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Published Monday - Friday about 8 AM Central Time ....some typos are fixed by 8:30 (in theory) Saturday
March 26, 2011 04:58 AM AM CST
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Reader Note This being the weekend, our updates are available for subscribers only - at www.peoplenomics.com. Annual subscription fee is $40 with additional details here. Our usual abuse of the English language return here Monday about 8 AM Central...
Crisis of Trust Crash or Rally Time Ahead Word that Portugal may need as much as $99-billion in bailout dough doesn't seem to have crashed the financial markets. Neither has the insinuation that growth in Germany could hurt the rest of the EU.
While we wait for the Michigan sentiment numbers and the GDP this morning, there's a good case to be made that economic fundamentals no longer matter.
Why?
Well, the governments of the world seem intent on printing up as much of whatever they print for money to keep things rolling. Not that anyone has ever tried (successfully) to do a whole world inflation before, so this is likely to be wildly entertaining.
In fact, I would not be surprised, as a result to see $1,450 gold and $40 silver over the next month, or less... days maybe. The precious metals seem to be taking off, along with other commodities like food and energy.
For this morning, the International Business Times was reporting that oil was
"...stable near $10-5.50 a barrel..." and elsewhere in the financial press,
we read questions like "Will
Central Banks Accommodate the Oil Price Shock?"
Not like that's not obvious - for as my friend Gonzalo Lira mentioned in a note yesterday:
Well, I dumped by short position yesterday, on the theory that now that we've passed the 12,100 'line in the sand' there just may be more upside to the market, yet.
Not that I am swayed to the ideal of a perpetual bull market...if I was, I'd have done like my friend Howard who loaded up on close in options designed to make money in a major short-term super rally.
A review of where I've made the most money in my life, comes down to the stark realization that while I did dandy in the Crash of '87 being on the short side of things, the rest of the time my major gains have been on the bullish side of things like oil, wheat, and oh yeah, gold from $273 and silver from $7.
I'm a slow learner, it seems - and while I think there'd be hell to pay for any kind of retirement account hijacking by the government - we're in the kind of economic climate where the main investor mantra must be - more than ever:
Not the Fed to stay out of equities markets, directly or indirectly, nor to just maintain the purchasing power of dollars; nor to manage economic policy, which back in the day was not the function of a bank. Nor can we trust many elected officials who can't keep their election promises, be it national office from top down, and not local government which seems incapable of adjusting their own wages and budgets to reflect stable to decline property taxes.
Back when I was a young tiger of a newscaster (long, long ago) I became cynical about voting, seeing up close and personal how the powerful and the rich spread money around to favor policies which most favored their interests which they wrapped up as "good public policy" but which upon inspection was usually a self-interested lie. Shocker, huh?
Lammert's Next Swan Still, if we get a good run-up in the market today, I may re-enter shorts just to see what happens next week. Clif's 'hot period' is upon us from today over the weekend into early next week, and The Fractal Economist, Gary Lammert sees fractal trouble ahead then, too:
All of which leaves me with one of the most perplexing investment problems of all: On the one hand, we're in Clif's window and Lammert's got a fractal bead on next week. So, do I throw a few grand into short term option positions which could pay off (massively, like 4-10 to one), or do I use common sense and not bet against the house?
The first 'trust' question of the morning is do I trust reasonable researchers with no economic axe to grind, or The House which has been working over my wallet here lately? Lay on a straddle or strangle here? Hmmm...
Troubles of Japan As we are getting hints of the 'ill winds' from the Japan accident circling the globe, showing up in Iceland, for example, a check of the www.radiationnetwork.com site reveals that you will still need your headlights on to drive at night in the US.
The situation in Japan is incrementally worse, though with a dangerous breach now suspected and reports of workers getting burned skin from standing in radioactive water without boots and such - hardly in keeping with the downplayed low risks which we've previously be reassured about.
The Japanese stock market was up 1 percent overnight and it was 'all green' when I looked at Europe this morning.
Now we get to the trust question about Japan. I'm not the brightest economic bulb in the house, for sure, but I was struck by the Yen-Dollar chart on the Fed's web site this morning:
Since one of our regular readers is a well-respected teaching PhD type who has lots of other initials after his name and teaches 600-level (and up) business classes, perhaps I could lay off the question as a 'quickie report' for grad students to submit for critiques?
The question which I'd like explained in 600-words or less is this: "How can a country which has just had its ass kicked with multiple nuclear accidents, a major infrastructure wrecking tsunami and damaged supply chains, have its currency value continue to increase in the face of such overwhelming damage?"
The simple answer is probably either a) "Someone's lying about sh*t or b) the markets are really dumber than we think and they will catch on next week and that'll be Lammert's albino black swan... but some details and supporting decision matrices, please to explain why your answer should be trusted.
You notice that the Japanese PM is calling the situation in country "grave"? Poor choice of words...or, does he know more than he's letting on and doesn't this get us back to that whole trust discussion?
But it's all OK - the Bernank has promised to speak out more and explain policy better. Wait - haven't I heard that somewhere before....oh yeah, where are those bank bailout amounts Bloomberg won the right to in court?
Banks & Banksters Dept. So with Portugal banko'ed and Japan still in woods, what do you suppose is going on in the background with major banks and, in particular, with the government's FDIC Insurance operation? How about a quickie summary from their CFO?
Say, you don't think that FDIC has embarked on the same kind of trajectory which hit the Social Security "Trust" Fund, do you?
Doggone it! There's that 'trust' word again.
Print Me! You saw, of course, that the print rate on M1 at the Fed is 11.3% annualized over the most recent three-month period and M2 is running 4.7 percent annualized?
So, how does this compare with the increase in goods & services made by our country here in the good 'ol USA? Hand me this morning's press release from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, wouldja?
So, if the GDP is going up 3.1% and the money printing is going up 11.3% annualized at M1, does that mean that Jas Jain, Lammert, and my other steely-eyed deflationists are right and that deflation is still here at 3.1% minus 11.3 percent) equals 8.2%?
Or, is another way of thinking about it to say if food is going up at realistically at least 5% and M1 is going up 11.3% (M1) that deflation is only 6.3%?
Does that mean its good that food is going up because it offsets incipient inflation? And is that why they're bombing Libya to keep inflation stoked so deflation doesn't crash the system? Pinch me - ViseGrips, please.
GlobalRev Notes Israel is about to deploy a new anti-missile system.
US officials are talking about regime change in Yemen and now Syria which is - IMHO - not a good thing, Why? Seems to me that Syria (and let's not forget Iran) could cobble up a crisis and get into an immediate shooting war with Israel, which could consolidate domestic power...
Or, is that the plan????
Better Dental You see where a court in Oregon has ruled that teeth are not considered dangerous weapons in a fight.
No word on tongues...which by my estimate are involved in at least 80% of human-human conflict.
Quake Watch We've been down that path plenty already this week....so go check out the latest at the USGS site here. We'll post an update when/if it becomes obvious...
(more after this)
Coping: Meantime, Back at Dream School We must be getting close to the third quarter of the moon, since I'm back into those delightful Panavision dreams that I get, often enough that something as simplistic as 3D television holds absolutely no fascination for me.
