Waiting for Housing, Big Rally Nears, Thinking “Anti-Gravity”

Two-part column this morning. The second column will be short but useful if you like to play Inflation Spotting — the Home Edition.

Big Rally Nears?

I have mentioned this a number of times, but I am seeing the trend again in the UrbanSurvival web-traffic numbers. Maybe. And remember: this ain’t advice.

If you have forgotten, this site’s readership has tended to run inversely to markets. When markets are cratering, our traffic screams higher; when markets are rising and everyone feels richer and safer, readership tends to sag. For 25+ years we have been doing long-wave economics work, and it’s still at the center of our twice-weekly ChartPack series over on the Peoplenomics side of the house.

In fact, the long-wave tradition continues with three more major papers over the next three weeks, including work on how to derive the long wave and why the damn thing isn’t nearly as dependable as people would like. Which gets us back to today’s little behavioral indicator.

When UrbanSurvival visitor counts sag, I have found it usually isn’t topically driven, caused by variability in my admittedly odd sense of humor, or because I used too many colloquialisms. It seems to reflect a change in people’s thinking — less interest in news flow when perceived risk is falling — and the effect becomes even more pronounced ahead of major holidays.

We saw something similar when the Dow was smoking higher ahead of the Fourth, although that didn’t save tech. So put this into your thinking hopper: while the “yeller dog” — gold — has been moving higher, so has the “empty dog” — Bitcoin — and our web traffic has been easing at the same time.

None of this is a timing signal and none of it says buy. But there is a small, definitely non-zero, possibility that the market is winding itself up for one more serious scream higher.

Now, ahead of the housing dope, let’s flip the…

News Compressor: ON

A few headlines also feel vaguely pre-rally around the edges. Whether that proves meaningful or merely proves markets can rationalize damn near anything will be evident soon enough.

1. Washington’s Iran sanctions package landed softer than markets expected, while Tehran is now explicitly threatening retaliation. Markets have a funny habit of rallying when the scary thing turns out to be merely less scary than advertised, so that may have some feed-forward into higher futures early.

2. EU versus Russia — War Tune-Ups: Vlad Putin has authorized temporary state control of fuel, energy, industrial, communications, transport, and logistics assets deemed inadequately protected, while a fresh drone strike set the Afipsky refinery ablaze and killed two people. Civilian economic infrastructure keeps sliding farther into the “weps-free” direction, which is another way of saying the distinction between battlefield and national economy continues shrinking.

3. Nearly half of global oil production now originates in countries touched by armed conflict, according to a new Reuters calculation. This is less a today’s-price story than a structural fragility signal, because crude production, refining, freight, insurance, and inflation increasingly occupy the same geopolitical fault zone.

4. Nvidia: Options traders are pricing roughly a $280 billion potential swing in Nvidia’s market value after the U.S. close tomorrow. Meanwhile, Alibaba is raising $10.2 billion for AI expansion even as some investors begin asking whether physical AI infrastructure costs can keep climbing without chewing through the returns supposedly waiting at the other end. Could Nvidia someday replay the 1920s Radio Trust? Mania always looks perfectly rational while the drinks are still being served.

Inside Pages

Markets / Economics

1. Bitcoin has pushed above $80,000 for the first time since May, rising more than 30 percent in roughly ten days while gold remains near multi-month highs. Bitcoin is still about 37 percent below its all-time high — and that’s before allowing for a year of inflation — so not trying to piss on anyone’s parade, but from out here in the woods it still occasionally resembles the reincarnation of Ponzi, only now with compute.

2. The dollar recovered modestly Tuesday, but investors continue questioning U.S. fiscal stability and Treasury’s increasingly active long-bond policy. COMEX FedWatch is showing better than a 40 percent chance of a rate hike at the next FOMC meeting, which certainly isn’t the bedtime story Wall Street has been reading itself.

3. Treasury’s possibility of using additional cash resources for debt buybacks helped bond yields edge lower, although skepticism remains over whether liquidity intervention solves anything underneath the deficit problem. Bond stress temporarily cooling? Maybe. Bond problem solved? That’s a very different question.

