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/

Elections: One Week and One Day to Go

We begin with a reminder that it is just one week and one day to go before we have elections for congressoids and others to deal with.

I like to remind people, when elections are coming, that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result.

Sending the same people back to join the Washington Cartel who got us into the current state of affairs (I get Obamacare horror stories emailed in readers several times a week) are at best unlikely to get us out of our sad predicament.  And yes,m Benghazi still matters.

Here in Texas, there is a hot contest for governor is underway between Wendy Davis and Gregg Abbott.  The Abbott attack ads came out this weekend on radio and make the point that a “Vote for Davis is a vote for Obama…”

I won’t argue for one side or the other in this.  But I will point you to Sharyl Attkisson’s new book is due election day morning.  Remember, she’s the former CBS reporter who’s won ooodles of good journalism awards (something like 5 Emmy’s).  So when her book comes out, please read it.

“Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington.” 

Why is her book out a week later than maximum usefulness? Or is that a coinky-dink, too?

The upshot of it is that there’s a cadre at the top of the corporate media food chain that wants the whole country to think like they do.  And frankly, that should scare the hell out of you. It does me…and even after my meds.

That, along with the weasel wording, sleazy, question-dodging PR flacks who are called out in the book. 

The only thing wrong with the book I can see is that it didn’t out in advance of next Tuesday’s voting.  It’s a damn shame people like me will be reading it on their Kindles on election day morning before voting late in the day after the worst of our suspicions are confirmed.  But, at least, I can maybe see who from Texas got named…

In the meantime, I’m still asking who will have the goanies to start up the campaign to limit election email.  One per candidate per week ought to be more than enough.

There should also be a national “Do Not Email” list.  Because the next time someone sends me an email asking for money to sign president-to-be-Hillary’s birthday card, I might just be tempted to send back a rather insulting reply…to ALL.

Unproductive Monday

Before we get to the rest of this morning’s jetsam, the good news is that male productivity may suffer a bit nationally today.  Sears Tool Club has a new email out and thousands of male “tool sluts” (like me) may be planning their own Christmas presents….

See you in the power tools aisle…although it will give us Type A males a little less time on task of screwing up the world.  Gotta have our priorities…which we work weekends on in the caves.

Markets Mixed

At least for now, futures were indicating down a tad.  But that may pick up speed later on since there are some changes in the wind:  Brazil politics and the Shanghai losing streak.

Big data morning tomorrow with Durable Goods and Housing data…but for this morning the Dow looks to drop 50 near the open.

Add to Your Ebola Notes

This from a reader:

George,

“Weatherford Bill” here.

Here is the email I received at “11:53 p.m.” canceling my order for Antiviral Face Masks.

Shortages caused by the Ebola virus are here…

Hello,
Due to the Ebola virus issue, the manufacturer of this product has reserved all remaining stock for government agencies.
We were also not able to find the product from other sources. 
This means we will not be able to provide you with this product at this time.
We are sorry for any inconvenience.
We have refunded your order.
Please contact us with any questions.

The Peoplenomics shopping list was our three weeks ago…just sayin…  Food worries are still months out, but planning ahead never hurts, does it?

ComputerWorld  Goes Partisan

Hate to break it down to you this way, but did you see what ComputerWorld headlined about Tesla boss Elon Musk’s comments about artificial intelligence being dangerous?  “Is Elon Musk obsessed or POSSESSED with Artificial Intelligence?”

A simple thought question always works to sort out the wheat from the electric chair, so here goes:

“Imagine that everything in the world was done by artificial intelligence and their human interfaces – the robots.

Now, where are the jobs?”

You see?  Musk gets it.  ComputerWorld?  Well, since their whole income picture is computerly people and their associated interests (and ad revenues) it looks to me like they have gone partisan in the debate over whether AI is good, or bad.  They are obviously on the side that will make and benefit from AI – many of their readers presumably are on the invention side of things, after all.

But the other side has something to say…and Musk gave voice to it.

I’d like to be the first to welcome Elon Musk to my Luddite Division of the Future. 

Ned Ludd has been made fun of ever since the British Factory Owner Class seized power (which they still hold, and we have a division of them here in the USA). 

The problem is, we Luddites will be shown right, over time.  The evidence will pile up as resource depletion, energy shortages, peak oil, mass pollution, or The Machine vs. Samaritan if you follow Person of Interest.

When I see someone write “Obsessed” or POSSESSED  I think “Aha!  Partisans.” 

It’s really a hallelujah moment around here that someone, besides me and a few friends, groks dead-end economics when the growth model eventually kills all jobs or kills off all workers…. ain’t no other way out of that maze visible, yet.

