(Tacoma, WA)  Also known as handicrapping geese.

You may have figured out that I’m fairly skeptical of the “World’s gonna end ‘cuz of Greece” talk.,

There was another attempt at getting last-minute talks going, but they went approximately nowhere.

The Greek people are getting screwed, with cash withdrawals from ATM’s limited to 50-Euro now as cash runs out.

But that’s what happens if you let a megalomaniacal foreign government (The Ure-a-peein’ Onion) control the currency of your country.

Once the meglo’s are bounced, as this seems to be one outcome to the polling to take place Sunday, Greece could issue its own currency and from there either “go Iceland” and have a nice life.  Or, they could go down the more government than sense road, in which case the Nuevo Drachmas (or whatever they call it) can quickly becoming like the currency of Zimbabwe.

Pick your poison.

European Insanity Revealed

There is a logical inconsistency of Biblical proportions to all this which about 100% of US financial reporters seem incapable of grasping.

Let’s me ‘splain you, Lucy.

Factoid 1:  Greece is a financial sinkhole.

The country has been doling out dough fasters than the Great Society under LBJ.  Free lunch for all, seconds and thirds if you want it.

Factoid 2:  The EU lends money to the sinkhole.

Factoid 3:  The sink hole is getting deeper and needs even MORE money.

Factoid 4:  When it looks like the sink hole might actually go away and no longer be a drain on the EU, the European markets decline.

Now, I only scored a 4.0 GPA in my MBA program from a no-name school (which could be because I attended) BUT it sure seems to me that if “rational market”theory were true (and it’s often not, by the way) then European markets should have put on one hell of a what?

“Greeks are leaving and taking their sink hole with them” rally.

But look at the major European indices.

The German market closed last week at 11,492.43.  When I looked earlier this morning it was at 11,099.    Is that a 3.4% decline? 

Now I ask you, why would that drive a market down?  Mercedes sales gonna fall if the EU doesn’t lend money to Athens?  Help me here!

By the same token, France was at 4,819 when I looked.  A week ago it was 5,059.17.   Uh…is that a 4.7% drop in a week?

Would the loss of a Greek sinkhole really screw France out of that much Champagne and Citroen sales to Greece?

This is why we sit bank in an immersion chamber full of decaf and try to view “world-ending problems” from the highest level.

I also generalize countries as a thought tool.

When I think Germany I remember my old 1986 930 whale tail and Heidi Klum.  I don’t see Angela Merkel.   I think BMWs.  Excellence pops to mind.

Ditto France.  I see a massively cool cultural heritage from Bridgette Bardot to Chateau Lafite Rothschild.  I See the Citroen 2CV – one of the most basic cars in the world.  The original earth-car…with less than half the horsepower of the original VW Bug.  Style is the word here.

And when I look at Greece?

There’s not a word for it.

I see an Onassis who married the Widow Kennedy.

I see a country which blew the Gyro marketing opportunity.

And yes, I am not a huge fan of Retsina.  Think  of it as tasting like a nice California blush wine with a side of pine tar.

Somewhere, deep down in the darkest caves of the unconscious America, imagery like this holds sway.  We are all mostly unconscious, right?

The sink hole may go away and yet people are upset?   Makes no sense.

Poverty – the fertile ground from which inventiveness springs – is what we’re talking about here.

Ever notice how all the major inventions in world history seem to come in the temperate zones of the Earth, not in the Tropics?  Four seasons drive humans to greatness.  Plan a little or die is a good thing.

Oh, sure, Pyramids and fine and all, but functionally useless.  That’s tropical thinking.  Egpoic, pure and simple.

I’ll take me one of them moveable type Gutenberg things, any time.  Was Edison in the tropics?  No.  Tesla?  No.

See many root cellars in the Bahamas?  Nope.

Remember, the high culture of the Aztecs was up at the four-seasons elevations.  Been there, done that, and Cusco is cold.

Point being?

Humans thrive in adversity.  Give us a problem and we’re bound to fix it.  It’s why we love robotics and app development.  Single sideband, SR-71s and ‘vettes and M-16s.  Beechcraft and Skunk Works.

Greece is facing a marvelous problem-solving opportunity.  A gold-backed Drachma would be a fine thing.

But instead, they want to stay in bed with a currency that’s coyote-ugly…the Euro.

So no, I don’t get it.

Somebody is conning someone and my money is on the odds that this is another ”Too big to fail con” run by our old friends the bondies.

If truth in labeling really mattered, we would file this all under Leachcraft Holdings and not worry so much.

