News

Long-time readers know that from time-to-time, as we attempted to wrap our brains about really, really big problems, we will resort to a blend of fact and fiction in order to make sense of the data that is accumulating before our eyes.

In doing so, we often come up with startling – and oftentimes amusing – takes on the world around us which – in turn – drives better informed investment decisions.  By acknowledging fiction and using it to sketch in some of the detail, we are driven to clearer perception of the facts.

As I was writing up my research outlines this week on our latest batch of home-spun gravity reduction/reduced-mass experiments, it became clear that even modest success in our pursuits could cause monumental problems in terms of World Management.

The concept – world management – is not something that is held in sharp focus.  In fact, I may be one of the few people who talks about it in public. Most conspir5acy types blame the wrong groups.

Read More

We might as well start with some real news.  Latest employment data out from the Labor Department:

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 242,000 in February, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 4.9 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Employment gains occurred in health care and social assistance, retail trade, food services and drinking places, and private educational services. Job losses continued in mining.

Household Survey Data In February, the unemployment rate held at 4.9 percent, and the number of unemployed persons, at 7.8 million, was unchanged.

Read More

It has been a fair while since we have talked much about the anti-gravity project.

THE WHAT????

Oh…how soon you forget!

We have touched on the historical aspects of levitation now and then (like this discussion from January of this year), but I don’t think I have kept you up to speed on the actual science project I have been designing to seriously poke around a bit.

But since you have been a good little wage-slave this week, I will let you in on what I’m working on.

This is actually a very worthwhile project because, to show you how it is that I figure I have as good a chance as CERN, or anyone else, of finding anti-gravity, let me engage you in a little thought experiment.

I mentioned a while back that I was reading the autobiography of Thomas Edison.  There is a method to my madness (which is considerable, make no mistake) but I don’t think I did a good job of articulating things.

Here’s the setup:

Imagine that you were in the shoes of Thomas Edison and you were bound and determined to come up with a solid, working incandescent light bulb.

You have two ways you can go about your task.

One approach would be to take and do a very comprehensive study of all the literature.  You would read everything there was to be learnt (this is old school time, right) about materials science.

Then you would look up everything that was know about electricity.

Then you would look up everything there is to be known about math.

And then you would study vacuum performance of materials.  But oh, sorry, that stuff wasn’t yet known.

Then you would sit down for the rest of your life and try to “pencil out” a working way to FIGURE how to build a light.

Could you do it?

I think not.

I think Edison’s approach (some learning, some actually living life, smoking cigars, and thinking, but spending lots of time in a higher organized way in the lab is the HIGHEST PROBABILITY of success.

So went my little thought experiment.

The Raw Concept Problem

The very first thing we need to do is put together “all the pieces” that we hope to be able to test in our antigravity experiments.

If I said to you “Build an antigravity machine based on the annecdotal reports we have that relate to the field…”

What would you “toss in the pot?”

You would go to everything that you could find even remotely related to UFOs and such as well as publicly available information about what the “elementals” were in such reports.

Here is some (but not all, obviously) of my data set:

• UFO’s (along with none saucer formats of flying/floating devices, such as one my friend Grady saw over Canada a while back) come in two very generalized formats.  One is the traditional (Ken Arnold description) disks while the other is more like a Fedora-style hat.  Commonality:  They all have a ring-like feature that seems to have something to do with the lift but the ring is not likely aerodynamic in function because I have good creds from a reliable witness who debunked the whole “round ducted fan notion” which has made the rounds on the net.
• Philadelphia experiment.  This gets us to the “what goes in the ring?” part.  According to the reports, there is some kind of magnetics which were used at fairly good power levels in order to make a whole ship disappear.  So write down a ring-like structure and magnets. Does ultraviolet light have something to do with it?  Those experiments reportedly used mercury vapor rectifier tubes for high voltages.  Can we get something out of UV OLED’s?
• Plasma may figure in some how, though I am not sure how (although I have some thoughts).  We know there may be some role for plasma because (this isn’t classified, but close) when plasma is injected into the boundary layer of hypersonic airfoils, there are some neat effects.
• Then there are the numerous Ed Leedskalnin coils that were in his shop.  Everyone I think has seen the pictures of his several ton device to generate (it is rumored) lots of lift.  But when Elaine and I toured his famed Coral Castle, the couple of times we were there in the early 2000’s when we lived in Florida, we noted there were numerous coils around – and most of them looked to be build out of regular galvanized fense wire (not barbed, but electric fence wire) and there were lots of guts of old car radios (of vibrator power supplies) and tubes and let me think…what can I make with that?  Oscillators of course.
• Then there is the James Clerk Maxwell lecture where he instructed his students not to look at the magnetic lines of force about magnets, but rather to study the “B-field” – which is the force around magnets which pushed the lines OUT FROM THE MAGNET.
• Let’s not leave out the tale told to me by some former MITRE experts about the reports from the Montauk Experiments.

