George Ure

I appreciate your interest in economics when there is so much other great material on the net to pick from this morning (like “how to talk to fish”).

But this is where we hold the financial séance daily and where dollar’s make sense.

Like the EU’s Great Land Grab of former Soviet Union lands, Ukraine, Moldova, and Schneepenheiser…no, make that Georgia.

But it’s not over till the fat lady sings and if you wade through the fine print of this CNN report, you’ll find the Ukrainians are still referring to Crimean territory as part of Ukraine.

And that means only one thing:  More conflict to follow in the region. The Fat Lady may return.

And for those keeping score of such things, the EU effectively picked up more territory this week than ISIS/ISIL.  But for the long haul, the pen is not mightier than the bomb, so roles will reverse next week, we’re sure.

The EU is running out of countries to annex and Vlad ain’t interested.

Shoot & Bomb Dept.

Human Rights Watch says it has located an ISIS execution site.  Number of dead could be as high as 200.  More comment on the roll-out of the Global Caliphate in the Coping section which follows.

On the other side of the war front, the “Torah conditions for 3rd Temple now met?” wonders WorldlNetDaily’s Bob Unruh.

And the money machine is already gearing up, reports warhammer:

George,

All this responding to armed chaos is getting expensive:

<http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140626/CONGRESSWATCH/306260033/Contingency-Spending-Request-Includes-6B-New-Weapons>

So much for all that sequester bluster. Thank goodness the U.S.

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It’s about time we have the same conversation here in public that we had with our Peoplenomics.com subscribers a couple of weeks back:  When you look at the data, there is indeed a New [global] Caliphate [NGC] emerging and you can see it clearly when you look at a map of North Africa, the Middle East, and Asia Minor.

[Map derived using Microsoft Streets and Trips 2013]

What I’ll propose to you this morning is that when you map out the major trouble spots in this part of the world, you can quickly see which country is at the center of things.

Not coincidentally, I figure, the country is also where the 9/11 perps came from, but most of the American public has forgotten that thanks to the spin and hype that accompanied the U.S. intervention in Iraq in response to 9/11.

Wrong country, pure and simple.

In order to understand the future dynamic *(2016/17 for war lite and 2022 for global war) it’s useful to keep an eye on these boundary lines.  Because the West is almost moving its boundary lines forward, too.

In fact, just this morning, the European Union signed alliances with Ukraine, Georgia, and Modova…and as I’ve shared with you for months now, the situation in Ukraine was not a Russian advance, but rather the Europeans going on their same crazy expansionism that started back in the Crusades and has only taken periodic breaks.

Fact of the matter is that we (‘Mericans) live in a country that Chris Columbus claimed as part of the Spanish front of globalism in the late 1400’s which persisted far too long.  As indigenous peoples in the Philippines might argue.

And the arising of a “police state” is hardly anything “new” – it’s all be done before but previously it lacked the high tech “touch.”  Shortly after Columbus’ time, it was called the Inquisition and non-conformists were being burned in Salem more than a century later.

One can only conclude that there’s a rhyme of history in there somewhere, and my friend Robin Landry – a great student and practitioner of economic cycle analytics in addition to his Elliott work – would no doubt point to this as the socioeconomic 500 years cycle with the USA’s revolution in 1776 the 250-year cycle.  And he’d be right, of course.

One of the longer-playing dynamics of world history are absorbed, we can also see how revolutions and the 500-year cycle play out.  As a broad brush, a 500-year cycle began about 1,000 A.D. and 250-years (very roughly) before that, Islamic forces conquered Spain under the leadership of the Umayyad Caliphate.  Wiki it:

The Umayyad conquest of Hispania is the initial Islamic Umayyad Caliphate‘s conquest, between 711 and 788, of the Christian Visigothic Kingdom of Hispania, centered in the Iberian Peninsula, which was known to them under the Arabic name al-Andalus.

The conquest began with an invasion by an army that (according to traditional accounts) consisted largely of Berber Northwest Africans and Arabs, and was commanded by Tariq ibn Ziyad. They disembarked in early 711 at Gibraltar and campaigned their way northward. After the decisive Battle of Guadalete against the usurper Roderic and the support provided to the Saracens by the legitimate heirs to the throne, the initial raids became, to the surprise of the raiders themselves, territorial gains successfully conquered and retained. The Visigothic kingdom splintered into client-dominions of the Umayyads. Over the following decade, most of the Iberian Peninsula was further occupied and brought under Umayyad sovereignty. In 714 Musa ibn Nusayr headed north-west up the Ebro river to overrun western Basque regions and the Cantabrian mountains all the way to Gallaecia, with no relevant or attested opposition. However, these northern areas drew little interest to the conquerors and were hard to defend when taken.

