History

     I guess that poor, unfortunate hebrew fellow who scratched out the first stick figures on Mt. Sinai, which later went on to become the foundation of the alphabets for the greeks, the romans, the indo-european nations, and even arabic and even geeze .... he really need not have bothered.

     Some things in history just happen over, and over, and over again, as if none of us had any access at all to history books recording the mistakes of our forebears.  You would have thought one tower of Babylon would have been enough, but no....someone had to go and build the World Trade Center, didn't they ....

     In particular, a great idea, great statesmen, leaders during trying times who bring men together to perform spectacular feats ... this has happened so many times, so many, many times ....egypt, the persian empire, ancient greece, the seleucid empire, the babylonian empire, the roman empire, so many times .... the spanish empire, the swedish empire, the french empire, the british colonial empire, the ottoman empire ... so many times ... the Third Reich,  the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics ...  economic successes lead a people to begin to believe that they, as a people, are better than everyone else, that their system is better than everyone else, and that therefore the whole world needs to be "enlightened" and liberated ... and, just as sure as night follows day, they abandon the very principles that they originally began with and which helped to make them great and powerful, they build up their military, and build, and build, they raise torture and abuse, spying and extortion, not only of foreign citizens but also their own, they bankrupt themselves on the enormous costs, and they collapse into oblivion....

    So goodie, I guess we get to do it again, huh.  This time will be a doozie ...

Obama

     Maybe its me, but my perception of this president is there has been more "coloring" of the reporting about him, more shading of the truth, more outright fabrication and lies, than any other president in my lifetime, if not for the entire history of the country.

     Many, many others have weighed in on the subject of whether he has been the best president, or the worst president, that we have ever had.  I don't even need to say on that score.

     In my vocation as prophet, I know I've already said what I think to a few people.  but not even those who respect my judgement gave it much credence.  When I said, back in the beginning of 2001, that the presidents desire to make war against Saddam Hussein had nothing to do with terrorism and nothing to do with WMD and everything to do with oil, they scoffed, they pooh-poohed me, hardly anyone even noticed, nobody remembers anymore.  When I said, back in the beginning of 2006, that the next president would be a black man, not even my black friends thought I had anything substantial to contribute, the whole campaign was either Hillarious or Algorithm.

    And there's only 5 or 6 people who ever read this blog, so it doesn't matter either.  I wrote about the black swan of deflation but the markets kept on going up, but at least Zero Hedge wrote the same thing a few days later.  Now, several weeks later, the markets have just begun to figure out that cheap gas may not be such a wonderful thing after all.

     So I can put this out there confident that no one will read it, let alone act upon it.  There won't even be any black SUV's with shaded glass pulling up outside my door to whisk me away.

    Barak Obama may or may not be the best, or the worst.  Historians can sort that out 50 years from now.  What you all need to know is that he will be the last President of the U.S.A.

     Its been good to know you all.  I'm checking out soon.  Your lives are about to get very interesting .....

bad news

well,
I just wanted to tell everyone
that there's not going to be much of a Christmas for very many people this year.

It all began last year
when Santa's wife divorced him.
Due to the biases of the local courts nowadays,
the judge ignored Mrs. Claus long reputation as a dithering alcoholic
and awarded her a substantial child support payment,
taking up all of Santa's money for toys and elf-labor.

He had to rent a room from me because he could no longer afford
his quarters at the North Pole.

He is also suffering from diabetes,
probably due to all those plates of cookies and milk.
and the prodigious effort of maintaining the belly that shakes like a bowl full of jelly.

What's worse is
that he has major back problems now
from carrying around those bags of toys
and also from climbing up and down all those chimneys.
He is due at the hospital tomorrow for the first of several surgeries.

Sadly, he won't be able to take the sleigh there.
You see, last week,
one of his reindeer was hit and killed by a car,
while another was shot by a hunter.
Blitzen was so upset about it
that he got blitzed and then wrecked the sled trying to escape the cops.

He is so far behind on his rent now that he is looking into
a new career as an actor,
to see what kind of accommodations can be provided
for someone who acts as so crazy that he gives away everything he has ....
maybe three hots and a cot, maybe even morning, noon and nightly pills on the side ...
and slippers and even jackets which have no arms. ....

so, anyway,
have a merry day,

I wood, but I won't.

http://www.walpoth.com/wood.html

 

 

any artist who tried to do work like this in this country would immediately get jailed
as a voyeur, child pornography, sex fiend.

Nowhere is there simpler evidence of the sickness here ....


I am reading "The Painted Girls", by Cathy Buchanan,
a novel about the desperately poor young girls
who served as Edward Degas' nude models and
Emile Zola's walk-ons ....

its real.

Maybe I am just crazy

Maybe I am addled in the brain.
Or a genius.  We will see.

I think that the black swan that all of us have been waiting around for,
is here.  All around us, in fact, everywhere.

We just none of us see it.  Not yet.

The central banks have been so confident
of their abilities to kindle inflation,
and all of the rich who are relying upon them,
that they have omitted one critical detail.

It is not enough to print a huge amount of money, to encourage inflation.
You have to give it to the people.
If the ultra rich hoard all of it, as they have been doing,
then there is no stimulus to demand
because those people who would spend the money
have less and less and less of it to spend.

I think we are now facing collapse, total collapse,
from deflation, and credit defaults,
and it could happen very, very quickly
once more people begin to realize what I am saying ....
and they will not be able to bring themselves to bail out the common man,
because they are too fixated upon screwing him ....

-chiz

weather

     There are lots of people -- call them investors -- clinging to the notiion that across North America, this coming winter will resemble last winter.  Human nature was ever thus, expecting the most immediate future to closely resemble the most immediate past.  sometimes things do work out that way, however, after periods of extremes events are far more likely to revert to the norm than they are to continue on in the extreme.

     This time last year, I had already burned through over a cord of firewood.  As of today, there have been only five mornings so far this season when I have wanted a fire in the furnace and by midmorning the warmth has been sufficient to let it go out.

     This time last year, the spot price for natural gas was around $3.40 and I was crying about how ridiculously low that was.  Right now its around $3.90.  I say that that is high, and I've put my money where my mouth is. 

     We shall see.  (Unless, of course, everything else goes south just a bit more quickly than we presently expect it to ....)

turnaround

     I turned around my portfolio late Thursday afternoon.  It is now 115% long, absolutely no hedges.

     My reason for doing so is my personal conviction that there is going to appear on the scene, perhaps in Brussels or someplace, some obscure entity who happens to have unlimited access to a printing press and who has a yen for certain currencies -- perhaps japanese and/or european.

     So I benefitted from the strong rally on Friday.  I apologize to both of my readers for not posting this information earlier here.

     Indeed this morning the Japanese stock market is booming, up over 3%.  Across Europe, however, there is still a lot of red ink.

     My inclination is that the powers that be do not intend to reverse the recent trends but perhaps to halt them and sustain the current levels.

