Hurricanes and Soap Bubbles – a Monday Schema – Ape Training

Futures are up — duh — because that “thing” we were talking about Friday is still in the process of peaking.

That thing is what we call a Belief Wave.

At its peaks, markets can show remarkable temporal coherence. In Saturday’s Peoplenomics ChartPack, we explained how, between the Dow, S&P, and NASDAQ, two indices were hitting unusual “double-zero days” while the third was sitting in a “triple-zero.” With a high close today in all three, we may score double “triple-zeros” and a “quad-zero” in our Magic Ovals view of markets.

With no obvious exogenous drivers visible yet, markets are on autopilot. Which increases the odds of a Turnaround Tuesday tomorrow.

But that’s tomorrow’s coffee.

Today’s Blink is bigger.

Because the vector changed.

The resumption of U.S. strikes against Iranian targets moved the world away from a clean diplomatic-resolution track and back toward managed confrontation. Markets hear missiles before they hear speeches, and oil repriced the risk almost immediately because the Strait of Hormuz is not some obscure line on a naval chart. It is one of the world’s key energy arteries.

The question is no longer whether tensions remain. The question is whether anyone still controls the escalation ladder. That is the Big Monday Blink. Not panic. Vector change.

On Hurricanes, Hormuz, and Soap Bubbles

This could be a complicated series if you’re not used to the worldview-based reality checks we do around here.

Much of the blathernet is based on faux rage and ill-advised commentary. A waste of time to follow, but it monetizes well. So if you have enough time to piss away making someone else money, have at it.

Around here, we like to begin with a “template review,” which — as you’ll see in a moment — has a lot of interesting background. From there, we use our template work and run off, like the Good Apes we are, to maniacally test-fit whatever is laying around into the template to see if anything fits, or might fit in the near future.

That’s how today’s workflow starts.

The Hurricane Part First

Spew-media is all over the story that June 1 — today, if the coffee hasn’t kicked in yet — is the beginning of Atlantic Hurricane Season. Between now and November 30, the Atlantic risk is officially open for business.

On the Pacific side, it’s a little different. Eastern Pacific hurricane season begins earlier — May 15 — and also runs through November 30. Farther west, once you get past the meteorological name-tab line, the same sort of big rotating wind machines become typhoons.

Not to be confused with the old G.M. high-performance truck models, which also included the Cyclone, which would wander us off into a different convo entirely. ShopTalk Sunday, maybe. With wrenches.

There are two Pacific watch zones today, neither of which looks like a record-book contender on the scale of Hurricane Iniki over Kauai in September 1992, Hurricane Lane in August 2018, or Hurricane Douglas in July 2020.

Still, the point is not the storm. The point is the map.

The daily National Hurricane Center maps show us how little disturbances off Africa can move west, organize, strengthen, and eventually flatten Gulf and East Coast seaside cities. We don’t watch those maps because every cloud is a catastrophe. We watch them because little disturbances sometimes become large consequences. That’s the template.

• Little disturbance.
• Long fetch.
• Warm water.
• Organization.
• Landfall.
• Damage.

History often works the same way.

Sailing Trivia and Pacific Hurricanes

If you are still chained to a screen — or shop floor — counting the days to retirement so you can “go sailing,” one of the premier events to roll with is the Baja Ha-Ha, organized by the West Coast sailing rag Latitude 38. Better mates under sail are seldom found.

This is the cruising deal: an annual rally from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, about 750 miles, with stops at Turtle Bay and Bahía Santa María. The fleet typically casts off in early November.

In 2026, the Ha-Ha runs November 2–14 from San Diego.

If you get to work on it right now, you’ll have just enough time to rob eleven banks, buy a sailboat under a fictitious name, get arrested by the FBI, post bail, and be out on bond at exactly the moment when casting off would be a good idea.

Otherwise, new glasses for the screen and new shop-floor togs are probably the safer entry vector.

Still, if your timing is good, you might get lost in the crowd. Out-on-bond timing rocks.

