Month: August 2015

There’s an old firehouse saying I was brought up with:

Say what you mean and mean what you say.

I have no idea why, but this popped into my head one day last week when I was in town for something, or other.  No, come to think of it, it was Wednesday morning when I met the mechanic down at the airport.  After that, Chinese food was comfort food.

Anyway, the point is I was at my favorite Chinese joint having the big buffet ($6.09) and watching people because it’s fun to do that, now and then.

The mood of the restaurant has changed very little over the years.  One change is they are now showing CNN instead of Faux, at least on the big screen easily seen from my favorite table.

So there I was and I notice the number of people who come in wearing sports-branded shirts.

By the time I was done, I concluded that more than likely, the independence-mindedness of a person could be determined by going through their closets and inspecting their cars or trucks.  It wouldn’t take but a minute.

You see, branding controls us.  If you wear a brand and you don’t own the franchise, you are chattel of the franchise.  A capital asset and that makes you less free and more owned.

One lady had on an “Elkhart Football” Jersey.  Which the logical brain explained, since the woman looked to be mid 40’s – that she wasn’t the football player.  Son, or nephew, more likely.

And then came the lunchtime procession of working males.  About an even mix of white, black, and latin.  (Capityalize all or none of those labels – depends on how well the Political Correctness Franchise has you imprinted.)   More than half the working males were wearing sports franchise or beer shirts.

I found myself wondering:  Do these people have any idea what they are doing?

Free advertising OR (the even worse possibility) actually telling the world that deep down in their deluded minds that they could even carry the water for a major sports team.

Consequently, I’ve come up with a proposal called the “Truth in Clothing” law.

The law would provide that if you wear a shirt or Jersey of any kind, you have to be able to prove some kind of legitimate connection with that franchise.  And, except for current and past direct employees (who have been paid by the club and have tax receipts to prove it), they would be required to identify their role that they are advertising.

For example, the fellow with the Oakland shirt on would have a patch that said “FAN” and the fellow with the beer shirt on (Corona) would have a patch called “USER” so innocent bystanders would know the proper thing to think.

People don’t realize how much their personal “branding” gives away. 

For example, say you’re a cop.  You pull someone over for erratic driving – they touched a line, say.

Who would you be more inclined (if even at the subconscious level) a breathalyzer test to? 

Candidate A)  Someone wearing a Boston Marathon shirt or…

Candidate B)  Someone weather a Corona beer shirt?

Maybe it is because I’m sensitive to branding, marketing, this thing I’ve been writing about lately on the PEOPLENOMICS.COM side of the house – THE FRANCHISE – but seems to me that many people don’t look in the mirror before they go somewhere and ask a very simple question:  “Am I dressed for my role?”

Works on cars.  If your car has a dealer named license frame, you are “owned” bitch.  If you have a dealer decal on your car, you’ve been imprinted with their brand on your ass….and are too sleepy to get it.  WTFU/.

Me?  I like to be low key and to be the most unremarkable fellow in sight.  Elaine, no matter what, always ends up looking like a movie star,, and every so often people look at me with the “What’s she doing with him?”  look.  That’s OK. But she does have a few things with “branding”:  A Hooters T-shirt (though she qualifies, lol), a DKNY top and a Fairbanks sweatshirt purchased?  (You get three guesses…)

At least when I walk out of the house, what I am wearing is real.  I own  exactly two logo pieces of clothing.  And one, which I am not “connected to” would be thrown away except it’s a “blend in.”

If you do own a lot?  I suppose my “Truth in Clothing” law would have to exempt outfits like the Seahawk’s 12th Man group.  Everyone is supposed to know that’s a fan organization, although I can’t be sure.  Just a guess based on 11 people on a side and the 12th person would likely be the fan who pays for the other 11, or so it felt like last time I went to a football game.

I quit going to sports events for a laundry list of reasons:  The ticket price, beer price, fan behavior, parking prices, parking lot rudeness,  long lines to pee, people standing up in my sight lines and so forth.  Not to mention the stupid assault on my senses from too much branding.

Were it not for the occasional research trip to see such technology breakthroughs as bottom-filling beer cups, and the current crop of cheerleaders (I’m old, not dead)  there’d be no reason to go anywhere near sports.

