Eddie Van Halen passed away the other day. He was not just a guitarist, he played every instrument, but guitar was his thing. And his brother Alex had his back playing drums, Eddie would not do an interview without mentioning him. 
 
To hear the best of him listen to his solo in “Eruption”, and it’s so wild and fast and so all over the place, you’d think he would get out of key any moment now. 
But he never does, just keeps you on the edge listening and that’s art for me. 
He was the rocking machine and also a great storyteller.
 
So, here is my tribute to him - only the good die young.
 
I am hooked on good songs and the ironic thing is that I don’t listen to music anymore. I don’t really read books anymore either, the library in my house is deadly, but now I am done reading anything new that comes out – there is nothing they can tell me I don’t already know. 
 
I subscribe to a news portal that insists that the next financial stimulus will consist of all citizens writing checks to the governments, $1250 in America. 
That’s a joke.
 
All these girls and boys in governments couldn’t resist the extra spending and the central banks are now coming to the rescue because they have no choice. 
Consequences unknown.
That’s not a joke.
 
Money is a mental concept, it is not a real thing if not backed by anything tangible. And to be clear, I see nothing wrong with it.
When the economy was expanding, even exploding like in the internet age, if the money was tied up to something tangible like gold, it would choke all the progress fast. Gold only adds about 2% of stock a year, good part of it going into jewelry, and the economies back then were growing at a multiple of that. This is the problem with “sound money”, delicately called “the gap”. 
Between fantasy and reality, my opinion.
 
The problems start when the governments go to far, like buying stocks and bonds outright in the market (with brokers front-running them), introducing capital controls or extending the maturity of bonds arbitrarily. Italy invented that, I think.
Say, you were holding a 5-year government bond, but the guys in Rome were running light on cash and couldn’t possibly redeem it. So they would tell you that you’re now holding a 30-year bond.
 
The Swiss National Bank (SNB) stands out as the biggest speculator in the world. 
Its balance sheet is over $ 1 trillion, or 136% of Swiss GDP.   
The Federal Reserve balance sheet is 35% of US GDP, so to compete with the SNB in going balls first down the ice chute, the Fed would need to increase its balance sheet from the current $7trillion to $27 trillion. 
 
Now covid supercharged the race down the chute and let’s hope the markets will hold (SNB is a major shareholder in companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook). 
What does that have to do with stimulating the Swiss economy may take some explaining to do. 
 
I read that the revenue from covid testing kits is $2 billion per day and at some point the cost of the vaccine will kick in too, helping the revenues even more.
Once the money starts flowing freely, the system has a built in resistance to stop it.
We’re looking at the biggest money making run since the internet bubble of the late 90’s. Replace “run” with “grab” according to your level of sensitivity.
 
That’s the brothers Van Halen below. Someone once asked Eddie what is the rocking music all about, “sticking it up to the man,” he said.

​Eddie Van Halen passed away the other day. He was not just a guitarist, he played every instrument, but guitar was his thing. And his brother Alex had his back playing drums, Eddie would not do an interview without mentioning him. 
 
To hear the best of him listen to his solo in “Eruption”, and it’s so wild and fast and so all over the place, you’d think he would get out of key any moment now. 
But he never does, just keeps you on the edge listening and that’s art for me. 
He was the rocking machine and also a great storyteller.
 
So, here is my tribute to him - only the good die young.
 
I am hooked on good songs and the ironic thing is that I don’t listen to music anymore. I don’t really read books anymore either, the library in my house is deadly, but now I am done reading anything new that comes out – there is nothing they can tell me I don’t already know. 
 
I subscribe to a news portal that insists that the next financial stimulus will consist of all citizens writing checks to the governments, $1250 in America. 
That’s a joke.
 
All these girls and boys in governments couldn’t resist the extra spending and the central banks are now coming to the rescue because they have no choice. 
Consequences unknown.
That’s not a joke.
 
Money is a mental concept, it is not a real thing if not backed by anything tangible. And to be clear, I see nothing wrong with it.
When the economy was expanding, even exploding like in the internet age, if the money was tied up to something tangible like gold, it would choke all the progress fast. Gold only adds about 2% of stock a year, good part of it going into jewelry, and the economies back then were growing at a multiple of that. This is the problem with “sound money”, delicately called “the gap”. 
Between fantasy and reality, my opinion.
 
