Welcome back to another fun-packed week here in the modern replay of the Roaring Twenties.

This week, we’re sure that you’re going to enjoy yourself because before you get another ass-kicking Greater Depression, you first need to have a sizeable blow-off top.  This is the pause the refreshes.

To do that you need falling commodity prices…and toward that end, we begin this morning’s Epistle with a reading from the Book of Goldman, where we discover their Old Testament (about oil going to $80) has been replaced with a new passage that mentions $40-something. .

I may have to send them a resume:  We’ve been nattering on about $35 oil (and maybe a spike into the high 20’s) for months now.  Nice to see the mainstream is figuring things out.  But just in case, repeat after me:

Roaring Twenties.

Just in case word from Goldpersons doesn’t move markets, we see further evidence of the current “It was the best of times…”   elsewhere.

Credit Michael Sanserino of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (posted on the Detroit Snooze site) for observing that while the price of gasoline is way, way down, the IRS has done something kind-hearted:  They have increased the auto used for business mileage allowance to 57.5 cents per mile.

Let me see…521-miles a month would pay for a $300/month car lease…194-miles per month would pay for insurance.  Drive 1,000 miles a month on 28.5 gallons of gas is only $60, so let me see here…$472 for a thousand miles, so with tires and brakes, IRS is about right…toss in Triple A and a breakdown or two and it’s spot on.

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One of these days, I really need to grow up.

How many hobbies is too many?  I have found out!

I was working on my electronics bench Sunday trying to clean up that part of my life and it occurred to me that yes, a person really can have too many interests and hobbies.

Take that odd little symbol on the right, there.  The triangle is one way to represent an antenna in schematic diagrams use in electronics.  That little crow-footy thing is a ground. 

As in “Hmm…haven’t had time to play with the ham radio equipment much, lately…”  In fact, this was brought to my attention when (about 3:38 PM, I realized I had missed checking into the Texas RACES net a couple of hours earlier.

Oh-oh.

Emergency nets are important.

But then, too, so is the local repeater Monday Night Social Net which I haven’t checked into for…maybe 6-months now.

Granted, I still do some solid electronics work.  For example, just in the past couple of weeks I have modified all three of our old-style MXL 990 Condenser Microphone studio mics by changing out capacitors, a move which makes a $100 mic sound as good as a $1,000 mic.  And with one more upgrade, about as good as a $5,000 mic, but that would be ridiculous.

(I picked up the mod from Silent Sky Studio over in Alabama, and only works on the old (through-hole, not SMT versions of the 990s…which are getting hard to find.  Check out Microphone-Parts which has updated electronics for the newer MXL’s and new mic capsules, too.)

And Sunday I decided to (once again) try to sort out what’s wrong with an old Swan 350 transceiver.  Got some tubes ordered…and that’s a time-sink, too, because finding vacuum tubes is work.

But there’s a list of 20, or so, decent little (and some big) projects that need to be done to keep the radio gear 100%:  The largest will be bringing down the antenna tower for it’s annual going-over which will involve some welding in order to put the support for the low-band antennas back where it should be. 

As long as it’s down, there’s a new tower raising and lowering motor to be installed and, long as that is going in, some new high-tech plastic line instead of galvanized wire to raise and lower it.  Fortunately, there are some smaller projects (repair the antenna rotator plug, for example, which is a 1/2-hour project, but it will take a half-hour to find the part…I assume you know how many 10-minute projects turn into 5-hour snipe hunts looking for THE critical part.

All of which would be an amusing discussion of a hobby except that list doesn’t begin to list the competing hobbies that are also vying for time.   The new deck railings with the hydroponics on top in some metal gutter, for example, is one of them.  Picked up some of the parts last week.

But for that to come together, it means spending an hour or two up in the greenhouse, because it’s time to get seeds started on the heat mat.

But the really BIG time sink, turns out, has been the airplane.  You don’t just get in and go somewhere…that’d be too easy.

Elaine really likes Santana.  And they will be doing a show over in Biloxi-Gulfport at the Beau Rivage or some such in March.   I know that’s a long ways off, but here’s what happens:

If we drive to Mississippi, it’s almost 400 miles of driving.  At an average speed of 50 MPH that works out to 8-hours by the time you get the poddy stops, gas, stretch legs or a coffee stop…

The airplane turns it into a 2:40 flight, so pop over the morning of the concert.  Can’t do that in the car because the last thing I want to do after sitting 8-hours in a car is go sit some more.