Last nights was particularly interesting because the central character in it was a "Budwig data controllers" - which a quick check of the internet reveals doesn't seem to exist, but it for sure was along the lines of the metal housings made by Bud Industries.
How the "budwig data controller" got to be key is that in this dream, I was part of a group of students about to graduate from what was some kind of a cosmic high school. Part of the class had been assigned the problem of learning to rebuild a particular kind of Cessna 182 (so that it would function without wings) and the rest of the class had the project of installing sophisticated instrumentation to fix a deep underground mining/production facility which had been discovered almost a mile beneath the surface of the earth in a gigantic cave.
The problem was one of instrumentation. Each of the mechanized processes was requiring its own set of wires and the 'students of the high school were charged - as their class project - with solving the problem of too much data.
Here's the cool part: The students, rather than simply stringing tons of wire to get the job done in a conventional way, came up with an "adaptive data computer" (made by Budwig in this dream) that would automatically learn the data requirements of the different data lines in a kind of time division multiplex manner, cutting the amount of cabling run by more than half and really impressing the instructors. --- Naturally, when I awoke, turns out that the Budwig Company doesn't make an 'adaptive data controller' but they do make plastic & rubber injection molded parts for small electronic devices and so forth. And, of course, there's Bud Industries, which makes the boxes that small electronics go in.
While the name of Bud Industries harks back to childhood - since I built many small electronic devices in Bud boxes back when, the Budwig thing was off the hook.
Budwig is in San Diego and Bud's main office is in Ohio, with a satellite office in Phoenix, so no coincidences there...just darn interesting. Perhaps a client of one of the companies is having discussions about this adaptive data controller and it just 'leaked' into my dreamspace. Hmmm... --- But that wasn't the punchline of the dream. It was what the instructors (who were always off camera, BTW) were sending in as messages & feedback to the groups.
The bottom line of it was pretty simple: "How come you can come up with good engineering solutions to dynamical computation problems, yet you haven't figured out how to optimize your own species?"
What followed was a very interesting notion that boiled down to this: Humans originated (were produced as DNA class projects of other-worlders?) and that we have multiple racial groups in the world has been part of the "class" we're all in during this lifetime.
The punchline was that if we want to really be ascended greater humans, there are all the pieces of such but its hidden in DNA. By figuring out the DNA and the marrying correctly, a race of higher humans could emerge.
Seemed to be almost the flip side of Hitler's (or Aryan supremacists) master race theory, in that this dream suggested that although the attributes were not in exact proportion, the emergence of a new & improved human wouldn't come from purification/distillation of one racial haplotype, but from a wise blending of all.
Weird dream, or what? Still, it was an extremely interesting sci-fi kind of dream since the pieces that made up the plot are all 'hidden in plain site' and it seemed to make that point that as in life, success at emerging to higher levels of evolution is not a singular efforts, but something all the students on the class-planet have to work together to achieve. --- I have no idea where the inspiration for this came to my subconscious; haven't been thinking about project boxes, DBA, adaptive data controllers which self-learn TDM for process control, or anything like that.
At a design pattern/archetype level I even reviewed recent movies, since this could an analog to a pirate movie where the 'treasure map' is torn up into seven pieces and a piece given to each member of a crew to ensure safe keeping. But, no, nothing like that.
Still, an interesting notion, that the treasure map is in our DNA just waiting to be assembled from where it's been hidden.
In the gene pool.
Speaking of Dreams, II Here's a good one which popped up in an email...passed on by its author:
Kind of an interesting dream, since we're not in the "waiting for release language to pop" mode.
By the way, you might want to read up on spikenard in Wikipedia, if you're not already aware of it. No, I don't use it, but sounds interesting and may have to do more reading down that way...
Ham Radio Notes I can't say enough good things about my new Kenwood TS-590S - the DSP section is awesome and the adjustable high and low side of the passband is reminiscent of the great audio that can be had from the classic SX-101 Mark IIIs...which means anywhere from fuller fidelity down to so narrow you can's make it out. But that's not how I got onto the topic. It was this note from a reader:
One step at a time.
First stop is the American Radio Relay League (ARRL) website pages on How to Get Started in ham radio.
Second thing you do is go read Dan Romanchik (KB6NU's) "The No-Nonsense, Technician Class Study Guide" which you can find all over the net - free - including our local Palestine - Anderson County Amateur Radio Club (PACARC) web site here.
Then get a license - the ARRL website has a search tool for something local here.
Next you'll see a radio of some kind. Used on eBay, you can get a decent 2-meter radio on the cheap and some of the new ones can be had for as little at $100 and change.
Remember, ham radio is not a replacement for a cell phone. They are not for business use, but "Honey, as long as you're at the store, could you pick me up some..." is considered by most to be acceptable use.
The beginner level license works just fine to get on local repeaters.
By upgrading to the General class license, no Morse code required! - you get vastly expanded HF privileges and from there, the world is your radio oyster (or time sink, depending on who's watching the clock...).
On a rainy night, in the middle of nowhere, nice to have someone to talk to. And for really long trips - like driving from the Midwest to California - you'd be amazed how many countries you can speak with from the car - if you can get an 8-foot whip past management.
Gardening Notes A email from a reader to begin this topic:
I guess it would depend on the kind of building. Some buildings are not well-suited to this kind of approach - I mean besides the landlord not being exactly wild about taking the roof off, lol... Many buildings have HVAC and power overhead and that is an issue.
Still, you're right that if you could find an oldish, run down building in a warehouse area, it could sure be turned into behind walls gardening, easy enough. Wonder if there are any factories that could be converted up in the former Rust Belt? --- Our garden is slow to get rolling this year. Partly because I still have planting to do, and partly because I'm still in 'learning mode' with the greenhouse. What I have established beyond a doubt is that a greenhouse when it's closed up and outside temps are in the 85º range quickly runs up to 120º or so. Been working at the new habit of closing the greenhouse at night to retain warmth and then opening it up in the morning when the sun starts to hit it.
The rest of the time I keep looking for the temperature-driven automatic (non-electric) window openers I remember buying for it. Now, if I could just remember where I put them so I...er...wouldn't forget where I put them...
For Your Viewing Enjoyment This...
Very good - gold star for the day.
Of course, the real problem of population (if they feed, they will breed) is compounded by an economic model of constant growth for constantly growing profits, which dovetails just perfectly with constantly watering down money. --- OK, a misleading headline. Caught myself on that... Shouldn't have used the word enjoyment. For Your Grounding might have been better. --- Go read the National Journal's piece "Four Census Takeaways" and you can see the nature of the demography nightmare.
Did like their use of the word "exurban" though. Seems to me we're coming to a point in history where the 'exurbans' will hold the city-states by the food supply, and in the long term - in socioeconomic terms - control the food and nothing else matters. Calories trump coins.
Beyond money, water and food are still the main currencies of Life - which people forget, but which we've been mindful of since we elected to choose up sides way early in what's coming. Perhaps from remembering all the troubles the Sheriff of Nottingham had with the folks out in the forest, you think?
And no, federal lands don't belong to the King. We're all the king yet this has certainly been carefully written out of regulations, hasn't it?
