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July 18, 2009 07:30 AM CDT
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Market's Last Gasp With the market action this week, a number of people have written to me and asked (more or less) "Hey! What happened to Robin Landry's target of 4,400 on the Dow?" You've got to pay close attention here. What I reported - and the report stands, is that the market was likely to go down and test somewhere around the 7800 level and when it did, there would be two possible outcomes. One of these would be a retest of the 6,626 low while the other would be a break to recent new highs.
On Thursday, Landry sent colleagues in the industry the following note:
If I had to write out expectations for the coming couple of months right now, I'd say something like the rally picks up strength after a bit of weakness following Friday's market expiration, but then along will come something in the latter part of August - a sort of 'out of the blue' event which would set the market up for a grand decline into October/November which would be accompanied by a real crisis of confidence for the Obama administration. But again, that's just a guess and you're on your own here since I fix companies, not broken portfolios for a living. --- While the Dow gained a couple of hundred points since last options expiration, do try to temper your celebrating by remembering that the Dow components were swapped out to get rid of some losers... or did you forget?
The broader S&P 500 closed at 940.38 which last expiration was at 921.23. Woo hoo! A 2% gain! Yee haw!
Ooops. January 2nd of this year, the S&P closed at 931.80...so we're still down a tad if you figure that way, but that's OK, it was only 903.25 on December 31st.
The only question that matters behind all the numbers is this one: Are you 'aheader" or "behinder?"
Bank Closings Pass Three Thousand Offices As happens on Friday's, the FDIC posted the latest evidence of the Second Depression after the market closed...a total of five banks, but representing 32 offices in all were shotgun married off:
If you are counting bank offices closed since last July 11th's IndyMac Bank closing, that's 3001 offices that have been reorganized and 80-institutions, again counting from IndyMac which marketed best I can figure the beginning of Bank Roulette.
Container Problems While things were particularly grim in this week's report from the Port of Long Beach as reported earlier, there actual was a bit of good news out of the Port of Los Angeles. Their total container handling was down a mere 12.75% compared with year ago levels.
What you don't know, until you flip over and look at their 2008 stats is that June of '08 was down overall 11.7% from 20007's levels, so in order to get a two-year (big picture) of how June traffic inbound was doing, we need to look at 20-foot equivalent units (TEU's) inbound from June 2007 (387,314.30) and divide that into this June's inbound loaded TEU's (281,175.05), which means from 2007 levels, L.A. containers inbound are down 27.4%.
Now, I don't know about your definition of a 'Depression' but when the real unemployment rate is over 20% in many of America's big cities and trade has dropped (measuring by L.A. container traffic inbound) more than 27% since the euphoric days of 2007, that's close enough for me.
But at least momentarily, I have the luxury of being able to speak truth and not lose advertisers which, come to think of it, the MainStreamMedia is not able to do. --- Economics Lesson: See how close total housing price declines (as a percentage) are tracking two-year declines in containers coming through LA as a percentage)?
Speaking of Ad Sales Did you catch where "Google sales slow amid slump in online advertising"? Gee, let me think...uh....could it be that we're in a Depression? Yah think that might have some impact?
Latest Job Creation "Emergency" With all the 'green shoots' busy withering in both the summer heat - and the reality of a flailing economic environment which offers not enough fiscal nutrition to enough plants to hire more vegetables, we have to sit back amused at the headlines how "Obama tries to regain momentum on healthcare debate" and wonder what kind of 'emergency' will be cobbled up to push this latest bit of corpgov slop & pork through congress? --- A couple of readers have asked "Why are you to against government healthcare?" In principle, I'm not, but I'll tell you what: Point to one branch of government that has not exceeded its mandate, gone massively bureaucratic, intrusive, invasive, and power-tripping and well have us a meaningful discussion. But in the meantime, I don't see any better outcome to the government's outsourcing of, oh, say handling the money supply, just to throw a dart at one of the more egregious ongoing disasters.
Audit the Fed - show them with clean hands and then I'm willing to listen. Or, onshore some manufacturing....you know...practical job-creation that works for America. A REAL energy independence program and food independence. make it a national agenda item to eat no more than 30% preprocessed foods or something that will really help and we can talk about it. --- You see, I'm one of those millions of American's that can't afford health care myself. 60-year old males who are self-employed have to pay more for healthcare in the private system than is realistic...so yes, I'm in favor of real healthcare reform.
But how's about honest healthcare reform. Not some trumped-up emergency that is 1,000 pages long and contains who-knows-what in the fine print which like the misnamed Patriot Acts no one will read until long after the fact? --- I try to maintain a good sense of humor about America's future, and articles like the tongue-in-cheek "Healthcare bill contains $87 billion for lawmakers' reading disorder" indeed help.
Not so funny is the headline in the Wall Street Journal's Online offering that explains how "Drug Makers score early wins as Plan takes shape." In other words, big pharma is going to figure a way to screw the pooch on this, same as they did in Medicare. Watch it and weep.
The good news is that even some common-sense-endowed "Conservative democrats threaten to block health care bill." Oh, and you see where the Congressional Budget Office boss isn't swallowing it, either? Think someone will actually read this one for a change? Ooops...there's that mystery word - change - which means what? All we're left with? Meaningless hyperbole just like transparency - especially if some members of Congress want to audit the fed to see how much really gets sucked out. You do know, I assume, that we pay bankers rent on the nation's money? --- Not sure which American people Nancy Pelosi says she has the support of, but not the common working-class families I know. We want something a little closer to a square deal, not a drug-company infested, insurance company scam, thank you.
In the soviet republic of Massachusetts, can't help but notice the "Massachusetts Universal Health Care Cuts" are coming because, like the old saying goes (denied by paper-hangers in Washington and in some of the socialist republics...I mean states) "At some point you run out of somebody else's money." Anyone besides me read what's going on in the Republik of Kalifornia?
California At the Wall Which gets us to the story in the Christian Science Monitor of "Clock's ticking for California budget talks" is worth reading. Especially if you understand the larger game in play by the PowersThatBe. In case you've forgotten, here's how it works:
Gotta love it. The Land of the Brave and Home of the Free has become the ultimate financial teat of the uber klassen. What a deal (for them), huh?
Google This Larry Summers, who I imagine wearing a high school cheerleading outfit reportedly "cities Google search as progress" since fewer people are looking up 'economic depression."
While true that Google's Trend Labs track for "economic depression" has come down since October of 2008, if you look at the lower part of the chart, the "news references" have taken a recent upturn. But then expecting a White House economic advisor to be anticipatory rather than reactive to data that's more than a year old...well, that is asking too much, isn't it.
MSM Not reporting: There's always something hot in the public's mind, and what brother Summers may not want to talk about is the recent uptick in 'swine flu' which he should know good and well is one of the replacement issues in the public's mind, or even better this one: Check out "Iran". Make up and issue and spin to win....
Want another bait- & spin one to look at? Here..."Healthcare reform". Gee, Larry, how did that come to be so searched instead of 'economic depression", you think?
Best of all? Here's one chart for Summers and the whole Rahm-run cabal to go study: "government lies". --- There, my blood pressure is up enough so I can go get some work done around the ranch - see you Monday morning... Peoplenomics this weekend is an in depth report on the "Calm before the (cytokine) Storm."
--- Send comments to george@ure.net The UrbanSurvival Mall: Peoplenomics This Week: Some Grand Strategy for Average Folks Yes, trying to figure out whether you should bail out of your 401(k) and pay off your home or your vacation property is a damn tough question. A far more complicated one, in fact, than most people will ever bother to think through. But in the interest of getting ahead in the long run, let's roll up our sleeves and consider it this week. Be warned though: This is real work and you'll want to go over this with your financial advisor because I am NOT a financial advisor...just a fellow with a little street sense and a fair to middling grasp of economics - and the future - which many advisors seem to lack. Remember who got this decline right? If your advisor had you putting money into stocks at the top in either late 1999 or mid 2007, you might want to hit the phone book, so to speak. Ready to get some work done?More For Subscribers Subscription Information MyGroPonics My commodity broker JB Slear has nailed a great solution for people who living in apartments and condos who want to become at least partially self-reliant when it comes to raising food: An ultra-high efficiency micro-hydroponics system using readily available local parts. 25-pages and plenty of pictures to turn you into a farmer no matter where you live (Great if you have back problems, too...)...or if you just want to fill up the back yard with MyGroPonics trees and feed the neighborhood... $10 bucks here...
Maxa-Cookie Manager The newest version of Maxa-Tools Cookie Manager (MCM) is available. Existing users of MAXA Cookie Manager Pro use the update button in the about window, all others can download the Standard version here: Once you try it out, click the upgrade button (!) on the upper right hand side for the $35 unlock to get it to remove even those pesky 'non-browser specific' cookies. Bonus: You computer may run faster. I took over 1,000 cookies off my son's machine that he swore was clean. It ran much faster.
