George Ure

Amazon Author Page: https://www.amazon.com/George-Ure/e/B0098M3VY8%3Fref=dbs_a_mng_rwt_scns_share UrbanSurvival Bio: https://urbansurvival.com/about-george-ure/

Economics of the Waco Shoot-Out

The media accounts this morning, like this one, are placing the blame for the large number of deaths at a biker gang summit in Waco, on the lack of cooperation from the restaurant where the killings took place.

Some of the more interesting background on the clubs involved may be found over here.

Oddly, no mention of Hells Angels in this…although Banditos are apparently the predominant club in Texas.   Already, there’s talk of more violence to come from this.

All of which gets us to the economic discussion:  If clubs like this make their money on meth, weed and coke runs, what would happen if the US had a much more open or lenient drug environment and made marijuana legal?

Not likely to happen:  Police, prisons, gangs, treatment, it’s all one big economic circle.  Make drugs available freely and there goes the auto glass replacement business.  If crime disappeared tomorrow, it would crater the economic, it’s as simple as that.

As usual, I am not BS’ing you on this.

In  2001, Portugal decriminalized drugs and remains so to this day.  A 2009 Cato Institute Report, which was latter turned into a book, written by Constitutional lawyer Glenn Greenwald, includes this observation in their white paper about Portugal’s success with no drug laws:

The report also sets forth the data concerning
drug-related trends in Portugal both pre- and
postdecriminalization. The effects of decriminalization
in Portugal are examined both in
absolute terms and in comparisons with other
states that continue to criminalize drugs, particularly
within the EU.

The data show that, judged by virtually every
metric, the Portuguese decriminalization framework
has been a resounding success. Within this
success lie self-evident lessons that should guide
drug policy debates around the world.

I can’t count the times I have told you that turning crime into an industry (which is what for-profit prison operators are doing) is very bad for freedom.  Portugal’s experience is that legalizing drugs isn’t a bad thing.

Keeping them illegal – which leads to smuggling and gangs and such – is.

Well, except Portugal, if you remember, was one of the financially strapped (down and raped) PIIGS countries of the E.U.

Until we recognize that organized crime of all sorts is fundamentally economic exploitation, we can look forward to a lot more violence to come.  That will mean more cops, more lawyers, more prisons, more rehab, more halfway house operators, more street crime, more….

Somewhere, someone besides me has to notice that the end of  Prohibition ended organized crime’s profit-making booze division.  I guess that’s why really organized crime is now called government.

Until government stops partnering with criminals in a social death dance – one that employs three lawyers per case and has left 22% of Americans scarred with criminal records – Texas is just a symptom of more to come.  Crime of the Waco sort is economic at its core.

Failure isn’t an option in the War on Drugs.  It’s a certainty.

Apparently, such clear-headed thinking is not available in Washington where, this morning, the Obamanizers will roll out more money to arm cops and will spend some of your hard-earned tax dollars on building “trust” with local communities.

As usual, government is solving the wrong problem… instead of “putting down crime” anyone with half a brain would ask “What’s putting it up?”  (Money)  “So how do we fix that?”

Want to fix burglary?  Mandatory 6-month jail time for people who buy stolen goods.  Take the economics off the table and you solve “crime.”.

Oh, wait…no MRAPS in peaceful living, though, is there?

Markets And Such

Consumer Prices will be released on the 22nd – Friday – this month.  Not much excitement until there.  Keep NoDoz at the ready.

Market is looking to open slightly down, which is normal after a blow-off options week.

‘Bout Drought

We now have MORE than twice of much rain as Seattle, here in the East Texas Outback.  Almost 29-inches while Seattle downtown is reporting 13 and change.

Moreover, Abilene, Texas, which was dusting off 3-inches last year is over 9-inches this year.

And the drought monitor looks like we are in for a horrific fire season in the woods of the West.

Is there good news for California?  Yes.  Reader Mark M spied an article about a breakthrough desalinization technique that has been developed  at MIT.

Of course that begs the question, can it scale in time to prevent the movement of some millions of people out of Droughtifornia?  You saw where this weekend, Washington State officially entered drought, as well

And while Lake Mead is trying to disappear, much to the worry of Las Vegans (check if that’s a word for me, would’ja?) there’s also a report of Lake Powell going Houdini on us..

Meantime, there’s so much rain here that our septic system is sluggish…

Reminds me of the joke from B-school:  You know what a statistician is?  That’s a person who can freeze his left foot in a block of ice and stick the other foot in a fire.  Then look you dead in the eye and say (wait for it…_)  “On average, I’m comfortable.”

I should count my blessings, I suppose,  but we’re just a little too “flush” with rain, thank you.  Walking in the yard, we sink in an inch or two…things are that soggy here.

