Joy To The World

This Christmas is shaping like a good thing down here for a change. Nothing to do with Bernanke of course, and even less to do with the local dolts who have slid their way into the Federal government down here in Australia where the end of every year is always HOT.

Nope. Christmas is good here because I have always had a strong connection with the jolly old elf who lives in the North Pole. Now I'm sorry for all of those who can't pull strings like I have been able to all these years since I was a little kid... I saw this movie once when I was um, maybe four or five – Babes In Toyland it was called. An odd little movie, well not actually little really, it was in fact rather long as I recall now.

Ray Bolger - prototype NSA guy

Anyway, in the movie these children had stumbled upon a magical toy factory and discovered a kind of a ray gun that fired a red, as well as a green, ray. The red ray made you bigger, and the green one made you smaller.

The thing of it was, that all the excitement in the movie happened after the children made themselves very small and were able to go through a tiny door into some magical wonderland-type place or other, not that I recall its name or much of anything about it really, now. Um, maybe, Toyland I guess it was called!

What I did manage to learn from the parable was that 'you must enter through the narrow door...'

A red ray when its going fast, anyway

There are those types who tend to want to use 'the red ray...' And go through all the big doors. Take a look at for example this Kanye West fellow – he's what you call a classical sorcerer. He isn't so much a musician as a reverse chanter. I suggest that you don't try to copy him if you've a mind to do any kind of sorcery because you're liable to come to a good deal of harm, frankly. I mean to say, keep listening to his audio productions and you will soon discover that a state of clinical depression is not as organically-based a thing as some doctors care to believe.

Grren trees of Scandinavia - the larch

A huge expanded ego affects a lot of people and everyone can 'see you' and what you're doing. Going down the green ray path means however, not that many people ever get to see you and what you're doing or how you're going about doing it.

Yes I'm sure that if an elf or an NSA goblin happened to be watching me, they wouldn't learn a thing. Well, elves already know everything and the NSA is just plain too stupid to learn from my own use of the green ray.

Use the green ray and you get to play with the toys...

On Wealth, Now That It Is Christmas

Much of traditional, that is - contemporary - myth is stuff that is all a mix up of the real past. And there's not much any of us can do about that. People become very adamant in what they choose to believe regardless of any facts. Nicholas of Myra used a personal bodyguard called I think, the Varangian Guard – who were all Norsemen. The modern myth or legend, if you will, has a lot more to it than people nowadays recall of its actual basis. And although it is the tradition that Santa Claus gives away gifts, for odd reasons, a lot of the puritanical West has a huge problem with easy or gratuitous and gifted wealth and the private holding of it, and also with the people themselves, who possess wealth.

(Modern joyous tune for avant garde Santa)

Nicholas was horrendously wealthy – and I do mean fabulously wealthy. He threw gold coins into the window of some young girls and the coins fell into their stockings – but you know this story of course as it contains just a hint of sex, enough for the story to have endured the boredom of ancient repetitions of any folklore.

Avant garde, modern Christmas sled

Oh yes, personally indeed I do believe in Santa Claus. I can report very trustworthily to you that today's Santa Claus, sometimes goes about in a brand new Rolls or Bentley Mulsanne – you know, the one with the extra large bootspace – and he has accomplices who wear black silk stockings. He loves to drink the very best vodka – Snow Queen vodka. And he has magical powers. He has gifts for all good girls and boys everywhere. And very expensive gifts for the very best of them.

Very definitely there was a Nicholas of Myra. Today he is absorbed into the global idea of Santa Claus. Not my idea of Santa Claus, mind you, but the idea held by a large number of the public.

My own idea about Santa Claus is seriously more exotic and up-to-the-minute as far as fashion and technology is concerned. And you know what, my idea is more correct too, what's more; I have no difficulty convincing little children about it, especially when I have the car driven around for them.

By the way, I believe Mandela just died more or less on the anniversary of Nicholas of Myra's death. What d'you think the tradition about him will be a thousand years from today?

The Politics of God

When the brooding Emperor of Rome – Tiberius – fills the river Tiber with the dead bodies of all those he imagined were the supporters of the Julii, he betrays a fear of something he cannot allow to abide under his rule; namely, opposition. Even just the threat of potential opposition.



The couch of some decadent tyrant or potentate...
Let's get one!

The Roman political undercurrent in the Jesus story is that from the very start, when three wise men from the East, seek out a new-born child in order to proclaim that this child is a king, and not just a king, but some kind of special king – from this start, the folklore matches entirely with the political suspicion that Plutarch gives words to, in writing, namely that Julius Caesar's son Caesarion was spirited away to India, and not murdered, and that in the time both of Augustus and Tiberius there was a fear that there may have been still remaining, someone in the direct bloodline of Julius Caesar that the Julii might eventually put forward as the legitimate, and actual Caesar.

There were, in Rome at the time, two main and powerful opposing families: the Claudians and the Julians or Julii.

Now as far as the other psychopath Herod goes, not very much is ever given completely decisively as to the reason the usurper Herod sets about to kill babies, but the assumption has always been that he feared some claimant appearing that would stake out an hereditary local kingship that the local public would agree with; something he did not have himself. That Herod was extraordinarily ambitious and materialistic and suspicious and ego-centric and murderous and maybe mad as well, is fairly well-attested to by most authors of the time.