Recent numbers give the scale of the floating tribe: in 2024, 131 boats signed up, 100 started, and 98 finished. Around the 2018–2019 era, 149 boats and 551 sailors were reported. Across the first 30 years, more than 3,000 boats and 14,000 sailors made the run.

Having spent over a decade before the mast, I assure you the Ha-Ha is no laughing matter.

Still, you may be asking, “What the hell is all this sailing BS about?” Oh. No coffee yet?

Weather Templates for News Forecasting

Part the second, then, if it’s too early to go dot-connecting.

Weather forecasting teaches a useful mental discipline. You don’t wait for the roof to leave before asking whether a disturbance is worth watching. You look at energy, track, pressure, steering currents, historical analogs, and the open water ahead.

We do something similar with news.

We deploy reasonably competent AI models to sniff around obscure “event coasts” to see where clouds might be forming. Not because every cloud becomes a storm, but because some storms look ridiculous before they become obvious.

This weekend, Polish seer Krzysztof Jackowski’s outlook included a long discussion of how “bubbles pop,” and that struck us as a cue to get out the template book. Because he wasn’t talking about markets. He was talking about geopolitics, war, fragile lives, and mass migrations around Eastern Europe.

In Jackowski’s worldview, people are like soap bubbles floating on water: delicate, ambitious, full of plans, love, hatred, possessions, desire, and certainty — yet never knowing when the bubble pops. That image matters because it fits our current problem set too well.

• Markets are in a bubble-pattern.
• Diplomacy is in a bubble-pattern.
• Refugee systems are in a bubble-pattern.
• Energy logistics are in a bubble-pattern.
• And bubbles do not always pop because someone attacks them. Sometimes they pop because a tiny pressure change finally exceeds the surface tension.

The Ukraine/Poland Template

Specifically, we have been worried about power outages in the Baltics, the Zaporizhzhia Ukraine Nuclear Power Station problem, and a possible related migration event involving Poland.

Jackowski’s translated signal included this:

“Something like this will happen that, for some reason, many citizens of Ukraine, in a short time, in some way, will move from Ukraine to Poland. Maybe it will be other countries also on the side of Ukraine, but the largest number of this population will move to Poland.

“So in Ukraine, something like this happens that a lot of Ukrainian citizens will move to Poland. Who knows if there will be a situation that more of them will move than when the conflict in Ukraine began. I don’t feel war in Poland, I feel a kind of exodus. So in Ukraine, something would have to happen. The problem of Ukraine. Gda?sk events…”

That is not a clean prediction. It is a signal cluster.

• Exodus.
• Ukraine.
• Poland.
• Gda?sk Events.
• No war in Poland.
• Pressure.

If we run that through a new/weather-forecasting template, a plausible scenario tree begins to form. Not prophecy. Scenario.

1. A nuclear plant incident, major safety scare, or credible contamination threat in Ukraine.
2. A large civilian movement westward.
3. Poland absorbs the largest share.
4. Social and economic stresses increase.
5. Localized incidents occur between groups.
6. One incident becomes internationally visible.
7. “Gda?sk Events” becomes shorthand for that incident.
8. Diplomatic pressure follows.
9. International organizations become involved.
10. Negotiations begin over rights, protections, zones, aid, status, autonomy, compensation, and who gets blamed.

In that framework, Gda?sk does not have to be the cause. It becomes the conference room. Or the camera shot. Or the diplomatic label. Or the place where a refugee-management problem becomes an international slicing-and-dicing exercise.

Port cities have a way of becoming more than port cities when history gets busy.

Big Monday Blink: The Vector Changes

Now bring the template back to this morning. The vector changes over the weekend.

The resumption of U.S. strikes against Iranian targets moved events away from a clean diplomatic resolution and back toward managed confrontation. Markets hear missiles before they hear speeches.

Oil immediately repriced geopolitical risk because the Strait of Hormuz remains one of the world’s most important chokepoints. The question is no longer whether tensions remain. The question is whether anyone still controls the escalation ladder.

Watch shipping, not headlines. Ships, insurance rates, and commodity flows often reveal the real situation before governments do.

