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Saturday,
September 10, 2011
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Uregent Truth Leaks U.S. Treasury a "Ministry"? A sharp-eyed reader, knowing how we loves to see leaks in language that oftentimes reveal the grander scheme of things sent us the following quote from the US Treasury Department website,. pay particular attention to the highlight...
I want a complete refund of my educational costs over the past 62-years. I was erroneously taught Treasury was a Department or Agency. Nope. Seems the royalist faction is making gains, huh? Imperial presidencies and czars/tsars and now this? Lingo lango leako. Land of the brave, home of the what?
(Written atop a soapbox those there is no Hyde-ing from it.)
Will the Jobs Package Work? No. But let me give you the long answer: President Obama's job creation plans were unveiled last night, and while any efforts are appreciated, we need to be very clear on just what is likely to follow all the showmanship:
I'm willing to be surprised to the upside, but every time I bet on the 'good guys' winning, I usually lose my ass on whatever the bet was about. So will peace and harmony break out? Ha! Not on your life.
The problem - simply put - is that corporations now run America by the checks they cut and the power they wield in Washington. If they think there's a way to get more than $450-billion, trust me when I tell you that want that money going to corporate coffers, not into the pockets of small time humans who haven't been elevated to super hero powers by the Corporate Supreme Court which has given unlimited political power to the golems offshore.
Hopeful cheerleading aside, Bank of America is looking at whacking another 40,000 jobs say reports. Since IndyMac we're seen more than 6,000 bank branches shuttered nationally (we count things like that in our spare time since it's a fine metric of how this Depression is rolling out compared to the last one).
Stocks may be lower in part due to this weekend's G7 meeting, but a glance at our Global Index shows the problem here: (this is a chart normally available to Peoplenomics subscribers...)
What this says, if it's too early to think about it, is that with the high in Global Markets in late 2007 and early 2008, an Elliott wave I down has occurred.
What the LameStreamMedia proposes was a "recovery" failed miserably topping in mid-spring 2011 and since has been getting back into 'collapse mode'.
Thus, as any chart-reader will tell you, unless the global picture improves to where the right-most '5' is exceeded globally, this is what global malaise/depression looks like and a decline over the coming year, or two seems to me like the only rational bet.
Elliott waves (as Bob Prechter and the crew out in Georgia know) give us some power tools to look into the future. One of the oft-repeated behaviors is that a decline as Wave 1 down, is usually followed by a bounce recovery of 50-75% with the Fibonacci .6718 retracement making frequent appearances.
Another 'rule' of Elliott is that the third wave up (or down, as we're seeing in this chart above) is most often 1.5 times the decline of Wave 1 down.
So 2008 to 2009 was Wave 1, the 'recovery' was Wave 2 and in this view, we are in Wave 1 down.
Calculator, please? In our chart, we can calculate the decline from 31,120 to 13,997 was a decline of 17,123 points.
The absolute best case would be a decline where Wave 1 equals Wave 3, so knowing the top of '5' 25,075, we can at a minimum expect long wave economics to bring us an ultimate low in the next year to 18-months of 7,952...and that's if a statistical miracle shows up.
The more likely count is the one that spells the dying gasp of international corporatism, since that would be a decline of about 25,600 points.
Obviously, if Wave 2's high was 25, 075, and we drop 609 point farther than that, we end up with a negative global index!
Which is - from a life planning stand point - a Global Depression like never before in human history.
So do I hope like hell the Obama jobs plan works? You betcha. A person would be a damn fool to hope otherwise.
But do I sincerely believe that it's going to work? Nope. Charts offer such a grim outcome that it's almost unthinkable. One outcome from the G7 will be continues synchronized global inflation and that's gotta jam silver and gold up through the roof..
Of course, even then, everything ends badly. And while I don't mean
to lay a huge massive bummer on you, go read Elliott Wave Principle: Key To Market Behavior
The global synchronized crash outcome isn't just a hair-brained idea. It's something to be planned for and hedged against. And in my opinion, those who don't see it and plan accordingly are just damn fools.
Oh, and if your financial advisor doesn't know this stuff? What did the Bard say? "A foo and his goo are soon poo?"
Shocking Fed Report Don't know if you noticed, but the Federal Reserve revolving debt section collapsed in the report out yesterday: Revolving debt was down 5.2% for the month which means consumer confidence sucks.
Latest update on the money-printing festival (Fed H.6 Report) says M1 creation for the past three months is still running at a 22.6% annual rate. Wanna send me a few mil? --- Good news is last month the US Balance of Trade dropped to just $44.8 billion, I'm guess in part due to Japan...
Systemic Fragility I know, I know, I make too much of the risk of EMP and such, but did you notice what happened when more than six million people ended up in the dark and heat due to a power failure in SoCal that bled over into Aridzona, too?
If you're not thinking the unthinkable several times a day, you're living in a box in your head. Small one at that.
California Independent System Operator daily ops chart here.
Hunger Hurts Time to dust off the checkbook and send another check to the East Texas Food Bank.,..this as hunger is making itself felt more in places like Omaha.
Wonder if the WB sends them a check monthly?
Old family saying: If you can't share when you're poor, you won't share when you're rich.
Turkey vs. Israel Next? The well-connected Debka.com story "Erdogan drives toward armed clash with Israel. Oil and gas at stake" is a worthy read.
What feature accompanies long wave economic depressions? Wars, remember? Since this depression will be bigger, we expect a dénouement of a grander scale than WW II. God I'm a cheerful sort, huh?