Attn: Mac Drivers: MCM does support the Safari Browser, but that does not mean it is compatible with Mac OS. Maxa-Tools only support the Windows world.
Help US Go Viral UrbanSurvival has a dandy growth rate, but sadly, it's nothing like swine (hybrid) flu's growth rate. However, if you'd like to sicken the PowersThatBe, just click here for a tool that may help. (It'll pop up an email window if you use Outlook (or a few other email programs) then simply send a link to everyone on your distro list...
"Live on $10,000" Updated What? You haven't ordered the ebook "How to Live on $10,000 a year -- or less"? Suit yourself. We're all going to live it shortly, anyway. I just thought you might like a heads up by reading about how to do it before you get pink-slipped. But, suit yourself OR visit www.liveontenthousand.com or, click one of the following button:
Yep - still possible. I also took a bit of additional material that was pertinent from recent issues of Peoplenomics and included them. The whole thing runs about 65 pages, but it gives you a vision of how to not only live on the aforementioned dollar amount, but also how to migrate up the economic foodchain if you make a little more than that and do some active savings... Click here for the page with more details on it. ---- Last week's report is here. For back issues of this site, click here. (Goes back to 1997!)
Friday July 17, 2009 Indonesia Bombing Report Our correspondent Bernard G in Indonesia has this on the hotel bombing there:
More as the reports come in... "Told you so!" Paulson: Close to Collapse Not that it comes as any surprise to people who read UrbanSurvival on a regular basis, but there's a report in the UK Independent today that Hank "Paulson reveals US concerns of breakdown in law and order" should the financial system have failed in the wake of last year's financial panic.
The reason that this is so important is that it gives credence to the report that back in (going by memory here) March 2008, CONgress held a secret session (only its fourth in history) and talked about how dire/grim/scary things would be should the system break down.
Ooops. memory isn't completely gone yet....here's a posting off the Honorable Ron Paul's web site from that period under the heading "Congress Secret session March 13, 2008":
Initially, these reports were passed over - OK, buried then - by the MainStreamMedia, which we assume had also been brought to heel through various scare-tactics which instead of reporting the news and risks directly, sat on the story while the printing press kicked taxpayer money to the biggest of the banks, auto companies, and so forth. As it turns out, that put what seems still to be coming on hold - but just for a while.
What few places talk about even today is the notion that all we've really done with the bailouts and fancy footwork is put off the day of reckoning so that when it comes, it will be just that much worse for all the additional debt, relevering, & money printing that will be further piled on to our past egregious financial misfeasance.
While there is still time for alert people to hedge their bets by investing in self sufficiency, there's also a good case that by this time next year you'll be looking back at even the relatively high unemployment rates and insane levels of government spending TODAY as 'the good old days'. No doubt, the push for national health care and such is all part of 'make work' programs that government can retain control over.
The government's strategic problem is that a massive Second Depression which we're already into now will result in a serious downsizing of not only government, but of the general population as things like the globalist model of 'free trade/labor wage rate differential spreads - break down accompanied by a much, much lower standard of living in the US - not to mention the wholesale theft of a whole generation's retirement planning by watering down the money supply in order to paper our way through events to come this fall and through next year. --- Seat belt tight? Barf bag at hand? You ain't seen nothing yet, although I'll have to file the Paulson confessional under the 'secrets revealed' meta data set in modelspace and warn you that if you think my outlook this morning is grim, wait till you see the updated predictive linguistics report next week from www.halfpasthuman.com. May be out Monday afternoon or Tuesday morning
Tuesday (night) Cliff and I are scheduled to be on CoastToCoastAM with George Noory where 7/21 runs into 7/22 to talk about what folks can actually do about what's coming. I mean besides flee paper assets and spent what you can on self-sufficiency, seeds, stored fuel, water, medical supplies and what have you. don't forget N100 masks and a radiation monitor, too, if the bombing of Iran comes off on schedule with the 'serious of unfortunate circumstances' that seem to accompany that.
Peace and Brotherly Love Department "Iran will bring down Western foes". "Israeli warships rehearse for Iran attack in Red Sea". Ah, the fine feeling of peace and brotherhood that's about. Why, it's positively stimulating, eh? ---- As we mosey along toward the October 25th date when finally we'll be done with all this print media foreplay and lob some bunker busters around and set loose the cloud of radioactivity and such, it's sad to note that after how many hundred thousand years of cave-dwelling that when we have differences of opinion (and don't even share a border to fight over) we see folks on both sides getting out their clubs...
Whollary? "Hillary Clinton rejects notion of diminished role." Who?
Someone Actually Listening? Moderate Mike Ross of Arkansas says he has enough votes to block the Rahmdown health care panic. Smart feller, this Ross guy, in my view. ---- Hey! How about it becomes evidence of treason or sedition for folks on the Hill to vote on any piece of legislation they have not read in its entirety? We all are starting to see how much blind leading of the blind there is, heh?
Way I figure it is this: If they haven't read it, they're not representing The People, right? ---- If they aren't going to read the legislation, and put some gray matter into it, we may as well buy 450-odd rubber stamps and sent the whole lot of them home - save a lot of money for the special interests to buy off others with, wouldn't it? Only downside I can see is most of them can't go anything productive when they get back to their home districts except file lawsuits and such...there surely aren't jobs for them.
Wonder if they have figured that out?
Funny "Ha-Ha" Meets "Funny/Weird" Just when I was pinching myself with the Vice-Grips on the shins this morning, since I'm running out of undamaged areas to pinch myself due to the plague of surreality Universe is dumping on us, a reader sent along this link to a Department of Treasury solicitation seeking a contractor to provide...oh I can't do this straight-faced....you read it...
The proposal itself it humorous in a dry, almost British kind of way. But to see this, you have to understand how humor works at its elemental level. A Wikipedia recipe on how humor works here:
How would I deal with such an absurdity? Fire up the PowerPoint, kids....here we go...
(Slide 1) Responsive to: "Understand the importance and power of humor in the workplace in a responsible manner."
(Slide 2) Responsive to "How to use talents in a creative way that adds humor to everyday experiences."
(Slide 3) Responsive to "Alleviate stress in home and the office "
(Slide 4) Responsive to "Know how and why humor is important to communication"
(Slide 5) Responsive to "Improve work-place relationships "
(Slide 6) Responsive to "Prevent burn-out"
(Slide 7) Responsive to "Contractor shall conduct two, 3-hour, Humor in the Workplace programs"
(Slide 8) Shameless self promotion
Further Readings in Humor For a further explanation of how humor works, please see the Congressional Budget Office Director's Blog which this morning offers a genuinely gloomier than even my forecast for the nation's outcome:
The accompanying chart show the variance between the BS/Happy talk model which gets pimped on The Hill and at the White House and the oh-oh, don't talk about this one model:
Obviously, this guy has missed our humor seminar. "Team one, hand him some herb. Team two, hand him a paper or one of those smashed pop cans with the hole in it. Team three? Some fire over there?"
But Wait - It Gets Better! Then when have veep-Joe telling us "We have to go spend money to keep from going bankrupt." Don't know what they put in the water in Washington, but veep-Joe might want to bring in some bottled water from East Texas, or change brand, or something... then he turns around and says of the current pork & stim that 'It's working". Yeah...sure...whatever, Joe. --- But all sarcasm, cynicism, disgust, and nausea aside, he actually is right in one sense (if I can use that word 'sense' in a country turned topsy-turvy): The government needs to immediately spend money to put people back to work and don't know how you'll take this but it seems to me that socialist health care being Rhammed down our throats, closing half America's auto plants and having the banksters tighten up lending just isn't the way to increase the velocity of money, is it? --- "Team one, hand him some herb. Team two, hand him....
--- snip and save section ---
Coping: With Your Kid's Future Back in 2001, when my youngest daughter Allison was thrashing about looking for a career, she settled on going into the food industry. While I wasn't particularly happy at the time with here choice of going through a two-year culinary program, I still held some hope that it would work out for her. Nevertheless, my advice back then was "If you want to do something in the food business, why not just go to work for a grocery chain, start as a checker and then work into one of their specialties like produce or baking?" I remember offering. But, who listens to Dad, right?
She did very well in school, and one thing led to another and a series of prep-chef kind of gigs is what I have to admit, having eaten at some of them, just really good upscale restaurants in the Seattle area. She even worked for a while as a prop chef for a Northwestie kind of TV show.
Still, as a dad who lives more than 10-minutes (often 10-years) into the future, I was worried that her training might not be a source of a decent (average and above) income for a long period of time. One suggestion I made (repeatedly) when she was completing school in 2003/2004 was "Why not become a sales rep for one of the food companies, or maybe go into wholesale food-serve supplies?"
Well, one thing led to another and for the past two years or so she's been working for a DNA testing outfit - and it was there that she was let go earlier this week...business is slowing in a lot of sectors, it turns out and the company was making adjustments and she was in a position which the company figured it could reduce while transferring workloads around.