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It’s the little things that remind me of how we got to be a confused, bewildered, and mostly paralyzed by cognitive dissonance in this country.  Come to think of it, without a southern border we may not even be a country any more.  Maybe that’s like computer software with a memory leak…without borders were just…leak , leak, leak ourselves to death…

A major dissonance arrived in Wednesday’s mail.

There it was:  A nice direct-mail piece suggesting that I subscribe to Alaska Magazine.

Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the magazine but they are really quite gorgeous.  The photography captures all the majesty of Denali down to the fishing boats of the southeast.

It’s along the lines of Arizona Highways, but when you set a copy of Alaska on the coffee table, I notice drinks stay cooler longer.

I appreciate the state, having been to Alaska a number of times, worked there, heard the ice on Turnagain Arm scream on a stormy winter’s night.  Seen the sun never set.. UFOs, top secret airplanes…love the place…but that was back in the day.

As I considered subscribing, the mental image of some hearty photographers sitting around a big A-frame on a lake populated by bush pilot sea planes, swigging coffee and pushing their Mac’s to the ultimate in graphic excellence disappeared.

I read the mailing address as follows:

Well, that turned into a quest for truth – and yes, the outfit has its editorial office located in Anchorage.  Likely this was a marketing outfit’s address, but this is the kind of thing (in Monk or Rainmaker fashion) that sticks in my craw, demands attention, and I feel compelled to dig out the answers.

That in turn led to trying to sort out why MapQuest couldn’t find the real Alaska Alaska office on Arctic Slope Avenue while Google Maps put it on Danner Avenue? 

That was only a sideshow to the question of whether I could set a seaplane down on nearby Taku Lake.

Damn!  Now I have to re-cultivate some friends in Anchorage to tell me which street name is current…Where’s the number of the Bush Company?

I’m sure one of these days the DSM-6 will be revised to offer some clarity on when a “healthy sense of inquiry” becomes a problem.  But, how could that be so for a writer?  Except in a column, like this one…

One of these days, I’m going to skip my anti-cynicism meds and begin my long-delayed campaign to start up the U.S. Department of Dissonance.  (My lawyer says U.S. will have to mean UrbanSurvival, otherwise I will be in hock to China for life.)

It’s a big job…but we’ve got to start somewhere.

Being a realist, though, I don’t expect any more success than when I campaigned to change the name of the New England Journal of Medicine to “What’s up, Doc?”

Still, it’s the patriotic thing to do. 

(But then so is annexing Canada.  I mean if Mexico can do it, then by God, why can’t we move our homeless to Vancouver?)

Tunes of Mass Consciousness?  Ohrwurms

Attention audiologists and woo-woo researchers.  As they used to say in CB-land, get’cher ears on for this morning’s discussion…

No, I don’t usually get up at 3 AM, but for some reason this morning I couldn’t get back to sleep.  Besides, the 1957 Mills Brothers song “Glow Worm” was going through my head.

All of which gets me around to wondering if mass consciousness (that some call universal subconscious mind) not only connects people in odd and mysterious ways, but also supplies a “play list” to go along with glimpses of future, wildly entertaining dreams and (with work) limited access to the future…

I haven’t touched on this phenomena for several years but the more formal name for it is involuntary musical imagery (INMI).

The Atlantic had a good article on point back in January.

But if you woke up this morning with “Glow Worm” going through your head, drop me a note.  I’m trying to decide is my “mental jukebox” is replaying songs from back when I was in grade school, or whether the Universe sends out nostalgia waves in addition to more common waves like gravity and light.

(And please, no emails point out light is only a wave some of the time, the rest of the time it’s a particle. I’m just looking around for the glow worm wave.)

Noise for Clear Thinking and “The Hum”

We we chatting Monday about how adding the right kind of noise might improve your thinking.

We had some pretty good input, too, like this from recording engineer/reader Dave:

Check this article about sounds in a quiet environment:  http://designingsound.org/2014/06/the-negative-space-of-sound/

As for adding noise we sound guys do it during mastering CDs and we call it dither.

Since I’m an old broadcast and audio guy I was reluctant to share that with you because once we start talking about dither, then I’d need to explain the subtleties of my favorite recording/mathematical wet spot:  Signal to quantization-noise ratio…

I should ask brother Dave whether that would be a productive use of your time because quantization error rides off into the sunset as A/D converter speeds go up in sample speed and A/D steps…but we’ll save that for another morning.

Reader Sherry has found the discussion of noise useful:

This info really helps my understanding of my mother’s behaviors.  She had a mild form of schizophrenia.  I grew up in a small house that had a radio and television on all the time. Mom said she couldn’t stand quiet since it allowed her to hear things that weren’t there.  She needed that input to allow her brain to function at daily activities.  She also said when she was really scared or upset, she saw faces on the wall.  Now I get it.