4. India’s second-quarter growth is expected to slow to around 7.1 percent as high oil prices and weaker private investment bite into what remains the fastest-growing major economy. Trump’s $100,000-per-H-1B visa may also slow the HR version of human trafficking, depending on how all the labor-cost arithmetic ultimately lands.

5. Mexico’s annual inflation accelerated to 3.26 percent in early August while core inflation stayed near 4 percent. It’s the neighborhood? At minimum, another little inflation marker to put on the wall.

Russia / Ukraine / Security

6. Ukraine says there is a practical U.S.-mediation window extending only to roughly summer 2027, before the next American presidential campaign begins consuming Washington’s bandwidth. Kyiv and Western partners have drafted another short-form ceasefire proposal for Moscow, so the negotiating clock is becoming explicit even while the shooting continues.

We cast this rather like two boxers discussing “peace” while they’re still in the second round. Everybody is talking about how nice it would be to stop punching while simultaneously looking for a better angle on the next punch.

7. Russia’s Perm refinery, the country’s seventh-largest by processing volume, remains halted after an August 21 Ukrainian drone attack. Russian refining disruption is accumulating while everyone keeps talking ceasefire, which makes “boxer talk” look increasingly like a funding deck.

8. Reality checking: South Korea and the United States publicly reaffirmed close coordination on North Korea after recent reductions in joint exercises raised alliance questions. File this under the endless happy-talk of solidarity, because geopolitics apparently requires everyone to announce how close they are whenever somebody begins wondering whether they really are.

9. More than 50 governments used Ukraine’s Independence Day to renew support for sovereignty and an unconditional ceasefire, while Britain and France promised faster military assistance. Western support remains firm, while the EU still seems to need a larger war with Russia to fix its economy and population problems, increase tax rates…you know the shopping list.

AI / Technology / Cyber

10. Unitree shares have fallen about 45 percent from their post-IPO surge, reversing part of the extraordinary speculative move in Chinese humanoid robotics. Danger, Will Robinson? Not lost in space — just lost in Bubble.

11. A U.S. court ordered Guardant Health to pay more than $245 million in a DNA-sequencing patent dispute involving TwinStrand Biosciences and the University of Washington. Genomics IP pressure keeps rising, and we’re still back at square one asking how any aspect of life you find lying around ANYWHERE can be patented. Which is presumably why I studied economics rather than law.

12. Political resistance to AI data centers is becoming a material investment variable in the United States as power consumption and local infrastructure costs migrate into election campaigns. AI-infrastructure backlash is widening, although money will eventually buy some version of the answer, so we’re not wasting much time hand-wringing.

Do Mess-ticity

13. Firefighters near Reno have raised containment of the Hawk Fire to 27 percent after it destroyed at least 32 homes and damaged six others. Evacuation orders still affect roughly 63,000 people, down from more than 90,000. Look for Spokane sister-city talks.

14. The NIFC incident report lists 86 uncontained large fires and 22,085 personnel committed, with the country still at Preparedness Level 5. Military personnel plus Australian and New Zealand crews remain involved, which tells you plenty about how stretched the national fire picture still is.

15. NWS expects a thunderstorm complex to move into western Oklahoma and adjacent North Texas around sunset Tuesday before sliding east overnight. Sadly, it looks likely to miss us, which is how weather forecasting works when you’ve spent weeks looking at dirt and asking clouds for a favor.

16. Hank, meanwhile, out on the Big Island? Tropical Storm Iselle is now a strong eastern-Pacific storm with winds near 70 mph, while Lala and Moke remain under Central Pacific advisories. This is not sail-from-the-Ala-Wai-small-boat-harbor-to-Okinawa week, unless your retirement plan includes becoming a Coast Guard training exercise.

17. Wet stuff on the red stuff? K?lauea remains under routine daily monitoring rather than a newly escalated volcanic alert, and the seismic board is relatively quiet. We’ll take boring whenever geology offers it.

New Signals Rising

One thing worth putting a yellow circle around is that the global energy system now has correlated geopolitical risk on both the crude-production and refining sides. Conflict touches an extraordinary share of world crude production while Ukrainian strikes continue taking Russian processing plants offline, increasing the possibility that fuel-product shortages could someday diverge sharply from crude-price behavior.