Same thing is true for concerts.  I’ve been to a few concerts and many clubs when we lived out in Burbank.  But the truth is, most sound systems slap you with +120 dbm sound and since we have a recording studio at home (along with our own low-power FM station so we don’t need to listen to commercials) we much prefer sound levels at 85 dbn for most music so we don’t have to scream over it.

Even when we’re playing along on drums or doing karaoke, we usually hold well under 95 dbm.  Why should we have to scream to be heard? (See my hobby site at www.musicengineerandproducer.com and no, not kidding about any of it.  In fact, the price of a basic audio meter to measure sound intensity is down to $15 bucks, can you believe it?  GM1351 Digital Sound Noise Level Meter 30-130 dB/Auto Backlight Display with Tripod Mounting Option.

On this concert thing:  Again, people don’t think.  Which car will get the canine unit called to sniff for drugs?  The slightly overweight old man with the movie star looking wife, or the guy wearing the NORML t-shirt?

Just saying, there are two reasons to rid your world of brand clothing.  I only buy a product with a brand on it if it’s the cheapest thing and disposable.  I had to buy a hat on a trip recently and the only convenient hat I could find has the stupid checkmark on it.  I didn’t care:  It was $6-bucks. 

I’d forgotten to pack my Beechcraft hat, which has a couple of FAA WINGS program tacks on it.  But that is not false advertising because it’s real, as are the “endorsements.”

I must be the odd duck, though, because no one else seems to give a rip.

Maybe it’s because I don’t watch enough TV and therefore have not been adequately “imprinted” with the Nanny State and Consumer Crazed Society.

Or because I’ve read too many books like Jerry Mander’s Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television.  On our cruise next week, I’ll be paging through his The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an Obsolete System.

(Mander sees the same problem we deal with on the Peoplenomics side, namely that a constant growth model (except on market days like today, lol) doesn’t work out in the long term…you end up with so many people and so much junk the planet ends up barren as the monkeys kill themselves on coke overdoses experiments show the bigger apes do the same thing.  We just do it with cars and styrofoam and shit and laugh at them.  It’s quite insane.)

This is all only a first step.  One we get Truth in Clothing out there, then we can move on to Truth in Politics, which would begin by moving the Federal Trade Commission so it reports to the Supreme Court instead of the lobbyist-infested other two choices.

Then the FTC would be given the mandate to make politicians vote and legislate the way they represented in their campaigns or go to prison.  Think how much of an economic stimulus that would be?  Can you imagine how many special elections we would end up holding?

None of which will happen, of course, because Jack Nicholson was right in the great line from A Few Good Men.    “You can’t handle the Truth.”

But we do hope you have a better time handling Monday.

Note From Dream Land

Two weird dreams last night. 

In one of them, a 45-year old male type male (dark hair)  comes back from lunch an an assistant is emptying his desk out.  He has a ceramic vase wrapped with a rough twine that is designed as a weight for balloons and such.

Since the only “day residue” I can come up with on this vase and balloon thing for the desk would be the local NASA Balloon Center and the fact that you only need Pi to 39 places to calculate the width of the Universe (don’t ask) it could just mean that a “high level resignation or firing” of some kind should be along in headlines shortly.

The second weird  dream was through the eyes of someone who was cleaning up from the storms this weekend.  They normally have a creek that flows across the south part of their property, though some kind of low (2’) seawall, or such.  And it backed up and overflowed the back yard and the wind ruined a plant which has 12’ stalks (many) which broke off about ground level (rotten) and will be hauled away this week.

No day residue I can think of there except that I need to mow the yard before the Landry’s get here Friday and we take off on our cruise to Jamaica, etc.

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I bet you’re wondering what’s ahead of the economy, don’t you?

Well, not to worry, mon ami, we have the answers.  A discussion from Robin Landry who has missed all the big declines like 2008/2009 and 1987 and 2001… and of course our own Trading Model which signaled the present downturn nicely by going to cash on July 3rd.

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You may want to check yourself in after reading the latest G’ment report on such things as personal income and personal savings.

Personal income increased $67.1 billion, or 0.4 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $61.5 billion, or 0.5 percent, in July, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $37.4 billion, or 0.3 percent. In June, personal income increased $59.4 billion, or 0.4 percent, DPI increased $52.4 billion, or 0.4 percent, and PCE increased $31.8 billion, or 0.3 percent, based on revised estimates.

