Year: 2015

The people of the Northeast, that part of America that seems to believe the sun rises and sets because of their exceptionalism are back at it this morning.

Out here in Texas we call it “snow.”

Ya’ll are calling it “Juno” which I assure you is nothing more than a marketing twist to it.

I assure you, it snows in most of the rest of the country from time to time.  Not so much in Miami, more in Anchorage, Fairbanks, Seattle, and the Dakotas.

But you don’t hear us issuing parking bans or handing-wringing about it.  It is winter, after all.

Nevertheless, officials are using phrases like “crippling and potential historic” to describe an event which hasn’t happened yet.

Last week, Amarillo had nearly a foot of snow…yet there was no hand-wringing.   Life went on…and even the cattle in the feedlots west of town got fed.

Help me a bit with my cynicism, here:  Why is it that the lib media of the NE can hand-wring about potential snowfall and not at least mention in passing that climate change may not really be such a big deal after all.

I mean other than a way to stampede the low-information voters into supporting yet another tax which will create yet another industry to solve yet another non-problem?

Oh, my, 3,500 flights have been canceled.

Worry, fear-monger, scare ‘em all to death.

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This is something to read carefully and think about.  The Federal Reserve is revising the way it reports the H.6 money supply figures.

THEY’RE WHAT?

Yep.  Here’s how it’s explained on their site:

H.6 (508)

MONEY STOCK REVISIONS
The Federal Reserve revised its measures of the money stock and their components to incorporate updated seasonal factors and a new quarterly benchmark.
This release includes seasonally adjusted measures of the monetary aggregates and components produced with revised seasonal factors, which were derived from data through December 2014 and estimated using the X-12-ARIMA procedure.[1] The revisions to the seasonal factors resulted in a lower growth rate for seasonally adjusted M2 in the first half of 2014 and a higher growth rate for seasonally adjusted M2 in the second half.
This release also includes a new quarterly benchmark, which incorporates minor revisions to data reported in the quarterly deposit reports, and it takes account of deposit data from Call Reports for banks and thrift institutions that are not weekly or quarterly deposit reporters.[2] These revisions to deposit data start in 2013.

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Funny how life works.

Yesterday morning, out of the blue, the power went off.

Even funnier?

I didn’t even know about it.

Until, that it, my lovely bride and brother-in-law wandered into my office and asked:  “Did you know the power was off?”

I gave a gesture around the room:  My super-computer (in the midst of an upgrade to an SSD) was still on.  So were all four monitors that display what’s going on via the two dual HDMI video cards.  The music was on.  Zeus the cat was laying half up against the 750-watt electric heater *(which was on low).  My halogen desk lamp was on.  The scanner was still displaying blue ready for scanning.  The duplex laser printer just had a page coming out of it.

“No, how would I know the power’s off?”

This, my friend, is the joy of a huge, massively over-built power system.  I seem to remember there had been a single “beep” from the computer, router, and satellite uplink UPS power system a few minutes earlier.  But the light hadn’t gone out.

Still, even though my office was warm and cozy while the rest of the property was getting more than 3-inches of rain, I picked up the analog old-style wired phone and called the local power company and reported the outage, although what most people may not appreciate is that while yes, Smart Power Meters may slowly morph our genetics, the Smart Meter would also stop reporting and power companies know that when blocks of meters go off-line together, there’s an outage.

Checking for Dangerous Backfeed

I turned off the halogen lighting and the heater.  They’d been on since morning and I didn’t really need additional heat or light. and had Elaine follow me out to the power center.

I held up the 7-watt light in a plug-in light socket – one of those $2 parts that you can find at Lowes which is useful to see when an outlet is powered up, or not.

“Even though I don’t need to do this, I do it anyway,” I said, as the light was plugged into an outlet box labeled “Inverter 1 grid side” and then into “Inverter 2 grid side.”

As it should, the light stayed out.

“Do I need to know how to do that?”  Elaine wondered.