Musk is a damn smart fellow…as most of us “Luddites will be right in the End” types are.

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Coping: Hints of WoWW – Flashes and Time Slips

It has been a good while since we’ve had anything big to report from the World of Woo-Woo – that place past Rod Serling’s “sign post up ahead.” 

It may be that WoWW is a consequence of natural forces we don’t understand.  Like right now, for example.  We’re in a “Michael K. Lee window” awaiting major earthquakes from the recent eclipse.  As we noted last week, the Hawaiian Kahunas were reportedly credited by Lee with noticing that quakes seemed to follow the Moon’s passage between Earth and Sun. 

The other item I’d propose is something I’d call the thermopoint.  No, I don’t think it is in any science books (yet) as it’s an idea which has only recently evolved.  Like in the last three  minutes, to be exact.

The idea is that Earth has semi-regular expansions and contractions.  the Northern Hemisphere ought to shrink its land masses ever so slightly when the Sun is providing the Southern Hemisphere with its Summer.   Down below the equator, the land would expand slightly. 

When the Sun is at it’s northern-most spot over the northern hemisphere, conditions would reverse.

In between would lay this thermopoint where the semi-polar expansion and contraction rates would be highest.

We would therefore expect (based on this whacky thought) that there would be less volcanism around the equator and more in the middle latitudes because these would be where maximal ground movement might occur due to having real summers and real winters, the result of which would be land mass expansion and contraction.

See how easy it is to come up with “nutter theories” like this one?

But there’s more to it than that.  It is entirely possible that other, larger, and perhaps unseen events drive Life as we know it.

One philosophical outlook, for example, holds that there are multiple Universes and that consciousness travels between them in ways not quite documented. 

Experientially, the Death process seems like dying, but it is simply a transit (through a door) and off to another reality which will be as complete as this one, yet dimensioned differently.  As some turn-of-the-last-century fellows called this:  another Universe orthogonal to this one.

There’s a fair bit to support the hypothesis…but it’s not our track this morning.

It’s the “coming and goings” of the breadcrumbs.  The little events of the “My, ain’t that strange?” variety.  The kind of thing which, after reading, you find yourself saying “Well, I’ll be damned…”

Sometimes they are small…other times big.  Sometimes explainable, sometimes not.

Reader Tom has a small one…small but interesting…

George,

I don’t know if this has relevance, but was wondering if you had received any other messages like this.

Last night, about 11:45 P.m. I had just gone to bed. The lights were off for about five minutes.  All of a sudden there was an instantaneous flash that couldn’t have lasted more than 1/1000 of a second I thought, out of the corner of my left eye. It was so brief I thought I was imagining it. The only thing is that my partner saw it also. She asked me “did I see that flash?” I told her I did, and had never seen anything like it.

I got up, looked around the house, looked outside to see if any of my security lights were on, they weren’t and went back to bed.

Has any of your other clients reported something like this.

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Depression Hedging: The Home FixIt Shop

Want a part-time job that can earn you $20-$25 per hour?  This morning not only do we deliver the goods on one, but we also show you the method to research many more potential money-making ideas that will be worth their weight when times turn down.,

Before we go “back to the future” however, we’ll first have some notes on major news stories and update our Trading Model. And many cups of coffee to warm up a fall morning…

[ May take longer than usual to load due to large number of graphics.

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Markets: How High is Up?

The difference between a fundamental analyst and a technical analyst is pretty simple. The fundamental analyst looks to the news flow going into markets, and today they might be wondering about the financial future of the European Union. The reason would be that the EU has just tried to stick Britain with a 1.7-billion Euro bill to keep the mishmash of bad governance in power. That’s like getting stuck for $2.

Coping: With Workshop Time and a Magic Lesson

The glorious thing about weekends is that it gives people plenty of opportunity to use the workshop – when the weather is just right.  Not too hot for outside work, and not too cold.

Summers – at least here in the East Texas Outback – at OK for shop work, but anything outside in the sunshine tends to be put on hold as soon as the temp gets over 83F, or so.   Similarly, during the coldest days of winter, the shop only sees use in the afternoons.  When a shop is much below 55F it’s just too cold to enjoy things.  One of these days I may hook up the old wood stove I picked up.

Thursday, Panama dropped by the office looking for ideas on how to build a display rack for his lady-friend.  She’s quite good of crocheting at they’ll be doing a small booth at a nearby town street fair.  The problem was, they just got a table, buy nothing to put up the crocheted bedspreads and such.  Wanted a right-proper display and was looking for ideas.