Odd Things We're Hearing A reliable source/guest, checking in to a hotel in SoCal Thursday reported seeing two suits chatting in quiet voices. One was saying...
Oh? That got my attention, as world-enders do. I'm hoping this is just someone who can't read very well trying to impress someone else and getting the Kepler news release Thursday all bollixed up:
Still, we gotta wonder about the ref to 11 .mil birds being tasked...so additional tips are sought. The Kepler news item is 650-light-years distant, so I'm not worried about that object...ask me in a million years, or so.
Movie Co-Marketing Then there's this from out tip line: The CDC "Dear Colleagues" note out Thursday:
Links to pages like this one and this one suggested. Er...OK...sure...still got my waiver letter around here somewhere, though.
More after this...
Coping: With Fires and Aftermath, Beyond Drought We were wheels up about 7:30 AM Thursday and as we drifted over the East Texas hills toward Lufkin about 2,500 feet and 95 knots, the scene was surreal. Everywhere we looked there was low-lying smoke mixed in with the late summer ground haze. It was as though Texas had managed to sprout its own version of the Smoky Mountains, a little flatter and a whole lot drier...
We arrived at the Angelina County Airport and were quickly waved to parking right in front of the Airport Cafe, noticing the Army Blackhawk helicopters whose crews were doing preflight's, doing some carby-loading, and getting ready for more action in fires later in the day.
A three-egg ham and cheese omelet (me) and a breakfast sandwich later (Elaine's), we headed back west, but not before developing an appreciate for the regional nature of the fires - lot's of 'em. --- At least one of our friends lost pretty much everything she had in the fire, save a computer tower. The family home burned just 7 miles south of us, lit off when the high winds earlier in the week, aided by tinder-dry conditions and adverse geography, swept up a brush-laden cut and ran into the house: that was the end of it and a metal out building as well.
The insured losses are already being talked about as more than $100-million and I figure it's good odds it will go at least twice that before we get rains here.
One press release out reports that "According to the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), Texas is having its driest year in recorded history. These conditions combined with hot temperatures and strong winds have fuelled the fires."
Overnight temperatures dropped into the middle 50's but the nearest thing to moisture is a lousy 10 percent chance of rain, but even that's at least a week out.
Tyler Texas, 40-miles north of us, reported as Thursday that the year-to-date rainfall around here has been 12.83 inches against an average year where 30.23 inches should have fallen. Last year was dry - at 25.27" - but this is just plain ridiculous. --- This may all seem only marginally interesting on the surface, but the study of economics is sometimes useful in life planning. I'll show you what I mean.
Much of the land out here was logged off just after the turn of the century. In fact, if you look at most of the pictures out of Texas in that period from 1905 on, one feature that will strike you, particularly when you go through the East Texas Oil Museum up in Kilgore (its online version is here) is the lack of trees in pictures from the Oil Era.
Around about 1935, or so, as the Great Depression dug in, lots of trees were planted in the South. The first Dust Bowl was centered about 200-miles northwest of here.
These trees would later become the prized East Texas old growth timber that we took 43-truckloads of off our land here in 2004. Timber sales in spring are best for the simple reason that with the sap running from winter, the wood moisture content is highest and weights at the mill scales are high.
We still have most of our land in 'tree farm' status but with hundreds of trees left we're facing a difficult set of decisions about what to do with our trees next year because odds are good that some portion won't survive the drought.
As a result, I've been watch the wood prices in other parts of the country. The price in August for Southern Oregon studs was running $230-per thousand board feet and logs were running $528 per thousand the prior month. Oregon is already moaning about the wood products price recovery is already lost.
As it becomes apparent around here that there will be millions of drought-killed trees, the likely next thing will be massive amounts of wood coming to market in 2012 and the year after, since it often-times takes two years for a tree's death to become apparent and the tree-farmer to give surviving trees a chance to recover - if they do, that is.
You might have seen pictures of farmers during the last Great Depression dumping milk on the ground in an effort to keep prices high? Well, this Depression may have - as one of its highlights - collapsing timber prices driven by several factors.
The first of which would be a continuation of the Housing Bust while the other big trend is the continuing migration away from paper and an increasing reliance on the paperless office and electronic document management systems.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the way I look at things, the drop in consumer demand from a continued soft housing market, the millions of trees likely dead from the drought, falling demand for paper....well, it just adds up to a kind of new Appalachians out here in what used to be a well watered section of God's Country.
I have a number of friends who make fun of Texans joining Rick Perry in public prayers for rain, and perhaps understand so since many are skeptical of any form of Higher Power. But be that as it may, I'll tell you this and you can take it to the bank:
As goes Texas, so goes America. And all the "job creation" showmanship in Washington isn't going to change anything overnight. ] Dust Bowl, or Fire Bowl, visibility looked about the same and the prospects about equally bleak.
The Corporate Veil Meantime our news analyst in Winnipeg sends this delightful note on how corporations are trying to stifle free speech on the net...
I like alone...honest!
You Live in the Outback When Dept. ...the first project of the day is to hose off the raccoon poo on the front porch from the critter coming to see if I'd dropped anything around the BBQ there last night.
Beats banging on the wall to keep the neighbors quiet, but just barely.
The Friday funny after this...
Friday Funny Reader supplied joke of the day:
Actually, I could use another fifth...
Send Ure comments to george@ure.net Reader Action Department: Visit: The UrbanSurvival Amazon store. Books, computers & S/w and outdoor gear.
