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Published Monday - Friday about 8 AM Central Time ....some typos are fixed by 8:30 daily
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January 29, 2010 07:55 CST New? Visit our
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This site is supported by subscriptions: For additional content, please subscribe to Peoplenomics. . Content mirrored at: www.independencejournal.com, Kindle (.MOBI) version here
Double Dips in Davos World Economic Forum is meeting in Switzerland this week and the headline in the WSJ online is that "Experts see another Global Dip ahead"...which sounds eerily like what we've been saying around here, although I screwed up since there's been no invite to Davos (or anywhere else, come to think of it) to do a poster paper on long wave economics from a non-mathematical perspective. --- Not that this should come as any kind of surprise: The only way the administration has been able to hide the reality of joblessness is by expanding a war and through use of the mysterious disappearing workforce in calculating unemployment stats.
The EU meanwhile has announced "last-resort backing for Greece" but as you and I know (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) this is not going to be successful in the long term, so why not just plan an orderly serial collapse of global economics and let 'er rip? --- Whether we get a second big downturn is, I suppose, a matter of who you listen to. I note, for example that Donald Trump is working to acquire that big apartment complex I told you about yesterday. If there wasn't a whole boatload of further deflation to come (and several ships worth standing offshore waiting to unload before we get a turnaround into hyperinflation I'd see it. But to my way of thinking, it's early.
On the other hand, such deals are big and take time to put together...maybe he's just starting the dance and can then postpone closing till the absolute bottom in real estate, sometime after the summer meltdown, and maybe close by Christmas to mid 2011. Be interesting to watch how the Donald times this.
Happy Stat Here's our happy talk number of the day:
GDP up 5.7% rate while unemployment is climbing? Pinch me. What planet is this, really?
Convolutions on Climate You saw where Osama bin Laden has come out deploring climate change in an audio tape being aired on al Jazeera? --- All of which has me planning solitude this weekend while I sort out what kind of world is it when Osama bin Laden, Al Gore, and the US EPA are on the same side of an issue...
Especially when bin Laden offers that "Noam Chomsky was correct when he compared the US policies to those of the Mafia".
Don't Cross the PTB file Go read the NY Post's story "Banker gives don't teacher bad apple". Upshot is a school principal at a school in Houston is retiring because he "referred to bankers as "sleazeballs" and a global investment banker called him out on it. --- Don't know what the teacher was supposed to call 'em, but this has the patina of "shoot the messenger" to it.
Quality of Mercy Department "NY pols stunned to learn Obama administration opposes funding for 9/11 health bill" says the NY Daily News headline.
Blame Sharing Tony Blair is due today to defend his decision to send troops into Iraq. Little late, but hey, war in that part of the world will be going on seems like forever...
Secret Talks The Debka headline "CIA chief Panetta in Cairo and Israel for secret talks on Yemen" no longer makes sense. Since if they really are 'secret talks" why are we talking about them? Go read the article though - this is an intricate dance...secret or otherwise.
Wet Spots While the people up in Oklahoma are having a mostly miserable time with the mixed rain and sleet - ice and whatever else cold you can think of this morning, people in Wacko Texas are to the ark building stage:
Even as a long-time Pacific Northwest resident (have you heard,,,it rains in Seattle?) this is pretty wet. Nothing compared to Sao Paulo brazil where 64 have died (and likely more) from flooding and landslides. Till, wet for Texas. We got only an inch and a half here at the ranch, being south of the bigger totals up north of us. --- Flooding in Peru up near Machu Picchu (northwest of Cusco if I recall the switchback train ride correctly) has caused about 1,400 tourists to be evacuated. People visiting go to Cusco and then a switchback railroad goes up one end of the city into the high Andes and then snakes down into the jungle and then buses switchback up several thousand feet to the ruins.
I remember thinking "What happens when it rains down here to all these bridges and dirt roads? Guess now we know, huh?
PeruRail map is here - the best way to see the country, for sure. If you stay in Cusco, be sure and visit the church built there back around 1536 and check out the hand-carved seating - absolutely amazing craftsmanship. (Picture lower right in this montage).
I don't suppose you came by this morning for my travelogue, did you?
Will be here after about 8:30 AM Central time:
This week I've been running experimental podcasts to see how hard they would be to produce on an ongoing basis. Not terribly difficult, as it turns out.
The only fly in the ointment seems to be the cost of bandwidth. Yesterday's report, for example, was almost 8 MB in length (nearly 15 minutes at a low sample rate) and that eats up a fair bit of bandwidth. Today, I'll be asking users what's a reasonable annual charge to have access to the podcast content (a bit different than reading the material) and whether a nominal $50 a year to offset bandwidth costs for the five-day-a-week content is worth that. I'll likely do another week or two of freebies, though, just because it's fun and I can afford the bandwidth on one of my servers at the moment...
(Thanks to www.rebeccaprice.com for the graphics...if you need graphics, look her up.)
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I admit it - I've been lobbying Cliff of HalfPastHuman.com to do another predictive linguistics run. There are a number of issues which I'd sure like better resolution on, and once things get into the 3-weeks to 3-month window, often the results out of the rickety time machine get more precise and since I am trading the market decline, a little more precision would be useful.
It's not a sure thing since there have been so many rip-offs of the report, recapturing the initial investment is a problem. While Cliff's been working on tuning the lexicon (language is drifty stuff, for sure) his colleague Igor is off to look at a 3 X 9 RAID array today. When we talk of 'heavy processing' we're talking heavy processing.
I'll keep you posted on this as the decision-making process moves along, still many moving pieces and I am planning to press Cliff to use a distribution system that can insert a unique serial number in each of the reports so we can track back the perps who trash the work.
Which gets me to explaining that it's not just the ripping off of intellectual content that's an issue. It's that when there's any discussion of the web bots it shows up around the generalize netosphere and has to be filtered out otherwise it causes a kind of feedbacks. In other words, what we found out in the early going of the project was that if too much about the future leaked out, it could color what people thought about when discussing it - and that in turn would lessen the accuracy.
Nowadays in addition to filtering off my site(s) and filtering from the web bot discussion group, the filtering to prevent feedback issue has continued to grow and that's still more work.
If you have no idea what I'm talking about, go look at the Wikipedia entry for web bot project and you ought to be able to figure it out. --- One item in particular we'd like more visibility on: The linguistics had been suggesting that a second round of engineered flu (or similar) would come out of the winter Olympics up at Whistler Mountain outside Vancouver, B.C. Well, now we read the article asking " Could Vancouver 2010 be the next 9/11?" and we get to wondering about the previous run and how this hypothetical attack could be carried out?
I always get twitchery when linguistics and intel start moving to one side of the room. Adding to the air of mystery: The head of the BC Privacy Office has been shut down leaderless. This leaves lower mainland press without a way to file what's the Canadian equivalent to FOI (Freedom of Information Act) requests. Hmmmm...
The Farm Report Nice note from a reader:
A little early to be hand-wringing about food shortages, but not too early to be garden planning. Some's Funny, Some's Not Mixed reviews about my 'endowment' reference of Thursday:
Well, not everyone thought that was funny:
Harsh! It may interest you to know that I just did a search for the word "tits" on this whole website and never been used once (until this morning). The only references to double meaning candidates, such as "jugs" have been in the context of "water" , "cooking oil", "milk" and so forth. Nothing sexist there. On the other hand, there are 37 references to "testosterone" as in "poisoning", "family pride", and "crazed". I read that as 37 to zero. Still to be totally fair as you insist, and to paraphrase "Just know that your sons and husbands are looked at every day of their lives as nothing but a revenue stream, or failing that, cannon fodder." So thanks, I'll keep on poking fun when a simple 'quantative' word (endowed) has become polarized / hot to the point it has. --- Send your comments to george@ure.net Shop Till Your Drop Department: Peoplenomics This Week Markets Rolling Over? In a number of hobbies, I've watched an amazing number of people mistake blind dumb luck for skill and daring. Ditto the markets. Still, my March 29, 2009 report "Me Bullish? Where to Play the 401(k) Game" (Peoplenomics #395) was nearly perfect. A good entry point would have gotten one in around 7,500 on the Dow. Similarly, if one had read Peoplenomics #436B January 2, 2010 and started to accumulate put options as I'm doing in my personal account, the entry might have been short from the 10,600 range if your intrasession sniping skills were sharp. This week, an update from Robin Landry and some ideas of where things might go from here. While some weeks we get way off into the weeds, we don't need to talk about market this and market that every week. Big decisions over the long term make more money and disturb sleep less.
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Maxa-Cookie Manager Been a while since I've updated you on how many cookies and web bugs have been removed from my main computer by the Maxa Cookie Manager from Maxa Tools: 1,602 web bugs and 54,131 cookies so far. It's amazing.
Take it for a free test drive by downloading it. To upgrade to full functionality will set you back $35 bucks,.. Is your privacy worth it? Once you try it out, click the upgrade button (!) on the upper right hand side for the $35 unlock to get it to remove even those nasty and highly intrusive 'non-browser specific' cookies. Bonus: You computer may run faster.
Attn: Mac Drivers: MCM does support the Safari Browser, but that does not mean it is compatible with Mac OS. Maxa-Tools only support the Windows world....so far. Given Jens and the other engineers time...
"Live on $10,000" A Year Having a hard time making ends meet? (Like who isn't, right?) A good starting point to better match up income with outgo is our $10 e-book "How to Live on #10,000 a Year...or less!"
It's an automatic download. It's written in an information dense style: The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the cheap, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you have a little hustle left. A bonus section called "How to Build Anything" should instill confidence if you've never taken on a home improvement/home creation project before, too..... Click here for the index and details.
MyGroPonics My commodity broker JB Slear and I have written a simple book to get you started on high density hydroponics. It's an example of how someone with a little creativity, access to a few 'dollar stores' and willing to try out some new farming techniques can grow an amazing amount of produce sin a very small space - like even an apartment balcony (if it gets some sunlight). Sound interesting? It's just $10 bucks here...
Pass It On A different take on things - that's what you'll find here most mornings. If you know of anyone who might also like our content, simply click here and send a link to them. Or, if you hated what you read, send the link to all your 'worst enemies'. Like they say in Burbank, "Ain't no such thing as bad press..." ---- Last week's report is here. For back issues of this site, click here.
Thursday January 28, 2010 Rally Bound! The price of gold is up and the futures are pointing to a solid day for the market in the wake of last night's State of the Union address. Still, there are some problems around, such as Toyotas big recall (extended to China today).
Then we just had the curable goods report released this morning which while it showed a month-on-month increase of 3-10th's of one percent is what when we back out inflation? Flat.
That said - and despite the fact that you and I are maybe the only folks bright enough to add Kentucky windage for the falling purchasing power of money to our thinking, there really was one good thing in the Durables report:
I was about to start calling friends to come over and party when I clicked onto the detail level of the machinery orders and discovered to my horror that the reason they bounced was December 2009 new machine orders was down a full 25.1% compared with 2008 figures. Shades of "When you ain't got nothin', y'ain't got nuthin' to lose..."
Then there was the mass layoff report Wednesday showed another 153,127 workers being laid off in mass firings in December.
With increasing optimism comes increasing prices for commodities and things like oil, gold, and such are up in the early going.
While Obama is calling for repeal of the "Don't ask, don't tell" policy about gay and lesbians in the military, that's probably a sideshow compared with the talk of a jobs bill and trying to save some semblance of a healthcare bill. --- If there is any mystery to last night's speech it was "Where's Hillary Clinton?" The answer is she's in London for conferences on Yemen and Afghanistan. Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan was missing as a security precaution.
All of which gets me to thinking the market may rally today....but turning down by the close is possible as soon as last night's mega-dose of motivational speaking wears off and someone looks at forward earnings besides me.
Mr. Reality Bear reminds you the Dow closed last week at 10,173 and yesterday's close was a whopping 10,236. Woo hoo! 6-tenths of one percent! Stunning. And the weak ain't over yet.
Browns Politics I see where at that aforementioned Afghan summit Gordo Brown "says the tide must turn." While "Whitehall rebels over 'brutish' Gordon Brown" recently, it sure looks to me like another career politician who has started reading polls and connecting policy positions with it.
Better late than never, I suppose. But this also speaks reams of the sheepish nature of Brits who rather than stand up for rights stood on soapboxes instead.
Not that we're any better, since the supreme court decision/national disaster of last week on corporate grifting. Still, once upon a time we had a dream and corporations once upon a time didn't get 'human rights'.
Speaking of Soap Boxes There's a dandy article on the Russian news site Pravda today which reviews the "Greatest Threat to America" which in caser you slept through last week may be the US supreme court. The Russian article reviews recent court decisions like:
The Pravda article concluded:
If you had told me 30-yuears ago that Russia would be lecturing the US on the conduct of democracy, I wouldn't have believed you.
Even worse: The analysis laid out today isn't wrong.
World Economic Forum Despite the untimely death of the WEF's security chief, the conference is going ahead is Davos Switzerland. There, Bill Clinton and other are trying to beat the drum for private investment in Haiti. --- Here's a little ponder for you: the word 'investment" usually implies some kind of return - as in 'return on investment'. This is different from the word 'gift' or the word 'share'.
Seems to me that most of the development world - Haiti included - has been 'invested to death". What humans ought to be talking about his giving and sharing with Haiti. But, no, this is talk of investment and implicit in that concept is a return.
Oh, and if that looks a lot like the yoke of debt, don't be surprised. Seldom has I see 'investment' turn into anything more than a corporate resource grab for national treasures like waterworks and so forth, from which people can be parted with their meager earnings forever.
Sure the world's in a tough spot economically. But the character trait of generosity is not defined by how much is shared when one is rich. It's defined by how the last bean is divided up when poor.
By this measure, Haiti looks destined to continue it's role as a nation of 'have-nots'; a role being reinforced by the nations of 'haves' that meet in mountain ski resorts and fly in aboard those private jets.
Spy Versus Spy Department Well-connected Debka headlines that "Turkey's ruling Muslim party: Israeli intelligence ran eavesdropping station from Ankara." Seems this is being made as a fresh assault on Israel-Turkey relations. But isn't everyone spying on everyone else in almost all international relations?
Cool Winter weather advisories are up from Arizona all the way to the east coast today. Tomorrow and Saturday expect to see lots of ice storm/power outage videos on the tube.
Sit On Your Wallet Department "Report: College endowments suffer huge declines" since many bought into what's popularly (although somewhat incorrectly) called toxic assets. --- Verging on Politically Incorrect: I like my colleges like I like my women: well endowed. Aw come on, I'm talking about brains, of course. Sheesh! Lighten up. Here, take some of these here pills.
Today's Podcast Will be here after about 8:30 AM Central time: www.independencejournal.com/mp3/20100128.mp3
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Coping: My Personal Typos Crusade As soon as I finish with this morning's report, have a little chow, shower, check the brush piles that are still smoldering, return a few phone calls, and have yet more coffee I'm off to Palestine where I will be picking up my new glasses. Be sure and drop by tomorrow as we find out if being able to see is in any way correlated to the number of typos around here. --- A few readers have sent in nastygrams lately telling me "Ure: Learn to type! It's worse some morning's than working out the NY Times Crossword Puzzle!"
Apparently, these readers don't understand texting. But that gets me to an interesting point of language to ponder. Cliff & I talked about it a while back, too when we were chatting about human I/O limits and linguistic efficiency.
Have you ever considered how worthless vowels are? A lot of words in the English language have much shorter (and commonly used texting) abbreviations which are a heck of a lot shorter to type and express the same linguistic concept. The only thing that differs is whether you have been conditioned to infer the correct meaning.
Take something like LOL. You know it means 'laugh out loud' but instead of 14 characters, it's three.
There's another writing convention: The Associated Press Stylebook used to say if a number is under10 the number should be spelled out. Over 10 and it's proper to use the numerals. Don't know if it's still that way in the stylebook, since if you haven't guessed, I seldom looked at even when I was a semi-serious journalist. Besides, in radio news, we never bothered with trivialities like splling. (sic) --- This week's little adventure into podcasting reminds me that people are just as 'picky' about things they hear as they are things they read. There's a two word phrase for such people and the second word of the pair is "retentive".
A reader corrected me for pronouncing "Diaspora" with the emphasis on the third syllable, instead of the second. While this is technically correct according to the Merriam-Webster pronunciation guide, the pronunciation of this - and plenty of other words, falls into a meta set called "regionalisms".
If you live in the US West, the big body of water south of Texas is called the caribBEan but if you're a Right Coastie, it's the caRIBbean.
Similarly, regionalisms impact how that mountain range in Tibet is pronounced. One part of the country calls it the him-a-LAY-uhs while another part of the country calls it the hih-MALL-yahs. --- I mention this because I've been pondering a lot lately whether the predictive linguistic project could be rolled over into a near-real-time project based on voice communications. You know, since a lot of US telephone traffic is routed out of country so it can be snooped and sampled at places like Pine Gap/Alice Springs by foreign workers and therefore 'legal' before being sent back to wherever.
I got to thinking "Since the Oracle at Delphi may have used an audible technique for predicting the future, might modern intelligence services use something similar when doing wide spectrum sampling?" Presumably regionalism in early Greece were tips as to where someone came from as much as someone saying "Toity Toid Street" might imply a New York/Brooklyn background.
What followed was a logical question as to whether putting a layer of speech pathology into the voice analog to the written linguistic analysis would in any way improve geographical reference resolution, or, for that matter, improve the accuracy of such a system?
Purely a waste of time, I suppose. Still, if I were a large alphabet agency living under a huge parking lot not far from Washington (that's punctuated with ventilators, LOL) it would sure be an interesting linguistic experiment to sample based on a fairly common word that's not subject to a while sh*tpile of regionalisms.
So here's the experiment (Assuming you had an Alice Springs or Menwith Hill, a couple of PhD speech pathologists and the concept of archetypical linguistics:
We'd start with triggering a 500-word recordings based on a keyword like "dream". Even higher priority would be given to keyword phrases like "dream last night" since short-term values could be expected to be highest as a future event gets closer to 'popping' into the Now.
*The 12-year history of the little garage linguistics project seems to suggest higher reliability of high immediacy value events. While only one person in 250,000 may be able to 'skry the future' 500-years ahead, a much higher number, perhaps one in a thousand may be able to sense a 'feeling of dread' within 24-hours of a life-threatening event.
Wouldn't it therefore
make sense, for intelligence agencies besides having complex
linguistic filtering to find phrases of interest such as [recordon:"bomb":exclude
if precedent = "it's dah": alarmif (language=arabic and
originareacode=|hotlist|)] to have instead something like
[recordon:"dream":exclude if precedent="wet":printtofileif
(proximity3"last night"] So hwere's the more -than-academic question: If you were to run that audio filtering program on millions of phone calls and pull out dream descriptor sets, and then run it through post processing of the kind Cliff uses, would you have a better handle on short-term high immediacy events and as a corollary, is this why the US was well-prepared for Haiti, or was that just good planning?
Down At the WuJo: Sick of ET Mythologies Speaking of linguisticy kinds of things, here's one for you to ponder.
You saw where "Scientists warn about attempting to contact aliens?"
Sit down on the mat here at the WuJo where reality meets the etheric because I'm going to let you in a large and terrible secret. How to contact an ET in the next two minutes! Possibly the scariest - and yet at the same time, the most liberating - thing you can ever lean, so listen up.
You know how concepts are framed in order to hide some obvious truth? "Huh?"
OK: a couple of refresher examples: We see economists all the time say "Inflation is when prices go up!" But the truth of the matter is values never go anywhere. The utility value of a 'thing' is pretty much constant. But what varies all over the place is the amount of paper or 'money' chasing it. So, when an economist says "Prices go up!" he's lying because the other side of it is always equally true: The purchasing power of the money involved is going down.
Just like Banksters call debt "Consumer Credit" and other switcheroo terms to hide the truth of debt, so too, in the search for the extraterrestrials, the truth is hidden in plain sight. Just no one is allowed to come right out and say it most times.
But, in the privacy of the WuJo, I'm handing out this little cards for you to cut out and paste somewhere convenient so you can see it any time the subject of ET's comes up:
Be careful who you mention this to. Them charlatans have spent centuries hiding this information and they have a way of burning at the stake those who catch on and speak of such things without throwing in with them. Which is why time monks who hang out at the WuJo are such dangerous fellows to be around.