It wasn’t a hard problem to solve:  An hour later we’d whacked off a couple of hunks of 4X4, about 16-inches long.  Leftover scrap from some past endeavor.  On each end of these, a 20” hunk of 3/4” plywood was centered, cut down to the same width, and these were the stabilizing legs.

As I was running this stuff through the belt sander, Panama got out the metal-cutting chop saw and sliced off a couple of 70” pieces of 5/8-rebar.  That’s the reinforcing steel that’s used on construction sites for concrete pours and the like.  Useful stuff to have around.

With a metal-chopping saw and a small welding set, you can jury-rig just about anything.  Make metal furniture, tables, even chairs if you’re patient enough.  I’m not that guy. So the welder stayed parked. 

Besides, Panama wanted something that would break-down into  pieces. Something that wouldn’t blow out of the back of the pickup truck.  So before the 4X4 bases were drilled, we punched =3” deep holes in them with a Fortner bit.

Not every home handybastard has one, but I’m always anxious to step up to the drill press to use Fortner bits.

The main difference between them and a regular twist drill, is that they drill a very smooth hole and the hole has a nice, flat bottom to it.

They’re not free; you’ll only get three-cents change back from a $50 bill for a set of PORTER-CABLE PC1014 Forstner Bit Set, 14-Piece bits at Amazon.  They are not general purpose drills, only for doweling and – in this case – rebar holes.. 

The reason you might want to pick up a set is that they work extremely well for any project that has round rod, doweling, or rebar in it.  If there’s one drawback, though, it’s that they are not set with really long shafts.  So drilling all the way though a 4X4 (3/12” roughly) will involve double-marking, turning the work piece and so forth. 

Which is why we didn’t through drill the base.

With the two masts of 5/8” rebar, all that was left was to find some more shop scrap – two pieces of 2X4. trim off the ends and round well on the belt sander, then drill two more holes about 2 /1” deep and slip these over the top of the rebar.  Now we have something we could screw and glue  a 2X2 “display bar to.

In  use, the top bar will have tissue paper on it to really show off the handiwork.  The 2X4s look pretty nice, and Panama highlighted them with a coat of “Safety Yellow” spray paint.

The whole process, including the drying time for the vertical rebar (painted with some black wrinkle-finish) took about 90-minutes from start to finish.

And that’s why fall in a workshop is so much fun:  You can walk into the shop with a problem and be having coffee two hours later with the glowing sense of accomplishment that comes from seeing a problem magically appear in the physical world as a “solved” whatchamacallit.

I’ve read a lot on how the Magus, Magik, Magi, or Alchemists worked.

They have a very interesting notion about how the “creation” process works.  To them, there were “veils” in the mind.  And what workshop dwellers are doing when they “work from the head and heart” (not from a set of plans – boring rote stuff like that ) is they “birth” the stuff that humans do on their way to be junior parts of a larger Creator.

It’s the ring-not-pass parts that are particularly instructive.

You begin with a problem and as you think about it, an ember of an idea comes into your head.  You gently blow on the idea, twisting it around this way and that, and next thing you know it bursts into the flame of a “hot idea.”  End of ring-not-pass or Veil #1.

The next step is to stand back (mentally) from your idea and see what it looks like.  This is the putting tinder on it.  More and more detail is added to the mental picture.  Ring-not-pass or Veil 2.  You can’t build the sketch.  You need the clarified vision.

Now we get along to the material selection and cutting.  It’s not to difficult:  You simple look closely at your detailed image in the mind and translate it into dimensions that you can cut and materials you have on hand.  Veil #3.

Once step 3 (translation into measurements) is done, Step 4 is the actual cutting of material to the right size.  As Panama and I were tossing the idea around (steps 1 and 2) we got agreement on what the general look of the thing should be.  Rebar is strong stuff, but it comes in 20-foot lengths and that would have been absurdly high and the small base wouldn’t have held it up.  So the dimensioning in step 3 is important.  We agreed the right height would be about 70-inches.

Step 5 was the “test and assemble” stage.  The rebar went into the bases, the 2X4s were slipped over the tops, and a couple of quick clamps pretended to hold the top bar in place.  This wasn’t particularly difficult, just takes a bit of time going from step 3 (dimensioning) through step 4 (cut and prep) to set up for the real Veil of interest…Step 5.

Feedback comes along as Step 6.  This is where the Magician tweaks the Great Work this way or that.  Panama had the machinery yellow safety paint on his version – I’d missed that in my visioning.

