weekend where the "colling system" of one of the Fukushima nuclear fondues was referred to as the cooking system, rather than the cooling system.

 

Also, sometime last week, I mentioned (think it was in a WuJo piece here) about the pissibility of magic rather than the possibility.

 

Readers, being ever so easily entertained by such foibles often send me correction notes; a few has made a full-time job out of it, although for the life of me, I can figure out where the money would be in that.  If I could, I'd hire myself on to make corrections, since cash trumps pain, at least up to a certain point.

 

Decided it might be worth sharing some of the suggestions that come in, because while mostly good, and rules I already know, when you've been typing 100+ WPM for a few decades, other-worldly spirits much up the connections between mind and fingers. 

 

Just to demonstrate how this is so, a description in Wikipedia of a phenomena called automatic writing is worth some scrutiny, since I'm not the first to notice that unsupervised, I might write something entirely different than business prose:

George (Georgie) Hyde-Lees, the wife of William Butler Yeats, claimed that she could write automatically. In 1975, Wendy Hart of Maidenhead claimed that she wrote automatically about Nicholas Moore, a sea captain who died in 1642. Her husband, who did research on Moore, affirmed that this person had resided at St Columb Major in Cornwall during the Civil War.

There's also a good bit of belief out in the WuJo that automatic writing allows other personalities - if not outright spirits to communicate.  Why, just then I first spelled "automatic" and "automatric" which shows my fingers may be smarter than my mind.

 

Still, it would be in the public interest to read a more comprehensive discussion of automatic writing, and in particular, whether Jane Roberts, who wrote the Seth books in what's been described as a channeled way, was actually an embodiment of automatic writing.

 

All of which gets us around - in a most circuitous way, to this morning's language advice from a reader:

"Hi George! I'm so glad I've been reading your daily column for the past six or seven years! Saved my bacon for sure!

I am mostly entertained by your flamboyant typos and spelling foibles, but for such a knowledgeable and experienced dude, you should be be able to discern when to use "advice" and "advise".

Here's my tip:

Advice = recommendation Please notice there's a "c" in each of those words!

Advise = delivering or presenting the advice Please notice there is NO "c" in advise

Now, I fully expect to never again see you use these two words incorrectly!"

All of which I know, but as explained, the George-computer has a built-in lexicon which has a fine sense of humor and a spelling method that's unique.

 

Another reader sent me a note over my use of this word:

Subject: Bloviator?

 

Text: "No such word!  See (link)

Ah - you see?  This is the risk of being a single-source thinker! 

 

If there's one thing that distinguishes UrbanSurvival/Peoplenomics readers, it's that they are multiple-source types.  They must habitually confirm or deny whatever is asserted, since, 99% of the time, someone is gaming us on any number of levels.

 

Sooo...long way of saying that Merriam is to language what the Dow 30 are to business:  A kind of upper crust, not for the masses.

 

For the masses, there's the Urban Dictionary where slang hangs out, and along the same lines, the www.allwords.com site where we find:

"bloviator

noun

1. one who habitually bloviates; a pompous, opinionated, typically voluble commentator"

Language is not confined to textbooks of the traditional sort.  It's real and slang exists to best express, usually in compact form, the meaning of things.

 

Writing (and newscasting back in the day) is really a simple thing:  You get a firm picture in your mind of an event you wish to convey and simply use words - as a painter would use a paintbrush - to fill in the colors and shapes.

 

Some words are hot  (fire, for example) but can be expanded to include conflagrations and firestorms on the high end, or reduced to smoldering rubble at the other.

 

Just something to think about, I suppose.  Unlike the overweight comedian, every ready with a good "paunchline" I'm in a reflective mood today:  Wondering how far down the financial elevator will fall, and in the process, when is a good exit point to book profits while markets remain liquid.

 

And then there's the problem of "betting against the Fed" which, with the help of the PTB, are trying to create an alternative reality in our midst where life goes on undisturbed, markets are stable, and all profits are honest and upside.

 

And that gets me to thinking about the role of automatic writing in what are obviously channeled Fed statements. 

 

Why, given a choice between Seth Speaks and the FOMC Statement, care to guess which one is more in line with truth, justice, and the American way?