Send Ure comments to george@ure.net Reader Action Department: New: The UrbanSurvival Amazon store. Books, computers & S/w and outdoor gear.
Now on our premium content site: Peoplenomics.com The "Global Observer-State" Problem What happens when you take predictive linguistics and zoom-out from even that macro-view of developing reality? Among other things, you begin to discover that yes, indeed, markets do love war (although on specific terms which we'll discuss) and yes, some of the PowersThatBe appear to promote emergent social movements for crassly capitalistic reasons. But what it's all part of an even bigger process which I've labeled "The Global Observer-State Problem" for reasons I hope this week's report makes clear.
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The "Do Drop Inn" Amazing gardens in about 2 square feet of floor space: www.mygroponics.com
Strange Dreams? Post your weird dreams to help our research along:
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Thursday March 24, 2011 Special Update Sadly: Ahead of Events, Again I wanted to post a link right away to the CNN/Money story that just crossed in the last hour that "Toyota tells U.S. Plants 'prepare to shut down' because of the earthquake damage induced supply chain issues related to auto production. I had mentioned the ugly side of JIT earlier in today's report.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but also recall that I mentioned last week that I'd gone ahead and purchased a new Japanese-made ham radio with the expectation that supply-chain issues could delay production.
Seems now that these expectations are starting to be filled - but there are likely all kinds of additional ripples...and none of them are particularly positive.
That Questionable Recovery A couple of hot-off-the-press reports to deal with first off - starting with the Durable Goods report from Census this morning:
Spinning through markets, while gold continues to glitter and silver bounced up to just under $38 this morning, we see Europe was up a bit, and a pullback today wouldn't surprise given the crappy housing numbers of Wednesday.
A bit of counterbalancing in this morning's weekly unemployment claims report, but read this carefully because I'm going to make a point in a sec:
Now my point: If we flip over to the most recent unemployment report from BLS, here, we notice that the number of unemployed is 13.7 million, which means what?
Only 64% of unemployed workers are getting benefits. Something we think about every month when we get a solicitation request from the local food bank.
Artifact of Language Since the earthquake(s) in Japan, it seems as though an amazing number of readers have been scouring every source Japanese to gain further insights into what the future may hold.
Upon spotting the Kyodo News headline that a "Neutron beam observed 13-times at crippled Fukushima nuke plant" one particularly honest reader candidly asked: "Can you ask your experts what this indicates? I have a science background, and I’m not sure myself."
I wasn't sure either...so I dropped a line to our consulting nuclear reactor engineer to have him figure it out. Here's his answer:
Yes, hopefully so.
Meantime, an American reader in Tokyo got some bandwidth to send us this:
Hopefully, that area will remain pastoral and peaceful... --- This weekend, out in depth Peoplenomics report will focus on long-term disruption to the global economy which is still being under-estimated in my view.
Subscribers wanting a head start could begin by reading Peoplenomics #241 (May 21, 2006) "Modeling Disaster in JIT Systems" here. Not so happy kanban...
Importantly, Japan's quake may provide an extensible failure model for the global economy, but more on that this weekend...
Denial's Alive & Well Speaking of global failures, we should mention that the Euro doesn't seem particularly bothered to have another banko country in its midst.
Near as I can figure it, the sinking dollar this morning just "shows to go you" that the US dollar is even worse off than the banko'ed Euro. Intermarket valuations are telling us something. Like what, for instance? How about...
Gotta love the District of Corruption and the watering down Fed.
Another Nuke Question Speaking of reactors and such, as we just were, I was drawn to the story out of Florida about "More concrete fractures a Crystal River nuke plant..."
Another series of those questionmarks about where's power going to come from if not nukes pops up...
Lingo-Lango A little artifact of language peeks out this morning on the Politico website, where Fearless Leader is quoted as saying that Americans, which presumably is meant to include folks like you & me "...don’t see any contradiction” in him ordering an attack on Libya to make sure “people aren’t butchered because of a dictator who wants to cling to power.”
Similarly, then, I'm equally confident that Americans will understand my getting the Heisman Trophy this year.
The way I see it, Fearless Leader and I are running neck & neck: Granted, I haven't run in a game-clinching touchdown (ever) but then again, the Man of Peace has yet to end a major war, or even close down Gitmo per promises. --- Anyone besides me willing to sign on for a Constitutional Amendment which would make it a criminal offense to promise one thing while campaigning but do another after election?
Smoking Miami Major fuel fire overnight at the jet fuel tank farm at Miami International Airport. Local media, such as the Miami Herald are worth checking if you have either personal travel plans or critical freight moving through MIA.
Quakes and Pains I posted a note yesterday (late morning) about how I was driven back to bed for a couple of hours of additional shut-eye by an overwhelming sense of fatigue. Over the years, this has seemed to presage major earthquake activity, although it could simply be the result of going to fast, doing too much, and having spring fever arrive.
But I am not alone in this. Readers are noticing oddities as we get closer to the 'release language' period around March 25 in Clif's predictive linguistics work. Some samples:
You bet I am, along with the magnetometers of HAARP, too. If you look at their recent large magnetometer deflection, looks like it until about 15:35 UTC on 3/23. The rise from this deflection of the H axis (north) appeared to be from about 14:00 on.
Going to the USGS page, we see that in this period (14:00 to 15:45) we had quakes in:
But more interesting was right about the incept of the H- deflection was a 2.8 in SoCal at 13:49 UTC. This was 18 miles southwest of Palm Springs, and look closely at this map...and as you do, notice the fault:
And earlier today, we had a 2.8 65 miles south of San Jose's city hall and 22 miles southeast of Hollister (which I trust you remember from your reading the history of California motorcycle clubs?)
You see it, right? Same fault line. Now, if you click over here, you can see there was also a small 2.5 in the Mammoth Lakes area overnight.
All of which could be fitted into the expando planet model, since the whole San Joaquin/Central Valley area could be an incompletely formed crustal rip which unlike the rip between Vancouver Island and Washington state and the Lower BC mainland, didn't leave as big a ditch to be filled.
So if I were betting, I'd have to say that the troubling piece of leftovers in the predictive linguistics, and this was from several years ago, was a very specific reference to fish on the steps of a state capitol and certainly a massive quake with subsidence of the Central Valley would fill the bill.
And let's not forget that in predictive linguistics, it seems the Bigger something is, the further ahead we get pieces of it in data. It may have been a processing artifact, but Sacramento subsiding - or more --- like an extension down that green fault line above to join the upper Baja to Salton Sea to southern Central Valley really would be a much bigger event than Japan.
No, I'm not predicting this, just that over geological timescales it would be an interesting bet to place.
Could there be a both SoCal and New Madrid? I suppose, but for now, I'm putting the most recent quake around Conway Arkansas down as more oil/gas fracking-connected action. It's a good distance from New Madrid, although near enough another one of those sunken/crustal rip areas, if you want to look at river basins as a combination of subsidence/erosion events.
Probably much worry over nothing, which would be fine.
Unless, of course, you notice the Gordon Michael Scallion site has an updated "Future Map of North America". Run in to the 2:55 mark and watch how far east he draws the new shoreline of the West Coast....
