You Know It Too

It's plainly silly to carry on as if you can't realize or accept that digital 'virtual' currencies are here to stay. They are here, and they are here to stay. Why do we even need to spell out the 'why...'

Paper (actually, literally 'pieces of something') money is strictly a local circulation item; and that is what they always were really, in any case. 

On the one hand the internet is littered with people proclaiming various (frankly all fairly similar) ways to make a lot of money, on the other hand you almost never will see someone explicitly telling you precisely how they actually did it, or demonstrate to you that they are doing it in front of your eyes.

It's sort of a tuxedo, isn't it

For all the years that I have been in the money business, either in government positions early on, and then in private banks, and eventually just in business for myself, I have never seen the exact same way (of making seriously sizable money) duplicated by different people - it's very idiosyncratic, as far as I have been able to observe.

Millionaires - that is, actual self-made ones - are very rare. And what one of them will do is characteristically different to what the next will be inclined to do. Sure, there are obvious basic management tools they pretty much all use, but that is always confused typically by accountants and not-hands-on observers for the generative acts and thinking which actually creates the money in-flow.

It's all about personality.

At least that's what suggests itself to me, having watched a lot of people make money from scratch.

But let me show you one of the reasons for the confusion about what goes on in these cases:

We live in a world absolutely filled with 'substitution' phenomena. It looks like 'it' and so it is it... Not.

It's a modern photograph, but it's still
printed as a 'black & white'

There is no way anyone who grew up knowing what Chanel No 5 originally was, is going to be convinced that what you pay atrocious money for now is really 'Chanel No 5' as it was. You pay for the packaging, the 'official' name on the bottle, but that's all. You're being passed off with a false product in every possible way - and yet it's possible I could get sued for even saying this, regardless of the simple fact that what I'm saying cannot be argued against rationally. There is simply not sufficient raw ingredients in the world to be able to make actual 'Chanel No 5' in the volumes required by today's market - and so the producers make what they convince themselves is an adequate substitute for the real thing.

And as time goes by, fewer and fewer people are around who know what the original version of a thing might have been, with the consequence that Wikipedia, for example, is just a pack of gibberish when it comes down to it in many many instances.

Another stunning example of cultural illiteracy, and yet one that is rather 'modern cultural' is the so-called Ice Cream Sundae. What you get looks like what the thing is imagined to have originally looked like, when the lower classes walked past the huge glass windows in early last Century New York Manhattan district where hotels like the Knickerbocker were (and still are in that case). But apart from that visual rough similitude, there is nothing that is authentic about what you are getting.

As you know (well I hope you do know) Pierre or maybe his son Griswold Lorillard either invented or caused to be invented, the Tuxedo, and its color is blue not black. Black and White photographs give the unguided observer the idea that the thing is 'black.' You might as well say the jacket er, was potentially sepia too, on that basis!

And the Martini, invented by Martini di Arma di Taggia, of the previously-mentioned Knickerbocker Hotel in Manhattan, is NOT made from dry vermouth and gin. And nor is it made from sweet vermouth and gin either.

It is made from the combination of sweet AND dry vermouths, and the best quality gin. And it was made in 1912 for the tycoon John D. Rockefeller. 

A real Martini - has the same hue as a natural colored chill-filtered
Scotch Malt Whiskey

I mean the whole point of being in a 'higher society' and having the use of great wealth, is that the experiences you can sustain are (are able to be) very sophisticated and even you might say, complicated.

There is no call there for 'substitution racket' tactics because of 'austerity!'

In the same way, I personally have exact and correct knowledge of how a genuine authentic 'Knickerbocker Glory' Ice Cream Sundae is made, what goes in it, and how it is constructed and what the juxtaposed components to it all are. I mean it's not a question of some cream and sugar and a few colored syrups and some nuts.

Let me tell you, the experience is TOTALLY, COMPLETELY other than what you may have been informed that it is, or was, or is supposed to be. And I think, as I look at widely spread information resources, the exact number of people in the whole world today who know what this thing REALLY is, might be critically low to be able to carry forward the actual knowledge in the hands of human society into the future. 

