News

The picture over to the right is finally revealing what we were mumbling months ago when (in a trance) I wrote about how at some point the last possible person would have bought their sixth automobile.  When this happened, I was expecting there would be no more parking places and we’d enter the jaws of economic collapse. 

We’re getting closer…..closer….closer.  And people like us are to blame.  We look at core retail (retail sales less autos) the same way the Fed looks at inflation (reported inflation less food and energy).  Their way is delusional, mine is not.  (What’d you expect me to say?)

We’ve been half-expecting retail sales to slide down the slopes into oblivion for quite a while now.  For a couple of good reasons all of which is because of bass, four-string, electric guitars.  Lemme ‘splain you, Lucy:

• Look around your house and ask yourself (language alert!) “Do I have enough shit?”  We did this the other day and decided that the one last toy we didn’t have was a four-string bass guitar to dink around with in our home studio. 
• The second MPQ (major pertinent question) is “Can I buy used instead of buying something new?”  In our case, the same exact $200+ new cheapo electric bass we could buy from any of 10-20 online instrument discounters new at retail, was available used from a Guitar Center up in Minnesonsin somewhere  for $99.95 – so we opted for the  the used one.  How many people go on to out-Jump Van Halen at age 66?  Zero, but why not try?
• The third MPQ is whether we need something at all.  The answer in all honesty, is “Prolly not…”  But if it’s a WTF moment and if you don’t owe anyone one anything, why not toughen up the left fingertips so someone will have something nice to say about you when your funeral shows up – even if it’s as little as “Shit, dude, what a riff the old man developed recently…”

Daughter Denise (the real musician in the family) was appalled.  “Dad, the CEO of Guitar Center probably rides around in a jet and why don’t you get something that’s a real instrument so you can get some quality sound out of it?  Like my old Gibson…or my boyfriends [something or other]?”

The simple answer is I don’t play guitar OR bass.  But we don’t have time to read, either, but that doesn’t stop us from owning close to a thousand books…because that’s the AMERICAN thing to do…spend, spend, spend and keep this pony running…

But that’s what makes this a perfect metaphor for America and where we are as a country, don’t you see?  Serious consumer super-saturation.  In other words, few of us have enough  time to use all our existing (language alert!) shit even once a week, let alone, often enough to have it actually make sense to own it, let alone BUY it.

That, and the Feral Reserves report last Friday on Consumer Debt says credit card use is up at an annualized rate of only 4.8% (a tad more than inflation, but likely more people are buying food on credit cards…) while non-revolving (student loans and mobile homes and such) had actually gone negative.

It logically follows that with the Baltic Dry Cargo Index stuck in park (its down to 2009 levels) there should be some signs of spending falling apart.  I mean besides the inventory numbers lately taking off to the upside.

So that’s reality at the street.

Now, with your ViseGrips at the ready, hand me the envelope and let’s see what the latest is from the US Department of Delusions, shall we?  Ooops…make that Census Bureau/commerce, but same diff:

“The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for February, adjusted for seasonal variation
and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $437.0 billion, a decrease of 0.6 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month, but up 1.7 percent (±0.9%) above February 2014.

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You talk about wet!

That feller off to the right is one of the pair of hawks that live on the property and regularly come by for Panama’s handouts of raw bits of chicken when game is scarce for them in the winter.

Looks kind of cold and miserable, but that’s what happens to animals when it’s raining Persians and Poodles in East Texas.

We have just under 4” of rain in the gauge this morning.

Local media are full of exciting adventures cause by the heavy precip, too.

Worse, we are in “take care with the septic system, too, since when the ground is saturated, the septic system tends to get a little cranky.

Tomorrow, Ol’ John from the local septic cleaners will be out for his every-other-year visit.  After a drop in the water table and that, we’ll be back to feeling our usual selves when writing repeated bad puns…

Flushed.

Slowing Down the Diet

Meantime, Mr. Gluten-free Paleo (or, at least mostly so) has continued to drop pounds faster than ever imagined.  And I continue to credit the apple cider vinegar pill daily as helping with the results.  Also, two meals a day and within 8-hours of each other. 

The idea is that Paleo is good, ACV is good, off the fatty foods is good, but also helping is the exercise and eating all meals within 8-hours which (theory says) should give the body a chance to burn through sugars and get on to fat burning.

