Take Me To Dinner

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:

Since You've Been Gone

"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?

Love Is A Two-Way Dream

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...

Is It Time, Morgiana?

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.

Some People Never Learn

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.