George Ure

You will want to have at least two cups of coffee on the burn this morning in order to sort through the monthly Gross Domestic Product data just out from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. 

That’s because in any college finance class, we we all taught to FIRST report some kind of a baseline hard number and then reference all following percentage changes to that hard number.

Well, as we continually complain around here, the way the BEA works, they don’t bother with such economic niceties:  The just launch into a double-triple serving of self-referential percentagizing ( if I can take some indecent liberties with language here) as they assume that you’ve remembered enough quadratics from school that you can solve for X if you really cared to get to the bottom of things.

Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 2.5 percent in the second quarter of 2013 (that is, from the first quarter to the second quarter), according to the “third” estimate released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

In the first quarter, real GDP increased 1.1 percent. The GDP estimate released today is based on more complete source data than were available for the “second” estimate issued last month. In the second estimate, the increase in real GDP was also 2.5 percent.

With the third estimate for the second quarter, the general picture of economic growth remains largely the same (for more information, see “Revisions” on page 3). The increase in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected positive contributions from personal consumption expenditures (PCE), exports, nonresidential fixed investment, private inventory investment, and residential fixed investment that were partly offset by a negative contribution from federal government spending. Imports, which are a subtraction in the calculation of GDP, increased.

Well, of course they did!  (WTF?)  As the late Billy May said “But wait!  There’s more!!!”

The acceleration in real GDP in the second quarter primarily reflected upturns in exports and in nonresidential fixed investment, a smaller decrease in federal government spending, and an upturn in state and local government spending that were partly offset by an acceleration in imports and decelerations in private inventory investment and in PCE.

The price index for gross domestic purchases, which measures prices paid by U.S. residents, increased 0.2 percent in the second quarter, 0.1 percentage point less than the second estimate; this index increased 1.2 percent in the first quarter.

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A hell of a mess and a touch of Wujo up in the Denver area?

My sister, Suzi, just got back from a Denver conference and told us at lunch Monday that the Denver area itself is still “open for business: and there were no noticeable impacts on either her conference, or travel.

But not everyone is so lucky as to be right in Denver proper.  Take my buddy Patrick, who lives

Hi George,

Attached is a pic of my house. It has been condemned. I send this in that even having a prepper mind set and concern I was not prepared for this. I did not expect this and was not able to get to my emergency supplies. a lesson learned.

Lyons, CO was hit hard in the floods. My house (above) was ground zero.

I have noticed something about the people in Lyons and other places. Everyone is complaining about their memory. Myself as well.

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Just out from Case Shiller/S&P this morning:

New York, September 24, 2013 – Data through July 2013, 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, showed increases of 1.9% and 1.8% from June for the 10- and 20-City Composites. For at least four months in a row, all 20 cities showed monthly gains. Phoenix posted 22 consecutive months of positive returns. Although home prices in all the cities increased, 15 cities and both Composites saw these monthly rates decelerate in July versus June.

Over the last 12 months, prices rose 12.3% and 12.4% as measured by the 10- and 20-City Composites. The year-over-year returns show a brighter outlook with 13 cities posting improvement in July versus June values. Las Vegas increased the most from +24.9% in June to an impressive +27.5% in July.

The chart above depicts the annual returns of the 10-City Composite and the 20-City Composite Home Price Indices. In July 2013, the 10- and 20-City Composites posted annual increases of 12.3% and 12.4%, respectively.

“Home prices gains are holding their 12% annual rate of gain established by the two Composite indices in April,” says David M. Blitzer, Chairman of the Index Committee at S&P Dow Jones Indices. “The Southwest continues to lead the housing recovery.

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Sometimes there are nagging questions that demand an answer.  Like an itch that won’t go away on its own – with a thorough scratching – there are questions in this life which just intuitively need to be asked, poked around at, and so forth. And once such “itch” is the area around Dulce (Dull-say) New Mexico.

An article posted Monday over at the UFO Digest website offers a lot of additional information about supposedly goings-on down that way in an article titled “MORE UNSETTLING EVIDENCE OVER DULCE PART IX.”

If this was the only article on the web, it would be easy to dismiss the place as just another artifact of the odd mental aberrations that bubble up to the top of urban legend lists.  But this one is special, indeed, because there are so many “pointers” around that suggest maybe there could be something to this talk about Dulce.

The Doc Vega article is a fine starting point because there are many framing references to the story that could be cast as making sense.  For example, the notion that the US would have a semi-prepared backup site which could be used for nuclear development work – not terribly far from the Trinity site (near Alamogordo, NM) would certainly make sense.