 

---

Monday March 14, 2011

"Albino" Black Swan Ahead?

Amidst all the news flowing around the Japan Super Quake - and we'll get to developments on that front in a moment - I want to start this morning's discussion on a "credit, where credit is due" note.

 

Last Monday in this column in "What's ahead in the libretto") , my friend Gary Lammert (the Economic Fractalist) had sent us a note predicting a March 8 high in the markets plus or minus a day.  Tuesday, right on call, the market rallied from an opening of 12,085 Dow to close at 12,214.38 and that high hasn't been bested since.

 

"OK, so what?"  Hand on there pard, Lammert sent me a note Sunday afternoon that explains now that his predicted high is in, we're about to go through something which would be as rare as an "albino" black swan event - something that happens every 250 years or so, and  probably equates to something on e degree larger than the South Sea Bubble popping in 1720...

 

So with his kind permission:

"George, my friend, what is coming is an Albino, Albino Black Swan Event, more rare by an order of magnitude than the October 1987 asset devolution. This Mutant White Black Swan will come only once every 250 years.

Both the recent devastating earthquake and the coming asset devolution macroeconomicquake are analogous brother natural events occurring in a nonlinear universe. If enough information and data were known about the linear building of stress forces on the tectonic plates, an exact and patterned prediction could occur regarding the exact timing of earthquakes. This information will be available for future generations. Unlike the information needed to predict the timing of earthquakes, the information needed to predict the historical collapse of asset prices is now available.

The summation of the macroeconomy's internal parameters - cumulative debt, asset supply, asset valuation, and job supply are integrated into the time course of its derivative asset valuations and follow very precise, very empirical, easily observable quantitative fractal time patterns, This patterns were described in 2005 in the Main Page of the Economic Fractalist and were used to exactly and prospectively predict the 11 October 2007 Wilshire nominal peak valuation.

Without going into long waves, to which you have invested a great deal of your life's time and to which you were a key contributor to the early internet longwave interest group, the Wilshire's 1982 nodal lows of 99 months forms a base fractal from 12 August 1982 to October 11, 1990 whose second fractal has a maximum of one and 1/2 month for second fractal 2,5x completion. The second fractal must end in April 2011. Similarly on a much lower fractal time scale, the May 25 2010 67/134 day:: x/2x fractal with the 2x ending on 9 March (the 134th day) vice 8 March 2011 with a nonlinear gap lower on 10 March 2011 - has only a maximum of 32 trading days left for completion.

While the timing of the ideal conclusion of the 1982's 99 month base fractal's second fractal and the 25 May 2010 67 day's (from 25 May 2010 to 27 August 2010) second fractal are exactly the same; asset valuation decay may proceed in a faster time course than the expected ideal reversal low on 25 April 2011.

By the new science of saturation macroeconomics, the ideal fractal decay low is is 9/21 of 23/18/14 days x/2.5x/2x/1.5x or on 25 April 2011.

Observe the exquisitely perfect 6/15/12//9 day :: x/2.5x/2x/1.5x nodal low sequence that took the Wilshire 6 March 2009 first fractal 88 day nodal low to low base to the 25 May 2010 second fractal low ending on the 221st day of a 88/221 day first and second fractal (with 2 of the 221 days half trading days.) The 6 May 2010 flash crash was a third fractal part of a perfect 6/15/12/9 day x/2.5x/2x/1,5x day sequence ending on 25 may 2010.

The probability of this patterned behavior occurring by chance approaches zero ... what the hell, let's agree to call it zero.

What will be the exact fractal decay sequence to the low? Other than confirming a new patterned science for economics and macroeconomics, equivalent to physics or chemistry, it doesn't matter....

Expect the unexpected: expect the Albino Black Swan."

Shocking?  Well, yes - and no.  You see in the Peoplenomics.com report this weekend in the ChartPack section, I note that the long-term recovery from the market lows of March 2009 have been penetrated and if this develops as expected, then the markets will have a gloal line stand of a lifetime at around  Dow 11,600 to 11,800 (multiple targets in that range in Robin Landry's work, for example) such that there was only one question Lammert's email left unanswered:

 

So this albino black swan – does it take out the Dow low of Mar/Apr of 2009?

"Yes, it must.

