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/

Scoring Our Trading Model

As we continue to pull bits and pieces together for 2014’s annual forecast, it’s time to see how well our Aggregate Index-based trading model would have done if you had done NOTHING but traded our timing model from last year about this time until present. At a time when banks are paying a crummy 0.1% (or less) on savings accounts, this system has been a huge winner. You oughta be impressed as hell when I run through the numbers with you. As the gurus of “Big Data” will tell you “data trumps gut” almost every time and this year was a hard lesson for me in not trusting my own model!

Learn to Sew!

Yes, fame and fortune could be yours, if you learn to sew.

Human flesh that is.   Says here in this morning’s NY Times that a each stitch is now over $500-bucks. 

Of course the $10- aspirin is a pretty good racket, too.  Learn to sew and push pills is my new reincarnation plan.  Now if I can only dream up a way to do it without $150K in student loan debt…$5 per stitch for the doc, balance on loans?

Market Takes a Pause

Worrywarts are back in control on the Street this morning with the futures sagging after a little pullback yesterday.  When I looked (over here), the Dow was looking down 60 points or so.  

There’s also be a decline in the POG (price of gold for newbies)…it’s down to a five-month low.

Much of the (so-called) economic recover has been related to falling interest rates.  As the yield on bonds (and bank accounts) have plummeted, the small earnings turned in by stocks have looked (comparatively) pretty good.  Ergo, up, up, and away on the indices.

But when the Fed sends everyone into rehab (by easing their money-printing festival, also know as financial crack) that’s going to drive up rates and, as you can see in the five-year chart of the 10-year Treasury note over here, it’s starting to look like the bottom may be in for rates.

As I pointed out in yesterday’s report, Greenspansonian logic aside, Robert Shiller’s concerns about an overvalued market make even more sense today.  And a reasonable Dow (13,000 or lower) makes perfect sense.

If auto sales, which will be released later today, fall to the darker side of forecasts, the market might be down 100 or more by the close.  Or, this could be turnaround Tuesday…we’ll just wait and see.

In the Co9nstruction Spending report, we see that:

he U.S. Census Bureau of the Department of Commerce announced today that construction spending during October 2013 was estimated at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $908.4 billion, 0.8 percent (±1.8%)* above the September estimate of $901.2 billion. The October figure is 5.3 percent (±2.1%) above the October 2012 estimate of $863.1 billion.

And while a 5.3% increase in spending sounds good, remember that there’s been a huge increase in the money supply (printing).  M2 is up 6.5% compared with a year ago, so anything less than 6.5% increases in construction bucks seems to me like no growth at all.

Hand me some of them meds, and I’ll try to look at it a little more optimistically. Or pass the pipe…

Talk is Cheap

Veep Joe Biden is heading to Asia shortly to see what can be done to hand out chill pills to the Japanese and Chinese who are slowly upping the ante over the Senkaku Islands area.

The islands are about 190 air miles from China’s coast, about 110 miles from Taiwan, and 95 miles, or so, from Okinawa which the Japanese claim.

While this may not seem like a big deal (rocks in ocean, who cares?) as always under our “Everything’s a Business Model” thinking, a quick read of Wikipedia reveals what?

After it was discovered in 1968 that oil reserves might be found under the sea near the islands,[9][10][11][12][13] Japan’s sovereignty over them has been disputed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Republic of China (ROC, commonly known as Taiwan) following the transfer of administration from the United States to Japan in 1971.

So there you have it:  Another front opens in the Manufacturer’s Resource Wars which, although it’s not apparent till you think about it, is what has been driving globaltics for the past dozen years plus…

More after this…

No Luck, Yingluck

The prime minister of Thailand has dismissed calls for her resignation.  But with police allowed demonstrators to get close to the seat of government, in what’s called an “easing of tensions.”  Which, as these things go, should last only a few days before crap lights up again.

Middle East “Lets Make a Deal” Time

To some, the idea of praying at a particular wall wouldn’t be such a big deal.  But, to Jewish activists who want to pray at Jerusalem’s Temple Mountain, it’s a very big deal, especially to the Muslim world which considers it their space.

Our resident war gamer picks it up from there:

On the surface, Netanyahu seems to be upping the ante, or ‘upping yours’ to anyone who is not an Israeli.

Know what I think?  This could potentially be a part of any ‘compromise’ Netanyahu demands from Sunni led Saudi Arabia for doing what will surely be the lion’s share of the dirty work against their Shi’ite rival Iran.  Minimalizing Iran will also likely stabilize Syria and marginalize Hezbollah, as both are sponsored by the Iranians.

Yes, the Saudi’s could rather easily import nukes ‘on loan’ from Pakistan to counter Iran and the long suspected Israeli arsenal, but that runs entirely counter to the Saudi monarchy’s goal of a nuclear free Middle East.  If Iran is actually taken down by Israel with help from the Saudis, quid-pro-quo tradeoffs could be a large part of any agreement once the dust settles.  You can let your imagination run free as to what other trade-offs could be possible if some semblance of security ever truly settles over the area – never mind that any such security would have resulted from what would surely be a very costly war in terms of regional blood and treasure.

Cheers,  “Warhammer”

Oh, and in the midst of some of the major parties trying to work things out, looks more and more like our president will soon announce a trip to Tehran.  Oh, sure, the WH denies such a think is in the wings, but the more they deny, the more it seems likely.  So just when some of the parties figure out a deal along with come the peacemaker……you can probably sketch out how well this will work out.

