Distracting People's Attention

Huff-Po continues to show us the latest scandalous event, and this week it's apparently about some lewd-ish thing that a heavily-marketed performer did on stage.

Huff-Po will absolutely also cover the UN's verification that chemicals were used by Assad against ordinary civilians.

However, I will suggest that you also try – as I spoke of back in I think June of this year – to stick six million Scovile units of cobra chilli pepper mist into your own eyes and see whether or not you might not prefer an actual nerve gas instead.

Personally I'm not sure what the tactical purpose of a chemical agent like Sarin is, when cobra chilli spray will do an even better job of suppressing opposition without the UN whining about what you did. I can clearly recall ex-London Met second top cop JohnYates whinging and whining in the Levinson Inquiry about his imminent 'political' sacking because of the offsetting 'real' value of his brilliant work on the terrorists all over London who would doubtless see his sacking as a green light for them to go hog wild. Well, okay muslims are not going to go hog wild, but some kind of wild anyway.

Burlesque Dancer Ginger Valentine

Here's the main problem, as I see it. Ginger Valentine should have been in Huff-Po, and wasn't. She's from Texas and she's the real deal. Bandar only knows what Huff-Po also knows – which is not too much of anything all that real. And there is in any case, a lot of in-fighting between all the Saudi Princes. They are not unified, and they are not organised; they are manipulative, and they are also manipulated. But they go by the pop version of events.

The real thing is the real thing. Everything is very misty though, in the Great Game. The real things hide in the mist. You only get to see them when it's already too late. Nobody sees much of anything at the moment. Just the rising mist. Something is creeping about in there, though. A snake, maybe. A monster maybe. The 'Game' is not 'Great' for nothing. It would be a fool who thinks he knows the outcome already, and an even bigger fool who goes about with any sense of arrogance. When you are arrogant, as Vince Lombardi once opined, you are brittle against a real opponent.

Having this sort of idea is just common sense too and doesn't come from any special inside knowledge. It surprises me though at the moment that the pop media hasn't floated the idea by now of a specialist 'hit team' with a catchy code name like in the old days of the first really major oil price crisis. Something like the old Team 'Jackal.' But I guess that's the difference between the current Disney kids and the old school. Not that I know anything by the way, in case the NSA gives a damn about what I write here! Which I doubt very considerably that they would. Afterall, how could anyone challenge the conclusions of the combined CIA/NSA budget of over 25 billion US Dollars annually. They, certainly, for that kind of money, must know it all. Put it this way, the temptation must be very great in there to carry on as if they did.

 

Where does all that money go, though? Anyone know?

Novelty For The Wealthy

When The Big Money Hits...



Ten grand, can you believe? Nice though.
I'd have it.

My wife's friend complained just last weekend about one of her husband's colleagues (well, at least it wasn't me she was talking about!) getting silly drunk with her husband.



Now these guys are regulars at probably the city's most upscale small restaurant and the types of money they spend there for alcohol is not particularly unusual I wouldn't have thought.

My own business partner is at the moment staying with some super-wealthy farmer types in the Outback and there is a troika of these 'bushmen' there all of whom know Johnnie well enough to – as they put – be able to call him Jack.

Lawrence, she's great but this is Ni Kulturni
compared to...

Okay so they drink scotch whisky.

I mean this is another one of these 'good living' subjects where there can certainly be a lot of snobbery, a lot of folklore, and a few genuinely traditional customs well worth retaining.

Sticking your finger into the small ceramic jug of water as you move it over to where you might add a little into the scotch, is something that I will personally retain mainly because that was the way my grandmother insisted that you do it – and she was born in Eaglesham so I will respect that.

I'm not a great fan of those small-lipped malt whisky glasses that have become the thing with the single malt people – not that I wouldn't ever do it. Personally I like those old heavy-based cut crystal big tumblers; supposedly too big to properly be able to get the concentration of flavours into your nose and taste receptors. I don't care what 'proper' is, I already know what all the Johnnie Walkers taste like – and I do mean all. Swing Superior included.

But what's this idea of getting so smashed that everything tends to get seriously messy and then it's 'lights out?!' I mean you just can't do this sort of thing all the time and especially not just because you have suddenly made another pile of money from whatever scheme. And you can't do it because what does it say about having a lot of money? That you have no clue about what to do with money other than make yourself unconscious?! It's ridiculous.

No I don't get all the 'complex flavours and depth of character et cetera et cetera...' I know anything Chivas tends to be a little bit sweeter than most. I know that I really like Ballantine's and Dalmore. I know that I can bear Red Label without much trouble. And much more than that I do not know.

