News

As I lay in bed at about midnight, brain on fire again with too many ideas, one of the major gripes about modern life formed in my mind.  It’s something so simple that even a child should be able to figure it out.  Yet no one actually does.

It’s this matter of planned and accidental obsolescence.

Seemed like everything I touched this weekend had some kind of planned “end of life” built into it.  Here’s the story…

Panama had come over one morning last week wondering why his computer was making a whining noise.  He’d taken it into the shop, opened it up, blown out the accumulated dust since the machine was coming up on its six-month inspection time anyway. 

We try to do that around here:  Take each computer we own  and check it out thoroughly at half-year intervals.  Mainly it’s blowing out the dust, but there can be more to it, as well:  Driver checks, disk checks with SpinRite from Gibson Research, and so on.

Powering it back up, the culprit in the brother-in-law tower turned out to be the power supply and once that was discovered, all I had to do was go into my office, open the supplies cabinet and pull out the right replacement power supply.  15-minutes later, the power supply was in, the computer back in service – absent the whining fan – and Panama and his SO/GF could get back to her online homework.  Runs like a top.

I didn’t think much about it – at least not right then:  It vaguely occurred to me that we may be the only hard-core preppers in the world whose idea of prepping includes a back-up power supply wrapped in foil for every computer on the premises, though..

Saturday, I got up and while working on projects outside (the deck) I decided to get serious about the bothersome computer in the recording studio.  That computer had been showing serious instability issues and I got to wondering whether it was somehow related to a slowly-failing power supply.

Diagnostics followed and sure enough, what’s the one thing that can cause instability once you have chased down drivers and run half a dozen anti-virus, rootkit, and malware hunting programs?

The damn power supply.

The recording computer is nothing special:  A four or five year old Acer. The kind which they stupidly put in a DVD without the emergency open paper click hole.  Other than this design flaw, it hasn’t been a good or bad machine – it’s just a Win-7 box running 64-bit mode with 8gB and a recently added high end graphics card to drive the dual monitors.

Just for the hell or it, out comes another power supply:  This one was a recent Sentey® Power Supply 725w Xpp725-hs / Computer Power Supply ATX / 140mm Fan Sleeve Bearing / 48ampers / 5 Sata / 2 Pci-e 6-2 / SLI Ready / Crossfire Ready / 115-230 Voltage / Power Cord / 3 Years Warranty which goes for $47 if you have Amazon Prime. Don’t order it yet…you’ll understand why in a minute.

Not too surprisingly, after installing the new power supply, I fired off the music computer, reran the upgrade readiness tool, the HotFixes, and cleaned up the old update crap.  Fired it off and it was like a brand new machine.

It has been happily “healing itself” overnight, but updates that previously wouldn’t load are going in fine and confidence is high that it will work as planned.  Although that’s often a sign of disaster in the wings, so knock on wood..

This is not to say that every computer failure is linked to heat and power issues, but I suspect quite a few are.  And if you really want to be “prepped” from an I.T.

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We’ll chat this morning about life beyond prepping and PCO: post-collapse operations.  Let me ramble here and explain why.

When UrbanSurvival started down the “invincibly prepared” path in 1997, I was living on a 40-foot sailboat up in Seattle and wondering “Just how bad could it get, this Y2K stuff?”

As it turns out, while there were tons of small computer issues, massive code rewrites to deal with the date-rollover saved the day – at least for then.

Next came the events of 9/11 and we saw how financial markets could (and did) react to something going terribly wrong.  Money in markets was simply not available if instantly needed in the face of calamity. 

Although it’s popular to let the Bush administration off the hook, that the ensuing war was a manipulation in order to invent a “Security State” overnight (employing a million people, directly and indirectly) is hardly deniable.

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So let me ask you something:

If you knew that one of the keys to future economic success for your country was oil, would you think the stock market should be going up, or down?

Hint:  Oil is going up.

Second Question:  If there was a regional war going on where cruise missiles were being tossed around and your country was on the wrong side of the conflict and had just pissed away a multi-billion dollar program of making up enemies in order to effect regime change, should the stock market of that country be going up, or down?

