Down to the joys of summer, at least when the sweat dries off, around here.

The humming birds were humming like the little guy to the right, the occasional piercing pain of sinuses acting up from a ton of mowing and such.

And for those wondering, the June bugs were starting to decline in number down at the hangar where our old airplane is still being held hostage by paperwork with the FAA.

Several people wanted to know, however, if putting down $30+ worth of peppermint oil would actually repel the June bugs.

I don’t know about other varieties of June bugs, but the ones in our area don’t seem to care about a) peppermint oil, rosemary oil, garlic, or that $25 “ultrasonic pest repeller.”

The only way to get rid of June Bugs seems to be a) blowing them out with the leaf blower.  And b) making sure next year to get the outside security light at the hangar turned off the first of March so they won’t be attracted to the light source.

More than anything, light is what drives the JB’s so a string of white LEDs will be installed in the grass next year, as well.  But, in the meantime, care to guess which summertime bit of furniture I’ve got my eyes on?

Meantime, I’m trying to figure out what the bird was I heard Saturday while burning a pile of leaves and pine needles in the front yard.  It sounded so much like water in a brook that I actually turned around to look at the deer watering pond to see what it was.

Nothing there (of course) but I’ve spent a lot of time on the property and this was the first one that I heard which was a got-cha.

Here We Are – Come Save Us

Despite the yard work this weekend, I can hardly wait for the next round of “Californicated” to go viral. 

We’ve been covering their drought mess for a long time – and I was just reading how California is throwing money at the drought by (among other things) paying businesses $3 bucks a square foot to put in drought tolerant plants.

Let me help you run some numbers:  Let’s pretend (IRS insists we do) that all of Ure’s little enterprises constitute a business.  And let’s also remember 43,560 square feet per acre and we sit out here in the woods on 28.8 of them.

If I could get someone to pay be $3 a square foot, even after backing out the house and shop/off buildings, we’d still be able to sop up $3.6 million dollars.

Hell, with that kind of ROI we would move somewhere else.

Please, California, talk to Texas about this genius-level idea!  Come Save Us!

(The fact that even a third-grader knows that as soon as you strip off all the green, you lose vertical air movement, and you’ve built yourself a dandy new heat island –  and that’s how the Sahara works.  But don’t think common sense…this is California’s version of burning down the rain forest, except they’re doing it with taxpayer money, as well… And then to be able to cry poor on top of that, OMG these people are what?)

Dumb, Dumber, and Jerry Brown followers.

Our forecast of drought migration is still on the table.  California is the New Dust Bowl – something that should become apparent in the 2016-2017 timeframe.  Just like the last Depression Dust Bowl.

The real first arrival of displacement didn’t become obvious until summer of 1930, but after that it was all down hill for three waves of depressing dust.

If California gets a respite, don’t go bidding up prices, too far:  These things come in macro waves and doubling down after the first wave would be a fool’s errand.

Still, the Golden Brown state is full enough of fools, so ya’ll have fun.

WoWW:  The “Dead Cat Dream”

World of Woo-Woo time:  I’ve told you before about little snips of the future that get wrapped up into my dreams.  Sometimes, the snips of dreams have Big Messages in them – like the January dream about the big earthquake in April (check Nepal). 

Other times, they hold contest that’s of a warning nature.  Like the dream about road closure due to a fatal accident, traffic being re-routed, and orange cones for lane closures – hours before it actually happened.

Fast forward to Friday night/Saturday morning.  Awoke at 2:18 AM with a terrible dream about our cat Zeus.  Had a strong mental picture of a piece of “equipment” falling on him and killing him.

Got up at the usual time, fed the cat (who was just fine) and thought “Stupid George:  See the cat was fine…”

Then, just a few hours later, about 9 AM, I headed to the hangar and as I was approaching the turn onto the Farm to Market road we live off,, here was a freshly dead young cat.

Siamese, and quite remarkably, this was the same cat Elaine and I had considered (however briefly) pulling over the car to rescue a week earlier when we had gone into town for lunch.  We discussed at the time how it had the look of a feral cat (there were now homes around and it looked like another “dumper” – which is what city folks do when they are irresponsible pet owners.

Felt kinda bummed out about it..and it didn’t take but a few minutes to recall the conversation with Elaine and wonder about the dream less than 8-hours earlier.  Dead cat – and now this – a real genuine dead cat.

Ever since then, I have been asking myself how to score this one.  The number of dreams in which a cat had died (and this is over 66+ years, mind you) is exactly zero.

