Writer Katie Hill has found what seems to escape the Washington intelligentsia’s ken: Proof that the Second Depression is in full swing. Her article here gives important context to a “non-economic” story that outs the truth. You see, back in the 1930′s Depression, horses went wild northeast of the Dust Bowl as people didn’t have the dough to feed them. Care to make a guess as to which wild horse population is growing again?
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We get the same kind of effect out here in the outback of East Texas, too. The other day another cat showed up: a young one, all black except for white “boots.” Zeus and Pusscilla are trying to figure out how accommodating to be. They get more food than they earn, yet taking in a stranger seems to be difficult as the raised hair on their backs seems to indicate. Yet, they seem to be warming just a bit to the idea.
In the animal kingdom, hard times bring differing responses, which vary by breed. The same thing is true in humans, I have to imagine, so I’m studying how quick the fat cats here at the ranch (analogous to banksters) handle things when a stranger comes calling, since it might give me some insight into the uber klassen/PTB/bankster behaviors to come.
Admittedly, though, it may not. When it comes to charity, I’ll keep my money on the cats.
Valentine’s Day Hope
While there is that class of bipeds whose love for paper with the right kind of ink on it exceeds their love of humanity, there’s something for both in our first economic number of the day: Retail sales are just out.
The U.S. Census Bureau announced today that advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for January, adjusted for seasonal variation and holiday and trading-day differences, but not for price changes, were $401.4 billion, an increase of 0.4 percent (±0.5%)* from the previous month and 5.8 percent (±0.7%) above January 2011. Total sales for the November 2011 through January 2012 period were up 6.3 percent (±0.5%) from the same period a year ago. The November to December 2011 percent change was revised from 0.1 percent (±0.5)* to virtually unchanged (±0.3%)*.
Tomorrow’s big “number du jour” will be the Fed industrial production and capacity utilization which I know you will be up all night worrying about. Don’t bother.
Mandatory Troop Cuts
…seem to be in the works to meet budget requirements. But wait! The monkey-mind is screaming “Isn’t this one more reason to have a false flag attack against America or our interests to keep this from becoming [or adding to] the unemployment mess?“ I’ll shut up and look for meds…
Has Russia Backed Out of Backing Syria?
Interesting speculation here…which might make a Syrian invasion likely, or could it be we are seriously mis-reading this and the Russians are doing a strategic pullback to draw us in? March draws near…
Markets Holding, But…
Despite the fact that Moody’s Investors Service has taken another whack at European countries by lowering their debt ratings, the European markets this morning are actually up.
This remarkable aspect of the so-called bailout is that Greece debt is (by this story) running about 160% of GDP right now and that the solution which everyone is getting wet dreams about doesn’t really reverse anything. It just brings the debt down to 120 times GDP by 2020.
Oodles of Gold Facts
NumberSleuth has a really interesting report on how much gold there is in the world over here.
Waiting for March 3
Thought it was March 2, but the chief time monk sent me a ponder to think about since (as our PTB insiders keep hinting “The Movies are the Message!”
george, don’t know if you remember but in the big lebowski movie, at the beginning of the film, jeff bridges puts Sept 11, 2001 on his check.
in another movie, more recent, which also has a cult following, idiocracy, the main character, luke wilson, is revived in the future on March 3, 2505. Now the interesting thing about this is that 2505 actuallys sums to 012….
hmmmm
Meantime, we keep watching reports out of the Middle East which one could describe, perhaps as calm before the storm. The US Navy which was 41% underway last week is now down to just 32% underway. What’s more interesting, only four carriers out and four amphibs…
Toss in the March 8 partial DNS shutdown “due to malware” (uh huh…whatever…) and the plans of Operation Global Blackout for later in the month and things couldn’t look murkier.
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Totally off point, or not, I didn’t realize there was a big pow-wow coming at CERN to discuss progress being made on cold fusion research. About time that the 1988 report of Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons gets recognized, maybe?
About that Marina in El Centro
This may seem like a fixation on my part, and OK, so what if it is? But you know a tremendous portion of our nation’s food supply comes from two great valleys California: To the north of Bakersfield there’s the San Joaquin valley. And off east of the LA/San Diego area, just a few checkpoints away heading east once you get over the hills is the Imperial Valley, and most people don’t realize that a large por4tion of this is actually below sea level – as is much of the are south of Palm Springs and down toward the Salton Sea.
“The point?“ Ah, remember that series of earthquakes we have been experiencing at the southern (high) end of the Imperial Valley?
Not a world-ender, but check out the map of the 5.1 shaker overnight here. I’m not predicting the Imperial Valley will flood, but El Centro is 39 feet – and more – below seat level – so it’s important to think about it you like your fresh vegetables, since El Centro is also living through a kind of “double jeopardy” already. It sports one of the highest unemployment levels in the country, at times north of 25%.
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Also overnight there was a 6.4 in the Solomon Islands, but no tsunami danger.
And a couple of more from a reader going through the big airport in Japan:
I am passing through Narita and have experienced the 6.0 and 5.3 earthquakes. the first one caught me in the shower on the 11th sotry of the hotel the other one at Narita Airport. A nice mild shaking. I really really want to get on the plane and head to Singapore. Just a side note: Could the Israel mistake be with Syria? they did bomb them a few months back and there is the rumor that all the WMD was taken out of Iraq by Russia and placed in Syria. That might be an actual threat for Israel to take serious. Lets see chem/bio weapons falling into the hands of the Syrian rebels. Not a bad Novel.
The initial reports on those quakes off Honshu were somewhat exaggerated. They’re now showing as a 6.0 and 4.9.
As to the novel ideas? We do wonder about such things now and then, but with only 2 or 3 weeks before things start to unravel seems I can wait. To do more would be like “cheating” when reading a novel…skipping ahead to get to the “good” part, only to find out it’s not so good.
A Well-Written Math Reminder
A well-informed reader in Canada thought this might be of interest: “Do mysterious laws link tennis rankings and earthquakes?” One sentence from this BBC report lays down one of the underpinnings of predictive linguistics work, which although not a science when Clif started grokking it in ’97, certainly has become an emerging science now:
“It was a striking finding – that something as fluid and untamed as language can appear to be so incredibly ordered. “
It’s cool, because while word frequency analysis has been around since prior to World War II as an intelligence tool, it wasn’t till Clif built the lexicon and set up the archetypes that small shifts in language (outside of raw frequency distributions) came into their own.
But, like the A-bomb, it’s one of those tools which can be used for good, or bad, depending on how much effort you’re willing to put into driving toward a particular outcome.
Maneuverings and Machinations
Going on all over the place around the Vatican lately.
Federalization of Police
Reader emailed me a tip about a story I’d missed:
I assume you saw this article on the “Socionomics” web site: [Social Mood Watch] The Rise of Federal Police Power , which stated, among other surprising data, that some 25,000. . .
If you haven’t seen it, you might want to check it out.
What happened to powers not specifically ceded to the central government remain with the States? That gets me to thinking I’ve become a throw-back old reprobate which we’ll discuss next…
More after this:
