The Secret Cycle
October 9th, 2009Reader AD sent in an excellent New Yorker piece that will be of great interest to anyone who dabbles in financial woowoo arts and crafts. While the focus is on conman/genius? Martin Armstrong, there’s something here for most Cryptogon readers.
I thoroughly enjoyed this.
The Secret Cycle: Is the financier Martin Armstrong a con man, a crank, or a genius?
by Nick Paumgarten
New Yorker
10/12/2009
Related: How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
Green Shoots: Budget Deficit Hit Record $1.4 Trillion in 2009
October 8th, 2009Via: AP:
The federal budget deficit tripled to a record $1.4 trillion for the 2009 fiscal year that ended last week, congressional analysts said Wednesday.
The Congressional Budget Office estimate, while expected, is bad news for the White House and its allies in Congress as they press ahead with health care overhaul legislation that could cost $900 billion over the next decade.
The unprecedented flood of red ink flows from several factors, including a big drop in tax revenues due to the recession, $245 billion in emergency spending on the Wall Street bailout and the takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Then there is almost $200 billion in costs from President Barack Obama’s economic stimulus bill, as well as increases in programs such as unemployment benefits and food stamps.
The previous record deficit was $459 billion and was set just last year.
Towards Hyperinflation: A Review of the Gold Market in the Context of Western Hyperinflation
October 8th, 2009WARNING: This is not a recommendation to buy, sell or hold any financial instrument.
DISCLOSURE: I am a BullionVault client and affiliate.
Paul Tustain, Director of BullionVault, has written an excellent piece about the nature of cold, the situation with some critical commodities and the potential for hyperinflation in the years ahead. I’d strongly recommend this to all Cryptogon readers, even those of you who have no interest in gold at all.
Towards Hyperinflation: A Review of the Gold Market in the Context of Western Hyperinflation (PDF)
Gold Breaks Higher Again
October 8th, 2009$1051.
How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect
October 8th, 2009I liked this New York Times piece. Here are a couple of related terms that Cryptogon readers may find interesting.
Inattentional blindness, also known as perceptual blindness, is the phenomenon of not being able to see things that are actually there. This can be a result of having no internal frame of reference to perceive the unseen objects, or it can be the result of the mental focus or attention which cause mental distractions. The phenomenon is due to how our minds see and process information. Closely related to the subject of change blindness, it is an observed phenomenon of the inability to perceive features in a visual scene when the observer is not attending to them. That is to say that humans have a limited capacity for attention which thus limits the amount of information processed at any particular time. Any otherwise salient feature within the visual field will not be observed if not processed by attention.
Apophenia is the experience of seeing patterns or connections in random or meaningless data.
…
Conrad originally described this phenomenon in relation to the distortion of reality present in psychosis, but it has become more widely used to describe this tendency in healthy individuals without necessarily implying the presence of neurological differences or mental illness. In the case of autistic spectrum disorders, including Asperger syndrome and individuals who are autistic savants, individuals may in fact be aware of patterns (such as those present in complex systems, large numbers, music, etc) that are infrequently noticed by neurotypical people. Rather than being aware of patterns that do not exist, autistic individuals may be aware of meaningful patterns within situations that appear meaningless to others.
I’ve always been a bit weird when it came to noticing things. When I was very young, I’d notice reflections of film crews on shiny objects or panes of glass on the set. (Cars are a particular bitch for cinematographers to deal with.) Older BBC shows are hilariously bad from a technical production standpoint. Seeing the shadow of a boom microphone move over the scene used to cause in me an almost physical unease.
Watching DVDs with me can be like this:
“Did you see that?”
“What?”
“The boom mic shadow was in the shot.
“What?”
Rewind. Play. Pause.
“Right there. That’s the boom mic.”
For me, looking into alternative viewpoints is no different than noticing that boom mic shadow, or the distinctive shape of a Panavision film magazine distorted and twisted around a chrome bumper. That stuff is there. Other people can see it if their attention is directed at it.
Other times, however, there is no pattern and that boom mic shadow is a branch blowing in the wind and the movie camera reflection is a… motorcycle parked nearby, or… Who knows or cares!? Just watch the movie. Damn conspiracy theorists.
So, Cryptogon is an attempt to overcome people’s inattentional blindness, while avoiding apophenia and its myriad hamster wheels.
How do we know the difference? There are many metrics. Cryptogon readers like being weeks, months or years ahead of the average person’s informational awareness on many issues. For others, making money is a good measure. For a few, having left the building before it burned to the ground was a good thing.
I just happen to enjoy looking for patterns. Even when I know there probably aren’t any (or any that I’m capable of identifying), I like to look anyway. For example, I don’t write much about my ongoing research into black box trading systems, but, this is how I like to relax sometimes. Now, what’s the difference between what I’m doing there and John Nash’s backwoods “decoding” shed in the film, A Beautiful Mind?
I’m mostly sure that there’s no pattern that I’m capable of identifying visually, programmatically or otherwise.
I guess that’s part of the difference between being curious and crazy.