Now on our premium content site: Peoplenomics.com Anaphylactic Debt Been noodling a whole lot lately on 'what ails the world' with the idea that whatever our problems are, there is likely a solution to be found if only we can identify the right analogs in other fields. This is the core of my "Substitution Method of Learning" that we've used in previous adventures. So this weekend's report is a kind of 'vision piece' which considers medical analogs beyond "debt is a cancer". While it is in some ways, the standard treatment is to maintain standard of living by upping the flow rate on the money meter. There is another analog, though, which may come into view over the next year. And if a bee sting will kill you, you're already a leg up on this possible future.
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The "Do Drop Inn" Amazing gardens in about 2 square feet of floor space: www.mygroponics.com. And remember our saying at MyGroPonics: It's OK to be a vegetable...
Strange Dreams? Post your weird dreams to help our research along into what goes on at night in people's heads: www.nationaldreamcenter.com
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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.
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Thursday, September 8, 2011 A "Buy the Rumor" Mania Yesterdays pop up in the market didn't put a silver stake through my bear-side playing of the market in my $13 portfolio, but I'm still confident the market will continue sliding down toward the 9,500 level on the Dow. I think most of yesterday's action was a "Buy the Rumor" kind of event, which if I'm not mistaken will be countered (and then some) with selling either late today, or tomorrow, after Fearless leader does his jobs speech tonight.
I won't join the pile-on trying to second guess the most difficult job in the world, and will instead point you to articles like "Dems urge Obama: Don't try to woo Republicans with your jobs speech" while I sit here in background and wonder why The Hill continues to capitalize the political party names in this country. Especially since most of us half-awake people know where their capital comes from, but I digress.
The real point of the coming 24-hours is we should see once again just how fickle Wall Street is: They decry government deficit spending pretty much 24/7/365 until their earnings hit the skids. Then a magical transformation takes place and "Tah-dah!" They love the kind of spending that will feather their nest.
Out come the checkbooks and in the contributions fly. Gotta love it - this is how the old paradigm works, or doesn't, as we shall see over the coming few months. But at least we have a sterling example of "Do as we say, not as we do" in the very short term. Popcorn at the ready?
Politics of Fires Well, this fire situation here in Texas has gotten interesting now with "Perry, Romney discuss Texas wildfires" ahead of the republicorps presidential wannbe festival.
The fires - which continue to burn - are generating huge interest on the net. Once camp - perhaps the better informed - says the reason the feds on scene turned down local aid was that without training and integration into the teams was that without the training ahead of time, the volunteers could turn into more of a liability than asset.
OK, I might buy that. Except that a contract fire fighting outfit source up in Montana sent me this:
Yeah, no kidding.
Of course, this in turn leads to speculation that this is all some kind of conspiracy to burn out as many people as possible, which is absurd. What's way more likely to us? This is what happens when a country is spending too much of its budget paying interest to banksters old debts instead of getting new services - like available forest fire gear - when needed.
I look for both Mr. Goodhair and Mr. Mittster to dance around that point.
Libyarated? Not quite it seems: While the Hunt for Red Gadhafi continues there's the little problem of where'd all Libya's weapons go? And that fuels speculation that a long insurgency could be in the works in Libya. --- If I were a strategic planner for Big Oil I'd be peeing my pants with glee about now: Behind the scenes, what could have been an oil jackpot looks like it could be years coming to market, so all that needs to happen is a bit of care and feeding of the insurgents and to keep supplies questionable. --- Now doubt this is not the public face of things, but as KAKE up in Wichita noted in a headline ""Oil prices falling as Gas Prices Rise."
Whether that's a design pattern or coinkydink, we report 'em, you decide. Oil's still below $89....and the contest is whether taking much of the GOM offline, higher water cut off big Mexican fields, and Middle East turmoil can keep oil profitable enough to justify some of those dicey shale oil plans which eat as much (and sometimes more) energy than they produce....
Right/Proper Perspective: When it's in the interests of the death industries to sell more arms, and the oil industry to keep prices high, why on earth would any sane investor expect a quick end to violence and quick oil pumping out of Libya? Here, try these ViseGrips on for size. Get real....
Well, Fuki Me Want to see an interesting chart? Drop by the Department of Nuclear Engineering at the University of California Berkeley for a gander at their air quality charts since Fukishima.
The data isn't current, but it may turn into a good historical record as we turn out the lights.
Speaking of Physics Large Hadron (end the world?) Collider data seems to call the Superstring theory in physics into question.
Still, Superstring isn't dead yet - no telling how long the bubble gum and baling wire of peer-review will be able to hold things together. Send me the conics from the Double-Bubble? At least they make sense in a 10-year old kinda way.
Autonomics My consigliore up in Ohio notes the Honda plants up that way added an additional shift recently so someone is buying cars. But I'm still wondering how much is organic growth, or are we still paying the price of Cash for Clunkers putting a hole in what would normally have been a zillion car pool of junkers and jalopies that could have been kept on the road?
Despite that hiring, I know a lot of people in the auto industry are watching Ford's plans to opening a billion-dollar plant in India.
Gone Flying This morning's report is maybe shorter and earlier than normal. Elaine are going up in the plane, find breakfast maybe down at Lufkin and maybe go shoot from aerials of the fires around here.
More after this....