Foreign Pressings: RT If you get some time, since it's not likely to be showing up in any mass consciousness way in the corporate media, try on Russia Today's "The idiot cycle: What you aren't being told about cancer. Part 1"
Salient quote: "The Idiot Cycle, a French-Canadian documentary, alleges six major chemical companies are responsible for decades of cancer causing chemicals and pollution, while also developing cancer treatments and drugs."
Funny what comes out on media that don't depend on corporate advertising from the promoters of dangerous technologies. Perhaps the promoters should all be...er...rounded up?
There's Always Hope At least, there is in Omaha. There Mayor Jim Suttle has rolled out the idea of a dime-a-roll toilet paper tax.
Why in Washington DC alone, we would end the world's economic woes, so full of....well, you get the picture.
We all but wiped out, it seems.
Coping: With the "Vortex of Death" The what? Yeah...good article at Helium under the title "Scientists' research warns humanity may be facing a 'vortex of death' and it centers around the notion that solar activity seems to trigger all kinds of trouble here on the third rock, including wars, regional conflicts and so forth...under the general label 'vortex of death'.
Of course, we already know that there is some kind of relationship between what have been the occasionally regular 11-year solar cycles, although the current cycle getting underway (Cycle 24) has been a little bit of a slug off the starting line. --- The problem with the research described in the Helium story is that our latest outbreak of warring (or vortexing, if you like) seems to have happened rather close to the bottom of the cycle. The idea is that if Cycle 24 turns into a solar radiation free-for-all, things could be worse than anyone could imagine.
Except, for our readers, of course, who already know that we're going exactly on a Yellow Brick Road into a Utopian future. More likely: We're in Peak Oil and that like it, or not, there are Manufacturer's Resource Wars that will continue to spring up, until we figure out how to keep a global popul;ation approach 7-billion fed, without blowing everything up.
A quick check of human history, unfortunately, argues that isn't going to happen but the actual arrival of the 'vortex of death' is well spread out in the literature.
One author (like Barry Lynn) have captured both in his End of the Line: The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation
An equally sobering - but slightly different take - may be found in
The Long Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age
For those who don't feel they need all the troubling details, the late Matt
Simmons book
Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy
Pollyannaism is not an everyday word, but I have a whole email folder full of notes from people who - upon confronting some of the ugliest of the data - immediately go into denial mode rather than looking at the data.
Two prime examples to date have been abiotic oil and global warming.
Yes, there is some good science that suggests that abiotic oil may be a real phenomena. But, even if real the problem earthlings have is one of replacement rates. Given that abiotic processes still take thousands of years, that's not going to regenerate enough oil to keep us from running out of freely flowing oil fast enough to prevent $7-gas before this year it out.
Moreover, while it's true that some oil wells have been found to continue production much longer than initial reserve estimates would have indicated, they still all experience massive declines in flow rates, such that a well which produced high volumes of oil, once upon a time early in its life, will only run a small trickle into the future. So whether abiotic processes can refill reservoirs in time to fill up the motor home is absurd. It doesn't.
On global warming, we see occasional solid data, occasional bad data, occasional writing of foregone conclusions, but the real discussion point seems to me to be carbon dioxide loading because near as I can figure, whenever the CO2 levels have been this high in the past, an Ice Age comes shortly thereafter.
Seems to me that the only logical course for regular folks to take is to voluntarily reduce their lifestyle and buy (with unused resources that lifestyle reductions free up) a self-sustaining lifestyle if such a thing is still possible.
And even that might not work, since the wild cards, which include catastrophic industrial collapse, global wars over resource, or having enough electronic infrastructure destroyed by solar flares that recovery to former levels of human advancement become impossible.
I think, though, my point is not to rub your nose in the 'vortex of death' concept, but rather to point out that those who see it clearly are in the best position to become early adopters of a vastly different lifestyle. Back to the earth kind of living and the reestablishment of individual sovereignty.
For now, one of the classics is still the Davidson & Rees-Mogg book The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
Let me finish this short series of observations on a familiar note; namely that corporations have come to be legally superior to plain humans in the last 75-years. Legally, they have more rights than you or me. Triply true in tax policy where corporations can write off things that small business owners could only dream about.
But what occurred to me this morning is that some of that superiority may be well-deserved. Maybe humans really are superior to humans.
Why? Any well-run corporation of any size has what's called a 'succession plan' - a plan that describes how the corporate entity itself will survive the death of disabling injury of its leadership at the board of directors level.
Yet strangely, regular humans don't seem to take the matter of running their family/tribe with such precision. Lot of people don't have wills - let alone an attitude of passing the torch of tribal/familial leadership on to the next generation. Instead, the importance of continuing the strong family gets buried by overpowered media imagery which seems to hold nuclear families in disdain, perhaps because they are more difficult to divide and conquer from a mass consumption mindset.
Something to think about, isn't it? I mean besides humans demanding equal tax regulations to the breaks granted corporations. Actually learning something from corporate conduct and translating it into a reinvented - and almost certainly more robust - family/tribal unit.
More Quakes & Pains A few more to munch with your Wheaties:
And, although I personally tend to think SoCal is where the next Big One might be, just because there has been so doggone much foreplay in the area, that doesn't mean Portland, Oregon could be "it" either...especially with this highly credible note:
Yeah...earthquake clouds have a long history...long enough to show up in the Brihat Samhita.
And one more reason to be worried? I assume you have seen the warning on the Piers Corbyn website?
A little reading on Corbyn's bio - and a review of some of his predictions - leads to inconclusive, but still...just one more little weight on the scales as we await whatever the pending "release language" should present - if anything.
Sometimes being wrong is the right thing to be. Like on this stuff.
Wednesday March 23, 2011 Special Update Extreme Fatigue Visits This is a Wednesday at the WuJo kind of update: Immediately after writing this morning's update I found myself overwhelmingly tired. So much so I was compelled to head back to bed for an hour and a half worth of nap-time. This is the typical kind of physical feeling I get immediately before a big earthquake - and it's something I've noted several times.
Well, lo and behold, I got up, made another pot of coffee and went to look at the HAARP magnetometer readings - and sure enough a major downward deflection of the North axis - and this could be coincident to a largish quake to happen shortly...dunno.
Still, normally I get this extreme fatigue onset two-three days before whatever the Big Quake is going to be and no, this is not auto-suggestion or anything else.
So we shall see - but if you're earthquake sensitive, make note of things like ringing in the ears and be on the lookout for Earthquake Clouds and send in reports. The rest of this week could be extremely interesting - or not...
But at least we might be able to see some things in advance...
Outing the Ugly Truth Colorful prose like "the ambrosia of cheap capital" sure seem like something you'd read around here (on one of my better days) when describing the U.S.'s approach to the coming insolvency. But, no, it came from Dallas Fed boss Richard Fisher, who has the distinction of having differed with Ben Bernanke and the Fed-think FOMC group five times now and six wouldn't come as a shocker.
Usually, when a Fed member speaks on this or that, it's all over the Fed web site, or at least the regional Fed pages. But, lo and behold, on the Fed's main speeches and testimony page, no sign of this magnificent decent. Similarly, the speech has not been posted on Fisher's own Dallas Fed speeches page here.