China We Have Heard On High

Gently drifting in from the Winnipeg bureau and our snooze analyst there…

Dear Mr. Ure,

Is the Chang’e-3 mission more of an international alliance than first thought?

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Coping: With a Dose of Dowse

Dowsing, which we talked about earlier, has really brought out the comments.  And some of them are pretty darned interesting.  Here’s one from the Wiz, for example:

My maternal grandfather was a dowser… Dowsed a well for my Dad back in ’60?  ’61? when he was building a new house.  That one never went dry.   Grandpa never used metal rods… he was the classic forked-stick-palms-up style dowser…but he said fruitwood worked best.
Mom couldn’t dowse, but said it skips a generation…  When I tried it, the stick dipped straight down every t time I crossed the water main that passes through my driveway & back yard. So I guess maybe it does skip.

Haven’t had the opportunity to look for something I didn’t know was there, but no opportunities have presented themselves.
Best Regards
Wizard.

There’s more, too…like this from WF…

Hello George,
it was interesting to see what you had to say about DOWSING! My  life brought me all over the world – from Europe to South America and the US. In 1980 I caught Gold Fever in California and worked my own claim for a while. I found good gold, especially with home-made dowsing rods (coat hangers) and NO experience.

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CyberMonday & the Tale of Two Economists

Sometimes it’s a joy to be a writer – and this morning is one of those times – because stories are floating about that are just screaming for comment.  And before we get into the Grim (credit card) Reaper report, it’s important to hear just how disconnected much thinking on the economy is.  Let me explain what I mean:

We begin with a report (over here) in which former Fed Deity (Sir) Alan Greenspan sees no bubble in the stock market even though we are at never-before-seen highs.

Does the word Ludacris mean anything outside of Atlanta?  Oh!  Ludicrous then…

Take the Dow from January of 2000 (11,723 and change) and pop it into the Federal Reserve of Minneapolis inflation calculator and you will find that just to keep even, the Dow really ought to be where?  15,897.

To be sure, the retired Housing Bubblator himself can make a convincing case, especially since we’re only 190 points above what made sense based on early 2000 data.

Still, Greenspan’s remark only makes sense if you’ve kicked the gingko biloba and have a worse memory than a chicken; in other words, you forget that on the week ending 10/15/2001, the Dow closed at 9,204.11.

WHICH if we were so audacious and disrespectful as to plug into the same renegade Minneapolis Fed calculator, might give us a more reasonable present-day Dow around 12,481 as a kind of “sensible outlook” number.

Which means – if I can handle the calculator after foody binging  – that Greenspace is not admitting that we could be more than 3,500 points into Bubble Country.  I must have missed mention that M2 money supply is up 9.2% annualized on a three-month basis.  How could someone overlook that?

Ah, but Ures truly has no creds as an economist, being only a dogged journalist with a no-name school MBA.  So I won’t expect you to trust lil ‘ol me.

But would you trust Nobel winning economist (and co-developer  of the honest Case Shiller/S&P Housing Index that we cite repetitiously as the gold standard in housing data) Robert Shiller?

Robert Shiller says that he is “Most worried”: about the US market being in a bubble.” (duh!)  Man after my own bearish heart.

Now, in all honesty, there is nothing wrong with playing a bubble.  On my www.peoplenomics.com website, our Aggregate Index trading model (which is for amusement, not financial advice, of course) is up more than 60% for the year (formal reconciliation will follow this week for subscribers) so as long as you’ve got a tool which let’s you hang on to the end (and see the end coming, which we do) then you can do just fine.  Bubbles for fun and Beechcraft in our case.

Right now, our current read of things is that we will likely see one more upthrust perhaps for another month, or two.  But then, about the time everything else is going to pot, we should be a marvelously playable decline.  (See the Coping Section for one possible – outlier – driver.)

But the point to be made as we again sally forth to place nose upon grindstone as good wage slaves of the corporate state, is that like broken watches, which are right twice a day, so too are economists. 

I’d give the ‘Spansonian view 90-days or less, and then Shiller’s view ought to rotate into the Genius circle, front and center.

But that’s no guarantee…just a sense of of things will work out as ‘Merica comes to terms with a declining standard of living under the thumb of (most recently) an insurance industry which has captured government to be its “enforcer” joining hands with Big Pharma which had previously led the way with government enforcement of vaccines and such.

‘Mericans sitting on their wallets and stories like this one about how weekend sales declined, are evidence that the New Minimalist/Prepper Mindset  has taken root. 

About the only guy to real cut a fat hog this holiday season seems to be Warren Buffett whose railroads will benefit in some measure if I read this right from more than half a billion plus your tax money subsidizing railroad work.  Falls to the bottom line, does it not?

That begins to get off track, except to sardonically  note that while you’re tinkering with H.O. scale gear, the real HO HO HO plays for  a different group of folks on different kinds of rails.

Campaign Contributors, perhaps?  They, as always, will have a very effing merry time, indeed.

Amadrone Dot Com

Madison Avenue Mike noticed that the HY Times has picked up on the CBS story about how Amazon is eyeing this new model airplane hobby  drone industry as have a potential place in the future of instant retailing.  It’s in the “gray lady” Bits section over here.