Coping: About that "Sunny Disposition" A reader who shares our concerns about the Sun sent along some notes on how he's eyeing things, which is pretty much right up there with our view:
Yep - and this Presto Alert popped into the I-Ching inbox:
All of which is really interesting to me - and I think ought to interest everyone on the planet since we know from one of sources close to the PTB (up a number of rungs from mere minion level) that often times "The Movie IS the message" and with that in mind, go watch the guy doing the research in the mine in India about particles from the Sun in the opening sequences of "2012".
Is there a message in the movie there? If so....Quick! Look surprised!
Mortgage Challenge A reader has been sending up periodic updates on how he's doing with this challenge of his mortgage - and since robo-signing and improper registrations appear to have run rampant, when he sends a note, I'll try to keep you posted.
The strategy is to allege fraud in the mortgage (who owns it, anyway?) and then advise everyone who might bid on it at auction that there's action to challenge pending. Kinda takes the bloom of that rose, doesn't it:
I'm not suggesting this as a strategy, since in addition to not offering financial advice, we also don't offer legal advice.
But being big fans of 'out of the box thinking' which is some of the glue that holds things together around here, this is worth a ponder if you're in that position...maybe something to talk to a lawyer about.
Adventures in Writing We're finally near finishing the very rough drat of "never-ending Argument" as Howard Hill and I near the really hard part. Having written one book, Howard assures me the first draft is not the toughest part. Nope - that's the mind-numbing exercise in editing, tracking, and making sure that I don't fall off into too many assumed knowledge pits, which I happen to do.
So sleeves up for that...no idea how long it will take, but it will eat, what it will, for time.
September 7, 2011 The Eurplosion Ahead We've been saying for a long time that investors ought to be skeptical of the Euro since the countries that comprise the Union are the problem collectively and just because the Euro was bigger as a currency than the individual monies of the several states, that doesn't necessarily mean better.
So it should come as little surprise this morning as the NY Times headlines that "In Euro Zone, Banking Fear Feeds on Itself."
This morning, curiously, the European Markets are up, at least superficially. Germany, hard hit earlier this week with a one-day loss of more than 5%, was up more than 2˝ percent.
Those percentages might seem like trouble is fading in the review mirror, except for a nasty quirk of mathematics. If something falls 10 percent, and then rallies 10%^, it hasn't made all of its gains back.
[For the coffee-deficient: A 10% from from $100 brings you to $90 and from there, a 10% gain puts you only back to $99...]
Last Wednesday, the Germany DAX closed at 5,784.85 and at press time, it was still down around 5,320. Any time a market rallies, like this morning, but is still down 8% in a week, you gotta wonder if this isn't a simple counter-trend rally and more downside action is ahead.
That's what's in the predictive linguistics, returning in spade over the rest of this month - and by the time time the new Shape of Things To Come report gets here (still around the 20th) we ought to just have time to get the motion-sickness meds rolling for what follows in October through year-end.
Data Drops The Mortgage Banker's Association weekly numbers are out: Applications are down for a third week running in spite of record low rates.
The Fed's Beige Book is due out this afternoon at 2 PM Eastern.
Still futures are up which proves "...some of the people, some of the time..."
Either that or this is a buy the rumor, sell the news ahead of Fearless Leader's jobs rap tomorrow night.
Yo! TX on Fire, III There's a might interesting piece in The Gonzales Cannon this morning about how the feds have apparently muscled in to fighting the huge Bastrop fire which is already the worst in Texas' history. But it's a little worrisome to read about volunteer firefighters being turned away...
Let's Build a Ghost Town The report in Salon this week about how (for $200-million of your tax dollars) a "Tech company to build science ghost town in NM" is about the dumbest things I've heard all week.
Besides the obvious attempt to do "The Truman Show" in real life, a reader asks the obvious:
Oh, the answer is politicians....who'd you think? Pork, Lobby, and roll...
Buying the Presidency Did you happen to see the Mother Jones piece on how the Koch brothers are planning to 'buy the presidency' in 2012? Yup - got a million dollar donor club and the whole thing.
What I'm a little sketchy on is this: If these guys can effectively buy the presidency of this great nation, how exactly does that further the Founders principles of democracy?
The peeps can't be trusted and they can be? Help me here... but until shit like this stops, no point in voting anymore. We The People have been outbid by corporate interests.
Strategic Questionmark OK, so why are Russian airports short of fuel - someone stockpiling something and getting ready for conflict?
Sun Pop This Presto Alert looked kind of interesting:
All of which - if e3xpando planet theories mean much, could portend another 7.0+ earthquake in the next week. Not to mention crappy ham radio conditions, but we shall see...
Meantime a reader asks:
Yep - even having some discussion of this in the book Howard and I are working on. People seem (to me, anyway) to believe that just because something always has worked, that it will continue working flawlessly ll clockwork like.
Not!
If we get a (huge) (mega monster) (make up your own adjectives) solar flare in mid 2013 there is not enough industrial capacity on Earth to replace all the ruined electronics in a short enough period to prevent New Dark Ages.
Still, that'd be a better ending than nuclear winter, I suppose.
There. Told you I was an optimist at heart.
I know I go on and on about this, but the definitive read is the National EMP Commission report - a simple scan of the 208 page unclassified document here is must reading to 'get' where I'm coming from on this stuff. (Big 7 mb file, so takes a sec to load...).
The part which makes even our discussions around here look cheerful is this:
And they're talking measured in years. So yes: I admit it: I'm a little preoccupied with the risks because of a) the Sun and b) all the nukes out there and c) because EMP ruins ham radio (except at a survival level) as an emergency coms center. Remember that disabled cruise ship a while back off Mexico?
