Real Life

What is real life?

Well, I do spend a lot of time with my nose sunk inside of ‘luxury lifestyle’ magazines – Courchevel, Cote d’Azur, that kind of thing - whether in airports or in a recliner chair at home. Have you noticed how the photographs all have this quality about them within the image, where there is absolutely nothing extraneous in the picture; nothing just plain lying around, the detritus of actual living?

And what about extraneous people? Do you have any of those? I have absolutely none.

I used to have many. But now I haven’t any at all. Not even you. You are of a superior intelligence, I fancy. And are rightfully ‘in the picture.’

For not many will go where I would lead... Only the very clever or the secretly well-favoured by good fortune.

 

 

There are rides and then there are rides:

Would you like to ride in this?
I wonder what gets to ride in here...

 

 

Real Positive Propaganda

Coca Cola is a great company and a great brand. Not only that, but at the top levels are very very bright people. Cultured people. Intelligent people.

You haven’t heard that a lot about Coke, eh?

But here – watch this:

This is positive propaganda that is not only incredibly revolutionary, but extremely Left-Wing too. And it comes courtesy of Coke. Now if you are not a terribly musical type it might take you one or two goes at the first 3 minutes of this to ‘get’ the thing, but really, it’s not too dissimilar to a ‘cowboy song,’ a kind of pop jazz version of an old school cowboy song. If you want to know what the words are, go down to the bottom of the video and check the ‘subtitles/CC’ box and you will get a translation show up as subtitles.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u3F7kcLrGvA#t=3

 

'Daanah Pah Daanah' - song from Coke Studio Pakistan

 

Agent Provocateur

What an agent provocateur does is, go behind the scenes, and incite someone or some group of people to rash or illegal behaviour.

Of course though, today, we know that the word is also a branded lingerie product that stresses marketing through images.

We all live in a much more sophisticated world today than ever before.  But wealthy and well-funded and sophisticated though it may be however, even the branded ‘Agent Provocateur’ company cannot spread itself so wide as to sponsor frivolous events in, say, Outer Mongolia. Or Western Mongolia, let’s be more specific, where the Republic of Kalmykia is located. (Between Russia and China). This kind of thing is reserved only for sovereign states to be able to afford.



Amir Ban, a chess engine programmer, with a Kalmyk.
Propaganda with a sinister purpose

I’m engaged in a fairly large commercial negotiation right now, and I am in a virtually unrelenting state of fear and panic. On the one hand it is very exciting, but on the other hand unnerving because I simply can’t trust that things are as airtight shut in terms of confidentiality as I would prefer them to be.

And so to skirt around things, let’s talk about Chess. Chess is most certainly, a frivolous pastime. It has little or nothing to do with strategy, since all the rules are pre-set, and the game itself produces nothing material. One can neither benefit from it by applying ideas from it about strategy to the real world, and nor can one eat the products of the game’s endeavour for there aren’t any to speak of.

Decadence, of course, is nothing if not to do with the sophisticated frivolous.



The Dolmabahce Palace

But of course I jest. Strategy is learned from many pursuits. And those of us who fancy that we understand strategy deeply, usually take the long view, and draw an often rather distant perspective on our ultimate objectives before we step into spotlights at all.



I’m not too sure that the word I’m really looking for is not ‘labyrinthine,’ rather than ‘Byzantine,’ to describe how I personally approach the art of making money.  Perhaps it is a bit of both. And yet it is the style I personally recommend, for at least in the dark and shadowy labyrinths of Byzantium, one may scratch the guilding off the walls and profit even there from alone, if from nothing else. And this means, one ought to always walk where there is money, and not where there isn’t any. Sometimes what appears like power or money is really only the phantoms flitting across the shadows of the labyrinth.

 

Next post, propaganda that is not sinister.

Sailing To Byzantium

So what do we learn from history? What do we learn that is useful to us when making financial and investing decisions?

I personally think one thing is that it is impossible or very rare to be able to change people’s minds when they have set themselves to a belief or committed themselves to an idea.

A 'diplomat's seating arrangement' in
the Dolmabahce Palace, Istanbul

When the empire of Rome fell and was replaced by what came to be known as the Byzantine Empire (330 AD onwards) centred in Constantinople, an oriental influence exerted itself on what had previously been a strongly Western European-influenced progress of ‘modern’ civilisation.

Turkey has now become – once again – as did the Byzantine Empire before it, a great economic centre-point of trade.

Turkey has immense geopolitical advantages, of course. It is difficult to see the economy of Turkey go backwards or sideways over the next several decades.

One will never be able to change the opinions of those who believe that ‘economic sanctions’ against Russia are clever.  And that New York is the greatest centre of money and trade the world has ever seen and will ever be thus.