“No, I just do it whenever we are at home to make sure the grid-interactive part of our system is still dropping the grid like it should.  “ A note to the system log followed.  “Tested system for no backfeed” and the date.

What’s backfeed and why does it scare the hell out of power company linemen?

Suppose you have a generator and the power goes down and you haven’t spent the money to put in a real transfer switch to physically disconnect your home  from the grid in event a wire goes down somewhere down the road a ways.

People often times will plug a generator into the closest outlet in their home and if they are lucky, that leg of the 240 VAC power coming in will bring up a TV and the fridge and maybe some lights in the house.

Few bother to think about the downed line.  A generator that’s plugged into house wiring will feed power back down the line to where it is broken.

It’s enough to kill an innocent lineman.

So apparently, Universe arranged our Thursday to make a major point about real back-up power systems.

NEVER NEVER EVER BACKFEED.

Now, about that Real Emergency Power System…

Hers is the shopping list I would go with for a really simple system:

Renogy 100W Mono Starter Kit: 100W Solar Panel+20′ Solar Cable+30A PWM Charge Controller+Z Bracket Mounts   This will set you back $185 at Amazon.  For another $150, add a second RENOGY 100 Watt 100w Monocrystalline Photovoltaic PV Solar Panel Module 12V Battery Charging as their 30-amp charge controller should handle the power of both cells.

Then you just need a good to great deep cycle battery and an inverter: Power Bright APS1000-12 Pure Sine Power Inverter 1000 Watt continuous / 2000 watt Peak 12 Volt DC To 120 Volt AC which is about $280 bucks.

Inverter School 101

There are two kinds of inverters:  The cheapo kind are “modified sine wave” and the way these work, if you look at their output on a scope is it looks like those stepped pyramids in Mexico, rather than a smooth rise.  It’s a stair-step kind of thing.

The pure sine wave is a better choice if you are planning to use a television, microwave, or radio gear because those “steps” may cause microwaves to hum oddly, televisions to have oddities to their pictures, and ham gear to hear “hash” on low bands.

But they are less than half the price of pure sine wave and if the batter is fully charged, you can microwave popcorn with either variety.

Battery Capacity 102

Now we need to talk about your battery capacity.

The most important thing to know is scientifically called the Peukert Exponent.  Old Wilhelm (going from memory) came up with this law in the 1800’s.  What he discovered was simply this:  The faster you discharge a battery, the lower its effective capacity is. 

For the science nerds, the details are in Wikipedia:

Manufacturers rate the capacity of a battery with reference to a discharge time. For example, a battery might be rated at 100 A·h when discharged at a rate that will fully discharge the battery in 20 hours. In this example, the discharge current would be 5 amperes. If the battery is discharged in a shorter time, with a higher current, the delivered capacity is less. Peukert’s law describes a power relationship between the discharge current (normalized to some base rated current) and delivered capacity (normalized to the rated capacity) over some specified range of discharge currents. If the exponent constant k was one, the delivered capacity would be independent of the current. For a lead–acid battery, however, the value of k is typically between 1.1 and 1.3. It generally ranges from 1.05 to 1.15 for VRSLAB AGM batteries, from 1.1 to 1.25 for gel, and from 1.2 to 1.6 for flooded batteries.^[1] The Peukert constant varies according to the age of the battery, generally increasing with age. Application at low discharge rates must take into account the battery self-discharge current.

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Yes, the Ure-a-pee’in Central Banksters moved today to make up money, just like the US Fed did and as a result, while we don’t think the end of the world will result, it sure is looking like the EU is in a heap-o-crap.  Done dunged by their own bad policies, is how it looks from here.

Quantitative pleasing. $60-billion in round one, but this stuff is like crack.  Hard to quit.