A large-scale EMP event would collapse the world as we know it and the threat is scientifically credible and basically nothing is being done about it.
Whenever I publish one of these Presto Alerts, ya' ll might want to climb out of thinking inside the box now and then.
Oh...and a mega quake may be close based on this:
Toss this in with all the lenticular cloud reports and you have a good case for seat belts - at home. Oh, and our best quake predictor just sent this:
Hmmm...seat belts?
Walnuts to Fight Breast Cancer Say, this is an interesting press release:
Might want to try a Waldorf Salad for lunch, huh?
Coping: With Yet Another Web Bot Rip There's a news release out of the National Institute for Computational Sciences up in Illinois about a new paper out this week which (oh boy - this is insightful, huh?) figures that future events can be forecast bgy applying what? Computer horsepower and some linguistics to the news flow on the net. Check it out:
As one reader noted - having read our dismay at the government's efforts to copycat the web bot project with the Open Source Indicators program asked:
A personal failing of mine came up in a conversation with my friend Gaye of www.backdoorsurvival.com recently as we were discussing my proximity to another game-changer technology. In case you didn't know, I was the first guy to send publicly-directed data over a radio station's main audio channel back at KMPS in 1983 using technology developed by a company which later evolved into Avaya.
Now, here we go again: George does some of the earliest publishing out there in this whole "new" science of predictive linguistics - putting out Clif's earliest runs in 2001 even before 9/11 and what happens?
Nothing
Until a couple of academics started claiming the "invention" of predictive linguistics 2006 and it's slowly rolled out into the global mass consciousness since then.
See a pattern here? Seems like if I'm working on something, I'm generally about 10-years ahead of events. That over-the-radio data, by the way is the scratchy noise you hear when radio stations do that emergency preparedness testing ("This is only a test...."). Thank me in part for the scratchy noise.
I could mention that I was also the first "voice" of outbound automated bill collection systems. My broadcasting pinnacle in terms of total audience size4 was saying "Please hold, I have an important call for this number...."
The outbound telemarketing/predicative dialer systems and call management techniques have advanced leaps and bounds and that one was really a team effort. Still, I need to periodically apologize for this bit of my work history because the earliest clients to use the technology (Amex, Consolidated Edison, and one of the federal home loan outfits) are still - last I heard - calling people.
So go ahead, ask: What's it like to go through life getting "Close, but no cigar..."? Not bad, actually...besides, being a multimillionaire would have brought its own set of problems I'm sure.
Wouldn't mind having 'em, though.
Bugged in N.C. A reader in North Carolina reports that in the wake of the 'cane last week they are now having lots and lots of bugs as a result.
Tales from the WuJo This one's been sitting in the inbox - but makes an interesting read...
Whew!
This is another one of those cases that fits into the odd box of "how accidents happen" - and it keeps looking like the general phenomenology goes something like this:
We can pencil out a couple of ways this might happen, depending on how we slice the MWI of quantum physics.
In other words, the open question is whether the deep shock causes something to arise & project from within the victim? Or, whether that "blue tube of light" people go toward in the NDE reports is akin to the wire on our mouse and that we're some kind of massive multi-player game Universe has going, such that at the moment of death, or essence climbs back up the wire to the Source?
So is that what death is? Climbing back up the wire to check out of a video game? But maybe that was formerly known - that the proximity of death had this 'by product' which could be used to manipulate the here & now which would go a long ways toward explaining why older cultures engaged in human sacrifice and such.
Oh, and some of those modern cults, too...the kind that do rumored child sacrifice and so forth part and parcel of working spells, incantations and supposed sexual rituals at the same time.
Not a pretty technology but more interesting to me it it's a damnation of the world's priorities that the super rich are trying to buy election outcomes rather than working the engineering problems of game-changing significance.
Or, maybe they already do know and engineer a fair bit in this space and that's how they get to be - and stay - on top.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011 Fire + Wind, II Here's the problem in a nutshell that forest firefighters were up against on Monday afternoon. It's the Weather Service METAR for Palestine Texas and it was representative of the main problem with the forest fires through the East Texas area which have now claimed somewhere around 500 homes and structures:
KPSN 052055Z AUTO 34010G31KT 10SM CLR 31/00 A2991 RMK AO2
The main thing to focus on was the winds from 340ş, or 20-degrees west of due north (340) blowing at 10 knots but during to 31 knots (that's highlighted in red). Couple that with dropping humidity and you've got local scenery like this:
Besides the roughly 5,000 acres of fast-moving range and timber fires down the road about four miles from our place, about 6,000 acres worth burned in the Bastrop area and about 2,000 out west of us in Corsicana. In all, looks to be cvlose to 20,000 acres up in smoke here since Friday.
Lots of hard work being done by the Texas Forest Service and the local volunteer fire departments. With winds dying down to a leisure 10 knots or less most of today, the crews should be able to contain the worst of it. But two dead and almost 600 structures later, it's a hell of a high priced holiday weekend.
The Weak Ahead I expect the Dow may go positive for a short while today, which would be fine since I plan to re-enter short side positions. One reason for my bearish grin? Germany was down about 5˝ yesterday and although they are bouncing a bit this morning (back up a lousy one quarter of one percent earlier) anyone who has the last Shape of Things to Come report ought to be thinking "Aha! Ifr Europe crashes, then it goes global/viral shortly, doesn't it?"
Think I'm going short for health reasons? The Euro dump made the WSJ so I'm not the only one telling you this.
