What If You Have 'Good' Ideas?

I recently watched a video recommended by a fellow Wall Street Bear Chat Board long-time member, in which the demise of the American Dream was portrayed, and the cause or blame placed more or less on decades of bad ideas, political and moral.

On the one hand, if a true reflection of what has occurred, then it is testament to the power of ideas - at least the negative power of bad ideas, certainly.

I find that in warmer zones, I have almost
exclusively Italian tailoring, and not Savile Row!
Most job interviews I have ever been to, I start by saying:
"you can't afford me." Jobs are a bad idea. Don't get involved with this
kind of nonsense that modern 'society' pushes.  

I suppose we all believe that we know what constitutes 'good ideas' of course; I know I do.

My presumption is also filtered through years and years of formal involvement in an Eastern European philosophical school - not one which we need to disclose in detail right here and now, but I will say it is Eastern, in the sense that it goes back possibly to ancient Phoenicia... And so I say I do know what good ideas are based around, and what they must metaphysically 'look' like in order to be correctly termed 'good.'

But might we be able to say that if we held 'good' ideas, then at some point 'our' society or societies will take on the forms of those ideas and become, themselves, good societies?

How might this work if we ourselves live inside of a very vicious and flawed, as well as corrupted yet large and powerful society - even whilst we try to hold in our minds some ideal of moral and social and human 'good' that we attempt to live by?

An ancient philosopher once reckoned that the happiness - or, as we modern era socio-economists like to term it, 'units of happiness' - that a tyrant or despot experiences is far less than what a free man experiences. And by 'free' the philosopher meant mentally and intellectually free. At the same time, the opposite was held to be also true, namely, that the fears and anxieties and pains that the evil man experienced were far higher than those the free man felt. In a world of unbridled materialism and materialistic objectives and idols, this concept appears quite unproven.

Until we qualify materialism.

I am of a mind to start a new segment within this blog, that I intend to call 'Destination Materialism.' I am not one of those religious people who perceive of an ethereal paradise beyond, where good people ultimately go, in order to enjoy absolutely nothing. Why, if anything, that is surely the heaven for today's academic specialists, who, in the words of the British comedian Kenneth Williams became so astute at being ever more specialized in smaller and smaller parts of things, that eventually, one of them became the world's greatest expert, in absolutely nothing at all.

The quality of things is the thing. The substance of a particular thing is key to that thing.

Unfortunately we do not live in world in which going to a job interview holds substance any more, if the quality and productive meaning of jobs no longer exists in any realistic human and social or sociological (at least) sense. We have what Professor Stephen Keen calls 'unproductive complexity' going on.

Young people face bleak and uncertain times.

This was created by an actual designer...
And most car companies cannot afford them.

The processes by which they become economically viable even at subsistence levels is complex.

I do not agree with the nostalgia about 'dressing for success' in job interviews. 

One of the great mistakes that many people make today is that they don't envisage that there in fact certainly are pockets of liquidity and real cash wealth around! In spite of the clear paucity of monetary circulation velocity and the enormous margin debt in play. Or they go to the wrong places having been overwhelmed by the illusion that size equals substance. 

Young people ought to acquire skills and hone talents that are in tune with the social currencies in those pockets of liquidity. Never before in the history of the whole human race has it been more true than that people casually assume craft, medicine, health, education, knowledge, food, materials and textiles, fabrics and liquids - are all easily accessed by the broad consumer channel. Product substitutes are easily available for most things. But most actual things that should be around at this time in history and human progress, are not available at all.

I watch, for example, in horror, at the local Chinese Kung Fu schools - some, or in fact most of which, are run by people I personally know and watched as they grew up under the tutelage of older Masters decades ago. I do not have students that I personally train and this is largely because I have not come across anyone I observed might have had the necessary application and focus and even frankly the interest or the desire. Yet in some of these present day schools, thriving as they are, the classes are filled with high fee paying, sloppy-actioned, and utterly misguided people and young people. I barely - barely - recognize the things being taught. But whatever is being taught it bears no resemblance to what we all had to learn those many decades ago. The old Masters are spinning in their graves.

Long gone from YouTube was the very first black and white, Super Eight film of the 23-year old Tibetan Kuten wearing the 120 pound war god headdress and floating all across the small clearing... 

Nod nod, wink wink.

You don't know what is possible.

"Millions Saw The Apple Fall..."

This was something the giant of modern trans-national economics, Bernard Baruch, said. He was talking about Sir Isaac Newton.

Observational scientific method starts in a formal and modern sense around the time of Cosimo De Medici and one of his mathematicians, Biambattista Della Porta.

