George Ure

The market going into the open looked like it would open down just a tad.  But is this the beginning of collapse?  No.  A “dead cat bounce” is likely out there in the short-term.

Collapses of the Black Monday sort have (almost) never happened more recently than 37-days from a stock market high.  More often, it’s in the 55-days or longer range.

December 5th, the intraday high of the S& P was 2079.47, so if you add at least 37-days to that you come up with January 11th.

The real time to be wetting your Depends will be January 29th, or thereabouts.  So for now, more likely is a dead cat bounce and remember the Santa rally is still due and options expire next week.  Odds of global disaster are slim until then.

Not that it couldn’t happen; it just wouldn’t be the smart money bet.

Retail Sales

Take an auto salesman to lunch today.  Thank him (or her) for doing more to save the economy that the whole collection of slick-talkers in DC.  Why?  Well…

From the Census folks this morning:

The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for November, adjusted for seasonal variation
and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $449.3 billion, an increase of 0.7 percent (±0.5%) from the previous month, and 5.1 percent (±0.9%) above November 2013.

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Reader Note:  UrbanSurvival will be opening up comments early next week for a test period.  It’ll give you a chance to post feedback and to pass along thoughts on articles easier…now where were we?  Ah…..

Home Handy-Bastard’s Notebook time…

I don’t often mention that UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics are “solar-powered.”  But they are:  Outside, just down from the garden and before you run into the ham radio tower, there are two racks of solar panels.  Each holds 10-solar panels; one rack is of 170-watt panels while the other is 180-watt panels.

All 3,500 watts worth of power is shoved underground down to my office/shop area where there are two Outback Power Systems Outback FM60 Charge Controllers , and a pair of OutBack FX2524T Sine Wave Inverter 2500W 24VDC 120VAC 60Hz sealed w/turbo and two racks of six-volt golf cart batteries (a total of 16-batteries, Interstates, and they work fine.

When we put in the system (which is grid-interactive, designed by Ures truly) the price of solar gear was considerably higher.  With the falling price of solar, you can now pick up panels for about half what we paid for the raw watts just 8-years ago.  (There are two in depth reports on designing and putting in your own solar panels and various design considerations over in the Peoplenomics archives for members and one can be found in the Master Index by searching the word “robust” – as in robust home power.0)

Which has what, exactly, to do with air tools?

Hold onto your horse, I’m getting to that:

Since we’ve built our little compound in the woods to be fairly robust, in terms of whatever the future can throw at us, I made a decision a number of years ago that we would want to have all kinds of power tools in an uncertain future and that’s what the solar panels are about (besides lowering the month power bills, which goes without saying, or does it?)

What was an eye-opener was when I went looking at the variety of tasks that could be done with air tools versus the number of jobs that could be done with electric tools, there was almost no contest.

This was proven to me yesterday when I went looking for a powered (electric, solar, air, natural gas…I don’t care what) caulking gun.

We’re using this winter to refurbish one of the few areas of the house that has not received its “designer treatment” from Elaine.  It’s the “screen porch” which is a common room in the South:  It’s where people can go outside when the temps are 90 (or lower) and not be carried off by wildlife and bugs to be eaten alive.

The problem with our old “screen porch” is that it was put together using 2-by-6 joists and 2-by-6 decking.  I can improve the floor stability easy enough with some house jacks and additional joists (I actually enjoy that sort of engineering) but when done, we will still have the problem of the decking.

What covers it now is old indoor-outdoor carpet which sucks.  Over the years, the cats have turned it into a killing room floor from a slaughter house:  Eating birds, squirrels, mice, rats, snakes, and even large bugs on it. Elaine’s a meticulous homemaker and she’s tired of cleaning indoor-outdoor carpet so we’ve decided to put on a couple of coats of this new super deck paint that’s become vogue in the last 10-minutes of home remodeling.

And that is where we get to the air tools.

Turns out, you can buy an air-powered caulking gun for under $40-bucks, which is what I did yesterday.  Campbell Hausfeld PL1558 Air-Powered Caulk Gun $35.

Reason?:  At age 60-something, you start to run the numbers of everything.

So for example this screen porch is 13-by24 feet and it’s decked with 2-by-6’s as I mentioned.   Everyone knows that a 2-by-6 is only about 5 1/2” wide,  so with the deck being 288” long, that leaves us with 52 boards too be caulked and since each one is 13 feet, that’s 680-lineal feet of caulking.  Not counting edge seams.

