Month: September 2013

(Near Weston, CO)  OK, you’ve heard the term before “A Man’s Home Is His Castle!”  All sounds good, but the courts have continued to water it down (the legal notion of home as a as one’s inviolable castle) , yada, yada, yada…but what happens someone actually starts to dream about building their own castle – for real –  with all the modern accoutrements including wireless, solar, highly insulated panels, and all the rest of it?

We  found out Sunday as we arrived at the home of long-time readers Shirley and Mike Bean who started off to use their life’s masterpiece as a bed & breakfast, but for now, it’s theirs to share with a just friends.

So, how would a modern-day castle work?  Who would design such a thing? 

The answer is Mike made his mark in mechanical and solar engineering in Hawaii (back when the islands had just poked out of the Pacific, right?) and he did OK in engineering, playing the markets and real estate such that he was pretty much able to check out from “civilized life” in the land of prefabs and coups(condos) and tiny homes and decided to really “roll his own” – a spectacular one-off Castle in the Pines at 7,700 feet in the mountains.

So what does a modern castle look like when you come in the front door?  Here’s the entryway into the Great Room:

Upstairs, the kitchen as everything (yes, big gas stove for gourmet cooking and there’s an icemaker in the fridge, I mean what’s a castle without a martini?) and looking up from the Great Room (where this morning’s report is coming to you from) it looked like this last night just before dinnertime.  That’s Elaine and Shirley looking down from the dining hall which is one level up with a panorama down into the great room…

The ladies ( I prefer wenches of the castle) deliver drinks  downstairs to the men of the House and when done,  up we go to the dining hall, and a feast on Burgundy elk, harvested in season on the property.

Now, this is not a remodel.  This is a serious ground-up effort that’s 6,500 square feet.

Interestingly, we have something in common in our fascination with the castle era and lifestyle.  We’ve both been members of the Social for Creative Anachronism, and like Elaine (oops!  Lady Elaine) and me, they also dropped out. (I could never figure out the org chart of the SCA and apparently I’m not the only one.

So here’s more of what the local Renaissance Faire types are missing out on:

So, this morning I have to sit back look at the pile of crap that needs doing in Texas, wander around the castle rooms….and ask myself….”So if the world ends tomorrow, do I have anything anywhere near this cool (less the boiling pots of oil up on the parapets) to make our stand in East Texas?”

No…not even.

What’s the coolest thing about the home?  Besides eye treats in every possible place?  The answer I think is the people who built it.  How many people do you know who have set their eyes on a big, serious dream and then set about building it and seeing it through to completion?

We’ve been fortunate enough to meet two such couples on this trip and – if you live in a small apartment or condo – it’s especially encouraging that people can still find a patch of ground and built a dream with their own hands from the ground up. 

It’s not common, but it is seriously cool and an inspiration to anyone who’s ever picked up a tool with the idea of creating a “life’s work.”

Government: Buying Friends?

With plenty of people asking about the role of government, and especially given the cozy, soft-ball questions from the mainstream media, you can’t imagine how happy I was to see a good-sized report on the growth of government public relations efforts over the past 20-years, or so.

This one isn’t a particularly easy matter of public policy (though the Statesman article makes it clear that maybe the pendulum has over done it…a lot) but having tried to deal with government in the early 1970’s – just as the government PR move was coming along – I can see two sides to the story.

On the one hand, public officials can literally be hounded too death by reporters at all hours of the day and night.  And most don’t have the luxury of personal protection other than a key contact in the local police department in event of issues.

But the other side of it is that PR types can – and do – serve as gate keepers.  And that means less access and more “soft-ball” questions.

Where the role of PR morphs into propaganda orchestration is when gag orders come down for Department Heads from an “executive.”  I remember the days when a county official, like the county engineer for example, could talk openly with any reporter who wandered along.

But not these days, at least to the degree as previously.  A county executive, mayor, governor, or even president, can quash and squash reporter inquiries.  This gives the executive even more power than they really need as well as it gives them a way to slip untold numbers of stories under the rug if they don’t seem to pass PR muster.

Ultimately, if comes down to the executive level tightening up their reins on control and the co-opted major media who go along with this crap get more access at the expense of the little guy.

Makes you wonder how many people remember Ben Franklin was at one time part of the alternative media?

Fukushima Fears Slowly Growing

While we actually looked at a home on a golf course during our Seattle area visit last week, we ‘re both in no particular hurry to sock away a few profits from our life in Texas and then turn around and invest it in an area which is downwind and down-current, from Fukushima.