I also hold John Hutchinson in some regard, although as far as anyone knows, he has not been successful in demonstrating levitation in a laboratory other than his own, but that may be a critical difference in how I approach things compared with others.

I am a process oriented person and I hope to (like Edison) make detailed notes.

Stir and mix gently..

My buddy Vince…;another member of the “friends of George for 50 years club,” and a ham radio op, and so one…has also been helping in the cause.  Great mind and if he wasn’t so busy sitting around his pool living the life of a cell tower magnate near Palm Springs, we might be further along in our design and test plans.  But he’s changing the world in other ways like G4 installations, and those do put food on the take and chlorine in the pool…

The Electronic Driver and Instrumentation Problems

Once you have a tentative design, the next steps are going to be feeding the right electronic signals into the device.

I don’t know if I ever mentioned it, but I have a pretty good electronics bench.  Ham radio types who live in apartments should be warned not to drool.

There’s the Rohde & Schwarz SMY01 which is a signal generator that will cover from 9 KHz to 1 GHz plus.  Digital function generators.  When we get to the collapsing wavefront part we can try a wide range of frequencies, power densities, and waveforms.  And this last (the modulated microwave alleged at Montauk) is what seems more interesting.

The largest problems is instrumentation.

I will be monitoring the project in two ways.  First will be the obvious (buy a good electronic scale) and then calibrate it and record results.

But here’s where we run into a problem (when you think about it).  Suppose you were able to bend space-time just ever so little:  If you did that, how would you notice if all the equipment in your experiment lost apparent mass at the same rate?

Take the scale:  Would it really work if a small amount (like a half a gram) was lost?  One way to do this is to pick the right scale and to use a large mass.  I liked Hutchison’s use of a bowling ball.

But the other instrumentation is a little different.  This involves putting together a small crystal oscillator and placing it in what should be the middle of the bent or time-shifted field.  Because time and/or mass would be different, would the signal from a small crystal oscillator be on the same frequency is monitored on a radio, oh, 20 feet away on the other side of my office?  The inverse square law suggests that when you have something vibrating at 18-million times per second, and you can detect a one or two times per second change, you have the kind of resolution to go looking effects.

Apparatus Construction

This is really the simple part…sort of.

Winding the coils is not particularly difficult.  Counting turns of fine wire is a pain, but if patient.  Maybe I could talk Elaine into helping as she’s far more patient than me.

I won’t show you the whole design, but it is simple enough and (as a hint) the device can be constructed with any even number of nodes, as long as that number happens to be (coincidentally?) at lead six<  As in the Start of David which I thought was an odd enough coincidence.

Experiment Design

The waveforms to drive the device are many and varied.  So we need a frequency and test plan…

So there you have some of the outline of the project.  And on that note, as soon as I get the research finished for Peoplenomics tomorrow and get that written up, I will be deeply into the winding of coils.

Should be fun.

Odds of Success?

Intuitively, there should be something there.  Gravity is a weak force.

But here’s what I think my odds of success are just a little higher than zero.

There has been, near as I can find anywhere in the public view, no real methodical sweep of mass in specific magnetic configurations in a methodical “DC to Daylight” way.

The fact that there is a lot to be learned from such dedicated “sweep” experiments is demonstrated by John Kanzius remarkable success at burning water.  See the YouTube video here.

Think carefullyt about John Kanzius’ success:  If someone had told you that “I’m going to sit down and blast salt water with radio frequency energy and see if I can bust loose something burnable…” would have have called them nuts?

Well, sure.