Chopping down the king of trees...
An ancient tradition!

Objectively, and from some distance in history, it is very difficult to steer away from the ironical prospect that rather than a tame and peaceful god or any quiet-voiced preacher, one group of rulers feared the rise of a popularly political figure, such as an accepted hereditary king of the East, and another group feared the rise of a popularly accepted hereditary king of the West – Caesarion or any of his 'possible' offspring would have provided just such an identity, being both a descendant of Cleopatra VII the Pharaoh, and Julius Caesar.

So on one level, the Christmas Story is a highly political and earthly one. It's about babies, and the eminence of them, and the sinister interest politicians and rulers have in them for highly obscure reasons; it's about the birth of kings and popular feelings about magic and power, and days off from doing the work of slaves; it's about material expectation, wealth, celebration and events out of the ordinary; and it's about plum dough (pronounced 'duff,' as you know) and alcohol and reaching a divine ecstacy through overindulgence in food and wine...

In short, one is able to celebrate the Jesus wine and bread thing along the lines of the more typical of your Epicurean ideals – 'eat this drink this get this imbibe this, and you shall surely experience heaven forsooth...'

Well in my mind you see, it was this Augustus fellow and his gloomy follower Tiberius who started all of this austerity nonsense, for one thing, and suppression of the common good, and this accounting for every sin and crime except not of the elite's ones of course, and especially all of this forcing the public into debt for no altruistic purposes. On the other hand, by my reckoning the earthly politics of god, goes along these lines: 'take this fish and open its mouth, and within it you shall find a coin, sufficient to pay taxes to Caesar.'

Oh for a real god and a real Caesar!

Alas for the present for the most part we must make do with a fake Douglas Fir made in China, a Bitcoin and a GMO piece of fish-filler.

Personally I have been endeavouring to search for some fantastic and fascinating expensive luxury gifts to lust after or salivate over during this latest Christmas Season, and I believe I have observed that even the obvious up-scale usual places in which to find this sort of rubbish are coming up pretty short-handed on the lust-inspiring. That is not good.

What? Are all the billionaires feeling sad and bored, or lost and stale?

Or maybe just clueless and unable to get away with it ever since money itself was thrown into the River Tiber by more recent psychopathic administrators.

I wonder what threat real money poses to those in power...?

The new Rolls Wraith film clip

Yet, miracle of miracles! I have myself not made sufficient profits this year to have to pay any false Caesars their levies. There is a god afterall, it seems. My type of god of course. And a very devious sort that sort is too! But it does for me. I know I should lift my horizons to more difficult tasks in the line of miraculous interventions. A Rolls Wraith is under consideration. I shall not be leaving the girl at the iron gate though - in case my god is taking hints only from the company's marketing...!

...And by the way please leave the girl in, By Jove!

Ogilvy's Reunion

The latest sensation in the advertising world is the new Google India 'Reunion' ad., which you can catch on YouTube. It's definitely worth taking a look at. In many respects many of today's film-clip adverts are more engaging and interesting than a lot of modern day full length feature films. I guess unless producers are prepared to take risks and actually buy and pay for some new script or storyline that isn't a total re-hash of something already done, dead, buried, resurrected, gone to heaven, fallen back to earth, and then beginning a whole cycle all over again – movies are just going to go the way of everything else sucked dry by this parasitic era.

Google India's 'Reunion' ad -
check it out on YouTube

Ogilvy Mather created and produced this ad for Google and there are certainly one or two things worth noting about this agency. David Ogilvy was the absolutely nonpareil advertising guru of all time, really – the man who created the 'Man in the Hathaway' shirt concept.

The standard biographies claim that Ogilvy worked for the British Secret Service and he may have done...

But his original employers and business partners, the Mather and Crowther and Dawson families, have more interesting histories. The actuality of who in that crowd worked for secret agencies was that one of these families possessed sets of twins, who were stage performers, and who travelled all over the world, coming into close contact in those days, with the dying-out Bohemian families – which consisted of Russians, Pomeranians, Armenians, Hungarians, the Belgian aristocracy, even some French remnants of the Louis' aristocrats. It was never that these groups lost entirely the wealth they once overtly possessed, rather, the major wars in Europe, invasions, political aggression, all caused them to take their wealth underground. The word 'hotel' in French history did not quite have the same sense of a place open to the travelling middle classes, and the Majestic Hotel in Paris served as more or less, the administrative Capital of every ruler of France since Napoleon until and including Hitler.

This hotel ( The Paris Majestic) was built and owned by an Armenian who said he was a Tunisian, and it was here that the famous Sarkies family got their training in hotel management and I suppose, entrepreneurship.

Secret services to this day employ twins...

Nostalgia is a funny thing, some people get taken over by prejudices of childhood or youth and young adulthood implicit in marketing that exploits nostalgic visions and end up missing out on the rewards of the future being born.

Another old guy's nostalgic vision?

I would compare and contrast Lily Allen's latest music video 'Hard Out Here' side by side with the Ogilvy 'Reunion' ad. The Ogilvy ad relies on viewers suspending some disbelief at certain points, in order to get the emotional messages through in a short time-span – and it's getting a lot of positive response. Allen's music video is copping a huge amount of criticism, on the other hand. Her vision is probably not as kind, on the surface, to the historical subject that she deals with. Personally I find the two examples virtually equivalent. I don't think there is anything underhanded in Ogilvy's nostalgic vision, and neither do I see anything underhanded in the way Allen treats her subject matter. The public's reaction though, seems vastly different.

