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Click to enlarge.

As disturbing as that chart looks for owners of department store stock, I have something even more disturbing to point out. It's not even adjusted for inflation! Am I done disturbing you yet? Not even close. It's going down as the population grows! Here's a crazy thought to maximize the discomfort. Let's chart where we are relative to that long-term trend in red.


Click to enlarge.

Hey, that looks an awful lot like I'm charting business cycles. We're more than 2% below the declining trend again (just like we were in 2002 and 2008). Third time's the charm!

I do have some words of encouragement for those who believe that the economy is virtually guaranteed to accelerate to the upside soon though. Good luck on that theory! Nothing is impossible if we all set our minds to it (and nobody panics at the first sign of things becoming unglued again)!

I'm known for my undying optimism you know, and/or my sarcasm. Mostly my sarcasm I guess. ;)

Have I mentioned lately that I have no desire to embrace "risk on" assets? Seriously. Sigh.

This is not investment advice.

See Also:
Third Time's the Charm (Musical Tribute)

Source Data:
U.S. Census: Monthly & Annual Retail Trade

Miguel Ángel Treviño Morales, Abdón Federico Rodríguez García and Ernesto Reyes García

Bodies of 72 illegal Latin Americans from Ecuador, Salvador, Honduras and Brazil were found inside a Zeta ranch warehouse by Mexican Marines after one of two survivors that escaped notified Mexican authorities of the massacre in late August 2010. Luis Freddy Lara Pomavilla, 18, from Ecuador had escaped from a nearby Zeta Cartel occupied ranch in San Fernando and made his way to a military outpost to seek help and authorities went back to the Zeta ranch where Pomavilla had escaped.

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny


Now that the second degree murder trial of George Zimmerman is over, with the jury's proper verdict of "not guilty", the nation begins the process of sorting out what it all means. As well as how the nation should move forward, if it moves at all.

View the following CNN video with Van Jones and Newt Gingrich... then, you be the judge. If reading body language helps pay close attention, it might aid you in making up your mind.



Now, some takes from your's truly...

This case is not about race. It is about a very stupid individual that acted stupidly in ignoring the police dispatcher's instructions on that fateful night.

The DA, as well as the prosecuting team botched both the indictment and the prosecution of the indictment. Place the responsibility where it belongs rather than screaming racism.

Bottom line, Zimmerman walked because an inept DA AMD prosecutors. It was not a case of second degree murder. Manslaughter or negligent homicide yes. And, that is how the state should have prosecuted the case.

Take 2 - The claim of racism has become so commonplace it clouds the ability to look beyond to find the truth.

Take 3 - I'm getting the feeling this whole affair might just have been planed.

1) DA brings wrong charges...
2) Prosecution could not make the case to get a conviction(intentionally?)...

3)In jumps DoD where it left off...
4) Federal civil rights violations charged...
5) Family brings wrongful death suit...

A repeat of the OJ fiasco... and both Holder and the President get some positive publicity.

Just sayin...

Really, Zimmerman should be made to pay some price for his abject stupidity (which by the way in and of itself is not a crime) that resulted in the untimely and unnecessary death of an innocent young man (not a child).

I'm not an attorney or a judge but I think 12 to 20 might be reasonable.

Stand your ground works when you have NO other alternative. Zimmerman had alternatives he CHOSE not to take.

Take 4 - Parents of any young man (or children as well given the drive by shootings and all in neighborhoods) should be concerned that things like this happen.

This is an issue of individual lack of judgement in Zimmerman's case as well as a systemic (cultural) issue.

If reason can prevail (on both sides) there is a chance the systemic (cultural) issues can be resolved.

The individual lack of judgement and respect for the rights of others will always exist. It is how we deal with these that determines who we are as a people.

Calm, following a storm almost always leads to the most appropriate implementation of safeguards.

There you have it. The takes by Van Jones, Newt Gingrich, and your's truly. What is important is your take.

What say you?

Via: Memeorandum

Hey sunshine! Did you have a good weekend? Spend anytime on Pinterest? I did (follow me here) and I actually had an occasion to search for something on one of my boards. It got me thinking - I pin like a mad woman, but how often do I ever really go back and look thru what I've pinned?