The Swaps and Derivative types don’t want an “event” because there wouldn’t be enough money on Earth to save us from the damage, is the chant.

Fact is, we could stiff them all and teach ‘em a lesson once and for all that the world won’t be held hostage.

We won’t,. of course.  And big money will buy the best talking-head sock puppets they can to scare us all into higher taxes and whatever it takes to run the herd again.

But think about tomorrow: Independence Day.

Independence nowadays is a highly personal thing.  You either think for yourself, or you go with the herd to the financial slaughter house.

But don’t look for that to be “In your face” anywhere, especially the Mainstream Media.

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Yeah, short column.  You have a party to get ready for. 

Or a BBQ, trip to the lake, or the river, or the hook-up joint, or something, right?

So right to it, then:  Hot off the press is the jobs report:

”Total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 223,000 in June, and the unemployment rate declined to 5.3 percent, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Job gains occurred in professional and business services, health care, retail trade, financial activities, and in transportation and warehousing.

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(Tacoma, WA)  A short column this morning, since I know you have a lot of important things to do…including getting ready for the Independence Day weekend.  A Potpourri of writer’s notes, though, since travel always puts things into perspective.

These are a few things I found interesting.  No useful as pick up line material (unless you’re trolling nursing homes) but these are the twisted thoughts that come from travel…

Media Distortion Lives

So Elaine and her son go off for some food and a beer.  And Elaine starts going into the big-city dangers of pedophiles and crimes against children and how are the kids going to protect the grandchild and so on.

But the son-in-law – while recognizing the threat, maintains it is minor – and yes, they don’t do stupid things in terms of child safety.

But what’s really going on?

Is grandma nuts?  The son irresponsible? 

Well turns out, none-of-the-above.  After some questions from Ure erstwhile reporter-type, what we experienced was a fine example of media distortion.

You see, Elaine and I live in something of a media bubble..  Sure, we will go on a couple of cruises this year and we’re vacationing right now.  But mostly, our view of the world is shaped by media reports.  We se maybe a couple of people a week, but most of our input is media.

On the other hand, the views of the kids are more experientially based.  They have lots of friends, workers, coworkers, you know the breadth of big city life.  Everywhere there are people and they have a much different slant on things that 10-hours a day of stream video and satellite input.  While different ratio.

From the viewpoint of the kids, worries about the risk of anything in media (dog bites, pedophiles, bad nutrition, Fukushima radiation, etc.) are certainly there in consciousness, but not to the degree that we see them from sitting out in the woods in near-total media emersion.

Pretty interesting to see it work out, first-hand.

The Decline of Style

Next social observation is about the ongoing decline of style. 

I mentioned this when we went on our cruise in February…how no one dressed up, anymore.

You know:  Gone are the days of regular seatings on some cruise ships.  It’s being replaced with a “when you feel like it” approach.,

I worked in the airline business, for example, as a kid when I was a radio and electronics mechanic way back when (IAM Local 751, I think it was).  Airline employees had to dress to fly.  Minimum was a shirt, tie, and jacket.

People used to do that…and dressing was an important part of the economy.

Not so much – hell, hardly at all, anymore.

We went to dinner with the in-laws and the kids last night and I don’t think there were more than half a dozen people out of a hundred plus men in this waterfront bistro who were wearing long pants.as  Everyone else was wearing cut-offs.

The women, mostly, looked like they had planned about as well:  Several I saw looked like they had walked into their closets, closed their eyes, and put on the first thing their hand landed on.

Not to say that it matters, but it does.

One of these days, I will pen the Great Ironing Exposé.

People no longer seem to care about wrinkles, and I may be the only person north of the Oregon border who appreciates a starched shirt.

And shoes that take a good shine?  Forget about it!

Yards as Signs

I mentioned to you the lack of rain up here.

A lot of yards are brown.

Sure sign of a person who is not flat-busted and who has some sense of pride-of-ownership is a well cared-for lawn.

I haven’t done it, but I’m tempted to go door-to-door and survey on this.

The Pet Theory being that people are on the inside, very muck like they surround themselves with on the outside.

If you see a neglected yard?  Almost a sure sign of people with a bad attitude, the way I reckon.

Card Declined

This was embarrassing:”  I went into the airport FBO after going flying with the father-in-law yesterday.  Off from Tacoma Airport and up to Bremerton (KPWT) where the Airport Diner more than proved itself the best fly-in breakfast joint around.

Came back (sight-seeing over Hood Canal and South Puget Sound) and needed a couple of quarts of oil for the return home.

Card declined!

Say what?

Yes, I could literally put a new Camry on my card but this largest Bank in America decided that it was suspicious and so my card was declined.

So a good part of the morning went into fixing that rat maze.

And this was after I had gone online before the trip and put in a travel notice.

A couple of hours later I was in a branch getting a big wad of cash and the teller was wondering “Huh?”

I explained that my card had been shut off, even though I’d gone through the bank’s hoops and I was not going to be Shanghaied in Bozo, Montana, or wherever, with 360-pounds of fuel I couldn’t  pay for.  So hand over my money.  I’m pissed.

“Oh, I’m sure that would never happen sir.”

“My butt!  It just happened with two quarts of oil.”

“Oh.”

This is the first time we’ve gone on a trip with (mostly) plastic only but there’s a keen lesson here about why the transition to a cashless society scares the hell out of me.

I don’t trust banks and (remember: I did their travel alert deal) they are not trusting me back.

Cash still talks and plastic walks.

Next time I will know better than put my nuts in the Bankster’s vice.  I’m am in charge of my life and my money – which gets me onto that whole other problem of banks don’t think it’s my money…just an asset for them  to move as they see fit.

I was fit to be tied and just thinking about it raises my diastolic 12-points. 

Ure just renewed his old axiom “Always have enough cash to use as get-home money.”

Somewhere in Fed Region 10 there is probably a Suspicious Activity Report  (SAR) with my name on it.  For any one who cares, it wouldn’t be there if banks did their jobs right.

(Ever wonder what would happen if someone came in and wanted to get $5,000 of cash for a drug deal and told the truth up front?  Or “I need to buy some C4 and caps to blow some stumped up”?)

We have rolled from being a country where the Founders ruled to one where Kafka and Orwell got it more right.

The gap between theory and practice if you’re an optimist.  Denial don’t last long, if you’re a pessimist.

Well, so much for Mr. Cheerful’s Trip Report.

We will have a somewhat abbreviated report Friday because markets will be closed, but show up anyway, because you never know what happens when the gentle outback farmerly-type goes to the land of slickers and bumps into the New Reality.

Mostly it’s been fun and highly edjumacational.

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(Tacoma, WA)  This morning we take on one of the more interesting sites on the web –  site which is has military/strategic planning roots and which has a very scary forecast of what could happen to the US population in the next 10-years.

Along the way, we will bump into a whole crop of conspiracy theories and we’ll kick the tires on things like the supposed pending announcement of a Planet-X/Niburu disclosure for this fall.

But alas!  As always, by sticking doggedly with the data, we arrive at a truth

Not one we were in a hurry to get to, but one to be included on our Threat Board, nevertheless.

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No, this is not a Crash.

Yes, the market will open down.

Yes, Europe is looking Grim.

But some simple truths about Greece and the global economy may set your mind at rest.

1.  Greece is in a world of hurt.  Banking is limiting people’s withdrawals from the financial system to only a few Euros per day.

2.  The Greek problems have hit markets around the world, but presumably you’ve discounted the problem in your own accounts.

So, no, I don’t expect the Greeks breaking with the EU will hurt anyone in the US except those chasing yields with high bond promises/lies.  Greece will have to liquidate decades of free lunches, pretty much all at once.  That’ll be an owie.

Bond holders will scream bloody murder about how they need to be made whole.  But the truth – for the idiots at the helm who seem to have forgotten basic accounting – is that interest has two components:  rent of money which is basically the borrowing cost and risk of default which the bondies (who have come to believe they are deities) can’t seem to remember how that works.

Bondies argue everyone else should buy their free lunch.

As a sage reader posted in the overnight comments section:

People need to be reminded that the Greek shut down of the Banking and stock market is nothing new. The US did that in 1914 (shut down the stock market from August to December), and shut down ALL banking for a week with a bank holiday in March, 1933.Only a fool would believe it would never happen here again, or that everything is contained in Europe, or wherever.

Ah…reminders, is it?

Well here’s one to bear (or bull_)  in mind this morning:  Crashes don’t happen at the top.

Yeah, sounds idiotic to mention a little detail like this, but remember just a few trading sessions back, the NASDAQ was hitting new Post-2000 highs.

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(Tacoma, WA)  A longer than usual report this weekend (don’t expect more than a brief update Wednesday) but more complete than most in that today we will not only embellish on our rather dismal outlook for the coming 10 year period, but we shall also share a few thinking tools and how we use them for analyzing complex situations.