But still, there are other bits – like the supposed fire-fight between off-worlders and military forces that have been hinted at in relation to other locations.

Still, the supposed tie-in with human abduction cases, cattle mutilations, and much more, is intriguing even if not particularly well-suited to tracking back to first sources.

One little oddity, which is just as likely to occur from my ignorance of how Google searches work than anything else, is what I’d call an anomalous result from Google.  As you know, if you put a + sign in from of a search time, the world’s most popular search engine will return [+keyword 1 +keyword 2] all page references on the web which contain both terms.

At least, most of the time, that is.  You see, when I casually put in [+Dulce +ufo] I got exactly one result and two ads.

On the other hand, when I put in a different city name and +ufo, I get tons of results. 

For example, the small town of Stephenville, TX, where there was a decent UFO sighting a few years back came up with a whopping 105,000 hits.

All of which could be blown off, except that if the search is modified to include the state abbreviation (NM) the results for [+Dulce +NM +ufo] we find 92,000 listing and (without the + operator) we can get for simple [Dulce ufo] more than 1.5 million search returns.

Maybe search operators don’t work like they have previously, or (screams my inquiring mind) maybe the search results are somehow different on this one?

Moving on, we come to the Wikipedia entry on the supposed base which begins…

“Dulce Base is an alleged secret alien underground facility under Archuleta Mesa on the Colorado-New Mexico border near the town of Dulce, New Mexico in the United States. Claims of alien activity there first arose from Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz.

Starting in 1979, Bennewitz became convinced he was intercepting electronic communications from alien spacecraft and installations outside of Albuquerque. By the 1980s he believed he had discovered an underground base near Dulce. The story spread rapidly within the UFO community and by 1990, UFOlogist John Lear claimed he had independent confirmations of the base’s existence. Political scientist Michael Barkun writes that Cold War underground missile installations in the area gave superficial plausibility to the rumors, making the Dulce base story an “attractive legend” within UFOlogy. According to Barkun, claims about experiments on abductees and firefights between aliens and the Delta Force place the Dulce legend “well outside even the most far-fetched reports of secret underground bases.”^[

In a further entry about source Paul Bennewitz, Wikipedia’s entry here reveals some interesting additional background about the source of the story.

All of which would put it into the “blow off” pile which wouldn’t be worth our mention, except for an intriguing bit of HUMINT which came my way a couple of years ago from a now retired person who, shall we say, looked at radar for a living.  He provided me with some (on background only) information about an object which had come in up over the Montana area, had done an approximate right turn, and had transited the South Dakota/Wyoming area in the Denver ATC airspace on a track down toward  fairly empty part of New Mexico.

Interestingly, it wasn’t specifically tracking toward Ducle, but rather some Native American lands which are rugged and remote but a fair distance from Dulce.

Oh, and the speed of whatever it was that tracked was into the thousands of miles per hour.

It’s here that being a journalist has some of its most difficult decisions.  We have on the one hand an intriguing story (based largely on a single source, now dead) but we have some totally unrelated anomalous data from a super high creds source who shared some track info, not unlike the data what shows up on Flight Aware, except that our old plane moseys along at 1/300th of the speed of the anomalous craft.

The odds of doing any breakthrough research at Ducle seems mighty slim.  But, since the other source allows us the luxury of some very rough triangulation, we can speculate all day long on what might be out there.

As a result, every time we’re in a position to to come through that part of the country, as we will be Saturday, or so, we wonder about staying up last on a high mountain peak or a mesa down south a ways, and just keeping our eyes open for the next “Fire in the Sky” kind of event.

If we apply the same kind of stringent math and analytic techniques that serve us so well in electronics and analysis of markets,  you can quickly see how such investigations are almost certain to be unsuccessful to something like four (or more) places to the right of the decimal point (i.e. odds of success about –.000003 percent).

Still, the way of the Law of Large Numbers work, it’s kind of like buying a Lotto ticket.  Oh, sure, the odds may be one in 8-million (or higher) but if you don’t at least buy one lotto ticket, your chances of winning become a certain zero percent chance of winning.  Or, as an ex Los Alamos fellow told me once:  The odds between one lotto ticket and buying 10 is small, but the certainty of no chance without buying a ticket is what you need to consider.

As indeed we do, as hints and snips have us wondering about disappearing civilizations (like Chaco Canyon/Anasazi) and what may be out there waiting to be discovered on, in, around, or between some of the mesas and mountains in America’s real outback country.