Lily Allen

My own perspective may have something to do with the peculiarity that absolutely nothing at all has changed in the cherished components of my life, over considerable time and through horrendous external ructions. I presume I tend to see which things are inclined to remain, and which, time and fashion are bound to jettison. I could be wrong. I'll have to wait a little longer to find out. But I can see myself nodding sagaciously to the others who waited with me... Waiting, let me tell you, is a vastly underestimated thing.

 

Fabius (the Waiter) Maximus.

Dreams And Fables... And Sables...

I re-watched this week, a fairly recent interview with the diamond expert Chaim Even-Zohar, covering his thoughts on what the future could hold for De Beers in the hands of its new majority shareholder - Anglo American Group - and in the absence of people like Nicky Oppenheimer and Varda Shine. One of the things he said as an incidental aside, was that 'big corporations and big groups like to sit on a lot of money so that they can do the things they like best – which is to use the money to give them opportunities to buy things.'

Now that is an interesting remark, and it's certainly true about what companies like to do, but it is a standard strategy that applies only when the circumstances are standard also. Which they are not now.

The opportunity for profit, say in the trading of diamonds for example, where the average price per carat is arguably a structured one (let's not go into it too deeply right now) - that opportunity is a highly privileged one that is not necessarily going to be able to function in most economies over the history of Mankind. Government direct increases to Money Supply, and the effects of past eras of inflation, allow for much more simplistic attitudes to profit opportunity than is often credited by those looking at 'success stories' such as the De Beers' one. For instance, in hindsight, is it really the brilliance of De Beers original marketing campaigns – as economic folklore credits – that created demand at such elevated prices; or, is it more likely to have been the fact that there has been so much money surplus in the hands of high end consumers due to high circulation velocities, and vast increases in Money Supply throughout the period.

So let's go back: 20th century 'standard' profit opportunities are based around the idea that premiums can deliver you profits. You pay a premium to secure a position in the beneficial outcome of a market transaction (and scale it up to maximize the results, of course), and because everyone has easy access to vast amounts of money, whether as debt (velocity and inflation effects), or as reserve funds (during this period largely a Money Supply-side factor), if you buy 'right,' almost regardless of the premium, there is simply guaranteed to be a way up or out. It's easy to look like a product development, or a sales, or marketing genius.

But in this century, last century's standard approach cannot be applied wholesale and be made to function successfully. Money velocity and fiscal policy conditions are very different.

Velocity is catastrophically low - so buying a diamond, for example, might as well indeed be 'forever' that is if you ever intended to sell it again for cash at some point...!

All of this is not to say that the perceived value of diamonds is actually misplaced in principle – and many people want to say this kind of thing about diamonds although I personally do not. Diamonds can physically last a very long time requiring very little or no maintenance, and they hold a certain amount of liquid value over that very long time, and therefore they do represent a reasonable means of establishing a family legacy that can run over at least more than one or two generations. As a commercial business though, they rely on the availability of consumers with cash to spend.



Rubellite ring from Hardy Brothers Jewellers

Yet if I were to consider some form of legacy creation that was meant to run over the whole of two or more generations, personally I would be acquiring rubellite gemstones rather than too many diamonds. Rubellite, even by today's low money velocity standards, is not expensive in the market. But that is not to say that it won't ever be...

Marketing companies say that diamonds are incredibly valuable – and this alone is not going to undermine the fact that they continue to be exorbitantly priced. But if you want to actually have a ten or twenty carat top grade diamond, the average person is simply not going to be able to afford one. But you might be able to get a ten carat top grade rubellite gemstone, even one with an inclusion that actually looks like the famous fictional Pink Panther! I don't think there's many people that realize that certain minor inclusions are prized in rubellite, unlike inclusions in other gemstones. Yes, The Pink Panther is a fictional Hollywood tale about a large fictional diamond with an inclusion that looked like a pink panther. But no, the tale is not entirely mythical, but may have been based on Eastern legend about rubellite. Frankly, if I told you what I know about these legends, you might rush out and buy some rubellite right away, stick it next to an old Arabian oil lamp and start to rub it to warm it up.

But there's plenty of time. You will want to get a lot of quality rubellite stones at $200 a carat so that you will have a treasure trove of them to sell at $600 a carat.

Put it this way, if you bid along with Steinmetz's more-or-less own diamond agent for the Steinmetz pink at $1.6 million per carat, you are going to be waiting a hell of a long time to sell it at $3.2 million per carat, unless you were using your own money; a waste of time and money you would suppose...

But going from Even-Zohar's terrific book “From Minesite to Mistress” being able to sit drinking champagne among millionaires and have your expensive friend sporting a ten carat top grade rubellite cocktail ring on her gloved hand, is the stuff of legend not of myth.

 

 

Calvin J. Bear

The 'Thermidor' Financial Market

The word for the month of July, in French, is 'Thermidor.'

And, it is from this word that the dish 'Lobster Thermidor' gets its name.

Lobster Thermidor

Well, in fact, it is a specific July that the name is derived from – the one in 1794, during which Robespierre was overthrown.

