George Ure

Stock markets around the world are an an interesting juncture this week, according to our Trading Model.  Seems if there’s a decent rally, the market could zoom off to new highs before our usual “Sell in May and go away” period.  Except, the other side is that if the markets do break down in the next week, or so, we could be in for a major bloodbath in roughly the same period.

Anyone who is even halfway serious about making free money from Wall St. knows it doesn’t matter which way the market is running; trades can be put on either way.  And, despite the periodic demonization of short-side players, there always has to be someone to take the other side of a trade – or there’s no market!

A look at Asia shows a pretty decent (1.77%) rally in Japan overnight and a small quarter percent loss in China.  European markets are nearly as exciting as a bowl of spaghetti.

Which I mention in case you’re trying to “noodle” what to do with your vast fortune:  Don’t think…wait for the market to make its mind up and go with the flow.

The market could “tread water” until the end of the week, too.  It will be Thursday before we get retail sales, which should be down a bit, partly because the number of jobs added in last week’s unemployment data was weaker than the Hallelujah Choir was hoping.  But the real numbers to watch will be out Friday morning when the Fed’s industrial production and utilization arrives only to be followed within the hour by the leading economic indicators.

Sure, the market might move one way, or the other, a bit.  But the real direction may take a bit of doing to sort out.  So if you work on Wall St. this might be the week to take a few days off before things begin to get nutty again.

As the World Spins

I mean this very (or at least mostly) seriously:  This is a very hard week for serious news junkies because so much of the stuff which is making headlines is either inevitable or just plain “don’t matter.”

Take the case of the first NFL football player, Michael Sam, coming out as being gay.  It that going to change anything in the NFL?  Nope, not likely.  Other than  the LBGT movement is one of the few growth “industries” around anymore, it’s not going to impact my plans to try out for the NFL.

What’s much more likely to impact my relationship with football is the fact that I don’t think there are any (repeat ANY) 65-year old walk-ons in the game.

Since media all have to come up with different “angles” on what’s essentially one story, we can’t help but notice that the fact Sam is from Missouri has made it into a few headlines. 
What, like there aren’t gay people in every state?

In our never-ending efforts to point out how the Universe serves up wryrony in heaps and gobs to aware observers, I’ll remind you that Missouri is  what?  The Show Me State.

You can make up your own ending, punchline, or social comment from here:  I just give you the set-up material.

My Swiss Cheesy Immigration Note

By a thin margin, voters in Switzerland have voted to bring back a strong immigration policy.  Which means that now they have crossed the uber klassen of the European Union leadership (a term used advisedly) because the EU thinks that people should be able to come from all manner of poor and oppressed downtrodden backgrounds and be free to trash the home of the gnomes of banking.

Needless to say, the home of the gnomes ain’t to keen on the idea.  For one, it might bring down the term  “average” a few notches.

Not that this has anything to do with the immigration mess here in the US where we have put ourselves into a “must do” on immigration because without it, government programs like Social Security will blow up sooner than later.

But it does get us to wondering if there is anything like a global ranking of national IQs of registered voters.

Well, lookie here!  There is such a ranking.  It shows that Swiss are still ranked 101…slightly above the 100 average IQ.

What’s more, a little study of the data says that Canadians have gone from an average of 97 in 2002 to a more recent (2006) reading of 99.

The average IQ in America, says the data is actually 98 and that prolly explains a lot about voter apathy and who we put in office, doesn’t it?

And, as for my contention that opening up the floodgates of immigration with Mexico would bring down America’s average IQ even more is supposed by the data that says Mexico’s  average IQ was 87 in 2002 and it’s only up to 90 as of 2006.

Know why we won the Cold War with Russia?  I mean besides bankrupting them on defense with the help of the Marcos Gold?  Russia’s average IQ  at the time was 96…up to 97 more recently.  Freedom makes people smart.

So what we SHOULD be importing, instead of Mexicans (suggests the data, not me) is North Koreans.  Average IQ 106…or better, Singaporeans or Honk Kong(ese?)?  Average IQs of 108.