I can’t fault Bezos for trying to keep a leg up on the competition, and I figure it’s only a matter of time till my local delivery buddy has to head for joystick school.  With luck, he’ll be retired first, but that’s the kind of thing on our future-scope.

One thing that’s troubling, though, is how the FAA will regulate drone traffic which  has the potential to cause mid-air collisions with real (pilot driven and licensed) aircraft.

I can hardly wait to call in…

“Tyler Tower Musketeer 12-Lima mid field left downwind runway 13, we just nicked a  delivery drone with 16-inch deli-style and two quarter-pounders…looked like two fries, in there, too…”

“12-Lima call the tower…that was our lunch…”

Hold Your Pickle?

Speaking of which, Tyler will get lunch today, but in 100 cities, fast food strikes are going around…

The odd history of the ‘Merican labors movement continues to unfold.  Dave Beck organized laundry truck drivers (becoming Teamsters) so we expect any day for a new generation of labor boss to organize fry cooks.  I kinda like the “International Brotherhood of Eatsters” but the odds of that catching on as a moniker are slim to none though it has a nice tone to it.

Certainly better than the “International Association of Frymen and Burgermeisters” or the “International Lunch and Whenever Union” – a kind of latter-day ILWU, and here’s one to Harry’s memory…  Could AFL-CIO come mean “American Fried Lunch, Cholesterol Included Optionally”?

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Coping: Lunar Chinese Year & Directorate 153

There are some days I ought to be producing “made for TV” movies and this is one of them.  Why, if I were a writer of any repute at all, I’d already have this puppy in production.  Since I’m not, however, I will simply write a really short screenplay for you to read.

Opening Scene:  We see an ultra-modern minimalist office with a couple of gray dudes.  One (older and wearing a suit and obviously in charge) is sitting at a desk and is obviously “in charge” while a younger fellow (only wisps of gray) in a lab coat is handing him a document.

Geek:  Chief, we just got this latest data run out about China and their successful launch of the Chang’e-3 Lunar mission.  Not only is the story all over Xinhau this today (this part isn’t fiction) but you can see in this data run from those fools at the www.nostracodeus.com project that “moon madness” has overtaken the Chinese state media machine!

Zoom In:  We read a snip from a just completed word-frequency table which looks at Chinese (English language) sites only:

This part, like the launch in our story, is also not fictitious.  This is all very, very real.  The fiction begins here…

Director:  “No worry, Chambers, the situation is well in hand.  As you undoubtedly know, we have made many forecasts and we have arranged for their to be an absolutely terrible February which will begin our period of incredibly high tensions which will last from almost the beginning of the new year until July sometime…”

Geek:   “But why would we do that, sir?”

Director:  “Chambers, you’ve been with us, what, six years is it?”

Geek: “Yes sir!  And it will be seven years in September.”

Director:  “Well, I suppose your loyalty is beyond question – and you know you will be killed if you reveal anything discussed here, am I correct?”

Geek: “Yes sir….”

Director: “Alright then, I’m going to lay it out for you – and you might want to take notes – but those notes are only for your personal use while here at work, are we clear?”

Geek: “Yes sir…absolutely.”

Director:  “I’m gong to fill in a number of blanks for you and why we absolutely MUST have a period of extreme tension and uncertainty in the US.  For this to make sense, however, we need to begin at the very beginning.  Do you remember what happened on September 13th of 1959?”

Geek:  “Gosh, sir, all I know is that it was a Sunday…”

Director:  “It was also the date that the Soviet Luna 2 mission hit the moon.  And, as you know, bit less than 10 years later, on July 20th of 1969, the first US mission with Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on Apollo 11 touched down.”

Geek: “I’m not following you, sir.  What does this have to do with a February from Hell here in the US this coming year?”

Director:  “Follow along.  You may be aware of some of the moon landing conspiracy theories.  Look that up in Wikipedia and they I’ll explain…”

Long shot of Geek grabbing an iPad and tapping on it…

Geek  “Well, it says here, sir, that…well, let me read it:

“The first book about the subject, Bill Kaysing‘s We Never Went to the Moon: America’s Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle,[8] was written in 1974,[9] two years after the Apollo Moon flights had ended, and self-published in 1976. The Flat Earth Society was one of the first organizations to accuse NASA of faking the landings, arguing that they were staged by Hollywood with Walt Disney sponsorship, based on a script by Arthur C. Clarke and directed by Stanley Kubrick.[Note 1][10] Folklorist Linda Dégh (de) suggests that writer-director Peter Hyams‘ 1978 film Capricorn One, which shows a hoaxed journey to Mars in a spacecraft that looks identical to the Apollo craft, may have given a boost to the hoax theory’s popularity in the post-Vietnam War era. She notes that this happened during the post-Watergate era, when American citizens were inclined to distrust official accounts. Dégh writes: “The mass media catapult these half-truths into a kind of twilight zone where people can make their guesses sound as truths. Mass media have a terrible impact on people who lack guidance.”[11] In A Man on the Moon,[12] first published in 1994, Andrew Chaikin mentions that at the time of Apollo 8‘s lunar-orbit mission in December 1968, similar conspiracy ideas were already in circulation”

“Gosh, you know thinking back on it, I can see how it could have been faked, I suppose, but I thought there was just too much…you know…evidence…

Director:  “Evidence?  Like what?  A good story told over and over, backed up by some bags of rocks and film with lighting issues that wouldn’t pass muster in today’s high-tech video world?  hardly!