Maximilien Robespierre was a truly abominable person, who made much of his integrity and honesty, and yet who could not resist manipulating and exploiting the clamor of the crowd, for his own power-hungry ends. His time at the top of power in France was known as the Reign of Terror, a period during which almost anyone might have been executed on the strength of a trifle because of the self-serving zealotry of Robespierre in particular.

And it is with this little item of history in mind, that I wish to address the matter of taking financial risk today. Risk is of course, as you no doubt know, not about the potential of loss, but about the degree of volatility, over the expected course of any investment. When the word 'risk' is used by the less learned, and is meant by them to apply to things like race horse gambling and so on, they are actually talking about the relative 'odds' for any outcome occurring, and not about professional investment risk as such. These people are generally looking at some very very quick event, in which money might be made on an immediate expected outcome. Professional investors want to have some ultimate result averaged out over a long period, say, ten years, for example.

We might well inquire into the consequence for our definition of risk (which is the standard economics textbook one, by the way), of a Central Bank and their political accomplices manufacturing a 'zero risk' climate for interest costs and share prices.

Revenues and profits by companies ought to have the most significant bearing on share prices, but, if they don't because of Central Banking policy to support equity price levels regardless of all other factors besides the government and bank determination to ensure liquidity (by which, they really mean, 'to preserve the remuneration levels of executives at unprecedented and unjustifiable heights') – then we are being faced with a similar form of hypocrisy that Miximilien Robespierre indulged in.

Will there ever be a 'Thermidor Reaction' – which is what the overthrowing of Robespierre was called at the time – against contemporary Central Banks and hypocritical and self-servingly hypocritical, zealot-driven, governments?

On the surface, since there is no volatility, it seems that there is no risk entailed in investing in stockmarkets. But there are also no standard ways of understanding profit opportunity either, because of the artificiality of the price of money... And many people also complain about the hidebound nature of the rules and bureaucratic red tape involved in launching productive capital of any kind.

Thus, one thing is clearly rising – public dissatisfaction. And this, like the recipe for Lobster Thermidor, is also a recipe full of mustard powder, if only metaphorically.

Holy Grail?
(...why am I always posting Maserati pics?!)

If there are any of you still out there who cherish the idea of being an individual – and individualistic - money-making private investor, then you must look at non-standard ways of perceiving profit opportunity. You must abandon the standard route, go into the deep silence similar to that of a Benedictine cloister, and hope that you will gain a vision of the investor's equivalent of the Holy Grail! There are many knights on this Quest for the 'holy grail;' but like the myth, only one or two out of many will ever see it I fear. This I certainly know – no major name in investing is even close to seeing it. No. Not even one of them. Not Buffett, not Gross, not any of them. These times have found ALL of them wanting.

 

In the next post, I shall outline some non-standard profit opportunities.

 

Best

 

Calvin J. Bear

 

Risk and Incentive

I was a bit startled last night while watching a very recent interview of the Kaiser, Karl Lagerfeld..

He casually commented out of the blue that social occasions like cocktail receptions were fewer and fewer these days; almost non-existent really.

The industrialist's son,
'Kaiser' Karl Lagerfeld,
still relevant.

Well, there still are a small number of product presentations and corporate functions and top shareholders' meetings that centre around some kind of catered event starting 'not before 1 p.m.' - as the standard demands for a cocktail reception. But he may be quite right when it comes to the non-business gatherings of the well-heeled social set. Hey, who are these 'well-heeled' folk, anyway, nowadays? I'm sure I don't know...

But Karl has provided me with a scrap of incentive to go down one particular prospective road at least that doesn't look to me to be totally adventureless from the get-go, as most other things are becoming these days: entirely forgettable, dull, thoroughly boring.

Indeed I was also rather taken aback by my own response to a sudden and largely unexpected turn-around in one of my own business ventures. Filled with almost countless ideas while ever I had to stick a lot of things onto the back-burner from lack of a decent budget, as soon as the prospects of having to hand, another round of 'meaningful' moneys (has been a good long while between those...) I found myself suddenly utterly devoid of those thrilling ideas that I usually can generate from simply out of my own head, and found too that I was able to see almost nothing exciting going on around me anywhere else either. Perhaps it was the shock of having money again. It's done something to me perceptions, I think.

Spending, money – just plain spending it when you have it – is one thing but it is a very lazy thing. And it's not what I only desire to do, personally. I like to see and hear the ideas and ventures of other people, especially of those really bright kinds of people who are intensely interesting because of their intellects as much as any other attribute.

Coffee and News - a thing no more...

I remember when my own parents would attend cocktail parties – or what used to be termed cocktail receptions. You might not believe it now but back in those days people didn't simply just turn up when invited to these kinds of things, but they had this remarkable capacity to bring something of themselves that was new and different each time they went to something as swish as a genuine cocktail party. It was like they seemed to prepare to attend. Nowadays things are far less socially ornate, you might say.

Yet there is also a certain risk aversive attitude that has crept into the whole world of the affairs of humans. And a very bad thing it is too.

Actually I believe I need to begin pointing out a few of the incentives for the taking of risk. There is of course as you all know, an art to the taking of risk. And if you get out of the habit of risk taking, pretty soon you forget about all of the necessary methodology.