Migration remains an underpriced risk.
Wars create refugees, but so do infrastructure failures, energy shortages, nuclear scares, and suddenly uninsurable places.

The Zaporizhzhia Ukrainian nuke plant problem never went away.
The plant is under Russian control, near the war zone, not operating as normal power generation, and still dependent on cooling and power arrangements that should make grownups sweat. A major safety event there would push populations westward, and Poland remains the most likely destination.

Pressure moves before armies do. Financial pressure, refugee pressure, political pressure, insurance pressure, energy pressure, and narrative pressure often arrive months before military pressure.

The world is becoming more coupled.
A drone strike in the Gulf can move fuel prices, shipping costs, fertilizer costs, food prices, election politics, and public mood half a world away.

The old assumption was stabilization. The new assumption should be volatility.

The Blink is simple:
When the vector changes, stop extrapolating from yesterday’s trend line and start looking for the next pressure point.

What to Watch

So what are we actually watching? Not just headlines. Headlines are mostly weather reports written by people standing indoors.

• Watch oil.
• Watch tanker insurance.
• Watch Hormuz shipping behavior.
• Watch LNG pricing.
• Watch fertilizer.
• Watch wheat.
• Watch refugee flows.
• Watch Poland.
• Watch Gda?sk.
• Watch power reliability around Ukraine.
• Watch Zaporizhzhia reporting.
• Watch whether officials start using humanitarian language where they used to use military language.
• Watch whether “temporary” protections become “zones.”
• Watch whether “aid” becomes “rights.”
• Watch whether “rights” become “autonomy.”
• Watch whether “autonomy” becomes sovereignty by other means.

That’s how slicing and dicing begins. Not with marching bands. With committees. And forms. And emergency language. And cameras. And then some poor bastard says, “Well, given the circumstances…”

History does not always arrive in a tank. Sometimes it arrives as a policy memo.

Back to the Market

Meanwhile, markets can still float higher because belief waves are real enough for trading purposes. A market doesn’t have to be rational to be tradable. It only has to be coherent long enough for the pattern to matter.

But belief waves peak. Soap bubbles pop. Hurricanes organize. Missiles change vectors. And migration tells the truth before governments do.

That’s why today with June beginning, the world feels a tiny bit different.

Not because everything breaks today. Because the board tilted. And once the board tilts, everything that was sitting quietly on the table starts looking for the low side.

Around the Ranch: Ape Training Notes

Neighbor’s boy is turning six years old momentarily.

So, in the interest of helping his parents raise a suitable replacement human, he got a dandy stack of goodies for his birthday.

Prizes included a nice Snap Circuits set because a young person needs to get acquainted with electricity on this planet sooner or later.

He also got a “make it nine ways” crane, bulldozer, earth-mover kit.

Plus a copy of the Cub Scouts Handbook, circa 1958, when it was functionally oriented and had little social content.

In short, a great haul.

Even gave his dad an earlier-times copy of the Boy Scouts Field Book. Again — probably incorrectly, too — one from before social anything and with lots more hands-on. Pictures of bugs and poisonous plants, which is a useful thing to learn out here.

It’s a great father-son relationship to watch bloom.

They just recently got power strung to their little cabin on a family pond. So Friday nights they can sneak out of cell and screen range, burn hot dogs, and do the kind of bonding that has been mostly missing for a couple of generations now.

Oh — the boy also landed a 12-inch bass. That was almost a Mark Twain moment.

Until I realized — working on The Time Farmer’s Secret book — that I was helping build another test-fitting ape.

The entire rest of Sunday blew up from that point on.

Because I am profoundly bothered by the question I asked:

“What is the difference between a tribe of self-delusion-sharing people calling themselves ‘educated’ and a troop of apes test-fitting every tool, everywhere, every which way, to see what works and then keeping track of it?”

I’m still trying to shake that this morning.

We tell ourselves we are educated. But how exactly is that different from a troop of test-fitting apes sharing results over time?

Maybe I’m just going, oh, bananas?

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net