I Try To Be Positive...

A Seriously Deluded Individual

This is John Yates, the twit who ran the Metropolitan Police in London into the ditches where Rupert Murdoch crawled in search of private conversations and personal scandals in high places that he could exploit for money.

Whether these men do these things due to genuine paranoid delusional beliefs, or whether they know only too well that they are gaining financial and other benefits at every step along their paths 'up' and are simply pretty good at hiding this inner knowledge, I do not know.

But what I am certain of is that Hebb's Rule, that 'brain cells wire together when they fire together,' is a reliable guide, and that eventually, people who continuously maintain some outward claim that they know inwardly to be false, will end up (in non-technical, entirely layman's terms) schizophrenic, paranoid, and genuinely delusional. And this is especially so when such persons actually get massively rewarded along the way for carrying off the lie - or the several lies they need to maintain, in order to push their position and their way forward.

Bernie Cornfeld - not too bad

I think J. Edgar Hoover became a seriously paranoid schizophrenic towards the end. A lot of modern psychiatrist don't like the word 'schizophrenic,' choosing bi-polar or manic or depressed – but the reality is these people have a mind split into two. I think from a little distant hindsight, now, it is possible to look back, for instance, at the financier who built the Playboy Mansion – Bernie Cornfeld – and realise that he wasn't quite the bad guy he is often made out to have been. In hindsight you can see that he brought real innovations to mutual fund investing and his legacy as a business identity might have fared better if the market had have rewarded him in any way justly for what he put into the market equity system itself, and for the support for equitisations that he gave.

But see the market never does do that and this is something well worth remembering when involving yourself in the sharemarkets at all.

The fellow that eventually caused his undoing was another of these what I would call, seriously dangerous delusional personalities – Robert Vesco. Vesco was an outrageous fraudster and criminal who exploited malicious litigation and mudslinging to advantage. He was linked to the Nixon funding regime. Whatever you might think of Nixon as a President, his backing was extremely suspect and it tarnished his political legacy, and few disagree on that point.

A really good man

But there are also extraordinarily good people about the place. They appear often in the guise of fairly simple souls. A cunning ploy, I must say. Look for more from this fellow in this coming year. (Pic on right: Tom Watson, UK MP)

Taking A Big Swing

I clearly remember the Saturday afternoon I sorta lost my nerve at the races. I had five dollars – a measly five dollars (ten dollars in all) – each way on a horse at twenty-five to one. My sister, who was working on the stand with Australasia's biggest bookmaker at the time, had confirmed to me that virtually the entire Committee had bet on this horse, which had started in the morning at 100/1.

I even remember the name of the horse now so many years later: Todvega. And it was ridden by the best jockey I have ever seen, John James (J.J.) Miller.

That's J.J. Miller on the right

The horse won in what is called over here 'a Port Hedland Photo.' This means, figuratively that the horse was in a photo-finish but the camera angle was taken from six hundred miles up North in Port Hedland, and thus it appeared as if this horse's head was in front on the line – even though it might have been way behind in reality!

Actually, I was standing at the post and this type of thing was unnecessary this time; the horse won for real coming up on the inside. Funny, though, in the published photo the shadow of its head was in the wrong place! I guess the Committee were just making sure...

During the course of the running of the race, for the first time in my life ever, I was shaking. I had plenty of time in the running to ask myself 'what the hell was I shaking for?' I had plenty of money, ten dollars wasn't going to kill me if the horse lost. Hell I had thirty five thousand sitting in bets in the stockmarket and I slept pretty good. And then it struck me, the race was a proxy for the actual bets I was really making, namely those in the stockmarket. I went right out on Monday morning and sold up everything. By Thursday the World Stockmarket Crash of 1987 had fully unfolded.

Luck? Presentiment? I don't know and it doesn't matter. Many of my friends lost massively and I had everything completely intact and was essentially in a better position because of the new context.

I had no clue exactly when the market was going to crash, even though I thought it would sooner or later. I had taken steps long before and had raised almost a million in cash from external shareholders and controlled a public company ready for the situation – this was where my main capital was, not in just the thirty five thousand I personally was playing around with.

I had intended to post today about simple and quick ways to counteract stress and/or lack of energy. And I will do that presently – if anyone is even remotely interested - but this other thing instead is calling for some attention: Bernanke says there is going to be a long long phase of slow growth ahead for EVERYONE... He bases that, I assume on the utter control he has exerted on the bond market. I think he would be correct too but for one strange dissonance that I have been observing recently. There has been way strange range volatility across sectors and categories that never previously exhibited this kind of thing. Australian blue chips varied over more than twenty-five per cent during the last year. That, is an impossibility for me to believe unless there is something, in the words of the new kids in the quant cubicles, 'latent' in the story. Something in other words, hidden to us all, going on.

You can see it too in the gold price range swings of late – the amplitude has widened noticeably.

I am told this may be because of false volumes from 'order stuffing' and that eventually there will be a price breakdown and then, if there really is genuine investor buying, the price will revert to its long term up trend. No doubt at all in my mind that the HFT people are trying very hard to damage the gold price. And maybe they can do it. But it calls into question Bernanke's certainty about a long long slow recovery for EVERYONE. Because wherever there are such large and systematic range moves, there is massive profit opportunity and when there is massive profit opportunity there is strong growth for some, not weak growth.

 

It's time for your hands to shake, again, because Ben and the 'Committee Men' want to take Port Hedland photos...

 

Calvin J. Bear 

Compositional Space

I 've been having this same old discussion recently with a few people – 'does money make you happy?'

Well if you're a regular here lookin' in on this series of tiny pieces about stuff that I think about, then sooner or later you're gonna have a pretty good idea about what you're going to spend all that money you're about to make on...

Not that you don't already, of course. But there'll be more ideas, won't there; just, more.

Desirable. I like that word. No, I actually love it.

If we don't desire things – I mean really desire them – then attaining things or getting stuff we merely want or think we want adds up to very little at the end of a day.

Composition, I find, is the great secret to all fulfilling acquisitions, that is - the secret to having satisfying possessions.

Lonely alleyways at night, for example, are composed universally of only a very few basic elements: emptiness, and stillness, almost silence, a few nondescript and old things lying about, or snow or still dark pools of water, and a solitary light or a huddling small set of lights weakly fighting the night's covering grasp. Walls demarking this place from other places.

Space – empty spaces, everywhere – are spaces just waiting to be filled. We are the people of the labyrinths. We just don't realise that it takes art, skill, and training, to be able to sidestep the monsters of the dark unknown, and to make sport of our predicament. Our supposed predicament of being in this place.

Walls between Fire and Liquid