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Of course, it could still be an irregular high flat IV at the next higher degree. 

But the main feature of this morning is that old Fifth-Dimension song, Up, Up, and Away.

Speaking of which, one fellow apparently didn’t want to wait for the Shanghai Exchange to turn around, as it did is last night’s session and leapt to his death because of Chinese market problems.

This will no doubt fuel the (growing) cast of idiots who are trying to pretend the Chinese market collapse is somehow an analog to the 1930s depression here.

And except for the fact that China is not a reserve currency country, and their stock market counts as only about 6% of global market cap, and (there’s a list), they have might have a chance of being right.

This morning, a nice short column.

I want you to circle two dates on the calendar and write down two numbers in each one.  Ready?  (this may be awkward on a laptop calendar, so don’t use a permanent marker, right?)

September 11 and 1,740 S&P  and September 14  S&P 2,012.

OK, the logic. 

Since I have been  studying long wave economics for 18 years now, how about this:  Major down moves tend to terminate their first major wave 55-days from the high?

Not saying that it WILL happen, but this is the kind of folk medicine we deal out on our www.peoplenomics.com reports along with a bunch of charts to make it up.

Which, let me see, means we should rally into next weekend, when we take off on our Peoplenomics Cruise to Jamaica, Grand Cayman and Cozumel on RCCL where Robin Landry and I can compare notes and our wives can shop the duty-frees (thus making continued  work necessary, lol).

But it’s also been arranged for the market to be closed that first Monday and we have our internet plans pre-purchased so even though it might seem like a “vacation” our columns should continue uninterrupted as they were when we did our Norwegian cruise back in February.

Speaking of travels (not that it matters) but Elaine and I are planning to be in Dubuque, Iowa October 1-4 for the Beech Aero Club national roundup so if any readers up that-a-way want to sit down and commiserate over a beer (we buy our own and so do you) then that’d be fine depending on schedule.

“This is social chit-chat….where’s my market news???”

Oh, shush.  You know that the financial model is unsustainable and needs to be fixed and that if you tried to run your family on the same accounting basis as the FedGov you’d be in jail.

The difference is when you print up money it’s called counterfeiting.  When government prints up money it’s called economic stimulus. 

You following, bubba?

So while the market is clawing it way up another hundred around the opening and West Texas Intermediate has clawed back up to almost $40, the reality is another thousand illegals will come in today, we are about three weeks from Q3 quarterly IRS payments to pay for everything, and going cruising is a fine way to momentarily get distracted.

Fact is, there is still a count which gives up one more move up into 2016 (late) or 2017 (late) and if that’s the case, then we will all have one last chance to get our affairs in order before the economy dies.

The only question is whether we see the Fed go to a negative interest rate, now that one Fed member met our expectation for a “surprise” announcement this week by saying, in so many words, that a rate hike was off the table for September.

And that sets up the end of the Ure Discontinuity for this fall and through 2016.  Stocks will go to the ceiling because they will be one of the few things with any kind of yield.  But the trick will be to roll back into cash at the tippy top and into Savings Bonds or Treasuries because then your money will be out of banks and (hopefully) less likely to be funding the bail-ins of 2017-2019 to save the rotten bastards who should never have been bailed out in the first place.

You see., the magic of “political correctness disease” (PCD) is that it preconditions the weak mind (yours and mine) to believe that “Oh those poor bankers…we can’t let them fail.”  Which is as close to horse shit as you’ll find outside a pasture.

But that, my friend, is what I call the economic equivalent of mass murder thinking.  “Since they can only kill me once…why not take as many…. “

Which is recent economic policy in a nut shell.  Everyone with a room temperature IQ or above knows this is not sustainable, so keep the orchestra playing and let’s run her up one more time and tell ourselves as best we can “This ship is unsinkable!”

(God that felt good to write…and it was so much nicer than “The 700 point Dead Cat Bounce”)

Gross Domestic Product

Do the Brothers Grimm write the Bureau of Economic Analysis press releases?  Yet, here it is…

“Real gross domestic product — the value of the goods and services produced by the nation’s economy less the value of the goods and services used up in production, adjusted for price changes — increased at an annual rate of 3.7 percent in the second quarter of 2015, according to the “second” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

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Long term readers of this website know that I am a huge fan of cycles.

