What Do Morals Give Us?

One of the long-term regular contributors on the private finance discussion site WallStreetBear.com - 'WRS' - just posed the interesting question: 'Well, what do morals get us?!'

Great question I suppose, given the present context for banking and finance and market capital.

He made much the same sort of points about equities rising for absolutely no good reason, errant banks endlessly bailed out by the taxpayer, the Fed not giving two hoots about moral hazard... and on and on. 

Egerton Hotel afternoon tea, in
Knightsbridge, London

And this last weekend, I found myself - as you do over the holidays - in the midst of the richer side of the family, several members of which are key 'players' in the high-end luxury automotive dealer and distributorships around the city here. Casting my eye over price lists here and overseas, I came to the conclusion (to myself only, of course) that high-end car prices were a reflection, not of the design inputs and the manufacturing costs and so on, but of the insanely fast and steeply-rising prices of London real estate! London, as you must know, is the money center of the super-wealthy and tax-savvy people of the world. It's not New York; it has never been New York. 

One fellow I vaguely 'know' maintains an horrendously expensive pad in Knightsbridge, but I don't believe he's been there more than once - ever - and then for only a couple of weeks.

To the best of my knowledge not a single actual functioning business he's ever been involved in has ever made him any money but because of his father being in a government somewhere, and access to bank lending without too much cashflow scrutiny, he has managed to 'make' literally tens of millions of pounds from London real estate. He lives part of the year in Dubai.

And he owns several Lamborghinis.

Is this really worth $800,000?
I don't think so...

When I bought my first Lamborghini, back in the 1980's, it cost me a bit over $40,000. Today's Aventador is going to set a buyer (although not me) back over $750,000.

What has changed? Prices of good steak are actually lower. Dividends are meager. Yields are worse.

I watch television programs about the supposedly 'super wealthy' and I can't imagine a more boring lot. It's ridiculous. I mean there's nothing in their heads. Their taste (just look at the interior decorating styles) is horrible. Their conversation is virtually that of illiterates with a lot of money and pretension to education. And then they get enthused about the prices of real estate.

This week a couple of old stockbrokers mates are finishing their Sydney-to-Hobart yacht races. I swear I heard old Craig Carter - a name from the old go-go-fund days - waxing lyrical about how 'grueling' the yacht race is... 'Grueling?!' Surely that's not a word taken from the noun 'gruel?' What on earth would he know about gruel?! He must have heard it off one of those Christmas season movies...

The thing about these kinds of rich people, is this assumption and belief they have that everything else is also open to them, so long as they just have that 'big smash' as the bookmakers call it. And the only game in town is this fall-off-the-log billionaire gift of the never-ending rising of the London property market.

Altara by Johan Vilborg (Nigel Good remix)

One of the people at this family function I was at, asked me what was on my digital playlist, and I quoted them a few tracks and artists, and played one of them, and you could see by the facial expression it was outside of their comfort zone.

And I realized that there is a stark difference between various classes of people's minds on this planet. I really don't think he understood what he was listening to. But for me, if you asked me, which is more valuable, this packet of digital information in a sound form that is available to some human beings - and a fifty million dollar apartment in Knightsbridge - it's 'no contest.'

Morals affect your brain, especially when society is progressing, as it has done every now and then in the past. What defines wealth is of course, money, but in the end, it's survival too. And when the waters rise, the dumb sink and drown. Most people today can't see that the waters are rising. I could have talked to him about Schumann resonances and stuff, and that would really have lost him.

And I Have One...

The moral, or ethical - if you like - dimension. What does it mean?

See, 'ethical' is just another one of these Greek words which if you understand, you can begin to make sense of why people use them. They're basically used to deceive.

I mean after all, what's wrong with English? Even Putin accepts English in the modern world! He said so last week; I heard him.

Katy Perry - the Evil, Illuminati, Satanic, Luciferian, Zionist,
wicked elf at Christmas. It's quite a traditional theme.

Ethical means that well, at least if you knew a person's behaviour was completely consistent - for instance let's say they were truly evil - then you could not complain if they did something bad to you; they would of course still be ethical... Oh yes, a person can be utterly evil and yet ethical, that is the correct English interpretation. 'Ethos' - the surrounding atmosphere... That's all it means. Common popular misunderstanding gives it a different meaning.

