McChrystal's A Good Man

Did y'all see the interview of General Stanley McChrystal this morning on Bloomberg?

They gave him a hard time peppering him with questions from every corner and interrupting him all the time - I think it was a bit of a tongue-in-cheek ribbing for him to show that they were not intimidated by him, and he can take it. He's a good man with a good sense of humour. That's clear. 

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle - nice helicopter.
Can carry Polonium 210.

Let me tell you about good armchair quarterbacks now - example: 'I know General McChrystal personally...'

I don't but you can and should know everything there is to know about a man like him from just any fifteen minute segment of anything he says. He's transparent. What's there to know? He's a good man. And an intelligent one. You might as well say you know him personally because all the key things you need to know about him are brilliantly obvious. He has a new book out called 'Team of Teams.' And it will be more than just fifteen minutes worth and because I like more of good things rather than less, I will be getting this book.

And now, to some more obscure things. Let's go back and say I'm that armchair quarterback once again. I'm not an operator (which is milspeak for a field operative).

So I don't know anything I'm not supposed to know from any particular confidential source.

My guess is that there is a hit out on someone in Saud. Not King Salman though because he is not the power; he's a front. I think there's a big, sophisticated, and well-funded hit.

Yemen is just a good place for a cover story.
And this is a portable universal ground control station
for a UAV.

Now, I never heard anything in nightclubs in Liechtenstein either nor in places where these contracts are offered. Somewhere, of course, there are experts in wall-digging, who are counting the theoretical money from having removed a few trinkets from Hatton Garden. Not to mention those with abundant glee from some source, enough to blow $200,000,000 for a nice Picasso. These types of people, although good at designing and building special task drones, would require a very good front story so that no one would ever find out who was really behind it.

And seeing as I have more or less pronounced the death sentence on someone, it is total fantasy on my part and the FBI need not bother about how I know these things in advance of them happening. I am a good guesser.

But what YOU do require to know, is what strategies you will be employing WHEN these things take final shape, and the lunacy of the Fed and all the cartel minions and the jerks in the White House wake up one fine morning to the DAWN OF A NEW DAY...

'Promote,' 'Drive' but never Create...

Economic Growth.

If you look at just about every Google entry for 'economic growth' you will see that most commentators and even a large number of accountants parading as economists, refer to 'promoting' or 'driving' economic growth, but never actually creating any.

OECD headquarters is in Paris,
conveniently right next to where all the cafe society
and exciting nightlife is. How coincidental. 

It's not that they don't wish to sound like little gods - they do that kind of thing almost to a fault about every subject really; so it shouldn't trouble them here in this instance either.

Somehow you see, one is meant to think of economic growth as simply 'being here already' and either slightly run-down and in need of stimulation, or being taken command of, and driven around after a rub-down and polish.

Left Wing political parties around the world shy away from expounding any clever ideas about inspiring economic growth - and they stick to the mantra about Right Wing politics being the politics of hate and meanness, which are... But between the two sides, none of them throw anything out there as far as ideas for actually creating new economic growth pathways goes.

You see, 'economic growth' has a very specific technical definition: it means the average annual increase in the liquid value of a market asset. And so if you adjust the statistical base upon which you are announcing any figures, you can present a rising figure that depicts 'economic growth' even though everything is actually contracted in overall real value.

Now that doesn't overtly really happen in modern economies because critics will usually loudly complain about different sets of numbers that put whatever 'rising' number into the real context.

But what does happen, is a militant blindness about any lateral extension of the financial market bases.

Capitalization of carbon credits might in theory be a 'creation' of a unit or segment of economic growth - that's one example.

It's a weak economic driver though, and unlikely to generate monetary velocity, which is the real bane of today's governments whose tax receipts are all highly fragile as a percentage of GDP.

What drinks do which finance ministers
indulge in...? I do see Varoufakis, with his open-necked
Op-Shop shirts, as a martini man; no doubt about it.
He has style. And like all Greeks, can take risk.
Remember, Nick 'the Greek' Dandolo!

It's very risky to espouse new ideas about new economic growth segments - they might not work. And politicians are not interested in society or the community, they are interested in themselves, and the survival of their careers, and the continued support of their backers. Thus I genuinely believe we have reached the limit of what is beneficially possible for modern democracies; they have all reached their terminal failure measure. And all modern nation-states in the forms we have seen them will decline and fail or fall from here.

But economic growth is very possible for the individual. The individual has no such pressure to refrain from trying new ideas and courting failure to an educated extent.

Never before, has there been such enormous opportunity for the private individual to create new wealth and to grow it for him or herself.

However did this exotic and seductive idea get into our closed minds?  

'Seymour, How'd You Get In Here?!'

Is there any point? There's no point really. As I posted in the month that bin Laden was supposed to have been killed in Abbottabad, Russian KGB Agent Yuri Bezmenov's famous words about propaganda and its hold of the mind of the US populace: 'you cannot change their opinions even if you confront them with authentic facts.'

Seymour Hersh is no noir detective yarn's femme fatale dame turning up in unexplained ways inside the detective's office late in the evening. That's for sure.

View from the Hotel d'Angleterre next to
Lake Geneva - Jesse's Cafe Americain
does a lot of Swiss scenes too...!

He's years late in his story that is now being given a lot of media coverage - the whole wild tale about SEAL Team whatever-it-was was openly ridiculed by everyone from Jesse Ventura to, I suppose, me at the time it was all meant to have been happening.