And to discover a cat we didn’t rescue, dead, immediately thereafter; well is that coincidence or something else?

WoWW II

By the way, I don’t remember if I share this update with you about the lady who had the disappearing gun night-vision scope problem…from a gun safe?

….hahahahaha..(manic laughter)-my husband , who found his mysterious, long lost night- vision scope last week, just came out on the back porch (l am sitting here , storm spotting) to show me the latest “gift-from-the-gun-safe”……a HUGE military-type knife/machete – serrated carbon steel, and a nice heavy sheath !!?? …..never saw it before, and it’s kind of hard to miss!! So what is the effing message here? : “DANGER, Will Robinson” ? or….” you may need this defensive stuff soon”? or… “come on thru, guys-we showed you the damn portal already”?… or “pay attention because TSIATHTF” ?? (… ….

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Denver and San Francisco were the hottest of the Hot in this morning’s S&P Housing report just out:

New York, April 28, 2015 – S&P Dow Jones Indices today released the latest results for the S&P/Case-Shiller Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices. Data released for February 2015 show that home prices continued their rise across the country over the last 12 months. More than 27 years of history for these data series is available, and can be accessed in full by going to www.homeprice.spdji.com.Additional content on the housing market can also be found on S&P Dow Jones Indices’ housing blog: www.housingviews.com.

Year-over-Year
Both the 10-City and 20-City Composites saw larger year-over-year increases in February compared to January. The 10-City Composite gained 4.8% year-over-year, up from 4.3% in January. The 20-City Composite gained 5.0% year-over-year, compared to a 4.5% increase in January. The S&P/Case-Shiller U.S. National Home Price Index, which covers all nine U.S. census divisions, recorded a 4.2% annual gain in February 2015, weaker than the 4.4% increase in January 2015.

Denver and San Francisco reported the highest year-over-year gains, as prices increased by 10.0% and 9.8%, respectively, over the last 12 months. It was the first double digit increase for Denver since August 2013.

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In Monday’s column I was bemoaning the fact that most RVs out there seem to be long on glam and granite, but aren’t really set up for well as long-term survival platforms.  I was wrong.

As happens, there’s an outfit in Utah called Timberline Range Camps that makes the real-deal survival platform suitable for bumper towing…  (I hope they don’t mind I borrowed a picture off there website – this is a free plug for them…)  They’re not cheap, but they’re also solid, come with a good wood stove and are designed ground up to be a real platform.  This is really cool stuff and you need to visit their site over here…  As you’ll figure, Timberline’s roots are in the sheep camp and commissary business and so they are used to the real outdoors environment.  Not some drive-in posh glam-on-wheels.  Real deal “out there” vehicles. Just the ticket.

No carpet to get dirty…I think the only change I could find would be a two-basin sink in the kitchen.  I’d sacrifice a drawer for that… Put a portable rack of panels for power, a covered 4X4 half-ton shell to load up with supplies and gear…yep, gone for 3-to- 6 months and no problems…Fishing gear, hatchet, chainsaw for the lazy, and yee-haw, pahdnah…

But Where?

Insert my bad John Malkovitch impression of “…there is that…”

I was whining that it would be dandy if America would just re-invent itself into a new kind of place and put a certain portion of the population on wheels with truly innovative mobile homes (I’ll take the Timberline with my one mod)  so that those who want to could enjoy the country a bit more.  Bumper pull is just dang practical.  5th wheels lose gear space…

Think of it as “The Digital Tribe” to borrow a concept from America’s first occupants.

It not the Timberline right, then what I’m thinking of would be something like a 30’ RV that has been made from 50% (or more) recycled parts.  A cut-down old Greyhound or school bus chassis would be another way to skin the cat, or maybe retooling a bumper-pull.  Ought to be a special part of vehicle laws to exempt such homemade efforts from the miles of government red tape that seem go with selling a vehicle, these days.

National Parks 2.0 then?   The government would go into some of the under-priced counties of the South, say in a few miles from the Gulf Coast and from about Houston all the way over to the east coast of Florida.  But up; under utilized land.

In the zone, government would buy up as much land as they would, paying top dollar if necessary – after all, they’ll just print up whatever money they need anyway.

Let’s say we have a strike 3 miles wide and 30 miles long to begin with as a “proof of concept.”

And then do the same thing up in Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Of course, some of this land will already have buildings and roads and such on it, but that would provide thousands of jobs for planners, architects, not to mention zoning attorneys, and that alone would be a huge economic stimulus.  Give it a deadline of 18-months for plan completion for the southern parks and 6-months after that for the northern parks.