But wait! (As the late Billy Mays might have said…There’s more!).

Since we are going to put deck paint on the top side, Elaine figured that we would be smart to caulk both the top and bottom layers. 

Holy smokes!  Now we’re north of 1,300 lineal feet of caulking and if neither one of us had carpal tunnel before the project, I figure one, or both, of us would by the time we’re done.

No thank you.

Hence my decision to postpone the start of this mega project until the proper tool shows up, and as long as I was thinking about it, I remembered that as part of your prepping, you might want to have a good assortment of air tools for after whatever calamity comes along.

We’ve got several power sources:  The solar and the old diesel genset, so power shouldn’t be an option.  And with the welder (gas) I could cobble the 10 KW power head off the genset to a tractor-run genset and that, in turn, could power the big compressor in the shop, which could if need be, used to fill the pancake compressor for small stuff.

I know that doesn’t explain everything:  Why not just buy an electric caulking gun?

It’s true that Amazon carries several battery powered caulking guns.  Example:  Makita LXGC01Z 18-Volt LXT Lithium-Ion 10 oz. Caulk and Adhesive Gun (Tool Only, No Battery) but check the price.  With electric tools, you’re buying a motor and either a battery charger or long extension cord problem with every too.  But check the price; yee gads.

This may sound odd, but there are several safety issues that come to mind when dealing with power tools:  Air tools aren’t going to shock you if you drop one on a wet worksite.  You can use them with relative impunity, even barefooted (yes, steel toes are required, but let’s pretend for a moment that it’s 97F and dripping hot and you’ve got flip-flops on).

Air tools are cheap, in comparison.  I can do die-grinding with my die grinder air tool, or I can dig out the Dremel, but for many jobs the air grinder is better.  Ever try to find a big framing nailer or electric-powered finishing nail gun for those fun shop projects? t

That cabinet at the top of this morning’s report was a 3-hour project (excluding paint drying time) because using a chop saw with stops, a dado set, and a belt sander, everything can be make quick-=as-you-please and then out come the air tools and some clamps (to keep everything square) and Presto!@!  Done project!  Elaine gets her cabinet (lower part is where the vacuums for the house live), with this and that’s on shelves above) and I get to build another piece of whatever we call it look furniture.

With Christmas just around the corner, if anyone in your circle doesn’t live in a coop (e.g. rent instead of own a home) then there’s only two things you really need:  Air tools and a book on how to build real-life dioramas.

“What’s a Diorama?”

Well, it’s the secret to taking a kind of average-looking mobile home on the outside and turning it into a kind of museum like experience on the inside.  The general idea is that there’s a kind of interior decorating that is a cross between television and film “set design” and museum-level dioramas that flips just being in a “house” to being “transported” is Elaine’s word for it.

The Wikipedia entry will get you started:

The word diorama /?da???r??m?/ can either refer to a 19th-century mobile theatre device, or, in modern usage, a three-dimensional full-size or miniature model, sometimes enclosed in a glass showcase for a museum. Dioramas are often built by hobbyists as part of related hobbies such as military vehicle modeling, miniature figure modeling, or aircraft modeling

To be sure, there is a certain amount of trial and error to it, but do some looking around for hotels with “period rooms” and go check out museums which have large dioramas and next thing you know, air tools and dangerous thoughts will be wandering through your head – all but displacing the visions of sugar plum fairies at this time of year with dreams of a Wild West Man Cave, a Trader Vics-looking dining room…and oh, yeah…the air tools that Santa needs to bring you so you can actually build some cool places.

“You mean if I wanted to build my house so it looks like Superman’s Fortress or the inside of a Mayan temple like in an Indiana Jones flick, I could do THAT?”

Shoot yes, Bubba.

I’ve got designs for an tropical ocean beach diorama that may turn the washer and dryer off the dining room into a shipwreck bar in the South Pacific.  I’ll do before and after pictures.

It’s all according to the limits of your imagination and problem-solving ability.

Oh, and how much you’ve let yourself get sucked into social conventions that burn out your life with nothing in return which gets us to Wednesday’s Peoplenomics report…

Sports As a Waste Of Time

“Where am I going to get the time to do thing kind of radical home treatment?”