Damn sham Kanzius didn’t live long enough to push out the technology and do some real optimizations, but since it is a patented process, I have sort of generalized it into…

“If Kanzius can sweep and look for anomalies using RF and water, why can’t I do a sweep using multiple topologies of coil magnetics and look for similar odd effects in the nooks and crannies of Basic Science where no one else goes looking?”

No, I don’t expect success but neither to I expect failure.

This is a science project and like everything else we do around here, we will come up with some hare-brained ideas, dump a few bucks into some far out research into the basics, and if we find anything, well, we first need to find something.

Dream Fragments

The two oddities for this morning:  One dream involved the flight of three large military aircraft.  Might have been a test flight, or something like that.  Got the idea that this test flight was somewhere over the U.S.

Read More

First up we have the Challenger Job Cut report for February.  After having a train wreck in January, this one is just downright peachy:

CHICAGO, March 3, 2016 – After surging to a six-month high to begin the new year, downsizing slowed in February, as US-based employers announced 61,599 job cuts during the month, 18 percent fewer than the 75,114 in January, according to a report released Thursday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.  

The February total was up 22 percent from a year ago, when employers announced 50,579 job cuts during the month.  

Planned job cuts total 136,713 through the first two months of the year, up 32 percent from the same period in 2015, when employers announced layoffs totaling 103,620 in January and February.  

Just as in 2015, the energy sector has seen the heaviest job cutting in the opening months of the year.  These firms announced another 25,051 job cuts in February, bringing the year-to-date total to 45,154.  Most of the cuts in the sector have been attributed to low oil prices.

The 45,154 energy cuts through February represents a 24 percent increase from 2015, when employers in the sector announced 36,532 planned layoffs in the opening two months of the year.

“Low oil prices continue to take a toll on workers in the energy and industrial goods sectors.  Since January of 2015, these two sectors alone have seen workforce reductions in excess of 200,000, the majority of which were attributed to oil prices.  The major concern is that the job losses in cities and towns that rely heavily on oil production will begin to drag down other parts of the local economy,” said John A. Challenger, chief executive officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

Read More

Markets are not falling apart.  The “usual suspects” will face off in November.  And Spring is slowly coming along, punctuated by the occasional earthquake.

That last point actually figures into this morning’s report of some serious personal woo-woo, so let me roll back to the beginning.

As long-term readers will remember, I am terribly prone to two rather unique things.  One is that I become tired before major earthquakes.  And I got the “earthquake tired” feeling on Tuesday afternoon about 2 PM Texas time.

The second unique thing that happens to me is that I have vivid dreams (and I mean like iMax vivid) on an increasingly frequent basis.  Often times, these dreams will either be about an event in the immediate future (by a day or longer, but sometimes just an hour or two ahead of events) while other times it’s like being at the scene of an actual news event.

Two Recent Example of Accurate Dream Content

I’m sure you remember the weird bus dream and how the actual event occurred in South Melbourne Australia.  (It was described in Dream #3 here: https://urbansurvival.com/coping-the-cool-part-about-aging/.) 

Less noticed might have been my note in the February 25 Coping section column about my motorcycle dream, down toward the bottom of this page: https://urbansurvival.com/coping-coloring-books-for-seniors/ 

One Other Dream Note

Damnedest dream overnight:  Kept dreaming about being on a motorcycle with some kind of throttle problem.  In fact, at one point, while riding, the throttle control simply fell off the right handlebar.  The inside of the mechanism was clear in the dream, too…

I don’t know if this means there is a recall coming, or if someone famous loses throttle control, or what.  But it was intense and I thought worth mentioning.  News scan at press time doesn’t show anything big.  Believe me, I’m on the lookout for this one.  It’s been 30-years since my old Virago 650 shaft-drive and no reason to dream of it now.  The bike in the dream was more like a moto-cross rice-burner…

Well, try not to look surprised or anything, but here we go:

February 26th (28 hours after the dream posting): “Recall News: 2016 Kawasaki ZX-10R Motorcycles.”

And February 29th:  “Kawasaki recalls Ninja ZX-10R and Ninja ZX-10R ABS motorcycles – The steering damper bracket mounting bolts may break.”

Hmmm…oddly timed and a bit if advance again.  It’s like riding a wild pony on this stuff.