Hint:  See last story in this morning’s column.

Yet here we are, barely an hour and a half from the opening of the market and the futures are pointing to a tiny gain come the open of trading.

You need ViseGrips to pinch yourself and a hookah to self-medicates in markets like this one.  Although to me it has a kind of air of the Friday before Black Monday back in 1987…

The drivers are all there for vicious downside action:  futures have run up hugely since the last options expiration, and Wall Street doesn’t like paying gamblers.

Then there’s the fact of Brent Crude oil which is over $53 a barrel this morning.  And as if that is not inflationary enough, have you been watching the price of gold and silver in the past couple of weeks? 

Silver is over $16 and Gold is holding above $1,150.

Now let’s toss into the equation that the US dollar is falling relative to the Euro as well.

To me?  It’s a case for rapidly escalating prices – and that would/ought to be trashing the Bond market in here.  But, no, the 10-year Treasury Note is holding about 2.11 percent – which is way below where it should be, given all the gathering forces of future inflation to come.

All of this is incredibly mysterious to me:  the market should be in the crapper – we’re losing a war in Syria.  The price of oil is climbing, and while that will be good for US oil companies, it will mean hell on Houston’s freeways is likely to become a permanent feature of life.

New import and export price data:

Prices for U.S. imports edged down 0.1 percent in September, after a 1.6-percent decrease in August, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

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Things are becoming surreal, these days.

We have Russia kicking the butts of ISIS, a feat the U.S. hasn’t been able to do with all of our [purported] might and which the Putin shock troops seem to have accomplished in a month.

The main problem created is what?

The U.S. public – common folks like you and me – might begin to see through the global Kabuki of it all and figure out that what we are fed is not what we should eat.

But how does a security state-framed West go about defusing a serious story like Syria, especially when it is one that could go theater nuclear as early as this weekend?

Well, the answer, strange as it may seem, is to press the restart button on some older conspiracies.

It’s psychological control.  Consider fighting forest fires, think of it as a “back fire” – a little fire, or three – set to deny the larger fire fuel.

Fuel, in the case of U.S.

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WW III is on, at least in part:  The Russian-backed Syria government has launched another massive attack on ISIS this morning.  Later today, the U.S. markets may wake up to the fact we’re been flanked and fooled and Iran may taken Iraq.

Over on the www.peoplenomics.com side of the house, we’ve been chasing down a crackpot theory about how the market of today has a curious resonance with an earlier period.

In this highly experimental work, we are considering the period that would match today with September of 2011.  That was a period of marked decline, just as today is, or should be shortly.

This is terribly important stuff to watch for a number of reasons, not the least of which is that it demonstrates the “Manufacturer’s Resource Wars” which should put the 30-years War to shame.

Since we suspect this fall of 2011 period, I went looking for more details about how the U.S. was doing with its “foreign entanglements” back then:  And from a BBC website page:

2011 August – Violence escalates, with more than 40 apparently co-ordinated nationwide attacks in one day.

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I haven’t done this for a while, but it is one of those things that should be on your list of things to do periodically around the house, particularly if you are extremely sensitive to radio frequency noise.

“Yeah, yeah…sounds like engineering crap to me…”

Maybe because it is.  But it doesn’t make it unimportant. 

Granted, if you listen to FM radio and streaming only, chasing down AM radio noise is a time sink.  But, with winter coming, there’s a certain magic in being able to tune the dial and mentally transport yourself to a different city. 

Up in Seattle, as a young whippersnapper, I listen to Ira Blue on KGO – first of the talk radio greats. 

I can categorically state that I sleep better when two conditions are met in my surroundings.

First, I like to sleep grounded.  We have been enjoying our “earthing half sheet” for months now and consider it a worthwhile experiment.

Secondly, I don’t do well when there is electrical noise around.  For someone who has spent half his life around AM and FM radio stations, that might seem paradoxical.