Reader first-hand information (particularly sightings and directions in this area) are always welcome, as well as a track intersection analysis of UFO databases.  We can always look at data, but like finding the next Microsoft in a “pink sheet” stock, we recognize the odds of success are low.  But like buying a lotto ticket once in a while, I might be convinced.

Thinking Points:  Change versus Revolution

As I expected would happen, by exactly non-violent peaceful change, “let’s invent ourselves into a better future and skip the barricades and guillotines” attitude didn’t sit with with a lot of readers.  Like this feller, for example:

I’m sure you are aware that there are many forms of revolutions other than blood and gore tho there is nothing that the powers fear more than a little unrest from the sheep and a tax revolution would fit the bill very nicely.WE CAN SET AND MUMBLE FOREVER ABOUT THE ROTTEN CORRUPT GOVERNMENT IF ONE WHISH’S TO CALL IT THAT BUT WITHOUT A FLAT OUT TAX REVOLUTION NOTHING AND I MEAN NOTHING WILL CHANGE AND IF IT SHOULD CAUSE PUBLIC UNREST SO BE IT.!!!

Another wrote:

Come on!
Pelosi went to Soros’ wedding! As did Bono.

The kleptocracy will not be fixed except by force.

If you mean “force” as in economic means, or in the proposed national trucker’s strike in a few weeks, then sure…I’m all in.  But, if you’re talking force of a harder form, count me out.

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In yesterday’s suppository….er…making that repository…on stock market trading, we arrived at some interesting numbers about how the US/EU exchange rate really does have something to do with market levels here in the US. 

So let’s see where things could pencil out:  Remembering, of course that pre-Fed, we saw the Dollar/EU rate at 0.75 with the S&P at 1700.51, or there about.  And this morning, the exchange rate was .7382 when I looked earlier.  So that puts the Ure’s Insane Trading System Forecast at an S&P of around 1,727.69.

Since the S&P closed at 1,722.64 yesterday, I would expect the S&P futures to be up about five points this morning, just on currency trading noise:  But wait:  S&P futures were up a lousy single point, which means there’s some bad news in the market somewhere.  Not end of the world stuff, just not runaway greedster happy-news, that’s all.  Oh, and maybe closing oute trades for the weekend and options expiration this afternoon.

Where things will get amusing should be next week, since we’re at levels where the floor could drop out from under us and the lunar influence up period ends on the 22nd, so next week could well see a return to the downside.  (An update on our trading model for Peoplenomics readers tomorrow, of course, but as usually, it’s been better than me at looking ahead…)  A look at the market in its closing hour should define our trading stance going into next week.

Update: Going into press time:  Dollar was back to  the .74 to the Euro range, which means?  Follow me here:  1,723 on the S&P and its almost there now…gee, the magical grease of currency, huh?

War:  The Testosterone Sell

That’s what I’d have to call the report this morning in the Washington Times about how a Raptor popped up on the left wing of an Iranian jet with a “go home” warning for getting to close to one of our drones.  This happened back in March, so odd that it gets reported now, methinks.

War industry stalwart Lindsey Graham will be seeking senate approval to pop Iran, so the whole picture is getting messy again.

Worse, even though Iran is sounding conciliatory in their latest discussions (along the lines of let bygones be bygones) the Israelis, who are just spoiling for a reason to bomb Iran’s Russian supplied nuclear installations (like we need more Fukushima’s?) says, in effect “…aw, don’t believe it…just deception at work…” and that may be so.

But one of Ure’s Axioms of pre-war diplomacy is that “Excessive testosterone levels cause impaired hearing.” 

Say what?

More after this…

You – the Suspect

RT has a nice report on how suspicious activity reports have turned who knows how many of us law abiding people into “suspects” in the Fusion Centers which were ostensibly set up to track terrorism, which may now include simply questioning the paradigm of the PTB a bit too thoughtfully.

Bedroom Terrorism?

Immigrant Kids the Battlefront?

Instead of looking so much at law abiding ‘Mericans, it would be nice if the Fusion Center folks would turn some of their horsepower on how mainstream ‘Merica is loosing the sex battle with terrorism because crapholes like Niger are making babies as fast as they can and immigrants are wildly out populating third (and earlier) generation ‘Mericans.

On point, and from our Winnipeg news analyst:

Dear Mr. Ure,

“A picture tells a thousand words“? The BBC report’s original picture can be found at the AFP search page as Was7917011, and was taken on Tuesday when Senator McCain delivered this speech at The Council on Foreign Relations. A question and answer period that follows is interesting. Naturalized citizen interest groups such as Voice of Vietnamese Americans are waging a centuries-long ethnic battle against an Asian nemesis. Is their war your war? 