     My buddies are solidly convinced that the drop in crude has been deliberately engineered to punish the bear.  Guilty parties meet customarily in Riyadh.  Belatedly it dawned on them all that the so-called free world pumps a lot more oil than the russians and the iranians do.  the recent price drops are threatening to bankrupt some seriously large and probably indispensable entities, such as Mexico, Venezuela, and the Republic of Exxon.  I am betting very, very heavily that the present price is an absolute bottom and in fact, within three years we will have the next oil shock.

    It will start out profitable and end up a disaster.....

where is the bottom

I cannot give you a number.  Not even a ballpark.

I can tell you that we are not even close, yet.  Yesterday's recovery, from down 460 at 1:30 to a close of down 175, will all be wiped out today.

This I can tell you ... when the teleprompter of the united states gets up in front of the cameras and tells everyone that the situation is hopeless and he thanks everyone for the good times, then, it will be there .....

the magic drop of water

     One of the nicest things about Ebola is that it will kill rich people faster than poor people.

     The deal is, rich people are so incredibly helpless.  they must surround themselves with servants and sycophants who wait upon their slightest whims and fancy.  They cannot do anything for themselves, not cook, not get dressed, not drive, not shop.  I swear, the very richest cannot even wash their own bums.

     All those people circling around them all day long, every day, it only increases the odds of transmission.  Trapped inside their steel and glass, their office cubicles, their forced air controlled humidity and temperature, it is nothing but a fancy, expensive, inescapable prison.  Death row.

     I closed out my short on United Airlines, two days ago.  Yesterday they got a nice dead cat bounce.  It'll head back down today, but I've got bigger fish to fry.

     I shorted JP Morgan Chase.  Biggest short position I have ever taken.  This is going to be so much fun.  I am going to make a killing.....

under biological attack by US Government

  okay, I am not a conspiracy addict .... I do not subscribe to the level of intent and malevolence stated by this article, but I present it to my discerning readers for thoughtful consideration.

http://www.intellihub.com/2002-american-medical-association-study-concludes-ebola-marberg-best-bio-weapons-choice-use-populace/

Yes, I believe that many of the actions of my government constitute pure evil.  However, in many or most cases, this evil is more the result of thoughtlessness, irresponsibility, and a general lack of discipline and personal character.  I do not believe that the people which are directing our destiny have pre-planned the ultimate outcomes.  They are not that smart and they are certainly not that erudite or worldly.  Most or all of them really believe that they can have their cake and eat it, too.  They are not Gods.

But I have said what I have said, and I will stand up here and repeat it for all three of my readers:  the central planners, the architects of globalization, have messed up, and while they may be terribly good at mitigating small or medium-sized disasters, it is inevitable that the day will come when something will be big enough that they can't deal with it.  It is inevitable just as if you throw a rock up in the air, it will come back down.  this has happened over, and over, and over again, in the history of mankind.  Nothing is different this time except the scale of the endeavor and the number of people on earth dependent upon it.  I guarantee you, again, that within thirty years time the number of living people on this planet will be reduced by at least half.

Even if they successfully contain Ebola, or keep it in Africa, there is something bigger waiting in the wings.  Every battle like this that they win only means that the failure will be that much more devastating.

On a long-enough time frame, everything goes back to zero.  No matter how many diseases we find cures for, no matter how safe we make our cars and airplanes, no matter how much we improve our agriculture,and no matter how much we pretend and fantasize,  everybody still dies in the end.
Life would be a lot better if so many people had not completely lost sight of this simple fact of life.  But it is what it is.

market crash

     The stock market is setting up for another major crash ....

It is going to be a slow motion wreck.  There's an awful lot of people who have an awful lot of money who are firmly convinced that the market will never go down again.  At the first sign of any cough or sniffles, Doctor Federal Reserve will come on the scene with a hypodermic needle to inject as much cash as needed, plus a lot more.

So how have they done with Ebola so far?  This, the miracle technological society, where there is a pill for everything, where every action that anybody ever takes has already been pre-scripted?

The members of the Federal Reserve have set a course, long ago, towards a very slow, gradual tightening of the money supply.  So far, with a lot of help from the Department of Labor Statistics, and the Goldman Sachs ought-to-be-convicted anal-ists, the numbers which are being reported in the major media are consistent with the patterned propaganda that everything is getting better all of the time and this is the best of all possible worlds (with apologies to Voltaire!).

It is going to take a pretty healthy dose of reality to get them off their high horse to recognize what is actually going on.  Maybe when a crowd gathers at the White House fence, carrying pitch forks?
By then, it will be far too late to avert disaster... those individuals who are below the top 400 richest and most powerful men in the world but above 95% of the rest of the population in the first world, are about to have the living shit kicked out of them.  They are totally unprepared for this.  Most of them have been lulled into a deep opiated slumber, a dream world of unicorns and rainbows, where optimism and hope are required and any deviation form "the power of positive thinking" is considered to be schizophrenic, deviant and maladjusted.

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of folks.....

Unfortunately, the people under them will suffer too.... as I have said, over and over and over again, the world population is going to be reduced by half over the next 20 or 30 years or so and its not going to be too much fun for anyone.  Let the culling begin ....

ebola - the real problem

     So the newest report from the WHO has updated the "worst case scenario" from 20,000 to 250,000 or maybe even 500,000.  That is quite a jump.  People are realizing that there isn't anything stopping or even slowing down this wildfire.  The number of cases is doubling every three weeks.

     There are some factors which are making this outbreak so much virulent than previous outbreaks.  They are not hard to identify.  One obvious culprit is the population density.  The number of human beings on that continent has doubled, twice, in the last couple of decades.  Ultimately, it was the good intentions of a lot of compassionate, concerned westerners who insisted upon feeding and medicating as many african children as possible, which made this possible.  Anyway, the gifts of foreign aid have been miniscule in comparison with the remittances, the money and gifts which the diaspora send home to their own families.  Most of the increase has jammed itself into cities where personal space has become unimaginably tiny by western standards.

     Another, slightly less obvious culprit is the greatly increased mobility.  The influx of cars, busses and trucks has been enormous.  No longer is the continent made up of millions of tiny, isolated villages.  People get around.

     So far the media, always eager fearmongers that they are, have not yet caught up with the real dangers, the real threats.  Even in the epicenters of the infections the number of people dying of ebola is still dwarfed by the number of people who have been and continue to die of the major scourges of malaria, tuberculosis, and AIDS.  Each of those diseases is still claiming ten to fifty times as many victims every day.

     The real danger is the secondary effects.  The real danger, not only in Africa but all over the world now, is the fear.

     In Liberia, Sierra Leone, Senegal now, the fear is spreading to everyone.  Shopkeepers are closing their shops, customers are staying home.  Porters are not bnringing their goods into the cities.  People avoid taxicabs and busses, not knowing about the health of the previous tenants.  People avoid opublic places, avoid conducting business of any kind.  All commerce is grinding to a halt.

      The real danger is this secondary panic and shut down response.  As goods stop flowing, death and destruction creep in from all sorts of secondary damage, from starvation, thirst, and of course from the lack of spare medical support personnel.  Policing also takes a hit while criminals willing to risk infection can have a field day.

