I’ve written to you many times about the odd goings on in the world that we are slowly sneaking up on…those events called “woo” (formerly wujo, but that term was obsoleted by a language change).  What we are piecing together is the idea – from ongoing reader reports – that the world really may be operating in accordance with Everett’s Many World’s Interpretation  (MWI) of quantum mechanics.

The overview of how this all operates is presented in the Nov. 1 article “Preppers as Procogs” and the drawing, if nothing else, are worth a quick review if you haven’t seen them.  It shows have the world “on average” can split and then “rejoin” itself.

All of which is necessary baseline to report the adventures of reader Pat, who lives in the Medford, Oregon area.

A troubled-sounding email came in from her on Boxing Day:

“…on December 24, i was exiting the south exit of Medford and there was a sudden shift of something (i was in the right place but not the right time)and the exit was unrecognizable. the street was wider, landmarks were different. my first impulse was to hit the brakes since i felt the “cat held over running water syndrome” but i gritted my teeth held onto the steering wheel for dear life as they say and by the time i reached the merging traffic into Medford i was back in familiar surroundings. it was horribly weird and tho i probe the incident in my mind like something stuck in my teeth i cannot make sense of it and have told only one person because it feels like i slipped a cog and lost my mind on the south Medford Oregon off-ramp for 15 seconds or so on Christmas eve.   -pat

As you’d expect, this has been deeply troubling Pat.  So I was pleased to receive another email from her Monday with the subject line “Revisited that south Medford exit over the weekend….”

“…and it is only a single lane exit not a six lane (three exit-three entrance) on and off the highway. that was such an uncomfortable experience i dont think i will take the everyday world for granted again. i am a person who takes landmarks very seriously.

i have such a strong feeling that something terrible (like a tsunami of plain old bad) and life changing is about to happen in the near future and it seems to be a feeling shared by many people. could it be a universal knowing or perhaps fostered by a sharing on the internet?

regarding everything is a business model.

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A number of readers have asked me to research a bit into “phantom time” which (even if you haven’t read Anatoly Fomenko’s History: Fiction or Science? (Chronology, No. 1)) is an intriguing notion that would destroy a lot of present-day thinking.

The Wikipedia notes on “Phantom Time” relegate the idea to the the trash heap, at least on the surface:

The phantom time hypothesis is a revisionist history and conspiracy theory developed in the 1980s and ’90s by German historian and publisher Heribert Illig (born 1947 in Vohenstrauß, Germany). The hypothesis proposes that periods of history, specifically that of Europe during the Early Middle Ages (AD 614–911), are either wrongly dated, or did not occur at all, and that there has been a systematic effort to cover up that fact. Illig believed that this was achieved through the alteration, misrepresentation, and forgery of documentary and physical evidence.^[

Of course, Fomenko is not the only researcher to come to the conclusion that there may be 325 years just “made up” in our historical past.  Oh, and as Fomenko contends, some of the key figures of what we take to be legit history were more likely made-up fictions who were given names of never-lived people or patterned after then-current-day folk heroes of Roman times. 

This is a battle that you’re likely to hear a lot more about.  One reason is that the wide-open communication of the internet makes it possible for people to simply “make up” a good yarn and use it to drive traffic to a web site.  It works, too.

And the other reason, of course is that “truth” is a very slippery and subjective thing, subject to the winds blowing through society at a particular time.  Which is why what an avid Christian may believe about “law” and “justice” may be considerably different than what an avid Muslim, or Buddhist, may believe about “law” and “justice.” 

Much of what’s believed is contextual and is based in no small part of how your personal operating system was installed.  I refer to the low-level formatting of your perceptions by your parents, their actions, and conferred belief structures.  Hell…their whole “way of being” is passed on at a low level that most people never get around to inspecting.