But if there's one thing Allison got from 'the old man's' family it was plain old hustle. So you can imagine how pleased I was to get a phone call last night reporting that "Dad I've got a full-time grocery checking job and there's a good chance I can move up over time..."
Needless to say I'm pleased as punch. One daughter in the 'can avoid it' part of the food business, a son doing advanced EMT training and another daughter in nursing school. At least they will all have jobs in an all but totally on-the-rocks economy. And that pleases the hell out of me.
---
Each of my kinds now has set what I refer to as a 'personal trajectory'. In other words, they have at least one 'no-matter-what' career track, and if they see some other higher return track, they can always upshift to that. But, as a personal safety net, they also have a set of 'keep alive' skills they can fall back on that will be able to put food on the table in all but the complete breakdown of society, and even then a good bit of medicine, knowing about wild foods and foraging would still give a person considerable advantage over the mass of people who never take the time to ask hard questions about their life like "In an age of specialization, what happens if my specialty is suddenly no longer needed?" --- Being early is something that has run in the family for at least 150-years, as I explained earlier this week. But here lately, as time & events speed up, the period we have to wait before being right seems to be shrinking. Doing 'wireless data and software over radio' which I was doing in 1983 was only about 10-years early. Moving to the ranch in early 2003? Only six years ahead of the pack. And pushing a daughter into the indispensible side of the food industry? Maybe five years early. And some of the predictive linguistics work ("death of the dollar" for instance) may only be three or four years early.
All this leads up to an interesting idea for a few hours of personal introspection this weekend, a study of personal 'time loops'. Most people have a hard time recognizing them, but as you get old enough, there are certain repeating patterns that emerge in most people's lives. You can graph them out if you want - and in some cases, you can even see your personal progress moving backwards - not forward.
Not everyone has multiple 'curly-cues' and there's no reason just to map your life as peaks of creativity. Another way would be to make loops based on marriages (I'd have three loops there, LOL). But it's an interesting tool not just for the personal insight it gives into the way you're conducting your own life, but when watching your kids grow. I can see in each of mine now, how their first creativity loops are going and it's from this that a parent can 'see' how their kids will come out.
As my grandmother (on the Danish side) said "It's through our kids that we achieve immortality." and by watching the rises and falls in their loops as they arise, there's a certain sense of wonder and a great appreciation to be had for the natural/cyclical nature of things.
Not that this is the only method of looking into the future of your kids (or inspecting your own life's work). Another method would be to use the S-Curve approach pioneers by my friend Cesar Marchetti at CERN which I described in one of the earliest weekly Peoplenomics reports - what back when it was "Inside Report" in 2001. The "S" curve phenomena described in that report not only applies to people's lives, but appears to also apply to markets.
So there...something to ponder for the weekend - life loops and S curves. and maybe even a ponder or two for the kids as they thrash about.
One thing seems likely, however, and it's a key thing to consider: It seems as time has moved along from the post-World War II period that the 'single loop' life - the going to work for one employer, staying there 35-years and then retiring to make a single loop (along with a single marriage, and so forth) is toast. Hard to run into anyone these days who has a single-loop life mapped out.
More like going forward into the future - and almost certainly as we approach 2011/2012, the number and magnitude of change implied by the LifeLoops (or S curves) will be increasing. And that has tremendous implications with how we construct our daily lives. ---- The approaching of the technical singularity struck home just yesterday for me as another new technology was described to me which has the potential to dramatically change computing. We're in a helluva race right now: The two contestants are the technological 'singularity' which offers the notion that enough technological change can save us (after Kurzweil) while the other is that so much change happening in such a short period will reduce the gains of enough of the middle class such that the marginal rate of return for increased effort falls below zero and society (as we knew it) just self-destructs (after Tainter, et al).
Hell of a race, huh? A sort of LifeLoops for the masses? No, that's how the Mayan Calendar works.
Around the Ranch: Wet Spot Although the chance of rain is only 20%, we've just had 1" of that 20% drop into the rain gauge overnight and this morning. Still too damn hot to play golf, but the greens should be in decent shape after all this...now instead of a golf cart if I could get a swamp buggy on the course....
Thursday, July 16, 2009 Port Disaster Growing The latest figures will be filtering out over the next couple of days from the rest of the ports, but already the Port of Lang Beach has released its June import and export report. It shows that inbound cargo from overseas is down 28.4% compared with June a year ago and that on a year to date basis, imports are down 23.5% overall.
On the export side, things were even worse in June with exports down 28.8% compared with year ago levels and that means exports for the year to date are down 26.9%
The Port of Long Beach is only the first of the Ports to come out with their report. And, Long Beach has been the most extreme case. However, as American consumers continue to see disposable incomes fall, I expect the problems of falling imports to be working their way across the country over the next couple of months. --- One reason that disposable income figures have not been falling as fast as the unemployment rate has been rising (and imports export business dropping) I suspect is in statistical methodologies. If you want something to write up a contributed article on (you can be a reporter, too, you know) just go to work on how the disposable income figures are based on things like 'housing equity' and see how much adjusting has been done there to reflect the real nearly 33% decline nationally in housing prices (S&P/Case-Schiller) since the housing bubble peaked.
Wanna make a bet there isn't some fancy footwork underway there to keep up the illusion that anyone has any free cash to go spend? Then try to sell that in a waterfront diner and let me know how you do.
The truth is becoming apparent if you work the docks, though...and while Long Beach may be dropping some due to market share, the other ports can be expected to see proportionate declines when they report over the next week or so.
Foreclosures Jumping After being at record highs last year, foreclosures are up a further 15% in the first half of 2009.
Gee, maybe living in camps and not burdened with a house payment, people do have higher disposable incomes, don't you suppose? --- You know things are bad when cemeteries are shutting down.
Tax Us to Tears Looks like top earning people in New York may be looking for a cheaper place to live since the NY Post is headlining this morning that "DEM HEALTH RX A POI$ON PILL IN NY: Terrifying 57% tax looms for biggest earners".
This tax and spend outbreak comes at a time when we're reading about how Social Security just spent nearly three-quarters of a million dollars on a conference in Phoenix.
And while the republicorps in congress have unveiled the fruity loops org chart behind the democons healthcare plan, which looks strangely like an org-chart in a blender, we see that a hospital in Massachusetts is suing the (formerly) Commonwealth saying that basically, universal health care there doesn't really pay for the low-end folks. Now, look the other way, cough, and try to look surprised.
But wait! Before you go, want to bend over one more time and pay for poor people in Colorado to get cell phones? --- If this leaves you dazed and confused, consider one way out might be to bust up the booze lobby. Did you see where "Calif Tax Officials: Legal pot would rake in $1.4 billion?"
JPM: We Gave Them Money - Why? Here's another one of those bank earnings reports that has me looking for something stronger than the ViceGrips to pinch myself with. "JPMorgan Chase posts 2Q profit, surpasses Street."
Not to text rude here, but WTF were the folks in Washington on when they a) Gave $25 billion in bailout money to JPM-Chase and b) Who ran Lehman into the ground so JPM-Chase buy them for $2-bucks a share?
Meantime, could CIT go down? Seems that way.
Don't want to sound overly conspiracy-minded here (who me?) but say, you don't think this is another attempt by the rest of the bankster mob to drive out competition and/or beat down an asset price so someone in the mob's inner circle an scoop them off the bankruptcy court steps at a wholesale (or better) price? Naw...perish the thought. I must be a whacko for even letting such a thing enter my thinking. Not in America - land of equality, yada, yada, yada....
Market Madness I forgot to mention that Industrial Production is down 13.6% compared with year ago figures according to the latest from the (not really ) Federal Reserve (which is above auditing). Construction is down 20.7%, business equipment down 17.8% and in the major industry groups the best performance was utilities down only 3.9%.
With industrial plants running at a mere 68% of capacity now, seems sure that even with an occasional twitch of life out of the economy, that won't set off hiring because hours worked has been falling. All of which means the administration's grudging admission that unemployment will top 10% will be wrong by at least a full 1% and maybe even 4-5% on the low side - or worse since this is a Depression, dammit. Been reporting on it since 1997 and still people are in denial. Truly frigging amazing.
Look: All the Baby Boomers can't get their 'profits' it will collapse the economy. There hasn't been enough 'savings' with all the money watering down that CONgress has been doing all these years to pay for squat. That's why states like Texas keep resurrecting the NAFTA Highway plan and selling of taxpayer-paid roads to foreign corporations to run as 'toll roads' - so they can double and triple-dip the taxpayers. And the cons aren't all just in Austin...they are in every capitol where a lobbyist can find a hotel room. It's that simple and yeah, people are that dumb.
Map This Fine map in the NY Times that shows where unemployment sucks most & least in the country.
Oregon (23% by the broad measure) and Michigan (22% broadly) are clearly in the Second Depression which few places except this web site seem to be candid about.