Each of these parks would be divided up into, oh, let’s say 3-acre parcels.  There would be a community water system, but the waste would all be composted in those composting toilets.  And there would be a requirement that half the food consumed would need to be produced on the property.

At three acres each, and 640-acres per square mile, our 3 by 30 miles park would measure in at 57,600 acres, which plots down to about 19,000 “units.”  Plus or minus a grocery store and firehouse or two with emergency medical personnel.

A lottery would be held annually to see who “wins” a chance to go homesteading for a year – or as long as they want.  Give ‘em a homesteader medical card, too.

The government would have a tough time with the concept, obviously. Since it’s government land, and comes off the tax rolls, a person who steps up to this lifestyle could get by with little in the way of outside expense:  $100 a month for the ground (and water for domestic use) and farming using natural methods (dry farming in a pinch) would be attempted.

In a sense, it would be like setting up a Neverland for people who don’t like the way the country is currently heading.

The fun part of this experiment is what people would all have access to a free website where all the functions of government would be parsed down to scheduled participation by everyone in this nomadic community.  The folks with doctoring and medical skills would work 8-hours a week at this or that, a dentist would be provided an office and 8-hours per week there, and so forth. 

There’d be volunteer (but scheduled) cops and other services.

It’s an appealing experiment in economics – which would not be currency-dependent.

By that, I mean when you step back far enough to view Sim-’Merica, you see that we use money as a convenient substitute for real labor.  This just cuts the middle men (the bankster class) out of the middle where they have weaseled into total domination from.

The lucky (or crooked) few who figure this out have no end of fun living the High Life.  The others, like us, who are not so good at the game, live the Low Life on whatever is leftover in the way of table scraps.

As a result, over time we have seen the government slowly taking over everything.  Government is basically now a money game. 

History says there is another way.  We know from the data that civil servant jobs used to be among the lower paid jobs, but the compensation for that was very good job security.

Today, since government has elevated its position (which is being kinder that saying megalomaniacal control freaks stealing everything that isn’t nailed down, through mechanisms like the crooked and process-free civil asset forfeiture game) government is now the place to be if you really want to make a killing (so to speak).

I tell my kids all the time:  Work for government – it’s where the money is.  You want to be on the tax-getting end of things.

The purpose of National Parks 2.0 would be to enshrine in public policy the notion that People are Free in America.   We’re not, presently.  Takes money.  Boatloads of cash.

For example, people get kicked off “public lands” all the time.  I would offer that if you’re a member of “the public” then if it is  really “public land” then you have rights to it,.  You don’t.  Getting kicked off public lands proves the point they’re not public.

Oh, this gets all wound up in environmentalism and legalisms and there’s much harrumphing about the public trust and benefit…but show me the books.

It doesn’t take a steel trap mind to see the game:  What was once PUBLIC land is now GOVERNMENT land.  And the key difference is that in the past government ruled by permission of the People.  Today, we are peopling with permission of the Government.  Stinks to high heaven.  Jefferson would be spinning in Monticello today, but he’d be on a no-fly list and a Fusion Center would have his number.  Domestic T-word, know what I mean?

Setting aside some portion of America as a frontier, where experimental democracy could use the basis of this great nation and update it to current software (so we could allocate community resources by other than gunpoint tax collection) seems like it would be a worthwhile thing to consider.

Wrapped up as a mobile living experiment, perhaps for seniors, these could be national retirement centers, or simply a place where people who are sick of the heavily dollarized way of running the remnants of America into the ground could go, begin to form a breakaway civilization, and live by a code of living freedoms respected among likeminded people.

Sure, it would be hard to start, harder to do, and impossible to estimate in terms of results.

But at least the exercise of wondering “What an attempt at government-sponsored communal living be like” opens us up to examining the missed opportunities that bind us to an unpleasant future by opening our eyes and realizing we can each make a conscious choice to do better and different.

Or, maybe we can’t?

Sitting out in the sun room Monday, kicking this around, Elaine made a sound observation.

The problem is the Dreamer’s aren’t in charge in American anymore.  The Moneymen are…

Good point:  Why would they give up title to anything when they have the upper hand?  That chilled my optimism…but only briefly.  There may not be a choice other than think in new ways.  Which gets me to a second point.

One of the reasons Islam is growing faster than any other religion lately (sort by growth rate, right column – 2000-2010 – over here) is because they are marketing a different system of land ownership.  We catch this stuff on the FTA channels now and then.  Thank-you Galaxy 19 K_u.