So, having said all this, yes, there are inconsistencies in the historical data, and researchers like Dr. Hans-Ulrich Niemitz (Berlin) have published some quite remarkable papers like the one “Did the Early Middle Ages Really Exist?” which may be studied online here; it’s 15 pages worth.

This a very worthy paper because it gets to the heart of the calendar-settings debate:

It seems, unbelievably, that Caesar introduced his calendar in 325 AD. This is unbelievable because by then he had already been dead for more than 300 years. If 16 centuries had passed since Caesar’s introduction of his calendar, the Julian calendar in Gregory’s time would have been out of sync with the astronomical situation by 13 days, not 10.

Others, including Fomenko, have noticed oddities like this, too/  Yet defenders of the old (Western) calendar cite factors like dendrochronology, which is the study of tree rings to make their case.

The problem is that even a “hard science” like dendrochronology has issues.  For example, if a block of 325 years really was just twisted out of the conventional time-line by the mad monks a-marketing, who did extensive historical revisionism as part of the rewrites of Biblical history in order to “age” Christianity relative to the new religion on the block (Islam), there’s nothing in the tree rings that says “anchor Islam here.” Or, anchor “Christianity here.”

As Hans-Ulrich Niemitz’s work notes:

Uwe Topper and Manfred Zeller pointed out how to resolve some important riddles and research problems of the Islamic and Persian-Arab-Byzantine world using the thesis of the phantom years. Firdowsis’ well-known epic, the Shahname, written around 1010 AD, ends with the last Persian king Yazdegird III, who died 651 AD. The epic tells nothing about the Islamic conquest of Persia and has no allusions to Islam at all.

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Sit down, relax, and open your mind up.  We’re going to venture into the most highly speculative thing I’ve written in a good, long while.  There is a longish chain of data to follow, but it leads to a very interesting bit of speculation.  This is a complicated story and we are still barely upright apes.  We’ve only recently figured out electricity, after all…so come on along on one of my holiday rambles…

The timing of this is important, as we head to what some (like Patrick Geryl) have hypothesized as an early January quake.  Whether it comes in as the 7+ class is not so much the point as the rather interesting thing that I’m personally experiencing right now.

Let me see if I can start from the beginning, for a change….

As anyone who knows me realizes, I’m a pretty intense and high-energy person.  You look in any dictionary for the definition of “Type A” and the odds are 0.00000000000000.2% that my picture will be there.  But still, higher energy than most.

Now, there are a couple of things which will slow me down measurably.  One is (like anyone) a good-sized meal with a lot of tryptophan.  Since we had a wonderful  Christmas dinner (turkey and dressing, yum), I have been indulging in all my favorite turkey left-overs. 

So yes, the combination of turkey/tryptophan and carbs is rumored to make one a bit sluggish compared with the usual “slow down or you’ll burn up in Earth’s atmosphere” ways.  But, as Wikipedia notes:

A common assertion is that heavy consumption of turkey meat results in drowsiness, due to high levels of tryptophan contained in turkey.^[50][51] However, the amount of tryptophan in turkey is comparable to that contained in most other meats.^[17][51] Furthermore, post-meal drowsiness may have more to do with what else is consumed along with the turkey and, in particular, carbohydrates

Which gets me to the point of mentioning that IF I can’t blame turkey, stuffing (mega-carbs) for the feelings of tired, and since my activity level keeps the risk of cardiac issues low, we can skip on the next second choice.

Would you open Curtain Number Two and let’s see what’s behind it?  Our research is about to take an odd turn.

There are lots and lots of people who are sensitive to earthquakes before they happen. 

The symptoms which show up range from dizziness to sick to (in my case), just plain damn tired-like with no particular reason. 

There are plenty of discussions around the ‘net that you can look into.  This one over at AboveTopSecret dates from 2010.  Other people, as in this discussion over at GlobalPsychics, feel an assortment of “odd,” “tired,” or, in some cases get “headaches.”

Why I think there’s something to this related to those “ongoing notes” I keep making (some in the column here).