Oh hey, don't get me wrong, I can equate a good spirit of age with a good woman of that certain age along with the best of them. And I can do the whole 'approach' and 'discovery' or 'reveal' as the French say probably even better than Richard Paterson.



A Tivioli sable being correctly modelled

No, it isn't me that I'm having difficulty with. It is all those wildly more loaded with cash and money guys around me that I'm struggling to understand what their point is in trying each day to have even more money than they already do. I'm sure that five minutes after I mention some interesting novelty to them they'd all go out and buy it and show their buddies the next new thing about what you have to do or to have or have to be, when you are rich. Or more rich, at least. I cannot think of more boring people to rub shoulders with than the Bill Gates's or the Bill O'Reilly's or all those kinds of media-exposed Ultra High Net Worthers. Seriously not. They are self-delusional narcissists whose only reason for being found 'interesting' to the uncritical, is that they are horrendously rich.

I won't be mentioning any novelties to any of them.



O, but I do know some novelties, believe you me.

Tea And Cucumber Sandwiches

Tea and cucumber sandwiches, anyone?

I have always had a slight feeling of underlying scepticism when it comes to things like drinking tea and eating cucumber sandwiches.

Coffee is the drink of revolutions, if not revolutionaries – and I drink a lot of it. Tea, on the other hand, has always struck me as the native Englishman's excuse for his austere streak, simply being prettied-up with porcelain and wild-picked flowers by the butler, maid, or mem-saab.

Cucumber sandwiches likewise; too simple, too austere, too, too, insubstantial!

So much for my 'slight feeling.' It's obviously a rampaging cultural prejudice. I constan

tly have to tell people that whilst I can accept being termed British, I am thoroughly no such thing as 'English!'

But am I missing something? I know that beneath it all, there is this kind of sense of wealth some decent English have in them, to do with their strong desire to quietly savour the wealth of total victory. Some Germans have it, too...

And that greatest victory is the one that virtually no one else ever sees but the victors – those sneaky victories that creep up and invade the brainspace of the conquered. It's not necessarily unstoppable, but you do have to have your wits about you or otherwise it's too late.

Unlike what all the tyros do, recently I spent three entire days doing nothing, watching the wave-tops on the ocean outside, from morning to night, napping quite a lot in between, and drinking tea what's more, and eating finger food including cucumber sandwiches. I'm not sure that I felt any real sense of privation during the episode. Okay I drank lots of coffee too. And I bought a bottle of another one of these glut-cheap young whites that may be had here for little money right now.

I learned something from the wave-tops. A 'disassociative sea of digital data' – and I am grateful to another person on a Bear Chat Board elsewhere for this phrase – may indeed contain sharks.

Reduced to a simplicitude, the medium that makes things float is water; but currency is the water that floats things, not digital data.

Right now I can see the sharks circling. It must be the clarity that tea-drinking brings. Though perhaps I'm mistaken.

Time for another tea, and a cucumber sandwich, and perhaps a Tiger or two later on still. Sharks, what sharks? What are you talking about, Calvin? Circling around a currency? No, not a currency. I think the sharks are circling around themselves and I don't want to be anywhere near the vicinity of any scratch on the precious reputations of all these unimpeachable, moral, honourable, patriots – of whatever country you want to talk about, not just the obvious one(s) - who are all just doing things not for money or sex but for the love of their countries.

You see? That's where tea-drinking fits in – when you just want to wallow in cynicism.

 

Calvin J. Bear

The Authenticity Of Old Guys...

...and Old Places.

When the Money Supply is genuinely constrained, and so-called 'takeoff velocity' has not happened – or not yet happened – then it is no crime or sin to be without cash.

Whatever you would normally trade in, or have to trade, does not move with as much energy, and cash goes 'into the freezer,' as I like to put it.

But freezers are not such bad things, necessarily. And particularly when it comes to money, you will find that psychology overcomes brute force most especially when the Money Supply and the circulation velocity declines. There's plenty of money out there: it's trapped inside the frozen sentiments of people.

Can you think of ways to warm up the frozen sentiments of people?

What is it with the authenticity of old guys?

I can tell you right now, people severely underestimate the power of subtle and intelligent words and thoughts. Aesthetics is a Greek word meaning 'perceptions through feelings' – people don't need to know what you're doing, they just need to get the right perceptions from the feelings that you are evoking from them.

Thomas De Quincy, the Orientalist writer who was also an opium addict, is a fine example of how words can evoke feelings. And then of course, feelings create perceptions afterwards. I am going to tamper very slightly with the order of some of his sentences for the sake of making sense here, but, all the same, the point is how evocative he writes. Watch this:

“I am surprised to see people overlook winter in his sternest shape, when it comes to the science of happiness. They think it a matter of congratulation that winter is going; or, if coming, is not likely to be a severe one. On the contrary, I put up a petition annually, for as much snow, hail, frost, or storm, of one kind or another, as the skies can possibly afford us. Surely everybody is aware of the divine pleasures which attend a winter fire-side: candles at four o'clock, warm hearth-rugs, tea, a fair tea-maker, shutters closed, curtains flowing in ample draperies on the floor, whilst the wind and rain are raging audibly without.”