Behaving 'ethically' - on its own without qualifiers - simply means behaving in accordance with their own character and the atmosphere that surrounds them. That's all. I'm not sure why politicians and others - judges, lawyers, doctors, academics, scientists - quite give a damn to use this expression, frankly. Unless they actually want to speak out of both sides of their mouth.

And so if it got to the point of me having to say something like - ah well, I have one of these 'superphones' I was talking about last week here: you know, the one that could drain your account of money and stick it into my account. What would I do? If I knew you could get one -? Would I just try and justify taking (stealing) money from people I maybe didn't like - or only from other criminals...? Or people with a surfeit of money themselves? Would I try to be like Robin Hood, and do good things for people in need? Would I even be able to resist the temptation of so much power?

It is of course, the human condition to be faced with these moral questions.

An example of  'Intelligent Design' - the 1948-53-ish?
Talbot Lago

And ah! It is even Christmas yet!

What we could do with all this money right now!

And so as intelligent people we have to think ahead a bit. What's going to happen when whole swathes of people everywhere have these things? There's going to be a huge 'situation' for a while. And it will certainly be interesting.

I hope you are prepared.

I'm not.

However I will tell you a little about my ethos... I'm a holder to the subtle nuances of intelligence. Design, to me, is an act of intelligent consciousness and its intentional will. But by 'intelligent' I don't mean following processes of logic alone; I mean alive. And dynamic. 

Also (modern) 'Intelligent Design' actually in the works - has hints
of the Ferrari Enzo, yes?

Like the Rowan Atkinson Blackadder series quote: Sir Edmund: 'We will certainly win!' The Duke of York: 'ah but we could lose, if we wanted to...'

Will I/Won't I...?

Let us see.

Superphones

So all these computer nerds work out that while the shooters at San Bernardino were on their phones 'tweeting' their allegiance to the Islamic Caliphate, they were also shooting up dozens of people with high powered weapons.

And all the old folk like me, when we hear this, sit around in our armchairs thinking 'ah well, that's a ridiculous impossibility...'

See his phone there?
It's part of the weapons system

But it's not impossible in computer games, though. In fact, it's kind of de rigueur actually.

Which brings me to what I really want to talk about - and that is, the very modern concept of the 'superphone.' The slogan that is used to describe the point of the superphone is: 'everything is connected, connection is power.'

And then in these games that are popular now, they add in that - 'hacking is our weapon.'

In one way it is all wish fulfillment, as the main '3rd-person character' (in the leading example of these simulation games, Watch Dogs, it is a certain 'Aiden Pearce') goes around hacking into people's bank accounts as he wanders through the streets of Chicago, and having the money automatically drain from their accounts into his.

Heh, wonderful. But in my day in Chicago, you didn't need to hack into people's accounts, you just plain robbed them directly at gun or knife-point - although I suppose this was more physical, more honest, a thing to do... 

Nowadays it's a bit different. The superphone is the weapon indeed, as they say in the publicity for the game!

The poor old war veteran has no money!

But this fantasy game highlights something which is really important in money and investing: I have never personally supported the idea about 'risk versus reward' - well at least, not exactly the way it is usually talked about.

Even when I made my first million in manufacturing back in the Eighties, I recall I never thought I was undertaking risk. For me it was 'no risk versus high reward,' and you managed the 'no risk part' as the thing you physically did to steer the money to you.

People think there is no such thing as no risk but that isn't right. Such a large percentage of the official investment world is full of complex risks and complex investment 'products' and 'situations' - these are nothing but ways of distracting people from looking at what they ought to be looking at; which is, namely, the no risk situation.

'Something inevitably will happen' - that's what you need to be looking for. Gold will go up. When the equity markets fly people will buy into flavour-of-the-month. These things are all inevitable. The passage of time going forward is also inevitable but the whole point about investing is 'when,' not 'if.'

Belgrade 24 Hours of Elegance party -
these guys have money...

If the Fed successfully raises, will the market fall catastrophically? Well, not inevitably under present circumstances. So that's not an invest-able risk, IE it's not 'no risk.'

But will some Chinese guy actually invent a real life, real, 'super-hacking' app-loaded superphone? 

Well yes. This is inevitable.