But the closest airport is a 20-minute ride from the hotel/casino.  So that entails a call to the airport to discuss that problem.  Rental car or taxi…turns out to be a push.

And then, since it will be almost spring, the weather research begins.  I don’t do IFR (instrument) flying.  Not that I can’t develop that hobby, too, it’s just more money into the airplane.  66 is coming along sooner than later for Ures truly.  Instruments for the plane and the training would be $4,000 and that doesn’t pencil if you have 5-7 years of flying left. Even I can be that rational.

Course there are other competing hobbies: the shop with all the power tools going unused is a crime against humanity.  So is not using the studio enough…

Oh, and we’re actually going to go on a cruise this winter.  Sure, what’s one more time thing.

Now, I’m not complaining.  Normally balancing all of these things would be trivial if I had nothing else to do.  But work is more important than any of the above, so to me, that one comes first (duh).  And then there’s Peoplenomics, and our little chats here.

There aren’t too many projects left on the house (a week’s worth) but that’s if I am not dealing with website issues, with viruses, with reader feedback, and all the rest.

So the plan (for now) is the balance of this year, we are planning to travel as much as we can.  A cruise, some concerts, a trip to Key West in the airplane, and maybe up to Fairbanks in late summer (this is proving a hard sell to Elaine) and then we plan to sell the air machine.  We’ve seen most of the country already, anyway, except going down to the tip of Florida and we didn’t get any further northeast than Hartford, CT.  Got the other corners covered, though.

Next year, with major house projects done (landscaping finished, hydroponics on the decks installed) that should leave more time for ham radio and music and podcasts, and composing and…

All of which is shared as a cautionary note.

Sometimes I have pointed (in jest) to people who watch sports as a “hobby” and made light of their interest in sports and very little else.

But these people don’t have to worry about keeping the rust of the jointer table, and they don’t have to replace the dad-gum batteries in the drill press laser guide.  The laser light going out on the chop saw doesn’t bother them either.

What’s more, when their kids play sports, they are totally into it.  They know the moves and can actually coach.

With the Super Bowl fast approaching now, I need to cut them some slack.  The whole family gets to use the Big Screen and Home Theater.  Most wives don’t have a driving interest in chop saws.  Fewer still see the pressing need jointers or dovetailing jigs and routers.

So later on this month, if you hear the sound of a chop saw and air tools during The Big Game…that’s would be the greater fool who has fallen into one of life’s most insidious traps:

Too many interests in too many things. Attention Deficit Hobby Disorder is what ADHD really means.

My rock polisher sits in a box too, along with the 49-cc engine to turn one of our bikes into a moped….so let me know how the game was.

(You become a senior citizen when you’d rather shoot landings, work on the garden, or run power tools than look at this year’s crop of vixens cheerleading.  Kinda like a dog chasing a car…what would they do if they caught one?  Especially if they already have one…know what I mean?)

Latest Dieting Research

On a more practical note, I did  have some computer time (4 AM Sunday) to do a little bit of research on how to lose weight.

Scandinavian and Scottish genes like to stay warm when it’s cold out and winter is a tough time to keep fat off.

But it turns out there is some pretty convincing research on something called intermittent fasting.

The way it works is simple enough:  One day you eat about normally.  On alternating days you only eat 1/4 of your normal food intake.

There are several ways to get into this, including the 5:2 method described in the Wall St Journal back in December 2013.

The research also answered another great question for me:  How is it that my wife can still wear the same sized clothes she was wearing in high school?

Well, turns out in the researching, that there’s another way to lose weight:  Eat all your food for the day in a short window of time. 

In Elaine’s case, she rushes around doing homemaker magic and doesn’t slow down for breakfast until 10:30 AM, or so.  And usually, we try to eat around 4 PM, or so, because I don’t like going to bed full.

The payoff seems to be that if you confine your eating to a 6-8 hour window, then your body has the 16-hours it needs in order to drop into fat burning mode.    The research also seems to suggest that the “common wisdom” of eating small bites and this and that throughout the day is actually wrong if losing weight is the goal.