“Let He Who Casts the First Stone…”

I just love it when John Kerry starts to criticize the leadership of North Korea.  And what do we do about it?  Why saber rattle and threaten new sanctions back, of course!

Just looking at things from up here in the cheap seats, sending Dennis Rodman to NK accomplished what, exactly?

It’s OK…the NK’s criticized Ferguson and Baltimore if I’m not mistaken…It’s no longer statesmanship.  It’s blame marketing.

Middle Easting

From our news analyst fellow up in Winnipeg:

Dear Mr. Ure,

France24 is reported that training has commenced for American-paid rebel Jaysh al-Islam mercenaries in the fight against ISIS in the Syrian theater. One could rhetorically wonder why the Saudis are not paying the entire freight for a Sunni group not only spawned by one of their descendants, but with linkages to an al-Qaeda derivative al-Nusra Front. So far this storyline isn’t quite lining up with the fine efforts of German mercenaries who turned back the Islamic incursion of Western Europe at Vienna in the sixteenth century.

Further to this discussion of the public announcement of American training commencement for the Jaish al-Islam rebel group, Hasan Hasan a journalist in Abu Dhabi issued a one sentence tweet this past weekend. He noted that the cleric Abu Mohammed al-Maqdisi was “subtweeting” the rebel group.  It looks like the alleged “dangerous and influential jihadi theorist’s” managers only started him up on Twitter two weeks ago. One trusts all is going to plan, Inshalah?

And then we note Shi’ite forces are moving to take back an Iraqi city taken earlier by ISIS.

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Coping: With an Oily Bottom & Forward Dimly

We have really enjoyed it – this long running decline of oil prices.  It has been something of a marvel.

For one thing, it has made travel relatively affordable this year.  And, while there is still the prospect of another wave down, it shouldn’t happen until we get one more screaming blow-off top in the market.

The future, at least to economics fans, is often foretold in Elliot Waves.  R.N. Elliott laid this all out in a deceptively simple book years ago titled The Wave Principle.

The basic idea is that big trends tend to come in five moves.  There a primary move (in oil’s case down), then a bounce, then a bigger down than the first one, a fourth wave bounce, and finally we settle in at the low.

My best guess is that we are seeing the end of wave 3 down and we might see a fourth wave rally of a couple of years before the fifth wave bottom shows itself.  And that, of course, will come with the Second Depression’s economic low-spot (armpit) somewhere along about 2019-2020.

Before you read a technical note from Oilman2, realize that we sometimes talk in short-hand.  I know that the oil data he refers to is the Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) which is the state agency that manages the oil property rights and  production facilities and dirty little details of oil including plug & abandon policies and what –not.

People who consider themselves shade tree “oil experts” who haven’t spent vast time on the Texas Railroad Commission site looking at the data are pretty much kidding themselves.

So much for my part…now the note from Oilman2 after I remind you the EIA is the Energy Information Administration…

Latest EIA data shows decline of 86kb/day in all US shale plays. The EIA data lags the RRC data significantly, as it is interpolated, whereas the RRC data is compiled and revised. RRC data has been showing even more decline in Texas fields. than the traditional lower estimates they are known for.

This was out late last week:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-10/saudi-chevron-said-to-shut-down-wafra-oil-fields-output-monday

The Neutral Zone is a cooperative effort between Saudi and Kuwait – the buffer zone for leasing they share between them offshore. The Chevron project is a tertiary recovery steamflood operation, and the ceasing of expat work permits for Wafra a year back indicates something more than ‘maintenance’. Khafji, according to my sources, had casing leakage issues on several wells in addition to sanding up in many more – both would require extensive workover ops to return to normal. My guess is a tiff between Chevron and KOC, but that is a guess.

If the rig declines flatline (several operators in OK are starting back to drilling, but not at breakneck pace) for another few weeks, shale oil production continues to decline and we do not see gaining production in Saudi, the bottom may be in.

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A Pretty Good "Get Rich" Scheme

There are only two things the average American wants, these days:  To be “famous” and to “get rich.”

The problem with famous, of course, is that it doesn’t pay the bills.  And the benefit of “rich” is that you can buy fame – if you have enough money.

So this morning I lay out a pretty good “get rich” scheme. 

No, it’s not fast, but is has a very good chance of working – since most people don’t even bother trying to get rich; most sit around waiting for it to happen.  Then they get disappointed when it doesn’t.  Go figure.

So we’re off to the realities of “getting rich” after some coffee and a few significant headlines.

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Long Waves for Kids: Fall 1927

I don’t often give much space on the UrbanSurvival site to our Peoplenomics™ work on markets.  That’s reserved for people who support this site with a $40/annual subscription.

But I want to break with tradition this morning to put into perspective where we COULD be in the greater scheme of things.

The chart above shows what would happen if we line up the market break in 1921 with the market break low of 2009 following the Housing bubble collapse.

