50 Million Miami Penthouse

So I guess, every time you see 'luxury' this or 'luxury lifestyle' that, it means someone has stuck a stupid price tag onto something.

 

$50 million for a Photoshopped pic

If you look at pretty much every single publicity photo of all of these new Miami penthouses on the market for 30, 50, and more, millions, all of them have been heavily Photoshopped.

 

Sure you get two or three floors of 'penthouse...'

 

Anyway, here's a pic of that business friend of mine's style of house - not his actual house but same designer - who insists on taking me for a drive in his Ferrari Italia all the time. 

Average Western Australian $900,000 house

 

And here's another pic of the view outside of my own front door:

Jindalee Beach -
definitely not Photoshopped.

 

Okay so me and you get a hundred million ($100 million) next week, and we can afford to blow half of it on a Miami Penthouse. These things can happen, you know.

 

You see, you read in all the business and finance commentaries these days, in any kind of media, 'The Fed creates money, the Fed issues this new zillion dollars of money, the Fed pushes markets to new levels with money...'

 

Ah, no. That's not money you're looking at.

 

But when you are a mad person, you can attach names and labels to anything you want.

 

They used to say about prostitutes - they get paid to stay out afterwards. Who are these Miami real estate agents trying to keep out?

 

 

 

 

New Money Laundering

The biggest ever 'hits/viewers/readers' of any blog post I have put up here was on one a long time ago headed 'Tax Dodging and Money Laundering.'

Not long afterwards there were a few press stories about how some of the world's biggest banks had been involved with Iranian citizens and even the Iran government itself, to find ways to bypass the embargo.

Pretty much all of the banks involved got caught - and this is of course because none of them know what they are doing.

'Dark' cards...

In spite of the fact that a massive spike in readers occurred with that blogpost title, no one ever contacted me seeking any details about how one could really go about money laundering or tax dodging - and, even though you could say, well, but John, you don't have any kind of profile in this area...

And so, I rest my case!

If you know what I mean.

The Chinese Lantern Festival

This March the 5^th, is the start of the Chinese Lantern Festival for 2015.



'Retro-modern' Shanghai lanterns

Now those of you who don’t consult the Feng Shui man for guidance and direction during the year on important matters such as your prosperity and your good fortune, will hardly give any thought to this.

But for those of you who sometimes delve into the Eastern or Asian Mysteries - and any other occult folklore for that matter – you will be interested in the significance of this year’s Chinese Lantern Festival.

At the heart of the Lantern Festival is Taoist religious belief and conceptions about how the world is run, and what the motivations are that lie beneath the surface of all things human.

On the whole, Taoism as a philosophy is not at all well-loved or well-favoured by Chinese people generally, although they adopt as cultural novelties the charming frivolities and idiosyncrasies that genuine Taoists tend to exhibit during, and concerned with, various celestial ‘Seasons.’

The Lantern Festival is in almost all respects the same as the Western popularisations of Christmas – the deity of the North Polar Star comes down to Earth and sets simple puzzles and riddles for children and adults, the solving of which ensures that he will give you gifts.

But this deity has a slightly more serious and important role in Taoist culture, because he is regarded as ‘the Chief Official of Heaven,’ and he vanquishes evil demons, and provides great prosperity through his squadron of powerful spirit beings – which may be seen, if you are favoured, in the evenings or night-time, by the gentle light of candle-lit paper and cellophane lanterns.

Hong Kong supermodel QiQi, @
'the Secret Garden' exclusive, private, nay secret
function attended by George Clooney for Omega.

There has been no adequately propitious time for this great deity to have come down formally and benefitted Mankind during any of the last fifty years or so, and there are a great many Taoist scholars who even believe that the world has thus been in the grip of demonic forces since around the time Kennedy was murdered.

But this all changes this year on March 5.

In his hand, the deity carries a jade sceptre, called in Chinese a ‘Ruyi’ – which literally means ‘as you wish’- and this is to indicates that it is by the intent and desire of this deity, that particular things happen according to its will.