No, Chambers, the US “moon landing” wasn’t exactly done the way presented and that’s why things must be bad – very, very bad, this coming spring.”

Chambers:  “I don’t follow…”

Director:  “The Chinese are going to the moon, you idiot!  They know they can do it and so do we.  And, as soon as they show up and find there are no footprints at the US landing site, they can blackmail the West into pretty much whatever they want… do you see it yet?”

Geek:  “But what about things left on the moon?”

Director:  “Nice try…but we sent up lots of junk and crashed it into the supposed landing site later.  We did that under the guise of “secret payloads” for intelligence agencies.  Well, that was US, Chambers.  US as in U.S.

Now you can seer the problem.  The “soft landing” of Chang-e 3 is not the issue.  It’s that when China goes to the moon, they will be able to overfly and take ultra-high resolution pictures.  And when the missing footprints and others technical issues aren’t resolved, the US government will be outed for having lied to the public for 45-years about this.”

Geek: “But the astronauts – they’re telling the truth, right?”

Director:  “Ever see any of them take a polygraph?  Of course not!  National heroes and all that.  And besides, all the details were piped into them under deep hypnosis helped along with some fairly recent-discovered “mind altering drugs” back when.  What that means is that the astronauts themselves deeply believe everything they report.  But as you know, we have amazing capabilities – far beyond what the general public can comprehend – in manufacturing artificial memories.”

Geek:  “So when the Chinese have men and equipment up there, and actually begin the colonization efforts, then the US will be made to be fools…yes, I see how that could happen.”

Director:  “Remember the Kennedy assassination?  It took how long for the documentary claiming it was an accident involving a US Secret Service agent’s rifle in the car behind Kennedy’s to appear?  Fifty years?  There are sometimes things better left unsaid, Chambers, in the interest of national security.”

Geek: “Understood, sir.  So we need to have a period of extreme destabilization so that people will think twice about disagreeing with government, especially openly and on the Internet, is that right?”

Director:  “Yes.  We need to ensure that our friends with search engines derate and just outright lose sites that get wind of this.  We also need to wait and see how diplomacy works out.  We’re talking back-channel with the Chinese to keep them from overflight and filming.  So we might muddle through this period.  They might even send out a team to install some footprints for us and then have an “accident” with a couple of astronauts, if you know what I mean…

But, if we don’t, there will be a kind of hell on Earth to keep people’s attention focused on other matters.  We will have crashing markets, budget impasse, Obamacare confusion, a spike in unemployment…and maybe we can get a couple of new war fronts open, too.  We may even have to play the “domestic terror” card, but we really need to hold that in reserve for use during the financial collapse, like we played it withy 9/11 to keep people from realizing in 2001 that the great stock market bubble in history had just blow up costing $5-trillion in middle class losses.”

Geek:  “So what do you want me to do about it, sir?”

Director:  “Keep a close eye on Chinese language and actions.  We think they have been playing their Sendaku airspace card loosely but when they announce that they are overflying the American lunar landing sites and release marginal pictures, then we’ll take that as a signal that they’re onto us.  And then we’ll have to move; quickly and firmly….

The real issue is whether our alien friends will give the Chinese permission to do more than a couple of landings, like the US negotiated before being told “Don’t come back…”  If the Chinese get more latitude then we will have lost a major strategic initiative.

So over the next couple of months, add the world UFO to your language search.  If my hunch is right, we should see an uptick in the number of UFO sightings when our alien friends realize that humans are coming back – and that our “advice” to the Chinese has been ignored….”

The mind reels with possibilities.  We could take the ending to this almost any direction we want:  It could be revealed as a joke, it might be real in an objective sense, or it could just be another one of the millions of misdirection’s found every day on the web; many posted by government agent provocateurs using multiple personality posting software.

I’d speculate along a certain line, but that wouldn’t be productive.  Besides, reality will reveal itself, and all in good time…

Oh, I did mention Directorate 153 is completely fictional, and not some secret roundtable of all the black budget security agencies who have really been running government since right after president Johnson’s days, didn’t I?

Dowsing Details

In case you missed Friday’s comments on Dowsing, we had a nice follow-up from a reader named Peter which has a few points of interest in it:

Hi George;
I remember working as a surveyor here in Canada in the 70’s and using coat hangers wires bent in an “L” shape to find existing underground utilities.
Radio detectors were just coming into service and were prohibitively expensive for the small organization I worked for.
There was no mystery or voodoo associated with it. It was just a practical technique passed onto me by one of the older employees.
Peter

Ah!  Someone else who can dowse.  I asked if there were any hints he could think of that I’d overlooked…

The only proviso I remember, was swinging them around a few time to “warm them up”.
The technique was to hold the wires forward and parallel, like holding a pair of pistols and when the utility was crossed, the wires would swing outwards away from each other and line up with the underground pipes.
It worked for electrical wires, metal, clay and concrete pipes. I don’t know if water had to be flowing at the time of detection though.
I never tried to find natural underground water with this method.
I downloaded a book you referred to a while back by Pam Grout E2.

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On Peoplenomics.com: How to Really End Crime

This weekend we present a practical look at the subject of crime – and propose a dramatic and innovative way to reduce crime, while at the same time lowering the cost of police work, detective bureaus, and prosecutions. Did I mention increase the conviction rate, too? I’ll explain how my latest brainchild – a simple enhancement to the cell phone/9-1-1 system – could result in major reductions in crime as part of our ongoing series “Shopping List for a SuperCountry.” After, that is, we roll some coffee out along with a side of headlines (and shoppers acting badly video) to set the mood… More for Subscribers ||| SUBSCRIBE NOW!

Black Friday Deals, Credit Card Burn (CCB)

No, I won’t often put in two Amazon ads, but this is Black Friday and already the whole fate of the nation seems to hang on how much money you spend over the next few days, or so news reports make it seem.  Hell, I’m just doing my part to help try to save the Republic, right?

To be sure, a lot of people did venture out after turkey looking for deals, but here in the East Texas Outback, most of the stores in town were closed.  Family values (like spending time together) are still important in this part of the world.  Even the local Lowes was closed.  Wal-Mart was open, though.  And wife Elaine spied plenty of workers stocking like crazy and putting up fresh end-caps (those displays at the ends of the aisles if you’ve never worked retail).

She didn’t run into any of the wristbands or Segways on patrol.

She had a delightful time of it, since there was virtually no one locally out shopping, too.  Seems that she wasn’t the only one to make that observation, either.

This morning, the whole nation gets into the swing, and as always we like to mention the fictitious injury called “credit card burn”  (CCB) which arises from using your plastic so fast that friction can cause painful “burns.” 

Some people will miss them initially since the severity of the burns are often slow to appear.  In fact, usually (and this is what makes CCB such an odd disease) the burn doesn’t show up until statements arrive in January.

As luck would have it, the only salve that works is a thick poultice of cash, applied quickly to the burn source.  If not treated promptly, credit card burns can fester into collectionitis and bankruptus.

—

I’m expecting holiday sales to come in a little above forecasts this year.  For one reason, the rising market gives the illusion that things aren’t all that bad.  Although, when questioned by CNN, seems people on reflection have grokked that that things maybe aren’t all that good.  You might want to read into the details over here about why almost 60% of those polled think things aren’t going so well.

And they may be going poorly, but the Obama administration is – at least in one sense – lucky because of the shutdown of government.   Here’s why:  As a result of the shutdown, government economic reports which would normally be out on “Cyber Monday” (like the employment situation for the month) have been pushed back to December 6th.  Little things like that may help peddle a few more trinkets.

Another area where the administration is lucky (so far) is that the coming January-February timeframe for a resumption of the budget talks/disaster seems momentarily missing from the public mindset.  Oh, sure, it leaks out in a few places, like this recent mention in the Op-Ed Part of US News’ site, but that was more than a week ago.  It’s almost like the mainstream media are complicit in keeping people from thinking about the hard economic realities of the day. 

Lest it screw up sales, which in turn will make retailers poor, delay ad revenue payments to media in January/February, and all the rest of that knock-on, ripple effect.  In other words, mainstream media have only money to lose from a crappy (but perhaps more reasonable) high spending period. 

Can America “Christmas its way” into financial recovery? 

No.  Not a ghost’s chance in hell, or even Christmas’ Past.

But don’t tell anyone down on Wall St.  With only “noise trading” and an historical trend to rally gong into the holidays well entrenched, the bulls are looking to put another 50-points on the Dow scoreboard and 5-more possibly on the S&P. It’ll be a shortened trading day.  Even Streeters gotta shop.

So please do your part:  Get out there are get the worst case of Credit Card Burn you can this weekend.  The fate of bankster mansion class depends on it. 

Just one word of moderation here:  You don’t want them coming after your Ho Ho Home….especially when the hangover of financial reality arrives in late January 2014. That’s just after the chickens come home to roost again in Washington.

More after this…

SuperRich: Their Own Private Idaho?”

A quick lesson in how to read this news this morning which you may learn something from.

We will start with the story writ large in the UK’s Mail Online which goes into marvelous (and dreamy) details about a proposal to build  an “…incredible mile-long floating CITY – complete with schools, a hospital, parts, and an airport for its 50,000 residents.”

I hope you see “the deal” here?

No?  (Did you swear off coffee or something?)

OK, here’s what’s up  methinks:  Scroll down to the map about half way down that page…study it for a second, then I’ll tell you what I see in this…and I think you’ll agree it’s cute!

you see the ship will be making its way in a nice leisurely way around the world every two years, right? 

And you saw the price, right?  $10-billion?  Which works out to $200K per person as a buy-in, not counting ongoing operating expenses which could be humongous.

This gets us to the first thinking point of the story: 

1.  Is this floating place/Freedom Ship idea for…

a.  Rich Folks

b.

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Coping: Prepping/Dowsing, Data and Disappearing

My late uncle Stanley was the first one to introduce me to dowsing as a boy.  I must have been 8 or 9 at the time and I was out visiting his small farm located near what is now Sea-Tac airport in Seattle.  It wasn’t a particularly big farm.  Just about 5 acres.  But that much land today would be a fortune, since a lot of property, residential and close to a major airport (off to the side where it’s quieter, however) would be a small fortune today.

Back then it was a genuine wonder:  A tractor, a stand of corn in summertime that towered over me, aunt Iris’s homemade pies (done between her American Legion volunteer work and a real working job), and a big collie which looked remarkably like Lassie.  Except, “Happy” had been taught to bark fiercely whenever the word “democrat” was mentioned in conversation.

One day when we were visiting, Stanley asked if I wanted to learn how to dowse.  I had no idea what that mean, but my dad and I followed him out to the shop out back (Stanley built all his own houses and may dad helped in on most of them, hence my grounding in tools…I was a tool helper).  After going through a few items in the sawdust covered room he announced he’d found what he was looking for:  A pair of brass dowsing rods.

After a few minutes of instruction (aided by a 6-foot piece of iron pipe tossed on the ground, I was ready for my first experiments in dowsing.

The first item I found (following directions to work the front yard east to west, eyes closed) was the waterline in from the street.

A second “find” was a sewer line.  Boy, was this ever fun.

I’ve used dowsing a few times since, and in fact that’s how we found the spot on our property to put in our back-up well.  Worked just fine.

The main tricks of it seem to be finding the right shoes.  Some people swear by bare feet, others claim leather soles work best, while another camp has the well-insulated view that rubber soles, like tennis shoes, are the real McGoslin.

The second key thing is to  hold the rods just right.  They need to be able to rotate, just so.  If they are held with the tips too close to level, they will sway uselessly.  However, if the tips are too low, then there’s not enough swing to them.

Third thing to remember is that your eyes need to be closed to “feel” things.  I don’t know why, but the feel is more apparent for many people with eyes closed.  Maybe dowsing has something to do with the brain shutting off overt optical inputs; I can’t just say.

Last point – and most important – is that you give yourself permission to dowse.  A lot of people fail at dowsing because they don’t let themselves actually do it.  They “counter-believe” in the process which understandably torpedoes the whole thing.

So there you have point #1.  If you really want to be a prepper, a pair of old brass curtain rods is a useful thing.  Or, drop by a welding store and pick up some brass 36” rod and bend some up, yourself.  The water may be down a ways, but in the hands of someone who has practiced the art (it’s not witchcraft, it’s just one of those natural forces we’ve lost track of, thanks to technology) water is often easily found.

So what on Earth could this have to do with data and our www.nostracodeus.com big data project which looks at the comings and goings of words from major media?  Well, you may recall that in Monday’s column, we added the words “harriers” and “carriers” to the dictionary and ever since then, the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning has been making headlines because it’s enroute to a training mission in the South China Sea, where China has just instituted an air defense zone, which the US has “tweaked” with a B-52 overflight, and which gearing up to project Chinese sea power into the contested (with Japan) Sendaku islands area.

One note about the Chinese picture (after you click on the first one at the link above) of the aircraft appearing to take off from the Liaoning.  It’s not.  The aircraft is too high to have done a takeoff – since the aircraft even light on fuel – would be less than half of its apparent altitude.  So this was, to my eye, an aircraft that came down, made an approach, and then did a go-round.  The angle of attack looks wrong for low airspeed, too.  Staged-looking.  Just sayin’.

Also, offers reader Roger, there’s a dandy backgrounder on air defense identification zones to be found over here.

After you go back and reread the post “Winds of Noumenon” you’ll see that events since have sure focused on carriers which could be a success for the data-sniffing technique, OR (and this is something that didn’t hit me until this morning) the Nostracodeus software could act something like a massive dowsing rod amplifier.  Or a “big data dowsing amplifier” might be another way to express the idea.

Could it be that regular people have hints (in their dreams) that tell them – against a very, very noisy background of modern high energy life – what’s to come?

Clearly, in last Sunday’s dream-state, carriers and harriers sitting on the deck came through, along with a picture of a female in charge.  Turns out that yes, there is a woman in charge of a major US naval group, and among her command (if a reader who researched the point has it right) there are smaller Marine ships with Harriers aboard.  (Mark II’s, if that matters.)

So the question is whether my dream was in any way meaningful? 

That I can’t tell you.  But, what I can tell you is that both Grady and I have now put the word “disappear” into our Indicators analyses as we’re both off doing runs now.  I haven’t looked at the size of the news sources run, in number of pages to read) but as I write this note my run (of woo-woo and fringe news sites) is 215 out of 2156.  In a couple of hours we’ll see what’s in that one.

The reason is the latest dream-state concept I woke with was “disappearing and some number of people were involved.  If, over the next week (two at the outside) we get a glob of missing/disappeared people, then will have even more research to do.

Something roll around in the back of your mind – which is where the reality we share seems to spring from…  Is future-directed software sort of like a digital data dowsing rod?

Readers Writes on China

In our Peoplenomics.com subscriber report this week, we highlighted the differences in strategic thinking about China.  Among other points:  The US is very technology-dependent in it military approach to things, while China continues to hold a strong “rural fall-back” capability which has failed in the US due to the attacks on the American farmer and small farm life overall.

As a result, I noted the large number of Chinese who in a sense are “massing” near the US border in places like Vancouver and Toronto – a point echoed by subscriber Joel who sent this:

My son the geographical analysis expert tells me that Canada encourages the immigration of mainland Chinese.

Gov expected lots of new jobs to follow.

However, the rich mainlanders established bolt-holes but leave their businesses to operate in China.  Lower costs, fewer regulations.

Maybe, if the violent rev in China really gets going, the entrepreneurs might relocate their stuff.

Meanwhile, Vancouverites and Torontonians suffer with ridiculously high housing prices.

Toronto has the second highest number of hi-rises in NA, after NYC.