Yes, I'm in that Nouriel Roubini camp that says "Worse than 2008" too.
My Oil to $65 Prediction Remember when I said oil would likely go to $65 before the year's out? Well, only $19 dollars left to go with a report this morning that prices are dropping due to the global economic slowdown.
Gee, look surprised.
Idiots at the Helm Dept. Notice how the LameStreamMedia doesn't talk so much about "double dip" lately?
World Bank chief Robert Zoellick is the latest to "go Fisher" on us.
If you're new to Depression studies 301 class this morning, I refer to Irving Fisher who was the first Yalie PhD economics grad in 1891. He's famous for saying (3-days before the US stock market crash in 1929) that:
Well, fisher was wrong. I'm not only saying Zoellick is the "new Fisher", but that his comments verge on idiotic. Unlike Fisher, Zoellick is a Harvard man. Still, his comments don't do anything enhance my opinion of Ivy League schools. --- Oh, should mention there are a few realists who see things as they are such as Deutsche Bank CEO Josef Ackermann who just said in Frankfurt: What was that Clif said about...oh yeah, normalcy bias?
Herr Zoellick please call Herr Ackermann und try to get your poop in a group on what's going on, please?
It's bad enough to be on the Titanic, but rose-colored glasses don't help us see where we're going. Yo! I'm talkin' ch'u....
New Attack On Guns? The headlines that 46 people were shot in NYC this weekend certainly sounds like it will become the basis of a renewed attack on gun ownership rights, to me. Wait a minute, here's more evidence that direction in a headline "Bloomberg blames guns for violence after parade."
I'm wanting for His Rahmness in Chicago to weigh in on the anti-gun side since CBS-2 in the windy city scores it as "7 killed in holiday weekend violence."
A knee-jerk reaction would be to decry such things, but Mayor Mike and others trying to load up the anti-gun band wagon miss a few details. One that comes to mind is that we're in the midst of a violence-based drug gang revolution on the streets of America. Already people have forgotten that about 10 percent of Mexico's population is already here. The S.A. gangs aren't going to be even remotely influenced by whatever Draconian new anti-gun regs come along. Get serious.
Doesn't help or course that our own government seems to have sanctioned sending arms south, does it? Or, is this some super-smart strategy that doesn't make sense to FOGOMs (fat old gun-owning men) like me?
Second point is that America is in deep kim chee with a host of social ills including an unemployment rate stuck 'offishully' at 9 percent, but if measured the same way it was in 1992, I understand it would be north of 20%. Social pressure comes out a barrel sometimes.
So what we have is a country in economic depression, up to its ass in drugs and authorities are getting that anti-gun look in their eyes? Where's my Constitution and the ViseGrips...I feel a need to pinch myself. Hey! Maybe the Founders really meant bare arms.
Curious Quakes Had a small one up in the Strait of Juan de Fuca this morning which is an unusual one, right near the subduction zone.
Then there was a 3.2 off northern California and a smaller 2.8 about 120 miles up the freeway from L.A. Then there's the 4.8 quake about 660 miles southwest of Anchorage, too.
If you live on the west coast and don't have at least two weeks of food and water plus some to share, quick run to the dictionary and look of "damn idiot" and see if your picture is in there.
Couple of quakes down around Mona Passage/Puerto Rico, too, so same advice in the northern Caribbean. Not that anyone listens. --- Sun's popping too:
Yeah, but do the particles to do make it turn into matter in the Earth's core and cause expansion of the planet? Which in turn would....oh, you know....
Drought in Jakarta From our Indonesia Bureau chief, and displace Texian Bernard Grover:
The attachment was an advisory from an Indonesian law firm which advised clients around the new currency rules and playing with anything other than Indo Rupiah is being criminalized. The circular warns in part that...
Although perhaps more properly a topic for Peoplenomics, if one squints just so, there's an outline of something harsh on the horizon. This generalizes to a country declaring no competition with its coin of the realm is allowed.
I expect as the nature of the evolving Second Depression becomes more apparent as the markets globally crash this fall and winter, that lots of other governments will begin passing 'laws' to sanctify their currency and demean other mechanisms for settlement.
I mention this because it's the kind of thinking that eventually leads to barring trading (without paying an onerous tax), and exchanges settled in gold, silver, or other unapproved storehouses of value.
So look for this to spread, perhaps slowly at first, but since the global economic system has run onto the rocks, this is the first bit of real grinding noise before the serious sinking part begins and we're all left adrift in the tumultuous surf paddling for our lives.
Coping: With the Advancing Police State Some months (mid-June) back I told you about the Channel 5 i-Team report up in Nashville about how people with out of state license plates were being pulled over with no apparent reason on I-40 and that Elaine and I were having some concerns about our route of travel to Detroit which took us through the area.
If your memory is extra-crispy this morning, you'll also remember that in the 20-mile area east of Memphis, we counted 13 police vehicles about half of which were of the k-9 packing blacked out SUV sort.
Well, here's another report for you, only this time it's not Tennessee, it's South Carolina and the report is from a respectable journalist who reads this site, to boot:
As much as I would like to tell you this is an isolated incident, it is not. Clif's got some data on timing and how much hard this kind of 'policing' will get - and when - in the new Shape report due out in 2˝ weeks, or so.
---
Got an email which included an eight-page "Affidavit of Truth" which is meant - if I follow the wrapper correctly) to establish one is really a 'sovereign' citizen and only subject to those laws in place to prevent one human from harming or denying another human of their property.