So Here’s the Latest Dream / Adventure

Timeline:  I was dreaming this dream from about 3:07 AM until my 4:00 AM alarm on the morning of March 2.  I had stirred about 3 AM, glanced at the clock and scolded myself for leaving a dream.  This was the first time I can remember when I woke from a dream (which was making no sense), went back into the dream – figured out the story line and then followed the dream to its strange waking-state results.

The first part of the dream was on-going.  I was not myself.  Rather, I was younger, wearing jeans and only a very light shirt and I was in a kind of run-down restaurant or hotel.

There was a dog in the scene.  Pretty ugly mutt.  Looked like a cross between a dachshund and a Chihuahua.  The dog looked like a cross with all the bad features of each breed:  The temperament of the Chihuahua and its legs, and the upper body of the dachshund. 

The dog had been scooting it’s butt on the floor which was dirty.  The room was whites, yellows, and blues…lots of blues in the furniture.

I didn’t like dog and figured by the way he was biting on his personal parts that he had a bad case of worms.  The dog then wanted to get up on my calves (which were on something like an ottoman) but I remember I didn’t want anything to do with that damn dog because if he bit, I would get God knows what. 

He also had something white (like a kids white sock) in his mouth.

I was in a distinctly grumpy mood…and I woke up.

(checked the clock, a minute or two after 3 AM so I decided to return to sleep and without forcing anything, I dropped back into the dream)

In this recliner, I was still miserable, but after a while a fellow speaking Spanish came in wearing a kind of khaki-colored uniform.  Looked sort of like an old Barney Fife get-up and he had a brown clipboard and he was prattling on about the terms of my arrival.

He said that I should really have cleared into the country elsewhere instead of coming from the country next door directly.

I blamed it on my pilot, a local fellow from the other country, who had flown me in this rickety old Cessna 172.  The plain had landed on a dusty road nearby instead of the local airfield.

Eventually, after making me wait some more, so he could “show me who was in charge” the officer  who was something like a cross between Customs and a cop, let me go and I was free to seek out my friends.

I then experienced what a film director would call a “jump cut.”  One moment I was being berated by the local power-freak and the next moment I was in the company of a couple of other scientists and we were looking at something that looked like an artesian well that was issuing forth water across about a 50-foot face of an obviously manmade stoneworks around the fountain. 

In the background were mountains, but they were unusual because they had no trees on them.  What’s more, I knew this area was in the “crook” of the Pacific Coast of South America, even though I have only been near that part of the world once before.  That was 32 years ago on a flight to Guayaquil to Lima and that was in the middle of the night… a good ways north of the dream site.

The conversation we were having was quite animated.  The issue seemed to be whether “the earthquake would damage the water flow from this artesian spring…”

(loud obnoxious noise)

Damn, the alarm went off and I was back on this side of the dream again.  Shoot-damn, and just as things were getting interesting again.

– – – – – – – –

As usual, I got up, made coffee, fed the cat, loaded up on vitamins, and then sat down to digest the day’s news. 

Suddenly, while checking the USGS website, I realized the dream had a serious woo-woo angle to it because of what was showing on the US Geological Survey website:

Quickly, I started in disbelief.  Could it be?

The I looked at the official data report:

Time

1. 2016-03-02 09:49:53 (UTC)
2. 2016-03-02 03:49:53 (UTC-06:00) in your timezone
3. Times in other timezones

Nearby Cities

1. 52km (32mi) WSW of Arica, Chile
2. 92km (57mi) SW of Tacna, Peru
3. 131km (81mi) SSE of Ilo, Peru
4. 166km (103mi) S of Moquegua, Peru
5. 366km (227mi) SW of La Paz, Bolivia

HOLY CRAP!  Right as I was dreaming in the dream about the possibility of “the quake damaging the artesian flow THE QUAKE HAPPENED IN REAL LIFE.

A Little Too “IRL?”

Since it was Wednesday morning, I took my second cup of coffee out in the office and didn’t think much more about the incident until about 8 AM when I went back to the house to scout up some breakfast.

Elaine was running a bit late so I looked at the data from earlier in the morning.  I’ve had enough of this stuff happen that there were no cold chills running up the spine, or anything like that.