     Having travelled extensively in Africa and dealt personally with many Africans, I am keenly aware of the strong cultural differences, how much more they converse with each other, how much larger their circles of friends and acquaintances are, how much more physical contact they enjoy with strangers, with acquaintances, with friends.  Personally I've always respected and admired them for that and wish those traits cold be just a little more common here.

     However, our cocoon mentality, our towering fear and mistrust of everybody, our neighbors, shopkeepers, and anyone we meet on the sidewalk or riding public transportation or passing in stores, will have a huge dampening effect.  Yes, the infection will show up here.  There are just too many people making the trips back and forth.  but it won't get much of a foothold here, it will not spread very much.

      However.

     However, the fear is already here.  Already, if you read news stories and commentary, and then you scroll down to the commenting sections, you will see anguish and the seeds of panic.  They show themselves in very ugly expressions of zenophobia, racism, and other forms of hate.  People protest any form of help anyone wants to offer for the nations and individuals now under such diress.  They seriously talk about total quarantine, as if it were possible to completely seal the borders of those countries when we can't even seal our own borders.  They talk about forbidding re-entance for any selfless medical workers who may have come down with the infection.

     Once the disease comes here, and it will, if it has not already, and the general population will find out, then, you can expect the panic to really take over here and really get out of control.  Because we are culturally virtually petrified with fear already, because the media and the politicians, and the pundits and the medical establishment already bombards us constantly with millions of different possible and impossible worries, because it has become fashionable to fear ones own shadow, fashionable to arm our police with weapons of war, to make our schools into concentration camps, to put cameras and microphones and helicopters everywhere, very little more will be necessary to make our whole economy freeze up like an internal combustion engine when all the oil drains out.

     And that might just be a black swan.

    

crises

If you have enough white swans all in the air at the same time,
they can block out so much of the sunlight that everything appears black.....

In my estimation, the very worst of all of them in the air right now is the one that the media is not talking about.   I am referring to the beginnings of total economic collapse in Japan ....

markets

This is pure speculation on my part.

Most of the financial writers and commenters these days seem to agree that the primary force which has been raising the markets these past 6 years has been the Federal Reserve policies, promoting easy money forever.

Most of the world observers (not counting the opinions of the world's richest man, or men, because they just may be a bit too biased), believe that the overall situation of humankind is more perilous than ever before.  There are more different serious crises developing all over the place than ever before.  Gaza, ISIS, the Syrian rebellion, the west's efforts to foment war in the Ukraine, Libya, Venezuela, Argentia, Ebola, the extreme drought in the US southwest, the Chinese bubble, the Japanese demise, Ferguson and the other police state issues in the USA, the eligible unemployed all over the world and especially among the young ...the list just goes on and on and on.

But virtually to a man, the traders all say that any significant downturn is extremely unlikely because of the damage it would do, not only economically but in setting off protests and more violent forms of unrest, worldwide and including inside the USA.  The Fed can, and will, print to infinity.  Those of us who are long term, experienced traders can point to all kinds of signs suggesting that even as the Fed is publicly announcing "tapering" and imminent rate hikes, it is clandestinely acting through more and more routes to sustain and raise the markets and put even more money in the hands of the very wealthy.


So the markets are between a rock and a hard place.  Can';t go up, can't go down.  they still do what they do best, oscillate.  That way, the insiders can still make gains every single day and most of the retailers who try to trade frequently will end up losing. 

We are not going any place, fast.  Like Alice and the white king. Up and down, up and down.  Just like sex.

UAL

so if the black helicopters come and pick me up tonight and I disappear, here is what happened:

My loyal readers already know that I am the quintessential pessimist.  Always the good boy scout, I just do my best to "be prepared" for any consequence.  The lifestyle has amazing benefits; I am so rarely caught be surprise by bad news, instead almost everything unexpected is delightful.

Maxims I have learned in years and years of investing include the ever popular, "buy low, sell high"  Um, the market is hitting all-time records these days, no?  Another favourite learned from childhood is "What goes up must come down."  So far Vanguard I seems to be the only exception known to man.

So I'm a fundamentalist, but I certainly have learned more recently that once the market establishes a direction, or trend, it has a tendency to continue on in that same direction for much longer than it makes sense to do so.

But nevertheless, when just about everything seems overpriced to me, like when these incredible valuations are given to IPO companies that don't make any product at all and don't make any profit at all either, I tend to be looking pretty hard for shorting candidates.

And with the US Government aggressively looking to start a war with Russia (or anybody else, for that matter), and with their heavy reputation, deserved or otherwise, for concocting false flag operations which often have involved passenger ships or airlines,

And with a company which has already declared bankruptcy once or twice, raped all of its employees for their pensions and benefits, and never made any serious money, now enjoying its best revenues ever but trading at 50 times earnings on a 1.8% profit margin,

and me still having three balls, even if I don't use them as much as I used to,

I shorted it.

Two days later a story comes across the wire of a plain clothes US air marshall being hit with a possible terrorist-inspired hypodermic needle in an airport in Nigeria and he promptly flies to Houston.

There will be copy cat performances.  There's a whole lot of folk who have a whole lot of reasons to hate the USA, and here's a new, fascinating way to strike back, extremely difficult to prevent.

There will be fear.

And they will need a scape goat.

peace love,

Narva

Here are some photos I took in Narva.

This argument, apparently, has been going on for quite some time.

The fort in the upper left is on the russian side of the river,
while the one in the upper right is on the estonian side.

-chiz

Apple

99.23 -4.07(3.94%) 12:32PM EDT

about time.
What are people thinking? 
Can there really be anybody who cannot figure out that since the iphone 5 came out,
Apple has nowhere to go but down?

Apple is the next GM ....by the end of the decade, they will be coming to the White House requesting their first bailout .... 

Seriously.  The next news item is going to be about a recall, following reports of accidental deaths which the company has been trying to hide.  This will come out at the same time as the announcement that Microsoft is recalling Windows 8 ....

Hemophelia A

     Okay, I have a question.

      It is a question about ethics, about morals, about human values.

     Hemophilia A is a complex of related human health disorders.  What these disorders have in common is a weakness or total inability for a person's blood to clot and thus to control and stop bleeding from wounds.  Scientists have isolated several different factors which can separately or together bring about this symptom.  For the most part these factors are all genetic.  Like certain other traits (baldness, for example), these traits appear primarily in the males of the species but they are primarily passed by the females  (if you are bald, you got the gene for baldness from your mother whose father gave it to her.).  For over 18,000 people in the US, an episode of bleeding  can be life-threatening.

     Baxter International is a pharmeceutical and medical device company specializing in issues involving blood such as hemophilia and dialysis.  One of their top sellers is a drug called "Advate" used to prevent bleeding episodes for hemophylliacs.  In other words, people suffering from these disorders will commonly be maintained on this drug.  They will take it all the time.  Because the condition has no known cure, they will have to take the drug for life.

     Advate treatment can cost a patient as much as $12,500 per week, $600,000 per year, though $120,000 is closer to the average.

http://www.enquirer.com/extremechoices/loc_extremeadvate.html

     Obviously relatively few patients earn enough money to pay for their own treatments.  By and large, the costs for this treatment must fall back on society at large, either the large insurance companies or else the even larger governments must pay most of this cost.