11-days of serious calorie restriction along with heavy exercise and such, and I’ve dropped 13.5 pounds.

So, yes, it can be done but I will likely declare a “free day” or two in order to give the organs that work hardest when dieting (liver and kidneys from what I’ve read) a chance to catch up with the changes.  This morning will see me wolfing down my  cottage cheese pancakes and that will involve the first use of butter (other than a tiny bit for use in pans) in 10-days.

Dropping a pound a day is NOT a good thing to do.  2-3 pounds in a week is plenty.  But (for whatever reason) being a male, I come from the factory pre-wired to think “If a bit is good, more is better, and the most is best.”

Speaking of which…here’s a dandy success story from a reader out in SF:

George,

I too lost about 40  lbs. about 2 1/2 years ago by changing my diet, exercising every day and moving my routine outdoors for extra Vitamin D benefits and mood enhancing.

My diet is a hybrid of the Paleo diet…No wheat products…although I have a cheat day with a local organic Pizza joint I crave…A lot of fish, chicken and Bison or a lean, grass fed, organic beef. I can’t get enough vegetables and I start each day with a smoothie that is a powerhouse of nutrition by itself.

The smoothie really powers my day..It consists of frozen blueberries, Vibrant Green powder, turmeric, cinnamon, ground flax seed, Apple cider vinegar, Chlorophyll, beets, ginger, taro root, kale/spinach mix and Odwalla blueberry juice.

I munch on almonds throughout the day and have a small piece of chicken. For dinner, I have a meat/fish dish, Organic greens salad and Quinoa/vegetable dish. 

I drink a glass of red wine a few times a week and the one hard liquor the diet does allow is Tequila (agave not grain based like most alcohol). 

But the one thing that is the key to weight loss is exercising…And I don’t mean lollygagging on an elliptical. I mean hard, drenched in sweat work outs that are measurable in increased performance milestones. I run at least 4 miles every day…but I measure my performance not in distance, but by the speed that I run. 

When I first started out, I was running 10:30 minute miles.

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A fair question to ask, straight off the bat, is “Who’s the headless dude with the ball and shorts and has George lost his mind?”

That fellow happens to be a reader whose moniker is Red Dog and he sent in a marvelous discussion of how he’s been doing that one major Chemistry Experiment in life (changing our eating, and thus our appearance and fitness) and it’s a dandy first-hand report.  I removed his head because that would make him personally identifiable, and our massive legal department wouldn’t hear of it without a release and I didn’t think to do that Friday…such is life.

(As to the second part of the question – Has I lost my mind? – the answer should be self-evident.)

Here’s his report:

George you recently asked about thoughts on living locations and weight loss.  For weight loss I suggest you look at Tim Ferriss’s book, The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman Tim believes in PAGG (see chart below) eating beans for breakfast, and chilling your core body temp once a day.  I take cold showers in the summer.  Look at the pictures.  I went from 178 to 153.  

As to living location.  My requirements are I need a place for clean fresh flowing water, where it rains enough for growing veggies, inexpensive land for a runway, land to create a self sustainable life style.  I looked at a map of the US and created a triangle from:

Nashville TN, to Huntsville AL, to the Pickwith dam in SW TN.  I would buy 50 to 100 acres within that triangle.  

I also use Apple Cider based hot sauce on my beans in the morning.  

Policosanol	117	23 mg day.  Fat Loss & cholesterol lowering.
Alpha Lipoic Acid	117	Liver Disease.  Store Carbs in your muscles or Liver, Not Fat cells.
Green Tea	118	EGCG.  Epigallocatechin Gallate:  Inhibits storage of carbs as body fat.  Kills fat cells.  Suggest decaffeinated green tea extract pills.  Mega Green Tea Extract, decaffeinated, 725 mg.
Garlic	119	High doses of Allicin.  Inhibit Fat regain.  Allicin 6000 garlic
		www.fourHourBody.com
Beans	83	Epazote from Mexican groceries.  Lentils.  Soak beans overnight.
Whole Grains	91	Whole Grains or Oats, NO.
BreakFast	95	Eat within 30 minutes of getting up.
	105	Lime or Lemon Juice.  P
	106	Air squats before eating, After eating.
Fermented	111	Sauerkraut & Kimchee.
Cooling Body	129	Ice pack on back of neck in evenings.  Swim in cool water.
	144	Cinnamon good lowers glucose levels.  In coffee?
	146	Eat slower.  At least 30 minutes.
	164	Kettleball swing.
	167	Flying Dog & 2 legged glute.
	172	Kettleball swing from Home Depo.
	176	Back ball myotatic crunch

“Red Dog”t

Just have one more try — it’s dead easy to die,
It’s the keeping-on-living that’s hard.