Unfortunately, Canada’s already got that locked up, but look at data on India where all those special visas are being handed out by the high outfits.  You see what?  Maybe people from India aren’t supermen at all…maybe it has more to do with corpslimes trying to get the work done by the cheapest available resource. And yes, that’s why the corpslimes have their eyes on Africa, next…exploitation is profitable as hell.

Gee, what a novel concept, huh?

Ruthless Hillary

No, I have no idea why the Drudge Report is covering the stories about Hillary Clinton’s bid for the White House so early.  Reports like “The Hillary Papers: Archive of ‘closest friend’ paints portrait of ruthless First Lady” aren’t going to make her quit the run…

Clinton has been busy retooling her Benghazi actions and now looks like David Petraeus is endorsing her.  If she wins, expect Petraeus to get a gov gig…which is how this stuff rolls.

Meantime, if someone could slip this Wikipedia entry to Matt, that’d be useful, methinks.  Familiarity Heuristic.

In psychology, a heuristic is an easy-to-compute procedure or “rule of thumb” that people use when forming beliefs, judgments or decisions. The familiarity heuristic was developed based on the discovery of the availability heuristic by psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman; it happens when the familiar is favored over novel places, people, things. The familiarity heuristic can be applied to various situations that individuals experience in day to day life. When these situations appear similar to previous situations, especially if the individuals are experiencing a high cognitive load, they may regress back to the state of mind in which they have felt or behaved before. This heuristic is useful in most situations and can be applied to many fields of knowledge, however, there are both positives and negatives to this heuristic as well.

Which is why ‘Merica is F/U’ed:  We vote for the familiar rather than best, novel, or different.  Which is why we have a couple of national aristocracies, and the Clintonistas is one of them.  So after Ma Clinton is done in the WH, it will then be time for the daughter to move up ther food chain…kinda like the Bushistas are working their aristocracy.

It’s a brand, don’t you get it?  We keep shopping at the same stores and electing the same has beens because we’re what?  Idiots!

Say, maybe our national IQ is lower now than it was in 2006 – you think?

Power Mongering

Turn about it fair play, figure the Iranians.  So they are sending some military might (a couple of ships) close to the US in order to make it known that we are not the only country that can project force.

Meantime, back home, the Iranians are getting simulated bombings of Tel Aviv and of a US aircraft carrier.

When we do it, it’s called Hollywood.  When they do it, its suddenly propaganda. 

Syriasly

More talks in Geneva.

You know, Syria has a government.  Just like we do.

Now, how would the world act if China or Russia started arming street gangs in LA and calling it a “resistance movement?”  Obviously, that wouldn’t go over well.  But when we do that in Syria it gets labeled peace talks. 

Weirder and weirder every day, ain’t it?

Meantime, the US/West/EU are promoting the uprising in Ukraine the same way, selling the EU and the kinder, gentler brand.

And so, Ukraine government (backed by Russia) has upped the ante by putting anti terrorism forces on alert, and that’s a kind of code word for “Look out for those western backed trouble makers…”

I just wish a big war would break out somewhere:  We need it for the economy otherwise we’re going to be reading forever about stories like creating government jobs for a million a pop.

You see?  This is the kind of back-end problem war fixes….

Do Process or Due Process?

Here we go again…another report that an American citizen – dumb enough to throw in with al Qaeda – will possibly be the target of a US drone strike.

So when you leave America, do you give up rights to due process?  I must have missed that in the Constitution…I was pretty sure I’d read the whole thing.

But then again, I probably missed the part of IRS taxing you after you leave America even if you renounce your citizenship. 

Being an American anymore is kind of like having a tattoo  that won’t come off…   Which gets us to…

Bye-Bye ‘Merica

Say, you don’t think that’s why a record number of Americans renounced their citizenship in 2013, to you?

You gotta read the Forbes article because it’s a girsly reminder how (just as in pre-War Germany) we’re slamming the exit doors shut and punishing those who do escape from citadel ‘Merica.

Quaking Hills

Three minor quakes in the hills of Hollywood are making news. But if you put out a big SoCal paper and it’s a slow news week (like now) what do you write about?

Personally, I’m guessing a big truck on Barham or on the Ventura could have done almost the same thing, but if L.A.

