Year: 2015

I live in East Texas.

We get all kinds of critters here.

We get snakes called cotton mouth, snakes called copperheads, and snakes that eat the offspring of birds that do such a fine job of keeping down West Nile.

We have animals that will turn a finely mowed yard into a raw land digging it up.

We have wild hogs – weighing several hundred pounds – that would just as soon kill you and eat you  as walk the other way.  And God help you if you get between a wild sow and piglets in the wild.

We are now into the time of year when a gun in Texas is a working tool.  It can be my old reliable Mossberg, or an assortment of short guns (Glock, Ruger, Colt,  and Taurus just to name a few).

I appreciate having a good store of ammunition, as well.  It’s an hour into town – and thanks to government efforts, often as not, there’s none to be had.  Not the kind of “response time” that lends comfort to people living on the wild-edge of society.

I mention this this morning because it’s important to keep guns, gun ownership, the Right to Bear, and such-wise all in perspective.

People get killed with all kinds of “weapons” – poor construction, hammers, knives, prescription drug interactions, and even (sadly) the odd public official.

So with the snake season in full bloom out here in fly-over America, please understand that from the perspective of this little patch of Texas, the following is generally true..

Guns don’t killed people.  Guns kill snakes.

Thank you.

Related Note

From a reader…apparently, I’m not the only one holding this view:

HI George,

I’m a consistent reader of urbansurvival.com website and really enjoy your content.  So much great information on your site no matter what level of prepping you are at.

I was hoping as a reader of your site that it would be possible to have my site listed in your “essential links” section?  I’m still learning the ropes with prepping but my brother and I know our way around firearms and have a firearms blog at www.armsbearingcitizen.com that we try to update as frequently as time will allow.

Regardless of if you can add us or not, just wanted to say thanks and keep delivering great content to your readers. 

Thanks!

Jason@armsbearingcitizen.com

Thanks for the note.  I don’t generally post reader websites, but this one made sense.  There are too many sites on the net that seem to confuse macho with gun ownership.  A gun is a tool, just like a chainsaw is a tool.  Massacre movies aside, no one has ginned up a drive to register chain saws or, in the wake of 9/11 box cutters either.

ArmsBearingCitizen is gets my respect for putting Gun Safes and Tips & Safety at the top of their page. That’s responsible gun ownership…so amen to that.

Snakes come in a variety of sizes, though.  A few even try to kill “infidels.”   Some try to take over aircraft – which is why many pilots I know now carry snake repellant to the cockpit.

The best example of gun control I can think of it “one shot, one kill” – of a snake, of course.

This viewpoint might be useful in Logan County West Virginia, where a mom is suing the local school board for arresting her son for wearing an NRA t-shirt.

I hope she wins.  Big.

Read More

“Well, I’m ready for anything now,” declared Elaine.  “I have my face on…”

We spent part of the early hours this morning under a tornado watch, and honestly, there’s not much going on at 2:45 AM other than talking about the weather.  The www.wunderground.com  display looked positively crappy.

The local weather net on the 2-meter ham band was active; seems lots of us with radios couldn’t sleep.

I would have made some breakfast (always a fine thing, 24/7) but with a vampire appointment for my 6-month old-man-blood work, that was off the table (so to speak).

“Coffee is OK, though,” I’d been told, but you can only drink so many cups. 

We’ve been in the hinterlands of East Texas for a dozen years now, and we’ve been thinking again about building a shelter.  It wouldn’t take too much to accomplish the task, a couple of loads of concrete, some block, rebar, and labor.  I’ve been thinking about  putting it under the screen porch and back-filling with dirt all over the place.

That way, we’d have a cool room in the summer and a shelter when spring lights off like it did today.

In the meantime, the combination of more-or-less continuous lightning (and how many cups is this?) gave me time to look up my pet theory that getting in a car with seatbelts and shoulder harness on would be a good move.

Not so, says this site which says in part;  “Do not get in a car or truck. Vehicles are generally tossed into the air and reduced to a pile of battered junk.”

I would have thought otherwise (impact zones and crumple and air bags) but seems not.

Still, being in a tornado in tall timber country., well, that project of a cold-room/shelter might just get moved up from the bottom of the project list this year.

