What You Don't Know

As of course you do know, things are not always what they seem, and certainly not the way the media portrays.

There are no Republicans actually in the California US Senate race, so naturally, the Democrats won there(!) - that is, there were no Republicans that you could vote for because the structure of the Primaries there is gerrymandered so that only two Democrats ended up being on the actual final ballot. And to some extent, this is a reflection of the partisan divide that characterizes the modern US election process and system.

Whereas on the one hand it appears that the Democrats 'won' the Representatives' Chamber (the 'House'), in fact they won seats where they were expected to add to their numbers because of the synchronization of 're-election' timing, in places they overall already completely controlled - Virginia, Florida (but even here only to some extent), Minnesota, Colorado.

The Blue Pill, the Red Pill, and the Black, Captagon Pill

And the reality no one in the media is prepared to tell you, is that there are stealth members of the Republican side who are presented as 'Democrats' - not saying here which these are...

At the same time, it is no secret that John McCain detested Donald Trump and the person who has 'inherited' the deceased McCain's Senate seat - John Kyl, worked for Brett Kavanaugh for a long time and is going to be a reliable supporter of the Trump Republican White House -, unlike McCain, who was anything but that. To cut a long story short that in any case you won't believe, Arizona 'has problems' in terms of whether it could ever survive object independent scrutiny about how things are 'run' and 'controlled' there. In fact, I'll tell you right now broadly speaking, it (Arizona) is a stronghold for foreign, 'globalist' interests and is 'not exactly legit.' People on the inside already know all this. ...Yet even so, Kyl is a big win for Trump and adds to Donald Trump's authentic power base in spite of the odds against him in Arizona from the 'globalists' of which McCain was one and worked against Trump at every opportunity.

The system is stacked in two different ways in the USA - firstly, the cities have the edge as far as the Lower House goes; because in this case, the more highly populated places get to send more people to that Chamber. Whereas in the Upper House - the Senate - EACH State gets to send two members no matter what their population sizes are, WHICH IS SOMEWHAT THE SAME STRUCTURE AS IN THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION; so in this case, the Senate shows no favoritism for population but it means all locations have equal representative voices. 

Now, no matter what you think about the fairness of this situation, the fact is, the Republicans increased their Senate numbers and this pretty much means they will continue to win the Presidency all other things being equal come 2020. And so to cut another long story short again, it means the Democrats will be * into the wind for the next several years. And they will let no one down on that front, that's for sure.

The argument is virtually always made that cities are the places where the brainpower is higher, the education is better, et cetera et cetera.

But I would challenge you on that score with this counter argument - the reality is today, cities are the places where there are more street people, more homeless, more bereft, more people who can be bought, more 'dead voting' and false ID's, more graft and corruption.

No. Things are not what they seem - if you just go by what you see on television.

Sure you can believe that people wearing black masks and smashing windows and people and burning and looting and yelling and screaming are all highly educated, upper middle-class, fully-employed intelligent people if you like, and they vote (modern) Democrat because they are smart - you can believe that if you like. And then, magically, all the intelligent University-educated middle-class people voted Democrat in the hope that one day the enlightened Linda Sarsour will become President...

Personally, my suggestion is you stack up on the popcorn and sit back to enjoy the lunatic humor of modern politics.

Crazy Italians Yes, Staid Germans No

You're not going to find too many people across the internet talk like this - at least not until there is some space between the launch and the hype and the reality:

Stefan Sielaff, who is probably on well north of a million bucks per year as Managing Design Director at Bentley, has presided over the biggest heap of s* that I have ever witnessed foisted onto the dumbed-down public, even if, in this instance, they are supposedly the dumb EXTREMELY WEALTHY public.