THIS IS NOT INVESTMENT ADVICE but as you can see, there is a case to be made for a rally into this fall, a pullback this fall, and then a stunning rally in 2016 before we collapse in a heap.

What would those dates be? 

Well, the week we are in would correspond to November 3, 1927.

The absolute top (although it’s hard to imagine such a perfect fit actually happening) would come ideally around March of 2017.

Then we would have two (back to back) 76 week periods of horrific decline.

But between  now and that first low mid August of 2018, we could see a lot of interesting things happen.

For example, I would expect gold to make a move to the 2,500 area and silver could hit $80, or more.

But the problem ahead would be remaining fleet-footed.

People like to imagine the market falling apart any day now.  And why not?  It sells newspapers and builds the web site traffic for the genuine doom porn types.

While I like catastrophism as much as the next guy (I made money in 1987, lol) the fact of the matter is there’s usually some logical basis for my outlooks, not just an urge to scare people in the me-too sort of way.

The Internet is a hugely circular place.  And that’s why I don’t spend a lot time trying to keep up too much with the doom porn types.  But I won’t bullsh*t you:  I’m  not too worried for American until after we get to the 2016 elections.

I don’t know if it will be due to the outcome of the elections, something about inauguration, or some financial calamity that will slap us in the face.  But between  now and then, short of the expected pullback to S&P 1,740 along the way, maybe this fall if we don’t get it in the June-July period, we know we’re going to his the biggest decline ever.

We just don’t know how all the fiddling with backdoor bailouts and Fed policy will play out this time around.  We could go any time, sure.

In fact, the me-too media has said damn little about the ongoing and critical collapse of the velocity of money.  Check out the chart to the right.

Velocity has just imploded to the lowest level in Ure lifetime.

So, let’s talk about Velocity for a moment.

Velocity is like annual inventory turns.  In accounting, it’s easy to think of money as having turnover.

If you lend someone $10-bucks, then spend it, and repay you, that generates $10 worth of local economic activity.  When you lend it out twice in a year (and get repaid twice) you get $20 worth of economic activity.

There was actually a time in the country when rolling over money happened twice a year…but that was during the go-go internet bubble lead-in.

What has happened now is that the turnover in money is down (as of the end of April – this is only published by the Fed quarterly as a chart) to only 1.5 turnovers per year.

Eventually, the Fed gets us into a terrible spot where they can’t print enough money to keep things afloat and they simply give up.  That’s when gold and silver confiscations have happened in the past because government – facing falling tax revenue, but on the hook for tons of social commitments – can’t do anything except confiscate everything that is not nailed down.

The good news – such as it is – is that velocity could pick up one more time.  But currency collapse it out there down the road as an  obstacle to peaceful future.

The real crap isn’t likely to be fully appreciated until late 2017/2018.  But then, however, the
“insolvable” problems will be really in our faces:

  • The migration from the California/Southwest drought
  • The extreme lack of jobs from…
    • Economic displacement from robotics and business process software and…
    • Lack of R&D spending
    • Collapsed disposable personal income from mounting government mandated spending on various insurances (car, health, etc)
    • And let’s not leave out self-driving cars and…
    • Virtualization of life and microhomes plus
    • The consumption impacts of a declining birth rate, LBGT spending changes and the impacts of environmentalism.
  • Should I mention the time lag between appeasement and war in the Middle East?

    • This last point is sort of savory: The Wikipedia entry on Neville Chamberlain puts appeasement a couple of years ahead of open warfare with Germany…so by then any appeasement of Iran should result in war in that part of the world.

    There, feeling better now?

    Empire State Manufacturing Report

    It’s just out.  A highlight?

    The headline general business conditions
    index climbed four points to 3.1. The
    new orders index rose ten points to
    3.9, and the shipments index was
    little changed at 14.9. Labor market
    indicators pointed to a small increase in
    employment levels but a slight decline
    in the average workweek. The prices
    paid index fell ten points to 9.4, its
    lowest level in nearly three years, and
    the prices received index edged down
    to 1.0, indicating that selling prices
    were flat. The index for future general
    business conditions fell noticeably,
    reflecting a positive but less favorable
    outlook than in April.

    The rest of the report is over here.  The only question is how close to Ure’s Discontinuity are we, the point where declining interest rates quite suddenly drop to negative numbers and stock and bond prices collapse…

    War Notes from “Warhammer”

    Yeah…you hate him…but his track record is very good at looking ahead…

    “The Saudi’s just threw a turd in the Camp Davis swimming pool:

    <http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-vows-to-set-off-new-middle-east-arms-race-and-match-irans-nuclear-capability-10250789.html>

    Whether diplomatic posturing or downright steely-eyed threatening, in reality the Sunni Saudi sultans are simply telling it like it is. One need not look further than the civil war festering just south of Saudi Arabia’s border in Yemen. The Shiite Iranian mullahs are fueling the fires of war by arming and otherwise advising and supplying the Yemeni Houthi opposition while a Sunni coalition, led by the Saudis and Egypt, provide armed support to the self-exiled ruling regime’s leadership.

