Category Archives: Survival News

Feral Hogs Moving into Urban Areas in Texas

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A fast breeding population of hogs is the last thing a city or suburb needs – especially after a disaster of some kind.

Neighbors in a Dallas suburb have certainly felt that way since seeing their well-manicured lawns uprooted and sprinkler systems destroyed by packs of hefty feral hogs — beasts that once caused problems mainly for Texas farmers and ranchers.

“I think people expect this to be a rural problem,” Texas Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said Thursday in Irving, where the city has captured nearly 250 feral hogs since October when they first were discovered roaming around. “This shows that in rural and urban Texas … the lines that divide us are fewer and fewer.”

Arlington and Dallas are among cities along the Trinity River that also have reported problems with wild hogs that weigh several hundred pounds, Staples said.

[…]

Although not all feral hogs have tusks, for years the animals have been a menace in rural areas by shredding cornfields, eating calves and damaging fruit trees — even breaking through barbed-wire fences, said Texas Farm Bureau spokesman Gene Hall. They also wreck ecosystems by wallowing in riverbeds and streams.

“They can do more damage than a bulldozer,” Hall said.

Which means you need to have plans in place to deal with them in the event that city services are no longer active. This means killing them – and finding something to do with 300+ pounds of pig that may or may not be edible depending on the age, sex and habits of the animal. I’ve heard male hogs are nearly inedible but I never had one so who knows.

Jobless Numbers Jump by 26,000

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Green shoots!

First-time claims for jobless benefits rose last week from an almost three-year low, highlighting the uneven nature of the improvement in the U.S. labor market.

Applications for first-time unemployment benefits increased by 26,000 to 397,000 in the week ended March 5, Labor Department figures showed today. Economists forecast claims would climb to 376,000, according to the median estimate in a Bloomberg News survey. The total number of people receiving benefits in the prior week fell to the lowest since October 2008.

But I thought everything was getting better.

PIMCO Dumps All U.S. Debt!

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From Reuters:

The world’s largest bond fund has gone ultra bearish on the United States, dumping all of its U.S. government-related debt holdings.

The move by Bill Gross’s $236.9 billion PIMCO Total Return fund completed last month comes in the wake of a vicious Treasury market sell-off and just days after he questioned who will buy Treasuries once the Federal Reserve halts its latest round of bond purchases in June.

Gross, who also helps oversee a $1.1 trillion investment portfolio as PIMCO’s co-chief investment officer, has repeatedly warned against U.S. deficit spending and its inflationary impact, which undermine the value of government debt and push up yields as investors demand more compensation for risk.

Over the last five months, worries over the ballooning U.S. budget gap estimated at $1.645 trillion for 2011, political stalemate in Washington over how to narrow it and inflationary fears have all contributed to a steep sell-off in Treasuries. The benchmark 10-year note has seen its yield, which moves inversely to price, rise more than one percentage point since early October to 3.46 percent by Wednesday’s close.

Gross expects further carnage. Just last week, he told Reuters Insider that a 4.0 percent yield for 10-year notes is a “rational expectation” if the Fed “disappears as the buyer of last resort.”

Dave Kansas at the Wall Street Journal thinks all is not lost:

So, when the world’s biggest bond fund dumps such a significant asset class, what should market players think? In the Treasury market, as the Journal noted, prices are actually rising today.

Is this a case of “buy” on the “selling news?” It is probably an indication that for all of Pimco’s size – it has $237 billion in its Total Return fund – it is not that big compared to the overall U.S. government-related debt market. This week alone the Treasury will auction about $108 billion in bills, notes and bonds.

It is also a reflection of the shifting issues at play in the Treasury market. There is certainly an Oliver Twist concern (“Who Will Buy?”) as the end of the Fed’s QE2 program approaches this summer. Mr. Gross cited this in particular as a reason to sell now. At the same time, the crises roiling the Middle East and North Africa, along with the spike in energy prices, is causing a lot of concern about the economic recovery. Usually, bond investors tend to like such dark mutterings, since weak economies rarely create much inflation, the bogeyman of all bond investors.

Mr. Gross’s thinking is affecting other markets. His view that the Fed’s QE2 will end on schedule this summer, endorsed by his government-debt dump, drove gold off its highs earlier today.

Most people are pointing out that the bond market shrugged this off, and indeed it looks like PIMCO’s strategy might be to sell now and raise capital to buy Treasuries later when yields are forced up by bad fiscal policy. But what if more people follow his lead?What if China starts dumping bonds too?

The occult workings of the treasury market is something we should all be learning about, because it is from here that we’ll see a collapse coming.

NASA and Others Confirm We’re Entering a New Ice Age

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I’ve long said we were entering an another ice age, and promoted the book Not by Fire but by Ice which may have had some problems with the research but the conclusions were right. Now NASA has confirmed that due to decreasing solar activity we will enter an ice age soon if we aren’t in one already. Global warming my ass:

NASA and the ESA agree, and so does the Russian space agency, Roscosmos—the sun is headed for a Grand Solar Minimum and a Grand Cooling will commence.

The aptly named Grand Cooling is exactly what it implies: the sun is going to cool. That cooling will also cool off the Earth. It will last from 30 to 50 years.

What exactly does global cooling mean? Well for one, Al Gore was sure wrong! The Earth isn’t going to warm, it’s going to get colder. Much colder. So cold a little or full-blown Ice Age will ensue. As a matter of fact, some scientists claim we’re already in the early stages of an Ice Age.

The article is interesting and I urge people to read the whole thing, which includes links to some of the papers these researchers have written describing solar activity and climate. The article ends with a jibe at Al Gore which also should scare the pants off of you:

It is unfortunate that Al Gore’s inconvenient truth turned out to be a fallacy. Global warming is much preferable to the climate the Earth actually seems on the verge of slipping into within a few short years.

Depending on the severity of the Ice Age, agriculture could be severely affected and millions could perish.

There are country destabilizing food riots now, as it gets colder each year things are going to get worse and worse.