      So my simple question is this:  does the society, the government if you will, which is paying these costs, have the right to demand and to enforce sterility upon the recipients of the treatment?  I will appreciate a variety of responses.

    

Ferguson

If we have rule by law, then a man who is known to have killed by gun an unarmed man, is charged with murder and goes to jail without bond until his trial date.

If we have rule of force, might, and money, then the white people need to wake up to the fact that they are vastly outnumbered in this world today, in all three.

He who lives by the gun will die by the gun.

The day of reckoning is at hand....

Freedom

from The Washington Post this morning:

dangers of sharing ‘Genie, you’re free’

By Caitlin Dewey August 12 at 1:09 PM

On Monday night, as fans around the world began to grieve Robin Williams’s death, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — best known, in many circles, as the people behind the Oscars — sent out what may be the iconic social media image of Williams’s death.

Genie, you’re free. pic.twitter.com/WjA9QuuldD
— The Academy (@TheAcademy) August 12, 2014

More than 270,000 people have shared the tweet, which means that, per the analytics site Topsy, as many as 69 million people have seen it.
The problem? It violates well-established public health standards for how we talk about suicide.

Evidently the slave owners do not like this kind of talk.
Its expensive to obtain slaves and even more expensive to train them and to keep them in line.
Good slaves, especially good rich slaves like dear Robin, are not supposed to die like this.  don't you all know this?  They are supposed to be checked in to a nursing home and slowly bled by leaches until broke, for however long that takes ....

I do hope and pray you all are paying attention! 

idiots

     Two boxes of plastic kitchen tall wastebasket trash bags on the shelf, side by side, for sale at my hardware store this morning.  Same exact size of bag, same quantity, both unscented (praise the Lord!  but that's a different issue.)

     Identical except for one thing ... one of the boxes has all the descriptions and advertising written in english, the other is Spanish.

    Oh yes, and the prices are different, the English box costs $13.99, the Spanish box costs $7.99 ....

trades

     It is difficult for me to know what to make of the current situation.  The US stock market (like many others) is showing historically high valuations, based on the promise that the radically loose money policy of the Federal Reserve and most other central banks must continue.  The politicians and the media continue to beat the war drums as loudly as they can, perhaps as a distraction or perhaps because they really want a war -- it would help with the population problem and it would give an excuse for a crash.  But the markets are no longer behaving as "free", like everything else these days they exhibit strong central control characteristics.  Prices may not be "fixed" but they sure are biased.  One cannot use crowd psychology methodology for market prognostication anymore because the crowd no longer has control -- its been overruled time and time and time again in the last 6 years.

     The most curious thing about all of this is that the media (which has been unabashedly touting Rosie Scenario like a thunderstorm in a hurricane) is chanting, over and over again, the likelihood of a crash, the pullback of the supposed smart money, and in particular the asides of individual central banker figures such as Lagarde and Bullard, that the market is toppy, investors becoming overconfident, bankers taking excessive risks, and a pullback is warranted.

     I call this "curious" because this sort of behavior has never preceded a proper bubble collapse.  In 2008, in 2000, in 1987, everybody was exuberant about how the markets would never go down again.

     I cannot afford to lose here.  I have backed off of oil and gas for strictly seasonal reasons.  I'm out of gas entirely while in oil, I sold December 38's on Suncor for a very nice premium.  I put the loose cash into some large cap health issues and then sold January deep in the money calls against them.  I am happy to collect the 5% or so delay premiums and the 3% or so dividends for a six month holding period before they get called away, but in a crash I'm fairly well protected and will have plenty of cash to repurchase stuff.

     Then, I've retaken a significant position in silver.  That's always a wild card, because the silver market has always been controlled by unseen hands.  Nevertheless in a panic it could be very, very profitable.

     Finally, I've bought a significant amount of insurance in the form of VIX calls.  What I'm holding at the moment are August expiration ... but as ugly as things look right now, I'm tempted to predict that I replace them with further out instruments if they expire worthless (or also if I make a smart profit off of them)....

     In short, things look as if a major pullback, more than 20%, is really likely, it only requires for the powers that be to want it to happen.  On the other hand, a further rise from here looks to be almost impossible, there's just no fantasy that anyone can spin anymore fantastic enough to convince very many people that real growth is possible.

     Good trades to everybody -- chiz

Drought

     There's a long article on Zero Hedge this morning about the extreme, prolonged drought occuring in the southwestern US, primarily in California.  Then, there's pages and pages of comments.  A lot of folk who sincerely believe that the problem is simply too many grass lawns being watered, too many cars being washed, or even too many showers being taken alone. 

     I guess that agriculture has become so automated, mechanized and dominated with huge organizations that responsible, so-called educated people don`t understand it anymore.  Particularly, americans don`t seem to realize how much farmland is irrigated and how much water is being used.  The results of this drought are going to be major.  The effects will be seen istrong price increases and in shortages of all sorts of vegetables, fruits, and meats.

     But that isn`t what I want to say.  I am really, really disappointed that no one seems to want to point out anymore the most basic, obvious truth to the situation.  What has changed from 100 years ago?  Well, we have built the huge dams on the Colorado and other tributaries, and huge piping systems to pump that water to lands where it can be used, so a whole lot more food is being grown.  but what else?  Has anyone noticed that the number of human beings living out there has increased by more than ten-fold?  Is anyone considering the logarithmic increase of the number of human beings on this planet?  Worldwide, our population has increased by over 150% since I was born!  

One out of fifteen people who have ever lived, in the million or two million years since mankind evolved on this planet, is still alive today!!!

 There are too many fucking people on this planet!

And nobody dares even to say so anymore.  Not one commenter on the thread even hinted at this.  It will be a far greater crisis coming upon us than even the most extreme fabrications that the global warming advocates of political change have proposed.

If, for example, there were to come to pass a sudden end of the natural gas used to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer on this planet, within six months most human beings would turn to cannibalism and half the population would be gone already ....

And nobody dares even to say so anymore.

    

gas facts

been reading arcane details all day.

a few facts, just additional color on the North American natural gas markets ...

The vast majority of nitrogen fertilizers manufactured worldwide are manufactured using natural gas as a feedstock.  This industry has grown up during my lifetime and is directly responsible for enabling the most recent worldwide population growth of 3 billion people ... without it they would die within less than a year ....

Ukraine has been a major manufacturer and exporter of nitrogen fertilizer for the world.  thinn about that statement hard in terms of current events.

Russia of course is also a major fertilier exporter.  In fact, the USA agriculture industry has been a major dependent of imports of russian fertilizer for the past 25 years.

Cheap natural gas in the USA for the last 5 years or so has stimulated the construction, renovation and expansion of fertilizer manufacturing plants.  Russian fertilizer imports have declined from around 500,000 tonnes per year to around 200,000.

Current total demand for natural gas in the USA is more than 25 trillion cubic feet.  Total demand for natural gas is growing rapidly while all other significant energy sources, coal, oil, nuclear and hydro, are all declining.

Natural gas pipelines between New York and eastern Canada have been reversed in the past few years so that Marcellus gas is being exported to Canada in quantity.