Toronto has the most construction projects of any city in NA.

This is the uptown area of Toronto: mostly Chinese, Korean, Iranian. (Yes. Iranian).

Quite a contrast in another way:  The US is arguing for open immigration for poor people who will compete for the few remaining jobs in America, while the Canucks are going for high dollar people. 

Seems there’s no “right path” in this:  The Canadian approach is screwing people out of affordable housing, but because of the lower wages which higher immigration from penniless people will incur, the US will get to “unaffordable” via a different path:  Lifestyle decline.

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Happy Thanksgiving: Phone-Friendly

Being a workaholic is….well…. a lot of work.  Even today. 

Out of habit I was up at 4 AM, so I finished some website testing on the UrbanSurvival, Peoplenomics, and Nostracodeus websites, and I was pleased to find that all of them are now not only fast (with times off the server in the range of 1.10-1.46 second, about 1/3rd the response time of weather sites, for example) but they also now look dandy (with drop down menus) on most mobile phones.

I did have a number of complaints from people who didn’t appreciate the change and who continue to dislike our new “mobile-friendly” approach.  Sorry, but we need to talk.

Since today is a semi-day-off,  let’s wander away of our usual “hard economics, hard news, and the odd bit of wujo” to give you a look behind the scenes at some of the decision-making processes that led to our latest changes.

As you may be aware,  (so-called/misnamed) “SmartPhones” are now accounting for an ever-increasing portion of internet use. 

Without the change, our site was “offensive” to mobile users.  Androids top the list although some are Samsung’s, some are iPhones, others are Kindles.  Since the pages make sense on my own Kindle and GomerPhone, I can now look at them on the road.

Now, as much as I loved the older (simple) basic HTML code (and clunky browsers) which had been previously used on both UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics, the times (and technology) have changed.  It forced me to make a difficult choice…namely to give up the old ways and make the public face of both sites much more (phone) user-friendly.

Peoplenomics readers will still be served the conventional .HTML pages, but we will (early in 2014 give the subscribers a choice of whether to use the mobile-friendly content or the “old-school” approach.

As to the difficulty of change? I hope two or three clicks to keep up has not been too much imposition on you. (Seriously?)

All you needed to do blow-out (delete) the old cached  content (meaning old pages stored locally in your computer) and then go on to any of our web sites.  The browser will load the changes correctly and life goes on.  Pages will display nearly the same – but now they can be found on most mobile phones.

A second point which stuck in the craw of a few readers (e.g. didn’t set well) was breaking the daily report into two parts which was done back in July: That when we broke the single long page into a news section and a lighter/more off-the-wall section (called the Coping section) which deals with everything from Wujo stories to personal cooking hints, prepping, and life out here in the “outback” in general.

Two things drove that decision:

First was pure economics:  The UrbanSurvival site costs are paid for by advertisers.  Please support them when you buy things by clicking from this site to their stores.

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An Insight into Futuring?

As Grady noted in the report earlier today, “Oh-Oh- CARRIERS!” this sent a small chill up my spine toward the base of brain because of a dream that I had earlier this week.

It wasn’t just any dream.  If was one of those rock ‘em – sock ‘em blow your eyes out in dreamland IMAX which comes as close to “being there” as you can imagine.

When I saw that Grady’s run had come up with “carriers” off I went on a Google search to see what was triggering it.

To be sure, going back through the data of my own run, I found a few [expected] references to things like “common carriers” and “air carriers” and things that are usually in the background.

But (remember the Monday write up of my Carrier dream over in the “Winds of Noumenon” post on the UrbanSurvival site, this quick elevation in “carriers” of the aircraft take off and landing type is more than slightly disconcerting, so I thought I would put a note up on the UrbanSurvival site, the Nostracodeus.com site and even Peoplenomics, since this arrival of ‘carriers” is troubling.

As the story is “getting legs” with reports like NBC’s “China deploys only aircraft carrier after US sends B-52s over disputed islands.” beginning to get some traction now.

The carrier involved is what the US would like to characterize as a museum piece.  The Liaoning is described by Wikipedia as:

“…the first aircraft carrier commissioned into the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN).[3] Originally laid down as the Admiral Kuznetsov class multirole aircraft carrier Riga for the Soviet Navy, she was launched on December 4, 1988 and renamed Varyag in 1990. The stripped hulk was purchased in 1998 by the People’s Republic of China and towed to Dalian Shipyard in north eastern China. After being completely rebuilt and undergoing sea trials, the ship was commissioned into the PLAN as Liaoning on September 25, 2012.

Of a more pressing nature is the fact that while officially the US pictures this as a “lone ship” it has two destroyers in escort, say some reports. 

Oh, and while the “sting” of its aircraft may not be what the Big E might pack for the US Fleet, we nevertheless note that the ship is hardly a museum piece and is, according to this note, staging up towards more efficient operations:

In June 2013, a second round of flight tests began on board the Liaoning, with personnel from the fleet air arm of the Brazilian Navy providing carrier training support to the Chinese Navy.[49] Five Chinese pilots were certified the next month for carrier operations.[50]

In September 2013, SMN reported that the Liaoning was still unable to operate J-15s with a heavy weapons/fuel load because of the ship’s limited size and lack of catapults.[51] The U.S.

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Early War Clouds with China?