At the core of it, their (Islamic) view is that all land belongs to God and people are only stewards of the land.  From there, according to this essay…

Generally, under Islamic tenure systems, land is classified into four main categories: mulk (individual ownership with full rights); miri (state owned land to which individuals may gain use rights); waqf (religious foundation owned land “stopped for God”); and musha (collective or tribal owned land) (Payne n.p.).

The US/Western view has a different heritage that harks back to Kings being divinely anointed by God to rule… and so, here lately, government has become somewhat enamored with it’s local representatives of God role…  See the Wiki on Divine Right of Kings:

The divine right of kings or divine right is a political and religious doctrine of royal and political legitimacy. It asserts that a monarch is subject to no earthly authority, deriving the right to rule directly from the will of God. The king is thus not subject to the will of his people, the aristocracy, or any other estate of the realm, including (in the view of some, especially in Protestant countries or during the reign of Henry VIII of England) the Catholic Church. According to this doctrine, only God can judge an unjust king. The doctrine implies that any attempt to depose the king or to restrict his powers runs contrary to the will of God and may constitute a sacrilegious act. It is often expressed in the phrase “by the Grace of God,” attached to the titles of a reigning monarch.

Kings may have lost some of their pizzazz (and some heads along the way) but “government” stepped in and stole the King’s shoes when came to declaring primacy over property.  It wouldn’t be so bad, but you can NEVER really OWN property, even when (like our place) it’s completely paid for.  It NEVER IS.  Property taxes are the scam to steal it all back and allodial  title is mostly a wet dream, thank you.

The SWOT Analysis is simple:  The smaller an individual’s “skin in the game” the more appealing the anti-Western (Divine Right-based taxation by government né kings of property) mantra sounds.

It’s an article of faith to us that government isn’t intentionally bad in the USA, but sometimes it works out that way.  Hard to prove in Ferguson, Baltimore and a bunch of Middle East countries, though…

Which gets me to the point of the thought experiment (Hallelujah!  A point finally!) on a new kind of National Parks:

If the US/West is to enter its Second Renaissance period, and make the kind of progress represented by the Industrial Revolution, to triumph at a moral level in the Age of Reusable Software and Disposable People, we need to be looking at viable alternative organization charts and seeking best of breed ideas and trying them out to see what kind of things we can learn in order to better fulfill the American Dream.

To do so with conscious de-emphasis of dollarization?  We’ll that’d be a hoot, too.  (We might have done better to study and lean from Native Americans, but that’s the old Divine Right of Government problem…and it worked for the railroad barons.)  Faster Progress doesn’t always mean Better Progress.  Slow can be good.

It wouldn’t be the first time the West has had an opportunity to study a challenging set of ideas and rip off….er….optimize some of the best practices found by others.

We’ve done it before (Think Algebra – Etymology.) and with a strongly branded challenger in mathematics.  So maybe it’s time to review our product line in keeping with presenmt market conditions and if necessary, t–o tune up the brand a bit.  If we don’t, the anti-interest and anti-ownership positioning of the challenger will appeal to more people and that will lead to increased systemic instability in the world.

Could government do something if so inclined?  Oh, sure.  But dollars, not common sense rules the day.  As an example of Elaine’s Moneymen in Charge theory…..

Off in the background, government is quietly re-slicing the pie in 11 states out west under something called the “Final PEIS of proposed Section 368 energy corridors.”  Not that we can do anything about the process now, because as the project website notes:

“Following completion of the consistency reviews by the governors of the 11 western states, any approval of the selected land use plan amendments will be documented in agency-specific Records of Decisions after a 30-day waiting period which begins on Nov.

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I call it my LOSTD (list of sh*t to do) and it gets updated every morning after this morning column is done.

I also do a “master list” of things I want to fall into place this week.  One of these is get the airplane finished (a designated engineering representative has the ball on that while we ask for a minor/trivial variance from an airworthiness directive (AD) which is just another way to turn an annual airplane inspection into a money-sucking pit. The payoff is a safe airplane.

The week’s master project list includes the 6-month, 50,000 chew tooth inspection.  I have to remember to floss for the next couple of days.  Easy to do when dieting, so no food in means no clean-up…

Then there are lots of real work projects…all of which need to happen and it’s just a matter of putting them on the list and then knocking them off one at a time.

My point is (ah, one of those, huh?) No matter what your age or station in life, a to-do list is a great stress reducer.

When I find myself worrying about this or that in the middle of the night, I’ve been known to write it down on the LOSTD which then allows me to promptly get back to sleep.