Anyone with interesting, hard facts about natural gas is encouraged to post comments.

-chiz

net neutrality

So I came across this video tonight

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU

But I am still in Brazil.

Here, the concept of net neutrality is beyond laughable.  I had to watch this video ten seconds at a time ...in between, I was torn between laughter, tears, and the excruciating effort of remembering the last several pieces that i'd heard for long enough for the next piece to make it across.

Atleast, thank the gods that the world cup matches are over.  Last week I would have needed three days to get through it.

p.s.  thanks, John ... btw I, too, hate Comcast ...but that is sort of like saying that grass is green and the sky is blue, isn't it ....

foreign

     I am traveling, alone, on holiday, in Brazil.  I am doing my best to avoid the World Cup, just driving, hiking, and taking in scenery, as well as these friendly, delightful people.

     From the beginnings of preparations this is being the most challenging, arduous trip I have ever taken.  Few people have any english and no one is fluent.  The street signs and road signs and other navigational aids, well they leave a lot to the imagination.  The cars go very fast, the trucks go very slowly, the motorcycles go between cars at twice their speed.  there is more but bottom line is I am having fun.

     There is a lesson here, something I have learned along the way.  A lesson for everyday americans.  Our culture, as promulgated by the powers that be, is steadily and increasingly numbing our minds, our imaginations.  we have been implicitly taught, incessantly, that easy is good.  I personally cannot speak for anyone else but easy makes me bored to tears.  I enjoy challenges, enjoy successes.  Whatever.  Not what I want to get into today.

     I just want to inform or remind everyone a bit of what it is like to be an immigrant or foreigner in our country (or any other!)  It is hard work!  Speaking a second language, no matter how familiar, requires more concentration and alertness.  Coping with all of the little day-to-day and moment-to-moment little choices and decisions that one has to make, in a foreign environment, requires  extra alertness and attention.  There are dnagers, small and large, in relying and trusting upon ones reflexes.  Many little decisions require concentration.  In Ethiopia, when you open a bottle of soda to drink, you keep the bottle cap and between sips you rest the cap on the opening, to keep out bugs and dust.  It is customary and wise and expected.  Its a little thing.  But there are just thousands of little things like this that different people do differently in different places.  If you spend enough time getting familiar with them you will gradually learn the original sources or reasons for every behavior.  Some mores are just artifacts, the motivation behind them is long expired but the behavior persists.  But some are significant.

     I am tired at the end of the day.  Exhausted.  I am not frightened or angry, its a good feeling but its tiring.  Nothing is easy.  I just want to point out that for foreigners traveling, visiting, or trying to live in the USA that they are working very hard, concentrating, and doing the best they can to learn and to fit in.  Respect is in order, where often annoyance is given.

coal

     My personal portfolio has gained over 20% this calendar year, despite my somewhat haphazard, off-the-cuff methodology and my general timidity.  Most of those gains have come from a 150-year-old coal company.

     Reading reddit.com, including stuff on their //r/energy as well as r/front, I can see that the large majority of young people in the US have been successfully brainwashed by the "climate change" campaign.  Most are convinced that any use of coal is courting instantaneous disaster, fantastic sea level rise, outrageous super storms, and other cataclysms.

     The USA is still the Saudi Arabia of coal, with the very largest and best seams ever found in the whole world underneath the Appalachian mountains.  Proper use does entail emissions control, to block soot, oxides and acids of sulphur, and mercury from getting into the air.  CO2 is a different issue and far too much has been written about it already, except that no one seems to catch the fundamental anachronism of the argument ... the advocates of "green" don't seem to even understand the most basic biological facts that when CO2 concentration increases in the atmosphere, the planet becomes more green.

     Even if I am correct and the "powers that be" have had their thumb firmly holding down natural gas prices in the USA for the last several years, the production of electricity from gas is still measurably more expensive than using coal.  However, as many people are just beginning to realize, the current prices are not enough to sustain the ongoing growth in demand brought about by the curtailment of the use of coal.

     Worldwide, the use of coal is growing faster than any other source of energy.  Please read that again.
COAL USE IS INCREASING WORLDWIDE.  Because its cheap and abundant.  Here's one source, I could find dozens if I hunted:
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/16/coals-share-of-energy-market-at-highest-level-since-1970

     Now the good politicians in Washington have gone and pissed off the russian bear by meddling where they don't belong in the bear's front yard.  Their response has not been surprising.  They have asked Washington and its allies to pay up for the gas they have been selling on credit.

    Europe is suddenly about to freeze.  Russia is quickly building pipelines to China so that the gas, once off, will never return.  The English, French, Germans, etc. will be able to get a little bit of gas from the Middle East but it will be considerably more expensive.  And it won't be enough.  In order to keep their countries from total collapse, their next alternative will be to buy coal from the eastern US and ship it across the Atlantic.

sorry, environmentalists ... your fantasies of solar, of wind, of algae, of hydrogen, of Santa Claus,  were very wonderful, but reality just came down the chimney....

Bite the hand which feeds ....

     There's an item on the front page of reddit this morning which lauds the fact that the USA is now producing more oil, condensates, ng liquids and natural gas than any other country on earth, having surpassed both Saudi Arabia and Russia recently.

     I am sure that this is great cause for rejoicing and celebration.

     I have to admit, Harold Hamm has done a pretty amazing job out there in North Dakota.  Recently I saw an opinion piece which upped the estimates of total crude production from the Bakken from 1 mmb/d to 1.3 mmb/d for next year and upped the peak prodution estimates to 2 mmb/d.  That is very, very impressive.  Concomitantly, profitable production is still expanding in hithertoe-ignored places such as the Permian, the Denver basin, and the Marcellus.  With all of this new internal production, imports of foreign oil have fallen to levels not seen in the whole lifetimes of half our good citizens.

     As I have said before, one of the catalysts or causes of this growth has been the ultra-low interest rates, the cheap cost of capital, engendered by the Federal Reserve, for better or worse.

     What I want to write about this morning is our choices of friends out there in the globe....and our choices of enemies.

     Among the so-called "first world" countries, the most advanced technically, there are certain nations which are outstanding in their internal energy poverty, in their needs to import energy.  The first on that list has to be Japan.  The second has to be Israel.  Other prominent members are Great Britain, France,
Spain, Italy, Germany, the Netherlands.  Those nations are all quietly approaching economic desperation as unit energy costs increase.

     Among the rest of the world there are certain nations which stand out as energy-exporting nations.
A list of the most important of these will certainly include Canada, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Angola, Khazakistan, and some other smaller players.

     Now US foreign policy has frequently treated Canada as if it were our little sister, pulling her pony tail and poking her at the dinner table, then telling mom and dad that she started it.  Meanwhile we have been perpetrating on going, steady, consistent, deliberate, ugly aggression and hostilities, for generations, towards most of the other members of that list.