That’s worth remembering because people tend to watch the crude quote and assume it tells the whole petroleum story. It doesn’t if the oil exists but the refinery that turns it into something useful is smoking.

Also from the Signs Civilization May Yet Survive Department: one U.S. Army unit is offering four extra days off timed around the release of Grand Theft Auto VI as a reenlistment incentive. Apparently somebody finally discovered that retention programs work better when the troops help design them, which may qualify as a minor breakthrough in federal management theory.

Around the Ranch: Thinking Anti-Gravity

Hiding out from the high temperatures here in the Outback, we found ourselves engrossed in a Why Files “Basement” segment: Diana Pasulka | Angels, Vatican Archives, and a Government Email.

It’s more than three hours long, but what makes it worth considering is the academic perspective Pasulka brings to material covered in her latest book, “The Others: UFOs, AI, and the Secret Forces Guiding Human Destiny.” Once we got past the “yeah…so, um, you know, like…” modern speech habits, the interview turned a very interesting light on a class of well-documented historical claims involving what you might call personal gravity.

And specifically mentioned was St. Joseph of Cupertino. Giuseppe Desa (1603–1663) was an Italian Conventual Franciscan friar from the town of Cupertino in Apulia, southern Italy — the classic Catholic “Flying Friar.”

He was considered slow, awkward, and poorly educated, so much so that his path to ordination reportedly involved some lucky coincidences on examinations. Once a priest, though, he became famous for frequent ecstatic raptures during prayer, Mass, or sometimes merely the mention of God, the Virgin, or certain saints.

Witnesses said he would cry out, enter a trance, and sometimes levitate. Accounts describe him rising a few inches, hovering, moving across rooms, reaching church ceilings or trees, or remaining suspended for minutes while apparently frozen in ecstasy.

More than 70 such episodes were formally recorded at one of his residences, Grotella, with many more reported over decades. Witnesses reportedly included crowds, nobles, clergy, a Spanish ambassador’s party, and even Pope Urban VIII, while the Church moved Joseph repeatedly in part to reduce the spectacle and eventually investigated him through the Inquisition.

The “local gravity” angle does not arise because anybody measured the gravitational constant around Joseph with a 17th-century laboratory instrument. They didn’t. It comes from the character of the historical accounts themselves.

Joseph wasn’t merely said to become lighter. Sometimes the apparent effect went the other direction, slamming him down or pressing him against the ground, while reported movement could be upward, forward, backward, or suspended.

The episodes were involuntary once underway and tightly associated with his ecstatic state. Skeptical interpretations obviously exist, including extraordinary leaps, balancing on toes, clinging to statues or branches, or ordinary events later amplified through religious storytelling.

Believers — and some historians interested in anomalous experience — argue that the sheer volume and quality of testimony makes simple fraud or collective invention difficult to accept as a complete explanation. Joseph was eventually canonized in 1767 and became the patron saint of students, exam-takers, pilots, astronauts, and air travelers, with the flying presumably having something to do with that last group.

His case remains one of the better-known Christian levitation traditions and continues to surface whenever people start poking at the boundaries among consciousness, anomalous physical effects, religion, and physics. Which, naturally, is precisely the kind of rabbit hole we will walk past, back up to, and then jump into.

Mental States Control Gravity?

I have gotten wind of this mind-over-gravity business before, and my buddy the Major has run into his own collection of very strange events while doing exorcisms. Yeah, I keep telling him, “Write your damn book!”

But here’s the part that grabbed me. Suppose — and underline suppose — that some extreme mental states produce effects people interpret as physical anomalies. Then the interesting question isn’t immediately “Great, how do we levitate?” but rather what kind of system architecture would even permit consciousness, body state, and apparent physical behavior to become coupled that tightly?

So I wrote a tasker for AI around Joseph’s reported pattern: “Tell me how this supposedly works — and how Cupertino allegedly got there.” The answer was deeper than expected, because it treated the whole thing as a stack rather than a magic trick.

