So there's this brand new, exciting video clip advert for the latest Mclaren 570 GT out - and personally I love it. Well, hey I mean if I absolutely had to, I'd be able to live with the car too... Anyway the ad has some tremendous backing music which, from memory is off this video short of the planet Earth at night taken from space, and some fast-action time-lapse clips of radio telescopes in various places around the globe. It was a singularly brilliant film short but it has been pulled from everywhere on the net, and there are now only very poor copies with rather average and uninspired backing music. VCCP, the creative artists' management group behind the recent series of Mclaren ads, is probably responsible for forcing the take-downs and I wonder how long they can go not showing the entire production credits for this particular ad... The other ads in the current series for Mclaren aren't too shabby by any stretch, but this one is really making headway into the customer mind-space that had been previously occupied virtually exclusively by Rolls Royce and Maserati and to a very small extent the Mercedes top-end product line. This ad is making me re-consider whether the alternate James Bond is going to be handed this model of the latest Mclarens to do the really serious work in!
I'm always a little amused whenever people talk about safes - you know, the kind that you're supposed to keep money in. Well, I mean, the good ones cost such a lot in the first place. You have this money, and then you buy the safe, and the next thing - there's nothing to stick in the damn thing. So you store your cigars and your Napoleon, I guess.
This guy's carrying his Doettling safe around
like a coffee flask! But he's an old fashioned guy - he's
reading the shipping news...
Here I am calling this blog something to do with 'old money' and now all money is about to become an ancient barbarous relic - if we let Draghi have his way! God they seriously want to wreck everything they touch, don't they? How do these fools even get to where they are... Why bother asking such a silly question; the answer is plain. Put it this way, he certainly wasn't ever elected to anything. Money... What an old fashioned concept!
Let's just all do away with the stuff. lol. This is the year, boys and girls. Things are happening this year. Nothing that the Illuminati knows about though. Illuminati. What a joke. They couldn't illuminate their way out of a brown paper bag. They can't get past the old fashioned dollars in the way.
Gandini and some of his masterpieces
This is Marcello Gandini. You can see the masterpiece in the middle has already been fucked around with by the Draghi's of the regulatory world. It is no longer the same in this pic as the one in the last post we made here. It is no longer streamlined and it is no longer beautiful; what you see is a vestige. The secret of money is making it, not hording it. And not endlessly screwing around with it. NIRP, ZIRP, QE and all of these other schemes are lunatic stuff. They are the fiddling around with, the bolting-on of, and the generally screwing up of, the fundamental concept of what money is. Money is anonymous, divisible, portable, a store of value, liquid. Modern money is none of those things. And you don't want to touch any of the stuff.
This is Sir Richard Rogers - the man in charge of the Lloyd's
building in London, that place with all the plumbing on the outside.
He's a genius, as were his under-architects, and there was a point
to his 'madness.' Just look at his face... My god, he's like Rutger Hauer
in that monologue in Blade Runner.
Another secret of money is that great money comes from great people. Great people have this visceral quality you know, it reflects on their faces, or maybe - it affects their physical outside from the power of who and what they are on the inside.
On the surface, we appear to have been living in a world in which the ordinary individual has no power over the vast corporate entities which envelop the globe, and subsequently too, the placed politicians that are 'put up jobs' and sit in various roles of 'leadership.' But one of the outstanding characteristics - and flaws - of the corrupt system under which we seem to be living, is that the types of characters used by large corporate entities are what the Russian KGB used to call 'functionaries...' And if you care to ascribe the kinds of underhanded and surreptitious violence that spy thriller writers sheet home to the KGB, then the story there is that generally, 'functionaries' were the first to be 'offed' by the KGB!
Who is this man, do you know
this man?
At this point one might do well to recall that our friend Mr. J-C. Juncker was caught up in the Luxembourg scandal to do with MI6 and the Luxembourg Secret Service (or part of it) and the Luxembourg government and/or Royal Family and 'some scheme to blow up various targets in order to create the impression of terrorism...' Oh, did you not know there was such a scandal? Surely you have heard of the Bommeleer scandal? (A paragraph was extracted from around here!) But let's go back to the trait of the bureaucrat, or functionary, better said. It's actually not okay that they tamper with the ideas of proper engineers and creators and real scientists under the pretense of public safety (or more likely the demands of crying competing corporates losing out!). Human beings have to stop being treated like idiots. As long as they still are treated that way, they will continue to behave recklessly, abusing technology and not treating serious, dangerous, and important matters with respect.
See how perfect, how streamlined this thing
was before the functionaries started their messing around?