Reader John sent an email this weekend which edgesd up to the point:

I have been looking over responses to the latest information. The official responses are now admitting localized trouble, ie FDA banning of seafood from most of Japan. But they are adamant that dilution will prevent any effect on CONUS.  As you know from reading EneNews and other sources, there are educated opinions to the contrary.

If we use the “follow the money” method, it might be construed that both sides have something to gain from their statements.

So another method of reasoning is necessary. I propose that, although the ongoing catastrophe is enough to make us stop eating seafood, it is not enough to make us emigrants. But criticality of the reactor 4 cooling pool rods could easily cause us to take a one-month vacation to the dry side of the state.

Our canary indicating permanent relocation is the evacuation of WA or CONUS by those American experts watching Fukushima. But how do we keep a close eye on them?

Read More

The main forecast of this morning are pretty simple, really.  For one, I expect sometime either today, or next week, Gold will wake up to a $40 (or so) beat-down which seems to happen often enough at the end of the month.  But this morning, in a fine reversal, gold is trying to break to the upside…

Still, within a week, I figure we could see gold back under $1,300….

And since that will mean international “hot money” will need less US paper to buy the Dow, it should result in the bottom give out from under the Dow and the S&P which are edging down toward their 50-day moving averages, although at glacial speed.

Still, today’s line in the sand is 1,701 and change on the S&P – last Friday’s close, and a mark less than that could spell further market downside next week.  We shall see.

So for this morning, Mr. Cheerful is swilling decaf and looking at the just-released Personal Consumption and Expenditures report wondering how long before “the music stops” in the worldwide financial game of musical chairs…

“Personal income increased $57.2 billion, or 0.4 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $56.2 billion, or 0.5 percent, in August, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $34.5 billion, or 0.3 percent. In July, personal income increased $21.2 billion, or 0.2 percent, DPI increased $32.7 billion, or 0.3 percent, and PCE increased $18.3 billion, or 0.2 percent, based on revised estimates. Real disposable personal income increased 0.3 percent in August, compared with an increase of 0.2 percent in July. Real PCE increased 0.2 percent, compared with an increase of 0.1 percent.

Personal outlays — PCE, personal interest payments, and personal current transfer payments — increased $38.4 billion in August, compared with an increase of $22.2 billion in July. PCE increased $34.5 billion, compared with an increase of $18.3 billion. Personal saving — DPI less personal outlays — was $580.7 billion in August, compared with $562.8 billion in July. The personal saving rate — personal saving as a percentage of disposable personal income — was 4.6 percent in August, compared with 4.5 percent in July.

Go on, see if you know anyone who actually saved 4.6% of their income in August…send in examples please, because NO ONE I know is stacking cash at this kind of rate.

The Dow futures were down a  bit when I looked but whether the 50 is crossed by the S&P toward the close is the one thing that really could matter today.

Bond Bombshell

Go ahead, try saying it out loud a few times – this is one of those “conditioned response tests” which shows rats may be considerably smarter than humans.  I’ve been sitting here in the client’s guest house this morning muttering this for a couple of hours now and “blond bombshell” keeps getting in the way or, the word just turn into verbal mush. 

Fortunately, my application to be a speech pathologist was turned down, so I had to stay in the business track, which gets us (eventually – but I could go off even further into the weeds if you want) to this note from our Jakarta Bureau Chief:

Hiya chief!

Thought this article would grab your attention.  Aren’t you expecting the world to end in October, led to Perdition by the bond markets? 

Couldn’t hurt to listen to Paul Craig Roberts again…he sounds like you. 

The question remains: Is the rupiah falling or the dollar rising?  Is this a currency war? 

Peace, love and happy motoring!

Read More

You will want to have at least two cups of coffee on the burn this morning in order to sort through the monthly Gross Domestic Product data just out from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

That’s because in any college finance class, we we all taught to FIRST report some kind of a baseline hard number and then reference all following percentage changes to that hard number.

Well, as we continually complain around here, the way the BEA works, they don’t bother with such economic niceties:  The just launch into a double-triple serving of self-referential percentagizing ( if I can take some indecent liberties with language here) as they assume that you’ve remembered enough quadratics from school that you can solve for X if you really cared to get to the bottom of things.

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the second quarter of 2013 (that is, from the first quarter to the second quarter), according to the “third” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

In the first quarter, real GDP increased 1.1 percent. The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the “second” estimate issued last month. In the second estimate, the increase in real GDP was also 2.5 percent.

With the third estimate for the second quarter, the general picture of economic growth remains largely the same (for more information, see “Revisions” on page 3). The increase in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, nonresidential fixed investment, private inventory investment, and residential fixed investment that were partly offset by a negative contribution from federal government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

Well, of course they did!  (WTF?)  As the late Billy May said “But wait!  There’s more!!!”