You will read in many places that 'no one recipe for the Knickerbocker Glory exists as far as we understand...' Well that is just complete ignorance. The Knickerbocker Glory is exactly only ONE and a very PRECISE set of ingredients constructed in a very exacting way which allows for warm and freezing elements to be present when the dish is served.

And there are alcoholic and chemical ingredients entailed as well.

It's pretty close, it's not exactly right - which means even
these people don't actually know what they're doing... They
know what it looks like - they don't know what it is.

Just like the genuine chocolate I was a little earlier telling you about, that you can get in Switzerland, there are sensations that result from this 'ice cream sundae' that are very cleverly organised. There are so many 'tricks' and subtleties about high Epicurean arts as they were reset by the French cooks of the Eighteenth and early Nineteenth Centuries - that all in all they constitute as it were, a book of magic or sorcery with genuine secrets and rites of entrance demanded before anyone can reach the upper levels of what is there. 

I mean, just handing a girl of age or woman a straw with a glass or small bottle of Champagne is meaningless to modern classes - and is very sinister in the hands of the knowledgeable rake.

And so, if we end our epistle on the vulgar subject of money and how to really make it, at last, we ought to be able to accept that in fact money is neither 'vulgar' nor is it in the province of the lower classes, to be able to make. Sure they can seem to have it for a while, and indeed they swim in oceans of it as if they own it and are the gods of the seas. So too with banks and governments.

What a laugh.

Money is a most sophisticated thing. It is entirely outside of the province of governments and bureaucrats to comprehend. They are, by contrast, the victims, of it.

Always this is so. It has been so right throughout human history from as far back as Crassus and even before him. It was so with the Weimar Republic. It was so with the French Revolution. It was so with the Russian Revolution. It was so when the Japanese made 'banana money.'

By victims, I mean they burn and they die. Like actual victims - well in fact that is what I'm saying they authentically are. I mean they authentically burn and they die - and that's including all banks but you won't believe me right now.

Come back and talk to me right here five years from now.

Change Is Coming

General Stanley McChrystal has a new book out 'One Mission - How Leaders Build a Team of Teams.'

Those of you who read here regularly will have gathered some impression by now that there is more than just me here, 'behind the scenes' at any rate.

And you may have noticed a moment just after the election of President Trump where I suggested 'the word was out to keep one's mouth shut' - if you were one of the 'friendly parties.'

This is Thompson Silk Co's 'historical archives' area

I am a friendly party and so - as much as it personally pains me so to do - I STILL have to remain sitting on some pretty warm kettles here, let me tell you.

But you can see already that the quietness of the front-lines, so to speak, has begun to reveal the leakers - the info coming out is clearly ONLY from antipathetic sources and it becomes in fact easy to track down because it consists only of small fragments of what people genuinely FULLY on the inside would tend to know, and those fragments can easily be traced to who were selectively given them, either on a need-to-know basis, or as a trap.

Now this doesn't mean there is actually nothing going on, OTHER than what was leaked, because in fact an awful lot is going on.

But I'm afraid that 'awful lot' is going to be remaining very much unseen by the public at least until at least after Mueller steps out of his own shadows or is dismissed.

No feed thrown out to the chickens, and they all start to starve and begin a lot of squawking...

More silk, any colors...

I don't know whether this Blog here comes across as just a tease to you - I have been accused of that many times in my daily RL business life by people who assume they know me. I don't write the Blog to give hints or indications of trends of market prices - I can't say I can prognosticate with particularly any greater reliability than anyone else. So it would comes across as a huge tease if you expect direct investing 'tips.' This Blog is meant to be like a slow drip of a type of colored water, which, after a good long while will affect your mind after it has been allowed to fall on your head...!

...Well if you let it, anyway.

You see - and I'm sure you know this already, but I'll underscore it - it's the filter you look at things through, which determines what you think you are seeing. There is no possibility, in my estimation, that people who are not trained to observed things in a specific way, will comprehend what is going on right now in the economy and in markets.

When change comes it comes right under people's noses and they don't really see it with a conscious mentality.