     Why?  Exactly how stupid are we?  Do I need to spell this out, what the ultimate results are going to be?  The Bakken is not going to last forever, folks....

man versus animal

     This is another post, another view, on the subject of the essential difference(s) between people and animals.
    There is simply no other creatures known in this universe, besides people, which enjoy killing and do it just for "sport".  None.  Not great white sharks or leopards or white tigers or cobra snakes.  All other species which are able to kill, only do so either for protection or for food, or both.  None do it just for pleasure.  No breed of hunter, no matter how effective, ever attempts to eliminate a whole population of another specie or race just to get rid of it.

     We are so "special" ...

Marriage

Why do so many so-called Christians hold forth the sanctity of marriage?

According to the bible, God never married.  In fact, neither did Jesus or Paul.
On the other hand, characters like Abraham had a thing going with the housemaid while David had twelve wives and Solomon, supposedly the wisest man of all, had seven hundred.

So what gives here?

The latest on gas

     Inventory numbers came out just a few minutes ago, showing a build last week of 74 bcf.

     The markets took this as quite bearish.  Investors proceeded to sell off gas futures and ECA, EQT, CNX, PQ, SEP, KMP, and others.

     I'm going, like, wtf, people?

     I guess they don't teach algrebra one in schools anymore ... as long as the kids are well-mannered and they can affect a pleasant mood and the behave and follow most of the rules, they get outstanding grades and remain as stupid as ever.

     Anyway, the same trends are in place.  We are in the season of the beginning of the build.  Its strongest during the spring, before the air conditioners start to drain the grid.  If we build between 70 and 80 each week (unlikely during the hottest summer months), then by the end of October we will have added about 1.6 tcf to the underground storage for next winter.  that's about the same amount that we added during the previous build season and during the one before that.

    However, to reiterate:  where we ended the draw season last winter was at 800 bcf ... but the previous year we still had 1.6 tcf left over and the year before that we had 2.4 tcf left over.

     and to reiterate about demand .... the population continues to increase, the number of dwellings and large office buildings and malls continues to increase, the number of operating coal generating plants continues to decrease, the number of gas electrical generating plants continues to increase, and the number of industrial factories built and operated by foreign countries, fertilizer, plastics, other complex chemicals, which require in order to take advantage of cheap north american natural gas is rapidly expanding, the number of buses and trucks built to run on natural gas keeps increasing ...

     and to reiterate about supply ....Encana continues to sell off gas assets trying desperately to remake itself into an oil company, EQT plans no new expansions, the total number of rigs drilling for gas continues to hold at a ten year low, NIMBY idiots continue to block the construction of much-needed new pipelines, and the selfish pigs in Congress are promising to sell our gas to Europe to replace the russian gas because they think the USA is all powerful and awash in gas, so to speak ....

    Which all adds up to the same simple conclusion ... we are still right on track to run out, completely, around February, 2015 ....

      So don't act surprised when the grid goes down and never comes back up.  It was there all the time for you to see it coming .....if you'd only looked with your own eyes instead of letting someone else do your thinking and calculating for you .....

Ukraine

so far I have refrained from saying anything about this.

The following chart is pretty well known and it says all that needs to be said on the subject.

euphoric fedora

not to disappoint or anything, but she loves God passionately ...

boobies

This is a naked attempt to increase my readership.

Its simply a collection of red-footed boobie photos.

one boobie

two boobies

lots of boobies

gas update

     The EIA report this morning represents what is highly likely to be the low point of the year.  Today's report shows a mere 822 bcf remaining in inventory.  This is less than HALF of the 5 year average.  My predictions of last summer and fall have come to pass.



     Nevertheless, the marketplace has only begun to respond to the situation.  Relatively few participants see the paradigm change that I have called for.

     The good folk running Encana are still selling good performing assets at bargain basement prices.  They are anticipating years and years more of continental overproduction and low margins.

     The prices on the commodity exchange have seen some exciting moments, as $6.00 was touiched a few times before settling back to around $4.40.

     Clearly the majority of participants are still expecting all the drillers to go out and drill with exuberance like they did 8 years ago after the prices touched $16.

      Its not gonna happen.  They were burned.  burned badly.  Even if Wall Street denizens have short memories, drillers have long ones.  Besides, $4.50 is hardly $16.  Its still barely profitable in many regions to frack a new well if that's all they can expect to receive.

      But there are still the issues of new demand, of all the cola generating capacity which has been replaced with gas generating capacity in the past 6 years.  Of increased needs for air conditioning, for nitrogen fertilizer, and for NG-powered vehicles.

     Now, on top of all of that, there is a need to replenish the inventories ... somewhere before next fall, the country needs to come up with around 3.2 trillion cf, over and above what is uses, to puit back into storage for the next winter.

     Else there could be just a little bit of panic, beginning just about hurricane season.

     For those of you looking for trades, the out year contracts (more than 12 months away) on the CME look awfully juicy, if you are heeled enough to play in that sandbox.  For stocks, most of the gassers still look to be too conservative.  They are selling too much of their future production in order to lock in these current low prices.  However, most of the Wall Street analysts, as well as Zacks, Morningside, et. al., still believe that Consol Energy is nothing but a coal company.... they have only been developing their gas reserves for the last twenty years, its still too new to notice ... their E&R program this year, well-funded, is ambitiously predicting a 30% rise in total output from last year ... right in the back yard of the consuming region, in western Maryland, West Virginia, and southwestern Pennsylvania, the best of the Marcellus shale ...this is a long term opportunity in a market where bargains are very, very hard to find these days ...also the pipeline operators such as Spectra Energy have great appeal, for those who desire steady, strong income (>5%) and relative safety ...

     For the rest of you, homeowners, need to stock up on sweaters and blankets, because heat next winter is going to cost you more than you have ...

trades

     Springtime brings ... more abundant sunshine, earlier, later, and higher in the sky.  Bees, flowers, songbirds, rain.  And time to rearrange the portfolio.

     For the time being, natural gas seems to have run its course.  Unexpected (by me), the remaining inventories in the country have been run down below 950 bcf .... this is a frightening number or at least it should be, but its a bottom.  The 5 year average for this point in the year is around 1600 and 950 represents less than a two-week supply.  Everybody understands that it will be rising for the next 6 months.  The big question is, "Will we be able to replenish the storage back to a normal high."  With demand for vehicles, for fertilizer, for chemical feedstocks, and for electricity for air conditioning all at all-time highs, well, I hardly think so.  Take into account also that among the exciting new tight gas shale formations, the Haynesforth, Permian, Denver Basin, Great Green River Basin, etc .... guess what?  Production is now declining already in all of them except the Marcellus.

     So we definitely need to revisit this issue when the weather becomes an issue again.  Note that a hot summer could have a similar impact as a cold winter.

     However, driving season is now upon us.  Year after year after year, the prices of crude typically bottm around February or March, then start climbing through the spring and summer.  Year after year, the -prices of the oil company stocks follow suit.

     This year, we have the added silliness of the greedy bankers who overstepped their bounds in the Ukraine, to add ether to the mix.  Investors are already beginning to figure out what the eventual inevitable results of their misbegotten policies are going to be.  Russia is simply going to accelerate its drive to sell more and more gas and oil to China and India.  They are better customers in the first place, guaranteed to increase demand over the long term.  In the second place, they don't exhibit the insufferable arrogance and pugnacity of the we4stern european and north american former imperialists.  third, they are capable of paying in gold, instead of the worthless paper that our bankers keep multiplying.