As I explained in a discussion of sports economics over on the Peoplenomics side of things Wednesday, people let their lives dribble out into television sets without getting anything of substantive value in return.  At huge public costs, too.

Let me share a dandy letter from a reader who whole-heartedly agrees with our unconventional view around here that while do-it-yourself sports are great (exercise and so on) the spectator sports, especially those that depend on taxpayer bonding authority are a rip.  We then got into the nubbins of the problem:  Pro spectator sports are now a major output of the USA.

Subscriber RJ gets it:

LOVE your commentary on sports today.

I’ve been lamenting about the parental hysteria around youth sports for some time, and after receiving grant money will be embarking upon a documentary film on the matter: working title is currently “What is Winning?” Many double-entendres within.

There was a great article in The Atlantic back in 2013 on the youth sports topic: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/10/the-case-against-high-school-sports/309447/

But what truly stands out is a comment my mentor, Dr.

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There has been a quiet exodus among some of us “grays” that should cause young people concern.

An increasing number are exercising their ability to (as the old airline commercial put it) “”Get up and move around the country.”

A cousin of mine, a year or two older, has picked up a winter home in Arizona.  My sister is eyeing Sequim, WA, and a long-time pal and her husband are looking at those hills north of Phoenix, too.

Their reasons vary, of course.  One likes more sunshine, another hates the traffic south of Bellevue, WA, and another has grown tired of the gray winters.  All super-legit reasons to move – on the surface.

But, when you stand back like you’re watching a herd, you that they are dispersing.  You know, like the animals that dispersed and headed up into the hills of Banda Aceh before “the big one” tsunami down there in 2004.  When I look just so, I see a kind of dispersion movement going on.

Not that they’d be wrong about dispersing.

I assume you’ve read the latest from super-brain Stephen Hawking.  According to this newspaper report, Hawking has seven ways that our run as dominant species on this rock could end.

Let’s run through them, one at a time, and see how realistic “The End” might be ands how to address those worries with just the right gifts at Christmas…:

1. Cataclysmic Asteroid Strike.

We don’t have to go any further than this morning’s report by the Christian Science Monitor to discover that a group of Russian scientists have spied a mountain-sized asteroid heading our way.

The good news is that while earth-crossing (goes ahead or behind Earth’s orbit every three years, or so) the asteroid is not at present dangerous.  It will miss.

Still,  you can feed paranoia for Christmas by giving a decent telescope like the Orion 09007 SpaceProbe 130ST Equatorial Reflector Telescope (Black).  For just $300-bucks, you could be the first one on the block to see it coming.  With a CCD eyepiece, you might be able to pick up some spare income from photographing the comings and goings from the motel down the street, too.  (Everything’s a what?)

Oh, and if you do find Planet X…..

2.  Artificial Intelligence

The way Hawking as it figured, humans might be judged as extraneous to the needs of AI..and so it could do away with us. 

In the meantime, notice that a group called Sqreem has been hired by the United Bank of Switzerland (UBS) to advise their high-end wealth clients.  Worth noting that Sqreem is not US-based, is it?

For gifting try Person of Interest: Season 3 ($40 bucks) along with The Arduino Starter Kit (Official Kit from Arduino with 170-page Arduino Projects Book) ($90) and some USB cables and a copy of Excel and Access so you can whip up spreadsheets for logic and Access databases until you, too, get a TV series about you AI project.

3. Genetically Created Plague

I bet you didn’t know that there’s a current outbreak of plague in Madagascar, did you?

The truly paranoid will want their own rolls of  Roll Products 142-0004 PVC Film Biohazard Warning Tape with Black Imprint, Legend “Biohazard” (with Logo), 55 yd.

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This about the easiest Monday morning column I’ve ever written.

That’s because of two phone calls Sunday from my list of “designated smart guys.”

Everyone has them, or should.  They’re the people who work in an industry, have a specialized practices, or some skill or exceptional expertise that sets them apart from run-of-the-mill people who don’t think, don’t store intellectual capital, and who couldn’t connect two dots to form a line to save their souls.

The world is full of “average” people, for a reason: Laziness.

It’s simple enough to cure, fortunately:  All you need is a design template:  If you want to be like smart, successful people, all you need to do is spend your time talking and learning from (care to guess?) smart and successful people..

I like to share the thoughts of my “Designated Smart Guys” (Ure’s Brain Trust) because they are extremely smart people and when they nod in a particular direction, you’re best advised to look where directed, because something BIG is likely coming from off yonder thataway.