It's like the MSM has a gag order...which is close, since the choke collars are pulled on a regular basis I hear...but seldom if ever in writing. Word of mouth. "Stay!" "Sit!" and such...
War Planner Israel's bombing (with tacit US support) seems on track for around October 25th....and with that in play, a reader is eyeing the headline that "US/Russian tensions rise over Georgia " and wonders if this isn't a set-up for World War.
Naw...wait till next year. See, in the wake of what happens this fall/winter it won't become obvious until early next year that there won't be enough food around to feed 7-billion people, so we have come up with a way to 'off' about 3-billion or so over the next few years.
Weaponized vaccines, loosing of radioactive fallout, confiscation of physical wealth, GMO crops and terminator seeds, poisoned oceans, it's all in the works.
Legislative Department The story about lawmaking madness in North Carolina in this weekend's Greensboro News-Record reveals that things like whether or not clotheslines can be regulated are coming up review.
But here's the part that caught my eye:
No mention about defense attorneys....am I the only one who worries about equal protection statues? Global Coastal - BLOB? The headlines coming out of Alaska are starting to make me wonder a bit. First the reports of a bit of land rising last week and this morning a report of some kind of non-oil glob floating about as the Anchorage Daily News headlines "Huge blob of Arctic goo floats past Slope communities IT'S NOT OIL: No one in the area can recall seeing anything like it before." --- Yeah, sure, you remember the movie "The Blob" and you're wondering "Is this the thing that is in the linguistics for global coastal event?" More when the next read from the time monks comes out - about next Tuesday I hear.
Creative State Spending California going bust? Other states in that line, too? Not a concern in Missouri, apparently, where the headlines ready "Missouri works to preserve giant salamander population".
Fungus AmongUs Since fungus is one of the threats to the giant salamander (which I suppose means no giant salamander hunting this yeah...damn!) we also find a huge number of fungus stories about. "Beware tomato scourge" warns the Philadelphia Inquirer. No worries here - our deer have eaten everything.
Toenail fungus is now being treated with lasers in Charlotte North Carolina - aren't you folks lucky, huh?
Not escaping the fungus amongus meme, we read in the Rocky Mountain Independent about how Potato Famine Fungus hits home gardens in U.S.
Further west, California and other Western States are suffering as "Beetle, fungus deliver one-two punch to black walnut trees."
Then there's "Gray Leaf Spot: Does your corn have it, or are you lucky?"
Say, did I mention vomitoxin grain warnings to grain elevator operators in Maryland and elsewhere?
Why there's even a fungus attacking Mormon crickets, we read in the Salt Lake Tribune. We'll keep an eye on that to see if it spreads to Muslim, Lutheran, or Jewish crickets. --- I will try desperately to avoid a terrible pun like: "I'm not a doomster reporting all this stuff - just a fun guy..." (as is fungi --- get it? LOL)!
Don't mind me, I live in a Maxwell House...
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Coping: Meanwhile, Back at the WuJo A number of comments have arrived (some ticking, others not) since I posted my "WuJo" note recently. To refresh (or introduce the concept if the coffee hadn't kicked in that day) the WuJo is what I call the intersection between the world of WuWu (woo-woo/New Ageists) and the Complete Reality DoJo where, as Donovan might have put it, 'facts, figures, and logic' may be encountered.
So let's go through some of it, shall we?
I hold time wave zero/novelty theory in pretty high regard although my reasoning might stand with a bit of detail. The main feature of TWZ is that it matches up with cycle theory so neatly. In other words, McKenna's 'novelty' and readily acceptable [academically blessed] economic cycle work is all cut from the same cloth.
What amazes me is that with rare genius (McKenna, Kondratieff, and even my Consigliore who has read dozens of books on cycles - many quite obscure and spendy - some cycle books going for $500+ a copy) I am just floored that cycle study hasn't gotten its 'due' ever since Christianity come West and started replacing things like the Pagan mid-winter festival with Christmas and so forth. Not that's it's bad...but it seems to represent how cycle theory got 'dissed" and jumbled up.
Pagan/Druid types - just to go a bit deeper - used to have a mid-winter festival which came around the winter solstice (Alban Arthan) before calendars were so formalized. When Christianity came along and wanted to 'do away with' the mid-winter observation of death/rebirth/ancestral honoring, and from which point, the 'life' of spring would be coming soon, Christian dogma was tweaked to focus on the 'birth' aspect and the historical date of Jesus' birth was moved from spring - which early data supports - back to a more 'convenient' time which happened to be around the Druidic winter solstice celebration.
Fine lessons in marketing here, but most people won't sit back and appreciate it because they'll be wrapped up in the 'owning' of a religion and will find it tough to toss ideas abou8t without getting emotionally involved; that's always the measure to me of how 'smart' someone is: Can they test-fit all the different puzzle-pieces of Life together without getting all worked up over ownership of one piece that was passed on to them by a family? Hard to do, but if you're going to figure out even bit of life, got to move puzzle pieces about....like geologists slide continental masses around to see how they might have once fit. --- Much the same can be said of Samhane (samhuinn) - a harvest/thanks festival to Druids, which was morphed into "All Hallow's Eve' - Halloween, and of course the Druidic rites of spring (Alban Eilir (light of the earth since the sun was making a comeback from it's short winter appearances) was timed out with Easter and the 'He is Risen fit neatly at the archetype level with the sun rising earlier and so it went.
All of which is to say that there are cycles all over the place in life; the holidays with celebrate, the tides, the celestial movements including this really long one that passes in 2012, and so forth. To hold in economics that non-numeric cycles can't be nested in this way and that is to hold to a flat-lander's view of the world.
People who don't subscribe to a much larger sense of cycles have either never gone boating on salt water, never spent enough time outside to notice seasons, and may not have noticed that the outside temperature rises and falls with the season in most places non-tropical.
Am I getting around to endorsing time wave zero? Sort of. Can't say it's perfect (but what is?) but what I can say is that when you have a large body of cycles covering topics like crops, tides, and even Mars making a record close approach to the earth next month, then yep, to go looking for correlations between measurable cycles and secular events doesn't seem to be a waste of time. And then, if you can build an algorithm that can demonstrably come close - and maybe look at the Noosphere project at Princeton as a possible 'how all cycles and moving along' kind of tool, that might just yield additional insights into how the massively entangled world we living in operates. --- Next email on topic?
But there's the rub. One of the reasons that the PowersThatBe need to (at some point) censor/restrict access to the Internet (or at least tone down the free exchange of ideas) is that it facilitates asking questions about those who would pretend to 'lead' us. Why, just think what would happen if cattle could stop in mid-stampede and ask "Are we all going to Abilene, oh what, here?" That would immediately become a problem for the cowboys who are doing the 'herding' - like the present group of PTB that are herding us all about for monetary gain. Freedom's a good thing an all, provided it doesn't challenge the ruling paradigm. If it does that, then it's time to make 'freedom illegal' which is why anyone who can think for themselves is either already, or about to, find themselves labeled or treated like terrorists. Next?
Critchton's book is OK - movie was fair, too. The supercomputers and quantum foam part blurred a bit for me - may have to reread it one of these days. But, in the meantime, please have your friend box up that bicyle-like contraption and send it along. I'll gladly pay the freight. Be sure and include the off switch though. I'm adventurous, but not completely stupid. Time for one more follow-up? Sure, week's almost over...here's one from a PhD down under...
There seems to be loose in the world right now a curious - almost contagious case of consciousness rising. Yesterday, I remember watching a bit of YouTube video which Elaine was watching about a chiropractor of some dozen years, or so, of practice who found one day that all of a sudden, when he was actually touching people they would feel him touching them. He went on doing some work with them and turns out that there were people having oddities like spontaneous healings take place. But the weird part (*least for me) was that he related that as this started happening to him, there were lots of mysterious/unexplainable changes in how electronics operated around him. Not only that, but when he did 'work' on patients, they would go home and sudden they would start having electronics do this and that in strange ways. Guy's name is Dr. Eric Pearl and he gets into some of what may be going on in this video here on YouTube. That wasn't the video Elaine was watching but you can get the drift of it. Suppose for a moment that there really is a new consciousness arising and what if - in flu-like ways - it is becoming 'contagious' as Dr. Pearl's work seems to imply? And suppose - and this is way out there - that the only way to 'bottle the genie back up would be to administer enough 'impurities' into people that you could bring their personal vibration levels down. How would you do that? If you come up with "Why, invent a new kind of disease and then mandate injections in the form of flu shots!" you get a gold star for the day. The timing of this all is almost - surreal - to borrow a term from the time monks. Weird Story Time: Want a a strange personal story? Back in about 1975 which I was news director of a radio station in Seattle, and the station had just moved its facilities to across the street from the Pike Place Market, I had a curious fellow show up at the radio station for an interview. The news department back then had a weekend public affairs program called "Introspect" that was an hour-long series of interviews covering all kinds of topics in the general area of public affairs. So this large Greyhound bus rig shows up and out steps this fellow of undetermined age and we have a fine interview about the lack of 'brotherhood" and "unity" in the world and what needs to be done about it. After the interview, this fellow says "Let's go for a walk..." Strange I thought, but "OK..." We proceed to wander along the Seattle waterfront and along the way he says "This is very important and you need to remember this..." Whereupon he gives me this thing he called the 'light chant'. Turns out you can find it on the net, too:
'Yeah...ok...strange" I remember thinking...but within just a couple of weeks a strange thing started to happen. When I would drive down the street at night, street lights would go off when I approached them. I haven't noticed it for a while, though - some number of years, in fact. But haven't recalled the chant till just this morning - sparked by the cantankerous electronics contagion reports. Now, well, may have to look into that just a bit more one of these days. Don't expect anything, though, since I now live 14 miles from the nearest street light in a town. Well Grounded Reader
Shuttle's on its way now, but yeah - lots of people have been wondering the same thing. Wednesday July 15, 2009 CPI Report Latest on the Cost of Living is out today...