    Imagine throwing a few nuclear fireworks into this already messy mix! I’d put even money on there being more than a few black glass parking lots popping up in cities such as Tehran and Riyadh. We could have our very own modern-day Middle Eastern accounting of the ‘legends’ put forth in the ancient Indian Mahabharata texts.

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    Coping: Cartesians within Dreams

    If dreams have predictive content,  we might soon be reading about a shopping center or mall attack in coming weeks/months.

    Or – and this is really the more likely – last night’s dream was merely a collection of thought stubs.

    First, though, let me tell you about the dream itself.

    The dream was from the viewpoint of what seemed to be a male figure who had just met (or was looking for) a loved one/female figure who was a relatively new hire in a bank or store customer service department in a shopping area.

    The bank or financial/customer service place where she (name: Christine) worked was somewhere to the right and perhaps down from the bakery that was the focus of the dream.

    The male figure in the dream had just dropped by where this Christine works and she was getting used to life in retail – which for her was seven days a week.  She was to get two days off during the week (either Tuesday/Wednesday, or Wednesday/Thursday).  But, when the male figure in the dream showed up, it was somewhere around lunchtime.  Maybe 11 AM or even 10:30 AM, or so.

    Since this Christine was in a meeting/training, the viewpoint in the dream decided to have lunch.  He decided to eat at a basement / half flight down kind of bakery.

    So he goes into this basement or ground-level bakery, but on the way down (stairs or behind concrete half-wall)) to it, he has an alarm bell going off in his head.  Could the building he was entering be the site of a terrorism attack/explosion in a few hours or near future?

    There was something that came through as a kind of “knowing” in the dream – and this is the part worth mentioning – that voce or knowing part said it was OK because the damage from the upcoming explosion in the northwest part of the building would not do significant damage this far away; perhaps only a few beams/pieces of ceiling,  but it would be survivable.

    He (the dreamer) then looks around.  It’s early, so not all the fresh bread is out, but he does see a couple of loaves of a pale white bread that looks fresh…and (some weirdness now) – boxes and boxes of Velveeta or other cheese.  Apparently this half – flight down bakery/shop is famous for bread and cheese.

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    Ure Basic Economics: The “Gold Product”

    Long – but useful ramble here:  One of the hangovers from being #2 at a regional jet air carrier in the Caribbean is a fine sense of Standard Accounting Ratios.

    When an airline figures it needs a 73% passenger load factor to break-even, it’s not blowing smoke…it’s an accounting calculation.  It’s something folks in airline admin, like me, model and tweak and press and connive in order to get all the costs as low as possible and thus, have the best chance of making money.

    It’s the art of the ratio.  If you have 100-seats, then if 73 of them don’t have fare-paying butts in then, the airline will lose money on that flight. On the other hand, if there are 100 people in 100 seats, the odds of making money goes up…but again, there are other ratios that need to be considered.

    Take your car..

    Say you have a $500 payment on it.

    Say you drive 100 miles a month.  That would mean you are paying $5 per mile just to drive the car…and some places cabs can be that cheap….and public transportation sure as hell is. 

    You get ahead (or behind) in life working these things out.  And then living “by the numbers.”

    When you drive 1,0000 miles a month, then your car cost per mile drops to 50-cents…and so forth.  That’s the magic of utilization – which is the amount of use out of something you get for the fixed part of ownership.

    Then, there’s the whole matter of variable costs. 

    Some of the things in your car depend on how much you drive it.  A fine example is gasoline.  If you get x miles per gallon and drive y miles, you can figure out one of your variable costs.

    People don’t put as much attention to the fixed cost side of things…they seem to worry more about the variable costs.

    “What in the world could this have to do with the cost of Gold?”

    Let me explain:  Keeping a little bit of what meager income we make is a matter of looking at ratios and understanding dynamics of money.

    I’m sure this morning, you’ll find lots of finance sites likely to focus on the pop in gold the past couple of days and proclaim that a huge breakout is here.  Not that they would be wrong, but let me introduce you to the dollar/gold ratio.  Because being right, but for the wrong reason can lead to disastrous decision-making.

    The basic idea is this:  If a dollar is worth a Euro, then it ought to take about 1,066  of them to buy an ounce of gold. 

    Referring to the chart at the top of this page,  please note that gold, indeed is up again this morning – or at least it was at press time.