However, before you charge into the equities markets, it should be noted that the Lantern Festival presiding deity has a frivolous attitude towards paper things or anything that can be lifted by breezes and blown away, whereas alternatively, he carries a special – large and deep - iron basin in which he has an endless supply of gold that he is able to make by turning iron into gold by the mysterious power of his magical sceptre which he always carries with him.

 

Swiss Tribal Wealth

Thomas Jordan, the current Chairman of the Swiss National Bank (which is their Central Bank) is a fairly recent appointment (2012).

His predecessor, Philipp Hildebrand was forced to resign due to some forex market trades his wife had made that some people suggested were based on her possible inside knowledge of what the Swiss Central Bank knew or was doing.

A Lamborghini in Switzerland,

on cobbled streets!

The reality is that the US Department of State had been agitating for a very long while to destabilize a whole series of global financial structures – from the Bank For International Settlements, to the SWIFT system, and the Prudential Standards Committee (for global banking) – and some covert arm of the US was highly active to undermine Swiss banking secrecy with the effect that dozens, quite literally dozens of private bankers whose client lists had been made public, became adversely affected, some fatally. Whether you care to say ‘suicided’ or ‘causes unknown,’ or ‘mysterious,’ the fact remains that dozens – mostly young or middle aged - have died.

As some of you will know I pointed out on the Wall Street Bear board more than a week ago, that there was a suspicious pennant top forming in the gold price and I asked the question, ‘well, why?’

Jordan has removed what his predecessor had implemented – the euro peg - and Jordan’s post-doctoral thesis is all about the potential downsides of the euro currency and sovereign debt default.

I would love to see Dr Martin Coward’s new Malta located hedge fund dormouse’s betting sheets just before the announcement...

Or his ex-wife Elena Ambrosiadou’s. Or ex-Swiss National Bank chief Philipp Hildebrand’s forex bets in recent weeks.

Of course, speaking of wives and ex-wives, Hildebrand is now married to the one-time Russian wife of the late French Billionaire Robert Louis Dreyfus – Margarita. And she is a multi multi billionaire.

Seefeld in the evening...
Not Switzerland, but full of Swiss Bankers.
See how the lights are golden?

And so we have, Elena the ex-Russian/Bulgarian-pretending-to-be-Greek computer expert billionaire, and Margarita, the overt Russian business genius, and also billionaire, swanning around the ski slopes and seaside resorts of Europe wondering where to stick their cash

The question is though, how long will Jordan survive if he isn’t buying euros like the dog whistlers in Washington and New York want him to? He doesn’t have a rich Russian or Chinese spy wife or mistress, for one thing, not that that is either necessarily a good or a bad thing.

But it’s all getting exciting now, isn’t it. And that is what we need, more excitement. The sudden huge rise in the Swiss franc (ch), previously a currency famous for its very price stability against the global currency basket, has certainly emptied a few people’s most precious baskets!

A Better Source Than MI6

We all know a little bit about Cyprus. There are a lot of peculiar 'banks' operating there. In a discussion just yesterday with a retired Sydney Merchant Banker, he raised the notion that low latency trading programs were complicitly national government things, and that there was a specific group of academics from Cambridge and Harvard dating even as far back as John Meriwether's LTCM, who had burrowed well inside of governments and administrations and that effectively had gained control of banking, even central banking around the Western World.

The saloon in the Maltese Falcon, formerly owned by

Thomas Perkins, now by the divorced formerly Mrs. Martin Coward

 

He mentioned a few things that caused me a little disquiet, because to some extent I have believed in the romance of the super wealthy...! He basically said that some of the publicity and PR just wasn't so in actuality, when you find out who really has what and what it's all about.

