News

One of our sources called last night to tip us off that a cruise ship would be docking in Galveston on the 19th and that on that cruise ship was a lab worker who had worked with the samples from Ebola Patient Zero up in Dallas.

Now that two healthcare workers in the hospital had come down with symptoms, my source told me, there was consideration being given to sending a helicopter out to bring the exposed lab worker back for closer medical scrutiny.

“Our problem, “ said the source who is a government official, “Is that we don’t want to be the ones responsible for letting 2,000 people who have been exposed off the ship in Galveston Sunday morning.”

As a result, look for high-stake government discussions today and into the weekend on how to best deal with the ship.

While we didn’t put this up as a headline last night (pending second sourcing) that came overnight when ABC and the NY Times reported on the case.  The Time’s “Health Worker Who May Have Had Contact With Ebola Is on a Cruise Ship.” provides a few additional details.

So does this early morning press release from the State Department:

As part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s detailed contact trace investigation conducted in response to the first Ebola case in Dallas, it was discovered that an employee of Texas Health Presbyterian Hospital had departed the United States via a commercial cruise ship on October 12 from Galveston, Texas. The employee did not have direct contact with the since deceased Ebola patient, but may have had contact with clinical specimens collected from him. The individual was out of the country before being notified of CDC’s updated requirements for active monitoring. At the time the hospital employee left the country, CDC was requiring only self-monitoring.

The employee has been self-monitoring, including daily temperature checks, since October 6, and has not had a fever or demonstrated any symptoms of illness. It has been 19 days since the passenger may have processed the since deceased patient’s fluid samples. The cruise line has actively supported CDC’s efforts to speak with the individual, whom the cruise ship’s medical doctor has monitored and confirmed was in good health. Following this examination, the hospital employee and traveling partner have voluntarily remained isolated in a cabin. We are working with the cruise line to safely bring them back to the United States out of an abundance of caution

There are only three cruise ships due to dock in Galveston on the 19th and the Washington Post mentions Carnival by name in its headline.  USA Today names the Carnival Magic.

So, as of this morning, there are three main aspects of Ebola to be watching as we head into the weekend:

1.  Will local government officials move to prevent the cruise ship from unloading on schedule come Sunday morning?  As our unnamed government source told me last night “I don’t want to be the [redacted] that turns 2,000 people loose, if they have been exposed…”

Yes, a tough call indeed, although I think it would be totally cool for Carnival to simply lay on double provisions for the Magic and turn the cruise into a 21-day event and let the people onboard log some additional R&R.

2.  The next problem to consider is whether the widely promoted 21-day window is enough.  There’s a report out this week on the Natural News site – which often has good healthcare content – that the incubation period (in a small percentage of cases, admittedly) may be as long as 41-days.

Medical sources tell us the highest period of communicability is when the host has reached high levels of the virus and is actively “shedding” but if the  onset can be so long, we may have other cases still incubating out of the Dallas incident.

3.  Last, but not least, keep an eye on economic impacts and lawsuits on this.

For example, does Frontier airlines have any recourse to CDC if they gave the Dallas nurse the OK to fly because she was subcritical?  A good lawyer ought to be able to build a 7 or 8-figure argument that CDC actions may have damaged their prospects.  Or, might other airline groups be eying a drop in forward revenue and be looking to legal departments?

It would be predictable.

And similarly, what will happen to the poor lab tech?  Will we – in coming months as this case shakes out – see lawsuits coming out of the woodwork for lost revenue?

Our back of the envelope math figures about a 60% chance of two more cases coming to light between now and Tuesday morning.  But in the meantime, the condition of the lab tech who went on a cruise will be important to watch, as will government response at the local level down in Galveston.

Organizationally, on the federal side, CDC is an Agency under the Director of Health and Human Services.  As Wikipedia notes “The President of the United States appoints the director of the CDC and the appointment does not require Senate confirmation.

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Yet another round of emails has landed like  V-2 rockets on London in my inbox.  One mentions what a douche I am for failing to embrace global warming.  That happens periodically, I suppose.  But with reason…

The Warmist email reminded me that US News is covering the rise of natural gas use and proclaiming that it won’t change the warming profile.

Those more prone to “chill” (so to speak), like the gang up at the Chronicle Project, sent along a snip about how sea ice in the Antarctic has just set another record high.

Asymmetry bothers me – a lot.  Polarity makes manipulation of public consensus just too damned easy.  Yet we see it in headlines every day.

Let’s focus on warming hype once again:  What seems to be going on is the northern hemisphere has more “hot air” going around than the southern hemisphere.  Real heavy ice down under and very little topside (Arctic).  Ignore the fact it’s summer, if you can, also.

I have a couple of theories about ice thicknesses; some serious, others less so.

Among the “less so” is the number of politicians, hysterical TV Networks, and so forth resident above the equator.  With the exception of New Zealand and Australian television, plus southern Africa, there’s not as much global hot air coming off the southern hemisphere. 

Privately, I wonder if Rupert Murdoch’s focus on America helped cool the Antarctic?

In truth, the southern hemisphere may generate less heat in 3-days than comes out of Washington in a single day.