    But at the same time, the “value of the dollar” is dropping.  It was down to 0.875 Euro this morning,

    So here is the magic of ratios: 

    Price of gold (say $1,218.70) times the dollar to Euro exchange rate (.875) equals a fully priced ounce of gold at about €1,066.3625.

    And what would the price of gold pencil to if the dollar rose to 0.94 Euro?  Simple:  $1,134.

    The gold/Euro ratio is not fixed, and sure, it will drift over time.  But when you’re playing in a multi-currency world, pah-leese don’t tell me a huge bull market is gold is happening – yet.  The huge bull markets are when major changes in the underlying ratios take place, not when currency has cut loose its moorings temporarily, as it has recently.

    My point (and this is why thinking in ratios is so damn important) is to look for the underlying ratio when you are trying to understand anything financial.

    Yes, you can make money on gold options and yes, the price of gold is going up…but a study of RATIOS reveals that the driver isn’t everyone waking up and running out and buying six Krugerrands before breakfast.  This is a currency swing.

    I will repeat what I was screaming at you a month, or so, back when I told you to watch the Fed which is printing up M1 and M2 like CRAZY to keep the economy pretending to recover:  The forex market is starting to devalue the dollar a bit…and as they do (like printing M1 at a 10.6% annualized rate won’t have an impact?_) the dollar may fall more relative to the Euro.

    That will press gold us, begin some internal inflation in the US and offset the big bad ugly word that no one in Washington can cope with: deflation.

    Why do you think I was headlining all that stuff about the Fed H.6 currency stocks report a while back?  Do I have to draw you pictures?

    Where could it all go?  Well, say the US continues to devalue relative to the Euro.  Say we get down to 0.78.  Where might gold go – strictly on a currency move – in this instance?   Are least to $1,366 or thereabouts.

    Of course, were this to happen, the underlying ratio would change.  There’s a pile-on effect that is not insignificant. 

    In fact, when you study ratios long enough, a particular neuron in your brain will short out and you will see that the ratios aren’t nailed to the floor and appear as a nonlinear curve over time.  And when the curve gets to a certain spot, the related (nonlinear) pile-on of lemmings begins and prices go off the charts to the stratosphere and becomes self-reinforcing.

    Yes, and we can get rich in these instances.

    The bottom line is what?

    I’m skeptical of this being a major bull market in gold just yet.  We need to see gold up into the $1,300+ range and wait for some pile-on effect to appear to become a real ratio-pusher.

    But the ratio (which is kind of rocking chair curve) will be covered in more detail in an upcoming Peoplenomics® report.  But the key thing is to keep an eye on the general business outlook and currencies.

    If people really were buying Krugerrands and Maples for breakfast, the currency shift could be discounted away.  But that’s not what’s going on here on this planet.  At least not yet.

    While the move over $1,200 is constructive, hold to decaf while we see how bad deflation really is, and how much of the Fed money printing really chases goods and services.  The truth will be revealed in the ^TNX 10-year note rates and the 90-day Euro futures.

    If the ^TNX doesn’t drop down next week after options expiration tomorrow, I will be surprised.

    This is, don’t forget  (index) options expiration day and traders love to drive markets up to scalp a few bucks.  Trading may be fine for some, but it’s too much work for old men  like me.

    Stocks should put on 100-points, or more today.  But it’s not because we recovered from our economic woes overnight.  It’s because with the currency shift, it now takes a few more (watered down value) dollars to buy the same intrinsic value represented by the underlying companies.

    I’ve found reducing financial thinking as much as possible to ratios has helped me make average to slightly better financial decisions.  You might consider giving it a try.  A few minutes with a calculator can change your relationships dramatically.  Especially the one with your bank.

    Longwave economics is not about hit-and-run trading.  It’s about these larger ratios over time that anyone can teach themselves to observe and invest by.

    More Dot-Connecting

    Madison Avenue Mike, when he’s not being a demigod of NYC fashion, is one of the more cogent news tipsters around here.

    His “picks” this morning include the report that the Fed really has secret bailout plans and capabilities that dwarf those powers of mortal finance….

    And he spied parent banking firms are likely to plead guilty in some FX-schemes.  Of course, the caught-red-handed bankster class ain’t commenting – but you’ve been around our coffee-klatch news operation here long enough to know what “No comments” means, right?

    Blah, Black, Blah…Producer Prices

    Here, read this press release:

    The Producer Price Index for final demand fell 0.4 percent in April, seasonally adjusted, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Final demand prices moved up 0.2 percent in March and decreased 0.5 percent in February. On an unadjusted basis, the index for final demand declined 1.3 percent for the 12 months ended in April. (See table A.) In April, more than 70 percent of the decrease in final demand prices can be attributed to a 0.7- percent decline in the index for final demand goods. Prices for final demand services edged down 0.1 percent. Within intermediate demand, prices for processed goods fell 1.1 percent, the index for unprocessed goods moved up 0.9 percent, and prices for services advanced 0.5 percent. (See tables B and C.) Final Demand Final demand goods: The index for final demand goods moved down 0.7 percent in April following a 0.3-percent rise in March. Leading the broad-based decline, prices for final demand energy fell 2.9 percent.

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    Coping: Dear Anti-Gun Rights Activist

    I live in East Texas.

    We get all kinds of critters here.

    We get snakes called cotton mouth, snakes called copperheads, and snakes that eat the offspring of birds that do such a fine job of keeping down West Nile.

    We have animals that will turn a finely mowed yard into a raw land digging it up.

    We have wild hogs – weighing several hundred pounds – that would just as soon kill you and eat you  as walk the other way.  And God help you if you get between a wild sow and piglets in the wild.

    We are now into the time of year when a gun in Texas is a working tool.  It can be my old reliable Mossberg, or an assortment of short guns (Glock, Ruger, Colt,  and Taurus just to name a few).

    I appreciate having a good store of ammunition, as well.  It’s an hour into town – and thanks to government efforts, often as not, there’s none to be had.  Not the kind of “response time” that lends comfort to people living on the wild-edge of society.

    I mention this this morning because it’s important to keep guns, gun ownership, the Right to Bear, and such-wise all in perspective.

    People get killed with all kinds of “weapons” – poor construction, hammers, knives, prescription drug interactions, and even (sadly) the odd public official.

    So with the snake season in full bloom out here in fly-over America, please understand that from the perspective of this little patch of Texas, the following is generally true..

    Guns don’t killed people.  Guns kill snakes.

    Thank you.

    Related Note

    From a reader…apparently, I’m not the only one holding this view:

    HI George,

    I’m a consistent reader of urbansurvival.com website and really enjoy your content.  So much great information on your site no matter what level of prepping you are at.

    I was hoping as a reader of your site that it would be possible to have my site listed in your “essential links” section?  I’m still learning the ropes with prepping but my brother and I know our way around firearms and have a firearms blog at www.armsbearingcitizen.com that we try to update as frequently as time will allow.

    Regardless of if you can add us or not, just wanted to say thanks and keep delivering great content to your readers. 

    Thanks!

    Jason@armsbearingcitizen.com

    Thanks for the note.  I don’t generally post reader websites, but this one made sense.  There are too many sites on the net that seem to confuse macho with gun ownership.  A gun is a tool, just like a chainsaw is a tool.  Massacre movies aside, no one has ginned up a drive to register chain saws or, in the wake of 9/11 box cutters either.

    ArmsBearingCitizen is gets my respect for putting Gun Safes and Tips & Safety at the top of their page. That’s responsible gun ownership…so amen to that.

    Snakes come in a variety of sizes, though.  A few even try to kill “infidels.”   Some try to take over aircraft – which is why many pilots I know now carry snake repellant to the cockpit.

    The best example of gun control I can think of it “one shot, one kill” – of a snake, of course.

    This viewpoint might be useful in Logan County West Virginia, where a mom is suing the local school board for arresting her son for wearing an NRA t-shirt.

    I hope she wins.  Big.

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    Is this Why We Prep? 1999 FN53

    Universe is always having fun with us – often at my expense. 

    So Tuesday, when I went down  to the airplane hangar (to make sure everything was coming along) sure enough, I got out of the truck (*with flat soled shoes on) and promptly fell on my butt in a mud puddle.

    Hmmm…falling down, is it?

    Sure enough, when I got home, the web was lighting up with word on this week’s “near pass” of asteroid 1999 FN53.

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    Second Kick-Ass Quake in Nepal

    Another Earthquake in Nepal.  7.3 and dozens more dead.

    End of story?

    Well, not quite.

    Here’s an interesting story to ponder:  Some friends of ours were in Nepal & Tibet a while back (within the last two years) and one of the oddities they found was a very large number of Israel IDF folks in country.

    Normally, I would have written this off as insignificant, but then I caught this story in an Israeli media outlet a while back (*after the first big quake) that headlined “Nepal earthquake updates / Some 200 Israelis preparing to return home on special flight”

    Maybe I am tilting at windmills here, but my mind keeps wanting to add one and one and come up with something.

    So far, it’s only a question:  What is Israel looking for in the Himalayas if anything?

    Say, here’s a website that goes into one thing that I remember about the area:

    “There is a tradition in Tibetan folklore of beyul — secret or hidden lands, usually described as valleys.”

    And what about Shambhala or Shangri-La?  Shangi-la first:

    “Shangri-La is a fictional place described in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by British author James Hilton. Hilton describes Shangri-La as a mystical, harmonious valley, gently guided from a lamasery, enclosed in the western end of the Kunlun Mountains. Shangri-La has become synonymous with any earthly paradise, and particularly a mythical Himalayan utopia – a permanently happy land, isolated from the outside world. In the novel Lost Horizon, the people who live at Shangri-La are almost immortal, living years beyond the normal lifespan and only very slowly aging in appearance. “

    And Shambhala?