Wednesday January 27, 2010 Fed Decision: Hold! (yawn...) Like this is a surprise?
So now the market can move down... Hidden in Plain Sight: Unmitigated Disaster I was really surprised when my consigliore called this week to point out something which was so obvious I hadn't thought to mention it. Bad move on my part.
"First of all, my model was built in 1979," he began, explaining that his model of where the economy is was not created in 1976 commenting recently on it. OK...9's and 6's are easy to get upside down.
I thought for a second: "Banks are getting serious commercial property back and this is just another marker on that slippery slope?"
Sadly, a good one it is. As I've written before, the Great Depression was as bad as it was because the recognition point was immediate, intense, and personal in the 1930's event. Money that people had in the bank one day was simply gone the next.
But in Depression 2.0 what happens is that instead of being obviously gone we see maneuvering that covers up the losses and pushes them into the future through bail-outs and loans (think TARP and other government backed rescues).
The net effect is that on a constant dollar basis, the Great Depression saw a personal loss per capita in the area of $475 per perso9n, but the bank failures and bailouts in our modern event are over $650 per capita - and that's before adding interest on the loaned money.
Because this money will be p[aid back over time through future taxes the immediate impact of Great Depressions slides out over some unspecified period, although by my consigliore's model, a 10-year, or longer, workout is still ahead, depending on how deep the deflation digs in before hyperinflation as the "only way out" becomes possible.
This brings us around to present-day events that then fall into an easy-to-understand pattern. --- Tonight, president Obama will try to get the nation to focus on something other than Depression 2.0 as he delivers a State of the Union message designed to revive hope.
Based on how the previous Depression's hope revival efforts under Roosevelt went, we're about due for "Good times are just ahead..." so over the coming weeks we should expect something like "Green Shoots 2" to get us looking to the future.
Even as Roosevelt was able to pump the economy using the Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC) and the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to create government spending employment, the present-day rhyming with the last Depression is obvious, as well.
Not to pick on electricity, the the modern times rhyme off the Rural Electrification Act (of 1936) will be the Smart Grid and the first steps toward this were embodied in the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007.
The problem not answered in the SmartGrid plans is that the 1930's and 1940's work of the REA laid the groundwork in the second half of Depression 1.0 for an explosion is lifestyle improvements. Everything from radio, to television, and a myriad of home appliances became possible and widely available as American companies like Maytag, Kelvinator, and others quickly spawned and grew in places like Ohio, only to find that before we got into Depression 2.0, many had been globalized such that finding an American-made refrigerator or stove now takes serious research and effort.
Similarly, one of the functions of World War II was to pull a lot of young men into the military so not only wasd the unemployed manpower level reduced, but there was a fair bit of economic stimulus that followed from supporting the war industries. Recylcing and repurposing the civilian population was handily done.
The modern counterpoint is a little more hazy: nebulous wars for nebulous objectives but the primary function is being partly met. Any time the public support for warring and spending drops a 'terrorist attempt' shows up conveniently timed or we see a headline like this one from Tuesday: "Al Qaeda seeks WMD, US unprepared: reports."
Lest skeptics think that al Qaeda is just a little too conveniently timed in its activities, we look back to the period prior to World War II and notice that "Oscar-winning US filmmaker Oliver Stone says Adolf Hitler was 'enabled by Western bankers'." Only a truly paranoid person would wonder privately if there's not more of a rhyme than meets the eye in present times. ---- Paradoxically, "Obama to propose freeze on government spending" in the SOU speech tonight. Not that he'll actually be able to deliver on this one any more than on "shutting down Guantanamo" or any number of other campaign pledges; America's caught in a replay of history that holds leaders captives to the libretto of history.
Government will be getting smaller, to be sure. The reason? Regular folks this spring will be getting property tax revaluation notices. Most counties are likely to try and continue with last year's assessment levels - however unsupportable they are on a comparable sales basis this year.
Living within a budget is something politicians love to talk about. But seldom are they able to deliver the goods. --- At some juncture, we will get to the social-upheaval part of the replay (this summer, perhaps) but almost certainly, someone in the Obama administration should be worried when "Indonesia mulls teraring down Obama statue" and here "American disapproval of Obama is on the rise."
You ain't seen nothing yet. Wait till the next leg down in the Second Depression gets going in earnest...
Of course it already is out here in "Reality Outside the Beltway". Channel 2 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa has a very revealing poll: Shows less than one percent of their poll respondents think we should "Keep congress. Our lawmakers are doing a good job." 98.19% says toss them all out and start all over. Wonder what the 0.9% don't understand?
Wither Housing Although the Case-Shiller/S&P Housing numbers were headlined as "Mixed Message in Data" the chart doesn't make me want to run out and buy anything until it gets past the zero axis:
Not all bad, though: "Data through November 2009, released today by Standard & Poor’s for its S&P/Case-Shiller1 Home Price Indices, the leading measure of U.S. home prices, show that the annual rates of decline of the 10-City and 20-City Composites continue to improve, in spite of price declines being measured across many markets during November. This marks approximately 10 months of improved readings in the annual statistics, beginning in early 2009, and is the third consecutive month these statistics have registered single digit declines, after 20 consecutive months of double digit declines."
George's Rule of Ten ...says that the price of gold is down almost six bucks which means the Dow should drop 50-60 today at some point. Yesterday's rally in the Dow let me place the last of my long term put options - thank you. turned down 10-minutes after my order was filled.
If it sounds like I'm gloating - I am. not often I can get things like up this well.
Fed Rate Decision comes out this afternoon. I'll post it as soon as it comes in. 99% confident that no change will be there, but some talk about improving conditions have not.....whatever.
Worth Reading Bill Gross of PIMCO is
out with his latest look-see at the financial conditions of
earth. Called "The Ring of Fire" it's a pretty good
assessment on two out of three points. First, he comments
on the Reinhart/Rogoff book "This Time is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly
The only part I wonder about is where he asserts "Now that a semblance of stability has been imparted to the economy and its markets, the attempted detoxification and deleveraging of the private sector is underway."
Pretty darned optimistic. The continue the analog he was using (to detox) I'd have to mention that we haven't gotten to the 'debtleriums tremors" part of withdrawal yet. Withdrawal from the excess consumption-driven model has a lot more pain to come, the way I figure. But, Gross may have it right as least so long as sgtories like "Consumer Confidence Hits new Recovery Highs" keep crossing the wires. --- My son who worked as an EMT for a while in a County detox center described the process of getting sober pretty vividly. Won't go into all the treatment options, but a single drink while tissue alcohol levels come down is sometimes useful. But if America needs a single drink on the bottle of debt to get past the 'debtlerium tremors' stage, we'll have a problem: The bottle of public debt is pretty much empty and given the public's mood, refills aren't coming any time soon. --- Thankfully there's someone to take the other side of my options trade in long-term put (downside) options. Without bulls, bears like me would be poor.