The first call was from my friend Howard Hill, who recently published the definitive book on how the Housing Bubble collapses.  The book hasn’t sold particularly well, but that’s because it was late to market.

In the world of high finance opinions are made quickly, but unfortunately, it can be argued that books prior to Howard’s missed key aspects of the crisis.  They simply got it wrong.  Howard’s book, on the other hand, really takes things apart, gets it right, and extracts a lesson which is useful to UrbanSurvival/Peoplenomics readers who invest in the longer-term  and don’t so much care about scalping a dime today and a nickel tomorrow.

Howard doesn’t write enough, but when he gets into a serious writing mood (three very excellent posts in one weekend) I feel compelled to share Howard’s work with you as incredibly useful in developing your understanding of high finance.

So part one of this morning’s column is to read the following (in this order):

Are We There Yet?

The Next Big One Might Already Be Warming Up

Three Conditions and Three Warning Signs

How to Tell if the Next Financial Crisis is Upon Us.

It’s a Wonderful Business

Bailey Bros Building and Loan

The last one will particularly appeal to people who enjoy Jimmy Stewart’s role in the Christmas Season classic – it’s a reminder of just how deeply ingrained our canonization of the financial industry is. 

Oh, and it also is yet-another reason to believe that “The Movie is the Message” as our Gulfstream-crowd sources have mentioned on many occasions. 

When one of the inventors of Financial Engineering as a craft calls, I listen.

But that wasn’t the only call to pass on from Sunday.

The second call was from a very knowledgeable smart guy in a different field: Military affairs. 

While we can’t reveal his former rank or other personally identifiable information, what I can tell you is when a former US Defense Attaché calls, I pay strict attention..

In particular, as we are watching The Global Caliphate get rolled out, watch Constantinople closely and check the Wiki entry for Ottoman Empire.  The hint of future from that exchange was simple:  Watch the Turks. 

During the 16th and 17th centuries, in particular at the height of its power under the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent, the Ottoman Empire was a powerful multinational, multilingual empire controlling much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.^[11] At the beginning of the 17th century the empire contained 32 provinces and numerous vassal states. Some of these were later absorbed into the empire, while others were granted various types of autonomy during the course of centuries.^{[dn 4]}

With Constantinople as its capital and control of lands around the Mediterranean basin, the Ottoman Empire was at the center of interactions between the Eastern and Western worlds for six centuries.

The advice from our source is simple:  Notice that religion in Turkey is 67% Sunni and that their most recent leader has been turning from his predecessor’s Western-leanings back to a more traditional Sunni social structure.  Which, in case it’s too early to connect the dots, makes Turkey a key ISIS player, even while they may put on some NATO duds now and then.

Turkey has “run” the ‘Stans before, all the way to Mongolia, so while we watch the birthing of the Global Caliphate, I expect relations to warm between the Saudis and the Turks and for ISIS to continue gathering resources in that part of the world.

Also, you may find one other part of the conversation interesting:  Why Russia may be expected to double-down on any Ukraine bets. 

It comes down to two things:  Most Russian military hardware depends, at least in some measure, on parts made in Ukraine.  The other key point is that Ukraine is Russia’s breadbasket, not to mention the Crimea being their only warm water port.

The EU desperately needs another financial date rape (ask Cyprus, Greece, and others about how much fun this is), but Russia is not about to be bullied by cookie-pushers into a Western rollover.  Not without bigger trouble than we can afford. 

2017?  We should be in the depths of the economic collapse, and that will speed up Armageddon since many of China’s five-year plans for 2020 are working well ahead of schedule.

Not later than 2020, seems our front row seats at World Collapse will be ready for prime time and if you haven’t resettled well away from a major city by then, please take a few moments of which country invented firestorm attacks on civilian populations. 

Two hints:  Dresden and Hamburg.

Along with Nagasaki and Hiroshima, these kinds of highly successful attacks on civilian populations set the USA up for a 70-year run as a global superpower.

Surely, you and I can’t be the only ones who have noticed?

Around the Ranch:  Leaf Me Alone

It you ever wondered about living out in the woods, there is one tiny detail that is NOT it any sales brochure.

It’s the matter of how many leaves come off the hardwood trees around here in the wintertime.