Operation Not-Gladio 'B'

As you know, we have looked at the 'mysterious' death of the Chief Executive Officer of Total Oil, the French oil exploration, refining, and distribution business. That was the late Christophe de Margerie.

And, we have also, a while back, looked at the chess players that go into Xinjiang Province... LOL. Well, I suppose you know about this now, don't you? 

Or do you not, yet?

Was he murdered by whoever is 'running' ISIS?

I'll let you do your own research into 'foreign agents inside Xinjiang.'

For now, let's look at a thing called 'War Games.' Well actually - 'military exercises.' 

Now, there's not people know this, not many at all, but in the modern world, with regard to all the top tier nations, 'military exercises' - all of them - are always part of a pre-existing, and generally highly classified or confidential 'project.' With the big nations, these projects go in two's: Project 'A' and then Project 'B.' 'B' does not stand for 'the second one' as in the letter 'B' after the letter 'A,' but rather, it stands for 'Beta.' And that is a secret. You have never heard that anywhere else before and I am telling you now for the first time anywhere. Publicly, governments will say it stands for the letter 'B,' but it does not.

It stands for Beta - which means 'put into (actual) test operation.'

So, for instance, Gladio 'B' is an actual military operation. It's not an exercise, although it can contain military exercises.

This is all highly secret stuff, so bear with me.

The Moskva goes on a naval exercise with
the Indian Navy?! Yep.

Not long ago, just prior to the invasion of Yemen by Saudi Arabia, the US and NATO, conducted what superficially appeared to be a secret military exercise off the Gulf of Aden. 

What most people don't understand, is the purpose of such exercises, is not to test the in situ efficiency of crews and equipment and so on, but to see what actual counter movements and knee jerk first responses a designated 'enemy' actually does, in response to the exercise. Inside the exercise, there will always be, one thing, maybe more than one thing, but a thing that is real, and is designed to get the attention of the 'real' perceived 'enemy' and spike their curiosity(?), for want of a better word.

Most leading nations have top value spies deeply embedded inside the tightest walled rooms within their foreign opponent countries. And so, what I mean by 'see what first responses are,' is that they will instantly know the first thoughts that entered the strategic command's analysis and thinking on what they are seeing or have heard, about the 'exercise.'

And this is really important because it gives people exact knowledge of what the other side thinks they know...

A real top spy today, drives a Bentley, not a bloody
silly Aston Martin! What would they know in H'wood!

And so you see - and you will see and you have seen recently - press releases on military exercises, both by the US and NATO, and China, and Russia, being the most recent or the latest one.

But these contain the red herrings.

And yet, because of the high stakes and the pretty decent knowledge-base of all top commands and political administrations, some facts and details will actually be real and true! Without that, the bait cannot be set.

Now I actually know the correct name of a certain current military PROJECT, although I will not say it (the name) just now, but it does contain the 'B' and not merely the 'A.'

And it's not Gladio B. Because that's the one people tend to focus on. Still. 

One factual clue I will give out, is this - the Russian government up until VERY recently, was not getting personal, direct, access, at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And it was a very clever trick that was subsequently pulled, and all I can tell you is that King Salman is literally pissing his pants right now. Until he heard directly from ambassadors, and let's just say 'emissaries,' the United States and Israel had convinced him, that he ought not to meet with high level communicators from Russia, because they would only 'frighten him,' and that what they would be telling him, were all just a pack of lies designed precisely, and only, to frighten him, but were empty propaganda (no threats being entailed, and only just 'objective information,' ostensibly).

The last (very recent) trip he made to Moscow was so highly controlled by his own staff, that he never actually had the meetings that Putin had tried to engage him in for that visit.

But. All has suddenly changed. He sat up, last week, and took notice of what Russia told him.

'Mr. Jones' - he's just an actor of course
but he was still bloody sinister in real life
anyway, as it happened. This guy played in
'Ice Station Zebra.' (Clue 2 U).

And believe me. All the chickens are coming home to roost.

You watch. Watch here - you don't think India is a player in this, do you? Well. Let me tell you something. The CIA and the NSA and co must think it's all very funny pinning the Mumbai attack on Pakistan...

I could not POSSIBLY say what I would like to say here on this - I would most certainly get arrested.

All the same. When it ('the thing') happens, I'm gonna point this post out to you and say 'well? Now the fuck what!' 