I very strongly believe the patterns to represent a real science reflecting the true macroeconomy - the patterns are too perfect to represent anything less. For me it has always been about the patterned science....The Federal Reserve is doing what it must. But it has caused 6 sigma (an exaggeration) malinvestment with its zero interest rate policy and ex nihilo purchases and underwriting guaranteed of everything overvalued and support of the 1.6 trillion deficit.

As Keynes pointed out rightly, in the long run, we are all dead. But for fathers and grandfathers... we are obliged ....we must try to support our families ...."

Very ballsy prediction, no? 

 

Regrettably, Gary doesn't update his site publicly (although it would be interesting to read his development of method.  Still, some hints may be found in his earlier work here.

 

I present this as the first agenda item for this morning simply because it is one of the few news/current-events outcomes that you can personally do something about.  As often as I repeat that this site is does not give financial advise, it does, nevertheless, explore interesting/alternative views and methods in the general field of macroeconomic theory and many of us, who have studied the field for years (off and on since 1972 for me), we've all be in and academic quandary.

 

The problem is like putting on a glove that is attached to a box, such that you can't see inside the box.  So, you're left with an imperfect sensing mechanism (the hand in the glove) trying to feel what's inside the box and then translate that into something your brain can reconstruct into a workable hypothesis and make informed decisions about future actions.

 

Might work with something simple - like a coin, for example - but suppose the contents of the box were all out of scale.  What would an "elephant in the box" be interpreted as by a gloved hand with no eyes for backup or secondary confirmation?

 

So, we have in the field of economics the conventional academics who run around trying to apply everything they can in the way of non-calendarized cycles and arcane formulae, then we have the cyclists who know that yes, there really is an economic long wave of some sort  (a camp I'm firmly in) but then comes the matter of what "pumps" the cycle?

 

Should mention Chris Carolan's spiral calendar work, too.

 

Some believe it is implicit in any system where simple inflation adjusted wage increases over time are dwarfed by multiple layers of debt, such as government taxation policies, derivative, and so forth, such that eventually there's a cyclical collapse.

 

Then there are other theories of the drivers including Jim Goulding's "Winter Is Coming"  (here, more like it) which looks to the Fourth Turning work of Strauss and Howe to perceive the "elephant in the box" as generational replacement in nature.

 

Then there's the matter of cycles driven by all kinds of other activities impacting humans:  presidential and political cycles, and let's not forget the crop cycles and solar cycles, as well.  Much of this is discussed by the Foundation for the Study of Cycles at their World Center for Cycles Research.

 

Then there are the monetarists, who perhaps led by the Ludwig von Mises Institute research, see long-term fluctuations in how much money is created - when compared to the making of goods and services, as the culprit.  When the ratio gets too absurd, large revaluation of either the money or the goods, takes place.  We think of this as inflation or deflation, but it's really non-asset-backed money being watered down or lifted up as a political policy outcome.

 

Don't mean to be longwinded, but there's one important question which Robin Landry and I chat about often.  Is the market driven by external (exogenous shocks) or is the market simply going to do what it was going to anyway and the news events such as Japan are just a convenient "excuse"?   Almost a chicken and egg perspective, is it not?

 

That's where economics is and that's why Gary's note goes up on the wall next to Clif's latest reports which center around a March 25th kind of release language event.  If Lammert is right about the next 30-days, and in particular about the cycle low around April 25, then that would fit with....

 

Web Bots, Fractals and the Next Mega Quake

This would be the week to be in the business of selling either the special ink, or the highly specialized high rag content paper to governments around the world, with which to print money.

 

Already, the Bank of Japan has printed nearly $200 billion  to inject into the markets in order to bolster the Nikkei and other Japanese indices, which seemingly didn't care and dropped more than six percent overnight, anyway.

 

One could logically ask, "Why would they do that?"  And the answer is similar to the macroeconomic answer to "Why 9/11?"  In both cases, there was a direct systemic threat existing to the continuation of orderly global markets.  If the run on Japanese stocks had not been slowed, then a much larger decline, perhaps 10 percent, or more, might have been possible and that wouldn't have been good since it would have nearly instantly propagated Japan's pain globally and potentially have resulted in global economic collapse.