Sunday I finished up hours and hours of leaf blowing because if we don’t blow the leaves off, what passes (barely) for a lawn gets covered with so many leaves that sunlight doesn’t reach the plants and then the grass dies….all of it.

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The Economic Outlook for the balance of this month couldn’t get much better.

For one, an increasingly unpopular president ought to be held in check by an incoming opposition congress, starting next month.  While this won’t be good for social issues (since both parties show up at the same paymaster window in Washington (staffed by the K Street Mafia), it will likely mean nothing (big) will get done.

And stability is something business likes.  A lot.

Going into this morning’s Employment Situation Report, the market has been holding near recent highs, the price of oil seems to be stabilizing around $66-$68.  Everyone knows that deflation is still out there, but as we explained earlier this week, when things like re-leasing previously leased cars (you can now lease the lease-return cars) the hyper-optimization of the auto industry seems to be sure to push auto sales to more highs, yet.   Even if we hit the skids in the new year and layoffs bounce off historical lows.

Economically speaking, it’s like we’re all passengers on the Titanic and we have all rushed up on deck to admire the field of icebergs which have been going by.  One was named AIG, but we got by that one, a small one was named Madoff, and there’s a group of bergs called the “naked short-selling” bergs, yet none of it seems to matter.

While following the ice breaker Dodd Frank, we seem to believe nothing can go wrong.  But when one of the architects of complex financial instruments says the Dodd-Frank didn’t really clear any of the ice ahead, you should take notice. 

Yet most don’t and won’t…such is the nature of the extraordinary popular delusions of crowds.

But not without reason.

There is just enough evidence that growth is returning to keep even the most skeptical over on the long side of the markets. 

I’ve been hinting at a further decline in the unemployment rate this month for a while so let’s fast-forward to this morning’s press release:

“Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 321,000 in November, and the unemployment rate was unchanged at 5.8 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today. Job gains were widespread, led by growth in professional and business services, retail trade, health care, and manufacturing.

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Before we get into some of the most fascinating work of the National Dream Center (on their outlook from 4-weeks ago) for Hawaii to be hit with a big something this weekend, a personal note first.

As you know, I have dreams now and then which seem to hold predictive content.  Perhaps the most detailed example was under “Irwin Allen’s Dreams” which accurate described many aspects and attributes of the Gulf Horizon oil rig disaster in he Gulf of Mexico some 18-hours before it happened.

This morning I had another one of those odd dreams and I’m not sure what it meant, but there were two physical features of the dream that were most curious.

The first involved an airplane flying and it had something to do with three mountains.

The mountains are three progressively higher peaks, with A being the lowest, B the mid-sized one, and C being the largest and (significantly?) the most rugged.

The problem ahead was for an airplane that would be taking off from the runway, traveling right to left and then following the flight path indicated between the smaller mountain and the middle-sized one, and then running into difficulty with sufficient altitude trying to climb over the largest mountain to the right…

Not that it is meaningful… just a curiosity and something to be aware of:  Plane trouble in mountains on departure from somewhere.  Green, rounded and jagged mountains.  Or not.

Side Note:

Both Elaine and I had extremely intense, vivid dreams last night – in another part of mine there was a visit to a coast with a mysterious (unexpected, unseasonal) fog.

The oddity?  Zeus the Cat, our Editor in Chief, was full of piss and vinegar this morning in a most unusual way.  You know how cats will sometimes get that “Wild-Eyed” look to them?  He was chasing imaginary critters all over the place…very strange behaviors for this animal – never seen it before in the house to this degree.

But that gets us to another project to hand off to Chris McCleary who has taken up the www.nationaldreamcenter.com project:  In addition to running language bots against the dreams people have, would it be possible to add an “intensity scale” so dreamers could, with a click, rate their dream intensities?

The reason for suggesting this line of inquiry is what?  The damn cat.

It seems intuitively true that there may be a cycle to people’s dreams.  A time of moon phase, maybe the location of a planet, or something on that order, which seems to reduce the veil between knowledge/visioning while in the sleep state and when the most intense dreams take place.

My personal “hot zone” for dreams seems to run from full moon to third quarter, and sure enough, full moon time, so the arising vivid dreams is not so unexpected.