I have to say, I am totally impressed.  The reader is not a young fellow (I forgot to ask his age, but I’m sure he’ll send that along) but his results lead to all kinds of interesting thoughts in the arena of life extension.

Policosanol was a new one on me, so you can Wiki it – though there is more on the Wikipedia site…

Policosanol^{[pronunciation?]} (or polycosanol) is the generic term for a natural mixture of long chain alcohols extracted from plant waxes. It is used as a nutritional supplement intended to lower LDL cholesterol (“bad” cholesterol) and increase HDL cholesterol (“good” or “healthy” cholesterol) and to help prevent atherosclerosis, though some studies have raised questions about the effectiveness of policosanol.

A second opinion from WedMD is here and when you’re researching, always be sure to check their side effects and cautions tab.  NOW Foods Policosanol 20mg Vcaps will run you about $16-bucks at Amazon.

What we’re really dealing with here are two issues:  One is the effect of weight on life extension while the other is the effect of weight on quality of life.

Looks to me like Red Dog is at about an ideal weight.  What’s more, he’s got the elements going here that will likely lead to an optimally long life.  Much thinner, though, and then the risks come back up.

A Wikipedia entry on the effect of being too lean from calorie restriction is worth some study:

Malnutrition may result in serious deleterious effects, as it has been shown in the Minnesota Starvation Experiment.^[8] This study was conducted during World War II on a group of lean men, who restricted their calorie intake by 45% for 6 months, and composed roughly 90% of their diet with carbohydrates.^[8] As expected, this malnutrition resulted in many positive metabolic adaptations (e.g. decreased body fat, blood pressure, improved lipid profile, low serum T3 concentration, and decreased resting heart rate and whole-body resting energy expenditure), but also caused a wide range of negative effects, such as anemia, lower extremity edema, muscle wasting, weakness, neurological deficits, dizziness, irritability, lethargy, and depression.^[8]

§Musculoskeletal losses[edit]

Short-term studies in humans report loss of muscle mass and strength and reduced bone mineral density.^[9]

The authors of a 2007 review of the CR literature warned that “[i]t is possible that even moderate calorie restriction may be harmful in specific patient populations, such as lean persons who have minimal amounts of body fat.”^[10]

§Low BMI, high mortality[edit]

CR diets typically lead to reduced body weight, yet reduced weight can come from other causes and is not in itself necessarily healthy.

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Three things are a foregone conclusion this morning:

1.  The Emperor has not clothes.

2.  The jobs report will show rising employment.

3.  The devil is in the details.

So here we go…

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 295,000 in February, and the unemployment rate edged down to 5.5 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains occurred in food services and drinking places, professional and business services, construction, health care, and in transportation and warehousing. Employment in mining was down over the month. Household Survey Data Both the unemployment rate (5.5 percent) and the number of unemployed persons (8.7 million) edged down in February. Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 1.2 percentage points and 1.7 million, respectively.

But wait – there’s more:  Fine print says there were 178,000 fewer people in the workforce.  Huh?

Which then means the labor participation rate dropped back to 62.8% after ticking up in previous months to 62.9%

As always, the CES Birth Death Model (the measurement of “statistically estimated into existence”  jobs is key:  But no, the CES Birth/Death model hadn’t been updated so it’s on my “Saved guffaws for later” list.

CES Updated:  132,000 jobs were estimated into existence, out of the 176,000 claimed in the general report, so net provable was…..no hints here… 44,000.  Futures turned down on the confessional…down 60 I looked.

And the alternative measures of labor underutilization – which is the PhDs flipping burgers index, shows a drop from 11.3% to 11.0 percent (good)_ but we wonder about the impact of long term aid running out on these numbers.

You ever see a government report showing the national homeless number?  Me either.

On, one other foregone conclusion:  The market should be down at the open.  The Baltic Dry Shipping Index is up 2 to 561…around 2009 low levels.

Shhhhshhhh!

Listen closely….. hear it?  Air escaping from a bubble is what it sounds like…or is it?  Maybe not just yet. The pop is still in the fridge.