 

The reason for this is something called the Herstett effect, which I've told you about before.  Most people don't appreciate how close the failure of Germany's Bank Herstatt in 1974 came to ending financial life on earth, although it's well--described in this Wikipedia article.

 

Much gnawing and gnashing of teeth followed and a system of "simultaneous settlements" was developed to avoid systemic risk.  The idea, which has been described as a kind of "financial firewalling" is what's going on with Japan.

 

Of course, as with any good set of hackers and computers, financial hackers do - over time - find ways to break any firewall, since at some level all markets are now linked.  It's perhaps the "hacking the financial firewalls" which could lead to the fractal ugliness.

 

Or not.

 

The possibility which stares at us from Clif High's predictive linguistics work, is that we are now only 11-days away from major release language associated with March 25th.

 

The main items concerning Clif at the moment are a) how do we communicate to the general population that the term "earthquake" is not a singular phenomena and that there's a much broader context which is not being communicated to the public, specifically, the tearing of the planet's crust which may be drive by a little-discussed mechanism of Earth's plasmas core expanding in response to energies from the Sun.

 

We've talked about this a bit and the limitations of human thought come into focus by observing that not all earth movement events are necessarily simple tectonic in nature.

 

One has only to observe that Vancouver Island, which in antiquity was connected both to the lower British Columbia Mainland to the east, and the Northern Washington on the south, was showed away from both to the extent that on the East, the inside passage to the north end of now Vancouver Island was formed and to the south, the Strait of Juan de Fuca was created.

 

Not to pick a fight with tectonic simplists, but conceptually, plasma expansion accounts for the widely evident north-south lay of many mountain ranges, and we don't need to accept tectonics are eon's long simple bank shots, to use a pub & billiards term.

 

Tearing is a big deal because the conceptual framework is much larger and accounts for things like Japan moving laterally 8-feet and the long rip/tear on the ocean floor.  Or, don't they like to talk about such things?

 

The other thing Clif's worried about is how to communicate the alternative radiation treatments which are available in the event convention supplies of KI (potassium Iodide) run out.

 

For example, there are references to reduced mortality of guinea pigs fed chlorophyll-rich diets (wheatgrass smoothie, anyone?).  Other claims of moderating impacts of radiation from eating fresh chlorophyll may be found here.

---

Back to center stage, we continue to watch the work pair count around the two words "radioactive" and "volcano" which should arise as a temporal marker just before we get the major US quake (likely West Coast) which arises in modelspace as an expectation along with the arrival of the "ill winds" in the USA and the word pairing "radioactive volcano" showing up.

 

Not to get right freaked-out about stuff, but in Sunday's Peoplenomics.com report (where we reported on the risks of MOX/mental oxide reactors of the Fukushima 3 type which use a mix of plutonium some number of hours before the global press) we explained the word pairing and expectations of a huge (as in bigger than Japan quake by some good measure) and urged subscribers to get the one month or more of food and water as soon as possible.

 

At the time we posted that Peoplenomics report, Google's news engine showed only nine hits.  As of 06:10 CDT, that count was up to 44, and going nonlinear as the 'new language" grabs hold, just as the predictive linguistics outlook would have us expect.

 

This leaves the huge & ugly problem of what else is in that part of the modelspace.  The US mega quake is part of that set.  Worse:  The "hot date" of March 25th looms, which is very, very, ugly close to the March 19 Super Moon.

 

Astrologer Richard Nolte has been studying this Super Moon occurrence at his site, but in linguistics, the window of concern is March 25 for release language. 

 

By the way, release language is the kind where when you tell your friends on the phone what you see happening, it's marked by the use of an expletive like "Oh f**k dude, did you just see California is now an Island?"  That's release - emotionally.

 

So we go into this week expecting what airline pilots would refer to as somewhere between "light chop" of "return to your seats and fasten your seatbelts. and return your tray tables to the upright and lock position.  We're expecting a few bumps up ahead..."

 

Yeah...a few...my foot.

 

Bahrain Boils

While much of the world's attention is distracted with the Japan quake, the wide region from the west of Africa to southwest Asia continues actively engaged in the events we've collectively been lumping at GlobalRev.

 

No clearer is this the case than Bahrain where lawmakers are now calling for martial law in the wake of weekend protests.