Going back to the studio for a minute (Dave, cue up the sound generator, rig up a spectrum analyzer and lemme do the 10-second lecture on “pink noise…”

As you’re tinkering around with adding noise to your thinking (assuming you have either a digital audio workstation (DAW) – if not, go download Audacity and have fun!), we should have a quick discussion of the difference between “white noise” and “pink noise.”

(Raise your hand if you know this one…)

White noise is just that – totally random noise like what you get between FM stations (assuming no adjacent signals and a long list of caveats).

Pink noise is (how to put this?) organized white noise.  Pink noise is spectrally evenly distributed (so you will have a comparable signal at 20 Hz and you will while making dog ear’s hurt when you tune up your MacIntosh 2300’s into some horn tweeters at 22KHz.

Back on point, just the “right” noise is not only associated with peak intuition (and learning) but also seems to correlate with peak experience.  Reader Mark has just such an experience:

George, interesting point, about “being in the noise”. I remember each one of the “moments” the music was loud.

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Hot of the press release from Case-Shiller/S&P/Dow Jones:

New York, June 24, 2014 – Data through April 2014, released today by S&P Dow Jones Indices for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the 10-City and 20-City Composites posted annual gains of 10.8%.

(The chart above depicts the 10-City Composite and the 20-City Composite Home Price Indices. In April 2014, the 10-City and 20-City Composites posted year-over-year increases of 10.8%.)

This is a significantly lower rate when compared to last month. Nineteen of the 20 cities saw lower annual gains in April than in March. California (Los Angeles, San Diego and San Francisco) saw their returns worsen by approximately three percentage points. Boston was the only city to see its annual rate improve.

The 10-City and 20-City Composites increased 1.0% and 1.1% in April. Seven cities – Cleveland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, Phoenix, San Diego and San Francisco – reported lower returns than in March. Boston rose 2.9%, its largest monthly gain in over its 27 years of history. San Francisco rose 2.3%, its sixth consecutive price increase.

“Although home prices rose in April, the annual gains weakened,” says David M.

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Special morning for us:  There will be an update about 20-minutes past 8 (or whenever I get to it) with this morning’s housing numbers, but there is much other action about this morning so here goes…

The biggest story on the financial side is that the US is keeping Germany’s gold.  You may remember a couple of years back, the German’s pressured the Fed to deliver back to German homeland all $14-billion worth of that yellow dog, that along with silver, is about all that keeps rabid central bankster in check.

Whether the Germans are backing off because of internal political disagreements (unlikely) or because changing the amount of gold Germany has would upset the economic applecart and might reveal how little gold is in bank custody will no doubt be the grist for conspiracy boards for a long time to come.

Nevertheless, we’re reminded that the last time a major world figure, Hugo Chavez, wanted to repatriate a bunch of gold to Venezuela, he ended up dead, shortly thereafter.

We also remember the death of an American President, John F. Kennedy was linked to a precious metals decision.  Wiki Executive Order 11110:

This executive order delegated to the Secretary of the Treasury the president’s authority to issue silver certificates under the Thomas Amendment of the Agricultural Adjustment Act, as amended by the Gold Reserve Act. The order allowed the Secretary to issue silver certificates, if any were needed, during the transition period under President Kennedy’s plan to eliminate silver certificates.

Since we’re big on “templates” around here, constructing one that says “Mess with precious metals in government hands can be a lethal mistake” may be a pretty good one to keep in mind.

Up dramatically earlier, the PM’s are back down from earlier levels, but we now have silver at $21 as of press time.

Take from it, what you will.

“Let Them Eat (yellow) Cake!”

Warhammer notes that Iraq’s invaders and now talking a nuclear end to Israel:

George,

There’s always a fair share of chest thumping happening in the Middle East at any given time, but this chilling claim by ISIS takes the cake – a Uranium cake!  “Iraq Invaders threaten nuke attack on Israel” reports WND.

If true, that Pakistani sympathizers provided ISIS with one or more nukes, Israel and the West’s collective worst fears are now realized. And for ISIS, as well as for Iran, nuke weapons are seen as necessary commodities in order for a true military-political caliphate to be realized.

This is a most curious claim, one that might legitimately be taken lightly – for now. That said, the situation seem to be getting more complex and interesting by the day in and around the Holy Land.

I am trying to grasp how Shi’ite Iranian theocrats are digesting this bit of Sunni ISIS news. I would have thought it more likely the opposing Islamic factions would severely wound each other in a protracted conventional religious civil war. Now, if nukes really have entered into the equation, perhaps Iran will seek a truce with the Sunnis in order to first liberate the Middle East from the infidels before settling their messy little family affair.

