Be My Vice

So this ex-chef of Kim Jong-Un tells the Daily Mirror that young Kim polishes off TWO - not one but TWO - bottles of Roederer Cristal champagne at a dinner sitting. He tells the newspaper that Kim is very fond of Cristal champagne. And Kobe beef. And, it sounds like, all kinds of expensive food.

And, I've noticed in pictures of him, that he wears top grade Panama hats and he is also regularly seen wearing brand new Charvet shirts... Sounds to me like he's read Peter Mayle's exquisite book 'Expensive Habits.' He must give his tailor bloody nightmares, though. Two, three state dinners and he's put on another 100 pounds.

It won't be the hydrogen bomb that'll be exploding in North Korea, it'll be young Kim himself.

Anyway there's something about Cristal champagne that I'd better explain to Kim - and to all those black rappers who apparently think this is a great drink - giving a bottle of Cristal to someone is a 'sign' among the elite of a certain tribe who shall not be named. 

A 'sign' that you're about to be bumped off. Or de-throned, anyway.

100 Years - Of Cool

So, as you know - I'm sure that you do know by now - John Malkovich has written a movie that he stars in directed by Robert Rodriguez (Spy Kids), which will not be seen for a hundred years. It's a marketing concept and project conducted in partnership with Louis XIII Cognac (House of Remy Martin). The movie is locked away in a time capsule.

Louis XIII and
100-year old barrels

If you look at the comments below the YouTube teaser video clips about it, there is just an abundance of criticism about it all, from the usual raft of bitter cynics and so on.

On the one hand, as far as public appeal is concerned, it's probably not a good sign that I like something... And I like this.

The muse writes
from a 100 years in the future...

Malkovich is just a phenomenon. So many people apparently detest him. And for me, this is always a good sign. He may be difficult to deal with, I don't know. I don't know him. He may be egocentric, but I don't know that either. He may be whatever the hell they say or think that he is and I don't even care. If I were a producer or director I would have him any day. 

He's never had the scripts - or at least the stories - that would provide the entertainment paradise what is missing from this talent.

They're all out there, of course. Producers don't pay for writers anymore though. Which is why they just managed to kill off the Bond Franchise. Amazing. But these fools did it.

Well done guys! Like the barbarians that sacked Rome, you have become legends.

100 years from now... Some Philip K. Dick is telling us right now what it will be like and no one is watching. Or, no one has had the opportunity to hear from them. Why is that? Really, why?

This is what I mean by 'we're entering a new Dark Age.' You CANNOT convince those who have domineered over the public purse, the academic frontier, the political discourse, and the general media, that they need to slash their wrists for what they have been worth to human race - which is exactly nothing. The Dark Ages come when clever people abandon the worn out, and embrace the new, and the exciting. It's not that 'science' or 'progress' is wrong, it's that the wrong types have claimed it as some province over which they have ownership and absolute control. Metaphorically, across all walks of life, people placed Dracula@BloodBank, and then expected that the 'proof' and the 'evidence' would still contain some semblance or life and reality - whereas it's all just wraiths and wisps of smoke now. 

One hundred years from now...

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.