Last, but not least, once the tweaks are done, you get to the final step in the Magic Process:  Beholding.  This is the delicious moment when you sit back, look at what you’ve built and enjoy the “use case” (to borrow a software term).

To recap:  The “Magic of Creation” is what?

  1. Loving the problem and seeing it as a Junior “Creator in Training” moment.
  2. Envisioning the Perfected Solution
  3. Translation into measurements
  4. Cutting the cloth or material
  5. Test assembly
  6. Tweaks to it’s really the Perfect Solution
  7. Beholding and enjoying the work.

A while back, I told you we were going to turn what was a simple tin-roof covered porch into a sunroom using left over materials from our house remodeling.

It came out nice enough; The space is 8-feet square, but it there’s something about having a front porch protected from rain, wind, snow, heat, cold, and bugs that’s very comforting. 

Toss in a couple of old director chairs, carpet, and Elaine’s decorative painting and now you have something that’s really nice and eclectic and functional.

And cheap.  Our total cost for the room was a new glass storm door ($139), 5-sheets of sheetrock, and the flooring.  Maybe another $150.

Now, on weekend mornings, we sit out there, have coffee, read, and watch the deer wander by.  Eventually, we’d like to get chairs that recline, so we can drift from coffee to book to snooze, but one thing at a time.

The most important part of this morning’s note, though, really comes down to this:  Average people – when the weekend shows up – sit around and do “average things.”  Keeps them nice and…well….average!

On the other hand, following the well-defined steps of “magic” one can seize on any part of their environment and begin to mold parts of it to become expressions of their own unlimited creative power.

There may be a Creator out there who organizes things like yesterday’s eclipse.  But that doesn’t mean we can’t each be Junior Creators in Training.  No matter where you are, there’s plenty of raw material for it…even if it’s something as subtle as rearranging the furniture.

It’s also a nice way of looking at people.  Since you can pretty much judge people by their fruits you can get an idea of class standings by looking around you.  Money isn’t everything…it’s just one kind of “creating” and not a particularly honest one at that. More like “”trying to “buy a grade” in school, oftentimes.

But people who make money and create? Tons to be learned from the study of them. 

I could wax on about this endlessly, but my bottom line is what?

Weekends are Magic.

Sunday Special

I just haven’t had time yet to distill down all the comments on the “Reproduction of the Gods?” piece, so I will try and get a special report on that up early Sunday morning in time for coffee.

Don’t get used to me doing this, but the topic seems to be of broad interest – and since the emerging global mass consciousness seems to be “awaring” itself on the ‘net,  it’s brain-fueling to  consider some of the possibilities…. so maybe Sunday morning.

A Web Insight into People’s Behavior

Thursday I mentioned that the two most recent posts from UrbanSurvival now show up on our home page – so people don’t have to click as much.  I attributed that to people’s inherent laziness.  But reader Drew explains that it isn’t laziness as I had presupposed:

George –

I quit reading when you went to the click format, happened to stop by today and was pleasantly surprised to find the old format back.

For me it was not a matter of not wanting to click, it’s because it doesn’t flow well with all the clicking back and forth. When I read it in the one page format, it just flows on as I read down, but when I start clicking I’m more likely to get distracted and go to another page and maybe come back to what I clicked, or maybe not. The clicking disrupts the train of thought.

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OMG: What if the Weather Stopped?

[Reader Note: We have decided to put the whole daily report on a single page in our efforts to more effectively recycle electrons.  Details in the “Coping” section.  Comments on this reorganized presentation are welcome…We now continue on to Bowling with Reality…]

No, this is not a joke.

The WaPo has an interesting story about how satellite data issues are causing some problems with forecast quality for the NOAA Weather folks.

The good news is that the data is starting to come back online:

NCEP IS NOW RECEIVING THE FOLLOWING NESDIS SATELLITE DATA FOR 00Z MODEL INGEST.. NPP – CRiS AND ATMS DATA GOES SATELLITE DERIVED WINDS GOES RADIANCES GOES SOUNDING PRODUCTS THE FOLLOWING DATA TYPES CONTINUE TO BE UNAVAILABLE FOR THE MODELS.. MODIS IR AND WV WINDS OMI OZONE DATA AIRS HYPERSPECTRAL SOUNDER DATA COSMIC GPS-RADIO OCCULTATION DATA NESDIS CONTINUES TO WORK ON RESTORING ALL THEIR SATELLITE DATA PRODUCTS..

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Coping: With Being Eclipsed, Prediction Notes

A long-time reader of ours, Caroline, sent me a note  reminding us about the partial eclipse of the Sun coming this afternoon to a large portion of the South.