From the press conference:

First, it decided to launch an expanded asset purchase programme, encompassing the existing purchase programmes for asset-backed securities and covered bonds. Under this expanded programme, the combined monthly purchases of public and private sector securities will amount to €60 billion. They are intended to be carried out until end-September 2016 and will in any case be conducted until we see a sustained adjustment in the path of inflation which is consistent with our aim of achieving inflation rates below, but close to, 2% over the medium term. In March 2015 the Eurosystem will start to purchase euro-denominated investment-grade securities issued by euro area governments and agencies and European institutions in the secondary market. The purchases of securities issued by euro area governments and agencies will be based on the Eurosystem NCBs’ shares in the ECB’s capital key. Some additional eligibility criteria will be applied in the case of countries under an EU/IMF adjustment programme.

Second, the Governing Council decided to change the pricing of the six remaining targeted longer-term refinancing operations (TLTROs). Accordingly , the interest rate applicable to future TLTRO operations will be equal to the rate on the Eurosystem’s main refinancing operations prevailing at the time when each TLTRO is conducted, thereby removing the 10 basis point spread over the MRO rate that applied to the first two TLTROs.

Third, in line with our forward guidance, we decided to keep the key ECB interest rates unchanged.

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Oilman2 and I have a kind of gentleman’s bet going on the price of oil.

For now, we agree on cheap oil, but once the general world economy hits the “Ure Discontinuity” as deflation digs in, I think the price of oil will become almost irrelevant.

I’ll leave it to him to ‘splain…

G –

Attached is a graph of WTI crude spot prices from 1970 to present.  I have indicated memorable events on a timeline.

Now, we all know that everything is a business model…so….

The correction was in 2009 – we hit 40 bucks, and then QE1 was released.

Look at the historical price, then note how reality disappeared in the first decade of this millennium. EVERYTHING was used by traders and national oil companies and every business related to oil in order to wrangle ever more dollars out of the system. This is when prices at the gas pump got linked to crude prices as well, via internet and POS terminals everywhere.

My opinion??  This had QE bubble written all over it – hot, loose money looking for more gains.

We corrected back to $40, which is likely the actual workable price if you accede that we hit Peak in 2005. The climb before the Rec/De-pression had China’s hot economy, the Housing Bubble and Financial Deregulation as the cause for the run-up.

The current one is simpler – QE1 hits and then hot, free money goes-a-looking for even hotter returns.

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A few readers believe me to be a saintly type guy:  Works all the time, eats healthy, gets plenty of reset, has the power to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Mostly, they’re right.

But even the finest intent doesn’t make up for those two times a year I go to the store with Elaine and something….yesterday it was hotdogs – catches my eye and “just gotta have ‘em.”

Not that hotdogs are bad for you, but not that they’re particularly good, either.

They have plenty of salt, some have nitrates and so forth.  The buns have sugar in the dough and they’re really dangerous in terms of calories, fat, and so forth.

But it’s the time of the year when even though I won’t put up with a football game for more than the final 5-minutes of play (that becomes a time machine, in that 5-minutes of play takes 15-minutes on any normal clock), I still get a hankering for the food of the sport.

Sports to me consists of culinary items:  Beer, hotdogs, maybe chips, no peanuts thanks (allergies), and maybe an ice cream sandwich. Deflating balls or hitting balls with sticks is ultimately stupid…only in America could this be turned into billions; we are so effing stupid.

Since I’m trying to eat healthy, I haven’t touched Elaine’s chips.  How a woman can eat chips now and then and remain the same 121 pounds forever is something of a mystery.  Wish I had those genetics.

Panama, out in his freezer keeps the Klondike Bar stash.  Nothing to an old soldier like a good sweet after a long hike…

So with those items off the table, in our Monday resupply mission to town (after watching the MLK Day Parade (didn’t have much choice, it was between us and the store, but it was a nice parade) I broke down and got some Ball Park Franks.

No artificial ingredients, no by-products, and the salt, well, more on that in a minute.

All the way home I was dreaming of them:  It has been the better part of 18-months since my last hotdog binge.

The Secret is Preparation

Having acquired the devices of sin, it was off to the kitchen to prepare the feast.  Called Panama on the intercom:  He was down with one…admirable self-restraint.  I was going for two, although my personal best is six, but that was set some 50-years ago.