Not often enough is the answer. Why am I pinning all of these wonderful images if not to use them for inspiration/daydreaming.

So I've decided I'm going to use Pinterest to create my dream house and today I'm starting with the outside.

Something a bit farmhouse like is striking my fancy.


Or maybe cedar shake. Either way, I want lots of windows and a nice big front porch.


 Of course this frankenstein house is on a grand lot with a long winding path,



which takes you to a front door with some major presence





There is a courtyard in the back with a lovely pool


surrounded by perfectly manicured gardens that my tan house boy CoCo maintains.


Beyond will be an herb garden that would make Ina proud


and more hydrangeas that I can count.


There also needs to be a gate somewhere



And a carriage house/garage, for CoCo's apartment of course.



What about you? What would your Pinterest dream house look like?

                                                                                 

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As I look at the chart, I can't help but ask myself three questions.

1. Has the Fed permanently put an end to recessions?
2. What are the odds that the economy will soon accelerate to the upside from here?
3. Is this really the best time in all of recorded history to put new money to work in the stock market?

If you've been reading my blog, then you can probably guess my answers.

For those just tuning in, this is actually an update to a chart that I created back in March of 2012. Unfortunately, we're pretty much right on schedule. Check out the link.

I do not believe that retail sales will hit 72% of wages during this business cycle. That's just a guess though. I suppose it could happen. What is more important to me is how low this percentage goes once the peak is in.



Retail sales for June will be released a few short hours from now. I'm hardly sitting on pins and needles anxiously awaiting the report though. Regardless of what the numbers show, one month does not make a trend. One data point will not dramatically impact what the chart in this post is trying to say.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

Traitor or Patriot
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet
***************

Whether Edward Snowden is a traitor or a patriot will never have a definitive answer.  At least -- that is my opinion.

No matter what happens from here on in, some will declare him a traitor and others a patriot.  It is the way of things.

I found it a bit disconcerting, to say the least, that he was supposedly laying bare secrets many of us had known from as far back as around 2006.  Heck, I thought everyone already knew the NSA was grabbing and storing all that data on us.  I just assumed they were filing every little jot and tittle of my e-mails away in some NSA dungeon somewhere for safe keeping in case I should ever get out of hand, so to speak.

Today, Snowden has set the world on fire spilling non-secret secrets.  How is that possible?  It just seems strange to me.

Is Snowden a spy?  I don’t think so.  I have no more information than anyone else living here in my swamp, but the feeling I have is that IF he is a spy, then he would be an “accidental spy” meaning that I don’t think he began by intending to spy on his country for a foreign power. That would make no difference in a court of law – nor should it.

As you can clearly see, I am torn. I am grateful that the curtain has been drawn back and now we can know, for sure, that our government IS spying on us. I am not happy about he manner in which that was achieved. 

In my family a tattletale was frowned upon.  I mean -- SERIOUSLY! It was considered dishonorable.  It was considered so bad that if myself, or one of my siblings, told on the other, the one telling to the parent was the sibling punished.  It was considered THAT dishonorable.

A whistle-blower IS a tattletale.

Then, too, I am concerned that a man of Mr. Snowden’s youth, education, and worldly experience could get so close to official secrets of the nation.  Seems to me that that, in itself, is a threat to national security. How did that happen?  Maybe there is something to the books we’ve read, and the movies we have seen, in which the government hires overly adventurous computer experts and hackers to work for various clandestine agencies of the government -- or go to jail. Maybe that’s the over-reaching of my overactive imagination, but it DOES make one wonder.

Ofttimes one can get a measure of the accuracy of a "whistle-blowers" report by the effort put forth by the agency having the light shone upon them to diminish the person blowing the whistle. There DOES seem to be a discernible effort by the US to do just that.  That, too, gives me pause and causes me to wonder.

Mr. Snowden denies being a spy for China. But it is not quite clear why, exactly, he fled to Hong Kong, of all places, and chose to surface there.  Hong Kong, does, in fact, belong to China, once again, after the British gave it back a few years ago.

