Once upon a time, in a galaxy far away, there lived a race of people who existed, near as anyone could tell, expressly for the purpose of fooling one another.

It was a happy planet, at least when the fooling was going right.  But much less so, when the fooling was going wrong.

On a particular Monday, Gazorp Universal Time, a ship that entered orbit around this odd planet, reviewed its recent observations and reported the following:

1. The inhabitants of the planet are enthralled with a time-wasting activity highlighted by excessive alcohol consumption in which they imagine there is meaning to a sport called “football.”  Everyone knows they can’t play football, and neither can a lot of the players.  Without the help of drugs.  When the government of the football country pulled a surprise “inspection” to see if drugs were being use, it was front page news .  We sadly report this as only our first example of a country “Fooling itself.”  Absent worthwhile leadership pushing toward conquest of space and time, this planet is absorbed in sports marketing as a multi-billion dollar industry, a prime example of “fooling itself.”
2. A second prime example was the G20 finance meeting this weekend.  Where it is clear that the world is quickly running out of resources to feed and energize its population, the G20 nevertheless persists in agreements to make up more paper (substitute for hard assets) and boldly (and stupidly) announcing its “Blueprint for Growth.”  We offer this as a confirming example of a planet “fooling itself.”  While it could be sharing knowledge and valuing all inhabitants more highly, their main preoccupation is with creating paper which is then traded for consumables.
3. Religions contribute to human conflict as we report their Pope is planning a visit to the football country in 2015 while at the same time, another religious group is working out the process of ‘tasteful beheadings to advances its goals.  Again, a planet doing what?  We have to recommend against any further external intervention agents such as we have sent previously.  This planet has a history of taking the core concepts we’ve shared and monetizing them for gains of money, power, or both.
4. While there are pockets of equality, most of the planets inhabitants engage in segregation of some kind.  The football country, having officially ended slavery 150 years ago, the segregation is now mainly along economic lines.  Again, an example of a ruling class fooling itself and imposing that error on everyone else.  We will report how well that plays when a grand jury report is handed down in Ferguson, Missouri, perhaps this week.
5. Our concluding observation that really clinches the “world fooling itself” comes as a company called Facebook announces plans for a “work” version of a playtime distraction.  As we previously reported on the Facebook model:  companies were convinced that they needed to move customer interaction away from their own websites onto Facebook pages.  Since there was no money in that, Facebook then held the moved audience hostage and now “rents back” the audiences brought by others in order to profit.  As we understand it, the Facebook work product would be a kluge of features already existent in products like LinkedIn, WebEx, GoToMeeting, and GoogleDocs and we expect a dash of Skype. As a previous report noted, this planet keeps inventing things until no one makes enough money and it is praised as “capitalism.” 
6. We believe that the sum of these and other observations will lead to another Global Financial Disaster, the timing of which could be anywhere from now until 5-rotations (years they call them) from today.  It’s an inevitable outcome we’ve seen on other planets when deeply delusional states take hold, and where the highest profits are made from fooling one another “most successfully.”.  Very similar to what happened on Betelgeuse 21 and Sagittarius 4.
7. We strongly recommend we repossess our Moon and move it to a planet better-suited to developing  civilization with a chance of maturing to direct-contact level.  Should we remind them it is a dimensional fold problem and not a rocket powered solution, or let them figure it out?  They’re leaving dead batteries and space junk on comets now…

More after this…

Book of Numbers

No,  not that one.  I’m talking initially about the NY Fed Empire State Manufacturing report just out.  From the NY Fed website:

The November 2014 Empire State Manufacturing Survey indicates that business activity continued to expand for New York manufacturers.

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I happened to be in the big city this weekend on business:  The Big City being Palestine, TX, population less than 20,000.

There, in the local Big Box store that specializes in tools and hardware was a Christmas Tree.  Plastic.  And priced at just $499.95.  The joy of this tree seemed to be the craftsmanship and it looked like even an idiot like me could assemble this designer-looking marvel with only a glass or two of wassailing juice.

How could I resist?

Resist, I did.  Promptly went over to hand tools and grabbed a 12” pairs of Channel-Locks and applied them to my forearm for the better part of 3-minutes.  Then I went back to the tree to recheck the price. 

It hasn’t changed and I was surely sober and in the moment, as evidenced by the edema on the arm.

I picked up a few things I’d come for and left shaking my head.  For a country where Social Security is going up only 1.7% it sure seemed odd to see a $500 plastic tree.

My next stop, Wally World, was a little more productive.  For one, I spent more money, and for a second, they had a kind of full-sized Santa that was like the Disney audio-animatronic.  This marvel of machinery would come two life at the damnedest times and begin “Fa-la-la-lah-lah’ing” all over himself and whoever was nearby.

