Guilt

Okay I'm feeling slightly guilty.

One of my business partners has a real thing for fast cars; I'm not all that fussed about them.

The whole world is apparently on the edge of some kind of financial precipice. Jim Rogers says let the bankrupt guys just fold – stop bailing them out. And I totally agree. But what I mean is that people are really saying things are really bad...

So... Yesterday my other business partner took me to Western Australia's best restaurant (Galileo's) and we went there at a hundred miles an hour in his 458 Italia (Ferrari, obviously).

Three bottles later of some Sicilian wine called I think Santa Cecilia, um, we took off back to his place and opened the very last bottle in existence of some kind of 'nuther red from Mount Barker.

Er, these wines were all absolutely spectacular.

I don't know much about the car ride home because the way the driving/passenger position is in the Ferrari (you sort of lie on your back with your head being the only upright thing... well kind of upright, anyway) the blood going to the back of my head and the swirl and swoosh of stuff flying by in my peripheral vision on either side meant I can't really tell you what the hell was going on – I never saw it, and don't remember much of it anyway either, really.

I'm doing a $260,000,000 Stage One project financing for a UCG and ammonium nitrate plant on a huge deep seam (non-fracing) coal resource in Queensland and I basically have a whole bunch of money from some Chinese guys whom I've never personally even met and including, I think so anyway, actually the Chinese government.

Okay things are bad apparently. Everywhere. I swear to god I have brand name banks tell me this every day these days and I don't know what to say back to them. I've never before personally been in charge of $260,000,000. Well not as far as I know or can ever remember. So I don't know what 'bad' actually might mean... Not by comparative experience or compared to the way banks must know why they are saying things are bad everywhere.

Well but they're not bad here, though.

I don't have political friends and my parents would be over 105 if they were still alive so I don't have family connections either, other than my wife's. Nobody knows me. Meaning, I am not a public figure. And maybe I never will be too. But things are certainly not bad here for me right now.

Calvin J. Bear