More seriously,  A search of  the LA Times archives reveals that drought in California is nothing new and that what passes as climate change rhetoric today obscures focus from the historical record and, further, the fluky weather of the 1860’s is why California doesn’t have a major cattle industry today.  Blame a drought of 150-years ago..

As a 1991 article in the LA Times headlined “The Great Drought : Fickle Weather in 1860s Led to Breakdown of Cattle Industry.”

Around the office here, when we’re not buried in work, we try to keep in mind that macro-variations in solar output and absorption of different particles, seems to have a semi-regular pattern to it.

Unlike the La Nina/El Nino oscillation, science has been quite slow figuring out that there is likely a “Northern Hemisphere Drought Oscillator” as well.

The 1860  drought came along (to round things off) about 75 years before the midpoint of the 1935 Dirty Thirties in the US Midwest.

Tack on another4 75-years to the last of the Dust Bowl years (1940) and now we’re looking at when?  Answer: 2015 if you haven’t beaned-up, yet.

I’m going to go out on a limb here for the Global Warming people: I’m going to predict (with a 10% margin of error) that when California finally returns to normal rainfall, we will be able to add 70-75 years to whatever that end date is and predict the Midwest will be getting its ass kicked 75-years hence with another Dust Bowl event.

While it’s true, by the way, that planting trees and cover crops top soil retained topsoil, it’s also true that a lot of the ending of the Dust Bowl had to do with the calendar and this Hemispheric Drought Oscillator.

The study of economics teaches us a lot about looking for the hidden variables behind many things.  In fact, I’ve just ordered a bunch of textbooks to do some research into the emerging science called behavioral economics.

What the intersection of psychology and economics is teaching us is that subtle changes to set conditions that happen off on the margins, may exert a disproportionate influence on outcomes.

While I’m pretty sure California will continue singing “How dry I am” for a couple of more years, the longer  and more holistic view suggests that weather patterns (like drought epicenters) may express in different locations over time. And oscillate at a frequency of 75-years.

I’ve studied Nicolai Kondratieff’s work extensively (the godfather of long wave economics) and you can see distinct solar patterns in his commodity price research dating back to to the 1200’s.

Not to claim Clement Juglar was a charlatan, but we note that his 7-11 year fixed investment cycle dovetails neatly with the observed 11-year solar cycle, as well.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately (off in spiritual studies) about the “operation of the Universe” under Law.  And when I say law, I mean the common framework that all things obey whether they want to, or not.  We can bend law (like gravity) but when we do so inadvisedly, it is at our own peril.

The same thing applies to socioeconomics, weather, and the general environment we share.

Droughts and climate change may very well turn out to be nothing more than localized expressions of systemic regional variation over time. They sure look that way.

So much so that in the next few years, I expect we will continue to enjoy the fruits of lower solar output which – in turn –  should moderate what’s being sold as “climate change..”

Like law in spiritual matters, when a macro cycle law arising in complex system dynamic equilibrium comes into view, it’s tempting to monetize it.  

Happens in religions, happens in science.  Which is why, when we spy a discernable change in something like the weather, politicians run off to monetize it.  Hence the press for a global climate tax by the New World Order/PowersThatBe types.  Everyone wants to own their own mandatory collection plate.

The difference between tithing and taxing is minute.

History is a damned inconvenience, too.  It fuels renegade thinkers.. 

The astute observer will note the California Drought of the mid 1860’s ended without government intervention.  When the cycle turned, the rains came back.

In likewise fashion, when the last of the Dry Years passed (at last) in 1940, the Dust Bowl settled down on its own. 

Sichuan Province in China is instructive, as well.  We have three pretty good data points we  can enumerate, drawn  from Wikipedia here:

1. 1928-30 Northwest China resulting in over 3 million deaths by famine.

2. 1936 and 1941 Sichuan Province China resulting in 5 million and 2.5 million deaths respectively.

3, In 2006, Sichuan Province China experienced its worst drought in modern times with nearly 8 million people and over 7 million cattle facing water shortages.

We can infer from the end of the 1928-1930 event a drought cycle of 76-years.

Thus we would expect from 1936 we should see drought arise in China from 1012 and lasting through at least 2016.  It ought to be greening up in California  about then, also.

Sure enough (although you no doubt miss things like this because of “news overload” and hysterical events like Ebola behinds headlines like “Drought worsens China’s long term water problems.” 

It also explains why the Chinese are working like crazy on cloud-seeding technology – in order to light off some rainfall.

As with the study of religion, polarity on issues like Climate Change is not very useful for the Great Middle.  If there is a central  (monotheistic) core to the Universe, the study of cumulative law is quite instructive.

Likewise, when we stop damning one side, or the other, to the bowels of hell for their perspective on climate, and step back far enough to see the whole cloth of the complex system, there may be some unifying principles (73-78 year drought cycles for one) that can help humans navigate into the future with much less effort and way lower taxes.

But where would be the job growth in that?

DreamScapes

Several thoughts from readers on my odd dream I described in yesterday’s column:  Mary-Anne of Omaha, for example:

Hi, George. Very interesting dream. Your comment about doorways into other worlds reminded me that the author CS Lewis explored this idea in his Narnia books.

