"It seems that here in North Central Florida we have a freeze watch in effect for Sunday morning as well as a Red Flag Warning for wildfires. This past week we were in the mid 80's during the day and barely made it to 60 at night.

I just hope that the farmers around here remembered what I was told years ago as a kid by an Uncle about planting your fields in the area (Northern Florida down to about Marion County area) - there's always a cold snap/frost before Easter - no matter when it falls - he almost always had crops to harvest before other farmers by following that rule. I have some of my seed in for the personal garden, but in pots so that I can move them back to the greenhouse. Also, my orchard trees have already bloomed (pear, peach, and apple) but some of them are still in pots so they are under the shade cloth which will protect them from a frost and the water will be coming on before the sun comes up."

And some feedback for our Missouri farmer who may have lost his corn in the cold snap - this is harsh...

"How could anyone in Missouri be dumb enough to plant corn in March, which is when they would have had to plant for it to be 1 to 2 inches high by April 5th? Greed seems to be the only crop growing these days. It just never pays to try to fool Mother Nature. "

Farming is a gamble, no doubt about it - some years a bigger one than other.  And throw in a high demand market and global climate swirls and you have something  as dangerous as Las Vegas any time.

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"A period of unseasonably cool weather is forecast across all of North Texas through the weekend. Temperatures will be 15 to 20 degrees below normal for the period Friday through Sunday as a Canadian air mass settles across most of Texas.

Beginning Saturday morning... there will be a several mornings with temperatures in the 30s. Widespread freezing temperatures are not forecast at this time.

Across western parts of North Texas... temperatures may be cold enough for light snow to mix with rain Saturday night and Sunday morning. No snow accumulations are expected."

A look at the National Weather Service's page shows that something mighty out-of-ordinary is going on for this late in winter, or as Weather.com headlines "Winter holds on."

"OK, no Iran attack, but so what about a little late cold snap - no big deal, right?" you're probably thinking.  Well, think again.  I'm getting emails from Midwest farmers that read like this one:

"...this is just to give you a heads up on the weather. we farm here in Missouri. the temperature was 28 when we woke today, several degrees cooler than we expected. they are forecasting lows in the mid-20's both Saturday and Sunday morning. because of the high prices, we planted our whole farm in corn. Yesterday it was doing quite well--1 to 2 inches tall and growing. today, it's dead. we'll have to totally replant when the ground dries again. local farmers who have wheat expect they'll have to destroy it and plant another crop. the local peach orchards may not have any production at all this year."

If the early planting is dead (as a result of the cold snap) that means a huge cost to farmers to till under and replant.

Today with markets close or closing early for Good Friday (taking off early on Friday is always good, in my book), we see a UN panel has just issued its bleakest warning yet on climate - starving, melting, or flooding, depending on where you live.

Our tracking of the term "shortage" out of the Google News search engine underscores the accuracy of the coming 'encounters with scarcity" prediction:

And, if the big cold snap and the chart of "shortages" doesn't bring you to your senses, or that gloomy article in New Scientist which says a worldwide wheat blight is off in the wings, then I suppose it would be pointless to remind about the 6.3 earthquake in the Azores on Thursday. OK, it was 720 miles from the potentially devastating tsunami source, the Island of La Palma's Cumbre Viejo volcano in the Canary Islands, which is 720 S/SE of yesterday's epicenter, but the concern here is that a large outbreak of activity in that part of the Atlantic could be problematic, if at some point, La Palme's volcano experiences a deep undersea quake/earth slide, which could, at least on paper, do to Florida what happened to  Banda Aceh in December 2004.

Admittedly, this last is a smaller concern that pending in the near future flooding which may dislocate 70,000/700,000 people (decimal points being a tough thing for the linguistics experts).  The odds of it are near zero in the next 1-minute or so, but near 100% over geologic time scales.

---

A number of readers have been looking at the same data/news reports/ and watching the daily drone of life and they have come to something similar in the way of conclusions: Much is not right in the world, there's a tremendous amount of 'programming" of the populace going on, and whether it's a result of chaotic systems or something more sinister doesn't much matter, now does it?

"Hello, George:

There are nukes in our future. I'm talking about the near future. Here is how I know that: tonight on cable TV the sci-fi channel is showing 2 unexceptional disaster flics back to back. In each one, nuclear weapons save the Earth. In the first one nukes are exploded along a fault line in the ocean to cause magma to discharge harmlessly under water (don't think about this too hard) instead of on land. In the second, nukes are used to destroy part of the Moon, thereby somehow preventing the Moon from disintegrating and raining fragments down on Earth.