But there are radio signals (which are not terribly disturbing to my energy) and there are audio signals superimposed on those carriers.

That ain’t noise.

No sir, what I’m talking about is the broadband hash that comes of line-frequency switched mode power supplies.  This are simply god-awful things to hear.

The Test Tool

I have a cheap AM/FM radio of the sort you can get for $20-bucks. I keep it next to the bed and when I wake up in the middle of the night (see Brain on Fire) and can’t get back to sleep, I will tune around the AM radio band and unless there is a big geomagnetic disturbance, either Ground Zero or Coast to Coast AM will be coming in from WOAI down in San Antonio.

I haven’t been listening much to the radio lately because I have been so damn busy.  Flight plans, travel plans, reservations, cruise, writing, novel, finishing up projects around the house – there’s a daily list that never gets down.  You know how that rolls.

But the other morning, I happened to wake up and there went the brain…not on fire yet, but definitely smoldering.

The quickest way to zone out, I figured would be a dose of AM radio.  So I turned on the radio and @#$%T^&*BZZZZTTTTT!!!   Static. 

From one end of the AM  dial to the other…static.  Horrible whining generator noise broadband power supply noise.  I have a pretty good ear for signal strength and in most positions, the noise on the little radio would have been 40 to 60 over S-9 on a real communications receiver…

….except…  There was one position where if I held the radio absolutely steady and not letting it move more than an eighth of an inch, the static would be off to the side of the built-in AM ferrite bar antenna (which is very directional) and I could hear the station.

Hell of it was that each time I was about to snooze out, my hand would move, thus the radio and I’d get another earful of @#$%T^&*BZZZZTTTTT!!!   Static.

Knowing the only tool I would need would be this AM radio, tuned between stations around 700 on the dial, I swore that before the day was out, I would find the source of this damn electrical  PITA and solve it once and for good.

The first thing I did was wander around the house.  AM radio on.  Seemed like the noise was louder in the bathrooms and the kitchen, but couldn’t be sure.

OK, step two then:  I killed all the power to the house.

Whoosh…….just nice normal atmospheric noise.  Please.

Next:  Turn the big stuff back on: 

Stove, hot water heat, dryer.  Blissful Whoosh….as quiet radio bands are supposed to sound.

One by one the breakers went on…until finally, next to last breaker on the right side of the panel was flipped on.  Care to guess?

@#$%T^&*BZZZZTTTTT!!!   Static.

OK…now all I needed to do was wander around the house and find that circuit and begin to manually unplug things.

There, in the kitchen, I found my culprit.

Our Foodsaver!.  What the hell?

So I grabbed an AC line filter and threw it on thinking that ought to cure the problem.

Wrong.

Actually made the noise worse.

The simple remedial action was to unplug the Foodsaver.  There was something else about this outlet that was interesting:  Even plugging in the lame $15 Wal-Mart toaster increased the noise level a  bit.

Damn odd, curious, and confounding. 

Now I have another project on the list:  Dig out my outlet checker and find out what’s going on with that outlet.  Is the ground off it? Are the hot and cold wires reversed on the plug?  Or, WTF is going on with it?

That’s as far as I got on it…there are more pressing items.  But sure as hell, this was a strange one and while I love my Foodsaver, the idea of this outlet being noisy leads to all kinds of other suppositions.

Might a GFI protector be in the process of failing and somehow that’s figuring into how things on this circuit are working?  Is the neutral and ground touching?

Or, is the Foodsaver power supply in this particular unit really noisy (electronically) for reasons that aren’t clear to me, except there would have to be a solid-state switch to turn the sealing element on and maybe that somehow is connected to the AC line?

Hell of a fine adventure.

By the way, when you find a problem (like this one) where you can narrow down the source of noise (which went completely away when the Foodsaver was unplugged) you can use the noise source to “calibrate the null” on your AM portable radio.

This is a true story:  When I was young I learned that with a cheap AM radio like this, and a $5-compass, that you could steal a boat in any harbor in the world and go anywhere you want with nothing more than an AM radio and some stations that identify themselves often.