 

Libya continues on a fast simmer with Gaddafi-backed warplanes hitting a rebel-held city early today.  And with the usual hype & circumstance, Hillary Clinton is in Paris to talk about Libya, which is to me like going to Hawaii to talk about problems of Kansas, or are we supposed to be so foolish?  Shopping must be good.

 

Without too much thought, what emerges is the PTB are not going to let a good war go to waste and much can be moved in the way of arms, all around, so what good is peace?

 

Markets, Redux

My friend Gonzalo Lira, who lived through the Chilean quake (he's there, right?) has a most interesting note this morning about how in the aftermath of the Chilean quakes, the public learned that the major insurance companies had not fully laid off their risk to reinsurance companies, since to do so costs money, and as a result, some big institutions once thought impregnably safe were revealed for what they were:  Profit optimized chiseler schemes designed for a poor mix of appearances and maximized profitability.

 

It's as though - metaphorically - the people were told to wear this particular type of glasses and everything would be fine.  Except the Chilean quake took off the glasses and the Kings of insurance were exposed as near-enough naked that the distinction didn't matter when the worst of the worst showed up.

 

Thus, while the futures are bouncing around down 63 on the Dow when I peeked, I had renetered short positions in our paper account on Friday expecting that one way, or the other, the markets would mis-stimate how Japan will turn out.  In this case, it's heading further down the rabbit hole and we're getting closer and closer to March 25.

 

Although I don't have money in a 401K account, I'd be in a totally risk-averse mode for the next several weeks, if I were, although this is not financial advise, consult the best financial analyst you can find, or simply join Gamblers Anonymous and call it good, I'd still be in my half metals half bonds stance...

---

A friend & subscriber in Asia sends this:

"George,

I have been informed by a very good source who has contacts in Asia that a radioactive cloud from Japan is making is way to the Philippines, its now 8.25 Eastern Aus time. This is not in the msm , why i don't know however it seems like the Japanese have kept this this quiet only time will tell if this is true."

Meantime, a Peoplenomics subscriber who has first hand reactor operator experience at one of the GE Series 1 type reactors in the US (23 of them) listed in the Sunday Peoplenomics report called within the hour to advise that...

"Most of these plants have seismic activated shutdown systems.  When they triggered, the reactor was scrammed.  But that doesn't stop the problem since there is so much heat left in the reactor.  When they lost primary and backup cooling, and when the civil authorities started passing out KI to the public and the sea water pumping that's that tells you last ditch efforts...

Indeed, that was my look ahead from mid-session Friday, that the bullish bias to the market would blind most to the seriousness of current events (not even taking a possible pending US mega quake into the equation) which, as you have probably figured, leaves the market open to a huge downward gap and the "ill winds" of the ALTA & SOTTC reports from Clif get disgustingly reason.

 

Oh...the instant of press time?  Linguistic hits in goog on :"radioactive volcano" are up to 47.

 

How convenient for the Shinmoedake volcano to erupt in fulfillment of that part of the model.  Except that just hugely increases odds of the US mega quake, of course.

 

Which - sadly - gets us back to the matter of settlement risk:  Will financial markets be in sufficiently good health to pay off what's due when we short-siders and perma-bears want their winnings?

 

We'll start watching the 3-minute updates of the National Radiation Map tomorrow or Wednesday off the data from the SFSU jet stream maps.

 

The consolation prize?  Those of us who have been 20-year preppers are no longer the brunt of jokes around the water cooler...sea water, at that.

 

I'd say next on the libretto should be the announcement of health risks by US officials, who would be treasonously derelict in their public duties not to disclose with as much warning as possible any threat to the US.  Maybe Tuesday, or Wednesday...we shall see.

 

Popcorn & beer may sound sacrilege at this hour, but keeping a news drone window open at work might make sense. 

 

The tradeoff between market stability and public health risks could be entertaining at the "history book" level.

 

 

Coping:   Monday at the WuJo

Just a short entry here (brain is fading from unusual workloads, lol) since there is so much attention being paid to Asia and the "orderly markets" silliness.

 

This fine reader note:

"Hi George,

I always thought this Nostradamus quatrain was speaking of a comet/asteroid pass...but given the Japanese flag and the rapidly deteriorating, underestimated reactor situation...