Energy and transportation costs dropped most on an annual basis, but you just know that falling car prices can only offset so much at the gas pumps for so long since the 3-month rate annualized would jump transportation costs almost 20%. Food is still cheap, but I expect that will swing to major increases this fall into winter, too. Energy on an unadjusted 12 month rate is down 25.5% but again, the most recent three month change is up 22.1% annualized so this is what the big swing into inflation looks like close in. Unfair to do this, of course, but the annualized rate of the one month change in all items pencils to 8.73% inflation. Is this where I say "Prices don't go up - our money's purchasing power gets watered down for the Nth time? MASSIVE Quake Remember all the indicators in the www.halfpasthuman.com predictive linguistics about 'new land rising' and the southern ocean - down toward the tip of South America? Well, not to freak you out but here comes another web bot hit: a massive 7.8 quake off the west coast of the South island of New Zealand. Just going from memory here, but wasn't the quake in China a 7.2? Just to give you a sense of the scale of this thing. This triggered a brief tsunami scare but danger seems to be passed now. However, start connecting the dots - like that land rising in Alaska - and you see why the time monks are not even trying to keep up with all the ground shaking/dancing mountains (above and below sea level) of late.
Big Health Care Push Could it be? A National Healthcare system in just a few weeks? Why the big push? More government spending? Intervention in the economy? Don't see why we need to do such a big press in this area until we get a little firmer sense of how the economy is going to work out, at least so it seems to me. Do we all become health care workers and treat one another?
CinC Challenge Very significant court case to watch as a soldier who has been ordered to the Middle East has gotten a court to put his deployment on hold because he questions whether the Commander in Chief can legally hold the office. MSM burying this, 'natch.
Ticking Toward October The chance of an Israeli (and possibly US-supported) attack on Iran around October 25th continues to grow with a report that "Iran could have atomic bomb within 6-months - report". One reader asked "What happens if the use of a bunker-buster were to set a fuel rod storage area on fire? Oh! You mean like a global Chernobyl kind of thing? Yah, there's that, but regular humans don't make policy any more, as if the bankster bailouts didn't make that point clear enough for all of us. Ya'll just keep paying your 33% credit card rates and be happy, OK?
Disappearance Meme "Montreal man's $50M disappearance 'shatters'; friends." Also disappearing: a White House web site link to a Privacy and Civil Liberties Board. And if that's not enough to get you to head-scratching, there's the case of a missing Indian scientist who has never absent from duties according to colleagues. --- Harry Potter tickets are disappearing...although that's outside the meme...so an interesting social note that people are lining up for escapist entertainment.
Homeland Security may ditch the color warning system for terrorist alerts. Then we have comments critical of the Sotomayor SupCo nomination disappearing.
Former Congressman Van Hilleary says the whole country is disappearing before our eyes. Like we hadn't noticed.
More disappearing acts? You mean like the WWF warning of disappearing forests? OK then...
Riots/Summer of Hell Department Besides the youth rioting and burning 300-cars in France this week, we're now reading about how American flags were burned (I'm embarrassed to say) here in Texas. Looking for UK rioting and then trouble to spread to the US - at least if the linguistic libretto is right.
Heavy Equipment's Bright Future Noticing all the bulldozing of homeless camps and left over/excess housing (a horrific waste, but no one is asking) seems like there's at least a pulse left in the bulldozing trade. --- So let me get this right: We sucked people into badly financed homes, stripped them of financial assets, shoved 'em into bankruptcy - let 'em set up homeless camps and enclaves and now we're going to bulldoze those efforts and then retrain them and get them jobs in healthcare and building trades using government money? Hand me the vice grips I need to seriously pinch myself. Stalinesque government...all we need are the gulags and those are being built. We have all gone complete frigging mad. But no one seems to care. Fine stuff that fluoride in the water and all those fluorine based doggie-downer pills, huh?
Counterfeiting "Police seize record haul of fake money" in China. Hmmmm...let me see.,..we just print up money on demand here and it's not counterfeiting. Oh! I get it! Cause the government is doing the printing. Check!
Migraine Department This morning's report is a little shorter than normal due to a developing migraine...Either a caffeine overdose or stress....might need to get new glasses, too...
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Coping: With "The Colony" A reader asked me overnight whether I had cable and the Discovery Channel and if I was going to watch "The Colony" a new series which they will be premiering on July 21. The answer is no, not at the moment - the satellite bill was something that got cut for a number of reasons, not the least of which is we still get some TV from 'free-to-air' [FTA] satellite services, including some foreign language stuff now and then (the joys of steerable arrays and knowing about www.lyngsat.com which is the best FTA resource in the world, huh?).
Besides the $1,200 per year saved, some good services can be had on the internet such as Bloomberg TV streaming on the net and more...all of which can be piped out our InFocus DLP projector to either the screen in my office or a portable one. CNBC, among others has a pretty good futures page, if you are still involved in the paper chase, so between that, www.ino.com, the charts at JB's site, www.fortwealth.com, and others, it's not like we're living in the Stone Age around here.
The further advantage (like 'all on my desktop' and 'free' isn't enough?) is that I never worry about the high frequency strobing effects from HDTV which some are debating could cause one to be 'brainwashed' or programmed with things like subliminals, since the display rate on lower bandwidth video is not fast enough to pack too much subliminal programming into, compared with higher display rates. Tinfoil hat stuff? Well, yes, and no...you've remember the MSM purportedly caught playing with subliminals before, right?
That said, Discovery has this series coming up which sounds intriguing as hell. "The Colony" seems of the 'reality TV' genre, but a twist emphasizing the skills that people would need to have to rebuild after a cataclysm of some sort in the USA. To quote from the series web site: " The test will take place in an isolated urban compound with no electricity from the grid, no running water, and no communication with the outside world."
Sounds like all the planning parameters that we have been working on around here for....how long is it now? The layout of The Colony can be seen here, but the layout of the place looks to be not too conducive to success unless 'seeded' with just the right stuff ahead of time.
Depending on what supplies are left laying around for the team, and just looking at the facility, seems like one of the features is a large building. That being the case, if I were team-leading the first item on my shopping list would be to put gutters up and a rain catchment system off the roof, since not much is going to happen without catching water. Then there's the matter of food and how much they will have to keep them going. Wonder if they will have any seeds?
Moreover there are many boxes of unlabeled 'stuff' that will no doubt yield a treasure-trove which might not happen to less fortunates in a real-life situation. Still, a little study of the layout brings up endless possibilities. Is there a bicycle? Can the truck generator be pulled out along with a belt to make at least some minimal power? Could the AM radio in the truck be retuned to the low-end ham band on 160-meters?
The Colony team apparently will have a leg up on about 99.9% of possible urban colonies that would follow collapse, since they seem to have an inverter and batteries at hand. (See the "Build to Survive" section of their web site. And say, where did those solar panels come from? A solar panel tracking array from scratch...yeah, right.... I'm sure people have a couple of hundred watts of panels just laying around the house. Hmmm...
The sand and charcoal filter off the roof catchment? Now we're talking. Just make sure you have a 250-gallon poly tank handy that can be cleaned and pressed into service for water storage. Hell, you've got two or three of them, right?
The 'producer gas' rig from a 55-gallon drum is something I've been itching to build...since we have trees and 55-gallon drums and welding gear handy, so that's a must-watch for sure. I've thought long and hard about buying a $500 'beater' of a car that's old enough to have a carburetor so I could have an easy-to convert platform for just such experiments. But that's way down the shopping list after another mile of fencing and cross fencing comes up on the list this fall, getting the metal casting furnace going and so on.
Back to the 60's and commune days!
If you've already have a sun oven, you may not be as interested in the how to build a highly efficient cooker section, and anyone who has lived on a sailboat (like we have) knows you can pick up a solar shower rig on eBay fairly cheap. I'm talking like under $5 with free shipping. May not be the high capacity kind outlined, but buy one for each member of your tribe.