To make a long story short, this email contends that just because one holds a drivers license, does not mean they have given up their sovereignty as humans. Here's the part:
Several people have asked what I think of these "Sovereignty Declaration" documents and my answer is pretty simple.
Sorry, if you believe that, you're completely out of touch with how real humans operate when imbued with the trappings of Power one of which lately is a black SUV which contains a well-trained dog which will yap on command giving "probable cause" whenever the officer wants it.
Best thing to do? Well, I think our reader handled it just right. PITA (pain in the ass) but all part of the evaporation of Constitutionally protected rights which is bound to happen in the death throes of an outdated paradigm which was been based on continuously increasing sales and profits - and payment of interest while there's in background an assumed infinite supply of raw materials and so forth.
As the "make things right" and resentment of the lab-rat treadmill "Rent Your Life from Corporations" achieves the inevitable backlash, people will rebel whether on paper with what "Affidavits" they care to and claims of sovereignty but in the end, you're the dirt and the PTB own the bulldozers.
If this sounds like a cowardly position, trust me: It's not. Takes huge amounts of self-control of hold one's tongue and keep 'coloring inside the lines'.
The reason to do this is clear: As the degradation of the financial system accelerates, at some point I see the PTB simply running out of money for the ever-increasing costs associated with power. Give people a few months of no pay or hyperinflation and things change.
Consequently, I tend to go out of my way to keep a low profile and keep an eye on the clock.
It may not be the bravest thing to do, but I'm getting to be an old man and doing battle with the beast and my idea of gardening is not working a prison farm. --- People behave according to the wishes of authority if they perceive the cost of protest would be higher than the cost of compliance. If you don't want to run the risk of being pulled over by the black SUV crowd, in fairness, most are likely honest but you're bound to run into an occasional bad apple in every basket of the good ones.
This is not a story likely to make national news because its just under the perception threshold of major media. --- But did I mention that one of the reasons we bought a plane was because we still hold that as long as a person is not breaking laws, they should be able to move around the country unimpeded?
But even so, there's still the road to the airport...and buzz from those few moments of near absolute freedom in 3-dimensions quickly fade as the3 runway threshold returns and we all come down to earth.
Unclouded Thinking From a reader who is newly arrived down under:
Hmmm...
Monday, September 5, 2011 Reader Note: Markets U.S. stock and bond markets are closed for the Labor Day Holiday. Asia was down in a serious way overnight with the Hang Seng down almost 3%. Things are also in collapse mode in Europe where Germany was down almost 3 1/2% earlier.
Drought + Wind + Fire = Death Not often that a news story of national scope starts almost in our back yard, since one of the reasons for living out in the sticks is to avoid large groups of people. Nevertheless, the combination of high winds from the north-northeast kicked up in the wake of tropical storm Lee made for firefighting nightmares around East Texas Sunday.
As I went to pick up Elaine at the Tyler's Pounds airport, I found myself weaving between fire rigs on the airport approach road, as a fire in the 30-40 acre range was working itself west and south of the airport.
"Close call" I thought - her plane back from seeing our kids up in the Seattle area was right on time - and so we dawdled off to a leisurely lunch.
When we got back to the ranch, there was an occasional whiff of smoke in the air so Elaine and Panama (my brother-in-law) jumped in the pick-up and went off to investigate:
The only firefighting tools that really work are four-wheel drive tractors, bulldozers, and the Texas Forest Service gear which includes this helo which showed up and helped get a line on the fire using water drops from one of the ponds that's only about half filled because of the drought.
One thing which really worked in residents favor is that much of the timberland and range around these parts has been pretty well stripped off up 6-feet or so, and as a result, the first didn't get into crowning - where the leaves and pine needs up on top took off. This kept the fire low - and because grass fires don't last long in place (the fuel burns out quickly) a lot of the area ended up looking like this after the fire burned through.
Depending on how Universe deals the cards going forward, this will be a good thing - or bad - for the land owners. As you can see, the burned land is exposed which means if we get really heavy rains, erosion can set it. And, it takes off the browse which will cut down on the deer population - the herds will move elsewhere. Same maybe with the feral hogs.
But longer term, the fire will restore some nutrients to the ground and East Texas will continue producing some of the finest beef in the world. But that's later. Right now, it's a mess out here. We didn't get the worst of it, though. --- In the Bastrop area, at least 400 homes have burned and the size of that fire is placed at 16,000 acres - maybe bigger.
A smaller fire, down near Houston, is blamed for one death so far.
Although the winds laid down some overnight, they're expected to continue blowing from the north at 15-20 throughout today.
We considered taking the plane up and doing some aerial photos of the fires, but so far I'm thinking better of that. Last thing the tankers need is sight-seers and I'm not in a mood to zip around the edges of temporary flight restriction zones. It is a holiday, after all.
Lee's Remnants Besides more than a foot of rain some places, the remnants of tropical storm Lee are making themselves felt in Mississippi and Alabama this morning - and likely later over into Georgia and the Florida panhandle with this tornado watch from the National Weather Service.
Can someone please send us some rain? All these damn fires and still no rain in the forecast.
Shake and Quake Turning into a pretty active earthquake month early on. Not only did we have that 7.1 (downgraded to a 6.8, I think) up in the Aleutians last week, but here this morning we have a 5.9 off Panama.
Nothing to worry about, just the Pacific tectonic plate rotating - with a promise of more to come. And that's likely linked (at some macro level, anyway, with the 6.3 down in Tonga overnight.