What price the whole fucking lot of them - FBI, CIA, IDF, MOSSAD, anyone of that lot. Fucking idiots. The lot of 'em.

Things are going to bite them in their own asses like you have no idea. It's not as simple as MIC conspiracy thinkers believe - namely, that 'they' want wars and a big war and then they can keep making money and so on. 'They' won't be in enough pieces for even the Goddess Isis to put them back together and that very nearly just gave away the name of the Operation.

Iconoclasm

Oh god I had a good dinner tonight.

Beef roast with black truffles, honey, lemon juice, black pepper, and maple syrup.

And roast potatoes - I mean perfect roast potatoes. And minted peas. And mushroom and beef sauce, maybe with a touch of Cognac in it.

Simple stuff. But not simple when it is done perfectly. Not simple at all.

Ah well, after all - t'is the Season and all of that.

Ah, here we go - roast beef, nicely done

But now have you noticed how so much of modern society involves iconoclasm, with just about every second person you meet being an iconodule. 

Iconoclasm - this is when people go around smashing up 'icons' or statues or monuments or just about anything and anyone associated with some cherished tradition or belief that the iconodule finds 'erroneous' or displeasing to them.

You know - like when the Islamic jihadis go around and smash ancient monuments and artefacts and temples and statues.

Or... and you may not like this - when people go around claiming that Santa Claus is actually 'Satan Lucas' (acronymic name) surreptitiously sold to an unsuspecting and naiive public.

Or that Santa Claus is a pagan idea hiding closely beneath the Christian surface; you know, like because December 25 was not Jesus' birthdate. But why wasn't it though? 'Deca' - 'ten' in Roman. And people say that Jesus' real birth month was October. I mean we all know that the months are all messed up now because of Augustus Caesar.

It's all a lot of nonsense, isn't it? And I don't say this coming from your usual modern atheistic perspective either. It's just nonsense on any level.

'Lucifer' is not a proper name, it is a descriptive.

And 'Lucas' is in any case not 'Luci-fer.' Sounds a bit like, therefore is like... According to the iconodules. What rubbish.

Since when, from the Christian viewpoint in any case, does Satan suddenly have all of this power that he exerts right across the whole globe, dominating the ideas and beliefs of everyone?

It's just so easy to be a destroyer, a naysayer, an iconoclast. A skeptic. But to actually know something concrete, and then also actually say that you do, is far too risky for the lily-liver'ed average smart-ass.

Lots of puns in Christmas stuff - cherries could be
because of the Dog Star, Xeryus (Sirius). Never heard that one before,
I'll bet. Ah, they're a dime a dozen.

Trump takes such risks. Is he going to pay for it? Time will tell. At the moment, not.

And then there is this other usual thing - whatever is from an entirely different culture, not 'Christian,' is pagan, or demonic and evil. All of a sudden now, no one, with a brain, anywhere in the world, is reasonably entitled to discover God or the genuine spiritual meaning of things, and thus anyone who has any thought at all about it - must be pagan and evil and bad.

What a lot of bloody nonsense.

'Father Christmas' is a pagan thing. And therefore it is bad! (lol).

It probably is a pagan-laden thing at that. Which doesn't make it 'bad.' Why does it make it bad?! I know there is probably absolutely no one who reads here likely to quote scripture back at me proving how the Old Testament talks about going after foreign gods and idols and all of this. 

But the trouble with these guys and a lot of gals too nowadays who quote all this stuff is that none of them has actually read the amount of original texts that experts have, and in the original languages and glyphs - and I know that because if they had, it simply would not be possible to say 'such and such' said 'this and this.'

'Such and such' is more than very often just a picto-gram or glyph with absolutely no way at all of knowing what the 'words' being written and said at the time really were.

We do NOT know, for instance, who 'Isis' this supposed Egyptian goddess was, or was meant to be. It's just a bunch of cartouche diagrams not in anything like an order that would ever make what we call a sentence. You'll find this claptrap in Wikipedia, for instance: 'Isis was the goddess who was the sister of Osiris who was killed by Set and dismembered and whose body was at first hidden in a tree and then cut into fourteen pieces and then stuck into boxes and then gathered up by Isis and then brought back to life and then they had a son, the god Horus, et cetera et cetera.'

