In one of the great twists of history (or irony), we arrive this week at the peculiar time of year when a religion founded on a savior gets geared us to be a savior of a different sort:  Saving the Economy.

For those who don’t know it, the reason Black Friday is called what it is because of the old financial term “In the Black.”   As opposed to “In the red.”

Many consumer products companies operate “In the Red: (losing money) until this time of year.  In shopping mall leases, for example, it’s not uncommon to have one rental rate for other parts of the year and a differential, higher rate for November and December.  In some leases, there’s even some juice for the mall owners – a bonus if sales hit some threshold, which is why you might here shopping center ads starting any old day, now, if they haven’t already.

The whole point of such ads is to get you down to the shopping center, where presumably you’ll wade through horrific traffic (things like flaring tempers over a primo parking slot are not uncommon) in order to pull out the credit card and load up on useless crap.

Not everything is useless: New phones and lingerie are two that come to mind.

Christmas season shopping is something we don’t do much of around here, anymore.  Somewhere out in the storage room we’ve got a lighted 12”-high ceramic tree that will suffice if we’re not too lazy to dig it out.  Seemed like too much work last year.

As for the Big Gifts?  Waiting for Christmas is for kids.  There’s no point waiting when a click can produce most goods in two days and time you can really afford it.  Most families we know don’t have any more money at this time of the year, so other than entertaining the kids, the big presents for mom or dad are more likely around landmark birthdays.

What’s more, although there has been a pretty good attack on Christianity all ‘round, with many crusaders forgetting that things like the Pledge of Allegiance remind us to be “One Nation, under God…”  the blowback is this:  If you attack Christmas, you also attack revenue.  Ooops~

With a GDP coming in around $17.5 trillion for the year, against accumulated public debt of $17.966 trillion means we are about 2.4% bankrupt as a country.  We haven’t learned a damn thing from the Housing Bubble collapse, so it will happen again…Not much reason for a merry anything, if you ask me.

A little resurgence of Believers at the checkout stands, buying big ticket items, could certainly help matters.  But with holiday-specific decorations banned many locales, nativity scenes cast as inappropriate for public places, and too many Christmas lights an affront to the conservationists, who’s in the mood to spend?  God help you if you have a liberal HOA that tells you what you can do with your own property this time of year.

Around here, we’re not planning to buy a single thing this year for one another.  $100 checks for each of the kids, a bigger one for the local Food Bank, but the real things of value we already have:  Each other, health, and no mortgage.  Gifts that keep on giving.

Tomorrow, I’ll go down to the county office complex in town with a check for another year’s worth of property taxes.  That’ll end our spending for the year, except for food and unless the car conks out.

The whole point of most religions was summed up in that great line from the movie “Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure”  “Be Excellent to One Another.”

It’s the one gift that can’t be handed down by government decree, won’t show up on Amazon or  at the mall.   It can’t be wrapped, nor is it particularly durable as divorce rates show.  It’s something that can be hoarded, saved up, put away, or resold.  Yet as those wiser than me have said, if you have all that click and mall stuff and you don’t have this, you ain’t got squat.

If you do have this one precious thing, none of the other stuff much matters, as it pales in comparison on any sane value scale.

The great conundrum of ‘Merica gets worse every year.  The sales hype becomes ever-more shrill as millions get twisted up into forgetting that “excellence to one another” is the point.  It’s the point in public, in government, and in private behind closed doors.

It may be what Common Core intends, but excellence to one another must be modeled, not storyfied.  Ruin enough families and there goes the modeled behavior part, eh?

This weekend, we talked about something I call the “Invention Horizon.”  It has application during the Christmas season. 

While each religion markets (often in exclusionary ways), underneath it all is this “excellence” gem…that’s the concept worth holding onto and sharing.

And if – as the anti-religionists demand – we do minimize the trees and wreaths and such, are we not fools for throwing the Baby out with the credit card receipts?

Seems to me that if we’re ever to advance off this lousy rock, we need to step back for a moment and embrace best of class human values and begin to generalize Christmas carols into what we might label People Carols…songs about the core values that transcend cultures.  *(I’d nominate this song from Bill & Ted’s as an example.)

Unfortunately, we aren’t yet able to cross that divide, except when it comes to a few bits of lyric in pop songs…but maybe that’s enough.  Well, at least it’s a start anyway.

As for Christmas saving the economy?  Yeah, might happen once again.

Ask me on December 6th.  That’s because there’s been a big increase in dream content over at the National Dream Center site that seems to be referencing of “employment” and the next employment report is due December 5th..  A week from Black Friday.

Three plus weeks of lead time on a news story?  Yeah, what a hoot, but remember there was about that much time on the last “biggie” like this – the Dallas/Houston worries that preceded the Ebola panic in what’s feeling like the same way.

But don’t mind the introspective Monday around here.  Just jump in the Cars and spend like there’s no tomorrow because, guess what happens on this track?