More on the lenticular clouds and earthquake link in the Coping section below.
Big Story Nearing? You know about the Princeton Noosphere project, right? Idead is that random numbers seem to cluster prior to major emotional events. A reader note:
As I mentioned to Peoplenomics readers this weekend, I went to an all cash position in my personal account Friday, thinking that I'd be able to short from higher levels on a post-holiday rally this week. We shall see - but if the bells and horns are going off at the Noosphere project, hope to be back in if there's a big bummer coming our way...
The Princeton project uses random number generators - and when they synch up (a neat trick since they are all 'random', right? Then big changes in - think of it as The Force, I guess - usually show up.
Same thing by the way for martial artists and those who follow Eastern traditions of spinning prayer wheels. (Ask Clif about this sometime...) When those wheels - spun in mediation - start to show two (doubling) or three (tripling) Universe is speaking in a voice too quiet to be heard in tyhe racket of modern life. Trick is to listen. Beating on head to "Wake up!" often follows.
Eyeing Iran Our Winnipeg news analyst sends this:
Hmmm...somehow, sitting on as much oil as Iran is, I just don't see the ruling cabal of the West letting them leave that much resource in the ground for later on as peak oil builds price. Can't have them rock the globalistas boat, you know. Anything that costs profits.....
Islamic Super State? The Washington Times piece that "Jihadists plot to take over Libya" brings to mind the possibility that the whole Arab Spring has been orchestrated by some very big money behind the scenes. --- Just as the US threatened Japan's oil to force their entry into World War II, then sat on intel which could have prevented Pearl Harbor, so too, I think there's something much larger at work in present times.
How about this: Since the global economic model is playing out its last hand, what we really need is a new/replacement arms race with plenty of drama so that people will continue paying an ever-increasing amount of their personal production to 'government' and the powers that be, through schemes which make us rent instead of buy and live forever under the blade of bankruptcy which as I understand it, doesn't discharge student loans and so forth. Thanks for that, Banksters!
Yessir, what we need it a new enemy and what better way to do it than to have a corrupt inner core funnel cash and arms to uprisers in order to create our own 'next enemy'?
Go buy Report from Iron Mountain or find it on the net and tell me that's just a parody from the Vietnam ear...
Postal Mortem New York Times is always worth reading, but particularly this piece about the financial problems of the US Post Office which could come to a head this winter without emergency action by congress. With those deft-thought-avoiders in the mix, I wouldn't hold my breath for a happy ending....
Coping: Lenticular Hints of Quakes to Come I know this is not science, per se, but it sure is interesting when we get to talking about earthquake how many people have seen lenticular clouds in regions prior to big quakes. The best email yet on topic came in this morning from a reader in Japan...
Well, now, this is damn interesting since the tracks seem much too regular to be any kind of naturally occurring phenomena.
Say, here's a dandy theory for you to go backtest:
What if we look at the HAARP data for the early to mid January period and look to see if there was significant activity showing on their magnetometers at the time?
Could it be that quakes are somehow offset temporally from actual date of occurrence by something like, oh, 60-days or so? Interesting home science project, but I haven't got time to work that one today so have at it and send us a report!
Labor Dead? Why, she's been reading so much UrbanSurvival and Peoplenomics content lately that my friend Gaye at www.backdoorsurvival.com is asking "Is Labor Day Dead?"
Not if you live in Chennai or Mumbai were hundreds of thousands of formerly America jobs hang out nowadays, but you knew that.
It's just the idiots in Washington seem incapable of connecting the dot from jobjackers to corporate campaign contributions.
Guess what? We voters can....
Bending Over Consumers Something of a consumer revolt is shaping up against compact fluorescent lights (CFL's). Get lots of email like this one:
Funny you'd mention this: I just was thinking about this the other day. Yes, they save some energy, no the quality of light isn't that good. And yes, if you bust one, read up on breathing the air around the break and look for the words mercury and phosphorous...
The good news is that compact LED lights are in the wings. The bad news? I'm sure the lighting industry has some prick (prickette?) in a cubicle somewhere trying to figure out how to get LED's to burn out at 50,000 hours - or less - intervals.
Crockashit! Grrrr... --- This is exactly the kind of thing which Howard and I are working on in the book right now: is there a way for the old business model of planned obsolescence and maximized greed to transition into a new model where long-lived products are actually rewarded so we stop working so hard just to stay even?
Don't suppose you would ever guess my take on it, eh? Good part of the book - we're now on Chapter 18 and coming down the home stretch.
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 11-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!"
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($29, Amazon). It's take you an afternoon, or two. Then you'll see
what we've gotten all worked up over.
This
fire was much bigger - a couple of thousand acres in size. And
while lots of people with time on their hand showed up to watch, hands and
willing hearts don't do much fire suppression when the winds are blowing 20+ and
the forest here is (as I've mentioned previously) just one match short of a fire
storm.
.
And
as such, I just wanted to send you a picture of the most spectacular
lenticular / earthquake cloud I've ever seen in my life, over Tokyo, just 2
months before the March 11th earthquake. Co-incidentally, it was taken on
Jan 11th, 2011 = 11-1-11 date wise, and the lenticular cloud is shaped like
11-1-11. You'll know what I mean when you see my attached photograph. This
cloud was so unusual, almost artificial looking, and very evenly shaped. And
the mega earthquake hit us on March 11th. Something to do with 11. I wonder
if this was a warning sign, perhaps. Or does it come from HAARP? Please have
a look. 