Factions At Work? We occasionally will refer to "The Factions" within the PowersThatBe entity in Cliff's predictive linguistics modelspace. Fascinating to watch them as they go this way and that. I suspect the 'leak' of the IPCC climate emails right ahead of the Copenhagen Climate love-in was a display of factional discord.
Now fast forward to the World Economic Forum opening this week in Davos and the reported death of the WEF's security chief and tell me if this is tit-for-tat or simply suicide as reported? --- I don't like the term "being suicided" but a recent nuclear worker case a few months back and now this one just stick in my craw. The old newsman in me just knows there's a whole 'rest of the story' that hasn't come out yet. Wonder if it ever will?
Permanent War For Permanent Peace Department As "Afghanistan, allies to launch new effort to return Taliban to society" and we read how the "Shadow Taliban government rules Afghan's lives." --- I keep wondering "What
exactly are we doing there? I mean besides getting control
of the opium crop?" Stories like this one tell me it's
another example of how officialdom doesn't know either and since
people are asking, they're having to cobble up how to extract
themselves while painting something as a "Win!" Gonna take
a fair bit of paint. Global Rollover I don't expect too much in the market here in the US until after the Fed meeting today announces no change in rates and comes out with a craftily-worded explanation that will satisfy the Street and say nothing other than "While conditions showed marginal improvement, the potential for a robust recovery have been delayed and so yada, yada, yada..."
Then the market can go down. Because of how interlinked markets work, the Fed may cite some reduction of inflation fears, which could push gold down and the dollar up a bit. But it's all part of the global/systemic dance which has seen the Seoul (South Korea) market just hit a 7-week low overnight. --- Not helping things in Korea was the little bit of gunfire along the disputed border area. No casualties, but gunfire there is always worrisome since the war never officially ended.
Iron Fists
Department
I try to keep in mind that US residents who opt out of America are still on the tax hook to IRS for 10-years, so we have something similar. It's just we use a lower velocity bullet.
Today's Podcast Will be here after about 8:30 AM Central time: www.independencejournal.com/mp3/20100127.mp3
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Coping: With the Corporate Persona Pull up a chair and we need to have us a little talk about "What's a human".
We need to go over this since the Obama administration has signaled that they may actually try to do something about the Supreme Court decision last week when opens the checkbook as wide as corporate interests want to go in buying elections, issues, and their way in congress.
This has me writing down ideas about the "Next Big Thing" in business structures since I'm pondering whether to buy a small company up in the Pacific Northwest. --- The reason I'm looking long and hard at it is that it would allow me to visit the Northwest as much as I want and be able to write it off as "business". Since Elaine and I have four kids in the Seattle/Tacoma area, owning a company in the Northwest makes sense. Elaine and I could travel up to see the kids, which means travel from our 'permanent residence' would be a take deductible business expense, as would meals away from home and so forth.
My consigliore says it's a good dead, provided I can get a set of deal points he's been kind enough to offer. "You could use the write-offs" he explained.
On the other hand, my friend Cliff raised a pretty good question in return: "Just how busy do you want to make yourself?" Good point: Already been in the life where getting on an airplane was nice because it was one of the few places the phone didn't ring, although in corporate planes, trust me, the phones ring there, too. --- Nevertheless I'm pondering now what would be the perfect business form if I were to move forward.? I want the limits of liability that go with LLC's - limited liability companies. However, the purpose of buying a company would be to figure out a way to grow and flip it. Since house-flipping isn't exactly popular here lately, corporation-flipping always has been and saying "I'm in mergers and acquisitions" is a lot more respectable lately than saying "I'm a mortgage broker..."
Therefore, I'm attracted to the S corporation structure: "S corporations are corporations that elect to pass corporate income, losses, deductions and credit through to their shareholders for federal tax purposes. Shareholders of S corporations report the flow-through of income and losses on their personal tax returns and are assessed tax at their individual income tax rates."
C corporations are a mixed bag, the LLC's are growing in popularity because while on the one hand "a C corporation is recognized as a separate taxpaying entity" but "The profit of a corporation is taxed to the corporation when earned, and then is taxed to the shareholders when distributed as dividends. This creates a double tax. The corporation does not get a tax deduction when it distributes dividends to shareholders. Shareholders cannot deduct any loss of the corporation. "
Now let me pull this all together into a single story to put in context: IRS is about to ask corporations to divulge what their taxes would be if they didn't use this tax structure, or that to reduce their tax obligation.
Where this gets really interesting is (as the NY Post puts it) "Tax man looking for firms to turn themselves in". --- All of which smells to me a lot like the corporate version of gun control: The innocent companies will turn themselves in, just like the non-criminal element might turn in their guns. But, on the other hand, crooks don't turn in their guns and (wait for it...) crooked corporations aren't going to out themselves, either.
With the US supreme court doing the nutty overturn on corporate grifting by continuing the charade that corporations are somehow on a par with 'natural persons' I figure it's only a matter of time till corporations come up with their over version of the 5th amendment right to avoid self-incrimination.
It's only one small step away from where we are now but the ramifications are huge of this once unthinkable direction. Tim Geithner and Hank Paulson are in Washington this morning being grilled on AIG being pressured by the NYT Fed to hide the true value of their credit-default swaps.
Looks like for now, corporations don't yet have 5th amendment rights, but with guys like Paulson and Geithner massaging events, I guess they don't need them. Still, makes me consider acquiring a small corporation. In many ways corporations already have more power than regular humans and I have been feeling a bit powerless lately.
Mostly on election days.
The Obama Minimum I see where there is still only one small sunspot today up at SpaceWeather. In a good-natured way, I call this the Obama Minimum and if you think the weather is bad now, just imagine what it would/will be like if we get a mini-Ice Age like the Maunder Minimum.
I suppose I don't need to tell you that "Winter snow totals trudge deep into records", or that "cold weather claims more lives in Europe." Especially snowy in Germany this week.
Instead I'll just point at the data which is failing to come off near flat-line - something it should have done 4-5 months ago and instead say "got your garden places ready to go yet?"
Trouser Lizards I can make up stories like this: Man caught at airport with 44 lizards in pants. He's off to jail.
The business point is that each of the lizards which he was trying to steal - lizard-jacking we'd have to call it - can bring up to $2,800 - that's in Europe.
This explains a lot about why Europeans elect the people they do (Gordo the Gold seller and France's "Take my son, please" come to mind) as they threw away sovereignty and what little sense they had to give the PowersThatBe European Division a chance to do promote their globalist wet dream. --- The purported perp was in NZ in 2008 in the company of what's described as a 'Swiss reptile dealer." Wonder if that's code for 'banker' or was this another kind of reptilian agent?