By daylight, it’s more useful to follow jet contrails, but you get the idea there, right?

If you’re not tracking yet, go watch this video about how Ira Blue on KGO brought fishermen home through the notorious fogs off the Golden Gate:

Have fun…I sure did, and it was a dandy 15-minute break from not getting the rest of the stuff on my list done on Wednesday.

I have been chasing noise sources this way for more than half a century.  Most common culprits are fluorescent light fixtures, silicon-controller rectifier based dimmers (SCRs) and Triacs plus switched mode power supplies.

In the event of a real serious EMP type event, the good news is that the AM radio band should be exceptionally clear of manmade noise like this.  The only downside is you may die in the ensuing violence.  But the DX’ing (distance listening)_ should be superb.

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Want to know where Bitcoin will be in 40-years or so?

That’s one of the topics we cover in this morning’s report. So is Ben’s new book.

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The headline in the Monday column here was pretty simple to follow:  We were due for a major tick up in the market (remember my telling you about the Big Rally long before this one?).

While a goodly number of doomporn types have been calling for the end of globalism and such,t he reality is that it is extremely unlikely to happen with a presidential election coming.  People will be fine taking their anger out at the polls, as long as that process is working.

Today’s close should (by my crazy method of analysis) be around S&P 1,958 and change.

The shocking part is where we could take out the 1,850 level by the close o

n Friday…which our Peoplenomics readers by now – if testing this latest crackpot theory of mine – are already positioned in trades, or have gone to cash, just in case.

If 1,850 sounds bad, there’s a chance of 1,750 the week after next:  October 20-22 if the system works out.

The real question is this:  When  does such a system stop being “crackpot” and become something more respectable? 

If you see a column around October 23-24 titled R.E.S.P.E.C.T.  it will have nothing to do with Aretha Franklin, but it will have to do with transitioning from crackpot to profitable.

But then  again, we won’t know until then.

Pacific Trade Sell-Out as the Left Field Event

Traitorous bastards is too nice a term for people who vote for “secret laws” like this Trans-Pacific Partnership crap that the Obamanation has shoved down our throats.  People in congress who voted for it all need to go.  Daylight democracy is what this country is founded on…not back office deals and corporate/lobbyist buy-offs. 

Mainstream Media like the NY Times are today peddling the corporatist view that this Trade disaster is a way to “keep a check on China.”

Remember how many times I have told you an honest socialist is better than the lying right-wing scum that sold out the country in the trade deal? Or the under-cover socialist in the WH?

Well, here’s Bernie Sanders calling it right – a quote from the Politico story here:

“I am disappointed but not surprised by the decision to move forward on the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement that will hurt consumers and cost American jobs,” Sanders said in a statement Monday morning shortly after the deal was announced. “Wall Street and other big corporations have won again.

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As a kid, there were certain family stories passed down from father to son that ensure the continuation of the “Ure attitude.”

Many of these were fire house tales…the kind of stories that working men tell one another while grueling physical work is going on. 

Sure, firemen get the rush of going into combat at a house or apartment fire.  But the downside of the profession is the hard work that few get to see:  The endless drill evolutions – so everything can be done in the dark, bad weather, and whatever else may come.  Then there’s the washing of hose, and (in the old days) hanging it all up to dry in the hose tower.

One such story in particular has stood out in my mind for better than 50-years. A father-son lesson of inestimable value.

It begins with my late father who was stationed at Pearl Harbor as a fire alarm office operator during World War II.  While Americans were falling on unnamed beaches around the globe, my dad – through no effort of his own – had landed a job  in one of the very few bomb-proof and air conditioned buildings on Hawaii…the Ure family has always been lucky that way and the luck continues through today.

It turns out that the “boss” of the Alarm  Office was a salty old Navy Chief.

It helps to understand that people back then didn’t go out to lunch very often – most packed a sandwich, or two, from home, maybe an apple or some non-refrigerated treat, and that was it.

Day after day, come lunchtime in the Alarm Office this old Chief would get out his lunch.