I intend the next few posts here to deal with present-day risk taking, incentives, and serious methodologies that work, as opposed to the folklore spewed out by stockbrokers and others who are only running promotions for their own fairly weak and contrived 'investment' products.

Circles Of Money And Power

I am absolutely a great fan of His Highness Prince Karim, the Aga Khan. He is, as you know, one of the only real living descendents of the Islamic World's Holy Prophet Mohammed.

The Aga Khan

What you don't know is that he is Greek.

The usual narrative goes that he is partly of Persian descent but let me tell you, if it is 'Persian' it is only Persian in the sense that Alexander The Great's wife Roxana was Persian; and she wasn't really Persian either but sort of Russian, as it would be now called although not at that time.

And what you also don't know is that whilst he is called the Imam of the Nizari Ismaili's (which he indeed is), his religious philosophy is rooted in genuine traditional Platonic teachings. And therein lies a most uncommon understanding about who and what the original 'Holy Prophet Mohammed' was and what this religion is really all about. Now there are things that I know about Nizari Ismaili innermost teachings that few anywhere in the world today would have any clue about, dare I say, not even the NSA!

But let me indulge in my usual Socratic irony - if I might egregiously call it that - and say that some Ismaili learned men hold that the Aga Khan possesses a holy right or privilege, to own and/or be able to befriend, the highest ranks of aristocractic Jinn, and that in fact, both he and his family have actually been photographed with Jinn females many times and that they even marry them and have children by them...

Aga Khan, friend of geniis

The secret of what I know about Ismailis is so powerful that I tell you, if the NSA knew it too, they would be able to quell all the present problems of radicalized Muslims around the whole world. But as they do not know it, I suppose we are destined for much more trouble still to come as they all blunder their ways through the minefields of religious sensitivities and cultural suspicions.

Alexander the Great, as you will also no doubt know from your readings of history, was a great horseman. And so is the Aga Khan. He has owned winners of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe although not on this occasion this year. This good fortune befell the Qatari Royal Family, which has also won races like the Mebourne Cup in very recent times and so their star must be on the rise, one might suppose.

Frankie Dettori is also a great horseman, and he should have been the jockey on this year's winner but apparently he 'hurt his foot' and couldn't ride on the day.

Dettori has a sore foot

And so I tell you all of this nonsense as a way of demonstrating that when it comes to big money people and big money horses and big money races, all kinds of smoke is blown everywhere obscuring what went on or is really going on and it's hard to see where the fires were or are, if any, and really, whether or not such fires might not even be from the flameless shimmer of geniis in the business in there somewhere. As you know, I do believe in geniis; they make things fall out of the sky that ought to keep flying, and other things fly away that ought to have stayed put.

Ruler Of The World

Ruler of the World... is a racehorse.

Ruler Of The World

It's owned by the world's wealthiest individual racehorse owner - if you go by only what is made through racing and breeding. John Magnier is the gentleman and he owns Coolmore Stud, which is now a global business.

Sheikh Hamdan and his Godolphin Racing, is outranked, I'm afraid, by Magnier.

The Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe - which is run this coming Sunday - is the world's premier horse race for gallopers. The Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe outranks all other races including the Kentucky Derby and the Melbourne Cup - and this year's event strikes me as being one of the strongest for a long time. The top contenders are robust and consistent racers who have the kind of fierce will-to-compete and mature skills and balance as racehorses that mark out the elite racing animal.

Orfevre

I have a firm opinion on this year's race - I favour only two horses: Orfevre (which means 'goldsmith' in French), and Ruler Of The World, Magnier's horse. These are two of the best conformed Derby horses you will ever see, and they have speed, strength, boldness, courage, racing skills, flexibility, and stamina. This will be a good race and worth watching to see what real horse racing is all about.

Donnelly River by Walkinshaw Performance Vehicle

In the 'general' area where I live, I have access to some of the best fly fishing rivers anywhere in the world. These places are almost completely unknown to outsiders. No one ever talks about them much except for a handful of aficcianados who have the money and the time to come all the way out here to fish.

Donnelly River

Most of the year, these places are extremely cold.

Yep. This is Kentucky

Well, hey, so's a Kentucky fly river for that matter so what the heck!

Me, I haven't actually fished for real since my teens I suppose. I jumped pretty quickly from the Marine Base jetty on Penang Island, catching smallish rock cod, to the bowling green turf of Belmont Park (Western Australia) in order to catch bigger fish with silver bait...

Anyways, I don't believe Dick Cheney has ever fished the Donnelly River over in these parts, but then again, I can't be sure about that.

It's not much of an out-of-the-way item to have ex-SAS people and the like, especially, these days, ex-South African BOS intelligence guys – be handed meaningful budgets to organise high-speed road transport of a 'standard' in order to ferry VIP's to parts undisclosed, very quickly hither and yon, and then back again. From what I understand, it is to the Donnelly River area.

Walkinshaw SS V8 Supercharged

I must say, that the choice of the latest Holden SS Walkinshaw – in all black – is a great choice.

Someone might be able to tell me whether this vehicle is some very direct variant of a Chevrolet, or whether it is something predominantly coming out of the Holden design bureau. The build quality is utterly something I have never before seen on Holdens although they have not been too bad recently. Yet this is exceptional. It is also very fast, very handlable, very luxurious inside, and looks quite different in real life compared to the pics available just yet. It is smaller than the photos would suggest, lower to the ground, and the chrome looks like, well, real chrome. The sound is awesome. The look is brilliant.