And then we will get into the weird stuff – which after we work through a number of levels of analysis won’t seem all that weird, at all.

And that’s where we will discuss the Wahalaylia – a new kind of percussion device – that arrived as a dream while consorting with future spirits in a post EMP, post-DNA war world.

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(Tacoma, WA)  Over on this side of “fly-over “ country, we are drowning in decaf trying to figure out whether the market drop of 178 Wednesday was the financial equivalent of a head cold, or whether it’s the cancer (or made up money) come like a Banshee to get us.

On the head cold side of things, we can almost make out the ebb and flow of Greece in the background.

As of this morning, the Dow as set to regain 71 of that.

Part of what’s going on is the mess in Greece.  Right now there are talks going on trying to avoid a collapse.

As we’re talked about before, though, stiffing the internationalists is not a bad thing.  Iceland is still a great country…and all the greater for having kicked at least some of the banker spew out of their country.

We should have such IQs and gumption.  So should the Greeks, but maybe Angels Merkel will play Santa Klaus.

More than anything, yesterday smacked of currency moving and and bond whiners.

Geppetto Does Personal Income (and Expense)

It’s fairytale time over at the Bureau of Labor Statistics…

Personal income increased $79.0 billion, or 0.5 percent, and disposable personal income (DPI) increased $65.5 billion, or 0.5 percent, in May, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. Personal consumption expenditures (PCE) increased $105.9 billion, or 0.9 percent.

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(Tacoma, WA)  I have not been able to sleep much on this trip.  Reason being that we are in an unfamiliar time zone.  The publishing time for UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics is the ungodly hour of 6 AM  this far west. 

I like to keep the time the same, because so many readers are on the East Coast.  Nevertheless, it brings me to one of my favorite rant points:  Why do we insist on fooling ourselves with time zones?

Every few years, the debate over Daylight Time makes the rounds, too.  But again, we are so stupid and so gullible, that we believe assigning a different number will somehow influence the Sun to operate differently.  It doesn’t.

Universal Coordinated Time (UTC) is how militaries operate.  That’s because it makes sense, and it’s one of the few things the military has gotten right.

If we were going to do time “right” there are only two solutions.  The simple (UTC) and the technologically precise.

On this last, I would suggest TLT, or true local time.

As a recovering sailor, I know how important it is to understand the Local Hour Angle (LHA) when working out the local problems with a sextant and H.O. 249 sight reduction tables.

The local hour angle is unique for every place on earth at a particular moment of sidereal time, which is to say, for a position of the Sun relative to the Earth.

Think of it like lining up a DirecTV dish.  The Satellites in geosynchronous orbit are neatly positioned relative to degrees east or west of the UTC line through Greenwich.  Which makes sense when you point a dish into the sky looking for, oh, Galaxy 3 at 97-degrees west.

All terribly consistent, don’t you see?

True Local Time has not been adopted yet, but since humankind is overcome with reductionism disease, and we fool ourselves into believing a lot of idiocy, I figure it’s only a matter of time (sorry) until someone builds the cell/GPS enabled True Local Time app.

The way this would work is pretty simple:  Anywhere you are on earth at 6:20 AM TLT (true local time) the Sun would be in the same place in the sky.

As things are now, the local arrival of Sunrise (or Sunset) is call over the place.  The way I figure, the sun should always crack the horizon  at 6:30 AM, so twice a year with true local time, you’d see the Sun’s upper limb (top of the sphere) peek out at 6:30:000.000 AM TLT.

It’s hard enough to optimize human behavior and things like our circadian rhythms that attempt to keep us all sane.

But here lately, wherever I look, the propensity of people to “do stupid” seems almost overwhelming.

Logically, there are only two ways to “do” time.  A correct local hour angle (sun at the same place in the sky for everyone at a given time (time being in true local time) or a completely externalized reference like UTC.

This isn’t the only area where human delusion shows through.

Another example is in how state (and other political) boundaries are built.  They don’t take population into account correctly.  And, just like the mish-mash of time zones, the mish-mash of political power based on population is another area of high delusion.

Let’s take California, for example.

When the lines were drawn on maps, there was no one there.  But now?  No only are there too many people (and did I mention not enough water) but they wield too much political power.

When the state had 5-million, or so, back in the dawn of time, there was something approaching political parity.  Now?  California has outsized everything.  Politically speaking, Arizona is a dwarf star in comparison.

