Amerika

People like to talk about celebrities who are essentially people being used as symbols. We all feel good when even celebrities suffer from the same stuff we do, from baldness to halitosis and hemorrhoids or addiction.

It confirms for us again that there is no escape from the humiliation of life. If even the golden and glittering are brought down to Earth, then for those of us dwelling in the muck of anonymous obscurity it is no shame to also suffer.

They also show us the benefits of being true elites, namely that you hang around with the people who have the best financial advisors, smartest lawyers, wisest bankers, and most connections in the worlds of business and society.

Consequently when we see celebrities doing something in a group, it becomes a question of whether we can separate the merely silly trend from the actually intelligent thing they do sometimes.

For example, some noticed that malevolent nerd gremlin Bill Gates is buying farmland in an attempt to spread out his portfolio:

In 1994, the Gateses hired the former Putnam Investments bond-fund manager to diversify the couple’s portfolio away from the Microsoft cofounder’s 45% stake in the technology giant while maintaining comparable or better returns. According to a 2014 profile of Larson in the Wall Street Journal, these investments include a substantial stake in AutoNation, hospitality interests such as the Charles Hotel in Cambridge and the Four Seasons in San Francisco, and “at least 100,000 acres of farmland in California, Illinois, Iowa, Louisiana, and other states … .” According to the Land Report 100 Research Team, that figure is currently more than twice that amount, which means Bill Gates, cofounder of Microsoft, has an alter ego: Farmer Bill, the guy who owns more farmland than anyone else in America.

Just for some context, this is not a huge amount of land, just a huge amount for any single owner. Texas ranches back in the day routinely hit 300k acres, and Texas itself is 172m acres, so he has a ways to go to be taking over.

The same seems true of other celebrities, especially from the dot-com area. Their goal seems to be to unload their own stock in the companies they started so that they can buy not just blue chips but vital industries, like transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, and utilities.

Smart money knows that the fake world created in the 1990s, the “new world order” of global democracy with capitalism used to fund socialist-style entitlements, had a good run but has come to an end.

All the numbers are fake. A tiny group uses this stuff fanatically, but no one else cares. Most people just want computers to do basic stuff, and more of them are moving away from owning a bunch of software to doing everything online.

This means that the big money days are over. These companies are dead men walking. Consequently their owners want to invest not in next-generation futuristic technologies, but the kind of stuff that a primitivist or survivalist might approve.

Our elites have been getting jumpy for a good long time, but this tells you where their heads have been for the past decade. Things are bad and getting worse, so get your money out of the false symbolic economy if you can.

Tags: agriculture, bill gates