“begins in Nashville area 4:51 to sunset — don’t look directly into…”

An in depth look at the details of it can be found on the EarthSky.org site here.

Apparently, she’s not the only one who’s aware of it.  I noticed that Panama Bates, my brother-in-law, had wandered out from his apartment out into the woods Wednesday and was busily throwing knives at the dead “knife tree” we use for such things.  It’s also a pistol backstop when we’re too lazy to walk over to the 100-meter range.

He’d picked up a set of five throwing knives (stainless steel, at that) and was throwing them about 20-feet, or so.  I wandered over and gave it a try, sticking the very first one out of five.  Bates had been running three out of five or better.

As Jim Bowie, Jr. (moi) tried to throw, Panama mentioned that we should see about a 60% level, but I wasn’t too clear on whether that was 60% dark or 60% light,  Didn’t honestly pay it much mind; it was much more important at the time not to slice my hand off as I worked out the intricacies of a handle throw, versus the tip throw. 

After a while, I worked up to where absolutely none of my throws were sticking in the dead tree, and I made a note to tell my liberal friends that I’d come over to their side, at least on knives.

Panama, shook his head with a kind of hang-dog look, went back to throwing 3 or better out of 5 at 20-feet.  Then he revealed that his lady-friend was doing 2-for-2 with a pair of throwing knives she has.  Worse, she did it under-hand.  None of this “rear-back, see it coming” stuff, for her.

I’ll stick to writing, but it was some first-hand experience in being eclipsed.

One worry, though, if your meds haven’t kicked in yet:  I always thought (and you can check me on this) that there ought to be more of a relationship between eclipses and major earthquakes.  Just seems logical to me that when the gravity of Sun, Moon, and Earth all line up, there should be extreme tides and plenty of earthquakes.

Apparently, I’m not the only one who is drawn to this alignment problem.

Michael K. Lee is reportedly a teacher of religion and history out in Hawai’i and somewhere along the way of studying how the Kahunas work their stuff, he did some work and Presto!  Out popped some working earthquake predictions.

I’m not the first guy to notice his work.  Graham Hancock (great fan of his work) had a write-up on it a while back.  Apparently, the EQ risk is greatest after the eclipse has gone by.

So not to be eclipsed by events – and since everyone is a predictor of the future, anymore – I’m going to step out on a limb and predict a 7.0 earthquake somewhere in the eclipse area in the next three days.

Lee’s work, notes a Hawaiian earthquake site, has windows after an eclipse that can go for upwards of 16-days.

So if a quake comes along, is a biggie, and happens in the eclipse path, and happens in the next two weeks, or so, remember where you heard it first.

And, if it doesn’t happen?  Well, the odd thing about humans is they easily recall successful predictions.  But the number of bad ones sheds off them like water off a duck.  Which is why I’ve taken to writing down not only when people make predictions, but also religiously scoring them when they fail to appear.

The results are often a slightly better than chance success rate, but if you know enough “precursor” events, such as Lee’s observations about eclipses and quakes, you can oftentimes get better than chance future predictions…hence our quake prediction this morning.

While predictions and futuring are fun, they are only of value if you can really act on the information provided.  So, if you take something like the “Lee Window” here for the next couple of weeks, the problem is what?  Obviously, everyone can’t move out of the eclipse path and wait under the quake window closes.

But, you can at least think about it just in case.

Me?  yes, we live in the eclipse path – or off to the side of it.  But we won’t move.  Besides, I’m having lots of fun with much shorter term (and more profitable) predictions like this one from Peoplenomics yesterday morning before the market opened:

“Now, since the market closed the S&P 500 at 1941.28 yesterday, we have a pretty good chance of a good pullback beginning today”

Turns out that was a worthwhile prediction, huh?  But that was yesterday and today we should bounce.

Had Steve Allen Found God?

Earlier this week, we were having a discussion about whether Ruler of All/God/Master of the Universe, used planets as incubators to hatch out new ultra-beings.  And we naturally asked if the emergence of the mass consciousness of the Web might be the latest Ultra-Being learning to speak and express?

For reasons that are never clear to me, I happened across a reference in my studies this week to the vox  populi..

And therein lies a fascinating tale that you can find on a dusty shelf of Wikipedia:

American television personality Steve Allen as the host of The Tonight Show further developed the “man on the street” interviews and audience-participation comedy breaks that have become commonplace on late-night TV. Usually the interviewees are shown in public places, and supposed to be giving spontaneous opinions in a chance encounter – unrehearsed persons, not selected in any way. As such, broadcast journalists almost always refer to them as the abbreviated vox pop.[citation needed] In U.S. broadcast journalism it is often referred to as a man on the street interview or M.O.T.S.[

Pretty cool, huh?  But is it vox pop from Allen or vox populi?