So pardon me, but over the next week, or so, I will be posting my “energy level” since in the past when I’ve had such feelings ahead of quakes, they are usually passed a day or two before the quake.  It’s almost like I am “resting up/storing energy” in advance of a quake (even though it doesn’t effect me, personally) and then right before the quake I get a rush of energy that must be something like Superman experiences.

It’ just plain ain’t normal, but it seems to be real.

So this morning I would say my…

Personal Energy Level:  7 (on a scale of 10 which is high/normal).

So for the next week, I will post here and on Peoplenomics) my personal energy levels when I get up in the morning.  Then, if there is a quake, we will be able to sort of plot the energy level change in advance of a major quake.

There’s plenty of scientific reason to do this on a mass scale.  We know that there are plenty of phenomena that are related to earthquake and earth movements.  Some of these include the odd appearance of “earthquake clouds” which have been dismissed generally as lenticular clouds, the so-called “earthquake lights,” and there may even be tie-ins to things like “Seneca Guns” which are unexplained loud explosion-like sounds hears in weeks (to to a month, or so) before earthquakes.

When something (like Seneca Guns) is well-enough established in the literature that it appears on a USGS site (like that last link) I give it high creds.

And have we had some “indicators” going off about a seriously huge quake to come?  Well, hold on to your hat:  Reader Fred J up in Northeast Arkansas sent me a Christmas note on 12/24/2013 at 9:26 PM that is precisely on point…

We had a loud boom here in northeast Arkansas today that was heard by lots of folks but no one seems go know what it was. I did a google news search for loud boom and found several instances during the past month or so with varying explanations. Might be the sound of Obamacare collapsing. LOL

Merry Christmas to you there in east Texas. I’m going to go snuggle in my bed and wait for visions of sugarplums.

Fred

They key thing is that in modern times, these “earthquake” noises may be occurring, but because of the very high level of distraction from living in over-communicated world, people may not have the sense they used to have about quakes.  They may not be aware of the Seneca Guns and other indicators.

Accidents in Research/Oddity in Data

Now, the other thing which I should mention has to do with the “earthquake lights” phenomena.  The scientific reasoning behind “earthquake lights” is that the earth, when moved, especially in areas of high granite content, may release gobs of Piezoelectricity.  Theory is that all the energy may express itself as flashes of lights.

The twisting of crystalline structures is known to produce small amounts of electricity, and in the 1970’s the big rage in CB radio was to have a “ceramic mic” since supposedly they were much cleaner sounding that simple Piezo/crystal mics.  Point is:  Ceramics can be bred in the lab to do nice things with electricity when excited by sound, and when you think about what the cooling Earth is, it’s all once-molten “ceramics” so the Earthquake Lights may actually have a power source.

Fine:  So what do we do with all this speculation?

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Yes, the power is still off for a fair number of readers in Maine and Michigan.  Not that power going off during a winter storm is totally unusual:  It has been going on for over a hundred years on a semi-annual basis, but we still (being I suppose, infatuated with electricity, here on the toddler planet) manage to find the lack of electricity as somehow unthinkable.

Yes, it happens.  And it happens from weather.  And media has now gone completely over the top by naming every breeze a “named storm” but it makes sense, if you run weather sites, channels, or are looking to build the case for warming, cooling, or whatever.  Winter storm Gemini, indeed.  It’s winter, for crying out loud, and we made it through how many hundreds of thousands of years without putting marketing monikers to it?

Christmas delayed is Christmas well played, at least among the online retailers.  Which is why UPS and FedEx are both working off point and clicksmas leftovers.

About the only economic news around is that the world didn’t end, and that’s reason enough for the market futures to tack on another 40-points, or so, at the opening.

Perhaps one reason is all the people still on vacation.  Fearless Leader himself is out for 17-days, which means he won’t be back in Washington until well into the New Year.