Sure, this keeps the blood sugar levels normalized, but if you’re going to lose weight in a serious way, you need to go 16-hours (or longer) with minimal food.  And there was even some discussion about an “eating every other day” approach.

That latter idea has a certain sensibility to it (not that I’m going to be that sensible!) in that wandering humans didn’t always have 3 to 6 squares per day.  In fact, they often got only a meal every day or two…or in the case of Roman Legions, they might get a bite of something for breakfast and then march until dark and then get some vittles.

The key (for me) is to begin the fasting upon waking.  That way, I am already past the “sugar burn” part and I can make it till dinnertime.

What screws me up is eating breakfast.  That starting me being hungry for the rest of the day.

None of this is medical advice, see your doctor before yada, yada…but it’s a ripe research area is you are finding those few extra pounds from the holidays are sticking around a bit longer than desired. 

There’s a Wikipedia entry on intermittent fasting over here.  Just remember as you read anything in the field that there are billions upon billions of dollars tied up in the whole business of selling diet whatevers…and those people can edit Wikis, too.

The way I look at it (already having found what really works great in terms of vitamins and energy levels) is the more a diet regimen costs, the less likely I’m inclined to try it.  I’d recommend a similar level of skepticism…

Around the Ranch

I mean besides running out of time for my own life?

Congratulations to George II who completed his annual re-cert to be an EMT-trainer.

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Quick!  What’s the difference between freezing rain and sleet?

I ran into this very useful graphic the other day in a NOAA presentation on winter weather that shows the difference between freezing raise (which we are having a bit of in Texas this morning, sleet, snow, and plain rain.

The Dakotas and down to Denver are expecting some serious winter weather and it will push down to the Republic this weekend and move eastward from there.

This is about the best graphic I have seen on the differences – and it’s one of those things that popped out of winter flying practice yesterday (outside air temp 19 at the time) and this is what the neighborhood looked like from 2,800 feet.  The grey trees are mostly oaks, a few hickory, and the deep green are southern/lob lolly pines.

The usual lush green down here turns a kind muddy brown in the winters and I was hoping to get “before and after” pictures of snowfall.

For better, or worse, though, looks like the forecast has dropped snow, so we will have to wait a while for the “after” pictures.  Understanding the weather, though, is really useful, weather you’re boating or flying.  Or, today, just living in the Dakotas or east of there as winter slides another one in this weekend.

Jobs Report:  Improved  (sort of…)

No doubt about where the market “should” end today after the manic rally the past couple of days.

Right about where it opens this morning.

And there’s a solid reason why:  The markets are often rather predictable to people who spend any amount of time learning different methods of market analysis.  And for the moment, the market looks like it will slowly edge up to new highs right around the end of the month.

Not a shoo-in, but near ‘nuff.

Should it happen, and we get new highs, that would push the “crash” potential out 55-days from the new highs, which means no crash until the end of March, which would be fine with us.  Although we havfe studied whatever we can get our hands on relative to Great Depressions, kit’s axiomatic that we don’t really want one.  But we can see the potential for one developing.

Just not today because the jobs report is out.  May I have the envelope, please?

“The unemployment rate declined by 0.2 percentage point to 5.6 percent in December, and the number of unemployed persons declined by 383,000 to 8.7 million. Over the year, the unemployment rate and the number of unemployed persons were down by 1.1 percentage points and 1.7 million, respectively. (See table A-1.)

Among the major worker groups, the unemployment rate for adult women (5.0 percent) decreased by 0.2 percentage point in December, while the rates for adult men (5.3 percent), teenagers (16.8 percent), whites (4.8 percent), blacks (10.4 percent), and Hispanics (6.5 percent) showed little change.

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The  nice thing about being delusional is you can do it all the time.

Take the market, for example, please.

The price of oil has rallied (all the way up to $49) and the market believes this to be splendid.

Similarly, the 10-year Treasury is up to 1.95% which is about as close to hanging out the “Free Money!” sign.

And while this continues, our view that we’re now in August of 1927 remains pretty much intact.

Oh, sure, the world could roll over and collapse into an economic heap, but until one of the financially important markets makes a mistake, it’s not likely to happen.

Even the Russians have quieted down a bit.  But off in the background, they have one-upped the West are are now inviting foreigners to serve in the Russian military.