These kinds of sentences implying what the cartouches supposedly meant, came a whole whole lot later than the time of any actual 'Isis.' And in every single case, the sentences were made not even by the people of the region, but by Greeks and Persians and far later Romans and others.

'The Virgin Mary and child' are really just the pagan Isis and Horus. Really?

Now people on the extreme 't'other' side of things will tell you: 'there is no evidence for the actual existence, ever, of the person Jesus Christ as depicted in Christian lore.'

Really? Even this, really? Ya think?

They have seen all the original texts that are used to maintain there was a real 'Jesus Christ?' Have they?

Because I have seen a lot of them... Do you know there are over 5,200 of them? Some complete texts though most fragments of many many different, now lost, whole texts. And there 43 separate main Gospel sources all of which very closely agree? The percentages of totally independent witness accounts - not Christian or even local regional people, but Romans and Persians - are very high, maybe forty-five per cent. The idea that there is no text actually dating from the actual time in question is absolute bunk. But everyone simply believes the iconoclastic version. Because iconoclasm is easy. Sure, of course, there is a lot of real ground for dispute on technical detail, and meanings and interpretations. That's because the past degrades current facts with abandon. But blanket iconoclasm, well that's the easiest thing, and people do it with no compunction and often no genuine substantive reason either.

The past cannot fight back, can it. So people do it. 

No. What we have is the typical arrogant disrespect for old things, and ancient things, and ancient cultures, and other people's things, that drives the mindset of idiots.

So what if Christianity were bunk?

And what if Islam is equally bunk?

And Isis, the ancient goddess of ancient Egypt complete and pagan idolatrous bunk?!

What in the hell does it have to do with anyone not involved in those belief systems themselves anyway?

Well but there are a whole hell of a lot of political dimensions - crucial, significant, important, and exploitable possibilities...

So trust me on this even if you don't want to follow along the line of ideology I spewed out above: 'ISIS' - namely, that ISIS we speak of today to do with Islamic Terrorists, is nothing more nor less than a disrespect to Ancient Things. It's not about 'the Islamic State in Syria.' It's not about that. Well, of course it is, but not 'only...' Or not 'exactly... It's about young punks who think it's awfully funny that the acronym is also a play on words, that it also means some 'ancient god' that most prolly never even existed 'for real' of course. Dem stoopid ancient pagans! We are so smart today!

It is no different from ISIS (jihadis) smashing up monuments. The other side of the same coin are also iconoclasts of tradition and ancient heritage. They are destructive vandals. Mindless, warmongering, uneducated, classLESS, meatheaded, unsophisticated, detesters of culture and history - and destructive, vandals.  

Lockheed's logo, when you do the usual occultic thing about twin symbols interchangeably appearing but standing for only one thing, a dark side of, and a light side of - well Lockheed's symbol IS the '666' that people go on about. Why shouldn't a war weapons promoter be less 'Satanic' than Santa Claus??

'T'is the Season to be Jolly, falalalala, la la la laaaaa.

Things are dark, and when Winter is even at its darkest, all is not yet lost.

Fast Cars Philosophy

In the consumer society, post-industrial era, in context of the deflationary but otherwise magic money era of the Federal Reserve System of the United States, it has become folkloric among the older generation that the motif of 'fast cars and fast women' (the aphorism here quoted) is in some way morally bad.

I mean I suppose one could take the two elements apart too, and look at each separately - either just 'fast cars,' or 'fast women...' 

American whiskey -
could Jesus have done miracles over this?
If he were in America, why not? Why is wine so 'hot?'
It's all about culture, and social style. It's a point of
interesting difference, not moral problem.

Though just what is a 'fast woman' anyway; is this something like a woman flying around on a broomstick like in the old days of the Salem Witch Trials...

Why does the woman have to be 'constant' and the man yet not need to have something to recommend himself as being a thing worth sticking around for?

Well anyway, these are just common phrases that people use that can cover a lot of territory.

And fast cars are bad because - they are dangerous, they are unnecessary, they are frivolous, decadent, expensive, mindless testosterone things, contribute to carbon pollution...?

Okay of course I'm sure I know what the morally problematic angles are on a simple level. 'Gross' materialism is an understandably bad way of carrying on your life. Pure aspiration to material things for the sake of envy of material possessions is destructive in so many ways.