A Byzantine form of civilization is not strictly speaking, oriental, and nor is it occidental. It is multi-faceted, and, as the Russian news service recently quoted, the lying voices against this economic and cultural precedent will now become polyphonic.



What the hell are they trying to do to her?!
(Katy Perry in a D&G Byzantine art dress)

Sophisticated people though, are well ahead of the whole game.

The Byzantine Truth

Part of the attraction of taking part in the activity of modern investing through stock exchanges, is the psychological motivation behind the idea of being able to go to your stock broker’s office, where all the fresh-faced kids out of college or university work, and have them make a cheque out to you when you ‘take profits.’

I always remember old man Geoff Cambridge from my original broker Saw Cambridge and Brannelly, very drunk, very old, still very dapper-looking though, turn to me inside the elevator and say: ‘taking profits young man? Excellent!”

Old Geoff Cambridge, the stock broker,
always reminded me of Wilford Brimley

I think it was just the standard patter he used on anyone after another late lunch.

The stock market Crash of ‘88 was something I personally foresaw and raised a bundle of cash prior to.  And I suppose I have basically never ever looked back since because of my actions at that time - but there is a stark difference in conditions today: there is little circulating cash about the place anywhere. Having the luxury of observing from a safe distance, after having cashed-up, I believe I more easily noticed the moments when circulation problems started to be created in the economy. I say ‘created’ because they were indeed created, rather than having been the result or consequences of economic factors. They were nearly all strictly the effects of specific political acts, which included decisions made in active and deliberate collusion with supposedly politically-independent central banks. BIS (the Bank for International Settlements) policy could have dealt with Hank Paulson’s so-called sub-prime mortgage and banking crisis, but was not only never allowed to, but inch by inch in the years beforehand, its power and structure and meaning was quite deliberately cut down.

Without going into all of that in this article though, let me just state what should be obvious but will likely want to be avoided by most - you cannot expect to trade or invest in exchange-handled stocks and bonds these days, and retain your money; you will lose it. And probably lose it all.

And so when I start to talk about making money - and thus being able to ‘take profits’ - from something to do with exploiting the natural Equation of Exchange leverage available in the circulation function of money in today’s economy, I will not be talking about going anywhere near a stock broking house or typical financial institution. All of these do not, in the first place, have cash that can be released into the domestic circulations…

So, you too might ‘foresee’ another Great Crash now - but then you will not able to access any cash to do anything about it and in any case you also need to be concerned that your counterparty really intends for you to be paid out at all. Criminality, heavy-duty cheating, broad theft, dissembling; that’s what you have on your hands with stock exchanges and their agents now. It’s not safe there. Sure there is a lot of paper capital told of in more ‘tall tales’ than Damon Runyon generated, and there are big sums written about all the time. You won’t see the cash though - there isn’t any. And more to the point, the digital credits are not allowed to go into economy-wide circulation in any case.

Which brings us back to the psychological impediments to a realisation about where the money actually is. You know where it is not, and thus you should resist the temptation to go to those places - but do you? Chat-rooms are still full of talk about stocks and shares and indexes. You might as well be spending time talking about some painting on the wall of the Louvre - the paint is not going to flow off the wall there either and turn into money in your hands even if you know which way the brush stroke was made. Up or down…

Stay away from the Wall.

A real 'Russian Cocktail'

Direct your mind to the foundations.

The foundation of a Russian Cocktail - a true ‘Russian Cocktail’ - is Maraschino liqueur and a brandied cherry. The Italians, soaked a Croatian cherry in brandy liquor to come up with the Maraschino cherry and the Maraschino liqueur is simply spirits made from the natural Croatian cherries including their pits and stems - which adds a slightly almond bitterness.

During the American Prohibition era, Maraschino cherries were banned because of the fact that they were soaked in alcohol.

Besides the Maraschino, a Russian Cocktail has pure grain Russian vodka in it as the main body of it. Crystal clear, ice cold, and with a red velvet heart of fire.

Now you need to understand, that American Maraschino Cherries - are fake. The FDA spells out that their definition of a Maraschino Cherry is this: “a maraschino cherry is regarded as the common or usual name of an article consisting of cherries which have been dyed red, impregnated with sugar and packed in a sugar sirup (sic) flavored with oil of bitter almonds or a similar flavor.”

No it isn’t. Nobody ‘regards it’ this way except the FDA.

And you shouldn’t regard the truth generally either, as being able to be simply or merely asserted absent from an independent and objective test. The truth is crystal clear.

You can see the truth, I promise you, through the glass of a real Russian Cocktail. And if you were holding a Byzantine glass in your hand, in which there was a real Russian Cocktail, you would not only be seeing the truth, you would be actually literally holding it.

Enough said.