In “The Magician’s Nephew” there is a “wood between the worlds” — an in-between place — from which you can get to any number of worlds/universes simply by jumping into a pool.

If you have the proper equipment (a ring in this case), the pool will turn into a chute and you find yourself deposited onto another planet.

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Turns out that the second nurse to come down with Ebola did indeed contact CDC before flying and was below a threshold set by the agencies.

While some of my colleagues have criticized me for being so hard on CDC from the outset with headlines like “CDC Dallas Screw-Up?” back before the MSM really ramped up,  a quarter century of news judgment is showing its value.  Unfortunately, our projects in September that we’d pass one million cases in January will also likely be right, as well.

And that could be very bad for politics and the economy.

Already we have seen stories about how the Obama administration – which has delayed the revelation of its “Executive Reconquista” program until after elections – now seems equally bent on burying the seriousness of Ebola until after elections as well.

Already, though, two countries, St.Lucia and Colombia, have announced travel bans from West Africa.

The Centers for Disease Confusion, meantime, is continuing to react to the spiraling situation, spending too much time on politics and not enough on action.  Adding close healthcare workers to no-fly lists seems like a no-brainer.  But to the Washington Cartel, it’s just another one of the obvious steps that is being fumbled.

Unfortunately, however, the problem is not limited to the United States.  We are hearing reports that our “Grow food of die” mantra is coming ever-closer to fruition as we spread before you the story of how the UN is becoming concerned that Ebola could fuel a world-wide food shortage.

It would be nice if such events were to follow sequentially and logically, but the odds continue to grow that they will not.

Economics – particularly the long wave variety we follow around here – has long demonstrated that what fips a decent recession into a full-on Depression is a drought and falling food supplies.

It’s what fueled – in part – the Great Depression of the 1930’s.

And here are the first two points of this morning’s report:

1.  Food supplies could be much sketchier than anyone realizers when Ebola and other pandemic diseases begin to munch of supplies at the same time markets are failing.  You understand, I hope, that financial markets are where (in commodity markets) food producers of the convenient goods in the grocery store, lock in their supplies and prices. 

We’re already seeing the large dislocations propagate in the commodity markets as Oil is down to the $80 range, and if things continue much longer (a year or two) that might mean prices down into the $40 range.  For now, the Saudis are still looking like they might come out winners (along with the US) in an effort to drop prices.

The sand in the Vaseline, though, is that oil prices coming down 20% quickly means that other prices will be deflating as well, and once established, the vicious cycle is harder to break than the virtuous cycle.

And, as the markets resume their downward spiral at the open this morning (looking for another 100+_ point downer in the Dow) we see that spiraling deflation may end up killing more people than Ebola.

2.  Given the unexpected way complex systems can operate when a single variable gets outside the normally bounded range, we can see markets crashing right around on schedule – November 10 is the hot date to watch. 55-days after the market high. Investors might be called psychotic-logical in repeating past patterns; they do so with considerable regularity.

So we can “line ‘em up” this morning as a sequence of disease disaster, leading to governmental disasters, leading to pandemic disaster, leading to food disaster.  We ought to see financial disaster as a plug-in right after the governmental disaster app begins to run.

Now that official government news agencies are spreading the word about how the odds of a major outbreak are still very, very low, we recall for you once again what you should be doing when government says “Don’t worry.”

You ought to be scared shitless.

Future futures market is set to open the Dow down 200.  Remember who said “1,740” on the S&P?   Robin Landry…and people scoffed.

Remember, his long term call is still for a Dow under 1,000.  But just not today.  We still are on track to really crash in November around the 10th.  Think of today as additional foreplay.

More after this…

A Word from the Future

Watch for a prominent death in Saudi Arabia comes out of our www.nostracodeus.com software.    Interesting thing to watch for, especially because of all the oil price intrigue of late.  Will it be linked?  Of course, not.  At least publicly.  But it shows up as one interpretation of data.  Just so’s you know ahead of time.

New Electrics and Oh Duhs

It has been years ago that the prediction was made of “new electrics” and since the term could be applied to almost anything with a power source., we have to discount it as a “prediction fill” in the here & now because new breakthroughs in electrical this and that’s come on a regular basis.

But after the disclaimer, isn’t this interesting?  Lockheed Skunkworks is close on something called a Compact Fusion Reactor, or CFR… A reader inside the striped-tail joint tells us…

George,

I recall from your column some time back you talking about the rise of ‘New Electrics’ coming along about this timeframe.  Not to toot my own company’s horn…but…‘TOOT’.  Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works is engaged in a project to build Compact Fusion Reactors (CFRs).  Here is a snip from an article on LM’s website:

“[Thomas] McGuire’s team is taking a much smaller approach to their fusion reactor concept.

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There is a fine line between democracy and “mob rule.”  And honestly, I can’t tell you where that line is.

What I can reassure you – with some solid backup – is that the US has since 2000 sunk from being in the top three of economically “free” countries in the world to 2012’s number 12 world-wide.

That’s not my opinion, but rather a report from the prestigious Cato Institute.

Coming to such conclusions is not done lightly or quickly, either.  It takes a little more than a year and a half to collect the data and for the report,

If you get some time, you might want to read the report in its entirety.