But then there is also art and authentic culture and social style and human thematic resonance.

New, 2016 Shelby Mustang GT

Why is the inner spirit, the cultural and/or social soul, and the personal being, necessarily a separate thing from the things we, as humans make, and use in our lives? 

No - the things which cause moral failure are different from the items, even the expensive and rather frivolous, items of material modern existence. A lack of respect for naked beauty is the one sure sign of real moral deterioration, in my view.

Undervaluing things, and overvaluing ideology and dogma, is morally transgressing; that's what turns things bad inside of someone. And their soul stops breathing and stops living, and then a vestige only of human energy lingers on, pretending to be a human being, and pretending to be alive. 

Sacred Cows - the 'Bo'-vine

Well you're all reasonable people here, I know. I know that you realize that symbols are used all the time by human beings, and by all kinds of groups, but these symbols are more often than not, just simple and quite mundane appropriations of shapes and ideas in graphics - almost caricatures, in most cases.

And for the most part too, they are contemporaneous adaptions of a fairly limited set of long-in-the-tooth basic symbols.

Depending on how well-read or well-educated whoever is doing the 'symbol appropriation,' you will get varying degrees of linkage to traditional meanings, and more than just a little often - you will get 'mash-ups,' a blending and even a jamming-up of totally contradictory ideas and their representative signs and symbols.

'The Owl of Minerva?' -
it's not the right owl, though

Things turn into fashions and then fads very quickly. That is just the way it is with human society. 

Today's 'Jay-Z is an Illuminati puppet' is tomorrow's 'who's Jay-Z?!'

The fact is, the Rotary Club plants trees in semi-circles all over the world, not just in someplace called 'Bohemian Grove' - and all of these Rotarian tree places are also called 'groves.' Usually, they commemorate the work of volunteers to some fairly banal social cause or other.

Okay I can see how it's possible to look at a lot of recent modern pop music and stage acts and so on, and see that it draws an awful lot on what is very commonly supposed to be some sinister imagery, be it black magic, or from pop satanism or satanic folklore, or more ancient Egyptian motifs.

A relatively wise-headed rapper recently said that he believed the 'Illuminati' imagery in rap music and other entertainment forms sprang from people just generally being interested and entertained by intrigue, and controversy, and hints of the mysterious, and of secret things.

People are not really interested in actual secret things. They're not very good at keeping secrets in the first place!

The only kind of secret that can be maintained is one that requires inquirers to take a lot of time and patience to understand in the first place - something the requires a deep commitment of time and brainpower. 

Yes there are sinister secrets and sinister organizations, and dangerous groups and very dangerous people - but I'm afraid Katy Perry and Jay-Z and/or their production companies are not examples of these. 

For one thing, they mess up a lot of the 'symbology' itself and alter the real hidden meanings - and to me it often looks like by sheer accident.

...humor - just underlining it for the too serious

Where you will not see hidden sinister symbols and meanings altered or messed around with though, is in the movie and video and print ads coming from some of the world's most prominent Madison Avenue advertising consultants.

These things are a quantum leap away from pop entertainment and you won't see the mixing up of signs and symbols here. 'Bohemian' and 'Grove' for instance, actually are contradictory occult or arcane words... I've mentioned that before.

You have to be very astute and observant and quick and knowledgeable to catch what Madison Avenue does in its productions.

Those myriad Christian-type commentators who rapidly jump at shadows and label everything with the 'Evil' brush and appear to think everyone is surrounded by dark forces all the time in the guise of anything and everything, are really serving only to hide all the more so, what is truly capable of doing damage to people - and this is whether you care to say to their lives as well as their 'souls.'

The dangerous forms of propaganda dis-empower the individual at every turn. That is the ideology and the mechanism used for keeping power.  

There is a 'they' all right.

They are not after self-expression, as musicians and artists are. They are after the maintenance of what they perceive is an entitlement to power.

Blindly follow an 'expert' allowed to take the mic and the stage in today's media and you are falling into this particular rabbit-hole. Believe me, you will have cherished sacred cows too...

Of course I cannot expect people to give up their own personal sacred cows. Your personal sacred cow. And I don't expect it. 

I expect you to be surprised, when your sacred cow is sacrificed. But you won't be able to say you were never warned. Look to your own sacred cows. Are they really who you think they are?