Tuesday January 26, 2010 Nice Bounce While It Lasted In Monday's column I showed you the five-minute chart Robin Landry had worked up and it showed the option of a rally up to the 10,350/10,300 area before the market could turn down again. Sure enough, at its peak on Monday popped up to 10,256.87 - at which point I was tempted to yell "Hold It!" and snap a few pictures myself for my some day book "How Modern Depressions are Dragged Out Indefinitely: In order not to feel so much pain today and give the same politicians who created this mess a chance of buying their way back into office for another term in the fall 2010 elections helped by a corpgov-friendly supreme court decision which provides for corporate auctioning of votes via unlimited dispersal of money and favors from other than natural humans who would otherwise have a traceable name attached to them, Volume 2." I guess that explains why there isn't a line of publishers bidding for rights...
The real adventure won't start until we take out the Friday lows and maybe another little run up this week before we start down again is how I'm looking at it, but this is not financial advice since I have other vices that are a lot more fun -- trust me. Still, the area below 10,160 could get ugly and clear the way for a test of 9,500 on the Dow.
Not to say the bulls don't have a case: If you look at the Yahoo five-day chart here, you'll see that there was quite a gap left at the Wednesday open last week and since markets have a way of 'filling gaps' a run up to fill 10,625 might be ahead.
All of which explains why I don't do day-trading. It's easy to see what the Big Picture is in markets, but trying to trade every zig and zag is closer to Russian Roulette and seems to have a similar payoff many times. On the other hand, the advent of long term options (goon out a year or two) makes it possible for people figure out the long range direction of things and place their bets and forget about the day-to-day machinations. I don't care how the market gets there so longs as Brinks has a ktruck coming right along behind it. Suits me fine. --- Gold being down early hints that a couple of economic numbers coming out this morning might not be so rosy. The Case-Schiller/S&P Housing number and consumer confidence could push things down.
Fundamentals do come into play at some point and I keep pointing to the most recent (Jan 8) Federal Reserve G-19 Consumer Debt report which shows the annual rate of change for total consumer debt, revolving/credit card debt and nonrevolving (long term longs like school loans) as collapsing:
Yes, that second number down on the right reads -18.5% percent annualized which so far most seem to be overlooking. But the way I figure it, this ought to have pushed financial stocks and credit card stocks out of a plane with no parachute so guess what I bought long term 'put options' on? Either the next Fed G.19 turns around, or at some point the geniuses down on the street will see the error of their ways (one of which is not reading my column, but there's an old farmerly saying about horses and water that comes to mind). Not investment advise, though!
Not that it's hard to figure when you look at the size of government debt: Ov er $12-trillion dollars now and with the slow-down in the economy, wouldn't surprise me at all if the debt were to exceed US Gross Domestic Product this year. It will for sure if you take all the 'off budget' spending into account which no one seems to want to do. That's like having a couple of additional car payments and not mentioning them when you take out a loan.
Simple enough reason for that Beltway disease denial though: That'd reveal more of the sheer ugliness of Depression 2.0 and who can afford to do that with congressional and senate elections coming this fall?
There's a propensity on Wall Street to talk about 'the strength of a global economic recovery". A person would have to be a damn fool not to see such talk as shills pimping a crooked craps game; the Easter Bunny is more real.
Like I said: If the rally lasts only through yesterday, or drags out until sometime in early spring doesn't matter. I figure Brinks will be along with my money later in the year one way or t'other. Gravity can only be defied just so long, although hot air still rises - especially in winter when it's cold out. Speaking of which...
Are We Next? THE Biggest financial story of the day could be the report that "Standard and Poor's warns my downgrade Japan" debt instruments. A reader who is pretty savvy asked "George, are we next?"
You aren't going to like the answer and Pappy always said "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all..." So...
(insert huge silence here)
Wintery Blast A winter storm watch remains in effect from late Wenersday night through late Thursday night for all of the Texas and Oklaho9ma panhandles says the Weather Service. Linguistics have us looking for two big blasts of winter ahead, but not sure if this one will be big enough to merit attention, other than putting the covers on water faucets and restocking our plumbing spares before the rest of the herd which does such things after the emergencies.
Global Warming Love the headline out of CBS' web site on the cost of Coping-haven: "Congress went to Denmark, You Got the Bill". Over a million bucks and who knows how much extra jet exhaust contributed to the...oh? A little too harsh a reminder of how our rulers want us to do without and they're "special"? --- When I do consulting, do I jump on a plane? Hell no. An email, phone call or a video conference costs nothing but recycled electrons. Then again, maybe congress has some kind of deal with the EU to support Danish hotels and car rental outfits, but it doesn't make sense to me.
Unless they can't read, maybe...
Aliens Among Us! --- Today's fashions have me wondering "It that really a human?" anyway.
It's Elementary So president Obama goes to an elementary school and uses a teleprompter?
Fans Meantime, the WH PR department's getting some questions, we're sure, after an Obama fan (cough, cough, ahem...) wrote to newspapers all over the country using the same name (Ellie Light). 68 publications in 31 states, in fact says the Patterico's Pontifications website which has been counting.
OIL in Haiti? While an Italian disaster expert is slamming the US and Hugo Chavez made his claims about an m'earthquake weapon' to Fox News sources, here's a hot one to ponder: A 'heads up' UrbanSurvival reader sent along a 2008 article out of a French-language publication that translates in part "...Scientists Daniel and Ginette Mathurin indicate that under Haitian soil is rich in oil and fuel fossible which were collected by Haitian and foreign experts. "We have identified 20 sites Oil, launches Daniel Mathurin stating that 5 of them are considered very important by practitioners and policies. "
Ticket to Ride NY Post reports that the "Feds OK Live nation/Ticketmaster (merger) with strings". Strings as in caveats, not Boston Pops.
Those Late French Here comes another political blunder as "Frances MPs' report backs Muslim face veil ban." Maybe should have though this through before the Muslim population of France grew to over 3.5-million don'tcha think? ---- Germany has 4-million Muslims now, by the way.
Blame Game Meantime, elsewhere on the road to peace and harmony, we see Muslims and Christians throwing blame at one another in Nigeria's recent religious fighting which has claimed at least 326 souls on both sides.
ME and is MEss Remember the reports that young Islamic radicals were converging on Pakistan? Well, look here:" Word out today that the Afghanistan intelligence services say the January 18 attack in Kabul was 'linked to Pakistan'. Not much surprising to that, is there. ---
Today's Podcast Will be here after about 8:30 AM Central time: www.independencejournal.com/mp3/20100126.mp3 -- I forgot to post the blog-style update yesterday...that will be fixed this morning...if I remember. More coffee before we move on?
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Coping: With the I/O Problem Along about tomorrow, Apple is expected to unveil a new tablet-sized product and CEO Steve Jobs says this is the most important thing he's ever done. --- While a low-priced notebook seems glitzy, the price point won't be much different from Amazon's Kindle which, by the way, has a smallish keyboard. And that's where my focus today begins.
While micro keyboards seem like a good thing, along with input stylus contraptions, the fact of the matter is that successful computering involves what I call the 'speed bump' on the man-machine-interface (MMI). And that is what?