With so many missing from Washington, the markets are in a “What could go wrong?” mode.  There are no Fed meetings, no hearings, no tax plans afoot.  And, so hard is it to find anything domestically to report on (other than the usual murder and mayhem) that the press has taken to just naming stories like “Hawaii Vacation: Day 5.”

Having ultimate confidence in the deeply insightful capabilities of the MSM, I’m expecting the bulletins to come breaking this afternoon:  “Hawaii Vacation: Day 6.”

Can I go back to bed now?

Wars on de Nile

The biggies that are in play this morning in the Middle East, although not entirely focused on Egypt, sure to have a lot of geographical emphasis on the word “Nile.”

For one, the biggest development in Egypt, which has been popping up in our word-frequency research for more than a week, is the announcement on Wednesday at the Muslim Brotherhood is now being called a “terrorist organization” and has banned it.

This gets to be an complex stew:  You’ve got the military government trying to run Egypt in a middle of the road way, you’ve got the Saudi’s off in the background, who are pumping something like $2-billion in aid into the place, yet at the same time, wasn’t it most Muslim extremists from Saudi Arabia, who were the purported perps in 9-11? 

And then you’ve got US foreign policy in play which is just incomprehensible, and has been since before Benghazi, but wait, I tripped, so I can’t testify.  *(I may sound just a wee might cynical on this stuff).  To deduce America doesn’t know you-know-what from Shinola would be a reasonable assessment.

Of course, Benghazi has nothing to do with Egypt, except as a symptom, and that works for us.

The other symptom (more recently and more importantly) is how the upper Nile district of Sudan is now in play.  From Wikipedia:

Upper Nile is one of the 10 states of South Sudan. The current governor of Upper Nile, and its first governor in the independence era of South Sudan, is Simon Kun Puoch. The White Nile flows through the state, giving it its name. The state also shares a similar name with the region of Greater Upper Nile, of which it is part along with the states of Unity and Jonglei. It has an area of 77,823 km². Malakal is the capital of the state. The town of Kodok, the location of the Fashoda incident that ended the “Scramble for Africa“, is located here. Upper Nile seceded from Sudan as part of the Republic of South Sudan on 9 July 2011.

Well, except that Sudan is not about to give up claim to an area with great mineral wealth, petroleum, and oh yes…water!

Despite what the governor of Upper Nile  (Simon Kun Puoch) thinks about rebels not being in control, the rebels have missed that email, and so fighting continues.

Other Fronts

In our Manufacturer’s Resource Wars framework include Iran where it’s been a bombing festival in Iraq. 

An d its musical government in Turkey where three cabinet ministers have quit charging corruption so it’s the old “Let’s do the shuffle” among the powersthatbe in charge there.

If you were thinking Santa would have brought the world some Prozac, we are pretty sure the whole of the Middle East was missed.

Hunger for Good News?

The tempering news is that according to a Gallup Poll, most families still routinely dine at home (sometimes even together) which is what may be holding the last bits of civilization in place.

Honor the Dead:  Wrong Dead

Yasukuni Shrine is not something you probably knew about until this morning.  Wikipedia says…

It was founded by Emperor Meiji to commemorate individuals who had died in service of the Empire of Japan during the Meiji Restoration

And that Meiji period was what?

The Meiji Restoration (????, Meiji Ishin^?), also known as the Meiji Ishin, Renovation, Revolution, Reform or Renewal, was a chain of events that restored imperial rule to Japan in 1868 under the Meiji Emperor. The goals of the restored government were expressed by the new emperor in the Charter Oath.

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As 2013 draws to a close, we come to the start of another year, and with it, perhaps, a change in how the world operates.

There’s so much going on, it’s hard to all take in at a single sitting, but there are two points of interest which intrigue me.

One, of course, is the Nordic legends of Ragnorok, but the good news is he holds off on the world-ending until a few days after my birthday, which I very much appreciate.