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The world we humans live in doesn’t do much changing. Oh, sure, we got ISIS trying to take Iraq and Israel is off bombing Syria over the kid, and the USA is now a biggie in soccer.  Come to think of it, since cell phones have been around for almost 30-years now, even that falls into my mental “bit bucket” that collects templates rather than the specifics of history.

Whether we like it, or not, the socialization of societies really does come down to a “shared series of templates.”

Stop at the stop sign, go when something is green, stop when red, all that kind of stuff is templated into us at a very young age.  And that’s actually a good thing since it reduces the CPU load on our brains in order to allow us to move into this murky stuff called “future” more smoothly; perhaps with some clarity.

REAL advances in humans come infrequently – and mostly when we look at our templates.  Which gets us to the most important “story” of the day.

The story headline, “Free will could be the result of ‘background noise’ in the brain, study suggests.” is it.

You should go read the report and then the related content over at Live Science.

The solemnly mind-bending concept is in this quote from the Independent article:

“The brain has a normal level of so-called background noise; the researchers found that the pattern of activity in the brain in the seconds before the cue symbol appeared – before the volunteers knew they were going to make a choice – could predict the likely outcome of the decision. “

You see the problem, right?  The decision was “known” ahead of time!

Somewhere, it seems, down in the “noise floor of thinking” there seems to be a ‘signal’ of some sort – the kind that people can “tune-in to.”  The signal of “right life?”

Emphasis, please, on the quote from Jesse Bengson of UC-Davis, one of the neuroscientists involved in the study:

“”This random firing, or noise, may even be the carrier upon which our consciousness rides, in the same way that radio static is used to carry a radio station.” “

Note that this is NOT the first time science has wandered into the realm of “pre-decision” knowledge of the future.  Could it be that we really do know down at some deep level about the future before it actually arrives, and that’s why, it could be argued, this latest bit of research shows that deciding takes place before the stimulus.,..even if by a second?

The first place I ran across this incredible notion was in

Dean Radin’s landmark paper “Time-reversed human experience: Experimental evidence and implications.”  The abstract of Radin’s paper?

“This paper reviews four classes of experimental evidence for time-reversed effects in human experience, examples of phenomena discussed in conventional scientific disciplines that bear a resemblance to time-reversed effects, and a new experiment that distinguishes between information flowing forwards vs. backwards in time. One implication of the cumulative evidence is that time – reversed effects permeate all aspects of human behavior. Another is that experiments in all scientific disciplines may be vulnerable to time –reversed influences, including studies based on gold-standard techniques like double-blind, randomized protocols.

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Would it be paranoid to begin thinking about gas lines in late August or September?  Perhaps not.

So we begin this morning with two major data points:  the first being Grady’s latest read of our word frequency analysis over at www.nostracodeus.com.  And, as he notes in Thursday’s post, our June 22-23 hot date range is looking, well, hotter if anything.

Let’s go to a contributed comment from our military affairs expert (handle: warhammer) whose opinions I value because when it comes to war-gaming, he’s the real deal and has “been there, done that” along the spectrum from weather warfare to cyber attacks.   I may not agree with many of his positions, but the analysis is always rock solid, fact based.

George,

This could be the start of something . . . BIG!

http://www.defensenews.com/article/20140618/DEFREG04/306180032/Dempsey-Iraq-Has-Requested-US-Airstrikes

I tend to think it is important because America alone did not decide to deploy airpower against the brutally effective ISIS armies.  Instead, the Iraqi government requested U.S. airpower to hopefully help stem the tide of ISIS progress and perhaps even gain back some lost territory.  I’ll bet dollars to donuts that the U.S. administration is not getting supportive emails from the Saudi royals, who are Sunni.  I’ll explain.

Led largely by seasoned al Sunni Qaeda fighters, ISIS has coalesced an impressive swath of territory ranging from Syria deep into Iraq.  The gains by ISIS threaten Shi’ite Iran’s world view and their holy vision of shepherding-in the Mahdi, or hidden Imam, to form a unified Islamic Caliphate that will eventually rule the entire world.

Thus the Saudi-led Sunni and the Iranian-led Shi’ite Muslims have a huge rift between them, not just in Iraq, but across the entire Middle East and deep into Southern and South Eastern Asia.  One-time staunch U.S. ally Saudi Arabia, the geo-center of Islamic Sunni faith, is increasingly finding itself pitted against Shi’ite led Iran through proxy wars and regional conflicts.  Iraq, Lebanon and Syria have already joined into the fray to various degrees, with Egypt, Libya, Turkey, Jordan, the UAE, Qatar, Kuwait, Yemen and Oman staring down the barrel of a primed canon loaded for a ravenous, long-lasting religious civil war.

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