Wikipedia has this quickie course in “lunacy” as in lunatic…

The term lunatic derives from the Latin lunaticus which originally referred mainly to epilepsy and “madness” as diseases caused by the Moon.^[3] By the fourth and fifth centuries astrologers began to commonly use the term to refer to neurological and psychiatric diseases.^[3] Philosophers such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder argued that the full Moon induced insane individuals with bipolar disorder by providing light during nights which would otherwise have been dark, and affecting susceptible individuals through the well-known route of sleep deprivation.^[4] Through at least 1700 it was also a common belief that the Moon influenced fevers, rheumatism, episodes of epilepsy and other diseases.^[

I have known a fair number of “out there” people in my life, running into them both as real nutters/crazies on the one hand, or those who express as gifted/geniuses, particularly in music, on the other.  One of the rewards of being a long-time professional journalist.

What comes through when you interview such people is that their worldviews are, for lack of a better term, “canted” this way or that.  If you think of human consensus as a compass needle that tends to point in a single direction, these people express views that may be anywhere from totally on track to 90-degrees (and in many cases orthogonal to) the generally way humans convince one another to behave.

In other words, to make the “herd of animals” analogy, these would be the critters on the outer edges of the herd, tuned in to a different kind of sensing that the rest of the herd.  Depending on their behavior, the rest of the herd might move this way, or that, in regard to a particular “danger” – or, in the case of non-violent or prophetic thinkers – away from new knowledge which “the herd” doesn’t want to (or have an ability to) come to terms with.

Ergo, date-stamping  the dream date becomes important and while each dream has a “posting date” the fact is that I’ve read many dreams in the Dreambase (which is what you call a database of dreams, right?) that were stamped with one date (posting) yet often referred to a dream from a different date.  Most are a couple of days, but I saw a few as old as 2-5 years which would seriously skew the data.

Hawaii’s Near Miss

Long-time subscriber Teresa in the Philippines sent a note this morning which ties into the discussion of dreams:

“Hi George, it’s been a long while since I’ve communicated.  This is to let you know another super typhoon headed our way in the next day or two.  We still have not gotten over the “Yolanda” that hit us in the South especially, Tacloban last year. 

This typhoon, “Ruby” is 100 MPH more powerful  than last year’s. If the Philippines is still afloat after Sunday,  we will let you know.

From the Philippines Atmospheric, Geophysical, and Astronomical website, we can see how the Philippines will be smacked hard this weekend by Super Typhoon Ruby.

Maybe Monday Teresa could check back with us on an update, as many people are interested to find out how this typhoon compares with other ones of recent vintage.

One of the more fascinating questions (which puts us up into the timeframe of two full weeks, maybe three from now is what happens if this bad boy heads into the subarctic and then ricochets off as another “polar vortex” like the recent storm did a month and a half, or so, back from Hawaii up to the Arctic and then bouncing down onto Canada and the US with record cold…

How the DreamCenter Fits All This

Remember their warnings about Hawaii?  Well, in dreams, one lush set of tropical islands looks pretty much like any other.  A note from DreamCenter director Chris McCleary offers this:

Typhoon Expected in the Pacific

At a minimum, we already have a headline that fulfills today’s Red Alert. That makes sense based on historical timing, but there are still questions needing answers, and one of those questions is….wouldn’t this event take Hawaii off the table?

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Glad I’m not the only one seeing it.

Just remember all our references to the Roaring Twenties and how we’re in the replay.

Then flip over to this Financial Times article that says the market has put in the biggest string of record sessions since? 

1929!

I don’t expect you to remember stocks that year peaked in September (3rd to be exactly) and then plunged in October, but from where this market finally gives up on its string of rallies, we keep counting 55-days forward.

Now, thanks to Grady at the www.nostracodeus.com project, we can see pencil in Iran action in mid-to-late April of next year.  If his date has any substance to it (April 19, more in “coping” below) then we can simply back-track 55 days and begin to eye February 23rd as when the markets should be hitting their all-time highs that should stand for decades.

Between here and there?  Ain’t got nothing to fear, but fear itself, as one quote has it.

There was a bit of good news in economic numbers yesterday, not the least of which was the chart (right) showing that there has been a major increase in hiring in the small business arena (employers of less than 500 employees).

Whether this is because three guys and a six pack, programming a new app constitutes a “company” I can’t tell, but any port in a storm, huh?

“What storm, Ure?”

