Trained, Uniformed, Kept Out Of the News

Here is a photograph of the Bangladeshi 'Rapid Action Battalion,' basically an armed group of thugs who act as extra-judical death squads for various factions in the Sunni dominated government of Bangladesh. They include Rohingya elements from across the border in Burma, and travel quite easily in and out of what is now a broken down, dysfunctional country - Thailand - and into a number of foreign countries such as Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Australia.

These, are Laskars.

 

Recently there have been a number of incidents, relatively easily concealed by the state-controlled media of Singapore and Malaysia, that have included car-bombings, violent tourist assaults, other things. When you have a state-controlled media you can characterise such things as 'a disgruntled domestic worker who wasn't paid,' type of thing.

There is some good sense in recent Australian politicians' and police force statements about being alert but not afraid or panicked.

Yes, you have to protect yourself.

Citicorp has its back covered, but you don't because you can't afford the lobbyists with which to get any politician to do anything responsible.

Welcome to today's world.

About a month ago I decided to back off a little because I respect and trust Admiral Rogers, the new head of the NSA. He's battling it uphill though.

The guy in the field is always the last to know...

 

But I expect Admiral Rogers to stick his foot down on some of the things that are being forced on the US by entirely outside interests. No Carlyle Group, no Singapore or Sri Lankan, and no House of Saud 'influence.' Politicians do not seem to understand that taking advice from a dictator is a morally bad choice. But big equals better as far as your average politician is concerned.

 

Let's have this conversation again ten years from now and see where it all stands!

 

Your country and mine will still be forced to go on though, ten years from now and ten times that too. So, let's start to get a few strategic things right soon.

 

If any of the strategies were correct, why is 'it' still happening? And I don't want to hear what I already know is a lie - 'lone wolf.'

 

This is my take on what the present security intelligence agencies know: I don't think they know what they are doing at all! Rogers may make some shifts and that, may start to take follower agencies towards the right ideas.

 

 

Scene Of The Crime

If you read pretty much all of the news services and business and finance news services out there you will never, ever, get actual ‘inside’ information and you’ll always be the last to arrive at the ‘scene of the crime,’ as it were. From what I can see, more or less all of the well-known economic commentators around today are reacting to and reflecting on already known facts which in effect are already past history by the time people start talking about it. I think we all know this.

But this is not for the usual reasons everyone assumes. There is a bigger reason.

People genuinely on the inside are creating the next ‘fact’ of the economic world as it will appear in tomorrow’s newspapers. The 'inside' doesn't really consist of 'facts;' not fully formed ones anyway.

This car will not be built -
because the MD, Dany Bahar, got sacked.
What a shame.

These people are taking on important risk, and no reporter or commentator has the same understanding of risk and consequently, even if or where they hear about it there is an amazing reluctance to say anything until far too late.

“This cannot be.” “This will never happen.” “He’s crazy.” Or better yet, “he’s weird.”

And then you get: “I knew about it...” “My editor refused to run it...”

You want to be at the scene of the crime, and preferably before the crime is committed.

There is no story in Russia.

There is no story about oil.

There is no story about the debt ceiling in the US.

And there are a very large number of other things – events, incidents, ‘troubles,’ ‘issues’ – that you will see in the media this week and next week too, and none of them are stories you need to be concerned about or take a great interest in.

Deadly Ebola is just a thing in a Michael Crichton book written about forty years ago.

The story will become the story all too late – after everything you thought you knew comes crashing to the ground. And then you will ‘know’ something different to what you knew before – when you were being assuredly very fully informed...

The crimes are being planned and plotted even as we speak. Or read.

 

Betty Who?

Sometimes I go to one of the BIG cities - you know what I mean: one of the big 'world' hubs. London, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, Chicago... And Sydney.

 

I don't count places like Singapore because they are not really open to the world in the same way that New York or even Berlin is. Nor some of the sprawling places that are dimensionally huge but otherwise very narrow in their localized form of urbanized culture.

Breakout class act -

Betty Who

 

But Sydney is in the big league. You go out to a live performance in Sydney and you immediately sense everything is right on the beat and that you are where it's at.

 

Betty Who is a new 'breakout' talent that is currently taking the world by storm. She's another of these decent handful or so of modern era performers whose energy is electric and who can get all the subtleties out of a well-written song and hit all the notes note-perfect and with a verbal tempo that is high up there on the front edge of the beat, and yet still remain crystal clear.

 

I think she is also another of these song interpretors who are becoming guaranteed success channels for the hit-machine songwriter Bonnie McKee.

 

Well now we have someone that we can replace the ridiculous Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop with as soon as!! A little photoshop work here and there on the dimensions but there is something about the face, isn't there... It is of course a lot better, but, also similar...

 

A class act is never just window-dressing!

 

But a class act is obvious against the ordinary.

 

 

Holistic Materialism...

I don’t know whether you know about this, or have heard the story – well, it isn’t a story, it’s the truth.  Somewhere in the world – in fact in a fairly famous place, where there are very well-known clothing retailers – not so long ago some people came in from out of town, bought a bunch of industrial-scale, if small and old-fashioned , fabric manufacturing businesses and the machinery that came with the businesses... And busted up the machines, and of course closed the manufacturing plants too.