Could it be that the old saying "Good news travels fast, bad somewhat slower" could apply to internet time, also? --- The US economic system is not alone with the 'approaching insolvency" problem - not by a long shot.
Fundamental economics has a built-ion dilemma which is caused by interest.
Having taken lots of econ classes, so as to be able to parrot the "correct" answer the fact is that in fiat money systems the cost of interest is made up on the fly and created by the monetary to balance its books and make fiat currency appear to work.
Which it might except for the ugly truth: When times are good, the purchasing power of money should go back up, after being watered down in bad times via deficit spending.
Problem is, that because politicians promised major support groups a 'free lunch' rather than exercise prudence and thrift, they allow a budget deficit to accumulate over time. Since the founding of the Federal Reserve (and the tightly connected Income Tax) in 1913 to fund it, the difference between sound fiscal policy and watered down purchasing power has been a tad over 2.3 percent per year.
Or, to put it another way, inflation over the long term has been this amount which is the secular expression of Richard Fisher's ambrosia. Apparently, he understands that when US debt is greater than US net income, we will be technically broke. --- But at least, we won't be the first to go. Later on this morning, look for Portugal's minority government to fail, as they get marched out to the proverbial wall in front of the market's marksmen later today.
The problem, of course, as with previous economic disasters such as Ireland, is that the banker class is made whole while working people - guilty of nothing other than neglect about how economics works, mostly - carry the burdens of yet another unworkable solution which damns them to an even bleaker future while preserving the accretion of wealth to the top 10 percent
Pushing Around Markets Not too difficult to figure out what's ahead for the markets today. We simply line up the data points this way:
Market seems likely to stumble along range-bound while traders away developments from the world's hot spots.
Still, if you get time and have a forensic economist handy, you might want to read the Tuesday release of the Fed's combined annual comparative financial statements for the Fed Reserve Banks plus the 12 individual banks, plus the LLC's which were popped up to cover the financial crisis.
Who said a good financial crisis wasn't good for the central bankers?
Remarketing the Libya War As the war in Libya continues with reports of Gaddafi forces using tanks and snipers against the uprisers, so to come reports of how the Libyan financial underpinnings are becoming contested in Europe.
Notwithstanding my notes on the presidential use of the War Powe4rs Act (which was arguably passed through congress under false pretenses, namely the purported twin attacks in the Gulf of Tonkin (there was only one and even that...) we can see the need arriving quickly to remarket this war to the American people.
Sadly, I can't claim credit for this astute observation; it came from my retired SF bro-in-law, Panama Bates at breakfast yesterday as we watched the live reports on Al Jazeera via satellite.
The gist of his expectation? Expect to see a quickly developing language shift to being calling the Libya military action support of a civil war.
Reasoning is quite simple: Americans will support indigenous peoples in a civil war a lot easier than they will support one side or the other fighting over oil resources - which is what this international intervention is.
Already the leading edge of the language change is evident in stories like these.
Cool thing about lingo-lango? People tend only to remember the last label applied and thus, by the time we get to the 2012 elections, the memory of mass consciousness will have been corralled into thinking it was a civil war and, of course, helping the downtrodden and oppressed....well, you get the idea.
This comes with a new national sport emerging: Showing clips of Fearless Leader or VeepJoe making promises about seeking congressional approval before deploying force, in this case against Iran was the context.
Like the old saying goes: things change. --- With the use of 'cruisers' in the air over Libya, maybe the story about how the British navy is running through its Tomahawk stocks will mean an extra shift somewhere.
Don't think of the sandbox as a series of wars, just remember it's just as much (OK, more then) an employment program.
Political Correctness Department Ah, nice to see the democorps are planning to hold hearings on Muslim civil rights. Comes within weeks of republicorp grandstanding on the threat posed by Muslim terrorists.
All sideshow stuff. I'm waiting for the three ring circus to get to the real threats to the world, namely the impact on world coffee and sugar markets posed by Danish Lutherans and the the carbon load on the atmosphere caused by de Rasta-boyz. Although maybe, these two groups could work out their differences as a coffee house in Amsterdam, but then how would that build network ratings? Please invite us.
I keep coming back to the idea of a unity political party that would simply make sense to everyone. The more I look, the more I feel like Giogenes.
Tweaking Iran Of course, off in the background Iran is about tied with Canada for world's largest holder of petroleum reserves which means the whole Libya exercise may come around to them next.
So we half pay attention when Turkey busts an Iranian plane with light arms aboard, or when China sticks up for Iran in nuclear discussions.
We can see the West's play pretty clearly as "Obama denounces Iran's 'campaign of intimidation' on the one hand, while it gets repackaged as "Obama sends message of solidarity to Iran's youth" on the other.
One could wryly note that politicians have done much the same in America, slicing the nation into the long-term aging stakeholders versus the promises of change for the younger folks who see dead-ends for their futures.
Gaming Silver With silver pushing back toward $37 this morning, we'd offer the article by Avery Goodman under the title "Will JPMorgan now make and take 'Delivery' of its own silver shorts?" to be worth a little study.
If you don't mind a little more direct use of street-level explanations, the SilverGoldSilver blog continues to chronicle events with the occasional fine cartoon to boot.
Google's Alexandria Yes, there go the plans for the world's biggest online library as a judge has ruled against Google's mass digitization of books.
Grounds were pretty simple: copyright violation.
Unfortunately, I expect that a lot of the really, really interesting books - like the Vatican's extensive library, were not on the shopping list. Still, 150-million online books is something to look forward to, except for one small problem: the decreasing amount of time people have for reading, anymore.
Coping: Which Survival Plan? A couple of readers have asked me what I think about the story carried by HFO out in San Francisco about the 'survival kit' plans being offered by a woman who was once associated with the Bernie Madoff family.
Not exactly what I'd put together, since my approach to radiation risks runs more to the low residual soap (Dial although some readers prefer Barbisol shave creme), good walking shoes, water, MRE's and other such things.
While we don't know what else might be in the offerings from the company "black umbrella" (web site), I daresay their approach to survival plans might be different than out go-bags described over on the Peoplenomics site in an article from a few years back, or what's recommended by the Ready.gov web site, not to mention dozens of blogs and discussion groups which plan for everything from rapture to EMP to kill shots from the Sun. --- Ultimately, the right survival kit will vary, and sometimes even on a day-to-day basis as threats change relative to your location.
Take my friend SurvivalWoman, who along with her husband, live up in the San Juan Islands of Washington State.
Six months ago, the main (perceived) threat for them would have been the possibility of a large earthquake. Here, the basics like food, water, and walking shoes would be a good answer.
But, since the Japan quake, two more plannable threats have risen up the risks list: tsunami and radiation. Not exactly back to the drawing boards, but they've been networking with local boat owners and in her Tuesday column, there was more discussion of what's needed to shelter-in-place. --- Key above all else when it comes to grabbing and going is the idea of first movement. What this simply means is that the first people out - in any situation - are going to have a better chance of finding resources along the way.
That's why paying attention to news developments is so critical. It's always better to move 5-minutes early than one minute late.