The problems start when the governments go to far, like buying stocks and bonds outright in the market (with brokers front-running them), introducing capital controls or extending the maturity of bonds arbitrarily. Italy invented that, I think.
Say, you were holding a 5-year government bond, but the guys in Rome were running light on cash and couldn’t possibly redeem it. So they would tell you that you’re now holding a 30-year bond.
 
The Swiss National Bank (SNB) stands out as the biggest speculator in the world. 
Its balance sheet is over $ 1 trillion, or 136% of Swiss GDP.   
The Federal Reserve balance sheet is 35% of US GDP, so to compete with the SNB in going balls first down the ice chute, the Fed would need to increase its balance sheet from the current $7trillion to $27 trillion. 
 
Now covid supercharged the race down the chute and let’s hope the markets will hold (SNB is a major shareholder in companies like Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Facebook). 
What does that have to do with stimulating the Swiss economy may take some explaining to do. 
 
I read that the revenue from covid testing kits is $2 billion per day and at some point the cost of the vaccine will kick in too, helping the revenues even more.
Once the money starts flowing freely, the system has a built in resistance to stop it.
We’re looking at the biggest money making run since the internet bubble of the late 90’s. Replace “run” with “grab” according to your level of sensitivity.
 
That’s the brothers Van Halen below. Someone once asked Eddie what is the rocking music all about, “sticking it up to the man,” he said.

​

​I am no good in crowds, I‘m the walking definition of ‘Old School’, which means that I want to be free to do what I want, not harming anybody around me. 
And I don’t intend to, I’m as sweet as a little puppy with big brown eyes. 
Just don’t test me.
 
Let’s move on to business.
 
The covid vaccine is hoped to be here early next year and it’s beyond the media’s collective imagination to ask what that actually means. 
I knew a good man in my previous life, actually pre-previous, as he is now retired, likely playing golf somewhere in Florida spending evenings on the beach, but he instilled in me that way of thinking. 
“What does it mean, really?”
As I understand, the drug, when it comes, or if, will require extremely low temperature to be stored in. And by low, I mean LOW. There is no infrastructure to distribute it in a compliant way, and these storage facilities can’t be built quickly. Trust me on that one. By accident, I am a fine engineer.
Then there is the fact that any new vaccine has about 50% success ratio, historically.
So if you hope for a “change the world” moment early next year– you better don’t. 
 
Back to the media: they represent the short-oriented mindset, like – “what do we do this afternoon, huh? anybody?” And it’s the army of ladies on the screen with their lips botoxed to the extreme, and also over weighted weird guys driving cars with very small displacement engines. 
 
We’re talking about oligarchs here and the people paid by them, the ones on TV screens. They only think in concepts much like Klaus Schwab’s Great Reset (the one of the Davos gathering fame, and somebody please explain to me the purpose of this get together, except it costs the taxpayers a fortune – there is an army protecting the finest from the citizenry and nothing ever comes out of the meetings, never). 
The practical application of what these people are doing is not there. 
They don’t even understand it, which is very sad.
 
Simple example – in California they will force all cars to be electric real soon but they lack the infrastructure to do so as they don’t have the required power grid to support it. 
Not to mention the budget that they won’t be able to accommodate to build it. So it will not happen. There will be not enough plugs to plug into. It’s actually the opposite, I mean, plugs, yes, but not enough places to connect. 
Hell, my thinking is flying away now into dangerous territory. 
 
Or the good one, no?
 
I will never support electric cars, because I don’t know where they get their energy from. Dirty coal fired power plants? Nuclear, in which case where is the toxic waste being dumped?
At least the traditional car has the catalytic converter, so you know what you’re blowing in the air.
 
Okay, it was like that until the Germans ruined it for everybody. 
 
People miss the infrastructure part as if it doesn’t matter.
 
Example number two - there was all the rage that the big banks will move to Frankfurt or Paris if Brexit happens, and I hope it will. 
But neither Frankfurt nor Paris have the telecommunication capacity of London. 
 
Not even close. 
 
There is no infrastructure to match London. And try to put it in – it takes years and an amount of money that is unfathomable on the bankrupt European continent.
Don’t you think that matters for business? Don’t you think the big players know it?
 
Scaling down now, sitting here on the patio on a beautiful day, I got some orders to do things around the house, but I have some serious hearing loss; my wife complains all the time. 
 
She read this essay, how it’s full of opinions and just me being annoying.
 
“I had the feeling that you won’t let go.” 
 
She said.

