Crescent Moon Street

The book's original title was not 'Half Moon Street' - it was 'La Calle De La Media Luna,' which means 'Crescent Moon Street.' 

And the beginning of the film contains the following sentence '...Just remember when you write your reports, that at the Institute here, we are dependent on our special relationship with the Middle East.'

...And seconds later, after those words have been uttered, a car-bomb goes off in the street outside.

What is it, about Arabic and Muslim culture, that
intelligence services seem to think accounts for the fact
that radicalized extremists, are so able to think for themselves
and to act on their own?

Now a question that needs to be asked today is, are there really any investigative journalism resources left, that have the capacity to discern facts from the slant or the the sheer deliberate distortion and obfuscation?

You see the real importance of this relates to whether or not, so much water has already passed under the bridge of 'special relationships' that even massive organisations like MI6 really have the capacity anymore to comprehend what is going on - past the walls of self-inflicted confusion they themselves raised when they decided it would be okay to get kids from out of academia funded by Saudi money and Qatari money and Bahrain money and so on.

This morning, we saw another 'lone wolf' radicalized extremist Muslim, shoot and kill eight people in Munich. And that would make, in all now, something like ten thousand and seventy-three lone wolves so far... Well it isn't but seriously folks, this is the essence of the so-called fallacy of Sorites, in which you never can see the actual boundary between one discrete thing or state/condition and the other (thing/state/condition), so that you can mislabel the real condition with some cover-all description.

How many 'lones' make a group...?

During the immediate post WWII period of the Cold War, it was easy to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, and information, intelligence, and strategic data were all obvious elements. And you either 'had' as in possessed them in varying in degrees or you lacked them in varying degrees - it wasn't as if you couldn't tell what constituted them!

An old-school Embassy 'plant.' Doesn't exist anymore.

One of interesting features of the movie Half Moon Street is that it becomes obvious to the viewer, that the government and the bureaucracies of administration and even the upper echelons of society, are completely without comprehension of the seriously dangerous things that are going on 'hidden in open view' as it were. And even the movie itself, on account of the need to keep the audience cognizant of the driving forces for the action and the conflict requiring artistic resolution within the story-line, employs the device of familiar Cold War embassy competition and diplomatic opposing agenda to give a reason to the violence and crisis.

Today, the obscuring of truth is not carried out by embassy officials government-to-government. It is carried out expressly by those charged with the duty and responsibility to expose with clarity, any hidden dangers: the media, journalists, and the intelligence services.

How far has this gone towards becoming a severe problem of itself?

Would, for example, Boris Johnson see the need for an entirely new and separate and highly secret intelligence agency, whose main function would be to actually have the capacity to work out the truth on the ground somewhere, and then hand over all the relevant facts and materials that could be used to base genuinely-informed government and significant business foreign policy on? 

Donald Trump seems to think so - it's implicit in his words 'until we can find out what is going on.' These words mean that he thinks, and his advisers think, that for example, Washington itself, doesn't know what is going on...

Which is a very scary thing, if it is true. 

But I will just leave you with this name - 'A. Q. Khan.' And ask you to consider very carefully, what you think might be the game plan in Turkey. 'Lone wolf' eh? That's how you get a hundred thousand Muslims out onto the streets in half an hour. They're all lone wolves who just do stuff that they make up in their own minds without ever following orders or obeying anyone. Not that they don't practice obedience five times a day, do they.

The Corny Solution

Well but why not? It's what people are attracted to.

So what's the corny solution to the Muslim problem? I don't personally know...

What's the corny solution to the amazing strength in Equities? Don't know that either.

Ogilvy's motif, not Burnett's

What about interest rates? Nope.

I don't keep a 'corn file.'

On the mass public level you simply cannot expect there to be any change at all either in government policy on Islamic terrorism, nor on interest rate policy. It is possible, as the economist Professor Steve Keen recently suggested, that Central Banks might force the increase of margins for derivatives, but to some extent I find this not corny enough to be what they would automatically go for...

Politicians - most of them - will never accept responsibility for the bad things that go on on the mass scale beneath their high ivory towers. They will continue this parade of bathos - a thing that Americans love, apparently, as the world turns into another episode of Serial Killer Sunday.

We will 'condemn and be appalled,' and 'send our condolences.' And do nothing.