 

 

Go this way...

In this: 

 

 

 

Why the hell not?!

The Form, The Substance

I have a lot of time for practical scientists and applied scientists. I think that Luca Turin is one of the very finest minds of the last few years. He has peers in his chosen field, and some of them are women, and you may be very surprised to learn what things these people discovered, invented, and often also developed into commercial success-stories and placed into common use in all of our daily lives.

Industrial chemist Luca Turin

You know, people talk 'billionaire' a lot in places like Forbes and on Bloomberg television, but seldom do they ever these days expose the true billionaire of practical and applied science that is not directly linked to just electronics and computing. Who knows, for instance about the certain lady who invented the lemon scent we all assume (incorrectly) is actually from some kind of extract or synthesis of real lemons and that we find in basically all of the household bleach, washing detergent, room fragrance, and even lemonade drinks and packet food products? She gets a royalty from every single product sold that uses her patented chemical and believe me, she is really a billionaire and now owns and lives on an island in the Mediterranean that has a fairly meaningfully-sized industrial chemical research laboratory and research facility on it. She is not listed on any so-called 'list of billionaires' or 'richest people,' but she certainly is that.

Luca Turin has been reported in leading journals as having recently made several new (he has made some previously!) breakthroughs to do with a more complete understanding of the neuro-physiology and also neuro-chemistry of how we sense things with our nose and tongue.

Turin is, apart from being a very clear thinker, an excellent writer and speaker and presenter of complex ideas, but behind him stand some Russian research scientists that he works with, as well as some of those women scientists of whom I spoke about earlier. To cut a long story short, the Russians visually are a rather dishevelled looking lot and Turin is as stylish as the city whose name he shares.

The Pope of global wine-tasting,
Robert Parker

Far be it from me to say that someone of the public stature of Robert Parker is a charlatan, but ordinary common sense ought to suggest to one's mind that nobody can 'smell roasting violet petals' from out of the chemistry of a red wine, for one thing simply because there is no odoriferant molecule developed by the wine that will create that smell compound! Either people are halucinating, or there is something indeed very chemically mysterious about red wine! But for someone like Parker to continuously say that wines have this or that bizarre non-wine scent or essence or flavour – when no such thing is scientifically possible – is grounds for me to look sideways at him, and everyone like him. Okay, call me an atheist of wine tasting and lump me in the arrogant, egocentric, and opinionated wonderland of people like Richard Dawkins when it comes to smashing people's cherished sillinesses that they insist on clinging onto, even in the face of facts that utterly disprove what they are saying. Oh I know it's oh so desireable to be able to opine intelligently about what bouquet the famous and expensive red wine you bought is giving off, but brothers, it just aint so!

No no no. Something else entirely is going on. Oh yes yes, you are sensing something – but it's not what you think it is.

Here's the rub: if you do what Luca Turin says, or what one of his Russian researchers says, about how you should go about tasting wine – suddenly, what you will experience is enhanced by a factor you would not have dreamed of beforehand. But if you do what Parker tells you, you will go away (albeit possibly not telling anyone else so) that alas, if the Emperor had no clothes you dared not suggest it be so, so esteemed is Parker and his ilk.

But they are wrong. Misguided, at best and entirely wrong anyway.

That a multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around the mythology of wine-tasting, is positive proof of the total lunatic behaviour of Mankind whenever its rational good sense is able to be distracted by brain chemistry rewards to do with material sensations.

Form and substance are of course not always simple or straightforward antitheses.

Out Front of the Royal Horseguards Hotel!
Horse and guardsman look great,
but it's an hotel for gawdsake.

Look at this picture. The horse and the guardsman look fantastic. But where is the substance? Is the building behind them just a modern era hotel? And if that building once housed both MI5 and MI6, do the current era vestigial and corporate memory custodians have secret private pretensions they whisper to themselves about, behind cupped hands over sly mouths...

You may as well say The Dark Ages of Inquisition and public damnation and political and financial rapine are the spirits that rule the air.

Luca Turin is a rarity; he both looks stylish and is someone of great intellectual substance too.

There are a lot of people today and a lot of groups and let's say 'entities' both corporate and governmental, that can wear the billion-dollar marketing and hype label. A lot of things have their wires crossed in the world today. There are billion-dollar machineries of government and private interests crossing over each other's traces and getting themselves and a lot of other people twisted up in the entangling lines.

The big fish are still in the seas, though. I would fish away from the big boats, and cast your lines far away from theirs... There are too many problems where the bigwigs are; too many problems among themselves, too many blow-in pretenders who actually come close to being bigwigs anyway because of the way modern finance behaves, too many bigwigs who are only big any longer in outward form with little or no substance beneath. And far too many cops and ex-cops who work for private money but who still have access and sway with government agencies despite protestation by politicians that it isn't so. It is so. Half the world's current armed conflicts are to do with programs that governments have lost control of. And you can't trust that lawyers and judges will resolve it all; things get 'stopped' well before revelations can get before an independent authority.

 

Stay well away. It is bound to get nasty now. I would say. Go fishing maybe. In some distant and despised stream.  