 ​“You have the same eyes,” said the lady on the 787 Dream, somewhere south of Island on the long flight home. 
The plane was cruising high above the clouds making its way to Canada. It entered through the Labrador, then followed the St Lawrence river, passed Montreal and finally hit the Toronto airport. And I know every moment of it, maybe 50 times by now. My little brother says it’s easier to fly up and down than square. And he knows, he is a pilot.
 
And I’ve been around too, you know, flown all over the globe.  
 
And `Canada is home for me, nothing beats it.
 
“You know,” she said referring to my brother, “we flew together many times, he is the calmest pilot I ever met.”
 
And I thought: “he is the coolest guy I ever met.”
 
She looked at me as if waiting for an answer.
So I said: “he is the better looking brother.” 
 
She took her time sizing me up.
 
“Maybe not.”
 
So before all that, I spent a few days in Warsaw, and Warsaw is always good. The views, the history, restaurants, parks, people, you can’t beat that. There is nothing like this anywhere else.
I parked myself in a superb restaurant, had a light meal on the patio, a glass of a good wine under the sweet October sun.
 
Plus hey! It’s my native language. I can pick up all the nuances. And I am a storyteller and I can make people laugh, or at least interested.
 
There was a polish writer back in the day, Jerzy Kosinski, and he made it big in the US of A, and then he killed himself in his Manhattan apartment.
His demons came to close one evening.
Back in the day in Poland he would tell stories on a train and people would miss their stations just fascinated by what he was saying. 
I am sure he was making most of it up, as I do. This is how art works, you steal from others but you add something to it. 
 
Read his book “The painted bird”, it is something for the ages.
 
And I talk to people, “chat them up” is the expression. I can’t work the iphone for the life of me, but I can talk. 
 
Then I had to leave Warsaw, with the covid scandal they want you to leave contact information exiting the plane in case of I don’t know what. Honestly I don’t.
 
I may have misspelled my name, I’m Michael Jackson now, I think that’s what I wrote. Also the last digits of my phone number may not be right – but hey, I had a big stroke a while ago and the right side of my body doesn’t function as it used to. My writing is bad and my mind wanders. More and more.
 
But I will follow the quarantine procedures down to a “t “.
I will do my part, just don’t want a clerk with a commanding voice calling me to check how I got my shopping done today. 
 
I’ll be fine.

​Former Chief Science Officer for the pharmaceutical giant Pfizer says "Second Wave" is based on faked false-positive COVID tests, "Pandemic is Over".
The "Big Pharma" insider asserts that false positive results from inherently unreliable COVID tests are being used to manufacture a "second wave" based on "new cases." 
Dr. Mike Yeadon, a former Vice President and Chief Science Officer for Pfizer for 16 years, says that half or even "almost all" of tests for COVID are false positives. 
Dr. Yeadon also argues that the threshold for herd immunity may be much lower than previously thought, and may have been reached in many countries already.
In an interview last week Dr. Yeadon was asked: "we are basing a government policy, an economic policy, a civil liberties policy on, what may well be, completely fake data on this coronavirus?"
Dr. Yeadon answered with a simple "yes."
Survival rate of COVID is now estimated to be 99.8%, similar to flu.
 
Another argument made by Yeadon et al in their September paper is that there has been no difference in outcomes related to lockdowns.
They say:
"The shape of the deaths vs. time curve implies a natural process and not one resulting mainly from human interventions...Famously, Sweden has adopted an almost laissez faire approach, with qualified advice given, but no generalized lockdowns. Yet its profile and that of the UK’s is very similar."
In Germany, an organization of 500 German doctors and scientists has formed, who say that government response to the COVID virus has been vastly out of proportion to the actual severity of the disease.
 
It helps to put this “pandemic” in an economic and geopolitical contest as well. 
In this sense it’s a gift that will keep on giving. 
Issues with EU disintegrating and strong separatist movements? Just turn up the media dial on Covid and people will stay home. Monetary easing and negative interest not working for years now ruining pension funds – do the same, just scare everyone, divert the attention.
The airlines are in a rare situation – BA chief executive Alex Cruz said this “last week we flew 187,000 passengers. The same week in the previous year we flew almost a million. We remain worried about the virus in the winter season. People are still afraid of traveling.” 
 
What he didn’t say is that the major carriers burned tens of billions of dollars on shares buybacks in recent years in an effort to lift the stock value. Now they’re coming to the governments, hat in hand, asking for taxpayer money for comparable amounts that they incinerated earlier. 
 