You know, there is a chance that Mr. Snowden is everything he says he is.  It is entirely possible that he is motivated by love of country. Multiculturalism has so infected us now that we have difficulty recognizing real patriotism when it smacks us right between the eyes. Even my words here are strewn with doubt.

Whatever the final outcome of all this, methinks it would be a grand idea to have a thorough investigation of all our national security agencies to determine if they are spying ONLY on those they are legally allowed to spy upon, and, we need to look carefully at the thousands of government "contractors" working for those agencies to learn how they get to be government contractors in the first place.  How, and to what degree, are they vetted? What are the educational requirements and the work experience required for employment as a government contractor in ANY of the US national security agencies?

And finally we, the American people, need to lean on Congress and tell them, in no uncertain terms, that we do not approve of the spying on US citizens in any program such as that called "Prism" or any other such program that eavesdrops on the lives of American citizens.  Let them know that we take the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution very seriously and we expect the government to adhere to it one hundred percent. 

In the end, it may turn out that whether Mr. Snowden is a traitor or a patriot will make no difference and, in fact be of little importance.  If nothing else, his actions have brought all this out into the light of day and ignited a national and an international conversation about governments spying on their own citizens. There can be no doubt this confab was way overdue, especially in the US.

I'd like to see, although I don't expect it, the "Prism" program shut down and the huge data storage center in Utah shut down and padlocked or even sold to a private company in any kind of business except the intelligence business. I'd also like to see the Patriot Act repealed as well as the NDAA, which establishes funding levels for the various agencies in charge of our national defense.

There MUST be a better way!  Surely we have learned people at the highest levels of our government who can formulate a superior method of gathering intelligence and paying for the expense involved.

Most importantly, the US government must recognize that it cannot continue to violate the constitutional rights of its citizens.  There are consequences to both the government and its citizens for the government's continued usurpation of powers.

It must stop -- and it WILL -- one way or another.

© J. D. Longstreet 

Department of Justice reopens its investigation to determine whether Zimmerman violated Martin's civil rights by killing him during confrontation in 2012. 

Click to enlarge.

Since I am a long-term believer in the long-term death of real yields theory, I am therefore willing to offer the following prediction.

Stick a fork in the chart's red trend line. It's over.

In my opinion, the peak was probably set on June 21, 2013 (the peak seen in the chart). That was one day after I made a purchase of a 19-year TIPS (with intent to hold to maturity). Thanks bond market! My patience has rarely been so rewarded. To think that I could have been stuck with 0.0% just 2 months earlier.

Those arguing that my linear trend failure prediction is wrong can mark October 16, 2013 on their calendars. That's the day Jeremy Siegel's mythical 3.5% real yields will arrive should the trend in red continue. I would not hold my breath for such an outcome though. At the very least, inhale extremely deeply before doing so, lol. Sigh.

Just opinions! This is definitely not investment advice.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: 20-Year Treasury Inflation-Indexed Security

                                                                              Sunglasses: Foster Grant/ option Here

by: Les Carpenter
Rational Nation USA
Liberty -vs- Tyranny


Debate over a women's reproductive rights, or put another way the right of a woman to select abortion continues. This nation, as a result of the SCOTUS 1973 decision legalizing abortion took the back alley abortion practice that was all to common before 1973 off the table. This was certainly a humane positive move forward.

Yet here we are today in the month of July 2013 even more polarized and irrationally inclined than perhaps we were in 1973.

Any reasonable and rational individual recognizes that abortion, certainly for the purpose of this discussion, means to terminate a developing fetus and thus the potential for human life. These same reasonable and rational individuals also realize that prior to a certain point in gestation the developing fetus is incapable of surviving outside the womb of the host female uterus, even with life support systems to keep it alive. Up until this point in gestation, typically accepted to be at or very near the 20th week (or 4.6 months), it seems reasonable for a women to have a free unfettered right to select an abortion.