Now look I just deleted a whole series of paragraphs (in this piece) going into detail about certain things that I realize I cannot talk about here...

This much I may suggest to you if you ever find yourself in a 'situation.' Turn in the opposite direction in which a panicked corny crowd of onlookers or the mass of the public is heading in any circumstance in which fear, confusion, rage or excitement possesses them.

In my next piece, I will be talking about a movie that 'just' barely made budget on its first release: 'Half Moon Street.' I will be referring to it at least, in small part. The first ten minutes of this movie is worth watching for relevance to today's world. And we can thank Louis Theroux's dad for it. Without him, the flick would never have gotten made. Paul Theroux, as you know, is French. 

The Market Truth

There's a famous guy - you might have heard of him - his name is Leo Burnett.

Should I stop there?

Okay so Leo Burnett is not with us anymore but he has left a legacy.

Leo had a file in his office labelled 'Corny Language.' He collected words and phrases that he heard people use which he felt had the certain 'corny' touch that people, so he believed - and he was right - were attracted to on a 'common, everyday human level.'

Screenshot capture from "Ingress"

Leo was responsible for most of the cartoon-style adverts for breakfast cereal and whole vast array of consumer products of the last well, more than fifty years.

Now let us look at what has been making the main news over the last few days - apparently an iPhone game phenomenon called 'Pokemon Go.'

Pokemon is a stupid name from a stupid Japanese kids' cartoon series.

Years and years ago an innovation called 'Ingress' that was designed and produced by the Google-owned game company Niantic was released worldwide and it made a little tiny impact, mostly among what marketers call 'the early adopters.' Ingress is the same as, and better than, Pokemon Go - as far as being an actual 'game' goes. But so what? People cannot handle 'better,' they can only handle 'corny...'

The Fed says - and everyone believes them - that they can produce money out of thin air, and also, that they can make money 'free.' And everyone believes them.

So, if you are a serous professional investor - and most of those who read here are - then it will pay you to continue to note that Rolls Royce the car company, does not chase numbers; it chases those who aggregate money. And such people are few, and rare. Now Ford, on the other hand, or Kelloggs, well they do chase numbers - and they get them too. And so do politicians chase numbers because that's what democracy is all about.

Even Rolls Royce the aircraft engine manufacturers today announced they would be stepping back their output of engines because of the Qatar Air purchasing situation, but that they would still be highly profitable. 

Tony the Stock Market Tiger will never Crash,
because he is a PVC punching 'doll.' 

When you chase numbers, and your margins are thin, it is easy to forget where your vulnerabilities are... They are in the numbers. So long as the Fed has banks to absorb the bond issues for collateral and liquidity, then it has no problem. But we are actually a long way down the road from banks actually 'making decisions' about the form of their collateral for loan liquidity. They need to use the Fed's bonds and its pricing of money. And that is because of the outlandish size of their obligations - and of the obligations of their clients who create the demand for their money. You see no one will undertake the risk of funding the capital required to meet the on-going debt bill from the past that has carried through to today - not with 'street cash' anyway. There are no retail equity investors. And don't let the media fool you about it; there aren't any.

I would be looking exclusively at small output, small number, real money ventures only, as far as investing is concerned. Everything else, in spite of the unlikelihood of a market Crash this year, is fantasy fiction and it will never return you any profits. 

Chilcot V. Hutton

The Hutton Inquiry - not the Report, the very existence of the Inquiry itself, is crystalline proof that Tony Blair has a problem that the Chilcot Report is blurring over.

Sir John Chilcot's two million word Report about whether or not Tony Blair or his government is responsible in some legal or ethical way for the Iraq Invasion categorically says that the intelligence services 'evidence' for Saddam's WMD's was overstated.

But you see, someone needs to explain the death of Dr. David Kelly. The Hutton Inquiry was about his death, but at the time it was not set up to deal with the substance of Kelly's actual infamy, namely that he accused the spying agencies of sexing up the evidence about WMD's.

Everybody knew what the 'story' with Dr. Kelly was - it was that he was a whistle-blower about the faked WMD intelligence. And that 'story' caused there to be an official inquiry into how he might have died... LOL. 

Let's blame the Russians! - hint: it wasn't the Russians...

He was murdered. It's simple as that.

Or well, maybe he wasn't murdered because Hutton never found there was conclusive evidence that he was murdered. Same way though, that there was conclusive evidence of course that Saddam had WMD's. Ha! What a laugh. 