And some things of course, are simply 'unthinkable.'

But they are going to happen anyway.

And you know it deep inside, and now I have confirmed it for you. 

When a person makes an investment decision -  and I mean when what they expect and intend is a big serious decision with large potential positive consequences - they do it alone (at least if they are the top of the line kind of investor) and they will want ALL the benefits to come to them and not have to be shared out to some sort of 'committee of decision-makers' any one of whom might claim having been 'most crucial' to the actual decision having been made.

McChristal's book deals with how you can make these kinds of decisions in today's world... ...as the result of having been given two rights, one the right to push back against hide-bound bureaucracy, and two - access to the best information at the fastest speed.

All of these specious 'probes' into collusion and obstruction and anything anti-Trump Team, detract from the ability of people to get key information out quickly - if that information is meant to be privileged to the intended recipients.

And that is fundamentally because people like myself are (surreptitiously) monitored by digital filters, as well as occasionally by live human 'over-watching' too. And that's okay with me; I don't mind.

So let me just say this much right now - there are three people who used the word 'change' in this last week: Kellyanne Conway, General McCrystal. And myself.

And all of us meant to use that word.

My estimation is that if you have been reading here for a while, and continue to look in, sooner or later lights will go on, not about what you read or see here, but to do with outside things, market things, even geopolitical things, and you won't even recognize consciously that your outlook has changed. It's all to do with being able to feel the texture, understand the fibers, appreciating the shades of color.

Time To Calm Down

It's all not the way it seems.

Everything is going beserk in the media - Comey this, Trump that, Brexit, Terrorism, Global Elites, my god, just everything...

LOL

Time to calm down, my friends. That is, in case you are being caught up by the fervor around the place.

Life goes on. Trust me - it will keep going on, and pretty much the same as before. ...As if you didn't know, though.

And then suddenly, one day, there was a change in the way
sports car designers thought about their designs

Yes there will be changes. There always are. These changes only superficially appear to provide financial opportunities to investors. You will find most people are always going to try and tell you that Earth-shattering social and economic changes provide opportunities to you as an investor. No they don't, however. 

Controlling the minds and the behavior and the decisions of people is the only way to make significant money, and the way to do that type of thing is to learn to understand human nature. Not in such a way as would get you a psychology degree though; that's not going to make you the significant type of money you want. It's not even going to get you a serious job easily anymore these days!

They put something in it 

A lot of people are forcing themselves onto people, forcing their way on them, with very little subtlety at all. They are virtually gang-stalking kids on Universities. Definitely trying to gang-stalk the ordinary public via the usual media.

But you see that's not how you 'do it.' Alfa Romeo doesn't say 'buy this or else!' They present something and people, well, they just buy it.

Here's another example:

I like chocolates. A lot of people do. I sometimes have the chance to go visit one of the two main Bachmann handmade Swiss chocolate shops. I have never been able to remember the actual name of the place over the years, despite the fact that I know where to look for the place, which street and all - I know where it is, I love the chocolates, I just tend to forget the name of the place after I leave. They never sell the handmade chocolates in any kind of branded wrapping, just little bits of fairly plain paper. 

But you see, my friends, I think they put something in those chocolates! I'm not sure what, and it only lasts maybe one hour or two hours, but Jesus Christ Almighty - I have never had anything that comes close to the effect of those chocolates, as I walk around the cold streets of Zurich, in the snow, just two bites into the fondant. And the rest of the couple hours is just a blur. Every time. No drop-off in effect. Amazing.

Bachmann's chocolate and coffee house in Zurich

They put 'something' into them. 

Sometimes, things move because they have 'something' in them. Bear that in mind when you think about investments and life and human society and everything. ; ) Especially when you see something start to really move.

Science thinks it knows everything or can know everything, but um, people like the chocolatier in question have a trade secret little 'something' and they or he at least isn't going to tell you what it is. He'll just make you feel it when he wants you to feel it. And it isn't necessarily scientific. But then you don't believe that, do you.

Crytpo's and Alt-Crypto's.