But, since we both know everyone’s too busy in today’s hurried-up world, let me share with you the part of the report I found most interesting.

From the Executive Summary:

Chapter 1: Economic Freedom of the World
The authors of the report, James Gwartney, Robert Lawson, and Joshua Hall, provide an overview of the report and discuss why economic freedom is important. They also review the decline of economic freedom in the United States.

Since I picture myself a pretty good unconventional economic thinker, I was anxious to get to this part of the report.  Because reports like this are designed to stimulate thinking and broaden public awareness, I don’t think Cato or the study authors would mind me sharing their findings discussed in Chapter 1:

“What accounts for the US decline? While US ratings and rankings have
fallen in all five areas of the EFW index, the reductions have been largest in the Legal System and Protection of Property Rights (Area 2), Freedom to Trade Internationally (Area 4), and Regulation (Area 5). The plunge in Area 2 has been huge. In 2000, the 9.23 rating of the United States was the 9th highest in the world.

But by 2012, the area rating had plummeted to 6.99, placing it 36th worldwide.

While it is difficult to pinpoint the precise reason for the decline in Area 2, the increased use of eminent domain to transfer property to powerful political interests, the ramifications of the wars on terrorism and drugs, and the violation of the property rights of bondholders in the auto-bailout case have weakened the tradition of strong adherence to the rule of law in United States.

We believe these factors have contributed to the sharp decline in the rating for the legal-system area.

Expanded use of regulation has also been an important contributing factor
to the declining ratings of the United States. During the past decade, non-tariff trade barriers, restrictions on foreign investment, and business regulation have all grown extensively. The expanded use of regulation in the United States has resulted in sharp rating reductions for components such as independence of the judiciary, impartiality of the courts, and regulatory favoritism.

To a large degree, the United States has experienced a significant move away from rule of law and toward a highly regulated, politicized, and heavily policed state.

The decline in the summary rating between 2000 and 2012 on the 10-point
scale of the index may not sound like much, but scholarly work on this topic indicates that a one-point decline in the EFW rating is associated with a reduction in the long-term growth of GDP of between 1.0 and 1.5 percentage points annually (Gwartney, Holcombe, and Lawson, 2006).

This implies that, unless policies undermining economic freedom are reversed, the future annual growth of the US economy will be only about half its historic average of 3%.”

As long as we’re kicking around the Cato Institute site, you might also be interested in their finding that some of what’s called healthcare law in the us may not be constitutional.

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Anyone who has studied their Scripture knows we ought to be seeing the next Horseman of the apocalypse pretty quickly now, since the oceans are bittered (at  least off Japan) and Death is riding around Africa and trying to hop plane rides to the U,S,

But mainly, the world end is taking its own sweet time getting here.

Take Ebola, for one.

OK, there’s a second confirmed case in Dallas and we’ve got some spare change on two more cases being discovered in America before the week is out.  That’s just looking at numbers.  Another number to think about: PR Department overtime (if any) at CDC keeping people from panicking.

The other BIG Slow-Mover is the market.

The decline of last week was fairly painful, but we’re due to get a break because options expire come the end of the week and Wall St. doesn’t like to pay bears (short side players) their due, so a modest rally is quite predictable.

But the really bad part about the world ending slowly is we’re being treated to examples of mass stupidity in the political arena.

Real Clear Politics makes the point this morning that the democrats are now blaming the republicans for Ebola.

The Gallup polls numbers, that I follow fairly closely, paint a picture of a country that is slowly losing its belief in elected officialdom.  Over time.

This would not be particularly concerning if it didn’t fit with some some macro-scale anthropological prototypes, such as the decline of the Anasazi.

Instead of watching news channels for clues about the future, a read of Collapse of Complex Societies by Joseph Tainter is a good starting point.  From Wikipedia:

Tainter begins by categorizing and examining the often inconsistent explanations that have been offered for collapse in the literature.^[4] In Tainter’s view, while invasions, crop failures, disease or environmental degradation may be the apparent causes of societal collapse, the ultimate cause is an economic one, inherent in the structure of society rather than in external shocks which may batter them: diminishing returns on investments in social complexity.^[5] Finally, Tainter musters modern statistics to show that marginal returns on investments in energy, education and technological innovation are diminishing today. The globalised modern world is subject to many of the same stresses that brought older societies to ruin.^[5]

However, Tainter is not entirely apocalyptic: “When some new input to an economic system is brought on line, whether a technical innovation or an energy subsidy, it will often have the potential at least temporarily to raise marginal productivity” (p. 124). Thus, barring continual conquest of your neighbors (which is always subject to diminishing returns), innovation that increases productivity is – in the long run – the only way out of the dismal science dilemma of declining marginal returns on added investments in complexity.

And, in his final chapters, Tainter discusses why modern societies may not be able to choose to collapse: because surrounding them are other complex societies which will in some way absorb a collapsed region or prevent a general collapse; the Mayan and Chaocan regions had no powerful complex neighbors and so could collapse for centuries or millennia, as could the Western Roman Empire – but the Eastern Roman Empire, bordered as it was by the Parthian/Sassanid Empire, did not have the option of devolving into simpler smaller entities.