Then we have more serious things brewing.
There is a looming confrontation between the Europeans and the Russians. Normally the Americans would take care of all this because of the deal they had during the Cold War – we provide security, you side with us against the Russians. That deal has collapsed – Americans are going their own way and Europeans are their own, but the problem is they’re not of one mind. European policy making requires that all countries have to agree and one veto ruins the deal. So the Russians have a Trojan horse in terms of Greece, Cyprus and Hungry and that leaves it up to the rest of the Europeans to act independently. 
The country that really matters here is Germany – they are desperate to have good relationship with Russia, this is where they get most of their energy from. In case of conflict escalation, they will need to massively re-arm, which will bring some memories in Europe.
 
Aside from all this, I am taking a week off starting Monday, need some break and first stop is Warsaw.
 
I talked to my sister, and she doesn’t take the Covid story as easy as I do.
 
“Go careful,” she said. 

Writing these Friday essays is one of the best decisions I made in my life. Even if no one read it I would still do it, and here is the reason – if you know that next Friday you have to say something original, you keep your brain in the creative mode.
And if week after week you leave this trail behind of thoughtful examination of the world, you can’t help but get better in whatever it is that you seek to do. And if other people read it and trust you more – that’s a jackpot, no?
 
Being good at something is not a good enough reason to spend your life doing it. 
I realized that some time ago. I may be a bit out of place as a structural engineer in the pharma industry, but I learned and I’m good at adapting. 
Still, I prefer writing, which may be also a decent retirement plan.
 
But when I walk into a slick design like Toronto terminal 1 or Gdansk (Danzig) airport I see right away how the loads are transferred through the exposed structure. This gives me a strange sense of pleasure.
You never forget your first profession. 
Gdansk, by the way, is comprised of 3 cities, the best kept secret is Sopot. I just spent a few nights in the Grand Hotel there on the beach, typing on the famous molo. 
It was absolutely fantastic. 
 
I started writing about 10 years ago, because imagination is the power to bring to mind things that aren’t present, the ability to step outside the moment. And I love it.
The step up from imagination is creativity, which is making something that is original, never experienced by anyone yet. How cool is that? You create something that wasn’t there before.
 
When we write our resumes, we make them sound like the life ran a narrative course, when in fact it was no-linear random process and that made it interesting. Life is a process of improvisation between your talents and the circumstances. Never clear where it will lead.
 
The most efficient people are the ones who absolutely love what they do. 
If you say – “why don’t you stop it and try something new for a change?” they wouldn’t know what you’re talking about, because they’d say – “this isn’t what I do, this is who I am. This defines me.”
It’s just this something in life that you get right away when you put your hands on it. Dancing, sailing, flying, writing.
 
Like my brother, who would show up for work and fly the big birds across the Atlantic to the JFK even if they’d stop paying him. He wouldn’t likely even notice that they’ve stopped.
“What’s the best airport from pilot’s view?” I asked him.
“LAX, hands down, Chicago’s O’Hare close second.”
“On the Dream (787)?”
“Good wings, pull up quick.”
Wings are the most important part of the plane, the rest is just mechanics. 
Wings are art.
 
Some people have figured out how to be naturally more productive than others per minute, and the way you do that is by having the instinct to ship. Not the instinct to polish, to justify. 
You may call it “staying ahead of the pain”.
Don’t wait for the perfect alignment, just jump in, and then jump out if you lose interest.
Sing in the shower, write a poem, take chances in life, at the end you came to the world with nothing and you will leave with nothing. 
It’s all about making the best of the meantime.

​

​Beirut seems to be a coursed city under permanent civil war, now also troubled by tragic blasts, like the one on August 4th that caused over 200 deaths and about $15 billion in property damage. Official explanation for it is a fire in ammonium nitrate storage that didn’t have proper safety measures. This material is as a strong of an explosive as TNT and from the same family of chemicals. 
It was stored there for the last six years, and during that time customs official sent multiple letters to judges requesting the resolution of the issue. 
The chemicals were confiscated from a Moldovan-flagged cargo ship that set sail from Batumi, Georgia to Beira Mozambique. Back in November 2013 the ship made port in Beirut, officially due to technical problems, but it seams that the owner didn’t have the funds to pay tolls for the Suez Canal. To get the money, he had taken additional cargo of heavy machinery, which was stack on the top of the cargo space causing the doors to buckle, and an inspection of the port state control deemed in not seaworthy, it was not allowed to leave and this is how the ammonium nitrate ended up in the warehouse on the shore. The ship sank in the harbour in February 2018 by the way.
In a press conference after the explosion president Trump said that according to his Generals, it was a bomb and so it was an attack. The media didn’t pick up on this statement, but the interesting thing is what he didn’t say, because he couldn’t. 
A stash of explosive chemicals sitting in the middle of a war-thorn city where tensions run high will give someone ideas sooner or later. In the aftermath of the event the whole Lebanese government resigned.
 