 

A long time ago I had some guy from Perkins Kleiner turn up here in Australia - I'm sure it was after Alan Bond had wrested the America's Cup - and he swanned around talking about technology investment and then he ended up shacking up inside of George Soros' office in Allendale Square, which itself was a building built using a dodgy cheque from UK accountants in Bahrain and that eventually Australian Treasurer Paul Keating had to bail the National Bank out for, because they continually leant across this absurd cheque. The cheque was written on the Bahrain government account, but the cashing process was 'at the end of the financial year;' and each successive year the cheque was converted to a higher sum and the term extended to the next year again! It was absurd but it actually happened.

 

And then you see Thomas Perkins apologising to the American Israel lobby about his remarks using Kristallnacht as a comparison of the 'Occupy Wall Street' movement.

 

UK mathematician Dr. Martin Coward

 

Well anyway - Perkins and the Director of Quartermasters in the US (an associate of Kleiner) and Dr. Martin Coward and even ex London Police Assistant Commissioner (who ended up on a 2 million pound contract with the Bahrain government to help provide security) are all connected. Coward's zillion dollar divorce in which his then wife ended up winning the majority of the money in their hedge fund IKOS, BECAUSE SHE WAS THE OWNER AND DEVELOPER OF THE LOW LATENCY SOFTWARE AND ALGORITHMS, is illustrative of the social circles of these people. Coward has gone to live in Monaco with a 'partner' introduced to him by, guess who? Oh yeah, Jeffrey Epstein. And I'll not say Ghislaine Maxwell.

 

Now when you also connect the head of the computing division in the UK SIS (MI6) Alex Allan, and his next door neighbour the close friend of Tony Blair, Geoff Gallop (ex Premier of the resources rich Western Australia) it's kind of no wonder that Allan got this untendered for contract fall into his lap from the then State Government of Western Australia for FIFTY MILLION DOLLARS - to draw up plans and proposals to revitalise the tourism aspects of the small nearby tourist-y island that Dutch explorer Willem Vlamingh called the 'place of the big red rats.' Or Rottnest Island.

High priced Bahrain security contractor,

John Yates

 

Coward's wife used an ex Israeli Army female soldier to spy on Coward's executives in order to get enough information for her London divorce case to be furthered. And I am certainly not above hiring the best people for the right job myself. Although, frankly, I wonder whether this wasn't a service extended to her by her original and main employer... 

The question is 'what are they getting up to next?'

And I do know...

And you will know.

 

 

 

 

 

Jeremy Hackett And James Bond

Okay so this is not ‘new’ but hey, you’re just not going to see it in the sunset media...

Various groups and experts in investment have been hollering about the sheer criminality of it for months but there’s no one much out there listening. GATA, Max Keiser, Casey Research – all these kinds of info moles were onto it first and Max of course, did his usual sardonic laugh; well, it’s now a cynical laugh.

 

Old School

The US Commodities Exchange operating company, CME, introduced this thing they are calling the ‘Central Banks Incentive Program’ – which is a discount program for any foreign central bank that trades in commodities in the USA. Now look, this is not only specifically illegal, but it is rampagingly criminal-minded; nobody can say they are not aware of the meaning of this kind of thing. The excuse the CME is giving –not that it is being compelled by anyone to offer any excuse - is that by encouraging foreign central banks to trade in commodities on US Exchanges, this helps ‘provide liquidity.’ Well, no, Central Banks don’t help provide liquidity they are liquidity, because they have a limitless ability to print legal tender, whose specific and only point is that of the preserving of the government monopoly right on money issuance. And their only role is in protection of the currency itself and of the banking conduits thereof; they use interest rate policy to assist the viability and acceptability of the currency – not to affect commodity market prices, my god that would just be plain open fraud.

 Which brings me to the ambiguity over ‘right and wrong’ in today’s world.

Everyone’s going to have an opinion on all of the problematic issues of - terrorism and urban violence and invading people’s privacy, and freedom of expression and freedom of religion or the rationality of modern science, or the politicisation of medicine. And so they should.

Of course, they say that winners write the final history.

My concern is that history is taking too long to be written at the precise present time... Which I realise is a little illogical of a statement since it includes the relativism of the passage of time.