And it’s not like other important fundamental state-changes aren’t happening:  One of the radical Muslim killers in France has reportedly turned himself in.  Yet to markets, which should be taking the Islamic take-down of Europe far more seriously, it’s been like trying to talk to drunks in mid-binge.

Maybe people who run markets really don’t study history, or, if they do, they must have missed the Moorish invasion.  To help out, a little Wikipedia help is in order:

“They grew well beyond the Arabian Peninsula in the form of a Muslim empire with an area of influence that stretched from the borders of China and India, across Central Asia, the Middle East, North Africa, Sicily, and the Iberian Peninsula, to the Pyrenees. Edward Gibbon writes in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire:

Under the last of the Umayyads, the Arabian empire extended two hundred days journey from east to west, from the confines of Tartary and India to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean. And if we retrench the sleeve of the robe, as it is styled by their writers, the long and narrow province of Africa, the solid and compact dominion from Fargana to Aden, from Tarsus to Surat, will spread on every side to the measure of four or five months of the march of a caravan. We should vainly seek the indissoluble union and easy obedience that pervaded the government of Augustus and the Antonines; but the progress of Islam diffused over this ample space a general resemblance of manners and opinions. The language and laws of the Quran were studied with equal devotion at Samarcand and Seville: the Moor and the Indian embraced as countrymen and brothers in the pilgrimage of Mecca; and the Arabian language was adopted as the popular idiom in all the provinces to the westward of the Tigris.

The Muslim conquests brought about the collapse of the Sassanid Empire and a great territorial loss for the Byzantine Empire, eventually also resulting in its collapse. The reasons for the Muslim success are hard to reconstruct in hindsight, primarily because only fragmentary sources from the period have survived. Most historians agree that the Sassanid Persian and Byzantine Roman empires were militarily and economically exhausted from decades of fighting one another. The rapid fall of Visigothic Spain remains less easily explicable.”

For the exceptionally stupid, this is what is going on globally right now.  And it’s being facilitates in fine Ju-Jitsu fashion, by leveraging the West’s insane addition to political correctness which, as we shall observe, is getting us into more trouble than it is getting us out of.  Remember, a good portion of the people coming in through that 700-miles of still-porous border with Mexico are OTMs – other than Mexicans and folks are coming from all over the world.

We are idiots and thus, doomed.  Don’t tell the markets this.  For them it’s the Roaring Twenties at least for another day. 

Tomorrow that might change with the release of new unemployment figures.  But already we have some samples and indicators of how that will play:

The new ADP jobs report out Wednesday was like candy for the market.  Up, up, and away!

And this morning’s Challenger jobs report showed something even more amazing: 

All of which should, by all rights send the market into a screaming rally that could last through the end of the month.

Based on these latest events, we are on the verge of rethinking the outlook for a market collapse from a low around February 19/20./  However before that comes off the table, we still need to see the Dow break back up above the December highs.

That would mean a rally up to 18,054 and since futures are suggestive of 200 points today, that would only get us close: around 17,800 maybe?  And that could be very bad because it would be a Fibonacci kind of bounce from recent lows, and then the market could start down next week, again.

Regardless, the Roaring Twenties is where we’re stuck for a while longer.  So grab your favorite flapper and let ‘er rip.  Why, just a decade to go and the zoot suit will be back.

Want even more gas on today’s screaming rally?  The Gallup polling organization has a hotty ou:

WASHINGTON, D.C.

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With Iran and Russia both pumping oil for all they’re worth, you’d think that some of the Big Brains in Washington could figure out that while “sanctions” sound like a high road morally, the reality is that when you kick a country enough, they will react in any way they can to set things back to normal.

So, quite naturally, when we put sanctions on Iran, it just gave China a cheap way to fill up its new strategic petroleum reserve.  And then along came the Russia sanctions, a gaff in the last Fed wording and next thing you know, we are at the 49 handle in oil with $40 and under getting to be a real distinct possibility.

Not every country has the natural resource at hand to jack their economies back to level after we deliberately try to push them over.  Some countries don’t – and in this case, you get the “cornered snake” effect.  If you don’t follow this, ask North Korea (or Sony) how this plays out.

Oil’s Collapse and The David Bird Mystery

Meantime, the mystery of David Bird continues. 

Odds are, you won’t remember his name, but he’s a Wall St. Journal reporter who forecast that with the end of the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easing, there would be potential for a catastrophic collapse in oil prices.

A year so, after writing such hard truths (such as are now coming to pass) David Bird simply vanished.  Even this weekend, there was coverage in New Jersey of his disappearance and the mystery that surrounds this most odd twist.

Or, is it really so odd? 

Dead bankers seem to be popping up all over the place, including a top Belgian banker who was found in the North Sea.  This fellow was #36.

All of which begs the question:  Who would be offing reporters for outing the Federal Reserve’s quantitative easting calamity which has only served to jack up commodity prices and thereby reduce the obviousness of our non-recovery?

That’s a toughie. 

One thing’s for sure, lots of people in the Oil Patch saw it coming, including and especially our source Oilman2 who yes, really is a rig engineer, and yes, really holds patents, and yes, really designs specialized equipment for rigs…One can almost imagine a massive intercine war in the oil patch over various kinds of oil-gang turf  like Bakken & Frackin’…

Hey G –

The big boys will be doing M&A stuff as the over-leveraged have to bail out of their sinking businesses. This is baked in for some now, but if prices stay as-is through end of Q1 (or lower), it will be baked in for the remainder of the year. Halliburton may benefit hugely by this in their acquisition of Baker-Hughes….wonder how many shares Dick Cheney holds of Big Red preferred???

Traditional wells (unfracked) have costs that can make money at $30-40. This is what we did in the 1990’s and industry grew. There will still be drilling, but it will be with rig count around 800-1000 in the US most likely. This means huge layoffs in the rig sector, oilfield services and steel mfg sectors. Difference this time?  There is no dotcom craze to switch a career into – can’t just know HTML or system admin and land a job anymore, as the digital sector is mature, not burgeoning.

For me?  Hell, I am 57 this year and consulting.

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The regular “heartbeat” of the Kondratieff long wave in economics has been jiggered with. 

By all rights, we should be in the Greater Depression right now, not still looking for it to develop over the next couple of years.

I’ve been telling you about this “Big Ugly” that’s set to visit the generation since 1997, so some skepticism on your part is, indeed, warranted.

Nevertheless, my buddy Robin Landry up in Shawnee, OK, who’s one of the best technical analysts ever, figures that his worst-case numbers (which in the very long term put the Dow at levels not seen since the early 1960’s) will be along sooner than later.

We passed an important milestone with the ^TNX (CBOE 10-year Treasury) trade”  Landry’s immediate concern is that we have already set up to take out the “2-handle”  (e.g. the TNX trading at under 2%)  But the real worry is that the 1-handle (an interest rate of one percent) will be taken out as well.

And this morning, with oil now down under $50 bucks in a convincing way, we have to sit back and review harsh realities around here.

Landry expected $80 oil would pause at $75…and that didn’t happen.  We then took out $70, then $60, and now $50.  The reason to hope oil will stop at $40 on it’s wan to the $30-handle is what, exactly?

We can already sketch in some of what the “NEW – New Economic World – will look like.  It just won’t be pretty:

• In the 1930’s depression “job sharing” was a common feature.  Today, we’ve already half-shot that gun with so many part-time jobs without benefits.
• Ditto in the front-end of the 1930’s government was actually solvent.  Today, we’re sitting on a stack of bills for free lunches that total just a bit more than our National Product annually.
• And unlike the 30’s, we’ve been holding shooting wars about every six months over in the sandbox countries, so we’ve spent a lot of resource there.

Looking ahead, to the end of this month, the Fed has a terrible problem:  If they attempt to raise rates, it will collapse the “employment recovery.”  But, if they lower rates, it will send the message that deflation is really here and that will spook the markets into a 4,000 point collapse before summer.

Their choice might come down to another quantitative easing because easy money is what had been holding up oil prices.  Without more QE, we could see not a 30 but how does a $20-handle on oil sound?

Our government folks are showing their lack of common financial sense in foreign policy:  Take the Russia “sanctions” for example.  This is driving the Russians into a 4 to 5% drop in their GDP this year.

You don’t really think a nuclear-armed, serious player is going to just roll-over and honor the Nobel-winner and his posse, do you?

Hell no:  Russia and the bomb-lusting government of Iran have both announced that they will be pumping more than ever.  Repeat after me:  The Player’s just been played.