And you all know that I have been saying for years and years - long before his supposed 'death- - the identity called 'Osama bin Laden' was in Pakistan.

Short of alien reptilians, the worst of the conspiracy theories that you have ever heard... falls far short of the truth. 

Seymour Hersh is completely correct of course. And I personally think he has pretty decent sources very fully authenticated and 'secured' by now. Someone funded and resourced with manpower and given the brief to 'prove' something to a public standard, is bound to have their reports take a bit longer to get out than whatever scuttlebutt rapidly reaches the general rumor-mill. And that's all there is to it. Hersh is not an establishment figure, and he has no ulterior motive. He's a journalist.

I don't myself deal in mere rumor either though - I go more along the pathway indicated by Bezmenov, namely that there are authentic facts already out there but people are not alert to them and often deny their reality out of hubris.

It's like 'everyone's' opinion of marzipan: they hate the stuff. It's bitter, deceptively pretty, expensive, and, horrible-tasting. Except that's not marzipan they're tasting. Importers love to say the stuff travels well, but it's actually among the worst food 'travelers' known.

Marzipan direct from a maker in Switzerland is
stunningly, bizarrely different from anything you
have tasted before.

What most people have experienced therefore, is stale marzipan. And so all marzipan gets a dismal reputation.

Barack Obama is not an orator - but somehow the media and the major press players all seemed to be convinced from the start that he was 'an orator.'

In today's world of banking and finance, there are authentic facts out there, but if you went by the general media, Wall Street is the heart of all money, and ZIRP is the benchmark market rate for money. And nothing percent is the benchmark ROR via dividends, although a limitless era of annual capital gains nevertheless attends these conditions. In other words, things go up without a Saturn V engine, and they break through the Karman Line by absolute fiat. There are no underlying drivers and there need not be.

Geneva, a nice quiet place, full of secrets. And chocolate,
and marzipan.

And the immorality of the Fed is justified by the ever-upward performance of the DJIA.

No analysts are required. Mathematics, and geometry are irrelevant.

But why does it all taste so bitter in the mouth?

Personally, I love marzipan. 

The Wallpaper Life

Let us forget, for a while, all of the problems of the world, and open the newspapers and absorb the immediate media cycle, and see if we can find some bright ideas, and some entertaining items...

Nope. I cannot.

And I suppose my own well-tried default, whenever in this position, is usually to fall back on food, and drink.

I must make a slight confession in that I have become rather comfortable with the progress of one particular business venture that is on-going with me. I have several on the go at the moment, all related although separate as actual businesses.

In this feeling of comfort, it is more the ambiance of life that interests me, rather than the substance or real content. I want a kind of 'wallpaper lifestyle' right now...

I guess I've become more than just a little bit of a recluse too; not genuinely one, more like, what do they call it now - 'the closed-in Millennials?' Well of course I am clearly not so young as to really be one, but I have always been a fashion dilettante and I think I am happy to fall in step with the nouvelle vague.

Even so, life in my world is not the bright sunshine of very high speed driver-sim computer games, nor the dark dystopia of 'Halo' wargaming on an 'alien software' PC.

I have decided that life in my world - regardless of whatever happens in the outside world - is going to be something of an 'invisible gated estate.' Something like a sepia detective fantasy - not entirely black or dark, but at least, shadowy, or in twilight. Not noir; that's too austere for me - I like color in the femme fatale's dresses:

All the doors are locked, and Mike Hammer or Sam Spade can sense the violets (which would mean an Orris root butter base in an expensive perfume, probably) even before one of them enters the private office. I could go on, but it just means the detective is not totally surprised by the presence of the hot blonde dame in his office.

"How did you get in here?"

"I came down the chimney - ho, ho, ho.' She answers, in a slow sardonic drawl.

"So waddya want?" I ask (that is, Mike Hammer does).

"My employer has a most intriguing proposition for you."

 (To Be Continued...)

A Superior Win

American Pharoah beat good horses to win this year's Run For The Roses at Churchill Downs.

The horse's name is officially spelled 'pharoah' although usually, the word 'pharaoh' is spelled with an 'ao.'

A strong horse with a decisive galloping action -
Kentucky Derby winner American Pharoah.

This was one of the most dominant displays I have witnessed. The winner traveled three and four wide from the extreme outside barrier (one-in, though, to barrier '17' with a scratching before the race), and yet kept complete cover over the fast leaders at every step and around every sweeping curve.

The placegetters were by no means tiring at the end themselves but the winner climbed all over them with seeming ease.

It was a remarkable win.

I don't like to tip fairly short-priced near favorites in a packed field long distance race, but this horse was always going to be difficult to beat, even though this year's field was strong and the eventual race run very true to previous form.

One thing that stands out to seasoned race followers is the dismal performances of the horses that usually run in Dubai - where there is no betting allowed, and possibly as a result, where the competition is not as fierce as it is elsewhere.

Alcohol and roses,
and wood and mint and silk... What's missing?

Money is a leveler or an equalizer in that sense. And you have to draw that lesson out of these events as far as market investing and just plain domestic economics and street economics goes right now. Banks are effectively, running in the equivalent of the Dubai Cup... Which is fundamentally a race for amateurs.

No alcohol, no gambling, no scantily-clad women. Seems like a world of castrated pharaohs, to me!