Often quoted as, Vox populi, vox Dei /?v?ks ?p?pju?l? ?v?ks ?d??/, “The voice of the people [is] the voice of God”, is an old proverb often erroneously attributed to William of Malmesbury in the twelfth century.[3]

Another early reference to the expression is in a letter from Alcuin to Charlemagne in 798, although it is believed to have been in earlier use.[4] The full quotation from Alcuin reads:

Nec audiendi qui solent dicere, Vox populi, vox Dei, quum tumultuositas vulgi semper insaniae proxima sit.[5]

English translation:

And those people should not be listened to who keep saying the voice of the people is the voice of God, since the riotousness of the crowd is always very close to madness.[6]

The usage indicates that the phrase had long since become an aphorism of common political wisdom by Alcuin and Charlemagne’s time, since Alcuin advised Charlemagne to resist such an idea.[7] Of those who promoted the phrase and the idea, Archbishop of Canterbury Walter Reynolds brought charges against King Edward II in 1327 in a sermon “Vox populi, vox Dei”[8]

But wait!  I look around at the blind, the lame, the sick, the pained, and the suffering and I wonder aren’t the acts of God pretty close to madness, too?  Was Steve Allen right in bringing out the vox pop which is evermore present on the web?

We had a dandy pile of comments on the post “Reproduction of the Gods” and I’ll try to get some of the better comments distilled down into summary form for tomorrow’s breakfast.

In the meantime, I’m working on a hunk of software that will text-to-voice postings from the web.  At last!  We can get sports-talk radio off AM radio.  We can instead listen while driving to the latest posts off the HuffPo, Drudge, and GLP…all played to be beat of the Princeton EGGS…

Continuous Improvement Dept.

Here we go, again.

A number of readers have asked over the years that all of a day’s writings and scribbles be on one page so you won’t have to click so much. 

Amazingly, there is an attribution rate over time (slow, but persistent) because people just can’t be bothered to click a couple of times to go sniffing around for pieces of UrbanSurvival.  You and that other guy are the only readers left, but it has saved us a bundle on bandwidth charges.  Very Dilbert of us.

So effective this morning, the website displays the two most recent epistles on the very first page.  Elaine thought the index at the top would be useful, too.

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Where to Invest During Negative Growth

We know the market is dropping just as soon as the little rally we’re in presently wears off.  It’s a lot like “hair of the dog that bit you” on the way to a monumental hangover; the underpinnings of the market are in trouble, everyone knows this, but we’re still in denial – and that’s a sure-fire formula for a rally.

In  the meantime, however, the problems of negative growth are still coming down the tracks at us; it’s just we don’t have the vision to see the train clearly, at least just yet.

As we covered in our last report, importing a new underclass from South America via the perishing once-upon a time border may seem like the easy way out.   Besides, it’s a lifetime meal ticket for political manipulators who promise the moon and then tax people to pay for it.  Not that the republicons are any better than democraps; they all helped surround Washington with the garrison of checkbook bandits from K Street who buy public policy the way you and I might hit Subway for lunch.

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A Brief Word from the Revolutionary

This is actually economics and management, and it’s something you maybe haven’t thought about.  But it’s bothering me this morning, so…..

Back when the length of U S Senate and House terms were being set, it look a long time to get a letter from, say, the West Coast back to the halls of power in Washington.

According to an Amazon forum, it took Pony Express:

Fastest, 7 days plus, average around 10 days summer, 12-16 winter

Now, let me apply some of our renown Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) skills and look at the problem in the time domain.

Let’s remember that 7-days was for just one way.  In order for there to be two-way communications, it would be 14-days plus a day for typing or writing because back then there were secretaries and such.  Some places were closer/faster, so let’s aggregate turn-around and travel time at 14-days.

A 2-year congressional term is 730 days.  So this means, the number of sequential back and forth communications that could be fired off would be (rounding off) 52.

Obviously, for a senate position (6-years) there would be three times as many, or 156 such exchanges. 

At the end of these exchanges, if a voter still hadn’t gotten something ironed out, there would be an election.  Throw the buggers out.

Fast forward to the present.

And email (even on a slow day on the net) takes 2-minutes to send.  Even with a big-ass attachment. 