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This week’s “Monday ramble” begins with a note from reader Chris that really made my day Sunday…and I think it will yours, too…

Periodically I do searches for unclaimed property for myself and people I know. Today I decided for shits and giggles to also throw in a few other people’s names including yours. I usually use this site www.missingmoney.com for my searches. Then I end up going direct to each state where more details are available. This one is for Texas: https://mycpa.cpa.state.tx.us/up/Search.jsp where is shows that Direct TV owes you $51.58 from 2011. Also looks like George junior is owed some money in Seattle. You have some small amount of money waiting there too: http://ucp.dor.wa.gov/default.aspx . George juniors appears to be in the amount of $50-$100. Just thought you might like to know.

Near as I can figure it, the www.missingmoney.com is a semi-official collaboration of many states – but not all.  I was going to run a check for a buddy of mine in Hawaii, for example, and was disappointed to see that Hawaii doesn’t appear to be one of the states taking part.

Still, there were other people we know who were due for some cash: One of Elaine’s boys, in addition to G2.  And one of my flying friends.

I was going to tell one of my neighbors that he’s got several items worth claiming, but I though he might think that I’d gone over to the dark side with computer surveillance of neighbors…

No, you’re not likely to get rich, since most of the money is small amounts, sees liker $50-bucks, or so.  But overall – at least insofar as our little slice of dough – the work to fill out the online claim form, and then gather up and mail the related backup documents worked out to working for $300/hour.  Hell yeah…I’m that guy.

Have fun with it and save some of that new-found money for a Peoplenomics subscription and a Valentine for your S.O.

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Table saw connoisseurs gather round…note here from reader Ken as a follow-up to our discussion over yesterday’s bean about the be-all, end-all BEST table saw out there for the money:

For years one of the many rewarding hats that I wore was working in a professional cabinet shop. Now I am not saying that the two thousand dollar saw is a waste of money since I would love to have one in my garage.. but what I do to get the perfect work table is make a set of side tables for the saw.. that way you can put a whole sheet of plywood on it and have the flexibility of being able to rotate the stock. I also love the panel saw guide I have to.. anyway here is a website showing a nifty set of side tables that are easy to make and store yet give you the large table area that would enable you to produce like the larger cabinet shops..( actually that is what we  had at our shop tables for our custom cabinets so we could lay out what we were going to do.. ) In any event something to ponder other than an economic crash on a Thursday afternoon..

Table Saw Extension Wing

Table Saw Outfeed Table

Over at this link (Sears) this is the table saw I have and love.. I used to have one of the older sears saws.. what was bad about that is the storage of it.. you almost had to have a dedicated work shop this saw on the other had is easy to store and use with the extension tables you will be able to store the whole thing in a foot print of thirty inches by thirty six inches..

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First thing I did this morning was ask “Is this the day I become a millionaire?”  Then the answer came to me:  No chance, fool.

Still, betting on the market doing down has not been an entirely bad thing for us financially although early on this morning it looked like the market would bounce a bit, but that would be fine. 

What’s got our attention, more than anything, since we don’t get the jobs numbers until tomorrow, is what is the reference to “the rose people” that keeps peeking out of our www.nostracodeus.com data?  Odd word to come floating up…so you might want to check the site later on this morning because Grady will be updating as soon as the overnight runs are done.

Which leaves us with the Baltic Dry Index as our next topic du jour.  This index has been flopping around at about the 1100 level recently and this morning’s reading is 1092, but only up 6-points.  Spring hasn’t exactly broken out yet and there ain’t no birds singing….

To put that in perspective, that’s about 1/2 of what it was just a few months back, and since the Baltic Dry tends to front-run the more staid economic indicators, it’s worth keeping an eye on where it goes from here because excursions below 1,000 become worrisome.

While the mainstream is trying to figure out how to come up with yet another useless Seahawks human interest follow-up story, we’re more focused around here on what’s going on in China.