The peace process of the 21st century will gradually accede to the next generation-in-waiting, and the battles may be waged from additional, new platforms? On a separate note, the group that supports the latter’s tv network also contributed to the Oscar-winning movie “Syriana” released in english. arabic, persian and urdu.

Not to put the bummer on ya’ll this morning, but if you want to see the places where the jihadist marketing crews are working it (out screwing the West), look no further than the CIA’s 2013 fertility stats update since this is where the front lines of winning the sex battle is likely to be played out:

So if you were creating a video game called “Sex Wars”, this would be the shopping list of countries with lots of young parents and those’d be the ones to target.  Simple at that. 

Evidence for the Georgsecution:  Al Qaeda attack kills 40 Yemen army troops.  (You really think I need to use the weasel word “suspected” on this one?)

There are 224 places on the CIA list which is essentially who screws how well which you can study over here.  And while the US is about mid-list at 121 this year, the majority of births even here are not second or third gen Americans, if you know your demographics. I don’t have any issue with the LBGT folks, but it’s not helping ‘Merica put numbers on the board, know what I’m saying?

The Pew Organizing has also been head-scratching on the plummeting white birth rates in the US for a good long time…  And, according to the Census Bureau, the bedroom coup will be complete by 2043.  ‘Course they don’t use such direct descriptors…that would hardly be kosher, after all, people are incredibly sensitive about such things.

Not that most ‘Mericans will study the data, either, as a result:  We’ve all been so Politically PWed in our thinking that to mention the word “white” is tantamount to racism because of rampant political correctness disease (PCD), but those are the numbers, properly sourced, and that’s the battlefront, like it or not.

It’s like going to a baseball game where all the special interest groups and liberalistas come out and bar discussing the score.  No counting of hits, runs, or errors.  Just at the end, one side claims victory and then disagreements ensue.

So while what goes on – down on the field – makes sense if you follow the scoring, it looks suspiciously like chaotic mayhem without a scoring system.  You know, like a football game without scoring looks like almost identical to a street fight.  Point:  We need scores on social issues to make sense of things and those that rebuke scoring are the Friends of Anarchy and plugging a subversive agenda.

I mean it’s great to say “Every child should be loved and wanted” but in a country where the same marketing phraseology is applied to pets (“adopt” “love” “save” “rescue”) I mean are we effing crazy?  (OK, I know the answer, so let’s move on…)

Speaking of Sex…

Along the same lines: No, I’m not anti-Catholic when I note how Catholicism (of old) benefited greatly from the old contraception policies which Muslim extremists now use to their advantage.  But as that’s fading, the church is now looking to embrace the non-populating LBGT community as the pope says “We have to find a new balance…”  Good marketing decision.

Pardon me for looking at various religions as marketing projects, but they fit all known criteria starting with analysis, implementation, and consumer measurement/sales.  Revenue is measured in the building fund and collection plate.  I don’t make suggestions as to which one you follow, but seems to me the cost/benefit ratio is plain enough with most of them.

And who is it who says at the drop of a liturgy “Everything is a business model!”? 

The line in A Few Good Men should have been “You can’t handle the data!” because every group in the world will attack you for even mentioning it.  Thus we suffer from cultural madness.  But you’ve likely got the gray matter to work that one out, right?

Besides, what ‘Merican  kid (second generation or beyond) can, in good conscience think about starting a family when by age 25 they’ve already been “Rode hard and put away wet” with student loans wrecking their lives and overpriced homes?  FMTT there are no easy answers.  So they get suckered into pet ownership as a disposable substitute by “the unconditional love of a dog” BS.  Still, the fear of marriage kids won’t have to fill out a FAFSA for the dog, right?  I mean government policy of marching everyone to the financial gallows does have blowback, too.

Government forgets to mention that low-income dogs don’t pay into Social Security…neither do dogs…but look, I could go on all morning until I finally offend everyone, so here’s where I should STFU for the morning on this track.

Greenpeace Note

One of their ships has been seized by Russia.

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The conventional wisdom on many investment-related websites is that the Fed decision yesterday touched off a major short-covering rally and from here things could go much higher.  That they could continue upwards, I won’t dispute, but as to the implied “cause” there’s likely something else at play:  The seldom mentioned role of currency valuations.

