Month: January 2015

This wasn’t much of a weekend.

Most of it was spent fighting computer attacks and here’s the odd coinky-dink:  my buddy Gaye up at www.backdoorsurvival.com was also having her fair share of problems.

Not that they were insurmountable, in either case, since we are both “children of the Halt and Catch Fire days up in the Silicon Forest.

I don’t think she’d mind my sharing this from a New Years Day email about how her new year started:

About 4PM yesterday Malwarebytes started popping up with “blocked malicious site” message every 20 seconds.  Looks like I got the SysWOW64 virus.  Tried to remove it but finally posted in the bleeping computer forum – eta for help is 5 days.  Don’t know how the hell I got it.

Like us, she keeps computers in reserve/offline ready for this kind of emergency and by noon on New Years, she reported:

Good news.  It pays to have the premium version of Malwarebytes.  They responded to my support request within an hour, gave me a list of things to do, and all is now well.

Unfortunately, that’s right about when things started to hit the fan around here. 

Remember last week when I was telling you about how our internet service was terrible?  Still is dreadful, but about noon Friday one of our computers – the one hooked up to the big screen in the living room, and the one which streams YouTube, TedTalks, and Amazon & Netflix – kacked.

Antivir  which is one line of defense, started telling us we had a virus – which when removed, reappeared in less than an hour, and without being online.  Bad sign.

So that got me to running a full virus scan (clean) followed by a Malwarebytes scan (found one virus) and thought that would be it.

Wrong.

By Saturday, the computer was up to it’s terrible performance again – but neither Antivir nor Malwarebytes was finding anything. 

In fact, the only indication of something wrong was a buttload of .js and .json files up in the (sometimes hidden)  user local and roaming files; this was a Win-7 box.

Even with no viruses found, the system kept on creating these Java files and it was really bizarre.  In fact, the first time I ran Windows onboard file clean-up, it found somewhere north of half a million files up there.  And even when deleted, they would come back.

So that led (Saturday afternoon) to me going to war with the computer.  I got out an axe (figuratively) and went after everything.  Killed everything in the StartUp, uninstalled programs that I didn’t use often (*like Java, thinking that might have something to do with all the .js  files showing up) and then I took off Chrome (which was being spawned into background activity, and even Firefox which was suspect.

That led to a read of the Mozilla warning on the Java Deployment Toolkit.

To continue, I downloaded a fresh database for Sophos Virus Tool, and decided to let it run overnight.   No soap.

Again (now into Sunday morning) there was no virus found and our files that were just removed had appeared in the hidden user directory.  The files count was up to something like 255,000.

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Although the market looks to open up this morning, it’s not really “up” in the sense that everything in relative.

For those who missed Wednesday’s trading session (Dow –160 and S&P down to 2,058.9) it wasn’t a whole lot of fun.

Later today, I’m sure my consigliore will call to scream victory since he’s been a fan of the End-of-Year rally for several months now.

Normally, that wouldn’t be a bad thing.  Except that if the top of this pig is really in, then we ought to be able to test some of our long-standing theories.

One is that from a top, a real “crash” develops around the 55-day mark.

Since Yahoo is kind enough to keep daily trading stats on the S&P in public view here, all we would need to do is thumb back through the data until we come to the recording closing high from 2014 at 2,093.55.

Looking at the intra-day highs, that occurred on December 29th, which is more than ample reason for my consigliore to score the point.

Since Excel is better at math than me at this hour, that means a crash date around February 22nd.

Since that is a Sunday (and I was supposed to be a cruise ship that day) the collapse will happen either before, or after that weekend.

One possibility is Friday the 20th, but there’s a problem with that:  It is a holiday-shortened week.  President’s day is February 16th.  So the week before should see a minor bounce (the holiday effect) and then the market should be retesting lows put in back in October 2014 (or even lower levels) since it is axiomatic that crashes don’t happen from market tops:  They happen from bottoms.

Whether this just sets up the final manic run for a couple of more years to money-printing-delirium highs, or whether this is the Big One remains open.  But we are confident enough of the look-ahead that we will not be going on a cruise with friends.  We’ll be staying home to watch the money pile up.