The Inferno - still a concept

Della Porta was a member of an association of scientists and naturalist philosophers who called themselves 'The Lynxes,' due to the reputed ability of these animals to see with great keenness.  

Today, we all watch as the leaders of government virtually everywhere stand by and encourage fictions on a grand scale in the world of money and finance. Nothing could be further from the truth than that The Fed is a good force - it is utterly wicked beyond anything that has stepped the world stage politically and institutionally at any time in the past. The Fed punishes savers and savings, and rewards a kleptocracy. And has therewith turned every social and moral tenet of the entire history of the planet on its head.

Fear of an increase in Fed interest rates - any increase - catapulted markets into a frenzy and a panic of selling across the boards. Things stabilized as the mooted increase was presumed to still be some way off... But an increase must come.

Skirt hemlines are rising...

And yet, at the same time, it cannot come. It need not come. The Fed sits in its Ivory Towers and is not compelled by any force in the market to turn interest rates upwards. Access to the kleptocracy has been maintained a closely guarded secret among the so-called 'elite.'

All's right with the world.

Adolf Hitler - a certain gentleman who in his own words, came from being an unknown - started out his early speeches with the words: 'we appealled and appealled and appealled to those who had brought about Versailles..."

No. Sadly, today's crop of bums pontificated upon in the criminally insane media as responsible and worthy, have learned absolutely nothing at all from history.

Today of course, the kettle boils less obviously, since street protests are dismissed by the media, and mob gatherings are only on the cold medium of the social media internet.

GET OUT NOW!

Volatility Becomes Intelligent Energy

The Federal Reserve (formally called 'The Federal Reserve System') has made a mistake.

And it is a big one.

Let us just dwell though, for a second, on the word 'system.' The actual proper name for what we have all come to know simply as 'The Fed,' is The Federal Reserve SYSTEM. Yellen is chairman of a 'system,' and not a bank, or an entity, corporate or otherwise, but rather - a system.

There are THREE colours in this scene... Clue.

It is a racing aphorism that whoever has a gambling system will go systematically broke...

On the surface, it would appear that 'The Fed' is the house in the gambling analogy and therefore should not go broke. The players should go broke. The Fed however, is owned by the biggest players and it hands out free money to these so that they can go on gambling - and losing - forever. The nominal counters - or gambling tokens - are asset prices, specifically real estate prices, and listed equities. If you look at it in terms of say the board-game of Monopoly, the desirable tokens or playing counters, are equities and real estate. Not factories and technologies or research and development or food production and logistics. I am not considering the status of military industries in this analogy at the present moment...

On everyone's lips right now is the question of whether or when The Federal Reserve SYSTEM will move to increase their interest rates. And this question has increased volatility in markets, and in combination with China falling for the three card trick of following a discredited Western SYSTEM - albeit one that favours elites of course - volatility has become simply enormous.

If not for the never-ending supply of fantasy money Big Banged into existence by the gods at The Fed, we would have witnessed a descent into pretty much a Thirties' style Depression by now in this era of absurdly low interest rates and economic anaemia.

The media points to 'bots' or electronic automated algo-rhythm based trading for the cause behind all the recent volatility.

Now while the financial market volatility is occurring, there is no change in interest rates. Risk, therefore, is suddenly seen to be non-existent as far as bank capital and financing is concerned and not a factor to be calculated in the interest rate formula...

Now I don't know whether there is anyone reading here that could care less, but it is the case, that a smart investor can now begin to make serious - and I do mean serious - sums of money because of the foolishness of what has been going on with this criminal mob now in charge of all money and all markets everywhere. The Fed has miscalculated and by a huge huge margin.

Think Douglas Casey. And that is all I am prepared to say about it.

Pirate Captains are elected by the crew;
they are not quite the villains that landlubbers suppose
 

If all the readers here were bound by what the privateers and corsairs knew as 'Chasse Partie' then I would go into details. As it is, most of you will have to work it out yourselves. But let me say just this, and let me make it perfectly clear: The Fed has made a huge mistake and you can start making money at will from here onwards and I don't even think they know where the problem for them is. Misdirection being the greatest secret to prestidigitation, I am not about to let it slip so easily as to blurt it all out openly here.

Thinking Energy

People fall into habits.

The Federal Reserve Bank in America has overtaken any presumed role as a protector of the currency and instead has become the North Star by which all equities must navigate from the direction of.

A privateer's compass...

Which way does the compass point now...? North, or South - 'up,' or 'down?'

In a world in which actors and media promoters - if not the producers - are floating the idea of a gay James Bond, you have to consider the possibility that the world has begun to spin, as it were, perhaps a little beyond the control of those who believe themselves to be 'in charge.'