It should be clear as well that for every rule, or piece of legislation, there must be provisions that recognize exceptions to the norm. Women who have late term pregnancy issue that threaten their life, the situation in which a women does not become aware of her pregnancy until after the 20 week benchmark (I know for a fact this happens because I have acquaintances and friends that this has happened to) are two examples that must protected in any legislation to be reasonable.

Further, the introducing invasive and unnecessary procedures for women selecting abortion is both unreasonable as well as dehumanizing. It is something any reasonable person should stand against. Just as unreasonable is the underhanded attempt to shut down clinics that provide reproductive counseling and abortions services during the 20 week threshold through legislation under the guise of insuring women's health. It is dishonest and wrong.

My byline states that both sides are driven by emotion and often allow passions to override reason. Until such time as both sides of the debate decide to come together and craft a rational and reasonable compromise that protects the right of a women to an abortion within certain "normal" parameters", as well well as recognizing there are reasonable exceptions that need to be recognized and written into legislation this debate will continue forever.

As unreasonable as the right can be, often the left can be as, or even worse. The following from a emotional unhinged leftist.

RN USA - "it totally escapes me why both extremes in this emotionally overheated debate prefer to talk (read scream) at each other rather than using reason to calmly work through the issues and arrive at a reasonable and workable compromise that works for the majority of women."

It totally escapes you because you have no fucking idea what it's like to be a woman, pregnant or barren. If you had some legislators in your state push through a law that said you had to have an invasive procedure (say a catheter up your penis) before you could HAVE a vasectomy, maybe then you'd have some notion of what it's like to be a woman who has a pregnancy that she wants to terminate--for any reason whatsoever. Maybe when they start throwing men who father children, then abadon them, in jail until their child is of legal age; when they start castratibg rapists, in public; when they start putting a telescope up the ass of every RWAMRA fuckwad that works to pass such laws as the one proposed in Texas, then MAYBE, I think those pieces-of-shit care about beings instead of scoring politica points. Fuck them.

Grow a uterus, get pregnant, have issues with your pregnancy--THEN you get to decide what's right for women re: controlling what goes on in their own bodies.

and continuing with this...

Irrational Nation-of-one-pants-wetting-liebertardlican:

You don't fucking get it, do you?

You DON'T have a vagina. You CAN'T get pregnant.

What you can do and have demonstrated in every comment on this subject is think that your amorphous and arbitrary definition (or anyone else's) of what a human is, is what should define a woman's right, under U.S. law, to control her own body. What is, moron? it is your FUCKING OPINION; it's not the definition of "human" under U.S. federal law, douchebag. Nor is abortion considered "murder" anywhere in this country--although idiots like you would be happy to see it defined as such.

The preceding diatribe personifies the extreme totally irrational and uncompromising left. The above comment was made on a respectable leftist blog whose administrators both apologized and handled the situation with integrity.

Make no mistake however there are those on the far right that are just as uncompromising and irrational as the lefty in question. An example of this can be found here.

Perhaps one day reason and commonsense will prevail. I for one am not holding my breath.

My apology for posting the rude and crude language that seems to be prevalent among the rabid left wing in America. I just thought you all should know in the event there was any doubt.

Via: Memeorandum

We conservatives spend so much time preaching to fellow conservatives, we need to develop ways to get beyond our comfort audience. Here is an idea; Reaching those that need to be reached the most, the vast majority of 20-30 year olds are not being reached through websites or channels like FaultlineUSA, they don’t care. We need to reach them via channels and interests that they do care about. That is why I am prosing this idea focused on skiing and snow boarding.

Comparing the failure of South Lake Tahoe, an over regulated government controlled town devastated by decisions of the government, to the comparatively free market environment of Bend Oregon during the same time period, 2000- 2010.


The economic collapse aside! - the impact is clear. I lived through it and I know the facts of South Lake Tahoe destruction. Target audience: skier and snow boarding community. The target age group that needs to understand the effects of centralized government control.

The Compact Between Americans
A Commentary by J. D. Longstreet
*******************

It is said the USA has more of it’s citizens incarcerated, imprisoned, than any other nation on earth.