    And, there is still the little craziness about the Keystone.  Its not a big deal, its just a stupid one, where politics has reigned supreme over common sense and the real needs of the society.  surely no one thinks that blocking the pipeline will have any impact whatever upon production in Athabasca.  The only thing it does is to tighten the noose a little further around US energy needs, because the Canadians are working feverishily to facilitate selling their precious oil to other customers, instead, for a higher price.

     So, suddenly its time to buy Suncor already.  Actually the time was at the beginning of the week, because I'm certainly not the only person to come to these conclusions and the stock suddenly jumped up by 5% the last several days.  From a low of 32.50 it has gone to 34.50.  It was very interesting as well to see WTI rising while Brent actually fell.  By June it should be back to its normal 36-38 range, assuming the warmongers are kept in check.  But if hotter heads begin to prevail and the steady drumming of another losing war crescendos it will climb a lot higher than that.

    At that point we can go back and revisit gas and coal ....

Crimea River

     The Washington Post has come out with an Oh! So typical editorial this morning which (in my humble opinion) once again puts childish feelings ahead of adult common sense.  Yellow journalism has never been so crass.

     They say:
"The United States now faces a naked act of armed aggression in the center of Europe by a Russian regime that is signaling its intent to steamroller this U.S. president and his allies. Mr. Obama must demonstrate that can’t be done."

     Editorialists love to use the word "naked" this way because it appeals to so many Americans who feel so impotent and inadequate in their sex lives, precisely because their own expressions of feeling are so often hateful and aggressive and so rarely understanding, empathetic and  amicable.

     I'm not all that different or special in this country.  It is true that I was exposed to a decent class in world history when I was in junior high school.  I can envisualize where the Crimea or the Caucasus mountains fall on a map of EurAsia.  But I was certainly never a military specialist or politician or historian or any of that.

     Anybody who knows anything about world history and economics understands the critical importance of access to the oceans and trade routes. The importance of such access for both peacetime and war success cannot be overstated.  All the great empires have dominated the seas.  Russia understands their principle, primary strategic and economic "crunch point" is ocean access;  they are doomed without it.  However all of their major ports are frozen solid for a good portion of the year; not a desireable state of affairs.  They cling and protect very strongly to what they've got because its all they've got.

     The Black Sea is a tenuous connection to the oceans.  While it does not freeze, the access to the open oceans can easily be commanded and controlled -- choked -- either at the Dardanelles (do you remember "The Guns of Navaronne" and why they were so important at that time? ) or at the Pillars of Hercules (surely you understand why a US insurance company places so much importance upon that rock?).  However, its the very best that Russia can do, otherwise they are landlocked.  Their very survival depends on it, all of their trade with the world depends on it, and any ability for them to defend themselves depends on it.

     This is why the country of Syria has so much importance to Russia.  This is why it was ignorant folly, last year, for Obama to make a stand against Russian support and control in that country.  A threat by the USA to Russian access to the port of Latakia is tantamount to attacking Moscow directly.  This is why Obama backed down from his last "red line", because wiser heads spoke quietly to him.  Trust me, strategists in Russia also observed how quickly he backed down.

     This is why the Crimea is so important to Russia.  Their survival depends on it.

     This is why they can be depended upon to defend their control of this vital strategic penninsula, regardless of the "rights" and niceties of the citizens who happen to life there.  They become pawns in a larger struggle.  The USA is quite prone to acting in the same autocratic, totalitarian manner when strategic locations critical for their commerce and control come under threat of unfriendly opposition, such as Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, or Panama, for examples.

     The Post, with today's editorial, is trying to stir up passions and foment trouble and sell more newspapers.  During my whole lifetime the world leaders have struggled mightely to avoid a major confrontation between the USA and Russia.  so how important is the Ukraine to the USA?  How important is it for us to stad up for their open political process?  Why are they suddenly more important than other oppressed people, such as those in Haiti, Somalia, Darfur, the Kurds, the Basques, and the "American Indians"?  Are they so important as to risk what so many have tried so hard to avoid, a world war three, a possible nuclear contfrontation, a potential for a large land and sea war?

    And if we do get involved in such a confrontation, do you think China will just sit back and watch?  Or will they take the opportunity of our diversion to crush Japan, once and for all?  And what other mischief might be expected to evolve in such a scenario?  What might happen to Israel while the US was busy elsewhere?

     Evidently, the paddle and the strap never should have been taken away from elementary school teachers in this country.  Evidently, some hot shot egotistical morons need some serious paddling, followed by years and years of studying about how things really are in this world.  Before its too late.....

redux

After an interminable interlude, a few intrepid investors are finally just beginning to figure out the situation about natural gas and the cold weather.

Meanwhile, I am starting to look ahead to next summer.  Here's a recent email exchange with a buddy of mine:

On 2/16/2014 2:05 PM, xxxxxx x. xxxxx wrote:

Seems to have gone away, much to everyone's surprise.

Sure feels like around here.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2541599/Is-mini-ice-age-way-Scientists-warn-Sun-gone-sleep-say-cause-temperatures-plunge.html

Bob

sun ain't been so quiet, these days.

could be a hot summer.
need a lotta air conditioning.
need natural gas.

lets you and him fight

  It occurred to me, while cooking my dinner this evening that if I were a Chinese strategist and I wanted to get rid of my two worst enemies with a minimum of frou-frou and ado, not to mention bloodshed and blame, that there's a really easy, straight-forward strategy which would do the job quite nicely, and it has the added benefit that a whole lot of folk would not ever recognize or perhaps not until a long time afterward, that I was the perpetrator.

Sell my US treasury notes (maybe all $1,000,000,000,000 of them, or maybe just a goodly fraction thereof).  Use the proceeds to buy Bank of Japan notes.  thereby causing the US dollar to crash and the credit-worthiness of the US government to collapse, while causing the Yen to rise against other currencies so that the Japanese exports collapse, taking their whole economy with it.

Sun Tzu would be so proud!

Then again, maybe somebody else has already thought of this.  It sure looked that way today!


Update 2/17/14 -- think I am just a crazy little moron with diarrhea of the mouth?   Take a look at these two charts from today ....

 


and



Still think I am nuts?  A forex trader working for JPMorgan in Hong Kong just jumped to his death .... wonder why??????

panic

The first tentative tentacles, like feathers of frost on a window pane, begin to explore the farthest reaches of the best minds on Wall Street, as one or two of them first being to perceive, that there may not be quite enough gas or enough pipelines to deliver it, to keep them from freezing to death deep in the recesses of their steel-and-glass enclosures in Manhatten .... ..and all the money in the world won't be worth a book of matches in the coming crisis ....

natty update

Natural gas spot prices "seems" to be holding the zone between $4 and $4.50.

I say "seem", because although at the moment the country is still well-supplied, there have been numerous reported local crises where utilities have been forced to pay $20, $40, even in one case $100 per million cubic feet, while many others have switched temporarily to kerosene.