Something is raging outside these days. I would say it's called stupidity, and crassness, and hubris in the confused who yet have pretense to rule.

Close the doors. Put up the shutters. Draw the ample draperies of your mind and light the candles of wisdom. If the calm pool is only in your tea-cup, that is enough – all you need in fact - for you to experience 'calmness.'

You will find, that no matter how separate you have made yourself – even as it were, like a hermit – the world will start to beat a path to the warmth of a composed place. And also to the attraction of composed ideas. You don't have to be confident about what lies outside the doors, only in what lies inside of them. Calmness and wisdom heals... All things.

These Gala Times

The vision and the reality of course, are seldom the same things...

For the greater part of my younger life, I would have quickly said that I wore English gentleman's clothes, only to realise much later when I actually started to look inside at the tailors' names and consciously think about it – that in fact I had been virtually always been wearing Italian tailoring!

Yes, the Bond Street origins of the clothes appeared to indicate English tailoring but the truth was the actual cutters were all Italian. And then I also tended to favour fabrics from Italian and Swiss and even French rather than the generally heavier typical English styles. Eventually, Loro Piana dominated. I still have an old Milanese sports-jacket by Mainardi & Co., which is a very rare tailoring house, but it is still around in various guises and occasionally goes by its own name too under a bespoke format. This jacket is not only far and away the best piece of tailoring I own, it may be handed onto my son – which is an experience I managed to enjoy myself with a good few of my dad's coats and from memory at least one pair of handmade suede shoes. Quite an accomplishment both by my dad – who somehow managed to look after the stuff incredibly well – as well as the makers, whose art in the products simply did not diminish with time.

Even now I'm a hell of a snob and might easily opine that the Italians go over the top with their daring attitudes to the rules of dress.

But then, at the immediate moment, I have been reconsidering all of this peculiar snobbery of mine. I watch the dead boring black suit brigade in all of the world's financial centres, and the world's political elites, with their standard conservative uniform dress code – and I consider how embarrassed they all are for real substance, whether in mind or spirit or actual lawfully-earnt money. And I consider my own wife's Sicillian family, who manage to sweep a few by-laws to one side and put on the most impressive fireworks displays on the city riverside each time one of the daughters gets married... And I think about the brace of Maseratis that park out front of the mansion (it is a mansion, by the way) when the family functions take place, and I especially think about the way the men dress in absolutely – well, to me anyway – outlandishly excessive mens 'fashion.' The silver satin jackets... The coloured batwing bows and cummerbunds... The velvet and gold embroidered slippers...

I've always considered a lot of this carry-on fairly tacky, and it is tacky and even they all think it is too – but, it is also a very special kind of tacky. It is based on a complete self-confidence that they are above and beyond formal dictat from anyone who pretends to cultural and civilized elite-ism. And moreover, that they are above and beyond other people's rules about what to be civilized means. They know the rules before they break them. And that's the significant difference.

I've stuck a couple of pictures in here of some attire by an Italian manufacturer called Ottavio Nuccio. It might look at first sight that they break numerous rules of formal attire and dress codes – but they don't break even a single one. And that is an amazing testament to the style and cultural high-ground that some Europeans possess. I'm not going into details about what is so subtly correct about this picture, suffice to say that it is ideally correct. One of the bits of 'clever' trivia going the rounds among the Western literati and cognoscenti of men's formal attire is the meaning of the phrase red sea rig, or schooner rig (which is the same thing), but this picture goes into even more rarified atmosphere about exquisite formal attire for a gala.

Breaking rules of formal attire? No.

Now you or I may not have the absolute budget to go to all of this excess, but to be careful about dress, even in some small symbolic way, is a reflection of your mind. The point about civilized people enjoying themselves is that they don't need the rest of the whole world to know or approve of what they are doing. It suffices that they know what they are doing and why. The great Italian writer Petrach lived through some of the most terrible and terrifying of times, but he still managed. Old knowledge, manages in the worst of times. Petrarch is generally credited with having first used the term Dark Ages. His insights into what wealth is, and where it is, prove remarkable reading... And as we are currently also in a form of a Dark Age, Petrarch is a useful guide to living in it.

Petrarch's vision, and reality, are closer than commonly understood by the masses and their masters in Fox and in Washington, in Singapore and Beijing and every other place run by tyrants and knaves.