Let me lighten things up a bit, however. The world is not in so dire a place or condition as surface appearances indicate. Underneath what you can see, there are lots of things you cannot see. Lots of things even the world's most sophisticated and well-supplied intelligence agencies do not see. And I say this because of what you can adduce from the great designers of the world - where do they really come from, which schools do they go to to acquire their unique abilities? Do you see what I mean? These kinds of people are simply, there. Suddenly, like brilliant shooting stars they appear from seemingly out of nowhere, and they change the landscape. And they change history. In fact, they change your destiny. How you can tell, though, the great and the good, from the extremely bad, is because the good is always also the beautiful, the sleek, the streamlined, the truly, truly, wonderful; maybe even wondrous. And it is coming.
(This is just a tone poem below. A bit like a Miles Davis kind of thing).
So the Prudent Beavers (that's what my wife calls the nice people on the Wall Street Bear professional investors' forum) were talking last night about the price of hamburgers.
Top Iowa hamburger
Hamburgers are one of those things that are fundamental, and in theory ought to be difficult to screw up - but they are screwed up in so many ways, one of the most egregious in the USA, being this tendency to believe that 'bigger is better.' Bigger is better almost inevitably takes one to the rising of prices!
Every serious adult club-person's 'thing.' - The pickle
Of course one has to admire the whole adventure of trying to raise any price in today's world, where even, apparently, the 500 Euro note is going to be taken out of the market because (according to the authorities) it is being used by criminals and those wishing to avoid taxes! My my. In LA there is a restaurant whose very reason for existence is the vending of - water. And they have found ways to increase the prices of various brands of water. Amazing. If you could, I suppose, convince the top 1 per cent to buy a certain thing for a ridiculous premium, it makes a lot of economic sense as a manufacturer since you have far less delivery and storage and frictional costs servicing a tiny market compared with a vast one. Your profit margin would make Martin Shkreli envious. I mean this is the ultimate marketing coup isn't it - getting someone to pay a huge amount of money for a short experience of, well, water... This bottle of water retails for around $2,500:
"I admire your courage, Miss, er -?" "Trench, Sylvia Trench. And your name is?" (With sarcasm): "Bond, James Bond."
(Add caption?) What d'you mean 'add caption!' Everyone knows what gets said here!
You see... Sylvia Trench is the name you need to remember; but you don't. And what's more, the delivery is the important part, as well as the approach: 'I admire your courage, Miss -?' There's wa-a-a-ay not enough people who consistently read here for me to open out fulsomely on some important current, key issues. You don't want some significant fact to disappear beneath the waves of limited marketing, and then people later on say, oh well it was out there in the public... El Cliffo - the Big One - ain't coming just yet anyway, so you don't really need me to announce anything too much ahead of the curve. So why not just ride with the benign, silly, frivolous diversions... Just for the moment.
My choice for 'Sylvia Trench?' Real proper evening dress and all
So, the proposition (story proposition) thus far, is this: Sylvia Trench (Bond's actual love interest, but that was never actually played out in the follow-up movies for a variety of reasons), is - for the sake of the story - let's say the daughter of some highly-placed, and sensitively-placed, government official or private corporation boss, maybe banker. And she goes completely missing for months, many months, perhaps six months. And then just as suddenly, she re-appears, and the security intelligence people are swung into the show to uncover where she went, what she did, and why. She has little or no memory of the missing time, and she re-appears as a slightly changed personality, and her family are very concerned. What's it all about? Is it sinister? Of course, it must be sinister; there can be no doubt. What has changed about Sylvia Trench... Well, for one thing, Sylvia Trench is more seductive, more worldly, more knowledgeable, about just about everything, than even the infamous James Bond himself. Can you image such a thing! I'm stuck with the name, I'm afraid. It was, however unfortunately, the name Fleming employed for this seductress, and we're stuck with it now. Or are we?
Medvedev says NATO has created a new Cold War. I say, well done chaps. That's what we need. Another war. Might as well have us one of them-a cold one of's while we're at it. I don't think the West can win it though. Not anymore. The people who really knew how to do these sorts of things are all dead and gone. I mean just look at the way Hollywood has self-destructed. This is the mindset we are dealing with. This is the 'new' generation of producers and directors. All idiots. Here is a pic that is not necessarily an example of 'everything about the composition is wrong -' but it's pretty close to!
The scene composition is totally wrong - gambling chips wrong, guy in the centre just wrong, Bond's shirt cuffs wrong, shot angle badly wrong...
And it demonstrates the mindset of a group of contemporary people who have their grubby little fingers all over various levers of power in the world today, and who have been rather rapidly evaporating value and substance and turning what had been a hard-fought, hard-won and evolutionary progress in Western society, into worthless sand. I won't always be simply criticizing things because of the way they currently are; I won't need to. Change is already on its way. Things will be different, of course - the winners will come from different places than before, but there will be a tell-tale familiarity about them. Perhaps they will be a touch more, um, luminous...