Although it’s normally the kind of thing best explained on our Peoplenomics.com  subscription service, there’s so much dumbed-down thinking on what causes rallies, that it deserves a little wider consideration.  So here’s a nickel’s worth of economic what-for on the house.

Currency, you must understand, as was pointed out to me by the late Dr. Paul Erdman years ago, is a much larger factor that people realize when it comes to pricing markets.  He had an uncanny ability to see the future better than anyone I’ve been since (nearly 40 years, now) by simply looking at some currencies, the currency futures and in particular the 90 day dollar futures.

So what we had yesterday was a fine example of how this plays out as the Fed made what is essentially a currency decision.

Let’s begin with the dollar/euro spread and the S&P 500:  An hour, or so, before the Fed decision I noted the chart of the dollar was showing the currency ratio was one dollar to .75 euro  At the same time, the S&P was around 1,700.58.

This morning, we see dollar was only buying 0.7368 of a dollar.  The question is:  Where should the S&P go today?

We observe that the Fed playing chicken with tapering from quantitative easing has dropped about 1.75% from the dollar’s purchasing power on the international market.  This is because the “quantitative printing” means to buy the same goods and services will take more of our lesser-valued paper.

It also means we can take the Wednesday pre-announcement S&P divided by the currency move, and predict with what should be stunning accuracy that the S&P should hit 1,731.46 sometime in today’s trading session. 

Did the S&P really hit a new high yesterday, then?  Well, on a nominal basis, yes, of course.  But in purchasing power terms did it?  Well, that’s one for Peoplenomics this weekend. 

But this move (quantitative printing), which again water’s down paper money’s purchasing power, shows up in other places, as well. 

Take the price of gold, for instance. It was running about $1,298.10 before the Fed decision and our little cheat-sheet approach to pricing opines that it should be priced post-decision around $1,321.25. 

But wait! spot gold this morning is showing in the $1,363 range earlier.

So what gives?  To be sure, gold traders may be a little carried away with themselves, but it likely means a further decline in the dollar, since the price at $1,363 is about 5%.  Which means the S&P could rally further from here…with a possible target of $1,785 or higher.

What’s open to debate is whether the currency trader view will prevail – which means the bulk of the rally is over – or, whether gold is telling us the future.  For now, I’ll be the guy following the lesser discussed currency relationship.  But, in either case, our trading model has once again gotten it right and betting against it has cost me another ham sandwich worth. 

Like Marty Zweig used to say (and I manage to ignore this good advice almost constantly)
“Never bet against the Fed.”  Especially one with nothing to lose on printing more paper which means it will take more paper to buy the same stocks…but to the lesser-schooled, it will look a lot like a short-covering rally.

Reader Peter has awakened, too:

I couldn’t get this song out of my head after the Fed announcement today. I’m pretty sure it is in public domain (but who knows in the Google era) and you are welcome to my adaptation. By the way, the original is by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen, which seems oddly appropriate.

Happy days are here again

Bernanke’s made it clear again

Bankers sing a song of cheer again

Happy days are here again

Let us not talk falsely now

He’ll let the presses run – And How!

For the bankers it’s a grand cash cow

Happy days are here again

In-flation must be increased

For the e-con-o-my it is yeast!

The Dow is hitting highs again

We’ve once again avoided pain

One must wonder who’s in charge again

Happy days are here again

Let me put on my best imitation Ed McMahon voice and say…”Heeeeeres Fearless Leader!”

{And just ignore folks who are also warning of an all-out currency war…}

Obamanomics

Meantime, president Obama is making the point that raising the national debt ceiling does not raise our debt. 

The problem with the debt ceiling is that is is simply not honest.  Anyone who believes the federal debt has been stuck on “Full” for several months doesn’t understand the hijinks of underhanded, off-books accounting.

Which, sadly, is the only reason the debt hasn’t busted the “offishul” ceiling long ago.  Does the phrase “Print and reclassify” mean anything to you?

One thing the price of gold may be screaming this morning is “We have a lot more watering down to come in order to make things work…” Oh, and that means the currency crowd might want to have some QuikClot®  handy to stop the bleeding as the rest of the world reprices goods sold to us at higher prices to come.

Oh, that will look like higher prices overseas being charged by overseas suppliers…which is how it’s bound to be sold.  But the reality?  It’s just our addiction to printing up money is just coming home to roost.  Should be arriving in 120-180 days, so we know when it should be here.

More after this…

Ugly Questions Post-Shipyard

RT is reporting this morning that a crack anti terrorism team showed up at the DC Shipyard and was sent away without seeing action.  From this comes the ugly question “Who told them to stand down when these folks were designed and built for such purposes?”