China’s state-run media (as opposed to our corporate-controlled media) is playing a strong rhyme off of pre World War II events.  Seems the head of Japan’s NHK Broadcasting service did something of a denial deal about the Nanking Massacre.  Which, if you’re Chinese (or read Wikipedia) is pretty real…

The Nanking Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, was an episode of mass murder and mass rape committed by Japanese troops against Nanking (current official spelling: Nanjing) during the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937. The massacre occurred during a six-week period starting December 13, 1937, the day that the Japanese captured Nanking, which was then the Chinese capital. (See Republic of China). During this period, hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians and disarmed combatants were murdered by soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army.^[1][2] Widespread rape and looting also occurred.^[3][4] Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed.^[5] Several of the key perpetrators of the atrocities, at the time labelled as war crimes, were later tried and found guilty at the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal, and were executed. Another key perpetrator, Prince Asaka, a member of the Imperial Family, escaped prosecution by having earlier been granted immunity by the Allies.

And so this morning, Xinhua offers this: “Foreign Ministry spokesman Hong Lei said that such behavior is “a barefaced challenge to the international justice and human conscience.”

Since these events hark back to the middle 30’s, and since we are in a Long Wave economic Depression (which is why interest rates are zero, if you skip the money printing festival) there are even more parallels to the pre-WW II period to be found.

For example, the US-backed president of the Philippines, Benigno Aquino, has been saying harsh things about China lately, including drawing a parallel between appeasement of Hitler and current events in the Senkaku Islands area  (Okinawa, East China Sea area) and that, in turn, has pissed off the Chinese.

The US, knowing which side our bonds are buttered on (if China completely goes cold turkey on the Dollar, we’re all screwed and a few folks in Washington grok that) some we’re off placing the typical US two-faced game. 

The way this runs is we say (from the US voice) that the Chinese are acting professionally in their air defense zone that they have set up over the disputed Islands area (with oil and gas under it, which is why all this dance is going in the first place).  And we’re gently asking China to adjust some of its claims.

No, we don’t expect China to adjust its claims.  Besides, China could still be miffed that so few people have an understanding of history, including that a Chinese Fleet sailed around the whole world in the years before Christopher Columbus, but they get no creds, even now, for being a global civilization because it didn’t set with the made-up history of Europe, but that’s another discussion – probably left for the chat about the deep (and twisted) roots of American Exceptionalism.

So our money is on China continue to ramp up military spending while they public are talking about their “New Economy””.  I’m thinking iron fist in soft glove.

And this has what to do with becoming a millionaire?  Ever look for Chinese defense industry companies to invest in?

Rolling in Data

We have a number of incredibly interesting numbers to report this morning…and I bet you’ve been up since midnight just counting down the seconds until you could get the new balance of trade figures, haven’t you?

The U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of
Economic Analysis, through the Department of Commerce,
announced today that total December exports of $191.3 billion
and imports of $230.0 billion resulted in a goods and services
deficit of $38.7 billion, up from $34.6 billion in November,
revised. December exports were $3.5 billion less than
November exports of $194.8 billion. December imports were
$0.6 billion more than November imports of $229.4 billion.

In December, the goods deficit increased $4.6 billion
from November to $58.8 billion, and the services surplus
increased $0.4 billion from November to $20.1 billion.
Exports of goods decreased $4.3 billion to $132.8 billion, and
imports of goods increased $0.3 billion to $191.6 billion.
Exports of services increased $0.8 billion to $58.5 billion, and
imports of services increased $0.3 billion to $38.4 billion.

OMG is that exciting, or what?  Well, how about the new Q4 productivity report…another wet spot for sure…

Nonfarm business sector labor productivity increased at a 3.2 percent annual rate during the fourth quarter of 2013, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

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You ever have one of those days when you wonder “Is the Internet developing a mind of its own?”

The reason for this is a bit weird, but I think you’ll appreciate the story.  Getting to it may be a little circuitous, but that’s what coffee is for, am I right?

So there I am, sitting around the house in a few free minutes from work (or what I tell Elaine is work that goes on over in my office) and I get to looking for a new table saw.  The one I got from Sears about five years ago has been OK, but just barely.  Nothing on CraigsList.

If you ever go shopping for a table saw (and people do) the BEST table saw on the market is called a StopSaw.  The things that makes the Sawstop CNS175-TGP36 1-3/4 HP Contractor Saw with 36-Inch Professional T-Glide Fence System including Rails and Extension Table (worth every penny of $2,000 at Amazon) is simple:

StopSaws have an electronic blade sensing  unit built in that can tell the difference between cutting wood and cutting fingers.  If the unit detects a change in electrical impedance of the material, it slams the saw to a stop in a (very small) fraction of a second.