Once it arrives, composing a reply could take an hour…but since it might have come in during a lunch break, and there could be a weekend, let’s generously say 3-days for turn around.  And then another 2-seconds in transit.

Given that the transaction speed is what makes government responsive, not the calendar (lol) then the length of a modern Congressional seat should be 3-days times 52 transactions, or 156-days.

And, by inspection, we see that Senate seats should be held for 468 days (1.28 years) which we could round off to one year and three months and buy senators a copy of Dragon so they can work as hard and fast as the rest of us.

And this relates to economics how, exactly?

Well, it brings down the stupid election spending and – because of higher turnover – there just might be less incumbent suck power and lower corporate bidding, which could put us all back in the game when comes to decisions like global taxes, fracking…well, we all have a list, right?

Any other Economic angles?

Yes.

The whole world almost melted down completely  in 1974 when Bank Herstatt welched on a debt.

That led the financial world to adopt something called continuous settlement – and that’s a fine concept to be roll over into government.

Lookie here: When Elaine goes shopping in town, I know when she will be home and when I need to go out and schlep in the groceries.  I can tell by when her debit card is dinged by watching the bank in real-time.

If banks can instantly ding my account, why can’t we get government online, elected along this continuous settlement model and get responsive? 

Don’t mean to get off our usual path of honest reporting of crooked finance, the continuous printing of money, or the pending monetary collapse of Europe.  But this is actionable except for one thing:  The Old Paradigmers can not change it themselves.

If the Congressional Record allowed and reported constituent comments, Facebook would be in trouble.

Meantime, stories of government waste continue to pile up because of unresponsive government.  The Washington Post reports three-quarters of a billion dollars a year is being spent on government employees who are on paid leave.

Life’s getting too short for this old man to run for office against one of these $100-million marvels that pretend to “represent us” unless we can squish down term length to something more reasonable and in keeping with modern business practice.  (The only thing longer than a senate term, though, is still software support hold times….)

Instead of running for office, I may have to settle for a high-paying government job, that I could be immediately be laid off from on administrative leave.  I recommend you apply for one immediately, too.

More after this…

Verizon Earnings

Kicking it:

Wireless

  • Added 1.5 million net retail connections; retail postpaid churn of 1.00 percent; 106.2 million total retail connections; 100.1 million total retail postpaid connections.
  • 4.8 percent year-over-year increase in service revenues; 4.6 percent year-over-year increase in retail service revenues; 31.9 percent operating income margin; 49.5 percent segment EBITDA margin on service revenues (non-GAAP).

Dow futures are up 45 when  we looked and some additional gains in the metals.  Crude is still hanging about $83.

Meantime, the National Association of Realtors is out with existing home sales…down a bit…

They also report in part “…unsold inventory is 4.5 percent higher than a year ago, when there were 2.21 million existing homes available for sale.”

One of these days that REO held by the banks will come out…

Tales of Two Three Oscars

Odd how these news rhymes work out:

Oscar Pistorius gets five years in jail.

Oscar de la Renta checks out at age 82.

And rounding up the Oscar cluster is speculation about which films might be hot for the 2015 Oscars.

The Dirty West/Ukraine Oil Re$serve$

Was using cluster bombs in Donetsk says a human rights group. 

Not true says the who yah gonna believe.

Aw…hell….didn’t they get the memo about the Dneiper-Donets petroleum basin? Have a State Dept. cookie and read:

The Dnieper-Donets basin is almost entirely in Ukraine, and it is the principal producer of hydrocarbons in that country. A small southeastern part of the basin is in Russia. The basin is bounded by the Voronezh high of the Russian craton to the northeast and by the Ukrainian shield to the southwest. The basin is principally a Late Devonian rift that is overlain by a Carboniferous to Early Permian postrift sag. The Devonian rift structure extends northwestward into the Pripyat basin of Belarus; the two basins are separated by the Bragin-Loev uplift, which is a Devonian volcanic center. Southeastward, the Dnieper-Donets basin has a gradational boundary with the Donbas foldbelt, which is a structurally inverted and deformed part of the basin.

See map page 6 here.

“You mean Ukraine was / is all about oil and gas?”

D’oh.  Of course it ain’t over…it’s never over.  Just like the Leviathan gas find off Gaza…double d’oh dough…

Everything is a business model, remember?

Too Much Sizzle

And not enough steak when comes to news content says a new Harris Poll out this morning:

When provided with several types of news stories and asked which are under-, over-, or appropriately covered, three-fourths of U.S.

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Coping: Reproduction of the Gods?

Way back when, Beatnik-era philosopher Alan Watts wrote a marvelous book:”  The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are.”