Of course, there’s another possibility:  The market will put in new highs this month, which would push the crash period out two further months.  In which case, it will be revealed to the world that I’m a cheap old Scrooge who didn’t want to spring for a nice balcony room on an NCL cruise which would not doubt be almost as much fun as staying home to count (and make) some money.

Time will tell.

The real point of this morning is to welcome you to the first Friday of 2015 and note that even though the market is looking bullish at the open, as the high-end graphic upper right indicates, whether it will really be an “up” day, is questionable, indeed.

What Really Matters?  Budget

The mainstream media has unwittingly fallen into unquestioning belief in press release language manipulating the playing field.

In a column this morning, The Hill looks at the looming budget battle in 2015 between president Obama and the GOD controlled congress.

It’s a generally good article, but I’d draw your attention to this little bit in here:

“….with entitlement programs such as Medicare and Social Security a potential target for cuts…”

Hold the phone, there Bucko. 

Since when is Social Security an “entitlement?”

It’s a subject for future analysis as a Peoplenomics piece, but take someone like me:  In my lifetime, myself and employers have paid in $400,000 to Social Security. 

Now, there are those who would argue that this isn’t quite right because my “out of pocket” was around (for example) $200,000.    And where can I get the kind of payout I anticipate with that kind of pay-in?  Glad you asked.

Unfortunately, the inflation game gets played on everyone at this point, because 99% of the American public isn’t as smart as you and me. 

In 1982, for example, I made $39,500 per year.  And about (round numbers) 14.5% went into Social Security.  In today’s dollars (those dirty, watered-down, mostly made up [96% made up]) things, that would be $98,392.

What’s more, in 1980, if I had taken the 14.5% of $39,500 – my part and the mandatory employer part came to $5,727 – and put it into the S&P 500, which at the time was what?   Well, December 22nd (1982) the S&P was 138.03.

For the REAL $5,727 at that point, had I been managing my own money and just tracking the S&P  instead of being held at gunpoint by Uncle Sam, that year alone would be worth today how much?   14.9 times the original sum and that’s just tracking the S&P for that period.  That would be $88,000 and change and that’s for just one work year.

I worked 50 years with those kind of numbers.  Some much higher, some lower.

Would results always be this good:  Hell no.

But I want to be extraordinarily  clear on two points here:

1.  If employees had been paid the “mandatory employer part” and invested it, we would be the richest country and the richest generation alive ever.

2. The fact there never was a “Trust Fund” – it was “invested in agency paper and other idiotically low returns” reveals that Social Security, while well-intended, had turned out to be a payoff of the poor and a terrible swindle of middle class and up earners.

Since I’ve now worked 50 years, what Social Security should be paying me on is actually well into the millions.  Watering down the money is key to the swindle, though.

So when someone dares imply that Social Security is an “entitlement” take ‘em out back, slap them around with a calculator, explain inflation to their thick skulls, and tell them you’ll wash their mouth out if they can’t see a swindle when they’re the victims.

Oh, wait, seniors are remarkably slow learners on inflation and they are largely dumb enough to believe politicians.  Two strikes.  Shall I mention the third?  That’s failure to pass on hard-fought mental acuity to the next round of suckers…

Wrong Message to Terrorists

This one caught my eye:  “Death penalty for Tsarnaev? Why Bostonians don’t favor that possibility.”

To my (admittedly jaded) way of thinking, this sends exactly the WRONG message to would-be terrorists.  The liberalistas of Boston have just painted a big target on themselves.

I’m sure my liberal pal will call incensed that I am going down the path of eye-for-eye justice.

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Yeah, I know:  Holiday morning and what the hell is George doing up writing a column?

Well, lemme see:  Elaine got up for a snack, the cat wanted in, it was cold and I was wondering if it snowed.

Since I was up, I made a pot of coffee and spied a dandy picture from SoCal sent in by our friend Jeffrey out there. 

Yee-gads!  Snow down to the what level?

“In a rare event, snow fell on the local mountains here in Orange County. A picture is attached. Apparently, the snow level went all the way down to 2000 feet.

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