The message: Nuclear Weapons Will Save Us.

Since everything we see on tv is either produced by government, approved by government or some mixture thereof, it's a safe bet that the public is being prepared for the "defensive" use of nuclear weapons.

Government control of the media is pervasive and insidious. Last week there was an article predicting that milk prices would rise by 9% this year. The second half of the article concerned a mother who buys four gallons of mil a week for her kids. Told about the increase, she said she did not plan to buy less milk.

It's very important that the sheeple not change their buying habits just because prices go up. Since the childlike American public is unable to form opinions without help, the article presents this woman so they will have someone to identify with. They will naturally do what she does, i.e. not reduce consumption. No matter what it costs, it's For The Children.

The claim that milk is a health food and beneficial to children who are toddlers and above is false, as nearly every literate adult knows. But the myth is government approved, so it continues to be presented as fact.

Welcome to communism. Excuse me, they call it democracy now."

This being a semi-holiday, I'm assuming you have a little more reading time at work today than usual, so I will continue with one other reader note: The dollar says this fellow, is in a heap-op-hurt:

"Hi George, read your rants regularly, a fine mix of factoids, figuring, and filosophy.

Now, I've been getting the sneakin' suspicion that all's not right with the world lately, not really sure why. May have something to do with pending global economic collapse, endless wars, politics of personal power and profits, banksters and corporate gangsters, sky graffiti, educational hari-cari, talking headism (who's motto is 'no news is good news), etc etc.

Anyway, not sure which dying canary to be most afraid of as we get the shaft, but one that I've been keeping my eye on for the last two weeks is the US Dollar Index. I'd never really paid attention to it before, but I read an article somewhere, who knows where, that said if it dipped below 83 for more than a week, we'd be toast. May have even read it on your site.

Anyway, it's been under 83 for more than a week now, and has dropped almost as bad as the president's polls the last couple of days. It currently squats at 82.45 (pejorative reference to presidential IQ deleted - G). If this is indeed significant and worth working up a hysteria over, I'm all ears. If not, just say "boo" on any other doom and gloom subject and I'll just run with that."

Boo!  -- Just kidding!  No, this fellow also has it about right.  There's the whole 'world-on-the-brink' problem of the Dollar. A buck will buy less than three quarters of a Euro now - and couple that none-to-encouraging comments from the time monks about the dollar outlook - as well as from the US Comptroller General David Walker, who sounds like an UrbanSurvival reader, given his dire predictions about our economic future.

Still, he's got it right as we see it - and a report at www.federaltimes.com, which you may never read, headed this week that when it comes to government, "Biggest spenders are least accountable agencies, study finds."  See if this doesn't sound like some of my factoids:

"Nearly 90 percent of federal funds in 2006 were spent by agencies with unsatisfactory performance reports, according to Mercatus. The four lowest-ranking agencies alone — the Office of Personnel Management and the Housing and Urban Development, Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services departments — accounted for almost $800 billion in federal spending in 2006. "

So there you have it - in about 1,565 words, plus or minus a punctuation mark, a high-level view of the world on Good Friday.  Please pinch me:  What's so good about it, again?  Oh yeah, many folks are taking off early today, or just plain skipping out altogether. Bond market closes at 11 AM Eastern. US stock markets will be closed.  Some pit trading. Here are more details.

This would be a fine day to report horrible job numbers because of the markets being semi closed.  But, it almost goes without saying that the numbers are good - because that's the only kind of numbers that can be released.  Even when they fail to hit expectations by a tiny bit, they are still presented as good/unchanged.

Today is no exception as we read about the March Employment report out from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the same people who never ask Elaine and I about real-world inflation when it comes to their Cost of Living statistics:

"Nonfarm payroll employment rose by 180,000 in March, and the unemployment rate was essentially unchanged at 4.4 percent, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Department of Labor reported today. Employment increased in construction, retail trade, and health care. The number of manufacturing jobs continued to trend down. Average hourly earnings rose by 6 cents, or 0.3 per- cent, over the month.