    In Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu traditions, Shambhala (also spelled Shambala or Shamballa; Sanskrit: ?????; Tibetan: ??????????; Wylie: bde ‘byung, pron. de-jung; Chinese: ???; pinyin: xi?ngb?l?) is a kingdom hidden somewhere in Inner Asia. It is mentioned in various ancient texts, including the Kalachakra Tantra[2] and the ancient texts of the Zhang Zhung culture which predated Tibetan Buddhism in western Tibet. The Bön[3] scriptures speak of a closely related land called Olmolungring.

    All of which get’s us to wonder why would Guru Rinpoche supposedly empowered some 108 of such places?

    “Who?”

    Padmasambhava[note 1] (lit. “Lotus-Born”), also known as Guru Rinpoche, is a literary character of terma,[1] an emanation of Amitabha that is said to appear to tertons in visionary encounters and a focus of Tibetan Buddhist practice.

    There is an alternative explanation:  Perhaps the US and others involved in the early Gulf Wars found something in their raids on ancient artifact locations – something widely reported during the fights.

    What IF – and this is only an IF – there was some hint in ancient literature that a previous civilization (ET’s come visiting and ignored the Prime Directive perhaps? Ancient history is full of dueling off-worlders…) had left hints to new technologies scattered about the world in other than the territories of Mesopotamia?

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    Coping: Two Weeks of Pins and Needles

    Mother Nature doesn’t seem  to be very happy with Nepal.  This morning’s earthquake – the second in two weeks in Nepal – has us contemplating the possibility that the exceptional strains around the Pacific Plate and the Indo-whatever-it-is will have to have some balancing – and that bodes poorly for either the West Coast or Hawaii.

    As you know, we had recently discussed some of the work of G.A. Stewart (see his website The Age of Desolation here) and we’ve mentioned that May 10 has been a day of concern for some time, but there’s this little matter of calendar adjustments that keep the mega quake window open until the end of the month, or so.

    One of these days, a longer investigation of calendar reform is in order, although Wikipedia has a fine start on it over here.  The idea of the can of worms this “accuracy of calendar” opens begins to reveal itself as we read:

    The calendar was a reform in 1582 to the Julian calendar. It was introduced by Pope Gregory XIII, after whom the calendar was named, by papal bull Inter gravissimas dated 24 February 1582.[4] The motivation for the adjustment was to bring the date for the celebration of Easter to the time of year in which it was celebrated when it was introduced by the early Church. Although a recommendation of the First Council of Nicaea in AD 325 specified that all Christians should celebrate Easter on the same day, it took almost five centuries before virtually all Christians achieved that objective by adopting the rules of the Church of Alexandria (see Easter for the issues which arose).[

    Without getting too deeply into it, the basic idea of the calendar not being “nailed down” with high precision fasteners, has to be considered any time you look at historical data.

    What we can say with some certainty is that yesterday was yesterday and tomorrow is likely to be tomorrow, but much beyond that, religion and government have been conspiring for a good long while and the constant re-write of history books – in the era before moveable data or moveable facts (as opposed to simply moveable type) – has a fair degree of importance.

    For one, we can’t say with very high precision what happened from about 1700 and earlier.

    One of the champions of pointing this stuff out is a Russian mathematician by the name of Anatoly Fomenko.

    He went through all the best information available on the Middle Ages and came to the conclusion that a lot of it was simply made up.  A good starting point if you’re interested in the possibility that even relatively recent history was just “made up” can be found in Fomenko’s History: Fiction or Science? Dating methods as offered by mathematical statistics. Eclipses and zodiacs. Chronology Vol.I which is but the first of several books on point. 

    Then problem is that Fomenko worked history backwards through referenced historical events and came to the conclusion that Christianity may have been largely made up. 

    The problem with Fomenko’s work is two-fold.  First, it doesn’t make Christians very happy because it opens the door to the possibility that a competing religion (Islam) may not be the newer religion by as much as is claimed.

    The other point that’s debatable in Fomenko is whether or not the Earth’s rotation or even our position among the planets more recently is as “stable” as we’d like to think.  Science has be moving slowly toward Velikovsky’s cosmological model of colliding worlds and that really upsets everything.

    The result, for Fomenko was being branded in places like Wikipedia as a “Historical Revisionist:

    “Fomenko is a supporter of drastically revising historical chronology. He has created his own revision called New Chronology, based on statistical correlations, dating of zodiacs, and by examining the mathematics and astronomy involved in chronology. Fomenko claims that he has discovered that many historical events do not correspond mathematically with the dates they are supposed to have occurred on. He asserts from this that all of ancient history (including the history of Greece, Rome, and Egypt) is just a reflection of events that occurred in the Middle Ages and that all of Chinese and Arab history are fabrications of 17th and 18th century Jesuits.