And what is wrong with a gay James Bond? My problem with it is that the idea itself today, lacks all creativity and inventiveness; it is just another one of the many copy-cat, me-too, mangle-the-original hackneyed contemporary fables that are being passed off for 'the leading edge.'

In spite of the many loud voices complaining bitterly about the cultural appropriation of Bond by the modern era pop media and entertainment elite, Bond has in fact never been far from sexual 'gray zone-ness' - Tilly Masterton (underage?) and Tiffany Case were both running dangerously close to deviance and probable illegality. The indications in the story were that Tiffany Case was 'more or less' a transgendered individual - and we have to accept that at the time the book was written (Diamonds Are Forever), it would not have been possible for Fleming to have been medically or scientifically any more explicit than he indeed was being in that particular book.

A gay James Bond in 1972 would have been original and cutting edge.

But not in 2016.

Human energy, can be looked at in terms of neuro-chemical energy, adrenaline, erotic motivations, the so-called Schumpeter drivers and Maslow's 'hierarchy of needs.'

A buccaneer -
Masow's Theory of Needs...

Energy in the Stock Market and in financial markets are reflected in many ways - the velocity circulation of currency, the rate of employment growth, and the demand pull on the Money Supply (interest rates), price and demand inflation - but not stock prices per se and not Quantitative Easing.

QE and stock prices are indicators of indisciplined Monetary Policy and a loss of market ability to tie governments to any economic standards. Too many media commentators have totally forgotten that economic theory includes all of these ideas that involve and include the social and sociological, including the just-mentioned Schumpeter and Maslow.

The compass is spinning all over the place. 'Magnetic North' in the economic world, no longer exists. 

And so if you are spending economic energy, you need to have some means of guidance as to your own direction that is separate from the standard rules and past heuristics.

But where exactly do you want to go?




  

Energy And Time

I am grateful to Donald Trump for reminding me about the function of 'energy' in business and in anything dynamic, in fact.

 

Trump - comparing himself with Jeb Bush - used the professional football coach's concept of a 'low energy' person versus a 'high energy' person - on the field, sometimes it is possible to have a less talented or less technically skilled player outperform a better player using a higher energetic output. "Do more things..."

 

All these things have their place, and Trump is not particularly wrong in any practical way in the context in which he was using the idea. But it's also important to think about what energy is and how it is intelligently used.

American high energy in a mechanical construction

 

You can see, for example, in this week's Stock Market action, that there was this one single specific point, where pretty much every single market of those that were all open at the same time right throughout the world, dropped like a stone; and they were all in synch. And then, something else happened, and the automated systems went back to work 'creating' the appearance of a market - and of markets - and that things were stabilising.

 

This is a powerful display of something, but not of actual supply and demand markets.

 

Power, is energy into mechanical balance, and sustained action, is the absolute effect of power.

 

It is possible for Stock Markets to have a sustained action of pricing organisation - by which I mean fake prices and a fixed 'market.' And this is very powerful in its own way.

 

But then, one also encounters things like the Pyramids, which are not powerful in any dynamic way, other than that they force the wind that blows around them to go around them for ever and ever, more or less.

Energy asleep, dormant...

 

The fact that investments pay little or no dividends or interest from actual earned dollars, and the fact that employment growth is an entirely fictitious figure nowadays, and the other important fact that tax revenues are ridiculously low compared to national debt - all stand like gigantic Pyramids that cannot be moved by the falsified 'Stock Market' equities' prices.

 

On the one hand, in history, corsairs and privateers were exciting gentlemen - with a few ladies, too - who lived often quite short but entertaining lives, although a number retired to a long old age very wealthy and very happy. On the other hand, one has the folkloric tale of a certain 'Rip Van Winkle,' who, after having fallen asleep for a hundred years, woke up into a different world.

 

Van Winkle, one could say, using Trump's Jeb Bush analogy, was a 'low energy' person, while he slept. You get the best liquor from patience though, and a very subtle, micro-energy. Which is not to say though, that cheap rum doesn't have its place also.

Asleep for a long time, Rip awakens to find
that the world he knew, has changed.

 

Jeb Bush is no Rip Van Winkle bourbon, though. And Trump, I happen to personally know, is not the cheap rum the media often likes to make out that he is.

 

But in any event, now is not the time to go laying down some exalted alcohol for some theoretical future.

 

Actually, now is the time to start waking up to the different place the world has already become.

 

Over upcoming posts, I want to start to look at 'thinking energy' and how this can be used in the acquisition of old-style wealth.