Here’s a video, if you doubt the “finger-saving” capabilities of the tool:

PFM – pure freakin magic.  Gotta get one.  So yes, for someone who types for a living (moi) or someone who needs to ensure that their home workshop “home-handy-bastard” project don’t go…er…digital…like my buddy James the famous doctor (at least in Tennessee) this is THE only saw on the market to own.

I want one because the cheap ($250 Sears) saw that I presently have ain’t cutting it (so to speak) for a number of reasons:

1.  Insufficient table “run-in” space.  The cheap saws don’t have as large a “front porch” (area in front of the blade).  The more room in front of the blade, the more precision you can get out of cuts because you can focus on the cut alignment, not trying to hold the wood up just so.

Of course, the out-feed area (behind the blade) needs to be big, too, since there’s nothing less fun that having to press down on a work piece on a running saw.  Especially if I don’t take the additional 5-minutes of screwing around to set up my out-feed rollers and all that crap.  I’m that guy.

The StopSaw has bolt-on out-feed extensions that (at my age) are more appealing than most centerfolds.

2. Shaft wobble of the blade. My present old Sears saw has a lot of blade wobble.  In other words, if you push the blade (“Saw unplugged, Fool!!!”) left or right, you’ll see you can move my old saw between about 1/16th of an inch to maybe 3/32nd’s.

A real saw ought to have basically NO left – right wobble or looseness of the shaft.

3.  Cheap, small Arbor;  The normal (middle of the saw blade) hole size on a TYPICAL home 10” table saw is 5/8th’s of an inch in diameter.  Just about all saws use this.   But where saws begin to separate the “men from the boys” is in the length of the shaft that the blade goes on.  This measurement is called the “arbor” length.

Anyone with a table saw, and designs on building furniture cutting grooves in the wood to hold shelves, knows the cut grooves are called dado cuts.  Makes for strong, good-looking furniture.

Now, try as I may, I have never been able to get enough of my dado blades on this short-arbor POS to enable me to run a 3/4 in dado in a single pass.  I can get a 1/2” dado set up, but barely.

On a real he-man saw, you get an arbor long enough to allow you to put on up to 7/8th’s of an inch of dado.  Yet another reason I am saw-shopping.  I would like to be able to run a single-pass 3/4” dado on the table saw which is way quicker than setting up the router (which will do it in a single pass) because the table saw makes a smoother cut.

4.  Non-standard table guides:  If you ever buy a table saw (new or used) made damn sure you get a saw that uses standard 3/4” guides.  This old Sears POS of mine has some fancy keyed guide that is totally useless because it doesn’t accommodate standard-track accessories.

Let’s say I wanted to whip up a cross-cutting sled so I could set up an angle jig.  (Fabulously detailed shop drawing right.)  The non-standard track issue I have run into makes me crazy.

Yeah, I know, “It’s a poor workman that blames his tools, Ure.” 

Bugger off.  That’s bullshit and anyone who believes that a small table, wobbly blade, short-arbor saw with obscure keyed tracks can turn out the same grade of cabinetry as a big StopSaw doesn’t know a rip from a crosscut.

About here’s you may be thinking “OK, interesting rant about table saws, and you didn’t mention that to replace the blade stopping cartridge is about $70bucks, but each time you replace one, that’s cheaper than a visit to the emergency room….but what about the misleading headline on this story…something about the Internet having a mind of its own?  What was THAT all about?”

Aha!  There you go again, dragging me kicking and screaming back to the point.  Doggonit…

Well, all this (except for maybe all the shopping details about how to buy a table saw (which might result in enough Amazon commission to buy a can of catfood for Zeus) is necessary background to explain the Internet getting a mind of its own remark.

You see, one of the sites that I came up with (while looking for the PERFECT table saw CHEAP was this site called www.dhgate.com.  I didn’t know anything about the site…just that it came up in a good for “cheap table saw” or something like that in the goog monster.

Odd assortment of stuff on the front page of the site….