1. Disposition. From childhood Joseph reportedly “gaped” and dropped out of ordinary attention. Think of the base layer as a nervous system unusually biased toward absorption, which could matter whether the ultimate explanation is mystical, neurological, or something else entirely.

2. Load. Years of fasting, extreme sleep restriction, hair shirts, chains, scourging, and other mortifications created enormous metabolic and emotional stress. Grosso’s interpretation adds an erotic/spiritual tension with no ordinary outlet, while Joseph reportedly called his body the asino — the jackass that would not obey.

3. Trigger. The episodes were commonly associated with a sacred cue occurring during otherwise waking life: elevation of the Host, the name of Jesus, Mary or Francis, a painting, music, a bagpipe, a leaf, blue sky, or even an image of the Christ child. This wasn’t described as a visualization exercise but as a perceptual spark hitting an already highly loaded system.

4. Ignition. Accounts often describe a sharp cry — urlo, grido, strillo — before the event. Joseph compared it to gunpowder going off in a barrel when the heart caught fire, and witnesses who were already watching him reportedly heard the cry first and then saw the motion. Think discharge rather than polite intention.

5. Rapture. Joseph was described as being “beside himself,” sometimes with eyes open but not normally tracking and with pain stimuli reportedly failing to register. Yet his superior’s voice could sometimes still reach him, suggesting that obedience may have remained as one surviving control channel inside an otherwise radically altered state.

6. Output. Reported movement was not merely “up.” Accounts describe lifting a palm’s width, moving backward on his knees, reaching an olive branch, moving over crowds toward statues, or appearing on an altar among candles, while other episodes supposedly involved tremendous downward force. Thus the intriguing description of the phenomenon as bipolar: sometimes lift, sometimes slam.

7. Reset. Joseph returned to ordinary awareness, sometimes distressed by the attention and by spectators reportedly cutting pieces from his habit as souvenirs. He supposedly asked God to make the phenomenon stop, but it didn’t, and eventually his superiors kept moving him around because the problem had become, among other things, a public-order headache.

The load-bearing fact is that he never reportedly did this in an ordinary state of mind. Whatever the explanation for the reported physical events, the altered state itself seems inseparable from the story.

How Does One “Induce” It?

This is where the question immediately goes sideways because Joseph did not have a documented method for changing the gravity vector. What he had was a lifestyle that chronically pushed ordinary physiology, attention, and emotion into extreme territory.

If the old accounts are taken at face value, the pattern looked more like chronic deprivation and mortification, affective isolation, extreme sensitization to religious and aesthetic cues, a threshold event, and then loss of ordinary voluntary control. In other words, closer to a phase transition than a technique.

Teresa of Ávila’s reported levitations were quieter and she eventually prayed for them to stop, while Joseph’s were described as loud, frequent, and largely ungovernable. A modern neuropsychiatric reading of this general type of testimony offers another possibility: abrupt vocalization, altered movement, reduced responsiveness, maintained posture, and subsequent return to activity could be compatible with extreme ictal or dissociative-ecstatic states.

That explanation can potentially account for the state without establishing that gravity itself changed. Which is precisely where the evidence line belongs.

Skeptical reconstructions treat the “flights” as leaps, balance effects, support from nearby objects, and later hagiographic inflation. Believing reconstructions argue that the daylight sightings, numerous witnesses, proximity, institutional scrutiny, and awkward details make simple fraud an incomplete fit.

Both camps can agree that something unusual was happening to Joseph’s state of consciousness and behavior. They disagree — rather spectacularly — about what his body actually did while he was in it.

What a Systems Thinker Should NOT Do With This

Do not turn any of this into a protocol because extreme fasting, sleep deprivation, self-injury, and chronic physiological stress are not “gravity hacks.” They’re excellent ways to wreck the organism, and there is no documented, repeatable, voluntary drill in Joseph’s life that says: Do Steps 1 through 7 and change your gravity vector.

If anything, the story says almost the opposite because Joseph reportedly couldn’t reliably control the episodes. So in architecture language, what we may have is some kind of attention ? affect ? body-schema ? unusual reported physical-output coupling, with the scream or ecstatic event acting as a threshold transition.