Another dandy read is Jared Diamond’s Collapse:  How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive:

In the prologue, Diamond summarizes his methodology in one paragraph:

This book employs the comparative method to understand societal collapses to which environmental problems contribute. My previous book (Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies), had applied the comparative method to the opposite problem: the differing rates of buildup of human societies on different continents over the last 13,000 years. In the present book focusing on collapses rather than buildups, I compare many past and present societies that differed with respect to environmental fragility, relations with neighbors, political institutions, and other “input” variables postulated to influence a society’s stability. The “output” variables that I examine are collapse or survival, and form of the collapse if collapse does occur. By relating output variables to input variables, I aim to tease out the influence of possible input variables on collapses.

While it’s fun having access to real cutting edge futuring technology such that we expect a China spying story to pop any minute now, and we know that people gifted with prophetic dreaming are about to go have another look, most of the look-ahead can be gathered with only the faintest of headlines and a decent framework.

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(Reader note:  I promised shorter columns this week.  Let’s see how we do.  Our usual precisely timed reports may be somewhat off schedule due to lightning storms which are wandering through East Texas this morning.  Our editor (Zeus the Cat) has taken the morning off to hide out in places unknown until the racket dies down.  He showed me how to smell-check once, but I fergot.)

You may not remember the early Peoplenomics reports.,  But you’ll find this tale pretty interesting.

In one of the earliest of what are now around 600-back issues of Peoplenomics – December 1, 2001 to be exact – I hypothecated the existence of something called Directorate 153.

The concept was that somewhere in the West there would be a multi-purpose government tool (yeah, sort of like one of those Leatherman tools) so that governments could do what needed doing without being “found out.”

Secret agencies, which includes the likes of the NSA and CIA, are fine for large scale intelligence operations.  But the military-intelligence operations have an “iffy” history of getting things right.  Or, keeping secrets.

To be sure, operations like Iran-Contra were  – at some level – well-intentioned.  But they also were large enough that they had a considerable “footprint” and this is a very bad thing because it meant over time, their existence and operations were almost sure to leak out.  They did.

Like the multipurpose tool, what government needs (or thinks it does) is something small that can be pliers, tweezers, pea shooter, futurists, high-level henchmen, and all more or less under wraps.  Oh, and under budget, too.

The December 2001  “Inside Report” (the name Peoplenomics had not yet been cobbled together) was based on the reports that someone knew more than was being told to us about the events surrounding 9/11.

For one, there were a flurry of reports about a group of “5 Israelis” videotaping events on 9/11.  Sure enough, we can find lots of references to this through a Google Search, but whether they were “genuine” or not is a little more ethereal.

In 2001 there were several incidents that suggested an “almost visible, but not quite” Invisible Hand was operating in the background not only of 9/11 but also the OKC bombing and other events as well.  Even now, a conspiratorially open person might wonder about some of the claims of “others”.

And the HYPOTHECATED Directorate might have gone back even further.  Remember, there are reports many people miss in the high-volume flow of the news that point to a “hidden hand” even going back to the Kennedy Assassination in 1963.

Besides the “grassy knoll” shooter, we also hear reports that Lee Harvey Oswald’s name was quietly added to the CIA wall of heroes.  What to make of the report?  I’ll leave that to you.

To me (back in 2001 and ever since) this “hidden hand” with future forecasting technology has been a real possibility.

Until this weekend.  Now it may be real.

That’s as the Washington Post began to report on (loved the choice of words here) a hidden Navy Directorate in a case involving the manufacture of illegal silencers.  From the Post report:

“The silencers — 349 of them — were ordered by a little-known Navy intelligence office at the Pentagon known as the Directorate for Plans, Policy, Oversight and Integration, according to charging documents”

The specifics of the Post story are less interesting to me than the generalities of it because it substantially “bulks up” our logical conclusion that there not only could be a few of these multipurpose tools, squirreled here and there, but they may have (and may still be) engaged in exactly the kinds of behaviors that would fit our Directorate 153 profile.

• Burn bags of documents are missing.  Someone doesn’t want anyone – including Navy brass by the sound of it – knowing exactly what was going on.
• Fake law enforcement credentials were made available to the group.
• The group (likely) had unlimited access to the highest levels of “national technical means”.  This would mean Keyhole satellite data, data surveillance, and so forth.
• And, by the time the Post gets done, I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some angle of “futuring” that would come to light.

But this last is highly speculative.  A little more background may be useful.

The December 2001 report sketched out a need for Directorate 153 on the basis of continuity of government and initially it was sited in the UK as an  outgrowth of MI-6.  This is because the British really had “the reins” of spy networks 30-years ago (and longer).,  They’d been the “seat of empire” and so it would be logical for there to be a major foreign component to Directorate 153.

Most Americans don’t have a clue why this is so, but here’s what the British were so important.

American government officials are barred (courts and law problem) from wiretapping whoever they care to when they’re off sniffing our problems for the country’s future.

How do you “solved” the legal problem of blocked wiretaps without a court order?

Easy!  You simply route the calls through a foreign-staffed telephone exchange and employ foreign nations to do the listening.  In this way, while the intelligence so gathered might not be admissible in a court, the quality of the intel was above reproach.