    He also claims that Jesus lived in the 12th century A.D.

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    Talk About Weather–Not Markets

    Why, you’re wondering? Well, except for Orange Juice futures (up 0.88%) there’s little of interest going on publicly today. A few bond numbers, but this week’s news will have to come with a data event like retail sales and import prices, but we’ll have to wait until Wednesday for those. Instead, how about we talk about the weather?

    Coping: Tornado Prepping

    “Well, I’m ready for anything now,” declared Elaine.  “I have my face on…”

    We spent part of the early hours this morning under a tornado watch, and honestly, there’s not much going on at 2:45 AM other than talking about the weather.  The www.wunderground.com  display looked positively crappy.

    The local weather net on the 2-meter ham band was active; seems lots of us with radios couldn’t sleep.

    I would have made some breakfast (always a fine thing, 24/7) but with a vampire appointment for my 6-month old-man-blood work, that was off the table (so to speak).

    “Coffee is OK, though,” I’d been told, but you can only drink so many cups. 

    We’ve been in the hinterlands of East Texas for a dozen years now, and we’ve been thinking again about building a shelter.  It wouldn’t take too much to accomplish the task, a couple of loads of concrete, some block, rebar, and labor.  I’ve been thinking about  putting it under the screen porch and back-filling with dirt all over the place.

    That way, we’d have a cool room in the summer and a shelter when spring lights off like it did today.

    In the meantime, the combination of more-or-less continuous lightning (and how many cups is this?) gave me time to look up my pet theory that getting in a car with seatbelts and shoulder harness on would be a good move.

    Not so, says this site which says in part;  “Do not get in a car or truck. Vehicles are generally tossed into the air and reduced to a pile of battered junk.”

    I would have thought otherwise (impact zones and crumple and air bags) but seems not.

    Still, being in a tornado in tall timber country., well, that project of a cold-room/shelter might just get moved up from the bottom of the project list this year.

    Billionaires Bugging Out

    A few years back, we had a string of reports about rich people selling all their U.S. possessions and heading for parts unknown.  At the time, it was attributed to (variously) a pending global coastal event or Niburu/Wormwood showing up, and so forth.

    The rumors had been turned down to nothing here lately until this come in from a reader this weekend:

    “…nope, the world didn’t end….last week. but the world that elitist /multi-millionaires and billionaires live in is certainly morphing into something that bears no resemblance to the one that relative peons like you and me are familiar with. l am very very very far from wealthy, but as fate would have it am related to two billionaires (in their mid fifties) and and am acquainted with several multi-millionaires ….funny how all of them but 2 were formerly investment bankers for some Big Hitters- they all “retired” about 10 years ago.

    They all live well beneath their means-3 of them had left Texas for other states, and as we speak today, ALL of them, l repeat ALL of them have been busy lately selling their family homes, vacation properties, rental properties and other holdings such as luxury cars, boats,even their airplanes- ……very odd- most of these people don’t know each other but are doing the same thing at the same time !!

    The Texans say that as soon as their kids’ school is out this month, (l mean the day AFTER, literally) they will be leaving for Europe and parts unknown for an extended “vacation”. The other “wealthies” are leaving around the same time, but are vague about their destinations…

    These people have the means to do anything they want …all but one couple have teenagers or younger married children and grandchildren….Their ENTIRE families are leaving together for these “wonderful overseas vacations”….strange how these folks give out very minimal information about their “vacation plans’. l don’t think l will ever see any of these people again…..someone, somewhere has given them a BIG hint, and they are rapidly dismantling their lives here in the USA…. l guess the rest of us , without the means to re-locate , oops, l mean “leave for an extended overseas vacation” will find out soon enough what the future holds….l am scared shitless.

    (Crude Words Alert!)  Say:  Not to pick nits, or anything, but according to one source, the term scared shitless first appeared in 1936.

    This is in terrible contrast to the phrase “scared the shit out of..” which is at quite the other end of the spectrum.

    As far as we’ve been able to determine, most people have this built-in confused G.I.

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    A Quick Course in Stock Screening

    I’ve given Elaine an interesting project:  Find some companies that she thinks we ought to invest in.   Having received approval for our minor parts change on the airplane, I think a trip to a casino somewhere would be interesting but options are far easier to play at home and you can make a lot more money at it.

    Sounds simple enough until you start looking at the task in detail.  Then it becomes…well…daunting.

    This morning we consider the problem of stock screening in some detail, consider some different approaches to sniffing out under-valued companies, and offer Mrs.

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