If you don’t think the Iran Appeasement Deal (now blowing up, figuratively anyway) was bad enough, the folks who surround Clueless Leader may have really stepped in it this time; tweaking China with a US B-52 flight into a newly declared Air Defense Zone which happens to conflict with a similar zone claimed by Japan. It’s a move which could begin to collapse the bubble in US markets in 2014… So how much do we need to target as our investment return in 2014 if a long wave economic war (think WW II) is only a couple of years? Hint: Lots.

Code-Head Notes

When we cleaned up the UrbanSurvival.com site back in July, we didn’t realize that some mobile users would not be able to find the “root” directory on small (cheap) smartphones like mine.  Which I discovered my own “GomerPhone” couldn’t read my own site, I decided to fix the site in the root directory.  The Bonus is we may be a little less arcane and not so hard to find on the net.

For long-term users, the extra click (and bookmark) of the new page should be our “final resting place” for a while, but best laid plans and all that.  That said, the www.urbansurvival.com site should be stable for a while.  At least till we get a new hair up ()#$%^Y) and try to keep up with technology….

But to move UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics with no down time to speak of…well, a libation may be in order.  ‘nog?

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“Two Turkeys” This Week!

There’s much to taste this morning as the headlines seem to indicate a slow cooking of the world’s goose prior to the long weekend, such as it is with storms and such.

For one thing, the Israelis are seriously pissed about the US going off and making what may be a massive mistake in allowing the Iranians to become a nuclear power because that is likely to set off a regional nuclear race.

While that may be grand for some of the US firms which could land big engineering and construction jobs in the future, it also makes the world a much more dangerous place to live since the more bombs there are, the more likely they are to be misused at some point.  And even minus warheads,  are we supposed to be dumb enough not to have noticed Fukushima.  Think Iran will be better plant operators?

While the NY Times is selling this under the headline of “Obama signals shift from military might to diplomacy” the other angle to it is to look up how well Lord Chamberlain would have done with an appeasement policy toward Hitler.

If the answer “Doesn’t seem to work too well…” doesn’t come to mind right away, a refresher on the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, or the  militarization of the Rhineland may help.

Every now and then, a President has to take a stand against countries that have become fixed on expansionist or megalomaniacal objectives.  Truman on Korean, Kennedy on Cuba.

Despite the abject failure of appeasement, which runs from the school yard bully all the way to the Middle East/present-day, not everyone sees the need to draw lines and take hard action.  And some, perhaps even members of congress, I would expect would be appalled at the presidential slack-handedness on Iran sanctions.

Give ‘em an inch and they’ll take what?

Hardly much mention of this, what in the heat of the PR campaign, but you did notice the Washington Institute pointed to what looks like an imperial presidency/rule by decree in their report “Sanctions Relief for Iran without Congressional Approval…”  I know…tisk, tisk…don’t let a little thing like the frigging LAW stand in the way of an agenda, right?

While it is true that former heads of Israeli security outfits (Shin Bet and Mossad) are hesitant to call for an outright attack, the deal with Iran might have included more checks and less opportunity for under the table development.

We’re left to wonder whether media was doing its job.

Our current president is presiding over a messy set of realities.  While Iran, essentially gets to skate with 7-loopholes, our Fearless Leader is busy orchestrating the roll-out of even more Draconian police state tools here at home, such as the FBI’s facial recognition system now set to go national.

And while “locking down America” continues, the long-running battle in Afghanistan to draw a line is ending with what looks like quick capitulation is coming.  So terrorists, those bent on world domination, and heroin poppy growers are a bigger threat than Americans?  I must have misplaced my fluoride treatments and ViceGrips.

Meanwhile, the inept LameStreamMedia haven’t figured out that in a country which already doesn’t have enough jobs, the LAST thing we need is wide open immigration to bring in even more people to take the government doll, which will require more taxes, while existing residents are left to fight over an ever-smaller piece of the pie. 

Fantastically, the Obama crew is still trying to perp this hoax over on the sheep, aided and abetted by media that won’t ask hard questions.  Here’s one: “Where’s the jobs gonna come from?”

Is there an appeasement policy with Mexico and the cartels we haven’t been told about, too? Is there a “right to squander” clause I missed?

Even if ALL of these facts escape you, there’s “Almost 80-million with employer health care plans who could have their coverage cancelled” reports Fox News.  We expect the liberalistas to attack Fox for reporting it, not the ugly facts of the healthcare roll-out disaster itself.

A CNN poll out this morning notes more democrats are fading into the sunset for 2014 thanks to healthcare, which is somehow not surprising.

But the good news – such as it is – is that Americans now live in a “two turkey” nation.  One’s in the oven.  And without prompting, let’s see who can figure out where the other one is, shall we?

Still In the Wings

A fresh round of U.,S, mortgage troubles is about to show up.

And while we’re making the gravy, how about a fresh impasse on the new federal budget, too?  There’s some momentary happy talk here, but we heard that wax and wane before the last shutdown, too, if you’ll recall.

More after this…

Let’s Blame the Shut Down (again)

If you’re on the edge of your seat for my pithy (or pissy?) remarks on Housing Starts, you can keep sitting rather uncomfortably because of this from Census:

The Census Bureau’s monthly New Residential Construction indicator includes statistics on building permits, housing starts and housing completions. On November 26 at 8:30 a.m., the Census Bureau will release estimates of housing units authorized by building permits in September and October.

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