But Chilcot DID find that Blair overstated the case for war with Saddam for no valid reasons...

Okay so then why did Blair ignore or dismiss Kelly's complaints? What is the reason today, that Tony Blair gives for his not having taken any note of what Kelly was saying back then?

He's not given any reason, because he has not been asked. Two million words and not one question about this crucial item.

Why, if Blair was aware of charges of falsity over the 'evidence' about WMD's at the time did he justify using the WMD's as the excuse for war. At least Chilcot has the decency to say this critical point: 'war was not the last resort in this case.'

No indeed it was not! For of course, we all know it was the first resort; the main resort, and the only resort.

You see it's not really open for Blair to say 'I misjudged;' for he made a decision based on knowingly potentially false information. He knew that Dr Kelly was raising objections about the veracity of the information. He didn't misjudge anything. He blotted out the contrary information, he obscured it, he deliberately disregarded it, and ultimately, someone killed off the officer waving the flag about it.

So - do you think everyone in the UK upper echelons and the elite are 'okay' with this? Do you think 'M' of James Bond fiction would just 'turn a blind eye?'

I'd have a 'Jill Bond' or a 'Jane Bond' in this saga, and she
would have a car like this, above. There'd still be a 'James Bond' too.
There'd be both. It's a modern world, you know.

No, certainly not. 'M' might well ask if there was something behind the war escapade besides just plain stupidity and the weapons industry lobby.

He might resort initially to Katherine Graham's UN Commission Report of the 1980's into Western industrial involvement inside Iraq in illegal weapons and arms manufacturing.

And he might consult actual people inside say, the German chemical industry, and heavy machinery industries, to find out the 'inside skinny' on what was going on (that is to say, if he didn't already know).

Lord West - he's a top man

Now see if I were running the UK government (LOL!) I would quickly move to have (retired) Admiral Lord West head MI6 right away. And Lord West, not being a Conservative, might easily decide to take an axe to the Department and throw out all those who had been installed inside there from recommendations and support from so-called 'allies and partners' with a lot of money and pull and who fund and push their own people through higher academic degrees to make impression on the recruiters at these places.

And if I were not running the UK government, and I were Lord West, and knew what was going on all the same - as he does do - then it would tempting to have some zillionaire benefactor help me pull together a private 'think tank' or 'institute for the advancement of...' And personally, I would be recruiting people from ex the Black Watch and the Coldstream Guard and this kind of thing, or World Champion athletes, perhaps from the Martial Arts or at least certainly of World Competition Class. And the purpose of this organization would be to go and ask the questions that political Inquiries don't, and to find out the unbiased truth - as most government inquiries do not either. 

And I would make those Reports very very public indeed. With the zillionaire's money of course. 

And I can tell you right now I know where our new 'W' would send his agents and get them to look.

And boy would you find some 'skeletons' and some dead bodies buried away!


  

White Painted Guns

Here is the beginning of our new, latest, let's call it 'fan-fiction' Bond story. 

If you have a lot of money you can get credits as part of the production - personally I would like to talk to Katy Perry's agents and suggest she collaborates with Illenium & Said The Sky to do a duet with Cristina Soto on the Main Theme Song (the video below). Frankly I don't see how the production wouldn't generate up in the billions of dollars.

Our Bond is going to have a tiny gun - he won't need
too much anyway, something for genuine close
personal protection that's all. (5-shot S&W 60)

But believe me, the one challenging consideration will be the way I depict modern spy agencies for you and it won't be happy for them, as the old days 'Bond Franchise' has let them get away with being seen as...

In fact, it's doubtful if my Bond will be working for MI6 anymore. But he would be taking a close look at the previously 'migrants without a green card' who volunteered as medics or translators under Obama's plan (not to mention the idiot Tony Blair had the same thing going on) and who ended up in the military or in the White House or in the CIA. Oh yes. You can rest assured there are a WHOLE BUNCH of Islamists inside these groups you pay your taxes to and for.

But watch the video. There are people who know what is going on and if they play their hand it is not going to be pretty for the media and the PC world. You might even think there really are aliens or angels involved... Put it this way - it's going to take more than what the CIA and the entire military of the United States has got to put this right now. So you'd better hope and pray that there are benevolent advanced agencies around.