Oh, the wild-ass deflation that has started to lay the seeds of the rig laydowns we talked about Tuesday.  And did’ja see where a gas station in Okie-lahoma has dropped gas down below $2-bucks…the first such instance since 2010 according to the report?

Still not convinced?  How about the ECB being unable to raise interest rates due to the crappy conditions in EU-land?  Hell of a note when even the banksters are having a hard time figuring out how to make a buck, even with access to free money. 

You knew that….you’ve just been told “It’’ ain’t so!”  ‘Cept it is, of course.  Your problem may be not casting your info nets far enough to fish up more truth.

Still in the Roaring Though

Press release on the Challenger Job Cut report is just out:

Downsizing activity by U.S.-based employers declined by 30 percent in November, with 35,940 planned job cuts announced during the penultimate month of 2014, according to the report Thursday from global outplacement consultancy Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc. The November slowdown comes just one month after job cuts surged 70 percent to 51,183 in October. The November total was 21 percent lower than the 45,314 job cuts announced the same month a year ago.

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There is a huge change underway in the world:  It used to be that the objective of hard work was to “own your life.”

Say you started off as a young person in the Great Depression (as some of our readers have):  Back then the idea was pretty simple – it’s the philosophy of our way of living, too – Own Everything Outright.

The reason for doing so should be obvious:  If you live on five acres of land, with some diligence and ingenuity, you can survive without assistance from anyone and that includes government.  All that needs to be done to keep government at bay is to obey laws and pay taxes on your property.  End of story.

Since the New Deal, however, government has become much more intrusive, not to mention soaring property and other tax rates.

One reason Elaine and I are reluctant to leave our little place in the woods is that 28.8 acres, a modular home, 40-by-40 shop/office building with it’s own apartment for the brother-in-law, and a 12×12 storage building costs us $843.63 per year in property taxes now that we get the senior discount.  Even so, last year it was still under $1,000.

On  our fact-gathering travels this year we talked to a lot of people in the different states along the way.  We’d ask about the cost of living, but mostly it comes down to how taxes are stacked.  In most states there is a property tax, sales tax, and in some even and income tax.  By the time you toss in county and city sales taxes, you can make up a simple tax index that explains a lot about the local cost of living.

When we looked as several properties we were shocked to see how Washington had a property tax that was on the order of $3,200 for most homes in the $200-300-thousand range.  Did you happen to notice how in the housing bubble collapse, property taxes didn’t come down accordingly for many people?

Still, the cost of living in our home here in  the outback is about $71 a month.  On Social Security that’s an acceptable number.  For people who bought the nice home of the beach in the northwest (typically taxed in the 4,000-6,000 range, you could be talking up to $500/month just to stay in your own home that you paid for.

Government’s your silent partner who will stab you in the back if you blink.

Still, in the wake of the Great Depression, people had a lot of this stuff figured out.  Property prices were cheap, and interest rates were reasonable.  Even so, a down payment of 50% wasn’t uncommon and homes were usually paid off in 10-15-years.  Of course, since America still had a lot of handcrafting and trade skills about, millions of people actually built their own homes.,

A couple of my relatives, including one late uncle in particular, who built fine homes…better than most builders would put in.  For about $15,000 in materials (not counting the labor) on e home I remember was sold for well over $100,000.  That home was one his family lived in while he built a newer home next door.

Thus, a man with some gumption and get-up-and-go could build a great retirement nest egg with some hard work and sweat equity.  Come time to retire, a person could sell the property on a real estate contract, without a bank getting a cut, an Bingo!  Retirement set for life with lots of money coming in from mortgages.

If there was social security, fine, but a man (or woman) who likes to work with their hands can easily build 3-4 houses in a lifetime, and develop a pretty good income stream that way.

This is how people thought in the Depression…and for fifty years following…..because it makes sense.

That’s a part of our history that is going away and the design of the PowersThatBe can be seen at many levels

First; in order to really shake the money out of people, you have to “de-skill” them.  Convince people that industrial skills lake carpentry, woodworking, metal smithing, welding, working concrete or tile, doing electrical and plumbing; all that is manual labor.  Then cast manual labor as bad.

Now you’ve got a government “three-fer” going: 

First, people won’t be able to support themselves in America, so it sets up the need to bring in immigrants to do work Americans are no longer willing, or able, to do themselves.  This, in turn, sets up social disasters in education, crime, drugs, and so forth, but that, in turn, means more jobs and THAT is a dandy excuse to collect more taxes.