Some of them are in your face, like fall, winter, spring, into summer.  And others, like the more general social cycles are harder to see and understand.

The idea that there are social cycles is most easily seen not directly, but by what we believe in.

For example, because liberalism (and its pals deficit spending) have pretty much been in a great rise and fall since Marxism came along, we can see how socialism/communism has been little more than a huge wave.

Waves never come alone.

In Elliott theory, as applied to the stock market, you have three and five wave groupings and at sea, you can often find 7, 9, 11, and even 13 wave “sets.”

But to settle on communism as a “wave set” you can see one wave in the Russian revolution, decline, then the Stalin wave (of death), the Khrushchev wave, and finally the ending wave which featured a variety of archetypes.  This last included a joker/drunk, a troika, and so on.

Social waves do not happen in isolation anymore, thanks to the omnipresence of media.

As a result, the bad ideas of communism were, at least in part, adopted in the West.  As they were, we can judge (roughly) our current state ion social cycles, by noticing our thinking about the West’s mirroring of Stalinism in things like the National Recovery Act here in the US.

We can also see where we are in the long wave social cycle, already well documented by authors like Strauss and Howe in The Fourth Turning, by looking at what we believe presently of past events.

Take the last Depression, for example.  The common teaching when I was growing up, was that government deficits and watering down the supply of money must be good, because it helped in the great depression,

Except, that in recent years, we have seen this laid out as a Great Lie.

In short:  If you think the Great Depression was abbreviated in any way by more government, extremely high taxes, and a police state that forced labor unionism on America, think again.  It was as close as we’ve been to communism in many ways.

There’s a fine video on point and the article (and audio book) Great Myths of the Great Depression which springs from the Foundation for Economic Education over here.

Suddenly, the Great Depression seems less like the liberalists “success of Big Government and deficit spending”  and more like an utter failure of both.  Misery prolonged by bad policy.  But, then again, nothing new in that.

As that wave of terror and death passed in Russia, and evolved into the Cold War with the West, the myth was repeated.  And even now that communism/socialism has failed and been cast out of the Soviet Union, a great “tainted thinking” remains in the US in the form of political correctness and utter contempt for the what Donald Trump has tapped into:”the silent majority” in America.

The social wave is no less interesting to watch than the stock market waves.  Although, as any reader of UrbanSurvival, or more so our www.peoplenomics.com website knows, the odds of a first major low being completed 55-days from the top of the market seems like a pretty good estimate.

This infers that our current rally will, shortly, complete, and we should continue on down to a significant low which is likely in the September 10-16 range.  As much as anything, this should be accompanied by the Fed NOT raising rates and if they get the wording just right, we should be off on a rally lasting several months which will be a wave 2.

Perhaps because we are in the vicinity of a Super Cycle (and even 250 and 500 year Grand Super Cycle top) it should be instructive to see how closely the social cycles and the market cycles line up.

Which is to hint that Donald Trump, who has a vastly different view of the “right role” of government that either Joe Biden of the current fellow next door, seems to have really soared in poles as the markets have declined.

But, once the first market wave 1 down from early/mid July finishes, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Hillary Clinton’s fortunes turn a bit as well as ascendancy of the old view of the world, as embodied in modern day democrats, who are still selling the Marxist/social echo that big government is good.

Not that Trump[ is arguing that government isn’t necessary, but it’s all measured in how well it’s executed.

Look for something else to peak:  The last gasps of political correctness which will be undone by the excessive zeal of its followers; the extremists.  As an example, the fellow that killed the TV reporter and cameraman trying to set off a race war.  Ultimately, that’s where political correctness and soft-headed thinking leads.

At its “marketing best” you see (and you can see this with too much government in the Great Depression as well, battering down doors to make sure no one was sewing  clothing in the garment district at night), terms like workers paradise and Utopian society.

The ugly liberalista thinking that is never acknowledged is that every last one of these Utopia peddlers I have questioned, sooner or later reveal that everyone else is part of their scheme.  Except them.

Their special role is that they get to be in charge.  And that’s how all these Utopian dreams (like Russian communism) morph from an interesting collective cooperation into a dystopian nightmare.