 

Sad Histories of Chinese Gold Dealers

I'm going to give you a kind of hypothetical situation of the past, and ask you to think about it and bear it in mind over coming months, and if, perchance anything untoward occurs somewhere on the world stage, then you may be prepared for the meaning of it and not jump at shadows as most others likely will.

Hitler's ring is currently up for auction

Let's say for example it is a war circumstance – say, the Second World War - countries are at war and one of them gets invaded but the soldiers of the invading side do not speak the language of those they have just invaded. In spite of what the current era and much-publicised NSA lets 'be known,' it is not really possible to, by some computer process , 'understand' every single nuance of a region's idiom, and even today, this scenario still applies in its general meaning.

Now – in the hypothetical past event - the invading army takes hold of mainly let's say, ethnic Chinese, and interrogates them to 'gain information...' What do you suppose would be the point of that d'you think? Let's say the place in question is not categorically a Chinese country, but there are ethnic Chinese people there – as there are indeed virtually all over the world then and now. On the other hand, let's say that the invading army interrogates only Chinese gold dealers... Would you think they were after general directions, you know, the meanings of the names of street signs, that kind of thing – or would you say they were after gold, especially any gold secretly held or that had been hidden away somewhere by the gold dealers?

Now Wikipedia is a great resource but it is totally prey to the propaganda machinery that 'winners who re-write history' can manipulate into it.

And so if you ever happen to read somewhere, let's say, on Wikipedia, that someone was an interpretor for an invading army, then perhaps you might want to consider if in any circumstance where that person was interpreting answers given by someone under torture, whether that interpretor may not have perhaps once or twice, failed to deliver the most utterly forthright interpretation of what was being said, prior to the victim having chopsticks ploughed through their ears and into their brains, for example.

Chinese gold shop

Well I apologize that I've had to say that so bluntly.

But, you might want to ask yourself why, if you ever travelled to a certain place somewhere around the world, there are not any major Chinese gold dealers there but mainly only Muslim ones, and where strangely perhaps, the place itself is meant to be largely ethnic Chinese? Now I don't mean simply jewellery shops; I mean actual major dealerships like the gold soukh-style of place... Which there are many of around Asia and India and naturally Arabia too of course.

Oh yes, there are a few contradictions to the 'tales' and 'stories' of personal histories spread about by quite a few notables in their 'authorised' biographies and memoirs; contradictions whose logical flaws have never apparently daunted the fawning that other power-inspired politicians typically, have done over these characters.

Of course they say that history is always written by the victors. I don't subscribe to that idea though.

Bad histories are written by erstwhile 'victors' and victory is itself a revolutionary science. The surfaces of things change. Bananas, yellow on the outside whilst fresh from the tree, turn black when they are yet even just a short time dead.

The Best Plans

I like to take the endeavour of making money, as one of the best examples of the test of applying a deeper knowledge to the world of exterior things. Money functioning in an economy is two things tied together with second-line significations and not just one simple thing: it is what people think, what they believe, plus the token system of exchange itself. From moment to moment, people form this view about whether a particular plan or other is the leading one on the table, and then, whether they consciously want to or not, the whole of their being works away at having that best plan succeed. This is not maths, and it is not science, but it is a type of geometry; people possess a certain invisible shape that always inclines them towards a certain direction.

A velvet Ferrari? Novel...

No matter how many times people want to have it another way – and those who do always argue from a personal interest not an objective one – you cannot credentialize the making of money. I encountered yesterday a friend of mine who told me that he was having difficulties with his bankers and accountants over a decision to expand his business to the tune of around seven million dollars. I asked what the difficulty was and he casually prepared the answer with the statement: 'well, banks cannot lend on faith.'

And I said quickly – 'well actually banks cannot lend period.'

Not anymore, anyway. Not with the Money Velocity as low as it is and the official benchmark rates as low as they have been contrived to go.

I asked him who told him he could not raise equity if lending was a problem, and he said his accountant. And I then asked why he believed him... Answer: 'because he's my accountant.'

'I suppose he invoices you for this remarkable insight?' I cheekily commented.

Now this client has an exceptional cashflow and a positive one. The best plan on the table would merely have been to point him in the direction of the deepest discount government bonds and say there's your expansion capital base – the only one that exists anywhere that is real, absent of the hidden costs from banks and accountants. Now this plan has to compete also with insane or fantastic ideas too, or the subtle power of marketing semiotics, or food allergies, or all kinds of other forces acting on emotions and the brain. The subtle force of these things too are real but they are not science. They are a form of geometry.

Brown food colour E130 goes into some expensive whiskies too and people still think they are buying decent Scotch, and I have even seen them comment on the beautiful amber hue when they swish it around the special whisky tasting glass they bought because they have absorbed some propaganda.

Dalmore-Lutwyche shoes - no synthetic colouring
Anywhere! 

People make decisions often moved by very unscientific causes. You can train a person's taste or educate it so that they are able to make discerning choices. This is the aristocracy of the learned senses. But it is a rare thing to find in a human being these days.

Yet one is far more advantaged to spend the whole of one's life educating the mean senses – and this can be done without resort to exhorbitant amounts of money – rather than spend it chasing money for its own sake alone.

Money cannot get you into heaven. And men and mice are mortal and their best laid schemes et cetera...