How fast can you type and how fast can you talk? In my case, although it's not a classic touch-typing style, I can whip out ideas at between 60 and 110 words per minutes. Most of my morning report flows out around 100 WPM once the coffee kicks in. If I ever get around to answering emails, I use DragonSpeaking 10 and that gives me a break from keyboarding for a while. And with the new quad-core screamer, things roll right along at blazing speed.
To be sure, you have maybe never tried on a real power-computing workstation and maybe one of these mornings I should take a picture of what it's like here in the morning. Four monitors and a TV set with overseas media going plus an occasional noise from the police scanner. The right monitor is looked into quotes, the middle monitor is big enough to write the column on the right-hand side while pulling news leads and research off the left-hand side of the screen. The right-hand monitor displays emails as they come in and the 4-th monitor has Projhect up with this week's activities mapped out.
Since it's all pulled together with a pair of dual-output video cards, the whole desktop flows seamlessly and bloody awful fast.
While it may seem - especially to listen to marketers - that notebook computers are really cool and all, for genuine productivity I would rather walk around with a dictating machine for making notes rather than futz around with a stylus or roll-up keyboard.
Give me the old Microsoft wireless keyboard and wireless mouse and I can kick back and roll through my work with blazing speed, although it you're waiting for an email from me, it may not seem that way at times.
Before you get whipped up into a frenzy about spending money on computing gadgets when the come out, do me a favor: Measure how fast you can really type, how fast you can talk, and how fast you can write if you're trying to scribble down thoughts.
My bet is that you can talk between 100 and 120 words per minute, and maybe as fast as 150 words per minute if you're from New York and you just stepped out of a Starbucks with a double shot Americano and a poppy seed muffin for breakfast. Maybe only 70 words per minute in more laid-back East Texas if you've just finished a huge chicken-friend steak breakfast with milks and extra toast and you're talking to someone in the aisle at Tractor Supply.
But you're getting my point, I hope? You can type and talk faster than the dickens and so the point of effort for maximum improvement would be a speed typing package and DragonBreath.
Getting real work done is an I/O speed issue. How fast can you read (which is where the Vortex reader is useful, BTW) and how fast can you output? Type like hell or talk.
Texting is a time vampire for people who are too dense to figure out the most important commodity in the world is time and anything that is not getting you toward a goal is keeping you from it. --- While I expect applies latest and greatest will be a worthy product and all, unless it scores fewer errors on the input side than Dragon or my keyboard or that little Olympus dictating unit of mine (which can be plugged in to Dragon for conversion to text later) pardon me while I just stay over here in the fast lane with my heavy iron, thanks.
Oh, and if I want to get a message to you, I'll email or call.
Other Gaps in Our Thinking We've talked in the past few weeks about the "Gap" in the linguistics that appears in late 2011 (October'ish) and then gets worse into 2012 and then recovers slowly thereafter. That got a reader to thinking:
That'd do it, alright, but have you ever considered the number and magnitude of quakes necessary to do that? Good grief!
Rarium and Unobtanium First year business students learn this one: Supply shortage4s drive up prices. Which is why the headline "Global supply of rate earth elements could be wiped out" catches my eye.
So now I have another shortage to worry about on my list of Things to Study:
By the way - if you want
to pop for a good book on this strategic metals problem, a book
on point is The Strategic Metals War
One More Worry Maybe this one is not as big as the mystery of why I can't get Krusteaz pancakes, but "Computer-driven trading raises meltdown fears" headlines a Financial Times story. But wait! Why not play the short side via options?
Monday January 25, 2010 Another Monday Rally Say, not to sound ungrateful about things, but the people in charge of arb'ing up the market have gotten kind of boring with their 'buy futures Mondays' routine here, almost to the point where it has become a tradable pattern in and of itself, don'tcha think?
Funny-da-mentally, nothing has changed over the weekend...and if there was no cause for wild optimism on Friday, surely the report that five more banks were marched to the wall after the close Friday wasn't an upper, was it? No?
Looking over the early runs this morning, the report that "Stocks set to snap losing streak; futures higher" has me shaking my head wondering whether the world has completely taken leave of its senses;' 'fraid I know the answer to that one already, though.
Peoplenomics this weekend was about "Where Next?" although the report from Robin Landry (sent to his colleagues in the investment business, not a general letter, sorry) filled in many of the blanks...
What happens in a few minutes is that the market on the 60-minute chart seems likely to follow the course of the black lines instead of the green, but that's fine with me since my time horizon is (perhaps optimistically) out in January of next year for my short-side options. Today may be a chance to buy more (he said, rubbing his hands together gleefully with a miser's glint in the eyes...)...
From the 60-Minute chart:
So, what's my point of concern - where it might look like a little longer upside? Your guess looking at the chart is as good as mine (better maybe, since you probably haven't started to "load the boat" with put options yet).
A rally north of 10,300 (1-i) would have me not buying. But if you look at my Aggregate chart, and the performance of the Global Index on the Peoplenomics side, the reasons to be buying large into the long side seem few and far between. --- Some of what's to come in the market this week may be seen as a rally to help Ben Bernanke hold onto his job. His reconfirmation is up this week and although I expect he'll be in for another term, that has placed a bit of a cloud on the Fed meeting. Maybe the headline in BusinessDay: "Scramble to save Bernanke as markets take a beating" has caused some of the gnomes of Greenwich to loosen up the longs today.
We get to wait around till Wednesday for the Fed decision, but it's no mystery: The Fed can't lower and if they raise, Ben & Company will be accused of killing the embryonic recovery. Not that the 'recovery' is any more real than "Good times are just ahead" jingoisms from the last Depression. Bernanke is hemmed in by zero interest on the lower side and worse.
China announced plans for a big convertible bond issue at 3% which means maybe someone will figure out there's a Dollar-Yuan Bond carry-trade possible here; at least I think so. I've never been drunk enough to do a carry trade. Borrow US funds a bit over Fed rate, turn around and buy 3% convertibles, take spread, buy a new business jet. yeah, seems simple enough, doesn't it?
About the only thing that could ruin life might be some really bad news on something like housing. The Case-Schiller/S&P 20-city housing index is due for an update tomorrow and with all these option ARM's coming up to reset housing could rear its head. or, come to think of it, so could the commercial side.
Still, I keep hearing that banks are making sweet-heart deals with borrowers to pay even some nominal amount like a hundred bucks a month just so they can keep from putting homes over onto the 'non-performing' side of the books, and since that's keeping the books looking a tad better'n reality, the market gets time to work lower. But not before a little nose candy for the bulls today.
Secret Ingredients Hats off to Reuters for laying out how the SEC wanted 'national security status for AIG details".
This was in the late Bushista - earliest Obama days, so I guess there's no pinning blame on one or the other. It is, after all, a duopoly only in name in America, especially with the supreme court decision on unlimited special interest next week. Kind of like the democans and the republicons have joint checking now.