Now we see no restraint on the Saudis, either, as they want as much dough as possible since they are writing the checks for the Global Caliphate to be set up. You don’t really think that mosque-building world-wide was strictly for fun, do you?  No sir.

All of which makes dandy strategic sense, if you can still stand looking at the world as a 12-sided chess game where all the players are using slightly different rules.  It’s how the world really works.  The Saudi version of “win” is different from the Russian version of “win” – and so forth.  Which leaves each of us to look for the next capture en passant and try not to be swept up in the passing.

How do we manage that little trick?

The Major Systems of Life

Count them up:  There are just seven of them:  Food, shelter, energy, transportation, environment, finance, and communications.

If you are able to provide for minimal levels of each of these items, your life will go on just fine, no matter how nutty the world around you becomes.

Just last night, my son called me up to inquire as to whether he could move down here to the Texas Outback (bringing a wife with him…he’s still running filters on that process) so he could build his own house.

As he explained it, none of his friends knows how to do bupkis – and he wants to pick up the old man’s ability to pour concrete, run wiring, do plumbing, put on a roof, and so forth  without paying of government along the way.

Oh, sure, building codes are nice (and we follow them – or better) but it’s the seeking permission part that gets him.

He’s seen us put in a simple (works great) septic system.  It cost next to nothing:  $750 for a large tank, another $350 in drain field and supplies plus $300-bucks in rental for the backhoe.  They are great fun to run, by the way.

All perfectly legal in Texas because if you observe 100-foot setbacks from property lines, have more than 10-acres, and other fine print, and no one complains of smells and such as you’re doing it, the process is easy-peasy.  But the cost differential is huge. A commercial septic is on the older of $18,000.  I know because I priced it out.

This is sweat equity.  Get used to it.

If you’re going to elevate yourself from the “run of the mill masses” who do nothing but play video games and RENT THEIR LIVES from da Man, then you’re going to have to figure out how the real game of life can still be played to win.

OK, he gets that with a house.  If you build your own, it will be easy to keep it in good repair virtually forever because you will have intimate knowledge of how it works.  And you’ll have both the sink wrench and basin wrench instead of needing to call a plumber.

And when comes to food?  You’ll be able to grow your own.

“Dad, what’s this Homesteading stuff I’m hearing about?”

Late-comers to the party, son. 

We’ve left a few back issues from our old Independence Journal site up over at our www.ruralpioneer.com website, but right now everyone with two flower pots and a home-schooling book thinks they are a homesteader. 

As we edge closer to the financial brink we will add content over there, but in the meantime, how to design/build a grid-tied solar power set-up is covered in our www.peoplenomics.com library which is almost 700-back issues deep and only maybe 50% of that is economics.

Still, the point of this morning it to try and figure out how to reduce your outgo, build your income, and try to avoid the position of believing too much about what people tell you the future is going to be like.  They’ll be wrong.

Classic example:  The US Department of Labor’s Occupational Outlook does not use the word “robotics” to describe the future of automation.  The word robot is used a few places, the the world they are describing?  Pure fiction and not a very good guess.  They still project a huge increase in carpenters, for example, which means they miss the social reality scene completely.

the LBGT movement means a lot of historical singles are happily coupling and that takes less square feet.  And childless unions sort of impact school and teacher projections, you think?

Someone in government “gets it” but then turns on a policy of Stupid by importing illegal high-risk kids with a propensity to gang and tosses them into the works in every major city.

Trust you saw the report that 700 miles of US border with Mexico is still ineffectively managed?

Trusting the future to government is like trusting the hen house to a dog that’s being used in LSD experiments.  Which is why, to our way of thinking, the closer you can get to freedom now the more you might be able to enjoy down the road.

Given that it’s now the first week of August 1927 (with a chance it’s August of ‘29) we should mention that the main point of this morning’s ramble is to alert you that the Fed could do something really stupid at the end of the month.

With the 10-year note headed for 1.5%  (my consigliore’s model) or at least down to the 1.75% range, you really need to figure out which part of the coming soup kitchen’s you wish to occupy.

Here are your choices:

• You can be a small-scale farmer and sell whatever is excess at rock bottom fair prices to the soup kitchen.
• You can manage or cook in the soup kitchen
• Or you can be in line to eat.