New Trade Figures

From Commerce:

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S.

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Actor Harrison Ford is in the hospital – doing fine – after having to land his Ryan PT-22 trainer on a golf course near the Santa Monica Airport due to engine failure on takeoff. 

Ford, who’s quite expert at the flying game (including a helicopter/ rotorcraft endorsement if I recall correctly) is not the first fellow to lose an engine. 

The plane he was flying, a WW II vintage PT-22 is a very seriously collectible airplane according to Wikipedia:

In 1941, as the natural development of the earlier ST series, the PT-20 and PT-21 was the military production version of ST-3 with a total of 100 built as the U.S.A.A.C.’s first ab initio monoplane trainer. The rapid expansion of wartime aircrew training required new trainers, and the Ryan PT-22, essentially similar to the PT-21, was ordered in large numbers.^[3] Named the “Recruit”, it entered operational service with the U.S. Orders also were placed by the Netherlands, but were never realized as the nation capitulated to Axis forces. The small order of 25 ST-3s was redirected to the United States and redesignated as the PT-22A. Another order also came from the U.S. Navy for 100 examples. The PT series was in heavy use throughout the war years with both military and civil schools, but with the end of the war, was retired from the U.S.A.A.F.^[4]

As a pilot, I tend to look at stories – like the Ford landing – a little more closely than most.

Back in 1999, Ford as a close brush, too.  That was when a Bell Jet Ranger 206 he was practicing emergency landings in (with an instructor, the landing process for engine out in a helo is called autorotation) back in 1999.

What’s missing in the media reports of Thursday’s event is just where Ford was when his engine conked-out.  If the engine failed when his plane was very low (300-feet, or less) then he would have been trained to fly to the closest thing to land on that was roughly straight ahead.

On the other hand, if he had taken off, was well past the golf course, had more altitude, he would have been inbound attempting the return to land and, seeing he wouldn’t make the field, would have chosen the next best thing – a golf course.

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Yes sir:  A record report from the National Weather Service up the road a piece in Ft. Worth:

“A record snowfall of 2.5 inches was set at dfw Airport yesterday.

The previous record for March 4 was 0.3 inches in 1989.”

So it is with overflowing generosity that we have packaged up the cold front and sent it east overnight where it should be arriving any minute to ease the sweat glands that I just know have been overworked with Global Warming effects this winter.

I would mention that suggesting the cold is because of warming is like suggesting that we all need to eat more to lose weight, slow down to get somewhere faster, and die in order to live.  However, I’ll just bite my tongue (which happens to be frozen to my teeth now).

I’ll just point to the records here and wonder if the folks in Mississippi aren’t maybe overdoing it a bit in declaring an emergency in advance. 

Do you realize that “Woodall Mountain” is the highest peak in the state (806-feet) and that’s just a lump out west or in he Poconos.  I mean, come on, now!  Cowboy up a bit.  Texas highest point is Guadalupe Peak at 8,751 feet…

(Sorry, I will stop teaching geography and how to read thermometers and just skip to the economics for which this site is better known.  Although there is much in common between climateers and mainstream economystics.

Job Cut Report

The ADP Employment Report giveth and the Challenger Job Cuts report taketh away:

Planned job cuts declined slightly in February, as US-based employers announced workforce reductions totaling 50,579, five percent fewer than the 53,041 in January, according to the report on monthly job cuts released Thursday by global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc.

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This is rather amazing. – to the point that I figure I should share it with you:  I am now a pound lighter than I was when Elaine and I took off on our cruise 13-days ago.

The numbers?  I put on 7-pounds during the cruise.  No, I wasn’t particularly proud of it, but lately I have been eating on a regular diet of two meals a day, within 8-hours of each other because of a lot of research I’ve been reading on apple cider vinegar.

One upshot of the reading was to find out that modern dietary ideas – like multiple meals per day – are not really how humans grew up in the wild.  Instead, people apparently used to walk around, looking for food, hunting and foraging, until they found something.

Then they ate to their hearts content….and moved on,

There’s a rhythm, apparently, to how this works.

When ancient ancestors had a meal, it often raised the blood sugar.  The blood sugar converted to fat, the fat was stored.  No mysteries to that.

But according to the data I’ve been reading (before going on the cruise), when the body is not given additional food (remember the wandering off part?) the first calories consumed were the easy-to-get-to sugars. 

Once those were gobbled up, the stored fats were eaten next by the cells.  And, at the tail end of that, the next to go were the heaviest of the fats – the kind that tend to accumulate around the belly in old men like you-know-who.

The idea comes into focus that eating kicks off this sequence of blood sugars increasing, fat storage, sugar burning, and finally fat burning.   Which is why people have different “breath” throughout the day.  Good breath mostly after eating but once the body moves into hard fat conversion, there’s likely some ketosis.

The part of ketosis that matters, when comes to eating habits, is this bit on the mechanics of ketosis from Wikipedia:

“During the usual overnight fast the body’s metabolism naturally switches into ketosis, and will switch back to glycolysis after a carbohydrate-rich meal. Longer-term ketosis may result from fasting or staying on a low-carbohydrate diet, and deliberately induced ketosis serves as a medical intervention for intractable epilepsy.^[6] In glycolysis higher levels of insulin promote storage of body fat and block release of fat from adipose tissues, while in ketosis fat reserves are readily released and consumed.^[5][7] For this reason ketosis is sometimes referred to as the body’s “fat burning” mode”

What I’ve gotten back into is waiting until Elaine gets up and cooks breakfast, instead of cooking my own.

Her schedule, and mine are offset a good bit:  I’m up at 4 AM writing.  She rolls out sometime between 7 AM and 8 AM…and gets hungry around 8:30 so that’s when food appears.

What this means is that instead of “breaking the fast” of overnight – which is where the word breakfast comes from – I’m adding about 4 1/2 hours to my fat burning time daily by eating when she gets up.

Then, I eat my second meal of the day by 4 PM, which means being up and about 3-4 hours after eating, which helps resolve lots of old-people problems like acid reflux.

But none of this should lose 9-pounds in less than a week. 

What Else was Going On?

Therein lies the tale…

For some reason, part of my “home chemistry experiments with my body” had not yet gotten to the bottle of apple cider vinegar pills that were coming up on my personal testing.  Now I’m into it.

Long-term readers will recall the idea here:  Make up a notebook for yourself and then systematically go through what works well for you as you test every vitamin and supplement you can get your hands on.  There is quite often something in the way of a supplement (or mineral) that when taken will change how you feel.

For example, when I want to learn at an accelerated rate, I will take Source Naturals Huperzine A, 200mcg, 120 Tablets.  The effect of taking one of these bad boys is that within an hour, there’s a marked improvement in mental acuity. 

Taken with a baby aspirin and a small something to eat, it is my “before flying” routine.  Since flying an airplane is a somewhat complex task where you need to have all your faculties, I figure anything that can bump up short-term IQ a bit is worth doing.  So a half cup of coffee, food with lots of protein, and a Huperzine A – plus a baby aspirin – I’m good to fly.

By the way, the baby aspirin is not to keep away pain or prevent heart attack.  Although, sure, it may do these things.  The real reason to take the aspirin is that it increases the body’s uptake of oxygen. 

I can actually tell the difference on the treat mill, too, as well as mental acuity on long flights where we’re up at 7,500 feet, or higher.  (We have oxygen, too, but don’t always carry it unless flight at 9,500 and higher is planned.  Requirements roll in (going from poor memory, 12,500 feet) for supplemental oxygen, but another long discussion…not this morning.)

So there was this bottle of apple cider vinegar pills (similar to High Potency Apple Cider Vinegar 625 mg 180 Caps by Swanson Ultra) in my test queue and I began the four week trial period on those.

WOW!

I was shocked.  9-pounds gone!  I doubt the rate of weight loss will continue as high, but to even lose 3-pounds a week would be phenomenal.  Hell, a pound a week would be fine.

There were a number of dietary changes between the cruise ship weight and this morning’s.

On the cruise ship we ate three squares a day.  Breakfast, lunch, and fabulous (bringing tears to your eyes and triglycerides or your cardiologist’s) dinners.

Restaurant food is generally much higher in sodium (salt), than we’re used to eating around here.  We are using ,Morton – Lite Salt Mixture that contains half the sodium of regular salt, with the balance of saltiness coming from potassium chloride…and since potassium is good for body chemistry….

Shipboard we had alcohol before and with din-din.  A cocktail (or two) and wine (or sake) with meals.

And I ate breakfasts.

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