Rolling Out Terror - Again I suppose you heard that Osama bin Laden rolled out another message this weekend and in it, he reportedly took credit for the almost-bombing of a flight to Detroit recently.
The real story this morning on topic is that bin Laden's message is being touted as something of a precursor to a possible future attack.
This is related to finance how? Think back to 2001 and what did we have? A market which was on the verge of recognizing that we were on the verge of a Second Depression. Along comes terrorism and conveniently, we get spending at Depression-era CCC and WPA levels except it's on airport security, the TSA, body scanners and so on.
Yes, 9/11 was a terrible thing, don't get me wrong. But just watch over the next week, or so, as editorials spring up across the land saying the 'latest threat means we need to get body scanner funding right away urgent-like...' I can almost hear them now. --- A passenger trying to open a door caused a flight to be diverted this weekend.
Elections Delayed Are... Coming in September to Afghanistan since officials figure there are too many security concerns at the moment. But isn't elections delayed the same as elections denied? Just doesn't pass the sniff test somehow...fighting for freedom, but no voting yet... hmmmm...
The Money Goes Where? I saw the report today that Brazil, China, India, and South Africa (BASIC) have urged wealthy nations to hand over $10-billoion to poor nations this year to fight climate change.
Not that spending money is a bad thing. But, usually in a rational world, the process is Party A says "Here's what costs add up to..." and then money is deployed, not "Here's money, see how much you can spend..."
Wetazona Northern Arizona got socked pretty bad by the rains over the weekend. As a result, Flagstaff and some of the surrounding area is now a federal disaster area. On the other hand, my commodity guy JB about 60-mil;es south says it wasn't too bad, so apparently localized damage.
Layoffs Not Over Electronics outfit Ericsson is cutting 1,500 jobs.
Drop by tomorrow morning - Labor Department should come out with it's Mass Layoff report for December early this week. Wouldn't want you to miss that chart...
Linguistic Follow-up Disappearances meme: An Australian millionaire is missing. --- Elliott Abrams using the word diaspora Friday. "What Haiti needs: a Haitian diaspora".
Goggle's news engine is up to 5,319 hits on the word this morning from a pre-quake level of under 100 a few weeks back. Not bad for seeing it comes 6-8 months back, huh?
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Coping: WuJo and the Grand Canyon Thought it would be best after all the serious tuff this morning to take a break and move right along to the WuJo - our mental martial arts school where reality/scientific meets reality/other on the mat of mental combat.
Today we wander into the Grand Canyon. Don't know if you have ever seen the story, or not, but there was a rather well publicized report (predating the net) that back in 1909 the Smithsonian Institution sent a crew to the Grand Canyon where Egyptian artifacts were purportedly found.
One of the earlier versions of the story traces back to Keelynet circa 1993 and reads in part:
The story then goes on to describe the findings in the cave and since then there have been reported efforts here and there to get the Smithsonian to reveal its role in all this - which seems to have led to denials - as might be expected. How much stock you put in the story depends on what you think of the whole field of hidden archeology, I suppose. Nevertheless, the Phoenix Gazette seems to have been real. All of which gets me to this interesting site "WingMakers" which landed in my inbox this morning with a note that I should take some time and read the whole site - even make a copy in case it disappears from the net again; apparently it has gone missing in the past...and be sure to read the philosophy attached to it. No endorsement, but any site that begins with...
...gets me to thinking about that
purported Phoenix Gazette story I heard in about 1996 or
'97 back when I was
reading Graham Hancock's Fingerprints of the Gods A lot of people won't even begin to consider that earth has a much richer and [hidden] history than is 'officially let on'. But, evidence of how scientists in a strict peer review setting skewered data on climate change that didn't fit a desired outcome has me reconsidering the possibilities. The problem is, however, like we were talking about last week, if earth really does have this hidden history and if there's anything to it, then the odds of something like our gap in linguistic data in October of 2011 or the reputed Mayan calendar problems in 2012 becomes a lot more possible.
Just wanted to throw that out there are brain food and a place to go researching in case Monday turns out to be terribly boring.
Robert Nelson Had IT! I forgot to ask my friend Robert Nelson of www.rexresearch.com about that bootstrap gravity engine design I wrote about a few months back. Thanks to reader AF for sending the link to the right page: HERE. "Mysterious new Aircraft powered by Reaction motor". Out of a January 1935 Popular Science. But there was another one and it was powered with an electric drill....
If you have a sponge-like mind, going to Nelson's Rex Research site can soak up days and days with interesting reading and grist for the home3\ science lab to test... but that gets us to the next item which is:
Say What? Department Urban Dictionary's got a good one as their featured word of the day: "Time Vampire" - which is someone who sucks time out of your life like a vampire sucks blood. More at their website: urbandictionary.com.
Nice Theory...But... Reader wants to know:
In a word: No. Money bouncing around in model space would accrue in the 'Markets" portion of the model. besides, when the six great quakes come later this year (>July 7th) they appear in the GlobalPop(ulation) area. Sorry...this is gonna hurt a little.
The .MP3 Test If you click over here: www.independencejournal.com/mp3/20100125.mp3 after about 8:30 or so, you should be able to hear a test of a daily .MP3 podcast. Style is conversational/sitting having a cup of coffee with you and maybe 10-minutes worth.
Comments are welcome on anything related: length, approach, theme and so forth. Probably will have a different music intro for each day of the week and the one this morning is something I \whipped out in Finale' & GPO 4 in about 10-seconds. Some day, I'd like to have time to spend learning how to drive the music software. But there's only one of me and zillions of music software outfits.
Before the chart, a little background: Once upon a time, a long while ago, I observed during my quest for 'truth' in economics, that the PowersThatBe, the talking heads on the teeve, and the other information sources that actively engage in the programming of humans not to think, had conveniently swept several trillions of dollars that disappeared in the Internet Bubble's bursting (since spring 2000) under the rug. Surely, it wasn't unnoticed by the thousands of people who called brokers and said "Where is my money?" "Gone, but hang in there as you're a long term investor!" was about all they heard back.
So one of our charts for Peoplenomics subscribers oughta be widely circulated - it shows that if you line up the peak of the Dow in January 2000 with the peak in early September of 1929, we're on a very very close replay track. Much closer than even the chart shows if you were to back out inflation, and put in the effects of 1929 deflation, but that'd be real work, and I'm sort of lazy if the truth be told.
No, it's not a perfect replay of 1929, but history doesn't repeat exactly, it only rhymes. So think of this as the rhymes and the crimes chart:
"George, that's only a coincidence!" your monkey-mind will protest.
Why sure it is...you bet. A 9½ year long coincidence...yessir....just a coincidence, I'm sure...
Write when you get rich,
George Ure, The People's Economist
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"
and his "Ring of Fire" chart sums up the public debt as a
percent of GDP problem.
written by James E. Sinclair. You know, as in
and reading into lost archeology.