In the Builds to Survive section, the idea of a 'cow catcher' and armoring their 5-ton truck is interesting, but I can certainly see a second season's worth of material they didn't cover.
My nominees for season #2 content would be:
What I envision is something that is Survivorman goes a year or two, kind of thing.
Still, hats off to Discovery, since it at least gets people to thinking about skill sets that may be useful in the future. Wonder if their marketing department will be selling the panels, inverter, water-filter kit and those 250-gallon poly drums which with shipping might actually sell if accompanied by a plan book for $2,500 or more. Hmmm...more ponders.
Sounds like a dandy show - not to pimp TV, but there are times media is not only good but possibly prescient as well. Kinda makes you wonder "Gee, is this something the producers came up with on their own, of is this some kind of a public education project for the highly aware?"
Season #2 (or maybe #3) participants? Oh, let's make this tougher on the producers. Let's get some volunteers from the Society for Creative Anachronism ( www.sca.org ). If you go to the SCA web site the site begins "Welcome to the Middle Ages - How may we help you?" Lyrics to Serious Steel rush to mind.
Yes, our hovel is in the Kingdom of Ansteorra and no, we haven't been to gatherings yet, but that will come. My point was that over a six-month period I'm pretty confident that a well-picked group of SCA'ers would be able to find and build a compound, get crops in, live of the land and prosper quite nicely. Problem for that series? Find enough land for the group would be able to actually do what people in the Middle Ages did: Site their encampments are naturally desirable locations like alongside rivers and streams, or better - junctions of rivers.
Given that SCA members live with one foot in the present and one in the past, that leaves only the middle ground between the Middle Ages and modern technology (life after surface mount, OK?) to be learned.
To get there - and since a reader asked me to repost the site information - you'd want to have read as much as you can from Lindsay Technical Books. In particular, if you're a home handyman (handyperson is more PC, I reckon) then the Dave and Vince Gingery series should be a part of your book inventory.
There's a few books by Gingery that I don't see on the Lindsay site, including the "How to make your own 35-foot tilt-over ham radio tower" - but the series on how to build your own machine shop from this & that's is the best bootstrap info I've seen.
And then if you will want everything from the www.librum.us website, much fine middle-ware there. Yes, by 'middle-ware' I mean the bridge technology that got us from the basic survivalist Middle Ages platform (SCA skills, like basics of weapons, tactics, cookery, weaving, herbal medicines and so on) to the modern era stuff (vacuum tubes, metal casting & dimensioned lumber and such).
Like I said, at the top - The Colony looks like damn fine TV, but if someone could find the land to run the series on (say doesn't Ted Turner have a bunch?) a second season "The Tribe" about the semi-nomadic crowd would be most interesting. Maneuvering for defense, bootstrapping a community, that kind of thing.
Not to be missed if you have access to Discovery...should be massively entertaining. But just going into it, I'd say water/inventory/food would be my line of attack - yours may vary. And yes, as soon as its out on DVD as a series, you bet I'll be watching it.
Damn Dreams Remember Monday I told you about a vivid dream about Elizabeth Taylor I had Sunday night? Well check this out: " Elizabeth Taylor hospitalised as she struggles to cope with Michael Jackson's death Coincidence? I dunno...my life keeps getting stranger and stranger... Personal Unemployment Rate I've mentioned many times that if you want a real reading on the economy, just consider all the people you know and count noses: How many have jobs and how many don't. My personal unemployment rate jumped to 100% yesterday when my youngest daughter became the third of three to lose her job in Seattle. Seems the company she was with had been losing revenue as payments in the system slow... National Bank of Dad to the rescue....who who's rescusing the NBoD?
Tuesday, July 14, 2009 PPI Report: This One Means Something OK, the Producer Price Index is out...and if you have some time, let me explain why this one is important. There are three measures of producer prices: The crude goods, the intermediate, and the finished.
If you go back over a fair bit of time (and all I had time to whip up for this morning's report was going back to January of 2007) and you put together the cumulative impacts, you can estimate how the corporate profit picture is doing internally - and eventually this comes out as earnings which in turn drives the market. With me so far?
Before we get into Mr. Ure's chart du jour, let's first table the latest 'facts' from the Labor Department report and then we'll get on to the chart...
Gobbledygook. This is all pretty much meaningless crap unless you have some kind of framing context for the data...which I happen to have handy in a chart, so hang onto your coffee cup. Here's how I went about this little charting exercise - normally the kind of thing I'd save for Peoplenomics readers: I took the data set going back to 2007 and asked "OK, so if crude goods cost $100 this month (Jan '07), and finished goods were $100 then (Jan '07), then how would the running spread between crude costs and finished costs look over time through this morning's report?"
As you can see in the chart below, there appears to be a spread (time lag) of anywhere from five to seven months between when the PPI figures show up and when stocks hit extremes of valuations. In other words, when the PPI crossed my hypothetical zero axis (no profit or loss on the crude versus finished goods) [yellow circles in the chart] and extremes of market valuations [green for the high and red for the lows] we can get a sense of how things are going for the overall market.
Here...look for yourself...
Now the point of all this is what? Oh, this might actually argue that the market high might not come until 6-8 months from now. depends when we get a zero crossing, under this theory and then add on 4-5 months...not the linguistically expected 'falling apart' scenario that shapes up in language. Could it be that what the linguistics are picking up is the most extreme case ever of 'market climbing a wall of worry'?
That's what ought to make this fall so damn interesting. We'll have a chance to test linguistic expectations (dropping markets, bank holidays, etc) against this approach to PPI, which says right now the big picture from the boardroom level is that 'things aren't that bad'. The lag time between when input costs and output prices peak I expect is a combination of transportation, warehousing & inventory, and shelf time, plus hysterisis till the sales figures get accumulated and aggregated into something meaningful.
But, pretty cool to see how the relationship (out of phase as it is) works, huh?
Here's what I think is going on. The linguistics may be hitting the zero crossings as the language would become intense there, but the data doesn't come in till maybe six months later...just a theory, but bears watching, huh? Linguistics hit the end of the zero-area in October of 2008, after all. Especially interesting if we get a zero-crossing in September (which is when the actual numbers start to look bad) but then we could kick around for several months (5-7 anyway) while the data-cycling catches up and the market low comes along.
Tres cool, or what? --- You saw where Goldman execs had bailed on $700 million worth of stock? Say, wouldn't be related to that missing code story would it? Naw...perish the thought... most of the sales were during the time us taxpayers had put $10-billion into them (since repaid).
Good Reading, Bad Reading Not that I'm the only one with a sour outlook, who wouldn't be surprised to see the Depression deepen. Take, for example, their latest Q2 Review and Outlook from Hoisington Investment Management over in Austin, Texas. Definitely worth reading if you manage your own investment decision - even more so if you manage money for others. --- Like me, they've got concerns about the velocity of money imploding - as I've been offering periodic reports of banks not extending credit. In fact, a business I know of that was scheduled to close next week up in the Midwest is about to go south as the bankers who had committed to fund a sale are waffling. Won't go into details (it's a client project) but it's evidence to me of how when deals are closing these days, everyone gets greed-struck and it trying to make up for lost income.
My client, in this case, is perfectly prepared to walk out if the deal terms change, but if it comes to that (or more correctly if the banksters change terms at the close) it will be one less deal...and that's the kind of thing that kills velocity of money. Oh...and causes the depression to snowball. --- And this relates to the Hoisington report how? Consider this quote:
And, as I expect my client may face next week, it seems likely to be spreading to the commercial sector now. I'll keep you posted.
The Feds Are Coming, the Feds are Coming... Remember the report in yesterday's column from our 'savvy investor' friend who explained in part that "Why else would the AIG Financial Products operation be set up in London, allegedly supervised by the US Office of Thrift Supervision, and write private insurance contracts called Credit Default Swaps on US mortgage bonds issued by unregulated non-bank finance companies owned by Wall Street brokerages?"
Bloomberg is reporting this morning that "Credit Swaps investigated by U.S. Justice Department..."
Seems as though this will be an anti-trust type investigation - and those can take years to develop. But, if you're a trans Atlantic bus driver (OK, jet then) or have hotel rooms to let in London, this could be your economic stimulus you've been waiting for.
New Handouts Department Country out of money? So what? "Minority broadcasters seek federal aid" says the WSJ this morning.
Of course what's NOT being mentioned is that most radio is toast due to the .MP3's /commercial-free revolution, but folks in broadcasting? Anyone but me notice that radio ad revenue peaked in the early days of TV? Just asking.... Not getting this new media stuff impacts all brick and mortar institutions. You would have thought the folks at Clear Thinking Communications would have figured this out, too. But who am I to ponder such? Notice how Cliff and I have been on a lot of internet radio shows lately? Oh, and Cliff's on Rense tonight, speaking of which...
PTB Being Outta Wanna see who the Powers that be are? Check out this link. 70-years of power, right there...