Beirut is a happening place these days and for all the wrong reasons.
On September 10 the port was ablaze again with black smoke rising into the sky causing panic and people leaving the city for safety. Official explanation was a fire in the oil and rubber warehouse.
 
Truth is – the city is on fire.
 
And I get the feeling that there is something deeper going on there and I’m uneasy with it, but I know full well that we will never find out.
 
Media provides mostly bullet news and the message is kept simple, which is easier to coordinate. What’s more important – local media outlets can’t afford to keep reporters all over the world, they need to buy the news from one of the big guys, like Reuters or Bloomberg, so it’s really a narrow feed.
 
And there are other ways to coordinate the message and I can give you a real life example from a chief editor of a newspaper in Poland. Back in the day the Batory Foundation, paid for by one of Soros’s funds, was publishing the annual donation amounts to specific media outlets. So, it was no surprise when you open a newspaper what’re going to read - they were then singing from the same key (Batory stopped publishing the info since). I suppose it’s no different in other countries.
 
I also got an early glimpse into how newspapers work long time ago – so this young journalist discovers some irregularities in the local supermarket operation (that’s in the US), writes an article about and gives it to the editor. 
He takes it, goes to see the owner and comes back with a fat advertising contract. Nothing gets published.
 
Apparently everybody cares about the integrity of the media and the journalists.
 
My experience is - when everybody says that they care about something that means nobody really cares.

​What I learned back then, at school, was that the formation of a character is in a large part knowing who you should care about and who you should not. Bad as it sounds at the first take, it is true. Also knowing whom you should listen to and whom you should not. 
If you’re willing to learn, you will listen to people who have something original to say. They’re not exactly easy to find, but you might get lucky.
I have a rule here – pay attention to the ones who can express themselves and convey a message in a minimum number of words. These are the best brains. 
I was lucky enough to have teachers like that, back in the day in the high school, far away from here behind the Iron Curtain.
 
These days in the West the confusion continues. The CDC (Center for Disease Control) in the US admits that more people are dying from suicides and overdose than from Covid. 
In Europe, the German health minister Jens Spahn has come out and publicly admitted that the lockdowns of the economy were a mistake. 
That, I think, is an understatement of the year.
Just wait for the avalanche of lawsuits from businesses that folded for no reason whatsoever, except for the government incompetency of handling the situation.
 
Listen – the politicians know full well that there is no pandemic. They push the topic because their economies are collapsing and they’re preparing to try to cleverly default on national debts. 
 
Another distraction, the BLM (black lifes matter) movement has a strong presence in the media. The black community is the most heavily armed (estimated at 10M people with guns in the US) with the highest criminal record by far. Are we missing something here? White lifes don’t matter? 
All lifes matter equally to me.
In life, every good initiative starts as a good cause, attracts attention, then becomes a business and eventually degenerates into a racket. BLM is no exception. I think we’re entering the racket stage here.
 
And spare me Gates and his buddy Anthony Fauci saying that we may have to wear masks and keep distance from each other for years to come. 
Okay guys, you will make your money when the second wave hits, the panic will go insane and you will have the vaccine at the high of the hype and price it accordingly.
 
Make your money, hope it’ll feel good.
 
It will be like the old Dire Straits song – Money For Nothing. 
 
Billionaire high school dropouts are suddenly experts on viruses, CO2 emission, population growth (decline in fact, if you dive into specifics) and Marxist Equality, excluding them of course. Bill Gates is an example, and he recently got $79M from Canadian prime mister Justin Trudeau without a real explanation for what. 
 
Hell, I stopped watching the news, there's nothing they can tell me I don't already know. All I check is the weather before I leave on my motorcycle on a Saturday morning and I drive hard, you better believe it. 
A guy at the gas station asked me what’s the fastest I went.
“I don’t know, the dial was showing 190 last I looked down and I was still accelerating. Thing is – at that speed you stop watching the dial because the scenery is moving so fast around you.”
“Wow,” he said.
 
