Where The Light Shines Brightest

Every single day I’m tempted to turn around and suddenly make one of these posts a total tour de force for you. Not yet though, not quite just yet.

The great Gary Vaynerchuk says the most common belief about the age of the Internet is that ‘all content is free.’ And he goes on to say though that the belief is slightly mistaken; he believes we are living in the ‘Age of Thank You.’ An interesting thought. He means it’s important to thank the money that actually flows anywhere! He’s right of course.

I'm not saying where this is -

it is not Domaine Romanee-Conti

You won’t remember now but several years ago I suggested people buy Domaine de la Romanee-Conti bottles of wine – don’t know why they were so relatively inexpensive then, they certainly were the best of the Burgundies then and they still are now. If you were able to get them –and these were odd lots, incomplete cases – but the prices of some of them have gone up over hundredfold. $200 to $20,000+!

I think in investing it is most important to understand - or at least to try to comprehend the mindsets of the people in your market, the mentality of the people around you, even the mindsets of those who appear to be the erstwhile leaders of everything. I must confess I have never seen so much rubbish paraded around as political leadership, banking or economics and finance genius, producing and directing talent in Hollywood... All sorts of things where the identities entertain us with their fantasies – certainly journalism and editorial content in the flagship press carriers. What is going on? Is this the end? A kind of post-industrial, neo-Gothic terminal decadence.

Amazingly I noticed some fairly heavy-duty press machines start to repeat some folklore I had personally been spreading around about how many truly wealthy people there are in the world – they are all gravitating to this mythical figure of around ‘30,000.’ Western super-rich people. That isn’t right; that is tongue-in-cheek stuff about the numbers of clients of the biggest tax-dodgers in Switzerland and Luxembourg and so on. The true figure is more likely around 80,000. But it isn’t more than that.

The DRC Montrachet is produced at around 250 cases a year, the Conti about 450. If all the rich folk wanted to buy a case each – well they simply couldn’t. And there is a huge error buffer if the folklore about who has the wealth is incorrect in any event.

So can you ‘see’ the mindset of the people in your own market?

I mean right now, and also how the passage of a few months will alter their behaviour?

People are saying the wealthy are running out of things to buy.

I don’t care what you say though, the rich do NOT all own DRC; it isn’t mathematically possible. The fact is, you can be as rich as you like in cash, but unless you know what actually exists, you only THINK you own it all!

Here is something that exists – an Australian EDM singer with some Asiatic ancestry there somewhere.  And a really great singer at that:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discounting 'Easy' Cash

As you know – and I’m sure that you do know it – Monaco is a tax-free sovereign state that is not an actual member of the European Union.

A Californian in Monaco!

Well, a Ferrari California anyway.

While Jean-Claude Juncker is being widely criticized by the media everywhere for his past history as an important  functionary in one of the most pro-tax dodging countries in the world, namely Luxembourg, no one gives a damn about tiny little Monaco with its mere 30-some odd thousand citizens, and its zero income tax regime.

Certainly, it does have a 30% social security contribution by employers within the total salary and wage package everyone participates in, but then, we are still really only talking about an in-put cost on outputs and there is no other tax on productive capital; I’m not certain that there isn’t some kind of arrangement about the sale of real estate, but this is not ever detailed to outsiders. And let’s face it - Monaco has the most expensive real estate on earth...

Monaco does use the euro and gets to stick its own motifs on the currency, and it is a co-operative full member of the Euro-Zone customs provisions, but it does not participate in any other specifically EU treaty or law or national contractual obligation.

Which brings me to my point:

Modern political systems and laws and policies are all motivated by the pre-commitment to volume as the most cheaply attained access to power, money, wealth, and human progress.

Goldman Sachs earlier this week issued a momentous pronouncement to the effect that high returns were not going to happen anywhere for a long time to come.

I’m glad they think so because in a world where every professional investor’s most hard-won insights become common knowledge overnight, I can’t worry about what everyone else does. They know everything already and haven’t got their minds open for anything new. Goldman Sachs knows it all. And the public listens.

For myself I cannot see anything but high returns.

Though not from volume.

Why do I restrict myself to high volume businesses in which a secular Depressive monetary velocity condition has been created by the same politicians and in-name-only ‘bankers who direct everyone to the volume option only?’

Gaudy Night -
Also a novel by Sayers

Here is the difference between a leader and an authority... You see, what we have around us to today, are authorities, not leaders. A leader eats last. Authorities have the first right to all the things that inspire greed and the greedy; as much is said in the Tao Te Ching too - about rulers and leaders.