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At least for a moment, maybe. But the early numbers didn’t look all that hot – 30+ by the Dow futures when I looked, but as Peoplenomics.com subscribers know, we’re laughing all the way to the bank on this latest slide.  And tomorrow, we’ll be doing some work on answering the next question logically arising:  “How far is down?”

But first the highlights:  Dow dropped more than 300 points.  Obviously, that East Coast bias against the AFC winning is more than just rumor.  And, since the next wave down in the Long Wave is due any old time, why not now?

I mean, what could be more graceful than a nice Wave 1 (or macro 3 down) starting over Christmas, going into April/May, then having a Wave 2 bounce, and then things collapsing in a heap at the end of the year?

No, it’s not cast in concrete and your investment decisions are your own, it’s just that the reason we study history is to find out new and exciting ways to make money without breaking a sweat.  Times like the present are what bears live for.

And when you look around, the reason for the decline is staring us all in the face:  The Fed has added more than $3-trillion to its balance sheet (in the form of mortgage debt mostly) so they’re about out of silver bullets.

Then there’s the drop in consumer disposable income because of gunpoint healthcare.  Which is not a criticism, except as one reader wrote during our recent healthcare poll:

Current policy is 5k deductible and 70% coverage with a few doctor visits (3 each) at copay of $30. Monthly premium is $550.

Under Obamacare, I will have a $7500 deductible, and premiums go to $1100/mo.

And that’s just one example of how one couple will be spending $550 a month less on things like dinner out, a movie, travel, and so forth.

Now, multiply that by a lot of people and what?  (Bipity-bopity-boo!)  The market drops.

Well, see, that wasn’t really so hard to see coming, was it?

And with all those people who got a one year stay of financial execution because they work for big companies that got the (crooked, illegal, but probably saving us from even larger, instant collapse) one year delay, we will be seeing even more downside over the next year.

You know, you don’t need to be a financial genius to navigate in the world.  You just need to wake the F up and see what’s going on in your own neighborhood.  As goes your income, so goes the country, if you have enough friends.  (*I don’t have any, so I have to study the headlines.)

Speaking of the headlines, the NY Times is blaming poor auto sales last month on bad winter weather.

Reality check!  Attention East Coast establishment media empire:  It was not snowing in LA or much of the rest of the country and the real reason is collapsing disposable incomes!  Hello?  Anyone home?  it snows last January, too, you know.  It does it every year, in fact.  Hello?  Anyone there?  FMTT

Another headline?  Sure:  Construction spending up.  Yeah, I know, how can this happen if it’s snowing so much people can’t buy cars, right?

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Peoplenomics this weekend was, if I do say so myself, one of the better ones in that it explained a curious bit of (simple) math that demonstrates the market tendency to become very nonlinear ultra-low interest settings like those expected in the period ahead.

The nonsubscriber way of thinking of it goes like this:  The closer interest rates get to zero, the more volatile the market becomes.  That’s because stock prices become cost-justified as infinitely high on an earnings basis just before yields hit zero, and then, once that barrier is passed, they become infinitely overpriced!

Yes, it’s a crazy way of looking at things, but the math holds up – and now we’ve got more research ahead to see how much of the market actually moves on the mathematical foundations laid out.

It’s like that Sunday football game.   Oh, sure, there were statistical indicators of what would happen, but there’s always that “emo component” – emotional component – that works its way into investment decisions and which team you support.

Just like I can’t understand how people get all wrapped-around-the-axle on a sports team, the answer is really quite simple:  It’s all about what goes on down at the archetype level that CG Jung wrote so eloquently about.  I won’t ask you to whip out your copy of  Memories, Dreams, Reflections, but transference behavior is oftentimes a “mother transference” and by the rule of “least resistance” the closest substitute wins.  Mass marketing of sports is what we get.

This is not to say that sports fans (and investors) are all idiots when it comes to manipulation of their emotions, but the reason that sports franchises have mascots is precisely because it enables and empowers transference that to the fan – at the experiential level – seems “normal.”  But to the aware (recovered sports addict or aware investor) the method is easily seen and stripped of its power to herd us blindly.