Let me show you how political boundaries should be drawn, and I will use California, as an example.

When there were these 5-million people in the whole state, it would have “original” boundaries.

But as the population grew, the borders of Arizona, Nevada, and Oregon would be expanded.  This would be done to equalize population between the states.  It would “level the playing field” for all kinds of problems, including return to the states of a portion of Federal income tax.

Right now, when funds are divided up, we first have to do advanced mathematics in order to figure out who should get how much in the way of Free Lunch.

Under Ure’s State Flex Lines, all states would be created equal, at least in terms of human capital.

You see what has happened along the Mexico border?

If we were using Flex Boundaries, as the number of people in San Diego went UP, the borders around the city (city limits) would compress in.  So that Rancho Mirage, or wherever, would still have the same population power.

What we have seen happen so often is that city empire builders gobble up land as fast as they can because the more people they can shove under their political wing, the more workers and income (empire) they can accrue.

In terms of Congressional districts, picture a system where the power of both rural and urban would be equalized better:  When city pop went up, the districts would shrink effectively, so that the balance between common sense rural folks and runaway lunatics in big cities would be more balanced.

As is, we see that cities, congressional districts, and states run over policy land mines all the time because they are not held in check by flexible borders.

Hence, in terms of national political influence, the State of California would be expected to (at some level) support illegal immigration because it supports more money from the central government and justifies more power.

On the other hand, under my plan, the boundary with Arizona, over the years, would have moved from west of Phoenix, first down to Thermal and Palm Springs.  And then as illegals poured in and so forth, we should how have the Arizona border just east of Alhambra and Pasadena-Glendale.

What would happen is that Arizona’s influence would have kept pace.

What’s more, it would be a marvelous make-work to put people to work.  For example, thousands of people would be employed with the biannual adjustment to signs.  City Limits and state naming signs would all have to be changed.

On the other hand, the populations would always be similar.  Population of Arizona might swell to 40-million (or whatever) but the size of California would shrink.

States that have small political influence now, like New Mexico, would expand dramatically, and it would make more sense economically, since the calculations on dividing up budget spoils would be totally simplified.

Give each state 1/50th of the pie and that’s that.  And then (in the interest of stability) hand out government projects (like defense) on the same basis.

This may seem like a hollow whine, but without a radical rethink, California will quickly become a bi-lingual state (not that it isn’t already) and the tearing down of American by ending our common language will be well underway.

Just as political divisions should be drawn on maps so that populations are equal, at a country level, they should be drawn based on language.  Under this common sense approach, San Diego and San Antonio would have already been ceded to Mexico.

And then there’s the matter of how Russia’s move in the Crimea was somewhat harmonized with the languages spoken in Ukraine.

I suppose we shouldn’t get too worked up over the ill results that are happening.  But as I see it, after not enough local hour angle of sleep, many of our root problems as a country c an be traced back to making poor compromises of a political nature.

Absent some “hard line thinking” compromise just means too many cooks are ruining the stew.

One nation, divisible by language, divided by time zones, and victims of “flex money” can’t have a happy outcome.

As Ure sees it, the Constitution didn’t say we would teach ESL to whoever showed up.  Short-term programs to transition into Engrish?  Fine with me.  We are an inclusive country.  But language frames how we think (or don’t). 

We’ll soon have Yemeni as a Second Language.  The runaway do-gooders are determined to blow up the population of the US before they blow up the population of the US, if that makes any sense.  Along the way, look for terrible “brand confusion” to totally eff with your mind as everyone knew that previously YSL was Yves St. Laurent but soon come:  Yemeni as a Second Language.

Pending massive Syria Immigration will screw up IT Departments since they thing SSL means one thing, but it will soon be Syrian as a Second Language (SSL).

I’m not particularly sympathetic to global refugees, I suppose.  When global humanitarian efforts take place on a grand scale, what they really do is encourage future despots to “go for it” and it’s like do-overs for bad children.  They stop the whining now, but you end up with implacable spoiled brats.

And that’s how the world is looking…

It is, according to my clock, later than we think.  Unless we stand up for a little Ameri-Glue, we’re hosed.  And three key ingredients of the glue to rebind us are a single time zone, equalization of political entity size to reduce intergovernmental empiring, and, oh yeah, a common language.

Hard stuff, this logical hard-headed thinking.  But when we’re over-run with people who hate us, and who will crumple America as the melting pot, creating an incomprehensible potpourri of everything from languages to their own forms of law, to remembers this chat:  When we could still save the “glue that binds us”.

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