"When the eclipse of the Sun will then be, The monster will be seen in full day: Quite otherwise will one interpret it, High price unguarded: none will have foreseen it"

The following also seem to hint at atmospheric fallout/radiation:

"The child will be born with two teeth in his mouth, Stones will fall during the rain in Tuscany: A few years after there will be neither wheat nor barley, To satiate those who will faint from hunger"

"When the animal domesticated by man, After great pains and leaps will come to speak: The lightning to the virgin will be very harmful, Taken from earth and suspended in the air"

Then there is Mother Shipton, a mystic from around 1520. Her prophesy speaks a problematic "dragon" that occurs when Gabriel stands on the land and sea and blows his trumpet, the dragon then encircles the earth 6 times, the last trip serving as an omen for catastrophic earth changes...read this passage, it doesn't take a whole bunch of imagination to match this up with the Bots predictions.

In nineteen hundred and twenty six Build houses light of straw and sticks. For then shall mighty wars be planned And fire and sword shall sweep the land.

When pictures seem alive with movements free When boats like fishes swim beneath the sea, When men like birds shall scour the sky Then half the world, deep drenched in blood shall die

For those who live the century through In fear and trembling this shall do. Flee to the mountains and the dens To bog and forest and wild fens.

For storms will rage and oceans roar When Gabriel stands on sea and shore And as he blows his wondrous horn Old worlds die and new be born.

A fiery Dragon will cross the sky Six times before this earth shall die Mankind will tremble and frightened be For the sixth heralds in this prophecy.

For seven days and seven nights Man will watch this awesome sight. The tides will rise beyond their ken To bite away the shores and then

The mountains will begin to roar And earthquakes split the plain to shore. And flooding waters, rushing in Will flood the lands with such a din

That mankind cowers in muddy fen And snarls about his fellow men. He bares his teeth and fights and kills And secrets food in secret hills And ugly in his fear, he lies To kill marauders, thieves and spies. Man flees in terror from the floods And kills, and rapes and lies in blood And spilling blood by mankind's hands Will stain and bitter many lands. And when the Dragon's tail is gone, Man forgets, and smiles, and carries on To apply himself -- too late, too late For mankind has earned deserved fate.

Yikes! Ejected radioactive steam pumped into the jet stream and circling the globe would indeed be like a fiery dragon. How interesting that Shipton also saw atmospheric phenomenon as a harbinger which immediately precedes catastrophic geologic earth changes.

This is all matching up a bit too close for comfort..."

Yeah, funny how this stuff works out, isn't it?  The Wikipedia entry on Mother Shipton  (really:  Ursula Southeil) makes an good ponder, since although it didn't appear until 1641 widely.

 

But suppression is what the current (old) world is about.  Like religiosity groups that ban premarital sex/masturbation because learning to focus on the creative processes/powers at the ejaculative moment is one of the most closely guarded secrets of of all the PTB.  Think of it as their rallying point and care to guess who gets "rallied on"?

 

Wrapped up in the "veils" between realities and alluded to in the arcane writings as "ring not pass" (and the underlying nature of alchemy) we see a very complex web of human aspiration-suppression and control that goes back thousands of years.

 

Whether you talk Ma Shipton, Nosty, ritual drug use, Jules Verne fiction, tantric sex, SciFi, or any other technologies of super consciousness super creativity which allow many to reach out and touch the future, the paradigm ownership group - those who cling tightly to these secrets of the creative impulse of humanity but don't wish to share it, especially with the likes of us - is expressed as a large web over the higher aspirations of society.  The control paradigm.

 

Sorry to break this to you, but that seems to be the truth of current affairs, whether it agrees with where you've placed your mental fence posts that neatly corral your thinking, confining your range of movement, or not. 

 

Quantum physics is sneaking up on the 'cat in the bag' anyway, so time's short for the PTB /PowersThatWere (PTW) anyway.  It's just they don't want to admit the game has changed with the global consciousness provided by the net.

 

"At once, Watson.  The game's afoot!" 

 

You  starting to understand why net neutrality is so dangerous?  the real terror to the PTB is the loss of power, loss of control.   

 

Wait!  there's a word for it.

 

Meltdown.