As we come up on the 250th anniversary of America, therefore, I will predict the decline of political correctness as we shake of still more of our misguided thinking from the past and begin to realize that the beliefs of the few do not trump (used non politically) the interests of the many.

Should be an interesting show.  But it will be a slow process seeing “political correctness” unwind, although the TV murders will go a long ways.  As will the continued crime wave brought to America by illegal immigrants.

But here’s the point.

People are waking up to political bullshit which much of “political correctness” is.  Would you refer to a plane crash as an “over speed landing”?   

How about this:  Rather than say three people were killed in a head-on car accident on the 405, how about “Three people received permanent tax breaks  when two vehicles stopped abruptly on the 405 this morning…”  Yet this is how mental acuity has been attacked.

Over the next 10-years we will see correctness and mind-control by social-psychology driven foundations slowly rooted out.

One phrase which I expect to decline will be “undocumented alien” which is used by media to “correct” to report the perps were illegals..  In the case of this rape and murder by two illegals in California, you have to read way down into the story to find out yep, illegals from Mexico….again.

I love Mexico, the Mexican people, but I have a problem with criminals and it is against the law to enter the U.S. without documents.  Yet the late wave apologists cry their eyes out about clear thinking. 

The thing to do is here is watch the market levels as we watch the word/thought distortions.  The next 11-years should be a revealing time, indeed.

Real change is a slow-motion thing.  If it were any faster, people would have to admit to their own stupidity and who wants to do that?  It’s one of those things people want to work up to…slowly.

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There are three kinds of people in the world:  Some of us are “future people” and we are always living 10-minutes to 10-years in the future.  Then there are “present people” who are in the hear and now.  But the ones to watch for at the “people past” because they are what holds back the world and prevent us from all “keeping it real.”

A Research Note:  If you ever run across it, I’d sure be interested in any studies you might stumble across linking health, income, and longevity to a person’s temporal orientation.

Word from the WoWW

Here’s the latest from one of our readers who is dealing with the World of Woo-Woo.  That place where things disappear and then reappear and then….

“I’m into the quantum leap. Back in the early 80s, I was putting together a bed and was putting the three wood planks on the rails to hold the box springs.

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Think the Market have been tough lately?  Only foreplay compared to the larger picture.

What most lack is the follow-thought thinking about what happens to government transfer payments and Social Security when the market enters a protracted Bear.

Everything going on in the world around you is still in pretty good condition.  And as we mentioned in last weekend’s report, container traffic from Asia is actually up a good bit compared with year-ago levels, so the end of the world isn’t here.

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So here we are and it is “Turnaround Tuesday.” 

Futures this morning were up 500+ and the dollar had pulled back and despite what may go on in the rest of the world, this completes a big I down, as explained above.

The problem is that a lot of people are only using half their brains when it comes to thinking about life in these times.  People act exactly like herds of animals because they don’t remember  the one great truth in human affairs that comes to us from physics:

F=M*A

Which is?  Force is equal to Mass times Acceleration.

Or, on the financial statements:

Assets minus Liabilities equals Owners Equity

When people forget the duality of the equal sign, they miss much of Life’s teachings.

Let me give you some examples because we have them all over the place this week.

A reader, for example, sent me an article that “Large amount of gold and silver found in reservoirs under volcanoes in New Zealand” that appears on PhysOrg.

Along with the link to the article was the reader wondering “How might this play into things?”

Simply?  It won’t.

Yes there is gold under them thar hills.  But it is in reservoirs “hundreds of meters deep” and even though it might look impressive (3-billion of gold, 3 billion of silver annually) there’s the other side of the equation.

Remember my slapping your knuckles for forgetting this before?  Any time you read a news event, there is an equal and opposite side to whatever.

In this one, it’s “Who is going to put in multiple mines and where is the energy going to come form to mine hundreds of meters under volcanoes, and in reservoirs full of water for ore at 20-parts per billion?

Not I said the little red hen.

That is economic suicide.  Not to mention environmental disaster waiting for a place to happen.

There are examples everywhere.  Take this reader contribution:

Went into the detention facility (office ) this morning and everyone was atwitter over the market. We are an investment firm so I suppose there is some need for that.

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