The second point about the list is a little harder to implement…but I find it’s the most important part of To-Do listing:  Do the things you hate – first.

Remember our conversation about laying brick (or concrete block)?  Do the brick laying and then drink a beer.  Do another course of bricks of block and then another reward?

The same principle applies to the LOSTD:  Do the thing you have been delaying – first.

If you don’t start the week off with some kind of agenda, the week will drag on aimlessly.

Of course, it will anyway, but having The List will make it even more apparent.

{Premonitions}  + {Personal Noise Floor}

OK, I thought to myself on Saturday morning, upon reading the early reports on the massive earthquake in Nepal, definitely some Buffalo Springfield stuff going on.

Explanatory note to troubled youth:  Roll the video from 1967 of For What It’s Worth and maybe (just maybe) that remark will make sense.  Or, not….

If you’re late to the party, go back and re-read my January 13th about the big April earthquake.  Or, the piece about it in Friday’s column.

All of which was before the ground started jumping in Nepal.

Reviewing the data on this “quake which I knew was coming at some level” is a very frustrating thing.  Yes there was a big quake in April and west, relative to the US, and big but not a 9.

What went wrong?

Near as I can figure it, people have all kinds of “extra-sensory” abilities, but we don’t do well when comes to being able to pick out the “right signal” from the high background noise.

I’ll give you an example:  Last night (*between lightning strikes and downpours) I had a most peculiar dream about “missing a train” which was in aq Latin country.  The “train, missed” was going back to a safe country (presumably the USA). 

Myself and one other figure were going to be on the train, but we’d somehow become lost in this foreign station and our train – with our friends on it – pulled out before we were able to get aboard.

The next train through was reserved for government officials and their families only.  It was an open air affair and the officers/officials worn black pants, red short jackets and had on caps that looked almost fez like.  Bandoliers, too.  Not the kind of characters to wander through a dream all the time…

A conference with the stationmaster turned into a real ball of yarn because he kept insisting I was George with a last name that was spelled hyphenated something like Alloyicious-Hibernia.

After the second train with the officials came through, my companion and I got on the third train just as it was getting to be mid to late morning.

And now comes the problem:  First, what is the train stuff about and secondly, was there a hint about a train accident in Spain to come?

www.dreammoods.com has a pretty good dream dictionary.  And it says of missed trains:

To dream that you miss a train denotes missed opportunities. It also suggests that you are ill-prepared for a new phase in your life. You may be procrastinating or putting things off that should have already been completed.

Which is interesting because I had recently gotten out of the habit of using my To-Do list regularly and perhaps there was a “stub” of thought that needed completion.

Another possibility is that it’s a mix of a thought-stub and a premonition about trains.  There didn’t seem to be any qualifying news stories on the wire…but I wouldn’t be surprised if we did have some big train story in the next day, or three.

The problem of serious “dream work” is to find ways to reduce your “personal noise floor”.  Effective precognitive or remote viewing work is like trying to tune in to a very week AM radio signal in a big city.  Lots of noise.  You can tune around the signal, a little this side, or that, but it’s still not going to come through perfectly, no matter how you fiddle with the dials.

Still, to get “bgi quake in April” back in January wasn’t a bad hit.  But it’s not that good since we get a major quake like this once a year, or so, on average.  So a 1 in 12 chance of getting April right was baked in the cake.

Longtime reader (and master data-cruncher) Tony R. keeps us posted on his periodic updates on the trends in quakes.  As you can see in this chart (of 7.0 and larger) quakes going back to 1963 that there has been a gradual rise from a period of quiescence that ran (very roughly) from 1977 to 1995.

The reason this is so interesting is that one could take this view of things and hypothecate that Einstein’s E-MC²  is not a “one-way street” at all.  It’s very possible/likely that the output from the Sun (or some other source) condenses in the center of large planets.  This being the case – which we don’t know for sure – builds an interesting model of energy/mass relationships which as the Trinity Test in 1945 conclusively showed, works in the other direction, too.

As if this isn’t enough grist for the mill, here’s a couple of emails from our news analyst fellow up in Winnipeg that are really interesting…

Dear Mr. Ure,

Randi Zuckerberg, an elder sister of the founder of Facebook, delivers some messages in her book, “Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives”, that will surprise you. She hones in on the notion of being connected, but still remaining in the moment.

With a tip of the hat to woo-woo, or the current edges of neuroscience, “Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior” by Leonard Mlodinow is an enlightening read of how our conscious minds can be manipulated subliminally.

Spoiler alert – the title when the cover is held to a light reads “Psst…  Hey There.

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