Instead, it was more of an acceptance.  Yeah, this had happened.  I took in the USGS map looking for landmarks.

Since I am real big on “sticking to the data” I decided to look and see what was on the internet about “artesian springs north Chile.”

I mean, how common would Artesian springs be in a pretty dry area, right?

Wrong.

I about froze when I found this as the second search result out of Google Books:

This is from a 1965 U.S. Department of Interior book titled “Geology and Ground-water Resources of the Pica Area, Tarapaca Province, Chile” by Robert James Dingman, Carlos Galli Olivier.

Read More

Having taken on some causative economics, the difficulties ahead for food (with an important addendum this morning) and shelter, not to mention sizing up the possibilities of the government calling gold and silver, we come this morning to the problems of transportation in the Second Depression.

With the market performance again this week, the case continues to build that we are more likely to have a 1920’s style blow-off top later this year, and into next, long before we have a complete melt-down, but it will be at that precise moment that all your wisdom will be necessary to keep from being sucked into dangerous herd-following actions.

Before we dig in there, a look at our charts, the first of the week’s job numbers, and a quick sizing-up o the “super” Tuesday results at the polls.

Read More

Yes!  At last!  Super Tuesday.  Don’t read this within 100-feet of a polling place, though.

You see, a lot of people vote for all the wrong reasons.

• They vote the “Party Ticket.”
• They vote “Conservative [or Liberal] Principles.”
• Many will vote today based on “Gender” and some hogslop about “Needing a female President.”
• A few will “Vote racial preference.”
• Others will vote “name familiarity.”
• A good number will vote “Based on promises of future action.”

In fact, as I will explain, ALL OF THESE ARE WRONG as I have it figured.

1. The Party Ticket?  There has been no major action of fixing the border despite the republicans having a majority in both the House and Senate.  In fact, there’s a story this morning about how Obama, et al, are quietly planning to increase the number of Syrian refugees coming into America.  Worse, there’s also a report that illegal southern border immigration has hit a new all time high.

Both political parties are responsible.

Read More

I mean, shouldn’t this be a holiday, or something?

Who wants to get up in the morning, see the futures are down a bit on the Dow, figure we are due for Ure’s pullback here, and see the umpteenth rerun of “Republicans Acting Stupid?”

Wait!  Are you sure it’s an act?  Hmmm…

Ah, well, we will get to that but first a short summary of world markets:  Japan was down 1%, Hong Kong down 1.3%, the Shanghai was down 2.86% and Europe was a mixed bag.  The Germans were down 0.9%, the French were treading water, and Brits were making bank, up 1.18% because they have enough send to maybe get into Brexit Rehab, which should keep them alive.

Gold is up another $12 bucks when I looked and everyone seems to be anxious to splash pixels with how there are worries about the Fed raising (with good reason, they should) and there are worries about the impact of the G20 last week.  But the reality is that the G20 doesn’t want to blow over the house of cards more than anyone else, so it’s not going to happen.

As for the data this week, there are motor vehicle sales tomorrow, the ADP and Gallup on jobs Wednesday.  Thursday, Challenger jobs cuts come along with productivity and cost data, factory orders, and miscellaneous who-cares.  And then we get to the Offihsul (sic) Employment Data on Friday.

If that one comes in at 4.9%, I would expected the Federal Reserve to feel more pressure to raise rates.  Otherwise, people will begin to worry about wage-driven inflation.

Stoopabama

And speaking of Wages, just how stupid is Alabama?  “Ala. city raises minimum wage, legislature strips it.”  Seems to me that Alabama is at a crossroads here:  Let wages rise so people can get back a little bit, or be the ass-clowns of the corporates and keep people working for peanuts (though I guess that would be Georgia, so maybe a different phrase…you plug in something here).

The Poor South has sold out to the Rich Corporations as “Bentley signs bill blocking Birmingham minimum wage.” 

Just for fun, if you have some time, you might want to look at how much of his last campaign was paid for by small folks ($100 and under) and how much was paid by the Rich ($101 and up) money.

Just so we’re clear on this GovBob, here’s how things work:  Just like Alabamans may resent the strong central government in Washington, don’t you think cities passing their own response to local economic conditions would resent excessive government at the State level? 