 

“Let us have one other gaudy night: call to me, all my sad captains; let’s mock the midnight bell.” Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra.

It is midnight in the world.

 

Why They Hate Assange

“The fevered imagination of the British ruling classes...” What a bloody rude and impertinent thing to say by the BBC.

I read that phrase in an article, not a recent article -, in a BBC archive about the beginnings of the New Age Movement.

The article itself is absolutely ridden through with the names of relatives and in-laws of my own father – and thus, I suppose of myself too!

I think I ought to know a little about these people!

Looks a bit like Bruce Dern!

Put it this way,’ Sir George *’ was not quite the person the media likes to cast him as having been. They have their own reasons for intimating that he was a rich, romantic eccentric, and nothing more. He certainly was not a technical scientist as far as I know but then again, I do know that he knew Rosalind Franklin the discoverer of DNA and I also know his private talking was different to when he spoke to students and the general layman public.

Now some things about Sir George still affect real, living people today who are in difficult spots – and I’m not going to create more trouble for them by saying anything too obviously and too publically.

Sir George was an establishment Britisher – but you see, of the day though; not of today. Today’s English establishment are an entirely different class and breed (lol – said that deliberately of course!).

Sir George is widely regarded as the founder of the New Age Movement. And that means that he would not have found favour with say, J. Edgar Hoover. Some current era Republicans would probably like to say the New Age Movement is a Communist thing.

And it may be that.

Sir George’s father bequeathed his estate – Attingham Park – to the British National Trust, and today it is also the home of an ‘educational’ Summer School that exists to network with American academics and students. If you were of a sinister mentality, you could rush to the thought that Attingham Park is a kind of an Anglo-American spy network – certainly a way of recruiting new network members. Which it is of course... But where it once was one of the mainstream British establishment’s own networks, it is if anything now a competing network with the extra-national mercantile elite that has found its way into Whitehall, definitely since the time of Thatcher.

Now I found I had to delete a small segment that ought to logically follow next in this flow of things, but it’s not quite the right time to say it all just yet.

What I am endeavouring to demonstrate to you however, is sufficient background history so that you can observe things did not happen in a vacuum nor did they all fall down in the last shower of rain.

It is not general public knowledge (although it does exist tucked away in an obscure part of the Western Australian State Auditor General’s Report) that the (don’t know what else you could call it) MI6 field operational team was set up and trained with massive Australian government funding on one side of Rottnest Island in order to then to go off and intercept undersea cabling in order to bust in on various Asian government officials private telephone conversations – in the so-called ‘Five Eyes’ scheme supposedly on behalf of its final beneficiary, the US Government. I know I‘ve mentioned here the name of the actual cover company in New Zealand that was used – and that’s never been published anywhere (although I did extract the section after a short while).

Anyway a lot of people don’t understand about ‘tradition.’ Jean-Claude Biver, the CEO of Hublot watches, talks extensively about tradition and how he prefers to match the old with innovation and with a vision of ‘tomorrow.’

Sir George also had a vision of tomorrow. He said not to be afraid of the coming world.

 

Sazerac Cocktail

Myself, I am very Old Fashioned. Some people think the Vieux Carre, or at least the Sazerac Cocktail were in fact the very first cocktails ever made. That is not quite correct but certainly, there is a line of history from their origination in France into New Orleans where the Sazerac first made its appearance in the New World. Thus, if the ‘real’ truth be known, in every New World, the ‘innovation’ there, is something that came from a forgotten, older world.

It’s all the same stuff, which goes round and around and around. People forget.

It pays not to forget though. Where the actual sources are...

 

The Nuances of Doctrine (lol)

It’s useless my trying to explain here how it is that certain bits and pieces of information turn up on these pages. I have mentioned previously that I am from one of the original Shell Trust membership families - this kind of thing counts a lot as to who your natural associations are over a lifetime, I suppose.

 

The Aviary in Chicago -
don't remember it being this good!

Anyway. Internet network communications are not by any means the first or likely to be the last attempts by various governments to keep track of ordinary people for some obscure purpose not immediately obvious to the casual observer. Herod the Great did it a while back, and he may have had the objective of murdering the entire line of politically powerful Aaronic Temple Priests by mischievously employing census records; a fact that casts its shadows till today and the so-called ‘Temple Mount’ situation recently in the news.

A lot of underhanded state power often comes through the seemingly mundane.