And technically it was legal.

One of the better-know communications intercept sites is Menwith Hill RAF station in the UK (Yorkshire).  Another is  outside of Alice Springs, Australia.  Known in the trade as Pine Gap and part of the Echelon arm of “national technical means.”

Even as the NSA operation up in Provo comes on line, the future of such earlier circumventions of strike constitutional law remains bright because two-way radio coms don’t always make it onto the PSTN (public-switched telephone networks) which is why from the KH-17 series and on, surveillance satellites have been equipped with broadband radio receivers that can frequency hop wherever needs in order to hear what’s being said behind pretty much whatever rocks you chose in the Middle East.

Even that is not perfect, however, which is why the graduates of Fort Huachuca (AZ) include folks who schlep  computers and scanning radios into the front lines of conflict (and beyond front lines) in places like Afghanistan.  (Thank you for your service, BTW.)

One of the real difficulties if my hypothecated Directorate 153 is real, is that compartmentalized intelligence is a real beast of a management problem.

Sure, you might cut up the functionality into multiple agencies (part of the group might be with the Navy, another part secreted into the Department of Agriculture, maybe Commerce, or the other uniformed services), but in doing so, there would be a huge level of trust required.

Still and all, even with congressional oversight of intelligence, there’s nothing to stop a group of super-patriots within government from creating their own “meta agency” and that may be the case in real life.

And sometimes the line between national interest and “that piece of paper” becomes a bit blurred.

So we’ll be watching the Post story develop and see how many of the pieces of our “hypothecated” Directorate 153 can be pieced together.  Just one, though, is a damn good start.

Just maybe it’s just seeping into media….uh, what it it?   13-years behind the theoretical work.  Not bad for a “nutter in the woods.”

A recent hypothecated episode is here.

Home Handy-Bastards Workshop

Say, not to pick a fight with the reviewers at Family Handyman, but I disagree with their assessment of the importance of a laser line sighting device and LED work light being built into a circular (e.g., Skil) saw.

While it’s true that any good journeyman carpenter can follow a line by instinct, those of us with only marginal skills can use any help we can get.  Bring on the lightshow and lasers!  Check out the latest issue for the lowdown on which two saws in their “saw off” had the laser.

I don’t get paid to mention this, unless you ante up $12 bucks for a subscription to The Family Handyman (1-year).  I think I get a nickel of that if you do. 

My real motivation is to remind you that regardless of how much money you (don’t) have, you can always add to the appearance and convenience of your own home with very little effort.  That’s what God made weekends for.

This week, we’ll get hip-deep into this in Peoplenomics and how it may pay large in the Depression to come.

War Between  the Wheels

Was it Peoplenomics or here that I was mentioning the showdown between Old Paradigm and New Capitalism as we discussed how Uber.com and Lyft.com were making a real go at the traditional taxi cab industry nationally.

So reader James is in Pennsylvania where the Public Utilities Commission is trying to jam a $6.9 –million fine up Lyft’s ying-yang.

George,

On the Uber and Lyft issue in Pittsburgh. If you want a cab now and are going anywhere but the stadiums,airport or the casino, call a jitney. Cabs in this city are strictly a gravy sucking reprobate stain. Period. Call a cab and pack a lunch.

They show up late or better yet, they take calls and just never show up. They don’t have to if they don’t want to. Its the rules they operate under. The only time they try doing ANYTHING is when some other transportation method is suggested.

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You know?  I really should stop looking at the “crap-coming-at-us” list between now and 2025 because – sorry to say – I don’t see a happy ending.

Not that we can’t “get happy” for however long a good hit lasts, or the effects of whatever you poison your liver with.  Those things will always be around.

But what’s missing is economic growth of the organic kind.  And since that’s heading for the exits almost every turn, it’s time to do some real straight-thinking about supply, demand, shortage of resource, longage of humans, and where we fit into the mix as things head for “10-years in the blender.”

And toward what end?  To redefine what (and maybe IF) we can do anything about it.  Prepping, as you’ll read in this morning’s report, misses much of the point.

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Given how the market turned into a trading turd Thursday, and just looking at the futures a couple of hours before the open (down about 9 on the S&P), I’m beginning to think that we will touch (and likely bounce) off the 1,900 level sometime in the next five trading days.

Or (and this is an increasing possibility), we could have a drop to somewhere a good bit under 1,900 by the 23rd, or so.  Then a bounce up to the trend channel, and then a further retreat such that by our November 10 target date, we could be dancing around 1,750 on the S&P.   Or we just crash to that level…my crystal ball short term is in the shop.

Long wave econ argues Toast is the correct answer long term.

Say, that’s a pretty glum outlook!   Yes – including our outlandish 2025  rate :28% unemployment rate forecast, but that’s how cookies crumble.

Well, maybe it’s not so glum….

You see what’s going to happen here shortly (with oil down to $84 and change this morning), is it will shortly occur to someone besides me that deflation is screaming.  And, as it does, what else is likely to tank in a major way? 

In the very short term, gold.  Unlike paper, though, gold can’t be watered down, so I wouldn’t be a seller…a real slump in gold prices could be the investment of a lifetime.