The acceleration in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected upturns in exports and in nonresidential fixed investment, a smaller decrease in federal government spending, and an upturn in state and local government spending that were partly offset by an acceleration in imports and decelerations in private inventory investment and in PCE.

The price index for gross domestic purchases, which measures prices paid by U.S. residents, increased 0.2 percent in the second quarter, 0.1 percentage point less than the second estimate; this index increased 1.2 percent in the first quarter.

Read More

A hell of a mess and a touch of Wujo up in the Denver area?

My sister, Suzi, just got back from a Denver conference and told us at lunch Monday that the Denver area itself is still “open for business: and there were no noticeable impacts on either her conference, or travel.

But not everyone is so lucky as to be right in Denver proper.  Take my buddy Patrick, who lives

Hi George,

Attached is a pic of my house. It has been condemned. I send this in that even having a prepper mind set and concern I was not prepared for this. I did not expect this and was not able to get to my emergency supplies. a lesson learned.

Lyons, CO was hit hard in the floods. My house (above) was ground zero.

I have noticed something about the people in Lyons and other places. Everyone is complaining about their memory. Myself as well.

Read More

Just out from Case Shiller/S&P this morning:

New York, September 24, 2013 – Data through July 2013, released today by S&P Dow Jones Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, showed increases of 1.9% and 1.8% from June for the 10- and 20-City Composites. For at least four months in a row, all 20 cities showed monthly gains. Phoenix posted 22 consecutive months of positive returns. Although home prices in all the cities increased, 15 cities and both Composites saw these monthly rates decelerate in July versus June.

Over the last 12 months, prices rose 12.3% and 12.4% as measured by the 10- and 20-City Composites. The year-over-year returns show a brighter outlook with 13 cities posting improvement in July versus June values. Las Vegas increased the most from +24.9% in June to an impressive +27.5% in July.

The chart above depicts the annual returns of the 10-City Composite and the 20-City Composite Home Price Indices. In July 2013, the 10- and 20-City Composites posted annual increases of 12.3% and 12.4%, respectively.

“Home prices gains are holding their 12% annual rate of gain established by the two Composite indices in April,” says David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “The Southwest continues to lead the housing recovery.

Read More

Sometimes there are nagging questions that demand an answer.  Like an itch that won’t go away on its own – with a thorough scratching – there are questions in this life which just intuitively need to be asked, poked around at, and so forth. And once such “itch” is the area around Dulce (Dull-say) New Mexico.

An article posted Monday over at the UFO Digest website offers a lot of additional information about supposedly goings-on down that way in an article titled “MORE UNSETTLING EVIDENCE OVER DULCE PART IX.”

If this was the only article on the web, it would be easy to dismiss the place as just another artifact of the odd mental aberrations that bubble up to the top of urban legend lists.  But this one is special, indeed, because there are so many “pointers” around that suggest maybe there could be something to this talk about Dulce.

The Doc Vega article is a fine starting point because there are many framing references to the story that could be cast as making sense.  For example, the notion that the US would have a semi-prepared backup site which could be used for nuclear development work – not terribly far from the Trinity site (near Alamogordo, NM) would certainly make sense.

But still, there are other bits – like the supposed fire-fight between off-worlders and military forces that have been hinted at in relation to other locations.

Still, the supposed tie-in with human abduction cases, cattle mutilations, and much more, is intriguing even if not particularly well-suited to tracking back to first sources.

One little oddity, which is just as likely to occur from my ignorance of how Google searches work than anything else, is what I’d call an anomalous result from Google.  As you know, if you put a + sign in from of a search time, the world’s most popular search engine will return [+keyword 1 +keyword 2] all page references on the web which contain both terms.

At least, most of the time, that is.  You see, when I casually put in [+Dulce +ufo] I got exactly one result and two ads.

On the other hand, when I put in a different city name and +ufo, I get tons of results. 

For example, the small town of Stephenville, TX, where there was a decent UFO sighting a few years back came up with a whopping 105,000 hits.

All of which could be blown off, except that if the search is modified to include the state abbreviation (NM) the results for [+Dulce +NM +ufo] we find 92,000 listing and (without the + operator) we can get for simple [Dulce ufo] more than 1.5 million search returns.

Maybe search operators don’t work like they have previously, or (screams my inquiring mind) maybe the search results are somehow different on this one?