Every single day – without variation – was a cheese sandwich. Day after day after day.

“I hate these goddamn cheese sandwiches…” the old salt would complain.  The air would turn blue for anywhere from 15-minutes to two hours, depending on the old chief’s mood.

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The futures were up this morning when I looked and in our odd work over on the www.peoplenomics.com side of the house, we anticipate the market high this week should come in right around….no, let’s save that for our Peoplenomics subscribers.  I showed them how to build the spreadsheet already…

Let’s just say this:  the market has another day (or two) of this rally to go.  But from there, we should be lined up on this year’s scariest of all market drops…but that will be over by the end of the month, or shortly after, so don’t go getting yourself all worked up about it.

A close today around 1,970 would be fine with me…let’s see how it plays.  But if it comes in at 1,973, or so, I will be screaming “I told you so” tomorrow.  Even 1,.967 will get Mr. Smug-face going.

Meantime, Roger Reynolds, a fellow who does an email list I have mentioned many times, as a similar view about the present rally:

Friday’s surge??? The move down from mid sept to the recent low is likely being called a successful “test” of the low—-hence Friday’s rally.

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The alarm clock didn’t matter today.

The brain went off first…waking me at 2:50 AM due to the hugely exciting events on this week’s to-do list.

For one, I am likely to drop back into “trading mode” this week and that excites the hell out of me.  Wall Street is a casino you don’t have to travel to play.

For another, I had a really useful insight into the future of Bitcoin, so that’s now a whole Peoplenomics report for Wednesday.

Then there’s the matter of the weather turning cooler here. The heat pump kicked on for the first time this season.

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Yeah, I look really stupid doing the happy dance, but since our report on  Wednesday in which I outlined a new approach to forecasting market action at two very specific places in the Elliott Wave structure, I was totally blown away by the Market’s behavior.

As Friday began, I was pouty and snippy – my system seemed (momentarily) like it would eat my lunch.  But the pure absolute magic happened at mid session and the S&P ended up over the 1,950 level for the week – as expected and forecast right here.

Halla-freaking-lujah!

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(Deep in the Wisconsin, Illinois, Iowa Triangle)

We find ourselves this morning wondering if someone would be kind enough to prescribe some major league anti-psychotics for this market.

The problem is this morning’s Job Report which we will get to in a moment.

It’s the set-up of market psychology, however, that causes us concern.  You know markets are in a precarious state when news “flips.”

In other words, when “Good” news is taken as bad, and “Bad” news is taken as good, then trying to make sense and reasonably investments using other than purely technical trading tools because something of a mind-eff.

Here is how the Job report looking from the “flipped” perspective.

Say the Jobs report comes in stronger than expected.

In as normal (non-psychotic) world, this would be good news and the market would go up.

What’s not to love?  After all, more people working means more tax revenues for government, so pressure comes off there.  Fewer people would be “on  the dole” and we would have an increase in savings and investment, which could get us thinking in terms of the Virtuous Cycle in economics, once again.

But that may not work out this way.

Instead, the market could be thinking:  “With more people working, the Fed would be more likely to raise rates in the coming months.  This would increase business costs because money would be less free…and that, in turn, would mean less money available to shareholders as dividends.  So that means that when the Fed raises rates, we would see stock prices come down, and we would not make as much money…”

Oh, and let’s not leave out that a recovering economy is press oil back up…

It’s wrong-headed, of course.  The fact is that a slow, rounding bottom to interest rates is coming, like it or not, and the fact that a return of the “I” word (inflation) would kick sales (buy before prices go up) and give a major boost to Housing (buy before rates do up) is completely missed.

So too the impetus for some of the dark pools of capital to edge out of bonds, which would then drop in price, and into stocks, which should rocket moonward, is also missed.

The battle between the factions – believers on both sides – is what makes a market.

Markets are only rational in a limited sense, and only some of the time.

This may not be one of those.

The Jobs Data

Which gets us to the Hot off the Press Release:

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 142,000 in September, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.1 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in health care and information, while mining employment fell.

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