Rockin' So the CNN story that is the head-scratcher of the day is the one that says "Jet makes landing with football-sized hole" and if you look, sure enough, there's a big hole which caused the rapid decompression. So the question is: Who, or what threw that at the jet seven miles up? Sapce-goat whats?
Calamari Alert Dazed squid have been watching up on the beach in the San Diego, causing speculation that it may have had something to do with a small earthquake in the area, or perhaps changing water temps. Camarillo calamari? Dunno...
About the Commander in Chief Headline is "Soldier balks at deploying; says Obama isn’t president." --- Sadly, this G.I. doesn't understand the golden rule. He who has the gold, rules. Voting is just a tool used by lobbyists anymore to payoff folks in Washington, anyway for the past 50 years - ever since Ike's notes on the military-industrial complex. To which we can now add the roll 'em uppers in Big Pharma as well......
Just Thinking About It The "U.S. mulling mortgage aid for unemployed." How sweet. Hand out $200-billion to crooked banksters who are bending us all over and just now these brainiacs are getting around to thinking about this. Finally catching up with the foreign car makers who were offering going to go in on payments, huh?
Helluva note when a Korean car outfit gets 6-months in front of the best government on earth, isn't it. Or does that mean we really don't have the best....oh forget it.
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Coping: With Rising Crime Rates A friend of mine up in the Pacific Northwest asked me some time back - want to say it was maybe a year, or so: "If we really get this depression you've been talking about, won't the crime rate be going up?" Her question was a good one - think at the time I told her, I would expect so, but that the way to avoid it would be to go 'low profile' and try not to make one's self an 'obvious' target - which a flashy car, bling bling and such would do.
What I hadn't put much thought into was how the self-inflicted crimes like suicides and attempted suicides would be going up.
But now, as the economic malaise continues to settle in, here come the headlines "Murder, Suicide Rates Climb When Jobs Vanish and Economy Slows..." --- Meantime, there are stories - like this one out of West Virginia that "West Virginians deserve protection from offenders" - which gets around to what to do with all the nation's 'criminals' since keeping someone 'in the box' is a very expensive proportion.
The Washington Post ran an article last week about how "States seek less costly substitutes for prisons," but since the economic recovery will likely go missing for another couple of years if the second leg down comes along, as I expect this fall & winter, and then drags into 2011, and since states are quickly going to run low on money because of falling revenues from dropping income, reduce spending subject to sales taxes, not to mention free-falling property tax revenues as home prices correct, there are only a couple of simple answers.
One would be a kind of work-fare program. If you have unemployment coming in, unless you actually have a job interview lined up, you could be recruited to be trained for a state job and work 2-3 days a week. Moreover, since there are so few jobs to be had, it's not like more people and running from interview to interview with a jam-packed schedule.
Of course the other thing to do would be decriminalize a lot of so--called victimless crimes. But the lobby to keep stiff penalties on drug use, for example, is very strong since the booze lobby pays taxes and the recreational drug folks don't since paying the Harrison Tax is a Kafkaesque form of self-incrimination. --- All of which sets up a very interesting public policy debate. On the one hand, the "UN backs drug decriminalization in World Drug Report" says one headline. But, another one begins "UN Drug Czar attacks legalizers..."
My friends live on an island in the PNW most of the time. while their choice of islands is fine, it's still in a country where 1 in 100 is in jail - 686 persons per 100,000 population as of a report a couple of years old.
But are there better islands? No, not necessarily. Even sleepy places like Vanuatu, where in 2000 the incarceration rate was 27 persons per 100,000 of population, things are deteriorating.
Damn. What I always thought of as an idyllic place to runaway to, Vanuatu was the subject of a British Foreign & Commonwealth Office advisory just a couple of weeks back that reported:
Hmmm...seems the crime impacts of the Second Depression are wafting around the world, eh? But, if you think this is bad, give it a year till the fighting over food comes along. Then you'll see some crime. Seriously. This is likely the leading edge of something much more pernicious than just an 'economic depression' yet to come. --- Speaking of food: Look out Proctor & Gamble: "Brasil Foods gains most in two months on share sale." From a demand standpoint, the BRIC is where real growth may come from (Brazil, Russia, India, China) so watch consumer-oriented up and comers in this sector.
Readers Writes Here's a dandy:
No, it just means I've switched to an enamel-coasted steel one and a stainless one, depending on the experiments. Colanders are much cooler than tinfoil hats at this time of year anyway, and the amount of microwave energy admitted is small, too, if the holes are the size of the ones used in see-through microwave oven doors. (You don't take this part seriously do you?) --- Another wonders:
Yes, I'd noticed there are quite a few common elements at the archetype level. But where it will really get interesting is when it turns out the battles in heaven stuff turn out to be the alien wars ahead...but first, let's crash the economy and have a famine, shall we? Then we still need to poison the oceans...oh, that's in process?
Excellent! (muttered in my best Montgomery Burns voice)...
Bank Search Tool Mattress getting a little overstuffed from all the greenbacks you've been salting away and need to find a local bank to put them all in? Well, here's a dandy little tool that shows bank performance... --- ---
Around The Ranch: Weird Dreams Department So there I was having a strange dream about Elizabeth Taylor being on a cruise ship and I'm thinking to myself: "Are we going be reading headlines about her in the near future? Strange dream, since until I didn't know until I did a little research this morning that she had not attended the Jackson memorial, preferring to mourn in private according to reports. Still, odd dream to have.... No particular reason to think about her - no press reports, movies in the past week, or anything like that to trigger it that I can recall it has me wondering "What was that all about?" Maybe I'm just wondering who will be the next iconic figure to become part of our 'disappearing meme'...who knows... --- This afternoon Elaine gets to show up for Jury Duty. Although she's not too keen on it, it got to me to thinking here's a fine way to figure out the quality of the people you know: "Would you be happy having them on a jury to judge your behavior?"
If the answer is 'Yes' then you're probably on the right path. But, if 'no', you either need to change friends, or change behaviors... Because in the end (as in 'end-of-life') it may well be that if Life Review really happens at time of death, the people you know will judge you...at least in terms of you having to experience their side of what your actions caused from their perspective.
I awoke remember to check the lunar calendar, and sure enough, we're at 605 waning gibbous (a bit over last half) of the moon. Seems the weirdest of my dreams happen when the moon is between quarter and one half...it's the time of month I look forward to, since it's like going to Hunter S. Thompson meets iMax many nights. --- Speaking of movies - "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Price" is opening at iMax on the 29th. Closest iMax being 90-miles from here, I'll just wait for the video.
Monday July 13, 2009 The Next 'Battle for Washington' We begin this week with a note from a very savvy private investor that's worth sharing:
OK, let's take a spin through media and see how the spinning is going in efforts to keep regulation and meaningful reform from happening. A few headlines from this morning:
And my fave of the week so far on this? "Banks may lose $1b in penalty fees owing to new law" headlines TopNews.
Yeah...and the problem with that is what? 'Bout time consumers get out from playing bottoms all the time.
The Weak Ahead Futures are pointing to a lower open for the week. While there's a lot more discussion in this week's ChartPack for Peoplenomics subscribers, the next stop should be the shoot-out at the 7,800 coral before we move either up for a last gasp (potentially violent) rally, or suck on down toward the 6,626 March lows.
Popcorn and watching from the sidelines is a dandy place to be. --- Producer Prices tomorrow along with retail numbers and then the CPI on Wednesday. That will be the most interesting to watch because the consensus is that CPI will be up 0.1% - which it might be if you weight housing prices collapsing just so, but pay particular attention to the core - food and energy which while I can't speak for where you live, around here, has been drifting up at a 5-6% annualized rate. We'll see...but put me into the pool for higher than consensus.
Attention Fiction Writers The new Treasury Budget is due out this afternoon at 2 PM Eastern. Read and learn.
SupCo Nod Coming Despite lots of rumor and innuendo on the net, looks like Sonia Sotomayor's nomination to the supreme court bench is a done deal, at least in the MSM. No doubt the republicorps will try to blow something up, since they have their own problems like...
Cheney's What Squad? Hitting at terrorists, or what? We may never know - the spin machine is past agitprop and now into full speed spinning... The NY Daily News has an interesting read on former veep Dick's 'secret counterterrorist program' that is causing an uproar. The part about '...but was it illegal?" is sounding oh so reminiscent of the Clintonista era "depends what you mean by sex..." kind of logic.
Summer of Hell Department More rioting this weekend in China. More dead, too.
Oh, and remember when I told you months ago that we'd see the summer of hell entering into prime time when rioting came to France? (UK and US are to follow this temporal marker, so get ready...). Third night of rioting (in France) after death in custody..." This being a summer of hell, this should expand into much larger riots later on (maybe later this week/next weekend, if my read of the time posts is right).
And as Europe 'lights up' keep an eye on emotionally hot headlines like "Nazi Greek State: Night of Crystalls in Patras, Bullets in Athens, Torture in Simi." which seem likely to drive events, too.