OK, what does Janet Yellen (et alia) do about it?

They MAY have started to “UNprint” the money supply.

The evidence is right there in your face:  M1 is down 1.7% in the last month and if we take the M1 annualized rate, basis the last three months, M1 is down to 2.3%.  That’s a hell of a chance from a 12-month print rate of M1 of 9.9 percent, I’d say.

M2 is down  to 5% from 6.4% over 12 months.

Which means?

We know that money’s cost is a function of supply and demand.  If the rates are low, there’s no real incentive to spend.  Why buy now if things are going to be cheaper down the road?  But with the Fed doing some visible tightening, they’re basic ally saying money commanding a little more interest might be a good thing.

Especially in the oil patch where oil under $85 puts the fear of God in drillers.  At these kind of prices exploration falls apart and if it gets much lower, rigs will start laying down.  And there will go yet another crop of high-paying jobs – off to harvest.

So watch today quite closely:  We have four Fed officials speaking and they may have something to say in unison if we listen closely.

Tomorrow’s Peoplenomics report looks at the “different kind of prepping” that comes into view in the times ahead, if what develops in coming months is indeed “The Big One.”  You may find it useful.

Import Export Prices

Here’s Festive for you:

Prices for U.S. imports fell 0.5 percent in September, after declining 0.6 percent in August and 0.3 percent in July, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Each of the 3 monthly decreases was led by falling fuel prices.

The price index for U.S. exports also declined in September, decreasing 0.2 percent following a 0.5-percent drop in August. Imports All Imports: Overall import prices continued a 3-month downward trend in September, falling 0.5 percent. Prices for imports decreased 1.4 percent from June to September, the largest quarterly drop since the index declined 1.4 percent during the final quarter of 2013.

In September, fuel prices drove the decrease, although nonfuel prices also declined. The price index for overall imports fell 0.9 percent for the year ended in September, the largest 12-month decrease since the index fell 1.1 percent in February.

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The Great Cleaving has begun in earnest.

In case you’ve missed it, this morning (sorry to do this to your schedule), we’re going to inspect four mighty interesting pieces of the Great Puzzle Called Life.  At the end of it, I hope you’ll find some worthwhile thoughts so that you’ll be4 able to assemble, tear-apart, reassemble, (rinse and repeat), as you work out how to prepare for whatever it is that comes next on either side of breathing.

The four concepts are both guiding and troubling…and should you have thoughts, please feel free to drop me an email.

The Big Picture

The first puzzle piece involves the currently being waged war between old technology and new.  We’ll explain the World of Two Travelers, 2014.

The second picture (or puzzle piece) involves breakthroughs in microelectronics that will (yet again) revolutionize technology. Cheaper, smaller, and more ubiquitous.

The third piece is a YouTube video which gets into the little matter of aliens, abductions, and related phenomena that edges us toward….

The fourth puzzle-piece.  In this, we see within recent works retranslating ancient texts, how Earth is (hate to break the news to you like this) a kind of a “planted planet.” 

The literature is clear, depending on how you read it and whose translations you trust: A super-race of beings is afoot in Universe, doing the bidding of a central Ruler of All.  And these Johnny Appleseed types, who “planted planet” are fabled in stories handed down through generations of humans now called simply “religion.”

Yet when we get into it, and you read translations of ascension language, suddenly ancient prophets “showing their faces as the Sun” might be descriptions that would have been used by desert tribesmen who have never seen a transporter beam on Star Trek in operation.

It’s an interesting stew and of first-order importance, worth the time to be taken as a whole cross-sectional sample of a very strange world, indeed.

1. The Tale of Two Travelers

When I write our Peoplenomics  reports – like the one this weekend on prepping for the guts of the Depression still in its infancy – I like to use examples that illustrate how the creative rebirth of capitalism is contained within the new technology that is presently set to destroy old-technology controlled by the (One Percent) who rule of Earth.

Nowhere is this more clear than in something I call The Two Travelers:

Case 1:

Two travelers awaken in their home town of Palestine, Texas.  They need to meet with an important client in Houston, Texas.  It will be a long meeting and it will start promptly at 8 AM, so the travelers decide to go early and stay overnight.  They arrange for the meeting to be held at their hotel in a conference room.

They fly from Tyler, Texas to Houston.

Upon arriving in Houston, they pick up a rental car for 24-hours ($60) and check into an inexpensive corporate-run hotel ($135).  Their total cost is  $195 plus a $5 tip for the bellman resulting in a total of an even $200.

Case 2:

All the other variables are the same except they call Lyft (www.lyft.com) and a private driver shows up and takes them to an AirBnB.com member’s home where they pay the driver $15 and the AirBnB bill comes to $75 for a nice room for the night.   The client picks them up at 7:00, and after breakfast, the meeting gets underway at the client location.  As they fly home, they add up the bills after paying, another $15 to a Lyft.com driver.

Their transportation cost was $30 instead of $60 and instead of a $135 hotel, they spent $75.  New trip cost:  $120.  They tipped the Lyft drivers and left a bottle of beer for the AirBnB owner.

Case 3:

“Screw this travel stuff” says one of the two travelers.  “Why should we go to Houston when we can video conference on Skype?”