Personal footnote:  So there we were last night, having a toddy with a consulting client in a big Seattle hotel last night and the client (who is exceptionally astute) wonder “You know with that 147-day cycle stuff, do you ever get to thinking maybe the PTB are just doing all this as a kind of sick experiment?”

He then wondered if the whole pole-flip between the USSR and USA positions in the world, leadership and style flip, might also be nothing more than a big test to see how easily flipped whole populations are.

Oh…he doesn’t watch MSM TV anymore, either.

If you really want to find the power-player’s here’s a major hint for you as to who really pulls our strings: Interlocking directorships.

Afghan Military Sales

Say, here’s an eye-opener of an email purported from the office of Texas senator John Cornyn which let’s the cat out of the bag on how your tax dollars are being spent to paper-over?pacify Asscanistan:

“…Furthermore, since the atrocities in Syria began, I have pressed the Obama Administration to end all U.S.

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Yes sir, the place is the same cantankerous, insubordinating, paradigm-challenging place as always.

One of the points of our travels this week has to be that neither Colorado nor Washington state have fallen under some pall of purple haze since the legalization of recreational marijuana in either place.

Traffic still moves in the same up-tight way, and I have yet (in either state) to catch so much as a whiff of the dread reefer madness.

Contrary to what some provincials may argue, there hasn’t been any sign of a major uptick in drug use in either state that we’ve been able to find.  Life goes on.

Any Seattleite, worth their Grande split-shot tall, double shake and hazelnut., knows these signs which are popping up around Snoqualmie Summit and the downtown Seattle Freeway is all part of another grand social experiment called “variable speed limits.”

The idea is that the state can dictate what it thinks the speed ought to be and thus make driving around here even more of a challenge than it is.  In fact in downtown Seattle where these variable-speed lab rat tests are more advanced, there are different speeds depending on which lane you’re in. I have to wonder is this is just a new and improved way to picking out the impaired drivers? 

“Ok sonny, do you know what your speed was and why I pulled you over?”

“Gosh, officer, let me look this up:  I was in lane #3, northbound at Spokane Street, it’s Tuesday, Sagittarius is in Neptune, incoming tide, 25-50% cloud cover, 59-degrees… dry roadway… I think that’s supposed to be 37.28 miles per hour, isn’t it? I mean unless I was indicating a lane change into lane #2 which would be…uh…27.63 miles per hour…”

“Close, sonny boy.  But you forgot the dew point.  That makes it 31.68 miles per hour so I’m going to have to write you for 5.6 over.  Unless you’ve already upgraded to Windows 8.1 in which case you get a special 7.3% discount IF you voted for release candidate 2…”

“Damn…No, officer….I voted for release candidate 1…”

“You did???!!! $%^&     Son, step out of the car….  (squelch noise)  Officer needs assistance and run an update trace on Washington plate…(muffled) . and send back up…I’ve got a release candidate 1 supporter –Tell the Fusion Center, too.  He may be a domestic programmer..  And notify DHS, too, as he looks like he may be  part of a Silicon Valley click gang…”

And in terms of entertainment, we also couldn’t help but notice in The Stranger that a joint called The Pine Box recently had an event called “Chicken Shit Bingo” with the subheading “Pick where he poops” which, even by Texas standards, is one of the more novel integrations of big city urban madness and rural serenity that we’ve come across yet.

All of which has me scurrying this morning to invent “Chicken Shit Speed Limits” which I’m hoping to make the Next Big thing up here.  It might not be as much fun as HOV and Reversible Lane Roulette, but any revenue stream in a storm, I figure.

Moon over Tacoma’s Commencement Bay as we rolled into el hotel last night.

You’re So Vain Dept..

If you think women take more mirror time getting ready than men, Madison Avenue Mike’s catch of the day over at the HufPo is that no, they take about the same amount of time.

More Yellen

If you think Don up (down this week, I guess) in Odessa, Texas and I don’t see eye to eye on Janet Yellen, we may not be so far apart as it  may sound:

HI George,

Not to get into a long discussion/argument about it, you are certainly more knowledgeable about such matters than me; However, to answer your question “Would you rather we get a strict monetarist, put the nation back on the gold standard,” The gold standard would be more honest, but the answer is no. I know enough to know that there has to be some creation out of nothing to finance growth. But I also know that debt as a way of life in the end is no life at all.

I know enough to know that we can not let this system of enslavement continue. I know enough to know that current system is way off track. I know enough to know that I am not OK with the system we have built.

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