When the East Coast banks went through their gyrations during and after the phase called in the American history books ' the free banking era' (1863 - 1865), was it ever the case that businesses and entrepreneurs actually made any profits...? Or was it simply that everyone lost money and eventually the currency notes issued by independent banks had to be stopped by the government and a national bank note substituted?

The question itself is flawed. Even the Wikipedia entry about the history of American banking mixes up ideas pertaining to the so-called 'backing of the currency' and losses of people holding bank notes.

These are two separate sets of facts which have to be looked at - and they pertain to entirely separate and different matters, although they are related. One item is the conducting (the action), ostensibly, of business and trade, and the other item is the means (money/currency IE the thing) via which trade (tangible sales) and business value exchange occurs.

The store of value feature of the currency in question is one thing, but the real physical sales and trade is completely a different thing!

What are these 'historians' trying to say? That the transcontinental telegraph never happened? That some of the most successful newspapers never were there at all? That iron bridges and intercontinental shipping never took place? That the railway never happened?

This is all simply ridiculous.

What happened was - all that happened was - that those people who didn't have a product or service to sell, failed, and those who had products and services that people didn't want to buy, failed. People who were not intelligent enough to handle the conditions of banking at the time, also failed.

People who were not intelligent enough to control the other side of their trade, failed.

You simply cannot make excuses about these things by sheeting all the blame home to the failure of a currency.

And in the same way today, ignorant people and those who permanently critique things, everything, all things, and are skeptics of everything, even of the proof they held in their hands yesterday and left on a shelf over night - believing it would fizzle into thin air suddenly while they were not looking - these individuals are making the same mistake about the recent vogue for 'all things crypto.'

For a currency to succeed for you, it is not necessary that it sit there in your top or bottom drawer for decades while you decide when you are going to convert that currency into the next physical set of actions and movements of value and hard things. It is only necessary for it to be liquid exactly at the point you require it to act as a medium  of exchange. People talk about intrinsic value or backing of money but there is no such a thing...

If you are using money tokens and a currency system as a holding pen for real things, products, or services, what you are doing is taking the risk that the 'security yard' that you have 'virtually' constructed for the real things is somehow immune from the same risks that a tangible, physical location has: flood, earthquake, fire, robbery.

Money is in fact always vulnerable.

And what people fail to understand is that the speed (instant liquidity) of transmission of nominal value of the real trade or sales, is entirely based on the strength of the two sides of the trade; not the money being used.

I can make the point by this example: if I want to sell a piece of real estate, and find a buyer, and then take some currency off that buyer, I am making myself financially vulnerable by thinking of the matter as just an asymmetrical affair - property sold for cash/the end. Wrong. That's only half the equation. The second half of the equation is - what do I want to do with the cash. If the answer is just hold onto it and wait awhile, then I am making my 'wealth' extremely vulnerable.

What I must do, is decide what I actually want to do, next; but if I think I 'want' to sit on currency then I MUST hold bonds because in the first place it is the only thing with a 'return of nominal capital guarantee.'

'Paper money' has no such guarantee; it only makes some pretense about you being able to exchange the thing for other things of the exact same nature, but not gold or silver or physical assets or physical capital.

The objection is always heard of course that say for instance, Bitcoin, will or might eventually 'collapse' - in other words, not function or be used any more as a currency at all.

This is preposterous nonsense. What 'might' happen is that the blockchain system doesn't function fully or efficiently - not that the 'Bitcoin' loses 'value.' It has no value! Except the last 'exchange' rate - same as any other currency!

No. Bad things will happen involving crypto-currency. Sure. And this is normal and happens with all currencies. And this only because silly people engage in silly behavior and do silly things all the time - not because 'the underlying value of' et cetera will disappear. There is no 'underlying' actual value in the first place; there is only the functioning idea of the blockchain system and the name or brand of 'crypto-currency' in question whatever it is. The usefulness of a crypto-currency crystallizes at the moment you contract a movement of a real good or service, for a sum in nominal 'price' or 'cost.' Because it is a creature of the digital and internet communications age, the only time a Bitcoin, for example, exists, is at the moment you contract and carry out a real physical transaction of some product, good, or service.