March 25th'ing Reader wants to know if this has anything to do with what may (or may not) be coming in release language due later this week:
Yes - been meaning to get back to this pile of research. The main thing about the LHC is - like HAARP - they don't exactly publish their transmission or matter-smashing times ahead of events - which might be pretty curious.
Plus - I wonder if the atmospheric heater team at HAARP ever talks to the LHC staff, since both are dealing with way more than pea-shooters and interactions though wildly small as statistics go, could be pretty impressive.
I mean think about it: What IF HAARP{ were to fire off when the LHC was peaking and it did something like a string-theory dimensional rip?
A little too "Philadelphia Experiment-ish" for you? Perhaps.
But would that be a way-cool accidental outcome to see? After all, maybe this god-particle just wants us to mind our own business and these sounds peoplke are heading may be more than Seneca guns.
Maybe its the Big Dog particles down at the quantum level trying to maintain their autonomy and getting ready to shake some fleas off to maintain it?
Tuesday March 22, 2011 Peoplenomics Subscriber Note: A few comments and the new long-term chart of mass layoffs is now available on the subscriber site here.
War, Housing, and the Elusive Recovery Although the market put in a great showing on Monday, the problem persists that without busting up through the 12,100 Dow level decisively, there's till a strong bear case to be made that the market is back into a long-term decline.
Some evidence of this came with the National Association of Realtors' February home sales report out Monday:
Under 'normal' conditions (remember those days?) when we didn't have simmering nukes, or a new war going on, this would have sent the bulls into hiding, but as I explained yesterday, Markets LOVE War, and yesterday's 178-Dow point romp seems to agree.
It'll be next Tuesday before we get the next S&P/Case Shiller 20-City Index, but my fear is that this is the early stage of what we've talked about previously; a scenario that will go something like this:
Naturally, most people's home payments/rent are not flexible, so we can only infer that what will help housing prices will be the continued foreclosures, which although they are not making the headlines like they did earlier int he Great Decline, are continuing, nevertheless. --- I've proffered for some time the notion that thanks to the ease money syndrome which Wall Streeters have installed, that New York, being the financial center of the world, in the same sense that Greenwich is the geophysical center of the world, would suffer much less than out in the hinterlands where the disgusted majority live.
Sure enough: the state "Comptroller: NY home foreclosures filings decline" but as the story which moved on BusinessWeek Monday noted, this came while foreclosures were still "...eding up nationally..." As if you hadn't noticed.
While waiting around for the next Case/S&P data, and the next confessional from the Fed on consumer debt piling up, the longitudinal (long-term) data point of the day is likely to be the Bureau of Labor Statistics Mass Layoff report due out at 10 AM (Eastern) and if I'm not up to my armpits, I'll try to get the updated chart on here when it comes out.
Meantime, a mixed open looms with resistance around 12,100...
Markets & Nukes To be sure, there has been some modest recovery in the Japanese stock market which has market pundits tripping all over themselves to hype. Still, a more sober look at the data notes that on March 9, a couple of days before The Quake, the Nikkei 225 was right in the 10,590 range while the close overnight was about 9,608. That's still a 9.3 percent decline, and even that cost the coordinated central banks untold billions.
Supco: Truth Out Speaking of untold billions, I assume you've been following the antics of the not-really federal Federal Reserve which has been fighting Bloomberg's efforts to get disclosure of how money bailout money was thrown - and how much each - at the "emergency lending" during the 2008 financial crisis.
On Monday, the high court declined a fed/bankster appeal to keep the amount of dough and other details secret, so we shall see how promptly the Fed can issue a report.
The laughable part now, if you're having popcorn for breakfast, will be to see in this grand farce how long the bankster side will sit on the report's release.
You see, Bloomberg requested the data in 2008 and the lawsuit part started in 2009. So, just between you and me, I would have thought the Fed would have been able to prepare its "just-in-case" report detailing how much taxpayer dough was thrown around over this more than two-year period.
I'm just sure that it will be a while yet, since handing over the contested data on the courthouse steps after losing would be just too easy. Instead, I wouldn't put anything past the banking class, including perhaps new action to keep secret who got how many cookies from The Big Cookie Jar.
What was that great Jack Nicholson line? Oh yeah..."You can't handle the Truth!"
However, as one C-level banker told me in an email: 'The fact the court didn't hear it tells me there are no major revelations in it..." Good point.
Problems for the Man of Peace Nobel laureate Rio Obama, is being plagued with very unpeaceful photos circulating on the net of an Army "kill team" posing with pictures of dead civilians in Afghanistan.
The White House is trying to do damage control on this and the Army has issued an apology, but the timing couldn't have been much worse.
While the US may have been hoping to build up some "we're with the people sense around the Libya mess, this morning we have a) lost our first plane in that conflict, although the pilot is OK, and b) the "coalition" (oil hungry countries) is pressing for an expansion of the no-fly zone.
Obviously, since I was somehow overlooked for a high-paying gig as a State Department consultant, I shouldn't ask the obvious. But, since that's never stopped me before, here goes:
"When it's raining cruise missiles and aircraft parts, and the oil-thirsty are agitating for expanding the conflict, and with soldiers taking snaps of dead civvies, where exactly is the PEACE or FRIEND message is in all that?
On the other hand, with Gaddafi now shelling his own countrymen, his marketing problems are at least as large and regrettably, that how marketing works in this world: lesser of evils. (Works with fast-food joints, too...)
Simmering Nukes Department The latest from the International Atomic Energy Agency continues to evolve toward a "we're getting a handle on this" outcome:
Today and tomorrow, the Japanese Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology will be conducting sea water sampling at eight locations.
Putting on my Mr. Science hat, that sure sounds like a lowball numbers of samples given the size of the Pacific Ocean east of Japan, but then again, no one asked me what "n" should be. Better: They won't have the resultys out until the 24th.
Seems the American way might be cell phones and RIB boats and near-real-time monitoring, but again, no one asked; which really stumps me.... --- Readers seem a bit fogged in by events, as well. Like this guy who wrote in:
How much junk science can the world hold, that's the question.
The New & Improved Police State Government's going with a $1-billion ID project reports the Charleston Gazette... should eventually bring in fingerprints, pal prints, faces, human irises, and voices. Gotta think they'd toss in DNA, too.
Better spit on the sidewalk while you can. Wonder if a plug of chew screws that up?
Coping: Expando Planet Worries
By next Monday, or so, we ought to either have huge amounts of "release
language" flying about surrounding something like a major West Coast earthquake,
OR we'll have to confront the possibility that the lingusitics around the date
were processing artifact. My money is on events. "Why?"
Well, much of my concern has to do with the plasma expansion model of how and why earth is growing. The idea is - vastly simplified - that the earth via some unknown mechanism, but having something to do with being a big energy absorber of the Sun's output, may be growing over time. As in geologic timescales and that this is the cause (along with complex magma fluid dynamics, of all the earth changes.
As one geology grad told me a while back - the focus on the plate tectonic theory was a relatively new thing, having arisen in the 1950's which got me to thinking perhaps there's more to earthquakes than tectonics.