That’s not a physics equation and it isn’t proof of altered gravity. It is merely a useful systems description of the reported phenomenon, and to me that’s the far more interesting question anyway: What sort of system would even allow mind-state and effective body behavior to couple that tightly?

Which is pretty much the same class of problem as Co-Telligence. Only written in 17th-century Franciscan instead of architecture diagrams.

Here Comes the State-Overlap 

Now we get to the part that really lit me up, because from a systems-thinking standpoint something odd happens when you put the Joseph of Cupertino reports beside the stranger possession/exorcism reports. Forget, for a minute, whether one side calls the source God and the other calls it something considerably less friendly, and just look at the claimed outputs.

In one case, extreme religious ecstasy is associated with apparent lightening, levitation, displacement, insensitivity to pain, altered awareness, and unusual force effects. In the other, extreme possession states are associated with extraordinary strength, resistance, object movement, altered awareness, insensitivity to pain, and sometimes apparent departures from ordinary mechanical behavior.

Different theology, different emotional polarity, and a completely different story wrapped around the event. Yet some remarkably similar outputs.

And that is where my systems-engineering alarm goes off, because when two radically different inputs produce similar classes of output, you start hunting for the common layer underneath them. Maybe the important variable isn’t Catholicism, possession, fasting, demons, saints, prayer, trauma, or ecstatic devotion at all.

Maybe all of those are simply different ways of driving the human system into an extreme enough state that it begins interacting with something normally hidden. In computer terms, two entirely different applications may somehow be reaching the same operating-system call.

And if Reality is in any meaningful sense computational, informational, simulated — pick your favorite word — then suddenly the question becomes considerably more interesting. Are these two very different human states accessing the same underlying layer of the Simulation?

That would be the common denominator. Not what the participants believe, not whether the emotional polarity is positive or negative, and not necessarily even what kind of entity they think is involved. The common denominator could be the substrate itself.

Which produces a deliciously uncomfortable possibility: perhaps a sufficiently intense, tightly coherent state of consciousness can occasionally get outside the normal user interface. Most of the time we live entirely inside the GUI, where gravity works, mass works, pain works, objects stay where you put them, and the body remains obediently attached to the ground.

But perhaps under very unusual conditions the human system reaches something lower in the stack. Call it kernel access, if you like, and suddenly some constraints we assume are fundamental might look rather different from the standpoint of whatever is doing the accessing.

That isn’t saying Joseph actually defeated gravity, and it isn’t saying an exorcism defeats Newton. The historical reports do not provide the instrumentation required to establish either proposition, but they give us something potentially useful: two apparently opposite classes of extreme human experience producing reports with overlapping anomalous characteristics.

Whenever opposite inputs converge on similar outputs, engineers go hunting for the shared mechanism. That’s not mysticism; it’s troubleshooting.

What if Intelligence is the Contact Point?

Which leads to the question I came away with: what if intelligence itself is the Contact Point? I don’t mean intelligence in the IQ-test sense, but intelligence as the coherent integrating process sitting between awareness, memory, body, perception, and whatever Reality actually consists of underneath our normal experience of it.

Maybe that’s the interface. Maybe consciousness isn’t merely running inside Reality but, under certain rare conditions, can somehow address Reality.

Simulation? God? Information field? Physics we haven’t found yet? Or merely a brain capable of producing experiences far stranger than our present models allow? Pick whichever hypothesis offends you least.

But if there really is a common layer, then Cupertino and the Major’s exorcism stories aren’t primarily religious curiosities. They become two wildly different excursions toward the same hidden operating level — saint at one end, possession at the other, but the same machine underneath.

And there’s the research rabbit hole worth losing sleep over. Because the really interesting question isn’t “Can humans levitate?” It is “What is the common operating layer of the Simulation — and what part of us is talking to it?”

My working suspicion is that Intelligence may be the Contact Point. That’s worth pondering while hiding from the Texas heat, because if the idea has even a sliver of merit, it rearranges a whole lot more than today’s headlines.

Write when you get rich,

George@Ure.net