“Hell yes… – let’s take the money we save and go mudding…”

“That’s what I’m talking…No Ebola on Skype, right?  lol…”

Cost zero.,

In each of these cases, various levels of infrastructure are used to accomplish the same business objectives.  A meeting “face to face”.  All that is missing from Skype to make it 100% competitive with physical meetings would be the electronic thumbprint/signature plugin that I’m sure someone is working on (or I just haven’t found it yet).

That’s how the “worlds  are merging before us right now.  www.lyft.com is real and they threaten the “old way” which is the taxi cab industry.  So is www.uber.com.  And so is Sidecar (http://www.side.cr/)

AOf course, this means war so both companies are under attack by the “old paradigm defenders” in places like Tampa, FL and Pittsburgh.  Oh, yeah, and did I mention that in the Pennsylvania case, the paradigm defenders are trying to sock Lyft with $6.9 million in fines?  I didn’t check to see if taxi meters are made in Pennsylvania.

California, meantime, is trying to figure out how to deal with the insurance side of the equation.

By now it should be clear:  Change is afoot in the personal on-call transportation and lodging fields.

I figure it won’t be too long before the corporate hotel industry goes after AirBnB claiming something or other about licensing.  Life’s a bitch when change is in the air, ain’t it?

2. The Internet’s Next Leap

And it won’t stop there.

There’s been some breakthrough movement on getting chip size and cost down for linking appliances around the home (and even internal engine parts if you want to put them there, for all I know).

A good write up on it here.  Rice-sized addressable chips.  Perfect solution for any problem  that comes along and can be networked.  Look for these in future robotics.

For now, there is still a future in mechanical engineering, but the more upward mobility you want to have, the more it may depend on integrating “smart” into “dumb” mechanical assemblies. And pretty quick, a lot of intricate hardware will become web/’app enabled so that mechanical assemblies may become simplified and chipped instead of mechanically linked in more expensive ways..

“Holy shit, Batman, the Singularity is here…” wrote a reader who supplied the link. 

I have to say, we’re not surprised.

3. Watching the Watchers or the Greys

If the Singularity is here (and a convincing case is there for those to see it) then we start edging towards this little matter of End Times.

Regardless of your religious affiliation (even none), the End Times are just about here when “All things become known” and advances in Tech  are certainly on the upswing.

If you’ve followed some of our other discussions in this column, you’ll remember that there is this Johnny Appleseed thing going on – where some kind of Super Race (which may be able to transcend regular space-time constraints we enjoy) – has “seeded” the Earth.

And accounts of the “seeders” if you will show up as religion.

A lot of research has been done on the alien abduction problem, as the jury is out on whether the abductees are being taken by “aliens” or whether there isn’t something “demonic” involved.

Check out this interview with Budd Hopkins…

Along with the alien encounter and abduction data, we have a whole field of emergent data suggesting that ancient contact between humans and “others” is how we were “bred” to be what we are now.

4. The Digital Rapture Problem

As I explained in yesterday’s column, whether there are “watchers” or “babysitters” or just outright “demons” around doesn’t much matter because we seem to be in a kind of digital rapture.

People are “leaving the earth” and joining up as a mass consciousness “in the air”. 

I did promise you this:

I’ll have to ask Chris up at www.thechronicleproject.org to run Thessalonians 4:16 through their filters and see how it comes out…

Thess. 4:16 is where we get into the meeting “in the air” part of The End.

Chris Tyreman was kind enough to share a very long, but thorough discussion of the whole “rapture thing” from his scholarly perspective.  I’ll let him explain…

“The rapture as described by many modern churches, is an idea based upon this concept given by Paul.  This is not a historical concept, but relatively new.

1 Thessalonians 4:16-1721st Century King James Version (KJ21)

16 For the Lord Himself shall descend from Heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God; and the dead in Christ shall rise first;

17 then we who are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so shall we ever be with the Lord.

The term “rapture” is not biblical and the event is merely a description of Jesus collecting his followers at the end of the rule of the anti-christ to defeat the fallen angel Azazel’s (anti-christ/beast) forces at the valley of Migado.  He is the one who arises from the pit where he was placed after causing the destruction of the Earth at the time of Noah.  Peter mentions those angels in his letters.  One can see the book of Enoch for the complete story which can be found online as “The Book of the Watchers”.

The rapture concept is one of the best ideas that those who control the Earth have come up with to dilute the strength of the church followers of Jesus.  Liken it to two people being told war is coming and they have to train.  One trains very hard, but the other is told not to worry, he will be taken to an observer position where he will be safe.  The day comes for the war and both are put in.

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Hum-dinger. 

A discussion and chart is up on our premium content site, www.peoplenomics.com.  The report link is here.

The rally might have had something to do with the release of the Fed meeting minutes for last month which included this downright supportive of low interest rates for a while longer:

In their discussion of monetary policy for the period
ahead, members judged that information received since
the FOMC met in July indicated that economic activity
was expanding at a moderate pace. Household spending
appeared to be rising moderately, and business fixed investment
was advancing, while the recovery in the housing
sector remained slow. Fiscal policy was restraining
economic growth, although the extent of restraint was
diminishing and would soon be quite small.

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