You can see the typical Germanic stubbornness, the sheer damn bloody-mindedness of it all - of their intent to force the 'Hunaudieres' concept car 'design' they shoved at everyone at the car shows around the world since f* forever, as far as I can recall. 'Hunaudieres' - albeit it is a nickname for a straight at a major French race track (Le Mans) where Bentley reigned supreme in the 1920's - is clearly meant by the Germans as a pun; it literally means 'hear the Huns coming.'

Here's some good design for you - and I'm
talking about the fabric of the shoes, and the photography...

If you watch their promotional videos, you will encounter very clever propaganda and media-savvy verbiage intended to mislead the average idiot viewer into thinking that they are building a Bentley; they are not building a Bentley, they are building a Mercedes or a Maybach - a slug-looking thing, filled with Dieter Rams' mentality of functionality (what the modern Germans speak of with glowing expressions as 'zer moolti-funktion azpekt.') everywhere. Too much of 'everywhere' in fact.

Now there's nothing particularly wrong with ABS plastic under grilles, and 'diamond knurling' fake chrome and bits of carbon fiber 'und teknologie,' and 'finest kvality handkraffted lezzarh' and other meaningless throw-ins taken from Swiss watch-makers and so on - if you are not buying a British automobile. 

But every time you hear the word 'homage' what they mean is 'it's dead and it ain't coming back and we're doing whatever we want now and f* U!'

If there was still a German Mark in existence as a currency I'd say they'd get close to, but won't actually, kill off the Bentley marque, but they'll kill it off now stone dead'r than a lead doorstop here with just this one single model because they are all backed by rubbish these days pretentiously called 'the euro.'

Don't kid yourselves that these idiots know what they are doing. They have had a ton of money and capital and a good forty years to burn it all and that's what they've done.

This is pretty close to the end. And there's going to be one hell of a self-inflicted old, stale, cake-fight once they go to the cupboard one too many times and find it's empty this time.

Super Self-Assured People - Because?

Many many many many many... years ago now... I went through a matriculation program and then to a University with a young guy whose name I won't say here. But he was quite a remarkable wit - flashy, smart, very funny. His younger brother was ever so slightly more serious though not by any means a dour or dull person.

Anyway - I did know they were from some Italian family with an industrial background but the two brothers never made all that much of it.

Possibly a Neapolitan style, could be Roman...
But it's definitely Italian anyway.

I even knew - since they told me - that they had both been enrolled towards their final years at University, in a specialist industrial college in Italy, called Fabrica. I then totally lost touch with both of them although very rarely I had occasion to speak with one of their grandfathers who made local (Australian) fortified wines over here until his passing a while ago. And, I still run into some of their family over this side of the world, and they mention that one of the brothers in particular, nick-named 'Rocky' would ask about some of their 'olden days' friends and I even came up in dispatches, as they say, around the time I had this tiny little listed Public Company here.

Once again, without mentioning their names, turns out they are part of the executive management of one of the top say, three, four, or five Italian absolute best bespoke and luxury menswear companies. That limits things down to a small few very well-known names but I will specify it is not Zegna or Versace. They are a Naples-based corporation.

Of all the people I knew back when, these guys were the lightest, breeziest, funniest and most well-adjusted, self-assured people I encountered ever.

In hindsight, frankly, it is an identifiable personality trait, both of a certain type of Italian, but also of those people who come from a long legacy of achievement.

Very beautiful - don't you just love the roped shoulders?

There was only one other person I have ever met and knew closely enough to see what they were like in their occupations, who had this same kind of over-arching self-assuredness - apart from the banking genius I worked for for decades - and this other individual was a German who had trained, literally, under Nazis in design and craft workshops as a very young person.

All of them, quite amazing people. If there was one thing I'd really love to introduce everyone here to, (it's a fantasy and will never happen) it would be to some sort of (at this stage) hypothetical private club or lounge at which there were these kinds of people swanning around just doing nothing so that you could tackle them one-to-one and just plain listen to whatever they had to say. In life there is gold, and there are golden words and the two are hard to distinguish as to which is more valuable.