Unemployment (Household Survey Data)

In March, the number of unemployed persons (6.7 million) and the unemployment rate (4.4 percent) were essentially unchanged. The jobless rate has remained within a narrow range--4.4 to 4.6 percent--since September 2006. Over the month, the unemployment rate for most major worker groups--adult men (4.0 percent), adult women (3.8 percent), teenagers (14.5 percent), blacks (8.3 percent), and Hispanics (5.1 percent)--showed little or no change. The jobless rate for whites decreased to 3.8 percent. The unemployment rate for Asians was 3.0 percent, not seasonally adjusted. (See tables A-1, A-2, and A-3.)

In March, the number of unemployed job losers and persons who had completed temporary jobs declined by 215,000. The number of unemployed persons who had been jobless for less than 5 weeks also fell, by 273,000. (See tables A-8 and A-9.)

Total Employment and the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

Both total employment, at 146.3 million, and the employment-population ratio, at 63.3 percent, were essentially unchanged in March. Over the month, the labor force participation rate held steady at 66.2 percent, about the same as a year earlier. (See table A-1.)

Persons Not in the Labor Force (Household Survey Data)

About 1.4 million persons (not seasonally adjusted) were marginally attached to the labor force in March--essentially unchanged from a year earlier. These individuals wanted and were available for work and had looked for a job sometime during the prior 12 months. They were not counted as unemployed because they had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey. Among the marginally attached, there were 381,000 discouraged workers in March, down slightly from a year earlier. Discouraged workers were not currently looking for work specifically because they believed no jobs were available for them. The remaining 1.0 million persons marginally attached to the labor force in March had not searched for work in the 4 weeks preceding the survey for reasons such as school attendance or family responsibilities. "

Being natural-born skeptics, we immediately pop over to the CES Birth-Death model to see how many of the 180,000 "new jobs" were 'created' by an estimate (a wild-ass guess with statistical theory behind it) of new businesses which aren't counted by traditional methods.  We see this time around, that of the 180,000 jobs 'created; 128-thousand were from the CES Birth-Death Model.

Now think about this for a moment: If we have 2,000 illegals a day wandering in from Mexico over the still-too-porous border, that doesn't break us even. And the figure bandied about is more likely in the range of 5,000 a day!

Then there's underemployment - which is your engineers flipping burgers, or IT people working convenience store jobs because they have been outsourced.  That's officially at 8.3% (Table U6, alternative measures of labor under-utilization).  Again, a change which is in the statistical "noise" error rate on the surveys.

Two other notable comments, and then I will leave you to get some real work done for my consulting client:  What amazes me is that manufacturing employment is only 14.1 million out of a labor force of 152-million.  Which means huge amounts of everything are coming in from overseas as jobs like business and professional services lost another 7-thousand for the month.

Another curious (read: incredible number) was that construction jobs were up 56-thousand for the month.  Hard to believe in the midst of the housing collapse, huh?  Well, like the old joke does, "Is the word gullible in the dictionary?"

Our Houston Bureau also ponders such matters deeply and finds the report in the Houston Chronicle disturbing: about the plight of returning veterans disturbing: "Disciplined, skilled, loyal - and struggling to find a job." We owe then a hell of a lot more than government double-speak for their service to country.

But, as we have noted before, it's hard to have real economic growth without real money - and the current system of having the private banksters who run the Fed and the subprime predators creating "money" out of piles of debt is just plain crooked.  The Financial Times noted recently that "A market correction is coming, this time for real." Worry warts.

A Peoplenomics Worst Case Scenario: Silent Skies

Escalation paths and complex decision-trees are not the stuff of everyday life for most humans.  They're a byproduct of the time when "mutually assured destruction" -- abbreviated as MAD Policy -- ruled Cold War thinking.  But, there is some merit to using such tools for analysis from time to time, especially when you're trying to get a vision on the short-term future that could arise in reaction to a direct attack by the US on Iran this month. If you live in two worlds, like we do, which is to say living optimistically but keeping a set of 'worst case' contingency plans in your back pocket, then this week's report is critical.  If nothing else, it will give you an appreciation that the month of March just completed may soon be viewed in retrospect as the "good old days."

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Thursday April 5, 2007

Presidents as Chess Players

An email from a reader offers an interesting point this morning as we read that the 15 UK sailors who were being held by Iran have been released and are flying home as we go to bytes:

Gas OPEC

Ukraine Tensions

Tubed in Thailand

WeatherWars Mystery

Car Chat

Planned Pethood