To me, this don’t sound like a terribly difficult problem to solve.  We’ve already decided (back in 2003 when I finished up my next-to-last big turn-around project) that when financial engineering collapses, the wise person will have a water source and the 4-Gs:  ground, gun, gold, grub.  Toss in a tent and a few tools and that’s how America was hacked out of wilderness.

OK, that and screwing the First Peoples over, but that a two beer discussion for another day. 

For now, the only question is: How long do you rent your life and do you ever go out and own it?

You can either voluntarily reduce your lifestyle on your own terms (as we have done), or you can wait for financial engineering to collapse and trust da Man to do it for you.

Which either makes us crazy, or just not very trusting of people with poor track records of getting things right.

Computer’s ARE Out to Get Us

Some reader feedback on our adventures with our media computer/Win 7 attack:

Oilman 2 contributes this map which shows the computer war in near real-time.  (Awesome find!)

Grady at our future-predicting web-scanning project (www.nostracodeus.com) offers this:

My anti-malware program caught an interestingly named Russian site in the scans yesterday: 

matchbox.alfatarget.ru 

Reader Rick (here in The Republic) offers this (with no warrantees from me!):

George, you may not know it but I am a reseller for Bluecoat https://www.bluecoat.com . They have a free Web filter program called K-9. You can download it here for free: http://www.getk-9.com/ It has NO adware etc. Bluecoat gives it away for free because it passes the URLs that people use to the Global Threat Analysis system (WebPulse) they use in their commercial products. All of their products send url requests to this system and it goes out to those sites and automatically classifies them for over 80 different classifications with up to four possible classifications per site. So, if K-9 asks WebPulse what a site is and it does not know, it checks the site and if the automated analysis is not 98% sure it knows it flags for a human to look within a few hours. In the meantime it classified as “unknown”.

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This wasn’t much of a weekend.

Most of it was spent fighting computer attacks and here’s the odd coinky-dink:  my buddy Gaye up at www.backdoorsurvival.com was also having her fair share of problems.

Not that they were insurmountable, in either case, since we are both “children of the Halt and Catch Fire days up in the Silicon Forest.

I don’t think she’d mind my sharing this from a New Years Day email about how her new year started:

About 4PM yesterday Malwarebytes started popping up with “blocked malicious site” message every 20 seconds.  Looks like I got the SysWOW64 virus.  Tried to remove it but finally posted in the bleeping computer forum – eta for help is 5 days.  Don’t know how the hell I got it.

Like us, she keeps computers in reserve/offline ready for this kind of emergency and by noon on New Years, she reported:

Good news.  It pays to have the premium version of Malwarebytes.  They responded to my support request within an hour, gave me a list of things to do, and all is now well.

Unfortunately, that’s right about when things started to hit the fan around here. 

Remember last week when I was telling you about how our internet service was terrible?  Still is dreadful, but about noon Friday one of our computers – the one hooked up to the big screen in the living room, and the one which streams YouTube, TedTalks, and Amazon & Netflix – kacked.

Antivir  which is one line of defense, started telling us we had a virus – which when removed, reappeared in less than an hour, and without being online.  Bad sign.

So that got me to running a full virus scan (clean) followed by a Malwarebytes scan (found one virus) and thought that would be it.

Wrong.

By Saturday, the computer was up to it’s terrible performance again – but neither Antivir nor Malwarebytes was finding anything. 

In fact, the only indication of something wrong was a buttload of .js and .json files up in the (sometimes hidden)  user local and roaming files; this was a Win-7 box.

Even with no viruses found, the system kept on creating these Java files and it was really bizarre.  In fact, the first time I ran Windows onboard file clean-up, it found somewhere north of half a million files up there.  And even when deleted, they would come back.

So that led (Saturday afternoon) to me going to war with the computer.  I got out an axe (figuratively) and went after everything.  Killed everything in the StartUp, uninstalled programs that I didn’t use often (*like Java, thinking that might have something to do with all the .js  files showing up) and then I took off Chrome (which was being spawned into background activity, and even Firefox which was suspect.

That led to a read of the Mozilla warning on the Java Deployment Toolkit.

To continue, I downloaded a fresh database for Sophos Virus Tool, and decided to let it run overnight.   No soap.

Again (now into Sunday morning) there was no virus found and our files that were just removed had appeared in the hidden user directory.  The files count was up to something like 255,000.

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