I just ride, hope better times will come. Gonna stop when the last drop of gas turns to vapor.
 
Or, possibly I'm on the edge of an endless fall, sure enough she's come to call. 
Got to go now, get on that bike. 
 
Me and the wanderlust.

​This week marked an anniversary of a significant event, widely understood as the beginning of the World War II. 
On September 1st 1939 German troops invaded Poland from the West and just two weeks later the Russian army invaded my country from the East. 
The Americans call it the double whammy.
This was a complex event that requires some effort to unpack in order to understand. 
 
This is my take on it:
Adolf Hitler didn’t want a war with Poland – there was no gain in it for Germany any way you could imagine. His concern was Russia and the spread of communist ideology in Western Europe, but even that wasn’t the main driver. He needed to secure the supply of natural resources for the German economy, meaning – control the countries who had them.
That was the only way to sell the war concept to the German industrial complex, which really runs the country, and he got the okay to do it.
This is why the war happened.
Hitler wanted Poland to align with him against Stalin, which would be the right thing to do for both countries.
Poland refused, and there are records surfacing that the critical levels of Polish government were infiltrated by the Russians who drove the decision. 
You need to understand the complexity of the situation – the eastern border of Poland moved with some (war) frequency. The loyalty of people there was not obvious, in the sense – which is actually my country? The language was floating between Polish and Russian, and the speaking always reflects the thinking and so the feeling of belonging.
 
Poland would be better off aligning with the Germans, avoiding almost total destruction of the country, genocide and then the following 45 years of Russian occupation, which ruined the economy and cost the lives of many people. 
 
One thing about war is that it causes hatred and the conditions deteriorate quickly. There is no control of what happens anymore. 
For me this is the definition of war for any leader – you lose control.
 
In 1941 the Germans were so close to Moscow, that they could see the Kremlin towers. If they didn’t lose some strength fighting Poland, but would have Polish divisions supporting them instead, Stalin would be out of the picture there and then. 
And if you ask me how far out, I say all the way out. 
 
What saves Russia every time is the endless space that makes logistics a nightmare, and also the weather. Brutal winters, wet springs and falls and short summers.
Plus you can’t conquer a country from the air; you need to put boots on the ground and this is when the real life starts, in the mud, mountains and snow.
 
The Russians are also an emotional nation, they can really get together in the time of need. When the German troops were storming St. Petersburg, in a long and nasty battle, the Russian tanks, the T-34, were leaving the assembly line firing hard just out of the factory gate. At the end they made it all the way to Berlin. 
 
It’s a loaded week in historical sense and what happened then shaped the fate of Eastern and Central Europe for decades. We’re not over it yet, not even close.
 
Now, I am sitting here by my pool under a big red umbrella on a beautiful summer evening sipping the Montalcino wine and typing. 
Music is playing in the rhythm of a slow cooking minestrone soup, so you can tell I live in an Italian neighborhood. 
As it got darker, I can hear coyotes, haven’t seen wolfs yet, but they’re quiet hunters. A coyote is like a dog on steroids. 
I like the nature around me, wouldn’t like to be chased in panic through the bushes by a wolf, don’t have the speed anymore, but the rest is fine. 

The topic of women’s right to vote bothers me, and not for the reason you’d think. Switzerland had a referendum on the subject in 1971 and since then women could vote in some parts of it. About the last country in Europe to go through with this, but it differs as the cantons have quite a bit of independence. Canton of Appenzell Innerrhoden (AI) was directed to allow women to vote by the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland in 1991.

The concept seems right looking from the distance, but it’s not so obvious when you think about it.
Women are sharp as hell, and I have one at home who gives me the run of my life, but the original idea was to have one political vote per family - not to stop women from having their voices heard. 
The husband and the wife would sit down and figure out what they want in an election. 
Having them vote separately just divides the family, it’s nonsense and it makes our societies weaker, also allows voting by the gut feel, not by the merit, as there is no meaningful analysis what’s best for the family. 
It’s not a great idea, but it looks good on paper.
 
Fast forward to the real time, the summertime, I was riding through the forests the other day thinking about a quote from Charles Bukowski, a German-American writer. 
He said “find what you love and let it kill you”, and I think this is about the best life advice I heard. And I found what I love – you are reading it now, maybe you read my book too.
And I always preferred artists over scientists.
The difference is that a scientist says a simple thing in a hard way, and an artist says a hard thing in a simple way. 
 