Billionaires Bugging Out

A few years back, we had a string of reports about rich people selling all their U.S. possessions and heading for parts unknown.  At the time, it was attributed to (variously) a pending global coastal event or Niburu/Wormwood showing up, and so forth.

The rumors had been turned down to nothing here lately until this come in from a reader this weekend:

“…nope, the world didn’t end….last week. but the world that elitist /multi-millionaires and billionaires live in is certainly morphing into something that bears no resemblance to the one that relative peons like you and me are familiar with. l am very very very far from wealthy, but as fate would have it am related to two billionaires (in their mid fifties) and and am acquainted with several multi-millionaires ….funny how all of them but 2 were formerly investment bankers for some Big Hitters- they all “retired” about 10 years ago.

They all live well beneath their means-3 of them had left Texas for other states, and as we speak today, ALL of them, l repeat ALL of them have been busy lately selling their family homes, vacation properties, rental properties and other holdings such as luxury cars, boats,even their airplanes- ……very odd- most of these people don’t know each other but are doing the same thing at the same time !!

The Texans say that as soon as their kids’ school is out this month, (l mean the day AFTER, literally) they will be leaving for Europe and parts unknown for an extended “vacation”. The other “wealthies” are leaving around the same time, but are vague about their destinations…

These people have the means to do anything they want …all but one couple have teenagers or younger married children and grandchildren….Their ENTIRE families are leaving together for these “wonderful overseas vacations”….strange how these folks give out very minimal information about their “vacation plans’. l don’t think l will ever see any of these people again…..someone, somewhere has given them a BIG hint, and they are rapidly dismantling their lives here in the USA…. l guess the rest of us , without the means to re-locate , oops, l mean “leave for an extended overseas vacation” will find out soon enough what the future holds….l am scared shitless.

(Crude Words Alert!)  Say:  Not to pick nits, or anything, but according to one source, the term scared shitless first appeared in 1936.

This is in terrible contrast to the phrase “scared the shit out of..” which is at quite the other end of the spectrum.

As far as we’ve been able to determine, most people have this built-in confused G.I.

Read More

Ah, the foreplay that goes into the jobs report. 

Before I open the envelope this morning, a word or three about handicapping this morning’s number.

If you look at the ADP jobs report this week (+169,000) and the Challenger Job Cuts report (61,582) we can sort of imagine a total jobs movement of about +108,000.

Not that this number will be anywhere near what government will claim:  They can get away with all kinds of statistical shenanigans because it’s their calculator and they run it as they please.

Of course the other thing they do is “estimate jobs into existence” using the CES Birth/Death Model which will no doubt show tons and scads of single employee start-up companies.  It’s only a coincidence, I tell you, that such numbers are impossible to verify.  Why, that’s the kind of data we like most.

OK, enough wind…the envelope please?

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 223,000 in April, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 5.4 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, and construction. Mining employment continued to decline.

Household Survey Data In April, both the unemployment rate (5.4 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (8.5 million) were essentially unchanged. Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 0.8 percentage point and 1.1 million, respectively. (See table A-1.) Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for Asians increased to 4.4 percent.

The rates for adult men (5.0 percent), adult women (4.9 percent), teenagers (17.1 percent), whites (4.7 percent), blacks (9.6 percent), and Hispanics (6.9 percent) showed little or no change in April.

Ure’s Infamous Instant Analysis

Here we go into the details: Half an hour before the numbers were released, the markets were pointing toward a model flat to slightly upward opening.  Seems most of the jobs jitters were relieved by the two private sector reports.

1.  Whenever a government report uses the term “Essentially unchanged” it’s time for a diaper-check.

2.  How come the press release says employment gained 223,000 while the worksheet here says it was up only 192,000? Makes little sense to me but, then again,  I got my degree from MBA’s R Us.

3.  Average hourly earnings went up 3-cents last month.  Don’t spend it all in one place.  Use it for a down payment on a stick of gum.

4.  Over on the no-longer-neatly formatted CES Birth-Death Confessional Page Here we see that of (the we-don’t-understand-how-they-figured-it) 233,000 news jobs, 223,000 were estimated into existence and of this sack of digits,  86,000 were in business and professional services and 76 thou were in leisure and hospitality.