All of which just went onto the back burner to simmer, until this morning when I wasn't even going to mention having lots of food and water ready for this weekend - just in case - until a reader who's touring Europe with his wife who reads this column (here comes a very bad pun!) religiously and sent the following email:
After staring at it for a while two thoughts came to mind. One was that the Vatican artwork above could have been a dire warning about abusing our bodies with too much of...whatever your favorite excess is. There's a certain uncanny relationship to the look of my eyes, now and then, for instance.
On the other hand, we have noted with the PowersThatBe often warnings come hidden in plain sight before major events.
And example of this is the famous Simpsons episode which conspiracy investigators think was a "hidden in plain sight" hint of 9/11 being in the works.
I don't claim that a major West Coast earthquake will strike late this week or possibly over the weekend. More likely: Much language has been floating on the net about the big FEMA National Lever Exercise which willbe called the "Great Central US Shake Out"
Obviously, as we get closer to the event, scheduled for April 28th, the linguistics around this will begin to spin up dramatically - so maybe (hopefully?) it will just be the language with descriptive imagery of the 1812 quake (and related language) popping into the public consciousness.
Still, we continue to be troubled with last fall's FEMA requests for proposals (RFP's) for a) 7.2 million MRE's and b) an RFQ for something like 10-million bottles of water in the region.
If I really let monkeymind out of the box, I can find plenty of other reasons for worry. Like this email, for example:
Not much to do but wait, I suppose. I'm hoping, obviously, that this is just the linguistic scanning system pulling NLE chatter out...but it isn't that simple and the sophistication of the underlying code would likely trap that out.
Still, with three major (over 6.0) quakes off Japan this morning, here's hoping the linguistics are wrong.
Constitutional Issues, Reconsidered I mentioned in yesterday's report that I was not at all pleased with the US taking the front row position in Libya and I raised the Constutitonal question.
A well-versed reader disagreed with my assessment of things:
I am not swayed by this. First, because the Second Gulf of Tonkin incident was part of the basis of Johnson's power grab, and if it didn't really happen, then Congress was deliberately misled and the War Powers Act should be reconsidered.
Given that there was possible deceit in the material facts surrounding the War Powers Act - and with serious Constitutional issues remaining - I think it behooves Congress to reassert its lawful powers to throttle back US war-making, and in this specific instance, since Europe has the 85% interest in Libya oil, I figure they ought to carry 85% of the offensive operations.
Before more of our already slammed US National Guard units get called up - like the Illinois group, I believe local forces from Bonn, Paris, Italy, Greece, Britain, and other bigger stake-holders should ante up.
Our beloved United States, as of this morning has a public debt of $14,224,862,420,919.33. That's damn near equal to our projected GDP.
When the Debt equals or exceeds the GDP that's technical bankruptcy and although the system may stumble forward, at some point logic suggests that we can't afford to keep being the world's police force unassisted and in reasonable proportion.
Especially when the basis for action - War Powers - was based in part on a possibly fictitious incident.
When the National Security Agency outs, via the agency historian that the Second attack didn't actually occur, (as described in the declassified Cryptologic Quarterly) seems Congress ought to rethink its delegation of War Powers to align legislative response with actual historical events as we lurch forward as a country into an ever more demanding (did I mention costly? ) future.
But, of course, that might serve to contain spending on wars, mind you, and can't have that now, can we? Not when we need economic recovery at any costs.
Say, I wonder if I can get an SBA grant to start a discount missile factory out back?
America's Least Want List My deflationist pal Jas Jain sent out an advisory to friends this morning which may have some truth to it:
Hadn't thought about that particular commonality, but sure enough...
Think I better go shave and roll back to a 'stache only. Besides, summer's coming anyway, so why not?
Monday March 21, 2011 War, Peace, and Monday Rallies Dept. Market's LOVE Wars Not to overly focus on the globalists deciding that the 2% of world oil represented by Libya must be "liberated" but the facts are facts and we're popping off cruise missiles again.
Without, near as I can figure, an appropriate action by congress as required by that troublesome Constitution thingy.
Still, the War Powers Clause exists as follows per Wikipedia:
Not that I'm the lone nutjob, suggesting that having a Constitution which doesn't get followed is essentially not having a Constitution at all. It's just that to point out that we've (pardon this) tripped over our own dicks once again and seem bent on proving that testosterone when mixed with oil is the world's most dangerous mix of deadly chemicals, even more so than a handful of leaking reactors which seem to have been pushed off onto page two, or later, by the MainStreamMedia (MSM).
Still, a John Nichols piece The Nation gets around to the same point: "Wars should be debated and declared by Congress, not merely launched by presidents..." Or, this Letter-blog note in the Orange County Register "U.S. gets into another undeclared war..." --- Not to spoil all the premium content value of our premium site www.peoplenomics.com, but please notice that the US stock market has been in the midst of a large decline which has the potential to accelerate and challenge the lows set in March of 2009 (at least on an inflation-adjusted basis) should the prospects for growth dim too much. Which, in case you missed the Housing Collapse, they are threatening to do - because of the silent invasion of America via undocumented workers who enter daily via the Internet with no one of economic consequence bothering to sound the alarm.
The way this stitches together is this: Wall Street is continuing to accrete wealth to the upper class, the real wages of the working class continue to decline, and if a writer dares to mention such 'inconvenient truths' they get branded wonks or nutjobs and marginalized. Not me, of course, but guys who've seen it coming (see the 2009 documentary Collapse by Michael Ruppert, which is on Netflix now...)
Which eventually get's to this snip out of Sunday's Peoplenomics report where I pointed out what a fine tonic wars are for the US economy:
If the U.S. was sincere about removing two-bit dictators, why haven't we done anything about the beat-down and starved humans in North Korea? The answer is hidden in plain sight, of course: North Korea doesn't have oil resource so they get a pass to beat-down and oppress. Besides, they provide a simply marvelous employment opportunity to employ U.S. forces along the border with North Korea, not to mention all those dandy war materiel contracts./
Gotta love them wars - even the illegal, unconstitutional, ad hoc gang actions; they're simply grand tools of economic recovery, eh?
So while the sheeple, those frogs boiled slowly are media-bludgeoned into stupor and acceptance of another "police action" I'll watch even more closely how my short position in the market fares.
The whole sorry state, though, has one upside to it. With the rest of the world calling this another Western oil-grab, and with it in point of fact being another bloody page for the Manufacturer's Resource Wars, I've invented a word to describe US/PTB behavior which manages to capture the essence and none-too-subtle subtle odor accompanying recent developments.
Cow-pious. (Pronounced: Kao'-pie-uhs, V. 1), to do whatever one wishes in completed disdain for rules and due process. Synonyms: "nah'-shun-all seh-kur-ih-tee " and "ah-mehr'-i-can straw-tee-jick in-trests")
As reported in a Boston Globe article, the US had previous withheld $750-million of back UN dues, but as you read on, you'll discover that in 2009 Fearless Leader and crew paid up those back dues, and so we are none-to-pleased to recall that the UN managed to put Libya on its "Human Rights Council."
Is it any wonder the UN's got not respect?
Even more confusing? The headline that "Liberal democrats in uproar over Libya action" doesn't make sense to me. Wasn't this the group which historically was a major force in keeping the US in the UN? I must have a bad memory, getting old, or something...world's making less and less sense with each passing day.