Sour apple Martini
You see the one big mistake being made at the moment is that people 'at the top' have this belief about forcing stuff down the throats of everyone else. And what they don't get is that if you piss off your servants, they tend to start to do things to your tea when your back is turned. I don't believe Goldman Sachs is in control. Nor are the Rothschilds. And especially not NATO! These are all slaves who have been able to turn on their masters for a short time and as they say, no tyrant like an empowered slave. Financial markets are terminally damaged - it doesn't matter what the news media says. The whole thing is 'done for.' The story of Greece v. the Euro-Zone isn't even close to being over yet. The Euro-Zone 'experiment' is a disaster of mammoth proportions that will take decades to undo if it ever is able to be undone properly.
Much better composition
But the most extravagant and obvious break from reality is the difference between Los Angeles today and places like say, Dubai, or Hong Kong, or Sydney or even Marbella in Spain, in spite of the Euro-Zone propaganda about Spain's 'economy.' These people have no clue. What they are doing is flying in the face of reality on the ground, and presenting a fiction in the media, and trying to extract moneys from taxpayers around Europe and much the same thing is also happening inside the USA albeit there is this pretense of the Fed being able to 'sell debt' to the rest of the world. If that were really true then the roads in Los Angeles would be just a touch better than they are. Once again, in spite of popular - and false - belief, Ian Fleming never made the mistake of saying Russia was bad. He said SPECTRE was bad. And what people generally never remember is that SPECTRE had operatives inside NATO and inside the UK who stole that nuclear missile or bomb off that Royal Air Force Vulcan bomber... Today, real James Bond would be working on the good guys' side. And most probably, they would fit him out with a red Ferrari LaFerrari. He'd probably go back to a sub-compact Beretta. The Glocks and the Walthers can't function properly with all the additional weight from the add-ons.
And the film theme would be slightly updated, well, twisted, maybe...
Down to his last 5 million dollars, the Dubai-based oil trader spends it on a new, grey-coloured LaFerrari. An excellent choice of investment. Well, it's not really an investment of course, more of a thing to do with your last 5 million dollars.
What is it - pewter grey? Plastic modelling kit grey?
All the little oil traders, you see, are in any case hiding inside their oil jars, listening to hear for the slave girl Morgiana to come by so that each might ask her: 'is it time yet, Morgiana?' I mean it's just so easy to make money now isn't it? As the affluence laps at the soft pink toes of the little Dubai tax dodgers and thieves - that affluence which springs from the global Central Banking hoodlums and their ZIRP/NIRP 'money...' What could possibly disturb the equanimity of all the affluent, living it up in their daydream condos... But is it time, Morgiana? After all, my La Ferrari will lose 3 million dollars as soon as it trundles out of the showroom, and my German Bund notes will buy me but a meagre breakfast after ten years holding onto them. Is it time, maybe, to buy... ...gold? 'Not yet, oh affluent and clever thief. Wait just a little longer. You have, after all, still 5 million dollars left to bide your time with.'
The moral of this story is - well, you know it - the thief intends to do something when he jumps out of the box, er sorry, jar, he is sitting in.
Preparations for the Chinese Lunar New Year are well underway across the whole globe. Inside China itself it has become a tradition now that people - usually those who work in cities - return to their families outside of those cities, and sometimes quite far away in fact, to celebrate the festival. On the one hand the Western media has it that China is suffering some kind of downturn... The kinds of statistics which are quoted in the media do not hold the same significance to me that they might to those who dabble in Exchanges that put up moving prices for people to bet on and have stops run through on and all of that saga. It's all very clever. Very, you know, technological.
Cathay First Class Lounge -
part of it, anyway
I am much more personally interested, in things such as whether or not the First Class Flight Lounges are going to be fairly empty or not! Or whether the Vodka Mandarin tray is well topped-up regularly. You know, it's kind of a 'James Bond' lifestyle thing... ; )
And they have at the service desk in there, a supply of the new Cathay Dragon-branded USB sticks - complimentary; you can just ask for one and they'll give it to you for nothing (that is to say, it's all contained in the excellent pricing arrangement they currently have for your tickets). What is the news in the world today? Well, the top crook judge, friend of now dead Chief Gangster Lee of Singapore, also died himself this week. This guy, whose name is not worth remembering anyway, spent his life doing his master's bidding from the bench of the Supreme Court. And now he's dead and has to follow his master to wherever these sorts of characters go after they depart from this Earth. Absolute Mandarin Spirit...! In the First Class Lounge. Places in the clouds. Not for the unworthy. Wonder what Gong Li is doing this CNY? She will not be in Singapore of course. I hope they give her at least part of the Cathay Dragon brand ambassador mission. That would be something special. This is a truly first class airline.