5.

Read More

I hope you don’t mind my sharing occasional vivid dreams that come along.  Granted, they are weird, but they sometimes offer hints of what’s to come so I pass them on.

I mean like my January 13 dream about the “big quake in April” or the Gulf Horizon dream, where I posted a dream very well-fitting of the Gulf oil disaster was posted fully 18-hours in advance of events.

Had another one overnight which I thought you might get a kick out of.

As this dream opened, it wasn’t clear whose perspective it was being seen from.  It obviously wasn’t mine – and there was no one I knew in the dream, except for the world leader part.  Vladimir Putin is hard to mistake.

It was as though I was either a journalist or a very high-level administrative person, and the dreamer was on a ship that was heading from Europe to the United States.

On this ship was – of all people – Russia’s leader Vlad Putin.  And since it was a leisurely sea-crossing, I was looking forward to interviewing Putin at some point in the trip, likely it would be in a day, or two.  Though the ship had already been at sea fully a day or longer in the dream’s timecode..

The dreamer was wearing odd clothing (a women, perhaps?) with what seemed like a rich – just darker than sky – blue shirt (or blouse?) and a gray jacket over it – a kind of Civil War Confederate gray, if you know the color.

The sense was that Putin was coming to the U.S. to hold talks with president Obama, and there was some sense of excitement because there was a sense that the talks MIGHT take place on the ship and there was anticipation that this could turn into a very key meeting, just as the Yalta meeting between Stalin, Roosevelt, and Churchill was at the end of World War II.

Coming on a large yacht/cruise (naval?) ship was interesting.  After the dreamer’s actually meeting Putin briefly – and being promised the later interview – the next day at sea had a couple of interesting features.

One was walking the ship, early in the morning and stumbling into the wrong meeting room on the ship.  This one was full of naval officers who were poring over a map which was displayed on a wall behind them.  It wasn’t particularly dangerous-feeling, at least at the moment, but the dream was highly embarrassed stumbling into thre wrong room in search of breakfast and press facilities.

The sense was that crisis was not imminent but the developments on the ground somewhere were being followed closely.

The next odd feature was the dreamer ordering a pizzas to go – back to the room for work.   Ship’s company screwed it up and the wait was much longer than anticipated.

And that was about it. 

Except for the overwhelming notion running like a thread that while there might be troubles between the US and Russia now, there would likely be a Yalta-like meeting where the place that this (dreamed) Putin-Obama confab will gain some degree of historical notoriety from the meeting, as did Yalta.

Timing on this dream was terribly imprecise.  There was little to indicate a date, but it seemed like early fall, but that’s only based on the sun  position in the sky when the dreamer burst into those navy dudes’ meeting. 

The timing from dream date to event date is all over the place.  The most accurate ones have been within 24-hours, or so.  The Gulf Oil disaster dream was 20-hours from writing and 18-hours from posting.  The Arizona road closure/traffic death and detours dream was a matter of less than 3-hours.

But the January 13th dream about the big April earthquake was on  the order of 14 1/2 weeks or 102 days.  (Ignoring dateline issues).  So, all over the place.

Speaking of dreams and such, there may be a big quake in the period now through May 21, so a heads up on that one.

I’ve been thinking about what could cause these dreams to take place and frankly, nothing seems to come to mind.  There’s no common foods that I can think of, alcohol use doesn’t have any effect.  But I may be looking at the wrong variable:  It could be a subtle electronic or electric effect, or along a different line, it could be a blood-sugar level, amount of daylight/sunlight…the number of variables when doing personal dream work like this becomes absolutely stunning.

When you come down to it, there’s no way of telling what the trigger is:  It might even be a seldom-used word or new concept sets off some kind of mental process.  Elaine happened to use the word vertiginous yesterday…not an everyday word for here.  No telling.

Another possibility (if you don’t mind the really personal stuff) is the one thing the dream states all have in common is they seem to occur within 24-hours after sexual activity.  Is it possible that some hormonal change, or other, changes the human propensity perchance to dream?