I’m tempted to put a countdown timer (Days till Ragnorok) on the right panel of the site…

Then, coincidentally we have 2012 researcher Patrick Geryl who’s on the track of major quakes and a possible poleshift in 2014 (or beyond) because the literature is just so very clear.  Clearer in fact than the calendar, which if you recall from past discussions, doesn’t include a “Year Zero” – which can mess things up.

If you were anxiously awaiting a massive global quake and coastal events in 2012/2013, don’t give up just yet.

Which gets me to Patrick’s latest observation that there has been a real lack of major quakes now for more than a month:

Hi George,

We had only 3 quakes with a magnitude from 6.0 or larger the last 30 days…

Link to Wikipedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earthquakes_in_2013

Link to USGS (large link):

According to my findings, this is unprecedented the last 11 years… I searched the database from USGS since 2002, and found only 1 time period that is less or more similar…

http://quake.geo.berkeley.edu/anss/catalog-search.html

2002/06/30 21:29:36.30 -22.2010 179.2500 620.40 6.50

2002/07/03 23:00:18.47 -5.0320 147.3360 31.20 6.20

2002/07/19 06:43:55.10 -56.6230 -140.6900 10.00 6.10

2002/07/30 06:55:07.78 -57.8890 -23.2420 33.00 6.20

So my question: what is going on? At least this is something quite unusual… Is the pressure building up in the volcanoes? Or is it the prelude to the start of the real Mayan end date?

Question: Can your ‘Quake’ friend do some research around this?

Cheers,

Patrick

I will forward this to him for his consideration – you bet!

But, in the meantime, this none-too-cheery Youtube video popped up:

So we will keep an eye on this, not expecting anything to come of it, but it does make for interesting viewing while we await the completion of the blow-off top in markets which is underway and which should reach a crescendo by, oh, the end of January, or so.

We’re watching with a kind of morbid curiosity – and keeping the old airplane ready to launch for high ground.

A further reason?  The recent quake swarm in the Canary Islands  and other Atlantic locations.

The chief producer of Coast to Coast AM invited me to come on and talk about what’s ahead and why I am on a new kick about taxing robotics.

I’ll be publishing a short e-book on the topic (free).  I expect to whip it out in the next few days – the first part was on Peoplenomics yesterday.  Part 2 will be along Saturday.  e-b ook to follow next week.  Nothing big – 10-15 pages is what it feels like, for now.

But it all comes back to the fact that the people who own machines do not pay adequate taxes on their machine’s outputs and government actually incentivizes companies to “de-human” their workforces by subsidizing machine purchases while penalizing hiring of humans.

Depreciation and other incentives don’t apply to humans.  But HR regs out the ying-yang, taxes on incomes, workman’s comp…well, you can add those up all day long.

Of course the subtle part of this is that the MainStream gets so overloaded with the (made-up) right-left battles, that the greater reality of how the machine owners (*and their bankers) ending up with all the marbles, is lost.

“Little wonder,” notes my wife Elaine, “So many people are lost and without purpose or direction today.  People don’t seem to understand that we’re now living the part in the movie “Metropolis” where people mindlessly go to work without point or purpose…yet that’s what the film was about…in 1927!”

And as usual, she’s exactly right.  It was a mighty prescient film.  You can watch a pretty good version of it on YouTube here although budget 2 1/2 hours for the project.

Turkey Hangovers, Child’s Play, Wii be Fine

Not much of a Christmas this year at, both at a personal level and a kind of group-gestalt level by the look of things.

It looks like the online etailers may have had a much better year of it than the brick and mortar crowd, based on the report that UPS (and Fedex, to some extent) has overloads from too many people pointing and clicking.

Most of “Christmas delayed” should be cleaned up by the weekend, and them will come the onrush of the January clearance sales events.