I heard this some time ago on TV.  I wondered what reaction the person making the statement hoped to elicit from me, and others, who heard it.

 My own reaction was… so what?

I mean, only a person having no understanding of the foundation of this country could be surprised by such a fact.

Now… for those of you who still think that is an awful thing to say about a nation… hold on a minute!

Consider the US is a nation founded on laws, on a written constitution, and a code of laws founded on that constitution, Old English Common Law, the laws of the Judeo-Christian religion, commonly known as the Ten Commandments, and a few other lesser known codes of laws.  The US is a “nation of laws”.

Now, here is the “kicker”!  Citizens of the US are free people… so long as they/we remain within the boundaries proscribed by the laws, which are made by their/our fellow citizens who have been vested with the power to create those laws.

America asks very little of her citizens.  All she asks is that they/we obey the law(s) made by the citizens of the country.

If a US citizens, or anyone residing within the US decides, for whatever reason, to live outside those laws, or to ignore, or in any other way, break those laws, then the wrath of their fellow citizens, the people of the 50 states as a whole, will come down on them like a ton of bricks!  And in a system such as ours… that is a good thing.

The fact that we have so many of our citizens in jail says nothing derogatory about our system of government.  It DOES say a lot about how our family structure, our educational system, and our religious community, has failed and failed miserably.

The “American Family” is as close to non-existent as it has ever been.  We can’t even decide what a family is, anymore!  “The Church” has abrogated its position as the “setter of societal standards” and has, instead, adopted the aberrant behavior of many in our society as accepted… and even praiseworthy.  No longer can a functioning American family point it’s young children to The Church for moral guidance. The Church has failed us miserably.  As a result the American family has all but disappeared. 

Our educational system has also failed… not only it’s students, but the parents of those students who entrusted their young into the hands of an educational system which no longer educates, but indoctrinates the innocent among us.

Those of you astonished when you hear statements about how many of our US citizens are in prison… remember this:  Those imprisoned broke the compact, the covenant, with their fellow Americans to live by the laws of our land.  They knew, before hand, their fellow citizens would require their freedom as payment for their transgressions.

So, do not even try to use the number of imprisoned Americans as a maul to hammer shame onto American society. It won’t work.  Each American lives within a self-imposed covenant, or compact, of laws he has forged with his fellow Americans.  This American Compact has managed to hold off the blackness of chaos and anarchy since the country was founded and it has allowed the US to become the preeminent power on the planet.

To those who would run our system of law down, we say:  Do not speak of that which you do not know… and do not understand.  Look first to your own government’s failure!  If you are an American citizen and do not already know this… then the shame is on YOU!

© J. D. Longstreet

Los DesperadoZ
In the past, they had not been available to return due to their schedule and fortunately we were contacted with ample time to be a part of the Mexican Fiesta 2013 this year. They look forward to returning and seeing all of their fans in WI and surrounding states and to a Fiesta, which had impressed upon them the last time they were there."
Dr. Arturo Martinez, Mexican Fiesta Entertainment Coordinator confirmed that Los DesperadoZ were performing at Mexican Fiesta 2013 and also the following Tejano groups will be performing as well, they are the Latin Breed, Los Bad Boyz del Valle and Impozzible from Houston.
Fiesta officials have confirmed the following entertainers to be presented at the three day Summer Spanish language music and cultural festival for August 23, 24 and 25 at the Henry Mier Festival Grounds or Summerfest grounds. Some of the previous confirmations were Bachatero Toby Love and Alejandra Orozco.

Click to enlarge.

Enough said.

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Real Estate Loans at All Commercial Banks

The following chart shows the finance rate on 24-month personal loans minus the finance rate on 48-month new auto loans.


Click to enlarge.

The 48-month auto rate for May 2013 was 4.13%.
The 24-month personal loan rate for May 2013 was 10.34%.

The spread between the two loans now stands at a new record: 6.21%.

This reminds me of something Ben Bernanke once said:


Got storm shutters?

Source Data:
St. Louis Fed: Custom Chart

This idea from Wild Bill has stirred up a lot of interest