Just in is a press release come in from the Gallup Poll folks:

Gallup’s November measure of the total amount Americans expect to spend on Christmas gifts suggests U.S. retail spending this holiday season will increase by roughly 3%, better than last year but still below pre-recession levels.

Take it as you will.

Banks Have Got to be Kidding

Had a note pop up in the inbox from my Big National Bank we do business with. All because last week  I called their automated service (which was screwed up) so I ended up talking with a human.  Simple check order.

That should have been the end of the story. 

But then four days later this weekend up pops:

Tell Us What You Think   – Your Call on November 17

I politely told them:

Dear Big Bank:

Please note that I called and ordered checks on Nov. 17 (arrived before your email, by the way).  Then on Nov. 21 you ask me about my phone call experience.  I got to the email on the 22nd as you work for me, I don’t work for you.

Let me see:  The events took 10-minutes instead of 2.  Wasted 8 minutes of my time.  At my age, 8 minutes is a big deal. 

Since my time is worth $100 and hour (a bit overpriced, but what isn’t these days?) you wasted $13.33 of my time. 

We’ve had this time-wasting discussion before so I won’t hold my breath waiting for the compensatory deposit.

Let me get to the point, however:  I am 65.9 years old.  This means I have been around for how long? 24,053 days roughly.

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You may get sick of me talking about government’s “creative accounting” but here we go again.

With president Obama’s new amnesty plans out last night, we have to wonder how quickly these folks who are in the US illegally, but not now being deported, will show up in unemployment figures?

It’s not a pointless question because 4.5 million people will have to show up somewhere…or not.  Perhaps a good sleuthing reporter (like John Crudele at the NY Post) could find the answer.

So what will five million additional workers look like when tossed into the jobs hopper?  I suspect it will improve the unemployment rate, but that’s just a guess. We hear that 8.1 million are already in the workforce and unemployment data, so who knows?  Mexicans in the US is dropping while OTMs continue to climb. 

Questions about “how the numbers work” are fairly straightforward with publicly traded companies.  I found Disney’s 10-K report an interesting read this week, for example.

When you’re dealing with government, though, it’s a more difficult problem. Take the little matter of how many people have signed up for Affordable Care Act coverage.

The original story (thus, the one most people will remember) is that 7-million had signed up by August, or so.  But, it turns out, 380,000 signups were for dental plans, so the real ACA number was smaller and did not hit government goals.

While the republicats and democans battle out another point of minutia, what we have is a larger problem of lack of government candor.

And even width the election behind us, that’s a problem that’s not going away.

If you were facing an airline flight on a plane with the same kind of safety record as the government (both parties) have, I’m sure you’d walk, drive, or take a train.  And I’d be right there with you.

Executive Amnesty

Oh, sure, it still ignores the law, but it could have been worse.  Besides, when comes down to it, doesn’t a president have the ability to grant pardon’s?  Just think of it as 4.5 million of them all at once.

As the WaPo reported this morning, last night was a mix of celebration and disappointment.  And, oddly, I’d offer that this is what America really has become, thanks largely to the folks in Washington:  A “mix of celebration and disappointment” but shading more to the disappointment side here lately.

Wall St.

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I was sort of surprised this morning when the USA Today folks did a piece on the disproportionate number of blacks arrested by police in the US, especially when the article didn’t get into the more important number: Conviction rates.

Don’t get me wrong, the USA Today story that can be found online over here makes some fine points.

And yes, blacks really are arrested more frequently.  But that’s could change due to illegal immigration being made suddenly legal.

Quite telling on the conviction rates point is this Wikipedia snip:

Various studies have shown that, in recent decades, there has been no noticeable disparity in black vs white conviction likelihood for those accused in black-run vs white-controlled cities, say Atlanta vs San Diego. In the largest counties, the rates of prosecution for accused blacks was slightly less than the prosecution rates for whites, for example. “…the only hint of racial disparity was to the advantage, not disadvantage, of blacks accused of crimes.”

There may some disparity in the arrest rate, but I suspect that if the arrest rates were really different than the actual perp rate (which is not measurable) that conviction rates would be different.  They are not.

Which gets me to the first ponder of the morning in the area of Peoplenomics:  Do cops tend to “go fishing” where they catch the most fish? D’oh…

I hold that Americans are a lot less biased that guilt-peddlers would like to admit.  I would also suggest that when black “leaders” like Bill Cosby are getting hounded on date-rape accusations and where black urban music features lyrics about “popping a cap in yo ass” every drug ref in the PDR and such, that the drug underculture and “do overs”  conspire against black culture.  It’s been largely destroyed by well-intended welfare overseers who drove black male heads of households from homes with the inevitable outcome from parentless upbringings.  What the hell did the nation expect?

More trouble.

Do you think I’ll give reporting like this arrests story, which seems incomplete and polarizing in what could be two of the toughest days in America’s history of trying to get race relations right a “gold star”?