Just as the Seattle “Seahawk” in an amalgam of northwest First People’s myths, the bronco has it’s own Wikipedia listing, as well.  It’s quite ridiculous to cheer for any team, particularly one that may pay less (percentage-wise) in taxes than me or you.  Yet millions did it Sunday, not realizing they were cheering for either a…

… large raptor, reaching more than 60 cm (24 in) in length and 180 cm (71 in) across the wings.

Or, they were sucked into cheering for…

…an untrained horse or one that habitually bucks.

Raptor or untrained horse.  It’s insane, but only if you detach and looking for meaning.

My (How’s your hangover?) column this morning will not get into the depths of MMMR (managing multiple matrices of reality) as it relates to sports – and investing.  That will be discussed in more detail for subscribers in Peoplenomics Wednesday.

I’m just pointing out that people will cheer for the damnedest things (fish, birds, social or racial subtypes) and not realize they are being “worked.”

In similar fashion, the markets have not yet crashed (although, give it time) because there are many market players who are too dumb to figure out (as great sage Jimi Hendrix warns us) “Castles made of sand, fall in the sea, eventually.”

Which is why, after the silliness of the Sunday, it’s time to roll out our new mascot around here.  No, we don’t know how long he’ll be around, but already the Urban Bears are kicking the average investor’s ass in Seattle-like style.

We can report the Bears whipped the Nikkei’s by almost 2%, the Chinns by 106 points, and in Europe, the Bear was continuing his run for the gold by beating the Frogs by 18 points and ahead of the Huns by 66, although both of those games are still underway.

Also in play, the Bears versus the Queens with the bears ahead by 45-points. 

The US game will be getting underway shortly, but we notice the monthly unemployment report won’t be out until Friday as the Labor Department has been on the injured reserve list from the partial government shutdown last year.  They’ve never made it back into the action.  Instead, fans will have to watch slow car sales and dwindling construction as they look for a reason to bet against the Bears.

Down here at the old sports book, we notice the Bears have won three weeks running in the S&P playoffs.  And only the most casual fan of Reality Bears would overlook in the stats that the Bears have ruled since Christmas week.

As you settle up on those office wagers today, you might think about putting a little something on the Bears next.  They’re looking sharp and the team makes a lot more sense around here than washed out birds or bucked-up horses.

“Go bears, or go broke.”

I trust you know what the Seattle win means by the Super Bowl Indicator?

More after this…

(I have no idea what this means.  Usually Amazon ads make sense to OFs like me, but this one is included because it’s so…uh….mysterious.  No clue what it means, but I will try it later, since I don’t have any friends… Now, where we we?  )

Happy Times Ahead for East Africa, Turkey

Well, not quite.  Understanding this next story requires you have your UrbanSurvival concealed carry training card with you….which means you know what a man-portable air-defense system is (MANPAD) and that it knocks airplanes out of the sky…

Dear Mr. Ure,

Links are circulating to this “Armament Research Services” article of manpad related weaponry allegedly captured from rebels in South Sudan.  While the verbal focus is on the weapons, evidently the seizure was worthy of a photo-op. Perhaps one may deduce out of the picture link from “The East African” discussion board that a son of the president of Uganda could be present.

Regards,

Gold star for our Winnipeg news analyst fellow on this.  And while we wait for planes to start dropping, we also should have our eyes on Turkey, figures warhammer…

It is becoming clear that the U.S. retraction into isolationism, the reluctance of Europe to play a leading role in Syria and the perseverance of radical Islamic factions led by al Qaeda are collectively precipitating an increased likelihood for instability in the Middle East region.

Now Turkey finds itself drawn into the cauldron of chaos, finding itself having to defend its borders and territory from incursion with overt but limited military action.

As Turkey joins the fray, the regional dynamic intensifies, with the potential for larger scale armed conflict seriously escalating.

Instead of the West proactively infusing meaningful measures to encourage peace, such as deliberate enforcement of nuclear and ballistic missile arms control, naval embargoes, intensified economic sanctions, and the demand for the surrender and dismantling of Syrian chemical weapons, the U.S. and it’s allies stand idly by as the pieces click firmly into place for armed confrontation.

There are simply too many competing pieces in play for the situation to end with a completely peaceful resolution for all interested parties.

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