Water was boiled, the franks brought up to perfection and the three buns were microwaved (cover on) for exactly 19-seconds.  Moist, but not gooey.

Then came the assembly process that I first learned about at the old King Dome in Seattle.

The “magic” of a hotdog is in being wrapped in foil. 

I don’t know what it is, but if you have a hot bun, a frank hot out of boiling water, and slap ‘em together and wrap them in foil for 3-5 minutes, something happens.

I can’t tell you whether it’s psychological (maybe) or whether it’s that foil is all glittery-like, but whatever the reason, after 3.5 minutes the hotdog is still hot, the bun is even more moist, and there’s been a melding of flavors that just needs mustard to complete.

I’m not bad like this very often…most of the time I eat healthy.  But sometimes, I confess, I’m bad.  Really, really bad.  Worse:  No regrets whatsoever.

I figure a couple of dogs on a national holiday can’t possibly be a bad thing.

Besides, since all the rest of our food, except for the odd pizza, is hand-built natural, the minor load of preservatives I pick up will pickle me, more than anything. 

And that’s a thought to be…er….relished.

Salt Ain’t All Bad

Following Monday’s discussion of blood pressure, a reader  (Bill #526) tossed this in the ring:

You need to get up to date on that subject.  Link below will help.
Debunking The Salt Myth: Add This Seasoning to Food Daily
from Dr. Mercola who knows whereof he speaks.

True stuff.  But I can personally eat high-salt and low-salt (of the same food) and push my BP around 10-points or more.  Seriously.

You body is one of the few chemistry sets you can buy anymore than hasn’t been licensed, restricted, regulated, or outlawed.  So keep notes and run your own experiments.

PQQ

There was an important note from a reader about PQQ:  Not all brands seem to work the same (for him):

Hi George,

Are you feeling the Pqq? I ran out of the Life Extension mitochondrial support brand, and have used the Jarrow (top rate company per my highly trained wife) result? I am very energetic but not recovering from exertion as fast. I will revert to the Life Extension brand.

Also, BP is more an issue for me due to lard, alcohol, and other issues. But I had real scare this Fall when my cardiologist said to buy a top shelf monitor and do 3 months on a protocol.

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A number of readers have asked questions like this one:

I noticed that you posted your BP results…I am presently sitting around 150 over 92 with 4mg of coversill.

May I ask what you did to get it down so nicely?  Brian

I could wax on all day about blood pressure, and I am NOT a doctor, so don’t do anything without talking to your healthcare professional.

Having said that…let me go into the long rap…

Data, Data, Data

The very first truth about blood pressure is that it changes all the time. I decided a couple of years ago when my doc put me on HZTZ that it was time to get serious about the problem.  In order to do that, I needed data.  So I picked up a couple of blood pressure cuffs (click on the link, they’re about $40 bucks).

Then I got to logging my personal blood pressure 4-6 times a day and noticing the changes in diet, nutrition, and vitamins and herbs and what-not that seem to make a difference for me.  Your results will differ.

First thing is weight.  If you are packing around an extra 20 pounds (or more) from ideal body weight, you will likely have higher than optimum blood pressure.  But that’s not true for everyone because I’m chunked up at 220+ and still had a reading this morning of 119/68 pulse 62 – that’s at age 65.9.

Hereditary effects matter greatly, too.  On my mother’s side there’s pure Danish blood and few Danes look anemic.  The Scottish side of me…a bit thinner…Dad was I think 185 at his high pointe, but you can get a decent idea of which side of your family you take after by looking at pictures.

Then consider getting an outfit to actually run your DNA and from that, you can begin to optimize your eating style.

Before you change anything, collect at least a week’s worth of data.  The more, the merrier.

The Diet Part

My DNA turns out to be northern European T-6 haplotype, so it’s less grains and more cold weather veggies because that’s what grows in that part of the world.  So I go very light on flour and breads.  Oh, sure, I will break down and gorge on cottage cheese pancakes, or nutmeg spiced French toast once a week, or so.  But mainly it’s meat and vegetables.

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