A developing question in my mind is whether US presidents are anything other than effectively administrative assistants for Fortune 500 sized corporations. What gets me to wondering is the Christian Science Monitor piece "With Libya, is 'Obama doctrine' on war emerging?" scanned back to back with the Fox piece "President Obama announces new measure...with perhaps a little help from President Bush?"
(More on topic in the Coping section, following the harder to swallow "news")
Japan Simmers If you're keeping tabs on the fluid situation at the Fukushima reactor site, the situation this morning (from the IAEA website is that:
Problem with the IAEA data is it's old (Sunday is old already around here). More current is the report that workers were evacuated when gray smoke was seen coming from one of the reactors.
The main thing to watch now is the reported food & water contamination stories and whether there will be consumer blow-back over radiation fears on Japanese-made goods.
Radiation Monitoring Reminder A number of people have been watching the reports update at www.radiationnetwork.com and have noticed that Denver seems to be running higher than other parts of the country, although not into any kind of alert area, as of press time, anyway.
My guess? All states have radon 'hot zones' which you can look up in the EPA database. Here is Colorado's, for example. Even with calibrated equipment, baselines vary...
Another good radiation map to look at is this (slow loading) one of what's going on in Japan. Ever consider what abandonment of Tokyo would mean to the world?
US ought to have a team of "economic development cherry pickers" over there right now, inviting whole companies to move to the US and take advantage of the Japanese communities in the USA and round up some first rate talent...but, of course, that might make economic sense...especially in fields like high speed rail, advanced robotics and semiconductors.
Yeah...way to frigging obvious. Forget I mentioned it.
Port for Breakfast Every so often, I look up West Coast container operations via the monthly dock reports.
Before you get really excited about "economic recovery is here, Hallelujah!" just go back a couple of years and look where we came from.
2010 sucked in general - so if you look at Tacoma's February 2008 traffic, just as an example (148,901 twenty foot equivalents/TEU's), you should be able to pencil out that this year's total for Feb (116,484 TEU's) is still down 21.8% from the same period three years back.
One other port (or, as I call it, economic fundamentalist) note: Let's keep an eye on the Port figures for March & April when impacts of Japan will start to show up - or not, depending on how clever you feel like thinking about it.
Root of All Evil Dept. Remember all the political bullshit we were force-fed during the financial blow-over in 2008/2009? All the high-sounding promises that banks wouldn't be forever "too big to fail" and wagging government policy?
Well...lookie here: Bloomberg piece which, among other things, notes that the top 10 banks how 77 percent of all US bank assets here lately, compared with a much tamer 55% back in '02. Tip of the hat for doing the work to Cady North...
Meantime, if you like reading about how banksters work (or leech, depending on how you look at it), check out the "Comprehensive Capital Analysis and Review" issued last week by the Fed.
The 800 Lb Gorilla ...though, is the Comptroller of the Currencies little reported Quarterly report on bank trading and derivatives activity for Q4-'10 which was barely noticed by most.
You have to pardon me if I don't stand up and cheer this part "Credit derivatives fell 2% in the fourth quarter to $14.1 trillion." Remember, that's a US only, credit only number.
Although the report noted that "Credit derivatives outstanding remain below the peak of $16.4 trillion in the first quarter of 2008" I'd offer that its still uncomfortably close to total US GDP for either year.
Not too shocking to note that gold is pressing back toward new highs and silver has traded over $36 again this morning. And the US dollar is down a tich, so all I can figure it the market will rally at least in the early going.
Screw the radiation leaking, war is good, and the M&A machine is up and running. What could possibly go wrong?
Sign of the Times I neglected to mention that last week, Utah governor Gary Herbert made Utah the first state in the nation to have a State Gun. In their case, the Browning model M1911.
Apparently, my one man campaign to have Texas designate the first State Nuke (as a good-natured Texan one-upsmanship) by naming something in the 5 megaton or up class from Pantex, hasn't gone viral, yet.
Still, if we're going to glorify things that kill people let's not be cowardly about this...let's go (as Texans seem prone to say) ALL IN!
Coping: Sad Facts of History A rather honest email was the first thing that popped up this morning. Since it's related to the conquest of humans, particularly those of lower class, it's worth a moment:
Pappy once upon a time made a very astute observation: If you want to see an economy blossom, just lose a war with the US.
Apparently, Russian prime minister Vlad Putin knows his history, too. He likens the US resolution that turns the oil-thirsty West loose on Libya to a call for a crusade. Not the kind of thing to be reminding the Arab world of...
Around the Ranch Been a busy place these last few weeks. Got the West 12 pretty much cleaned off and looking good. Not just my efforts, which have involved smashing the daylights out of out Kubota B-7610 HST tractor, having to reweld several things I broken on the Bush Hog. Although the tractor claims to have 220 hours or so of tach time on it, it looks like it landed with the Allies at Normandy.
In fact, so hard have I pressed it, trying to get 100 HP or work out of a 24-HP diesel, that I've renewed my offer to Kubota to do semi-destructive testing of equipment. --- My son, who I told you a couple of weeks back had gotten his Technician class ham license, showed up at the Mic & Key test session on Saturday up in Seattle and passed so he's now a General class ham.
His first contact with me, after upgrading, was by telephone, though. Something about "Remember you promised me an HF radio when I passed my General? Time to ship something..."
So...those boxes will go out today... to the newly upgraded KF7OCD. --- Which reminds me: Last week I told you I was thinking about upgrading to the new Kenwood TS-590S which is one of the new Japanese down-conversion radios, heavy on the DSP.
My timing being impeckerble, Elaine left for Tyler (shipping and hair something-or-other) Friday about 11 AM. The overnighted gear showed up about one hour later from the local UPS driver, who I guess we might classify as an unindicted coconspirator, LOL.
First time I have ever used a 50-Hertz wide CW filter...absolutely amazing. And racked up a half-dozen countries or so during the Russian DX party on 20 meters, to boot. --- No danger of Elaine reading this particular confessional, though. She's been running around putting finishing touches on house cleaning (it wasn't dirty in the first place, but seems men and women have differing views generally on this topic) since my sister is coming down for a week's worth of visiting and curious, at least to me: By circumstance this was all put on the calendar before we started focusing on Clif's March 25th release language.
So whether we get huge release language, as in West Coast (or other) quake, we will be well staffed and prepped, and the kids in the Northwest will have an HF up before it gets here.
Even if nothing happens, having a backup coms setup is never a bad thing, way I see it. Seems being a 'prepper' is a lot less fringy than it used to be, though I can't imagine why....
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, we're like SO sure... (Shhh...don't tell anyone that major Depressions are two-part coupled affairs like the linkage between 1920-21 and 1929, OK? Damn, dude...don't spoil it for the sheep...)
Oh...don't forget to "Write when you get rich!"
George Ure, The People's Economist
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and more recently in
.
by John Michael Greer.
outed more than I expect the PTB were comfortable with, not to mention to all
too candid pointing to continuing oil seeps/leaks down in the Gulf of Mexico.
.
But even here, there's one huge underpinning assumption about the availability
or power, satellites, networks, and an economic system which serious solar
activity could dash in seconds.