Second thing that happens is the people move into smaller and tighter quarters in suburban areas which are then too small for people to support themselves on.  So now hardly anyone is allowed to build their own homes (we’re blessed this way) and as a result, government gets to set up licensing bureaus to issue permissions to bang a nail, install a wire, or toss in a new sink.  Permissions is a whole government industry that ranges from the Zoning folks, who have stolen your right to do anything you want if you own your own land, to the building inspectors who won’t let you work on even simple home wiring or construction, unless you pull a permit.

Then, since you probably don’t hold a general contractor’s license, you can’t do your own work on your own property…and strangest of all, it’s in these places that home prices go up the most, which means those governments are rewarded for permission-restrictions and they collect more what?  (Property Taxes!)

Thirdly, the requirements to hold a contractor ticket for most trades means industrial arts are not being taught in the schools like they once were.  You talk about a complete and utter disaster?  But government knows best:  It knows that independent people who assert their property and “King of their own Castle” rights wouldn’t put up with such things voluntarily, but then comes the Education Industry which parcels out student indentures for millions of students who will never work in the field for which they have trained.  There is NO market for Middle Ages History experts, except regurgitating the same facts to the next group of victims.

I don’t mean to start off on a sour note, like this, but Elaine and I went to the big city Wednesday to do a little shopping.

Sure enough, while listening to the radio on the way back to the ranch, we heard yet-another scheme to turn even more people into permanent “Life Renters.”

It was an ad to lease a used vehicle.

The ad pitch was pretty simple: 

“You know how a lease works:  A person leases a new car, rather than buying it.  But now, you can lease that recent model, low mileage car and the first owner will have taken the depreciation on it!  We call this program re-leasing.  And it allows you a much smaller monthly payment.  In fact, in order to get a car this cheaply, you’d have to take out a six-year conventional loan.  So why not just re-lease a car for a much smaller payment?”

The rest of the trip home, I just sat there shell-shocked.  America has lost its way Big Time when the idea of building personal equity (ownership) has been hollowed out to this degree.

Not that it hasn’t been tried elsewhere:  You remember, I’m sure, my previous rants about the dangers of the 40-year home mortgage.

But this is where America seems to be going:  We’ve gone from a fine idea to a population of 317-million asset-strippers in just a few generations.

People who  develop and personally hold equity have little use for Big Government.  On the other hand, people without two nickels to rub together are totally dependent on Big Government, right down to meals and housing.

In the past, the balance has been somewhat reasonable, but that’s quickly fading in the rear view mirror.  And with it, the America that once was.

What is the functional difference between democratic socialism and we have now?  I’m having a hard time seeing it.  And every time I pay taxes or hear an ad on the radio announcing yet-another-way to asset-strip (into more “rent-your-Life”) the blur continues to build until now it’s looking like the fall of the old Soviet Union was just a trick to push America down the same subtle agenda.

When you change from a Land of Personal Initiative to a Land of Permission, there’s a price. An d the price keeps going up as the level of government dependency is raised. And even more when new schemes to lower personal equity come along.

What disappears over time?  Oh, uh, just…uh….Freedom.

Futuring: Disaster in Q2 of ‘15?

Not to put too fine a point on it, but it we are building into a year-end market peak, then we should see a marvelous decline in Q1 that could be tradable, even by us reprobates who manage our own money.

We don’t often put glimpses of the future out there, but this note from chief programmer of the www.nostracodeus.com project, Grady,  seems to exactly fit with where some chart projects have things in free-fall:

We’ve been seeing indications that Iran would be going to war but we didn’t think it would be in support of the fight against ISIS. It is. Iranian Phantom Jets have been spotted doing bombing runs on ISIS targets in Iraq.  John Kerry cautiously welcomed the help this afternoon. [3 December 2014] It got us to wondering if it will have any effect in future nuclear talks with Iran. There will be more of Iran in this fight April 19, 2015

Markets almost always need a scapegoat.  My guess in some golden mushrooms would be a dandy distraction from a self-imploding blow-off market top.

But, that’s only a guess, for now.  Still,  Israel has made its “line in the sand” clear enough that sooner or later that’s bound to turn into a line in the glass.

You’ll notice I refer to that part of the world as where the Sand Peoples live.  Within a decade, tops, I reckon to change the reference to the Glass Peoples for this reason.

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