 

Hackett advertising has found this

Ian Fleming re-incarnation!

Why I like Jeremy Hackett’s menswear company, is that he focuses less on old school ideas of ‘Empire,’ and much more on quality of clothes and an identifiable British culture of design. Which is the problem I have with the current producers of the official James Bond movies – I don’t think they can distinguish between ‘jump cut editing,’ or ‘flash photography,’ or Hollywood tropes and jingoism (what the common popular view of the British Empire and its presumed morality is) - and a narrative that is genuinely faithful to Ian Fleming and/or even Kevin McClory, for that matter. The latter of whom, just for the record, was my father’s second cousin through the Irish Bell family. Dame Gertrude Bell, as I have regularly noted here, being the British Foreign Office instrument that established the House of Saud.

Without tea and sugar and ships and the Royal Science Academy – what, really, is the British Empire?! Now let me remind you all – these things are all of them from the Stuarts, not the Windsors. And the real British Secret Service contains the following heads of department: Clifford, Arlington, Buckingham, Ashley, and Lauderdale.  The CABAL. Now you watch the current producers turn all of this on its head and confabulate the CABAL, with SPECTRE.  

 

Advert for Hackett again - getting it right again

You stay here, though. I’ll show you THE Secret Service.

LKY On The Edge

My information - and it is from a source that has been reliable - is that Singapore dictator Lee Kuan Yew's health is failing very fast and he does not have long to go.

 

And I think this is just stating a fact at this point.

 

Looks old here...



 

My Competing New Bond Film

Having now read enough of the leaked latest James Bond screenplay, and having heard that the production is said to be now already $200 million over budget, it is a wonder to me why the producers never seem to have the brainpower to hire an actual, as in, real, writer/s!

Some of what I read is just plain silly.

And so I have decided to do just that - hire some real writers - myself...

Design evokes narrative -

the noir detective-style character, parks his

Challenger SRT Hellcat in a post-industrial

brickyard, gentrified and converted to loft apartments.

The actual Bond screenplay leaks are so extensive and detailed that there is little reason to suspect they are any kind of false trail. No, the storyline is that MI5 and MI6 are merging (this is simply a fact from real life, and it happened around the time Blair decided to push WMD fibs to justify committing to war in Iraq). Personally, my judgement is that the idea that Bond is about to be retired, comes from the author John Pearson, who wrote an ‘official biography’ of Bond, which towards the end assumed an older Bond going to live in Queensland or Sydney, from memory, on a boat. Fair enough, I suppose.

The villain in the movie is no one Ian Fleming ever penned – a character called Heinrich Stockmann (seriously?!). And he’s meant to be the boss of ‘Spectre.’ And Bond just tricks him and shoots him. Some villain.

Anyway I know some real writers and I’m going to ask ‘em to come up with a competing ‘latest’ Bond.

My own design philosophy parameters would be that Fleming adulated Chandler, and that Bond is an English noir tale virtually always set elsewhere to anywhere in Britain, and containing way more American and other culture paraphernalia than you might think.

I know you won’t believe this, but Bond is a young Jesse Ventura-type, if anything, (ex-navy diver/commander) and has a cover job – Universal Exports – not very far different from your common-or-garden pulp detective type story from a Chandler-esque book.

 

Actor James Marsters - cyber-enhanced transhuman
Dr. Milton Fine
(My villain choice)

And it’s 2015. Any real villain is a cyber-enhanced soldier or ex-soldier or upper ranker... Not even fully human, really. More-than-human, but not actually human. I’m thinking Dick Cheney, but then that’ll never make it to the screen, will it?!

So we’ll go for Dr. Milton Fine, aka Brainiac from Superman, instead.  

Seriously Though...

What's he doin' here?

 

2012.  Honestly, Vlad, you can trust me.
All I want is some more borscht. I'm hungry, see. And my friends
at Bain & Co don't feed me. Much.