But schooled and learned senses can tear down the veil between heaven and the mortal plane. The secret of money is that it never is, about money.

Imogen Heap

Too many of the very undeserving get too much of the world stage, don't they?

Winston Churchill didn't say that – I just did.

'Calm down everyone'

I mean we could fight them on the beaches and all this but we wouldn't win. They'd completely overrun us.

Fortunately they don't know what we know. They don't know the secret code words; not even the NSA knows about Orlando...



The Amazing 'Immi' - Imogen Heap

Here's my message for the moments that will soon quickly rush by us all now, now that the proof of all that is everything has once again been established for the six thirty news' acid scrutiny of truth:

Calm down, and listen to the music.



Here's a pic of the incomparable Imogen Heap. She killed it on a Dave Letterman Show a couple of years ago doing a live performance of her work 'First Train Home.' I think this live version was probably her best one that you can see on YouTube at the present time although her party version video ain't bad either.

Check it out. Listen to the music.

Best,
 

Calvin J. Bear

Mount Hermon

I'm not sure if it's a kind of mischievousness inside of some people with a lot of knowledge of mythology and basically, I suppose, pseudo-religious folk tales, but, it's at times like these – where we all stand on the edge of another (sigh) round of 'shock and awe,' albeit this time 'limited' or 'narrowly-defined' (whatever that is going to mean) – that you get various rounds of esoteric whisperings about 'the true nature of things.'

Occasionally, it's a lot of fun to wander around inside of YouTube, watching the frothing prophets specialising in the End of The World stuff (which muslims call 'ilmu akir zaman') deliver their sermons on the signs and symbols that portend of the final battle.

You will find prophets of every brand: Jewish, anti-Jewish, Islamic, modern Christian, everything, really, if you waste enough time looking.

The fabled Mount Hermon

At least I guess, it's worth mentioning that the border of Syria and Israel is marked by the beautiful, and religiously significant, Mount Hermon, the spot upon which, it is said, that Grigori descended to have sexual relations with the daughters of men – whom they found 'beautiful.' This worries me, actually, because rather than indicating something wicked within the mindset of the Grigori, it tends to indicate that their idea of physical attractivity must have been like our own (although we have no indication that any among them were gay – and this should please the Russians...) and thus it tends to indicate that the non-human Grigori were themselves, not dissimilar to us. Yet the standard opinion appears to be that they were 'traditionally' angelic (you know, like in ikon paintings), of incalculably large actual metaphysical size and more or less of ineffable shape (five thousand wings ten miles long going in every which way et cetera, and endowed with hundreds of eyes looking in all directions), very advanced in knowledge and power, and whose mismatched genetic offspring were ugly, gigantic, voracious in appetite and violent. According to the beliefs, somehow these descending beings went against the intention of god by finding themselves attracted, to the attractive; as we would know the meaning of the word, ourselves. This strikes me as rather odd, the spin that has been cast onto the ancient myth, even by the writers of the various mainstream scriptures themselves. Frankly I discount these versions we are most generally presented with today, as being accurate – or even vaguely accurate -, accounts of some ancient event or incident that might have happened in the distant past in the vicinity of what has ever since been called Mount Hermon, or: the Mount of the Chieftains.

Today's 'ever-alert Watchers...'

Recently, among my muslim friends, I have once again heard the colourful story they have about ancient Gog and Magog rising up to cause tremendous death and destruction everywhere and even including trying to strike at the current (modern) band of angelic beings now above the earth, by the shooting of powerful arrows up into space. According to this tale, the modern angels send the arrow-heads back covered in some red dye giving the bad guys the impression that they had indeed injured the 'hosts of heaven...'

Much though I probably shouldn't say this, I did witness a year or so ago, one of the test firings of the Israeli Arrow 3 missile that goes into space and can knock out satellites and controlled space craft. Quite an amazing piece of technology, really. And of course, the Syrians might have the Russian-made Yakhont missile, and they certainly do have a few anti-Tomahawk missile Kashtan-M batteries. And so we shall soon see what all transpires, when a mini run-through in real life of the popular folk tales about final battles, takes place, covered by Fox and CNN.

Russian Yakhont missile
not a joke, by any means

Alawis belong to a most peculiar 'religion,' if it can be called that even. Bashar Al-Assad is a totally weird-looking fellow, to me. He has snake-ish eyes. I don't like him when I look at him. Frankly don't care what weapons he uses or has used. And when you hear him speak you can easily get the notion that he is a most self-involved, arrogant, mindlessly self-important, and utterly stupid person. And so there, you have my declaration of where I stand on this subject. But he is a very small snake compared to the bigger ones there are in the Arabian World. Let's see how long it takes to get rid of a small snake, because there are some big ones that will have to be dealt with sooner or later. Abdullah will soon enough go into his 'unmanifested form' as the Tamilian friends of my childhood would say. He is a huge snake, but there are others ready to grab his spot, and for the most part, the ones being supported by the West are, as usual, the same wrong ones 'we' supported like we supported Saddam, Al-Assad, and even bin Laden (or whatever his real name was). The right ones, in my view, have names like Kaled, or Talal, or Rashid somewhere in their names. (You don't know how many times I redact stuff from this blog... You can be assured there are a lot of names that I simply cannot mention.)