Defining Luxury Properly

Some prominent branding specialists, as well as major news media and up-scale magazines, are constantly talking these days about what the 'Millenial consumer' is doing to the definition of luxury.

An opening statement in this declaration seems to be that 'the days of luxury being synonymous with wealth are over.'

Really? Really, Fortune Magazine? Do you believe this? No wonder all you guys are going to the wall or having your wings clipped 'bigly.'

'Luxury' is the unique place in the barren desert...

Today's branding specialists and marketing people all the same focus around some fairly standard and tradition concepts about what 'luxury' has meant down the centuries. The word itself is much older than most authorities generally say - the Romans had a word 'luxus' which meant excess and self-indulgence. Most present-day authorities like to mention that there was a Middle English word taken from Old French and which meant 'lust' or 'lechery,' the strong implication there being that it has its actual roots in a Western European pagan deity - 'Lugh.'

Modern marketeers make the mistake of adding the idea that today's idea of 'luxury' includes 'authentic craftsmanship.' Well the problem with this is that you can be an authentic craftsman of the synthesizing chemical laboratory but never will you duplicate the actual scent of an actual taif rose.

This is a real place, this is the Liwa Oasis in Abu Dhabi

No. Luxury is a personal thing - it identifies and defines the person as they truly are. It denotes a kind of self-indulgence but on a stratospheric level, not an Earth-bound, limited, needs-based level. And it certainly is about wealth.

The most intensely bespoke thing there is, is the personal individual ego and central consciousness of the particular individual human being. People are very complicated - they have broadly shared qualities and characteristic 'human' similarities, yet they are each completely unique. And uniqueness separates people, it doesn't bring them together. That is, it doesn't bring very large numbers together, but it creates categories and specializations that exist in hierarchies which ascend to the peaks where 'the best' of each category exists, either as a tiny capstone group-let, or even as a single person who defines the actual sole epitome; the perfect example.

This is luxury - all natural, the 'Liwa' from the Velvet Collection by Ali Al Jaberi
of Widian Corporation

'Luxury' means the best... But the best thing for you the individual, not 'the best thing' that might be shared with a whole lot of other people.

Huge Changes

Debenhams announced a huge loss for the year to September, 2018 - virtually a billion dollars ('loss').

Now this is pertinent to what we have been pointing to for the last two years at least: that there has been a major and noticeable decline in the marketplace for all the 'high end' consumer products, and luxury products and luxury brands. This public company's disclosure of such a huge loss really is one verification of what we had been suggesting from anecdotal evidence.

On the one hand it appears as if write-downs of goodwill and IT and 'stores' (what does that mean? Does it mean capital value, as in property value? I don't know...) dominate the 'loss' figure and other than these write-downs there is a trading profit.

This was called, at the time 'the revenge dress.'
Is it blue, or is it black, by the way?

But wait a minute - we are talking a 1% (wh-a-a-t?!) profitability on a turnover of 3 billion pounds! That already sounds like a fudged figure, or at least 'sharp' accounting to get things 'over the line' and 'into the black.'

You would think that with such low interest rates in the Western World big corporates could 'engineer' something better than this kind of unmitigated disaster.

So what's going on? Is it 'the on-line world' doing it?

No, I don't believe that. It is the relentless and utterly mindless drawing off of the domestic circulation of cash money (velocity/circulation) caused by the errant ideology of 'austerity.'

And we are going to hit a lot of brick walls and they are going to take politicians, governments, and whole societies into the grave.

A drop of dew on a rose petal can kill you, and at least that is a romantic way to go, compared to a lot of others that get the press's attention these days... This is the way the gods act, you know - 'whom they wish to destroy they first make mad.'

This Givenchy thing, well, there were two of them,
and two of them are in the museums today...
But I think there were three of them, and one was not black satin, but midnight blue sheared velvet

There is something out there moving around beneath the surface and its hidden hand is manipulating things.

A single drop of dew...

Just remember I said that.