The problem at the moment is all the NIMBY folk who rationalize their behavior with all this hocus pocus about global warming.  Their real motivation to blocking all pipeline construction has been pure antisocial selfishness.  The country does not have enough pipelins for a good distribution system.  Worse, as reported recently in The Washington Post, some local pipelines are aging and decrepit to the point of resembling sponges more than tin cans.  Twelve manholes were discovered to have a concentration of leaked gas sufficient to explode.  After reporting this to the local gas company and then going back to recheck four months later, all twelve were STILL ready to explode.

The one "polar vortex" (after many weeks of below average temperatures) brought about a serious depletion in the national inventories.  Any investor with a grain of imagination can look at the chart and project the serious potential for the little blue line to get down so low that spot shortages, so far isolated to unimportant districts likie New York City and Boston, could become more widespread.

Now, going back to the weather map and only looking at the forecasts for the next ten days, we have , surprise surprise, ten days of continuing very cold, below-average temperatures, continent-wide.

Some of my fellow investors have reported patterns of trading similar to the patterns of paper gold and paper silver and, dare we say it, the LIBOR.  Somebody or some entity takes the opportunity, when trading is thin, as say, at 4:00 in the morning Eastern Standard Time or, fifteen minutes BEFORE the weekly inventory report comes out, to sell large blocks and blow away people's stops.  This sort of activity has the effect of maximum loss for the entity doing this.  One does have to wonder.

The U.S.S.R had centrally-dictated pricing for most of its existence.  They successfully eschewed inflation.  However, they successfully eschewed a smooth supply chain and ready availability of key products.  When a shipment of right shoes did arrive people had to line up for several blocks to hope to get one.  Without ever knowing if they would ever have a chance for left ones or not.

It indeed is beginning to look to me that there could be some serious shortages later on in February.  Since all that coal generating capacity has been shut down and can't be restarted, we could have some critical brown outs, black outs, and empty gas pipes leading to burst pipes, frozen homes and offices, numbers of dead homeless folk and older people and babies and, one can only hope, some Wall Street traders and Central bankers getting "stiffed" ...

Thank God I heat with wood.  There seems to be a good supply. 

God Created Satan

well?  If not He, then whom?  Is God all-powerful, almighty, omniscient, able to do anything? Is He not the Creator of ALL?

Pastor made this crucial, critical point last night.  He said it in ways quite differently than I would but that's just a cultural distinction.  The message is paramount, and it sure seems to me like a whole lot of US citizens, particularly leaders and spokespeople, are missing it these days.

He was reading from near the end of Luke and presented the passage 22:31   "Simon, Simon, Satan has asked to sift you as wheat."  He emphasized the verb "asked".  He stressed that Satan cannot do any smallest thing without god's full permission.  He referenced the book of Job, wherein the whole premise is that Satan has gone to God and challenged Him and God grants him permission to attempt to torment and sway Job's heart.

For what it may be worth, I would challenge the anthropomorphism of the character of Satan and simply state that above all other gifts, the very most sweetest that God gives us is our personal sovereignty,  our freedom and independence to choose.  Who among us would joyfully bow down to God and sing His praises to eternity if it were servitude, slavery, without recourse?  Every one of us needs to know that sin is a possibility.

The recent policies of the US Government reveal a total insanity based on the failure to grasp this simple fact of life.  The government, the leaders, the media, all want to suggest that Satan can be defeated by the government.  It wages a "war on poverty", a "war on drugs", a "war on terrorism' (I'll save this one for another thread, the majority of people worldwide recognize that the US government itself is the premiere terror organization of all time, and we can go on an on and on about denial and projection, blaming other nations for our own faults,  about paranoia, manipulation, waste, fraud, and abuse.) and most recently, a war on climate, which ought to be so hilariously funny that people would pay their taxes gladly just for the entertainment of it all but somehow some folks just miss that ....

Wanna guess who is gonna win, when our govenrment makes war with God and condemns His creation?  Anyone wanna make book here, give me odds?

I was glad to hear it from Pastor.....very glad, for these are dark times ....

monthly dry shale gas production

Obviously,
its tapering off.

Do you think one "polar vortex" is going to change that?

Callipygous

     A persistent pen pal introduced me to this new vocabulary word recently.

    Now, there are several blood relatives of mine who price themselves upon their extensive epistulary repertoire.  My minister also occasionally indulges upon solipsistic soliloquoys of language.  Sadly, none of them are likely to want to use this particular one.  So, my dear reader, I must inflict it upon you.

    Since it is an adjective, let me just present to you a link representing the underlying noun in question....

callipygous

Lead Paint

     I get so annoyed about this, sometimes its a wonder that I can function at all.  The common belief is that capitalism spawns innovation which constantly improves our standard of living.  I would so love to trust big business.  My experiences keep on telling me that the opposite is happening.  If anyone can tell me how the innovation of reducing the width of toilet paper by 1/2 inch improves my standard of living then please, please step up and say so.

      But there are much more insidious examples.  It was actually the announcement that incandescent bulbs have been made illegal that got me going this morning.  Evidently the coal mining companies needed some means to sell all the mercury that they take out of their product, so they invented a new kind of light bulb that uses it and now they foist it upon us in the name of energy conservation.  So amusing.  But we'll have to save that subject for another post.

     Consider the following news item:


http://www.health.state.mn.us/divs/eh/lead/topics/braceletrecall.html

     Now read those words again.

This is the first documented death of a child from lead poisoning in Minnesota.

In 2004, approximately 1,500 children had blood lead levels of 10 ug/dL or greater and 122 with 20 ug/dL or greater. (in Minnesota)

(that is one to 12 parts per 10,000,000, in case you do not speak french.)

Lets not even go here, for now ....

http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2011/08/31/Solar-power-brings-lead-pollution-threat/UPI-81811314829387/?st_rec=31531317414510

Granted, lead does much more damage to young, developing bodies than to adults.  But just for the record, I live in a house which is over 120 years old.  The house had been abandoned when I bought it and not maintained properly for decades before that.  I have torn down walls, removed most of the old plaster, and hauled tons of material to the land fill.  I have sanded every floor, removing 50-year old paint.  Read that again. I have spent easily 100 hours sanding floors.   Lead paint is extremely durable.  That's why they used lead.  It makes a much better quality paint than anything on the market today.
If you use lead-based paint then it makes a hard, durable finish which will stand up to years and years of cleaning, brushing, and pounding, without peeling, flaking, or scraping.  It makes good paint.

Granted, toys should probably not be made with it.  children's jewelry probably should not be made with it.  Probably not cribs, either.  Granted, there are some folks who would love to say that I am mentally deficient, but there's actually fewer of them than there were twenty, thirty, forty years ago.

Recently I had the windows replaced.  Because of the lead in the paint, the company that did it was required to put a red plastic tape border around the house warning everyone (besides me) to stay away, and the workers had to wear those paper breathing masks and they put little plastic drop cloths down under the windows and then they charged me over $600 extra.  Most of the money goes for the training instructors and the special licenses and the government fees.  All of it was a total waste of effort, obviously.

One child has died in Minnesota from lead poisoning, in 20 years of statistics.  Obviously, they don't count bullets .....