At a personal level, chili isn’t my personal favorite Christmas eve dinner, but the turkey yesterday more than made up for it.  What soured things was personal issues between a couple of my kids, which resulted in BS phone calls during Christmas dinner.  I chose not to answer until after dinner, and by then – as tiffs between people in their 30’s going on teens tend to do –had spiraled into turmoil that the UN would be well-advised to avoid.

It was a harsh reminder that the “Only person you can be responsible for is yourself” and that when people under 90, or so, begin trying to preach and teach one another, things often end up in the ditch.  This was their “often.”

And when it becomes apparent to the drama perpetrators, the old “soldier gathering” ploy kicks in and then come attempts to drag others into the drama…hence, my phone rings. 

I’m sure you’ve seen that psychological “play action pass” run if your family circles, too.  It seems the outliers of common sense come down the chimney over the holidays and emos run high..  This was our year and chimney, I suppose.

Other than the disruptive calls from the kids (Me?  Bitter?  Which is why, at near-enough age 65, I can still call them kids…) it was a fine turkey and lots of sleep followed.  My after-dinner snooze lasted from 5:15 to about 7:45, and then the sleep from 8 PM to 4:30 AM.

Armed with a can of cream of mushroom soup, several bacon strips and toast points, I’ll be the guy making an SST sandwich imitation for breakfast.  (The recipe was discussed in detail after Thanksgiving.)

Panama and Elaine got into a Wii festival.  We bought the game console (on sale, natch) about five years ago and  we drag it would every now and then.  But after not playing for a long time, it’s surprising how much fun they are.

Which gets me to the learning point that maybe be really people don’t need to buy much (going forward) when comes to giving and gifting and such. 

Maybe Christmas is best spent rediscovering “the old toys” like our aging Wii.  It’s just as good a time-sink as ever and the cost was nearly zero, save a fresh dose of 8 double-A batteries to bring the balance board and the controllers back to life.

Looking ahead to Christmas 2014?  We’ll start thawing the turkey in about mid September.  And we’ll have our phones disconnected for the month of December.  Then Wii’ll be fine.

In a “crack-up” boom, you might be well-advised to counsel your kids to consider jobs in the shrinkupational pursuits: 

The more crowded and less directly dependent we’ve become on another another in the virtualized world, the more emotional issues result. Stress in the feedlot.

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{Reader Note:  Coping with a cranky computer this morning so our usual formatting may not be as crisp as usual.  You may need to use your back button to read the whole column this morning until the problem is resolved.  Early this morning it was be a writer or computer geek.  Guess you can tell which one I picked.

Not to worry, computers live in fear of me and I will beat some respect into this i7-920 POS as soon as this morning’s report is done…for now, now computers were harmed in the making of this morning’s report.  That is, however, subject to change.}

Oh, sure, nice rally yesterday in the market.  But this morning, Santa’s apparently going to step out for a toke and a dram, at least that’s what the futures are hinting at.  One reason?  A press release from ShopperTrak has us wondering if the Old Fat Feller has lost his sway over the instant gratification crowd.  Why wait for one day a year, after all?

“Last week was the last chance for procrastinators to finish last-minute holiday shopping, but the weather prevented many from getting to the stores. ShopperTrak – the world’s largest counter and analyzer of retail shopper traffic – reported that for the week of Dec. 16 to Dec. 22, GAFO* in-store retail sales decreased by 3.1 percent from the same week last year. Retail brick-and-mortar shopper traffic decreased by 21.2 percent compared to the same time period in 2012.

“Bad weather throughout the country kept some shoppers away from stores,” said Bill Martin, ShopperTrak founder. “This past week was their final opportunity to complete their holiday shopping before Christmas – and though many did finish making their purchases, retailers did not see as many shoppers as last year.”

Despite more markdowns and promotional efforts from retailers, “Super Saturday” (Dec. 21) saw a decrease in retail sales by 0.7 percent compared to 2012. In-store shopper traffic decreased 18.1 percent from the same day last year. ShopperTrak predicts after-holiday markdowns to drive robust retail sales and store traffic days to come, particularly the day after Christmas (Dec.