On his quest for understand of the Big Everything, it occurred to Watts that if you’re really the All and Everything, how would you keep yourself entertained over Eternity?

To his way of thinking, one way would be to play a gigantic Game with yourself.  The way it works is simple:  You mere sub-divide yourself into billions of smaller piece (not one of which knows All) and then set them out on a planet – like Earth – and then sit back and watch the entertainment as all these pieces try to reassemble themselves into something approaching the Whole/All.

Neat concept.

It explains why (when people are in love) they say things like “I feel more Complete with you in my life…” and things like that.  In an ideal marriage, that’s why sometimes (in fact maybe often) people hook-up who are  in many ways different.

Take Elaine and me, for example:  She’s neat, right-brain, poetic, good-looking, and physically fit.  I’m messy (at times), left-brain, not-so-poetic, not so good-looking, and if I lost 30-pounds it would be a good thing.

Yet we have aspects of each other that we admire, respect and really do find complimentary.  Our home shows it, too.  The big pieces are mine, but all the art, colors, and general vibe of the place?  Totally hers.  And it works…so much so that people who visit say “OMG This doesn’t look like this from the outside, at all!”

And that’s what happens when people “complete” nicely.  The compliment and they don’t fight, they grow one-another…it’s way cool.

But Watts missed something, I think.

Writing in the period he did, the Internet wasn’t around, and so the whole matter of “Global Consciousness” was a very abstract thing.  Sure, it could be imagined, I suppose, that these 7-billion little humans, each with some tiny aspect of Greater Whole might one day come together.  But it wouldn’t come for billions and billions of years.

Without the Internet, that is.

But that all began to change when the Princeton EGGS program began  the serious quest for simultaneity and coherence in global emptions.

And that’s where the bit curtain is being pulled back…in an amazing way.

I don’t think he’d mind my sharing an email with you, but Monday I dropped a note to Chris McCleary, who runs the National Dream Center.  I told him it was an interesting bit of synchronicity that we both (in columns Monday) wrote about how “the technology” (dreams, futuring, software, and such) is working in some who new directions….

Yeah, Its like the rush of insights are too much to contain. Thanks for the plug about inputting dreams, by the way!! Maybe it’s you to thank for the sudden rush of several new dreamers in the past two weeks.

Okay, the more I’m working with historical graphs, the more I’m just shuddering at amazing stuff. I’ll give you a preview here. These words were collected for a certain meme, and they aren’t words that are normally used together, but nonetheless, they rise and fall together.

In other words, MEMES ARE COHERENT! It appears that certain related words (that don’t go into sentences together) nonetheless get used more or less in relative frequency. Check this out…

There were additional graphs attached, but this one gives you the idea:  There is word-coherence in how the dream content being logged at the National Dream Center.  Yikes!

Get this, I did NOT map first and then select the closest graphs. I selected the words I wanted and then mapped them, only to find out that there was a pattern among many of these words. Why would Real, Open, Sense, and Attention all be rising and falling all the same time?  Even if that can be answered, the better question is what is making those significant peaks and valleys?

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Buy the Rumor Day

After a hellacious run-up in the market, this we ought to be an interesting one on a number of fronts. First off, the consumer price index is due out Wednesday morning and it should show inflation is being held relatively in check. This is a report that used to come out like clockwork on the 15th of the month, but now (for whatever reason) they gov’t can’t seem to get its poop in a group as quickly as back in the old days. In the meantime, it will be pass the NoDoz as Fed member Jerome Powell speaks in St. Louis at a community banking conference and I hit the espresso to listen in on (yet another) Ebola conference call.

Coping: Zigging the Future and Ebola

For us,the future on Monday mornings like this, comes down to “bounded Ziggy.”

“So what’s a Ziggy,” you obediently marvel, barley able to move after the weekend.

Have you forgotten?  The old TV series Quantum Leap which had a plot about jumping around in time…

Quantum Leap is an American television series that was broadcast on NBC from March 26, 1989 to May 5, 1993, for a total of five seasons. The series was created by Donald P. Bellisario, and starred Scott Bakula as Dr.

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Demographica: Say "Hi!" to Negative Growth Rates

We’ll get to the overnight episode of “5,500 Cruise Ship Roulette” in a minute. But today is also time to update the mass invasion of the US through the former Mexico border. And regrettably, the latest statistics back up our earlier contention that the great “Dirty Secret” the Washington Cartel is hiding from voters until after elections and the Executive Reconquista to follow, is that without mass immigration, our economy is going to implode. Seriously. Ka-Boom!

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