Now this is the lead-in to the summer of hell meme I'm talking about....
Motorcycle Weather: Biker Notes Been accumulating a few notes of interest to serious bike riders: "Third Hells Angel charged over fatal brawl" caught my eye in news out of Australia where bikers are called bikies. --- Efforts to outlaw the club in the Netherlands have failed...again. -- Other chapter news: "Hells Angels’ impending visit changes Spirit Valley Days" up in Duluth, Minnesota. --- The British Columbia club is seeing headlines like "Convictions could hinder gang: RCMP" --- And, while I haven't seen anything in the press about it, heard through friends that Smilin' Rick will be out in four after a sentencing appeal last week up in the PNW... --- Last, but not least, the summer uptick in bike accidents is now in full swing. Leathers, helmet, and lights on. Call me a wuss...but I'm still here. Figure I've cheated death enough, so I roll with the red car now and then when I feel the need for speed... If some Monday the column doesn't appear, that might be me being snagged by radar for 2X the speed limit, or some such...
--- snip and save section ---
Coping: Trouble in the WuJo Chill with me here, grasshopper. Here at the Complete Web Reality School's DoJo it's time for for a little deeper inquiry into the nature of time and what's to happen between now and 2012. This is all the fault of a reader who ventures into the lands of "WuWu" (a/k/a/ woo-woo) who asked me about time-line jumping. Hated to explain, but best I can reckon (after hanging with the time monks for nearly 10-years now) the concept of 'time lines' makes about as much sense as confusing shipping lines on a nautical chart expecting actual lines on an ocean. There are no 'time-lines' per se, any more than going down to the local marina you'd see 'chart lines' drawn neatly up the channel outside the marina. Things don't work that way.
Of course, the question may arise "If we're not jumping time-lines, what's going on?"
Here comes your ponder from Monday at the WuJo. For hundreds of thousands of years, people lived as tribes. The whole sphere of their consciousness didn't extend more than perhaps 35 miles - what a determined man could walk in one day. Write this down: tribal consciousness.
A little later, along come carts and then sailing ships and the expanse of knowledge - the boundaries of how people though, so to speak - got pushed back. Thus arose (write this down, too) Global consciousness.
As technology grew, and we started expanding our ability to see farther out including into the depths of space, along comes (write this one down, too) galactic consciousness. The Internet has been a key (or is that chi?) component facilitating this uniting of the global population (that which is GlobalPop in our modelspace) into a single emerging consciousness. Which (as you'd expect) just scares the hell out of the controllers and those who would retain power they used (and abused) during the earlier reign global not-yet-galactic consciousness.
Then as some point, we will get to where all signs point - if'n you know how to read them - which is what? (Pen ready?) Universal consciousness.
How here's the thing that's about to happen: The swings that impact the existing 'global consciousness' and 'galactic consciousness' are going to becoming progressively larger and more extreme as we get closer and closer to fall of 2011. It will become even more apparent as we get to a place (you'll see it in this upcoming ALTA report if I get Cliff to explain the mechanics - a fair bit of work, though) in 2010 through 2012 where events will occur that will be of such magnitude that they will have the emotional impact of years and years of emotion - all being released in a short number of weeks. And later, even days or hours. Maybe even seconds!
And as we go forward, although there will be pauses while various cycles 'synch up' the whole of the cloth is that groups of people will be moving from one level of consciousness to another, such that by late 2012 we will be at a place where events could be releasing centuries of emotion/karma not in weeks, but in minutes. Hard head-trip, that.
That stressing and straining seems to possibly be how 'universal consciousness' is given birth, and all the increasing intensity of the events and the related time compression is to consciousness what contractions are to a mother's contractions in labor. At some point you'll just have to 'let it all go' and return to the One. --- Still, the question persists about timelines, but these come from people who don't yet suffer from a condition called "hyperchroniac disease" - or the acute awareness of time to where even the smallest variations in its fabric are of note.
I don't claim to be 'special' in any regard, but the only real hyperchroniac event I've ever personally experienced was in May of 2001 when Elaine and I were living on our sailboat at Oyster Point marina in South San Francisco. We awoke one morning with clocks akimbo and a feeling that our experience of time had somehow become viscous and syrupy. Within hours, things were back to normal and a day or two later I had my answer to my questioning "Wow! So that is what just zinged by!"
Turned out to be the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory breaking a world record for the world's strongest magnet. I personally had an altered state experience at exactly that 'time' and so that's what I attribute it to.
And that's how I see all the pieces all fit: My fascination with things electric/electronic, being partial to m-wave antennas (as opposed to e-wave/Hertzian designs), the Philadelphia Experiment with high powered magnets, why some folks claim to see apparitions after & around MRI machines.
There's a common track here that involves energy and vibration and it's clearly NOT something you conjure up in the backyard. Might get it crossing the galactic ecliptic, or at a subtle level, it may drive people mad when they can't reconcile the rapidity of change coming at us, but it's not something you 'do' at a planetary level. Nonsense, although it may sell well. --- The hyperchroniac experience is tough to describe, but having experienced all of the following, it's somewhere between - to try and put a fence around the experience): a near-death experience (which I had with childhood asthma), an 'enlightenment moment' where you dissolve into Universe and become part of the great ocean of everythingness, along with a touch of delirium like you may have experienced with your worst-ever flu.
If I were to mix up a batch of the feeling, it would be 10-parts of the touching everythingness, one part NDE and 3 parts what delirium is like. That's what hyperchroniacs feel when time gets a bit 'loose' from it's moorings. Vibratory states move about.
And it may be a 'whole body' kind of experience, since a magnet in the area of my head doesn't seem to do much...which gets me to the next phase of my personal researches - where I work on placing multiple magnets so as to build a 'field' to see if I can create a local hyperchroniac 'hot spot' and do a little personal time twisting. Magnets and chakras are on the experiments like along with the quest for the zero-point energy, which would be the axis around which all vibrations work.
But claims by some that they've done doing planetary time twisting? ROF-LMAO Take it from me...t'ain't the case. --- And my credentials are what? Don't know if you read up on who my great great grandfather was on my dad's side. But besides being an apologist for the British factory-owning class, for his "Philosophie of Manufacturers" (a fine economics text) Andrew Ure was also reputedly the source of inspiration for Mary Shelley's book "Frankenstein". That's the downside of the family, Butcher of Glasgow stories and such. But. the upside is that our 'shocking experiments' were century-early precursors to defibrillators...if you're awake enough to follow.
So, you see, the nut falls not far from the tree, Grasshopper. This poking around at the edges of how the animation of humans works is hard-coded into my genes. And this much is clear to me: We vibrate - each at our own frequency because we each have our own destiny & karma to work on - and we don't all just 'jump'.
Yet.
You'll know we're close to a planetary change when you start to seeing people standing around drooling because what's going on 'outside' can't be reconciled with how firmly they hold to previous mental constructs of how things work. That level of change/reality-storming comes along every so often.
Yep. Frozen stock still and drooling...a pervasive sense of surreal - like walking around in a dream in a syrupy state of time becoming incongruous and warpy...should be an obvious enough clue, don'tcha think? And when it passes, we 'stick' to whatever plane we're ready for. Some folks even get to run 'time backward' from there, but that's another day under the lotus tree. Kinda graceful in a Big Cosmic Blender way. Like a planetary LSD trip but without the drugs. And where you come down is where you're ready to land and work the cycle through again.
Think commencement and school.
Oh Crop! As long as we're stumbling around the WuJo, explaining the Great Mysteries and exposing sorcerers for what they are to the few magicians about...our cartoonista, Rebecca Price of www.tuen-republic.com will now reveal a complete explanation of crop circles!
Oh those orbs.... Now, suck up some coffee and let's get back to here, now, and actionable...
Before the chart, a little background: Once upon a time, a long while ago, I observed during my quest for 'truth' in economics, that the PowersThatBe, the talking heads on the teeve, and the other information sources that actively engage in the programming of humans not to think, had conveniently swept several trillions of dollars that disappeared in the Internet Bubble's bursting (since spring 2000) under the rug. Surely, it wasn't unnoticed by the thousands of people who called brokers and said "Where is my money?" "Gone, but hang in there as you're a long term investor!" was about all they heard back.
So one of our charts for Peoplenomics subscribers oughta be widely circulated - it shows that if you line up the peak of the Dow in January 2000 with the peak in early September of 1929, we're on a very very close replay track. Much closer than even the chart shows if you were to back out inflation, and put in the effects of 1929 deflation, but that'd be real work, and I'm sort of lazy if the truth be told.
No, it's not a perfect replay of 1929, but history doesn't repeat exactly, it only rhymes. So think of this as the rhymes and the crimes chart:
"George, that's only a coincidence!" your monkey-mind will protest.
Why sure it is...you bet. A 9½ year long coincidence...yessir....just a coincidence, I'm sure...
Write when you get rich,
George Ure, The People's Economist |
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