'Repeat' - a German cashmere boutique;

very high quality.

By standard economic theory, there is the view that this type of thing is always part of a larger chain of events, and that the vulnerability of the old manufacturers was due to their own failure to either manage their revenues or to make sufficient profits – and that furthermore, at some point product output and quality is eventually improved, not lessened just because in the erstwhile it seems that some China-made substitute has replaced the better quality but more expensive and unaffordable and usually fictionally ‘ideal’ standard item.

In the specific case to which I was referring in the first paragraph here, the brand names themselves continued on for a while albeit using China-made products of a similar kind to what they had previously been labelling and selling.

London Town is the actual place where the items were being sold and marketed from, and you shouldn’t jump to a quick conclusion about what the products were, or are.

Now I don’t personally believe that in the long run the highest quality of items in question will not return to the shopfronts from which they had been made famous in the first place. And it is the case that right now, the Chinese manufacturing standard at the high end has improved beyond recognition from the bad old days of say the Sixties and Seventies and even the Eighties too.

My own critical thoughts would lean more to the very great and very negative impact - basically around the whole world - of the leeringly too high costs of being a business established inside of any modern city... It is my suspicion that indeed cities themselves, as dynamic architectural and socio-economic/social-cultural entities, have been broken catastrophically by city councillors and various influential interests and city managers. I don’t believe you will see cities as they have been over the last hundred years. They are going to change in ways that will make them categorically quite different from what they were previously. I don’t mean superficial change; I mean categorical alteration of their very nature and meaning.

Cities are viewed by government, at every level of government, as tax centres and revenue sources; but they are not that any longer. They once were that, and the golden goose has been killed.

 

Under Christmas tree,
is staying under the Christmas tree.
No tolls for thee!

If you stuck all the toll road imposts, whether timed or so-called ‘congestion period’ levies, that you wanted, and increased parking fees, and increased rates and offered more and the most complex and ‘creative’ leases that you possibly could come up with, all that you’d end up doing is go broke yourself like Detroit did – as basic volume of economic activity dried up.

But then no politician or corrupt builder and developer ever sees this or cares that such things can or even will happen. We are long past Corbusier but they refuse to acknowledge it. There is no call for more tall buildings, more buildings, or complicated ‘developments.’ It is not in keeping with the era or the economics. But the standard practices go on.  All these developments will continue on until a literal Doomsday.

A friend asked me whether I thought that corrupt money and money made by cheating and/immoral and unethical ideologies still did not reward those people who do these things with a stack of immediate gratification and many material comforts.

But of course it certainly does reward people in such ways.

That is why Doomsday, when it approaches, is not ever accounted for beforehand.

The ‘whole person,’ must have both sides of the equation: the animal dynamic (or atavistic) materialist side, and the unbiased objective idea forms in their connected logic structures apprehensible to the intellect alone and to the inner visions. You must comprehend the meaning of the Italian designer, or else you are in possession of only the metals and the materials, but not the actual intended point of the construction. The best English brand cars are today made by Germans. And the great (of which there were originally four of...) ‘Lord of Cashmere’ – Berk – is today exclusively a net citizen.

Design - in counterpoint...

Not necessarily in the wrong place but

definitely in counterpoint. 

 

So be it. It is a good thing. Doomsday is only a game on the internet. But it is a real consequence in real cities.

So be it, though.

Simon, Tahiti Looks Nice

I think this was something  from out of an ad from the Seventies... I'll have to check.

 

Anyway this was the popular vision of the super-wealthy back around then.

 

Guy, with large format newspaper, wife, SON, private jet, spa on board.

 

 

I might have to explore the current 'visions' of what it 'might' be like being one of the adequately wealthy. I don't like the phrase 'super wealthy;' it just means someone with a certain kind of OCD.

 

The 'wife' in the advert says to the guy: "Tahiti looks good."

 

Guy picks up phone and says: "Simon, Tahiti."

 

Tahiti food today is a modern commercialised pop version of something 'seafood/Polynesian/rice/coconut/etc...'

 

Sad to say though, I like this kind of commercialisation. These sorts of things get to become commercial because lots of people also like them.

 

Yellow curry shrimp (or prawn, if you're not American.)

 

Some of the venues are not so commercial, but hey guess what? Thank god the food is! Nothing so bad as some swish joint where the food is opinionated and ah, rubbish.

 

So, "Simon - Tahiti looks good..."

 

I don't need my brain troubled by too many complicated thoughts right now. Does anybody?

 

Commercial is good. Christmas is just around the bend - commercial is very good.

 

I will be doing commercial, this Christmas. Jesus approves. Trust me. Jesus knows about money. He once turned a coin with Caesar's head on it over in his hands. Found it in a fish salad. Caesar Salad Tahiti, the dish was called. (There's a huge conference going on in Tahiti right now with some HUGE money movers by the way. ; ) Betcha not too many standard media clots know about THIS!) Lot of walking on water expected to be done next year...

 

 

International Resort Hotel Bora Bora.