You can’t have it both ways, dude. Unless you’re just trying to be “the man” for the whole state which makes you more of an overseer than governor.  Just because some lawmakers get reactionary, doesn’t mean you have to put on the dunce hat.

People just don’t seem to see things clearly.

Read More

Although we’re going to talk a bit about flying, the FAA’s WINGS program, and all that “stuff” that goes into being a pilot, this is really a story about how to get really good at something over time; and how good hobbies help us live – and think – better.

A lot of people have hobbies, but there are those who take hobbies seriously and there are people who I would call the dilettantes; people who pursue something in a half-hearted and half-assed way.

You see it in all sports and pursuits, the people who take things on a so-so basis. At the end of the day they just sort of play-at whatever they profess their hobby to be.

It’s like the gun owners who don’t own a gun for a purpose (personal protection, hunting, or marksmanship) and instead just use it as a brag tool.  “Yo, moe foe I gotta Glock!”  So?  Step out here to the 15-meter line and hit that playing card up there on the backstop…call next week when you hit it.

Now, you take your 50-caliber Barrett sniper rifle:  I know people who actually own them and live in Texas.  But to them, it’s a tool – and this one fellow in particular I know goes back to the East Coast now and then as an instructor because he’s that good. I won’t tell you the “alligator at a mile” stories… but there are other folks who can’t hit the side of a barn at a thousand yards with the same gun.  You see the difference, I hope.  In the hands of my friend, it’s an art form.  In the hands of someone without serious training?  It’s a large noise-maker.

Or, as another example, during the time I lived on my sailboat and actually did serious sailing, there were those of us who went out and ran the mid-winter “Iceberg Regatta.” Then there were the people who were hanging around the bar when we got back from serious sailing to have a warm-up toddy.  The bar was always full of wannabes who wouldn’t know how to tie a bowline, let around behind their back, let alone at night, let alone on a pitching foredeck.  So you see what I mean.  Furniture boat crowd versus sailors.

This weekend, I had two days being deadly serious about one of my hobbies, which is flying the old Beechcraft around.  

Although I took one of my neighbors up for a quick bit of sightseeing on Saturday, the real agenda of this weekend was to make sure I was still “sharp” on the stick and a safe pilot. Although not required for another nine months, my biennial flight review (BFR) and more, is done.

To do that, there are three things that helped to make that happen: Training, rest, and vitamins.

First, I am a huge believer in doing advanced coursework – way beyond whatever the minimums are for any hobby.  Yes,  You can fly an airplane with 40-50 hours of flight time, a check-ride every two years and a third class medical.  Three take-offs and landings every 90 days and you can be “legal” for visual rules.

We get readers, now and then, who tell us they worry about our flying all over the country, which we do.  They express various safety concerns.

What most people don’t know (because I haven’t discussed it much, but will this morning) is that I go so far past the minimum requirements that it’s ridiculous.

That item above right, for example, is my FAA WINGS transcript.  It lists 30- courses and check-rides in the past four years.  None of this is required, but if you take the hobby seriously (and want to live a long time) you go the extra mile and continue education. 

As a result, I’ve been through such courses ad “Aging Gracefully, Flying Safely,” “Accidental Causal Factors:  Stabilized Approaches,” and certification to fly the “Washington DC Special Flight Rules Area.”  Plus tons of other topics covering positive aircraft control, loss of control accident analysis, gobs of weather, icing, and severe thunderstorm tactics and so on…(the best one is stay at the hotel, BTW.)

And I have what I consider the finest flight instructor in the world.  A ranked aerobatics competitor who’s a retired 767 driver.

Read More

OK, you’re wonder, what is a “brain amplifier?”

Well, odds are good you’re reading this on some kind of a computer and they are definitely “brain amplifiers” but few people use them as they could be used to do things like, oh, make better stock trades and such. 

Instead, people tend to take off-the-net software, plug in some really basic configuration nonsense and call it “an application.”

While that works for Social Media and a few goodies like that, they are not likely to make you any richer financially and they will almost certainly withdraw a lot of your time from your life bank of that stuff.

So this morning a rap about “Bain Amplifiers” and how to apply a little Peter Drucker to the time we walk around.

So in order to really begin to take more control of our lives and outcomes, let’s bean-up and move along to some headlines and our charts…

Read More