Little kids in their grocery carts would point at the moving fatso and their indulgent parents would go over to observe the effects.  I would have paid big to find out what was going through their heads, but I knew what was going through mine:  The world has gone frigging mad.

Nearby was another lighted tree that I could buy and take home.  This one was only $249.95. 

Still, somehow at the advanced age of 65, spending money on a Christmas tree doesn’t seem like a wise environmental choice.  Trees sequester carbon.  And it stands to reason that if the world has high CO2 levels, sequestering carbon is a good thing.  So what cut them down?

Oil, on the other hand, an even more dense source of carbon, is used to make the fancy plastic trees so again, back to the sequestration problem.

It occurred to me that there’s a serious conflict between saving the environment and saving Christmas; at least in the retail sense.

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Three items for breakfast this weekend.  In our first serious Focus piece, we look at dynamics of oil pricing.  And how what goes on in oil could be setting up the Global Financial Collapse. Secondly, we look at timing the problem of the Global Depression. The third item involves the little matter of how to maintain the integrity of a system that seems to accurately forecast the future, as we discussed in the Friday UrbanSurvival.com column.

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Everyone knows the Mexican-American war from the history books.

Wars end with borders drawn and terms agreed.  Or, they used to.

Except that past string of corporate-owned politicians in Washington have ignored the border and instead have misappropriated resources of Border Patrol so that it’s a joke.  How did all those kids get here?

Now, it looks – just as I predicted before the election in no uncertain terms – like the Obama administration will roll out its 10-point plan next week which would let 3.7% of Mexico’s population to take up permanent residency here.

Democrats apparently have big hearts and don’t mind empty wallets (as long as they’re someone else’s):  The Washington Examiner notes that 42 percent of Medicaid signups are from immigrants and their US born offspring (used is the term anchor babies which isn’t a polite term).

The timing after the election is clear:  The administration will be moving as quickly as possible to roll the 4.5 million into America before the republican controlled congress and senate start blocking funds.

In the meantime, I’d like to congratulate the Obama administration for undoing the outcome of the Mexican-American war as part of the ongoing corporatist agenda to create a North American Union which will eventually do for our quality of life what the European Union has done for countries like Greece and Cyprus.

Way to go, O and ya’ll in the poor excuse for a congress.

By failing to enforce our southern border, they’re now about to unwind 166 years of American history because we failed to address the low-intensity conflict and the drug cartels that are rotting Mexico from the inside.  When Mexico falls, it will be by our hand.

The sad truth is there would not be drug cartels without a ready U,S. market and the porous  border allows for exactly that. 

Consequently, our taxes will go up, Mexico will continue to deteriorate, and the democrats will once again proclaim a great victory for “the people.”  Along with the CANAMEX highway and the Mexican trucks now displacing American rigs.  Yessir, fine defeat, this one. Way to frigging go.

For the record, I am a firm supporter of legal immigration.  The Executive branch, unilaterally deciding to impose a tolerance polity is not in my view, legal immigration.  It’s an imperial presidency.

Both sides of my family, decades ago stood in the lines at Ellis Island.  It insults their integrity to allow short-cutters  including many with criminal records to remain here.

I won’t bore you with more opinion.  There’s legal immigration (good) and there’s tolerance policies and ignoring the law of the land (bad).  We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between the two.  To wit:

8 U.S.

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As usual, a reader gets credit for sending me a press release link that I missed in my usual scan of the news.  Check this ou – from a university in Australia:

Griffith University academics are challenging the foundations of quantum science with a radical new theory based on interactions between parallel universes.

In a paper published in the prestigious journal Physical Review X, Professor Howard Wiseman and Dr Michael Hall from Griffith’s Centre for Quantum Dynamics, and Dr Dirk-Andre Deckert from the University of California, take interacting parallel worlds out of the realm of science fiction and into that of hard science.

The team proposes that parallel universes really exist, and that they interact. That is, rather than evolving independently, nearby worlds influence one another by a subtle force of repulsion. They show that such an interaction could explain everything that is bizarre about quantum mechanics.

Quantum theory is needed to explain how the universe works at the microscopic scale, and is believed to apply to all matter. But it is notoriously difficult to fathom, exhibiting weird phenomena which seem to violate the laws of cause and effect.

As the eminent American theoretical physicist Richard Feynman once noted: “I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics.”

However, the “Many-Interacting Worlds” approach developed at Griffith University provides a new and daring perspective on this baffling field.

“The idea of parallel universes in quantum mechanics has been around since 1957,” says Professor Wiseman.