OR could it be something as simple as the right amount of coffee?  Again, each of the dreams seems to follow a period when I’ve had coffee (decaf) but that narrows it down to every day, so toss that one…or not?

The payoff some lucid – precognitive dreams is a glimpse of aspects of the future.  Occasionally, you will run into departed loved ones, and such, but they seem mainly preoccupied with the odd things they are doing with their existence since passing.

And again, we circle back to the psychological basis of dreaming:  Are all these things stubs of long-ago incomplete thoughts that just all get tossed into the blender with only a very tiny pinch of “future” to them?  Or, is that how the whole future of humankind works: through the common denominators of some critical mass of people dreaming a dream…

I’d sure encourage you to follow Chris McCleary’s work at the www.nationaldreamcenter.com site. Since I started having the occasional glimpse of existence outside of the confines of our shared human timeline, back when I was 45, oir so, it has been a marvelous work to experiment with – and gives purpose to sleep.

What I suspect is that the process of opening up to such dreams comes from connecting with a loved one in a moment of extreme emotional stress.

Years ago, when I was sailing up in British Columbia on my old sailboat (2004 youtub e video here) so this was before then, I was overnight in Nanaimo B.C.

Read More

Challenger Job Cuts report is just out and it’s not pretty.  From the company press release:

Falling oil prices contributed to a 68 percent surge in job cuts last month, as US-based employers announced workforce reductions totaling 61,582 in April, up from 36,594 in March, according to the latest report on monthly layoffs released Thursday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. The April total was 53 percent higher than the same month a year ago, when 40,298 planned job cuts were recorded. It represents the highest monthly total since May 2012 (61,887) and the highest April total since 2009 (132,590). Year to date, employers have announced 201,796 planned job cuts, which marks a 25 percent increase from the 161,639 layoffs tracked in the first four months of 2014. This is the largest four-month total since 2010.

Stocks look to open around flat.  The real reaction to all this week’s employment data should culminate tomorrow when the monthly jobs report comes in.

Software Time Machines:  Issues for News Junkies

Time we had us another chat about news templates.

I’ve told you often enough about our ongoing evolution of the web-scanning software called Nostracodeus (which is updated daily by Grady over at www.nostracodeus.com) and which we run overnight here, as well.

The idea is simple:  Send software out to scan the news and look for tell-tale words that are harbingers of future events.

We often do very well anticipating this and that because the world doesn’t happen in an entirely chaotic manner; there’s a kind of soft order to how we careen into the future.  It’s found in the analysis of time-indicators in news and social media. 

Take a word like “next week” and scan the web looking only for pages posted in the last day, or two, and which point to next week.  Then go through the web pages and see what next week will look like in a Big Data sense.  It’s really pretty cool.

Except, sometimes there are other forces at play and we often jump the gun by a day, a week, a month, a year, and so forth, because these are most commonly referenced timescales.

This morning, the stock market will be opening flat, but there is an increasing chance of us seeing a big scrap between bulls and bears at the S&P 2,040 level.  I told you on April 6th in our report then that this was in the cards…I apologize for being a month off on  the precise data of the battle.  But here’s how it looked a month ago:

What we were mentioning the past couple of weeks to our Peoplenomics™ subscribers could show up today, or this week, as the S&P 500 does battle royal at the 2,040 level.

My friend Robin Landry and I talked about this at some length when we flew up there to huddle weekend before this one.   Here’s part of what Robin had sent out to his managed account clients:

“Once the MACD has crossed the signal line and begins to drop sharply, in the past it has paid to get defensive and raise cash. The 2040 level is also about to be tested as well as the trend line from the low last October which I referenced above was broken earlier today and then the market rallied into the close to the underside of that trend line.

I call this the Kiss of Death, when it happens, because of the high percentage of times when this happens the decline resumes and accelerates.

There are also a number of other technical indicators, not shown, which are supporting my concern of the potential for a large decline.

Read More

Proof of Recovery seen!  (I jest, wake up.)

Want to see what happens when a country spends way more than it exports?

“The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce, announced today that the goods and services deficit was $51.4 billion in March, up $15.5 billion from $35.9 billion in February, revised.

Read More