Moving on, we come to the Wikipedia entry on the supposed base which begins…

“Dulce Base is an alleged secret alien underground facility under Archuleta Mesa on the Colorado-New Mexico border near the town of Dulce, New Mexico in the United States. Claims of alien activity there first arose from Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz.

Starting in 1979, Bennewitz became convinced he was intercepting electronic communications from alien spacecraft and installations outside of Albuquerque. By the 1980s he believed he had discovered an underground base near Dulce. The story spread rapidly within the UFO community and by 1990, UFOlogist John Lear claimed he had independent confirmations of the base’s existence. Political scientist Michael Barkun writes that Cold War underground missile installations in the area gave superficial plausibility to the rumors, making the Dulce base story an “attractive legend” within UFOlogy. According to Barkun, claims about experiments on abductees and firefights between aliens and the Delta Force place the Dulce legend “well outside even the most far-fetched reports of secret underground bases.”^[

In a further entry about source Paul Bennewitz, Wikipedia’s entry here reveals some interesting additional background about the source of the story.

All of which would put it into the “blow off” pile which wouldn’t be worth our mention, except for an intriguing bit of HUMINT which came my way a couple of years ago from a now retired person who, shall we say, looked at radar for a living.  He provided me with some (on background only) information about an object which had come in up over the Montana area, had done an approximate right turn, and had transited the South Dakota/Wyoming area in the Denver ATC airspace on a track down toward  fairly empty part of New Mexico.

Interestingly, it wasn’t specifically tracking toward Ducle, but rather some Native American lands which are rugged and remote but a fair distance from Dulce.

Oh, and the speed of whatever it was that tracked was into the thousands of miles per hour.

It’s here that being a journalist has some of its most difficult decisions.  We have on the one hand an intriguing story (based largely on a single source, now dead) but we have some totally unrelated anomalous data from a super high creds source who shared some track info, not unlike the data what shows up on Flight Aware, except that our old plane moseys along at 1/300th of the speed of the anomalous craft.

The odds of doing any breakthrough research at Ducle seems mighty slim.  But, since the other source allows us the luxury of some very rough triangulation, we can speculate all day long on what might be out there.

As a result, every time we’re in a position to to come through that part of the country, as we will be Saturday, or so, we wonder about staying up last on a high mountain peak or a mesa down south a ways, and just keeping our eyes open for the next “Fire in the Sky” kind of event.

If we apply the same kind of stringent math and analytic techniques that serve us so well in electronics and analysis of markets,  you can quickly see how such investigations are almost certain to be unsuccessful to something like four (or more) places to the right of the decimal point (i.e. odds of success about –.000003 percent).

Still, the way of the Law of Large Numbers work, it’s kind of like buying a Lotto ticket.  Oh, sure, the odds may be one in 8-million (or higher) but if you don’t at least buy one lotto ticket, your chances of winning become a certain zero percent chance of winning.  Or, as an ex Los Alamos fellow told me once:  The odds between one lotto ticket and buying 10 is small, but the certainty of no chance without buying a ticket is what you need to consider.

As indeed we do, as hints and snips have us wondering about disappearing civilizations (like Chaco Canyon/Anasazi) and what may be out there waiting to be discovered on, in, around, or between some of the mesas and mountains in America’s real outback country.

Reader first-hand information (particularly sightings and directions in this area) are always welcome, as well as a track intersection analysis of UFO databases.  We can always look at data, but like finding the next Microsoft in a “pink sheet” stock, we recognize the odds of success are low.  But like buying a lotto ticket once in a while, I might be convinced.

Thinking Points:  Change versus Revolution

As I expected would happen, by exactly non-violent peaceful change, “let’s invent ourselves into a better future and skip the barricades and guillotines” attitude didn’t sit with with a lot of readers.  Like this feller, for example:

I’m sure you are aware that there are many forms of revolutions other than blood and gore tho there is nothing that the powers fear more than a little unrest from the sheep and a tax revolution would fit the bill very nicely.WE CAN SET AND MUMBLE FOREVER ABOUT THE ROTTEN CORRUPT GOVERNMENT IF ONE WHISH’S TO CALL IT THAT BUT WITHOUT A FLAT OUT TAX REVOLUTION NOTHING AND I MEAN NOTHING WILL CHANGE AND IF IT SHOULD CAUSE PUBLIC UNREST SO BE IT.!!!

Another wrote:

Come on!
Pelosi went to Soros’ wedding! As did Bono.

The kleptocracy will not be fixed except by force.

If you mean “force” as in economic means, or in the proposed national trucker’s strike in a few weeks, then sure…I’m all in.  But, if you’re talking force of a harder form, count me out.

Read More