So, on a beautiful weekend I rode between the lakes, seven hours on the Yamaha and I was exhausted. At some point the bike was flashing low gas light for a long while and I was sweating bullets going through the wilderness.
Finally I found a gas station in a small town, got a drink and nice sandwich there to recover.
 
“Everything all right?” Said the lady.
 
“No, but thanks for asking.” 
 
“How far are you from home?”
 
“About two tanks of gas.” 
 
She must have seen something in my face and said: “you know, if you’re losing your soul and you know it, then you still have a soul left to lose.”
 
“I am with you.” 
 
“I was going really fast because my bike was running out of gas.”
 
“That’s not how it works,” she laughed. 
 
“I am a risk taker.”
 
“We’re here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us. “ She said giving me the credit card back.
 
Back home my wife said that I am mad going that fast and far and for too long and she may be right, but I won’t change, too late for that.
 
Every time her arguments corner me and I don’t have a good answer, I think, “you're better off alone, you're better off than me, but every time I'm gone I'm everything you need.”
 
Must be living right or something.
 
 
*Credits to Dorothy Parker and Charles B. for some of the words above.
​

Geography is the bedrock of human society but it doesn’t get much attention when we think about the world. 
At some point the Harvard University even dropped the geography department altogether. And these are the same guys who recently lost a cool billion from their pension fund, because their investment strategy was kind of, you know, off. 
 
There is more to geography than meets the eye and it is crucial to the fate of nations. For instance, countries in tempered climate do better than the ones in the tropics. 
Just look at Africa, where the top layer and the bottom layer of the continent are richer than the middle. Economically it is shaped like a McDonald sandwich. 
 
South America works the same way. In terms of GDP per capita it is led by Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, all tempered weather places.
In tropics, the agriculture is less efficient; some say you get half the output for your efforts. There is no winter insect kill, diseases are easier to catch witch shortens the lifespan, so if you’re a trained engineer or a doctor there, you will not contribute to society as long as, say, in Europe. 
To be fair, some tropical countries played it right – just look at Thailand or Singapore. They developed their strengths in tech and finance. 
 
Singapore is going to benefit big time from Hong-Kong’s fall, which will be messy and long, and the capital is leaving already from there – if you’re a financial institution and have a trillion dollars to park, would Hong-Kong be your choice anymore?
 
In Europe the diversity always helped with progress, and the continent is really a peninsula with smaller peninsulas separated by everything geographical you can think of. 
All the main rivers start from the Alps and spread like a car wheel design. Moving goods on water is about one-tenth of the cost of moving them on a highway. For an economy to be competitive this is a do-or-die factor. Problem is their rivers don’t interconnect.
Still, the diversity is Europe’s strength as people learn from each other, good and bad. 
The concept of the EU, while looking great on paper, gets in the way of that, which is why I’m not a fan.  
To be clear – EU is in the process of disintegrating and I see the covid scare as a desperate attempt to regain control. Switching people’s attention from politics to health. 
 
The geography of Europe is in a stark contrast to China, where the main two rivers are parallel, the coast is round and there is a chain of islands out the coast that can be easily blocked for trade and military traffic by a powerful enemy. 
I can name two easily– US and Japan. They both beat China in naval power big time.
This is the reason, not even looking at economical factors (and there are many going against them), why China will never become a global power, as it never did in history. 
By now they have peaked in everything except for military build-up, but the thing about the army is not the hardware – it’s the experience of the people who run it, and that takes decades to earn, like a couple of World Wars. 
Meaning – winning them.
 
So, no – China will not do anything of importance anytime soon. 
They do silly things - their response to viruses being transmitted from animals is nothing short of criminal: wouldn’t you close all those live animals markets to prevent the next wave? 
 
Let’s keep it light at the end, as I always do. 
Lightness keeps me in shape – it’s that and the V-max when I’m moving high speed down the highway (the number of it is 404, the fastest one). 
 
Now, imagine a good guitar, harmonica and low voice playing this:
 
“My baby did a low down dirty thing,
​My baby, she turned my mind to mush.
She had the gangster lean lookin' a little flushed
She took my liquor and left me the can to crush”.
 
And that’s Billy Gibbons, thank you for these lines man.

​Bitch took my liquor and left me the can to crush.

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