Think again.  I’m not that guy.  But it likely will sell newspapers.

While we await Ferguson  and Executive Amnesty, seems to me we ought to look to the sources of the real problem – which is all that money spent on social programs since the Great Society has not significantly changed poverty in America or the injustice that breeds what?

More after this…

Consumer Prices

Say hello, again, to deflation…

The Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) was unchanged in October on a seasonally adjusted basis, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported today.

Over the last 12 months, the all items index increased 1.7 percent before seasonal adjustment. Gasoline and other energy indexes declined, offsetting increases in shelter and an array of other indexes to leave the seasonally adjusted all items index unchanged.

The gasoline index fell for the fourth month in a row, declining 3.0 percent, and the indexes for natural gas and fuel oil also decreased. The food index rose slightly in October, with major grocery store food groups mixed. The index for all items less food and energy increased 0.2 percent in October.

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OK, here it comes.

Media Frenzy101 course.

First you lead with the governor of Missouri putting the National Guard at the ready.

Then have the FBI actually forecast violence.

Then you talk about how protesters have been training for weeks, now.  Key quote from one of the organizers from that story:

“And I also think we’re not going to get change in this society unless white people are just a little bit afraid.”

Hold the phone.

Sounds to me like what great evil?  Racism.

There is a fine line between free speech and sedition. Peaceful assembly?  No problem.  Rioting?  Big problem.  That would be an attempted revolution.

Wrapped up in fuzzy-think liberal jargon like “deep love” and it might just get pulled off.  Forget that the “target list” smacks of military thinking and revolution tactics.  Just claim free speech often enough to keep the “public” supporting the “revolution.”

Worst of all:  The organizers seem bent on rioting no matter what the Grand Jury comes out with.

Now, last time I checked, we were still a country of Laws  If a Grand Jury, with all the evidence before it comes out with a verdict that stops short of what the “organizers” want, which seems to  a lynching, by the way, then at what point does freedom of speech turn to revolutionary hate speech?  Inciting to riot was a crime, last I heard.

The law is the law.  But when two bit organizers in positions from the White House on down, ignore the law (like on immigration) and due process (pending in St. Louis), then that, dear reader, is a revolution.

Because the Left didn’t win at the polls, look for them to turn this into a media frenzy that ignores the founding principles of this once-Great Nation:  Rule of law, due process, and the peaceful pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness.

Unless you believe in lynch mobs, which seems to be the mindset of the revolutionaries and being promoted by the mainstream media.

I am no great supporter of Eric Holder (Gunwalker/Fast & Furious and contempt of congress, remember?) or how the administration is about to break a lot of other laws.

But the pending Media Frenzy over Ferguson seems curiously timed to coincide with the administration’s amnesty agenda.

If a genuine despot were planning to overthrow America, would video of a lynch mob and throwing out laws on illegal immigration be sufficient? 

Watch closely.

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Speaking of healthcare, as we do often around here,  the chief programmer of our www.nostracodeus.com project, Grady up in Alberta, just laughs whenever I begin to whine about how the US has the more f/u’d healthscarce system in the world due to three major factors.

The first, of course, is the pharmaceutical industry which lies about every alternative treatment that comes along if they can’t patent it.  There’s no money is a great vitamin regimen, something I totally believe in (and feel great because of).

The second point is that there are natural medicines that have been around since time immemorial that do absolute wonders.  A leading physician we know who holds many patents in his specialty, practices in one of the enlightened marijuana states. He’s gone the alternative medicine route after conducting more than a year of exhaustive research on the elementals of marijuana.  It’s not the THC (the getting high part) that is the miracle drug, although it does chance how music sounds.  No, in terms of ridding people of cancer and a whole shopping list of other ailments, it’s the cannabinoids (CBDs) that yield results that shame many FDA approved drugs.

And third, of course, there’s the how it all gets paid for.

In a rational government-run program there would be no  profit. Not that profit is bad, but the whole point of government is to provide profit-free services, although most (like fire and police) do provide jobs.  In the USA we have a wonder-kluge that pretends to provide healthcare yet at a price that is absurd compared to other places.

Grady, up in Alberta, pays $44 a month for whatever comes along.  And, he assets, most everyone else does, too.

So as you watch your lifestyle ratchet down over the next couple of years as healthscarce ramps up, pay attention to what this one lawyer/reader shared with me about the healthcare mess:

My version of your I Ching in box is what our family used to call “The Book Fairy” but now call “The Information Fairy”. Open a book and the page you open to will have the answer to your current pondering. Now it’s expanded to multiple media. And weeks now have themes. Last week was “Liberals can’t do math” week, a version of which one sees in every French election.

I love my many left leaning friends, but last week when the Obamacare bills were unleashed after the election, I posted my brother’s new rate, which went up 36%, or by $450 a month, and politely thanked Obama for nothing. I also asked liberals, who are in denial that the country is sick of their policies, to stop trying to help me. The storm of blue jerseys was astounding.

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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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