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I have to imagine the biggest part of “coping” right now is all the last-minute holiday activities, so I’ll keep this morning’s comments short and to the point.  (yeah, right…)

As of this morning, it looks like the weather is not exactly cooperating:  There are plenty of reports of delays traveling around the East.  As usual, the mainstream media will be pointing out how serious the situation is, but a more relaxed ‘tude suggests that it is winter after all, so what’s the big?

The latest Triple A Gas Gauge report (over here) offers that the current price of regular (nationally) pencils out to $3.258 compared with a year ago when it was running $3.247.  That does tend to back up the recent assertion that there’s little inflation in the economy, so perhaps that’s something to be thankful for.

Around the ranch, we’ll be putting on a turkey later on this morning.  And, about 5 PM, or so, we’ll sit down to a Christmas Eve dinner with all the fixings.  But we’re not doing presents this year.  With the exception of recapturing more of our youth, and planning more travel, there’s not much left to want.

The kids, on the other hand, are getting their checks in the mail and all seems well with that.

There are a few people who contribute greatly to the content around here, who I’d like to personally thank for their help over the past year.  These include:

• Grady at the www.nostracodeus.com project which is where we look at word frequencies of various things, since there have been many instances where words arriving, fresh into the headlines, indicate bits and pieces of the future to come.
• Stephen, my consigliore/ (a real-life) attorney in the upper-Midwest, is on the mend from a skiing accident a week, or two back out in Colorado.  He’s going as fine as can be expected with a plate in his foot, and I just know he’ll be looking forward to future air travel and conversations with TSA about why he’s setting off alarms.  Our wishes for a speedy recovery.
• Bernard Grover of our Jakarta Bureau deserves thanks for the many fine reports from the Dark Side.  That’s where many of the jobs that used to reside in the US have gone. SE Asia.
• No list would be complete without mention of JB Slear over at www.fortwealth.com who always offers keen insights on how commodity markets are going.
• So, too, the comments (particularly on Elliott wave counts) of Robin Landry up in Shawnee, OK are gratefully accepted.  They may get snow for New Years up in Oklahoma, according to the forecasts.
• And then there’s Oilman2 who (right about now) is back offshore on a rig 200 miles out in the Gulf.  Hell, if I was making his day rate, I guess missing some of the meals shoreside would be worth it.  His insights into the real oil picture are very important.  Without oil, without gas, we’re toast as a civilization.
• Our News Analyst fellow up in Winnipeg (David) contributes greatly.  He’s got a sharp, investigative streak and not only knows what the good questions are to ask, but also how to use the wide-open web to find the answers.
• And then there’s Warhammer, our war gamer/expert who’s no longer flapping with the B-52 crowd, but instead if able to share his insights from the (relative) safety of East Coast academia.  Although, I wonder if the Air Force isn’t safer (in some ways) than the battles in higher ed.  Especially with the Student Loan Great Reckoning still ahead.
• And last, but not least Gaye Levy up at www.backdoorsurvival.com. Between our two sites, there’s a carefully planned (sometimes, anyway) symbiotic relationship:  UrbanSurvival is about right now, get it done aspects of news and current events.  BackdoorSurvival offers the longer, more considered prepping plans with plenty of “How to do its” for when you get (properly) freaked by the headlines.

There are many more contributors, of course, but those folks have been like year-long Christmas presents for us:  People whose word you can “take to the bank.”  In their individual fields of expertise, they are great thinkers, with keen perceptions, and it helps us to have the “steady hand on the tiller” look toward the future.

And on days like this, when there’s not a cloudy in the sky and the chance of snow down in this part of Texas is way off to the right of the decimal point, we reflect on the things that matter:  The making and holding of memories.

And the realization that we’ve been living in that place that’s “Over the river and through the woods…”  But we’re not old enough for the rest of what’s in that song.

Have a very Merry Christmas.

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