I mean 'critically exist,' not conceptually exist.

Bitcoins only exist in discrete packets of time, not continuously over all forward time itself to the final decay point or 'decline and withdrawal from use point' of 'Bitcoin' (and any alt crypto-currencies) and thus they are entirely unlike standard paper or bank money.

'Transport' equals 'Telecommunications'

Everyone's heard of the Panama Canal and some people realize that there always has been another potential route across the land barrier that cuts off direct shipping lines between the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans.

The Panama Canal itself has a storied history and the other route across, the 'Nicaragua Canal' route is a story which has not yet ended, of course.

Let's say I have access to a filing system of strategic capital projects around the globe - well, these 'canal' projects in recent times all have one single common thread running through them (ahem, sort of pun). 

And that common factor is that every single major investor or proposer with serious financial backing, who ever either got actively involved, or spent real money scoping the ideas - is or was a telecommunications company.

Hutchison Whampoa, the Chinese Investment Bank, which now owns the rights to manage the ports on both sides of the Panama Canal, is a telecommunications giant, and very possibly the biggest telecommunications company in the world. And that is really saying something, given the other players in that arena.

As we all know nowadays, if you want to control the communication to the White House to any part of the rest of the world, you really need to control the Pacific Undersea Telecommunications Cable.

This is a pic of the actual section of an actual battle group, actually sailing
down to the Antarctica in the actual 'Ark of Gabriel' war games maneuver

Which is of course why today, there are all these 'secret' or clandestine operations going on out of New Zealand to the Antarctic and to various military bases in the Antarctic. It has got nothing to do with the mythical 'Ark of Gabriel' that the Russians floated as a piece of fiction to pretend they were running a 'war games' exercise down there. The 'Ark of Gabriel' was supposedly an artifact found by the Russians in Saudi Arabia, and for some mysterious reason that created immense speculation in the 'ancient alien' circles and those kinds of places on the internet - had to be transported securely and in secrecy to the Antarctic.

And that was the actual story the Russian Navy itself put out but covered itself by also saying that this was simply the premise of a war games scenario.

The fact that actual maneuvers took place over quite some time led to hyperventilation in the 'ancient alien' set, naturally, and the speculation came to be that indeed, some mysterious object or artifact was actually taken off to be securely sequestered in some vault in the Antarctic.

But what is the truth?

What on Earth is the point of ever asking or answering any question in this day and age that contains the word or the phrase 'the truth' in it?!

'A' truth, for anyone who could care less, is that the Five Eyes Secret Surveillance Grouping, spiked the Southern Hemisphere Undersea Telecommunications Cable in at least three different places, one of them being some spot off the coast of New Zealand, via a permanent mission base deep down at the Antarctic.

Now the Southern Hemisphere Undersea Telecommunications Cable itself is actually 'maintained' or even 'owned' by some shady British 'company' registered in Bermuda.

One of the subsidiaries of this company is 'Iron Sands Offshore Mining Limited' which is registered in New Zealand and run by MI6 operatives (I'm not sure if this is breaking any law by me saying this... Anyway...)

It's just acting, dude - if I'd have really hit you
I would have killed you, Neil...

Iron Sands has had involvement, strangely enough, with ye olde James Packer. And James Packer, recently made some overtures to the government of Cuba for permission to develop hotels and resorts in Cuba. Of course we must not forget that Packer is the owner of one of the biggest casino groups in the world.

So, let us contemplate getting involved in say, the Nicaragua Canal Project, which superficially has been said to have faced a delay on account of the recent China Equity rundown, and thus some limitation on one of the major financial backers. Meanwhile of course, crypto-currencies have been doing remarkably well and there is no shortage of a bull market there, with the Chinese leading the fray.

...Fcuk me, though; I'm an old man now. The last time I karate'd (he whinged to his boss that I was 'a karate expert' - which I am not) a MI6 operative, sending him to hospital briefly, was at least seven or eight years ago!

So, Jesus H, Muhammad! I'd need some fair incentive to get back into that game with some skin in it.

How'm I doin' on this so far?