“In the well-known “Many-Worlds Interpretation”, each universe branches into a bunch of new universes every time a quantum measurement is made.

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We consider the next moves for the leadership of our fictional Directorate 153 going forward.  We periodically look at a fictional extra-government unit that really pulls the strings in global affairs.  Not that it’s real, of course, but when we look at what goes on in the world, we can see what seems at times so much like an “invisible hand” that we have to consider the existence of such a group as a real possibility.

When we do, some interesting insights appear.  Particularly when there has been recent talk of the Berlin Wall anniversary and such.  Think of it as the “How we get bent-over next” search.

First, though,  coffee and headlines plus our trading model.  Oh, and do we thank climate change for this morning’s iced coffee?

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Coffee.

That’s what we need more of, around here.

Yesterday, for example, I missed my usual half-octane blend of regular and decaf, going for the decaf-only because it was time for my once-every-six-months visit to the doctor for the blood pressure and cholesterol checks.  Hence, no coffee…because with me, a cup of  serious caffeine is good for 10-15 more points on the high number.  I tend to add 10 points as a “white coat” reaction, anyway.

If the reference in the Monday column to Columbus Day made no sense, this morning I’d have to agree with you.  Doesn’t to me, either.  At least today is doesn’t.

Which explains why Mr. Timewarp somehow got into his head that Veterans Day was Columbus Day.  “No, you idiot,” wrote one reader directly “Ask Panama what day it is.”    Monday? I shot back.

Seriously, I would have asked the retired ex-SF/Ranger brother-in-law, but Panama was busily cleaning his favorite little .380 pistol at the time and Pappy didn’t raise no fool.  Several readers hinted at the error and I was slowly catching on.  I don’t take chances….

Going forward, we’re just going to have to agree here:  Every-so-often I will display signs of aging.  Or, I am so helplessly addicted to coffee that I can’t function without it.  I should put a little flag in the heading of each column that says something like “  Coffee:  ON” or “ Coffee: OFF.”  We might even find a correlation with spelling errors.

Where were we now?  Oh yes….

So I’m there at the doc’s place. The blood pressure was fine… although the doc is still trying to sell me on preventative medicine.

“You know, we need to talk again about you having a colonoscopy, since you’re almost 66 now….”

At this point I gave him my best upper-management Look of Death for Saying the Wrong Thing. I’m good at it. 

He looked worried, furrowing his brow as he weighed whether to press the point….and then brightened and said “Well, OK, we talked about THAT then….”  Smart man.

In a previous session I’d explained to him (in no expletives deleted terms) that I appreciate that there is a trade-off between a colonoscopy and risk of having some dreaded disease, or other.  But I also made it clear that when someone sticks various instruments and implements up in “No thank you” areas, and wants me to shoulder all the liability if anything goes wrong, no, that is not exactly “risk sharing.”  Show me some quid pro quo, bro.

Near as I could read the proposed 13-page waiver of liability fine print, if something goes wrong (like an intestinal wall is broken) that could lead (worst case) to death.  I suppose that at least would not be a tax event from my standpoint, but still….

Let me think about this:  My side of the equation is, let me see:  Money and death.

The doctor’s side of the equation?  If something we4nt wrong, they might have to do emergency surgery and that could delay the next appointment on the health care delivery conveyor belt, or in extreme cases, delay a tee time.

The good news is that there was an article in the October (yeah, the month when Columbus Day was) issue of MIT Technology Review that described how a spoonful of special yogurt and a urine sample might very quickly replace the colonoscopy.

I’m sending my doctor a copy of the article and mention that “when the test yogurt is available in strawberry flavor I’ll be taking that replacement test.  Provided the waiver of liability is less than two pages.  I might consider other flavors, too, like blueberry…”

Alternatively I should really ask if a self-inspection is out of the question since several readers have suggested that my head is already conveniently located in the required inspection position.

The “Offset of Reality” Problem

Since this is a pseudo-holiday, we can focus on the important items next.  Not that personal health isn’t, but to my way of thinking WoWW (World of Woo-Woo) reports are much more fun to study than, oh, say colonoscopies.  One is shit weird while the other is just weird shit, if that doesn’t ruin your PopTart.

Some readers think that the report from James in yesterday’s column gives away the real source of Woo-Woo reports (like jottles and such) as nothing more than perception breaks on the part of the people involved…  Reader Bobbi sent this….

Hi George,

   As much as I’d like to blame the Hadron collider, I think reader James is probably correct. It’s probably what makes the difference between an autistic person and a normal person. Maybe Woowoo is a glitch in that system.

  This morning I had a brief one. I had a rack of 40 test tubes, each with its own screw-cap lid securely fastened. One tube in the first row had its lid missing.

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