Via: New York Times:
In addition to assorted bad breaks and pleasant surprises, opportunities and insults, life serves up the occasional pink unicorn. The three-dollar bill; the nun with a beard; the sentence, to borrow from the Lewis Carroll poem, that gyres and gimbles in the wabe.
An experience, in short, that violates all logic and expectation. The philosopher Soren Kierkegaard wrote that such anomalies produced a profound “sensation of the absurd,” and he wasn’t the only one who took them seriously. Freud, in an essay called “The Uncanny,” traced the sensation to a fear of death, of castration or of “something that ought to have remained hidden but has come to light.”
At best, the feeling is disorienting. At worst, it’s creepy.
Now a study suggests that, paradoxically, this same sensation may prime the brain to sense patterns it would otherwise miss — in mathematical equations, in language, in the world at large.
“We’re so motivated to get rid of that feeling that we look for meaning and coherence elsewhere,” said Travis Proulx, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and lead author of the paper appearing in the journal Psychological Science. “We channel the feeling into some other project, and it appears to improve some kinds of learning.”
…
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
Hotel Defaults, Foreclosures Rise in California
October 7th, 2009Via: Los Angeles Times:
More California hotels are being pushed into foreclosure as tourists and businesses alike scale back their travel plans and owners are unable to pay their mortgages.
Statewide, more than 300 hotels were in foreclosure or default on their loans as of Sept. 30 — a nearly fivefold increase since the start of the year, according to an industry report released Tuesday.
The list of troubled properties includes the St. Regis Monarch Beach in Dana Point, the downtown Los Angeles Marriott, the Sheraton Universal and the W hotel in San Diego.
Most struggling hotels remain open, but industry experts believe many properties are likely to be closed down in the months ahead, even if they are not in foreclosure, because they are losing so much money. The owners of the renowned Quail Lodge Resort and Golf Club in Carmel, for example, plan to close the hotel Nov. 16.
“I have never seen so many lenders contemplating mothballing properties,” said Jim Butler, a hotel lawyer and chairman of the global hospitality group for Jeffer, Mangels, Butler & Marmaro. “It can and it will get worse for the hotel industry.”
The problem is not unique to California, but the effect is being felt especially hard here because of tourism’s importance to the state.
In Southern California alone, there were at least 140 hotels in default or foreclosure in September, including 55 hotels in the Inland Empire, 33 in Los Angeles County and 30 in San Diego County, according to the report by Atlas Hospitality Group. Statewide, 260 hotels were in default on their loans and 47 had been taken over by their lenders in foreclosure, the Atlas report said.
The industry’s woes are compounded by the sour commercial real estate market, which has left many resort operators owing more than their properties are worth. Even as they struggle to make payroll, scores of resorts and inns have given up on paying their mortgages, fueling the skyrocketing level of defaults.
“It’s a prolonged downturn, and it will be a long time before we get out of it,” said hotel broker Alan X. Reay of Atlas Hospitality, who tracks foreclosures and defaults in the state.
Part of the problem is that unlike home loans, mortgages on larger hotels typically are supposed to be repaid in full after five to 10 years. Many of them are coming due now. But like their residential counterparts, many hotel owners refinanced their places at the top of the real estate market, often taking equity out of their properties. So the loans are ballooning at just the time when there are few guests at the hotels, and the properties are worth little.
“We expect this number to rise dramatically by the end of the year and into 2010, because we’re seeing so many hotels operating under forbearance,” Reay said.
The CELL – Recognizing the 8 Signs of Terrorism
October 7th, 2009…and multiple concussions.
Vaccines’ Dark Inferno
October 7th, 2009Via: Global Research:
The vast majority of scientists, physicians, nurses and public health educators’ trust that the ingredients in a vaccine have been individually and synergistically proven safe and effective. The public believes these vaccines, aside from their specified virus(es), are sterile solutions, free from undesirable contaminants not listed on the manufacturer’s package inserts. When the pediatrician injects a vaccine into the muscle of a child, the public has unquestioning faith that this is the case. In other words, we want to believe that vaccines have been generated under perfect conditions for the safety of children and ourselves.
Our investigation shows that most people do not know what is actually in a vaccine: the active ingredients listed on product labels, inert ingredients, and, most important, the hidden ingredients. Even more remote is taking the time to actually study the subject matter, review the scientific literature and discover the truth for oneself. To our amazement, that truth was easy to find. But it is a truth that will scare the hell out of you.
Do Temperatures Seem Normal for This Time of Year?
October 7th, 2009Just curious.
Online Game Players Pay 21-Year-Old Computer Geek £50,000 a Month to Carry Out Muggings, Murders and Heists in an Imaginary City
October 7th, 2009Via: Telegraph:
A 21-year-old computer whizzkid has become a millionaire and takes home £50,000 a month after he created a hit online computer game.
Joe Chedburn, a self-confessed geek, was just 16 when he came up with the idea to write an online game focused on crime.
Torn, which is text-based and has no graphics, grew quickly and now has around 41,000 active users with over 1.3 million account holders.
Although the game is free to play users can pay £3 every month to receive extra points and status.
Most players are willing to pay enabling the site to make around £50,000-a-month. Joe, from Frome, Somerset, is now a millionaire at the age of 21.