Here is an interesting man in today’s world of commercial perfumery:

Subrenat, on left

He is, both a petanque champion player, as well as the head of the European Regulatory Committee overseeing the commercial manufacture and sale of perfumes. Perfumes are of course, a potentially very dangerous product, utilising, as they do, various industrial chemicals and petrochemical by-products and molecular compositions, some of which explode and some of which can cause cancer. Perfume manufacture – synthetic perfume manufacture – requires regulation and licensing. Jean Pierre was chief perfumer at Avon – an American company that maintains a list of millions of customers and virtual customer representatives around the globe.

Hubert Humphrey, another industrial chemist by training, is generally never linked to Brownie Mae Humphrey, later Brownie Wise, the marketing genius behind Tupperware.

And neither is Jean-Pierre Subrenat generally linked in the media with Jean-Jacques Subrenat – a committee member of ICANN (the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.)

Anyway it is common knowledge in the intelligence communities that both Avon and Tupperware and some suppliers and contractors to McDonalds are in fact part of the United States Intelligence machinery – in particular anything to do with blown plastics and Styrofoam and also ISO, though ISO is an internationally-co-operative engineering and systems management organisation.

All the technical and manufacturing licence data to do with a vast swathe of plastics, petro-chemical, pharmaceutical, electrical, advanced engineering activities – goes through a centralised data collection stream and archival system in Europe and the USA. This is how Boeing knows who to blame for capstan wiring faults, or ‘O’ ring seals on space-shuttles, for instance.

The modern world, being such a complex place, with so many tiny facets that could break down at any moment into a catastrophic contagion of disasters, requires decent management and control of technical systems and also of human involvement with those systems.

And I agree with that.



'Vespers-in-Bed'

It is not a reason for alarm or concern. If people in high places fall out though, and anger, resentment, and pay-back, becomes contemplated, then there are reasons for alarm and concern. And... there is also nothing any one of us can do about it except watch it play through.

 

I recommend sitting back and drinking cocktails and eating cocktail food - perhaps the James Bond favourite 'Vesper Martini,' or the French-American-German (would you believe) Commander's Palace Sazerac. The Sazerac, will come next post...

And The Winners...

1. Terravista (5 yr old gelding by Captain Rio from Parfore);

2. Chautauqua (4 yr old grey gelding by Encosta de Lago from Lovely Jubly);

3. Lankan Rupee (5 yr old gelding by Redoute's Choice from Estelle Collection).

 

Terravista, a lovely chestnut 5 year old, took out the Darley Classic today in Melbourne. I wasn’t really watching for this horse but it won in a hotly contested finish with the two horses I was most interested in, running second and third.

Terravista

The thing about major races that a lot of people fail to think about, is that there is big prize money for virtually every position all the way back to eighth. Horse racing exists for the breeding industry, and so, once a horse can fill a particular higher level – or ‘class’ of racing – the prize moneys are spread around in order to support and encourage animals to get in and to stay in those types of races; and of course, as a result, for breeders to look to producing that superior class of animal.

It is my own personal belief that the two that filled the minor placings – are being prepared more for next year’s Southern Hemisphere Autumn, rather than continue to try and prove anything more in this campaign. Even so, they won $180,000 and $90,000 respectively, for running second and third just in this race alone.

I thought it was a fascinating race, down the straight at Flemington – no turns – and this permitted the winner, who normally is used to going around in an opposite direction in races around an actual circuit, to still maintain the same leading-foot style for ‘left-to-right’ (clockwise circuit) racing that it is used to without having to adjust to the opposite way of going around.

 

Corthay's shoes...

typical French stuff, and good for New Orleans!

This race itself proved nothing other than that any of the first four or even five are extremely good race horses.

It’s very hard to try and convince someone who is not a racing fan to ‘understand’ and appreciate what good horse racing is all about. But hey, when you are back on the creaking deck-boards, late into the warm, dusky evening, and your polished Corthay cordovans are pampering your worked feet, and there is someone to talk to over your Bourbon, you need to have a topic of conversation that fits in with the atmosphere. It’s either Hank Williams singin’ or Jerry Lee Lewis honky-tonk rock-and-roll playing, or the breeding of the black type class race horses of the year and of the coming year. What else could it be?!

 

A brilliant conversationalist

The orange sun goes down, the paddle steamer splish-splashes down the river, the Bourbon stings your tongue, a meteor flashes across the night sky. Ah, life is good and has ever been thus.

Try and convince old money otherwise...