A Marvelous Sky

Last weekend I played once again in a band just for one gig.

And only one song.

It's a real simple basic tune that I took on – The Long Winters' 'Sky Is Open.'

You can hear their original version on YouTube.

No one over here knows this song; it's never been played on the radio here.

What I like about the tune and the way The Long Winters perform it is the clear vocals and the fairly standard English diction of the singer in spite of a touch of Canadian accent in there.

I've more or less lost most of my Ultra-British accent that I grew up with, having lived in Australasia for quite a few years now. I think I'll have to remedy that though, as modern Australian/Australasian is a peculiar, clipped, slack-dictioned, sorry thing... Well I think so.

New PRS Guitar

The guitar part in the song is also extremely easy to play. Now I can manage a pretty difficult range of techniques on this instrument – in fact my Dad called me Paganini all the way up from a small child and I think he thought that like him (that is, my old man, not Paganini!) I might one day take up the violin properly. But I never did. I think though at some point he may have thought I really was Paganini too. Who knows, I may have been in a former life. But I am not now and I don't play publicly anymore although at one time I played in ski resorts all over Austria with fairly big-time professional session and side musos who ski-ed off-tour and played in the nightclubs apres ski.

I'll tell you how good I was – I played joint lead guitar in a jazz band whose drummer, Glenn Walsh, went on to hit the skins on tour for Stevie Wonder in Sydney. There ya go.

Anyhow... 'The Sky Is Open,' is a song currently being considered as the theme for a potential Hollywood big budget flick featuring Marvel's Ms. Marvel. I don't think it'll ever get made though. They've even slated the tremendous New Zealand director Mike Takahori or whatever his name is (he directed the last of the good Bond movies Die Another Day). Ms. Marvel is riddled with complications as far as sexuality and a dark comic book history that won't go away no matter how much spinning goes down the marketing tunnel here.

Me, I'm happy to lust over a new Pernambuco-necked, Maple-topped, PRS guitar, play tunes just for my own self-indulgence, and think about whether it would be fun getting a Sunbeam Alpine or Tiger from somewhere and fully restoring it. This was the first car James Bond ever drove in the movies by the way. But you already know that.

Charlize Theron CANNOT play Ms. M.

Madonna... Could. You mightn't think so but if you go back to her being directed by Traktor Films in the video clip of the song Die Another Day you realize just how amazingly good at action pieces she really is.

Hollywood will likely screw up this job just like it has everything else recently. Even Julia Roberts could do this role. But not, NOT Charlize Theron.

All these people getting too old? No, I don't think so. Hollywood can halt time. Shame it just can't go back to when there were real producers there though.

The Art Of Modern Finance

I can't say this is new to me; I have encountered it many times before, especially during the late Eighties and early Nineties, when I worked for a brilliant Sydney Merchant Banker by the name of Jurisic long since retired. There were a lot of brilliant people around the place in those days: I recall one of the most fascinating individuals I have ever met - Karl Teuchert - the woodcraftsman and designer who designed a large amount of the furniture on which Federal Senators in Australia sit. He was a man full of energy and passion and extremely generous with his knowledge of materials to all those who sought him out. Karl worked almost exclusively with an Australian hardwood known as Jarrah, which is similar to the rare and expensive American Cocobolo.

But I digress – slightly.

A beautiful pic unconnected to the gun debate

I am driving at making the point that today it is extremely rare to find someone, anyone -, who, knowing a great deal about their subject matter, will care to divulge a lot of that knowledge fluidly.

It is simply far too difficult to keep the commercial value of any specialised knowledge intact once that knowledge is allowed to drift unescorted out 'into the wild' as it were.

The banker Jurisic owned a small boutique investments house, and Teuchert owned two fairly large craft workshops in which he employed about thirty highly talented craftspeople. Both of them could supply virtually completely unique products to a high-end and individualistic market that was not able to source the same things elsewhere. And, more to the point, this 'high-end' market was not prepared at the time to be satisfied with substitutes of a lesser quality and standard.

One just has to say, however, that it is now moot if the China market produces knock-offs of a lesser quality anymore. Sad to say but true, Chinese film directors make substantially better movies than anyone in Hollywood, e-Readers are cheaper and better if you buy them from the back-alleys in Hong Kong, and space shots launched from inside China are safer than anything Morton Thiokol or TRW ever did. This will not last. But it might go on for a thousand years yet before 'it doesn't last,' if you gather what I mean.

Anyway, back to my first sentence. I recently had the experience, once again, of watching a group of intelligent people turn to water in the face of the serious prospect of actually making big money now. Far easier, apparently, was it for them to spend a lot of money going around the whole world visiting people in high places just to hear those mysterious 'yes, yes, yesses,' which really meant 'no.' Unlike the Eighties though, today, there is only the one single rare diamond that you will find once in your lifetime, rather than being able to walk up the road a little ways to cast an unhurried eye over all the other diamonds singing much similar tunes. And the one single rare diamond has forsooth even a spirit being within, which moves and lives and thinks – just like those fabled stones in the Garden of Aladdin.

To possess such a stone one must employ a young thin lad, who can easily fit down that Underworld Entrance through which no fat, well-fed and watered, modern Middle Class merchant can go.

There is much in that sentence, no doubt, and it is by no means a terminal statement. But what is absolutely certain, and sure, and true, is that the means and the mechanisms and pathways to financing, of both the high and of the low kind, may be found quite possibly only in the minds of strange sorcerers claiming to be the long lost brother of your lately deceased and much beloved father... The thrill and the magic of financing important things is – and quite possibly always has been – a secret knowledge, and an art.

Back when I was a callow youth (never was exactly that, though), then, and even now, there is this strange holiness and religiosity about finance that many many people have; it is a thing which is given to you apparently, and to you alone, especially, and above many others, because you are worthy, and you do things in a certain prescribed way that others do not. It is in so many ways a blessing adorning the worthy alone, by the gods of money.

Whereas of course it is not anything of those things. It is simply a person knowing where money is and where it flows inside a dark cavern into which few go and thus where one might still get some before a thousand hungry gnats swarm in to steal it all and to make of yet another cool and fertile place an arid desert patch. As they do. And I fear that those who are survivors in arid places are symbiotic creatures of those gnats. They seem to be in every place that has a want of necessary and adequate funding. And to me, at least, they seem to have a special relationship with gnats.

Dancing With The Sparks Of Light

This is about money, believe it or not.

And I should not be sidetracked...

But I must stop briefly and just note the odd usage of the word 'parabellum' by those philosophers of the gun around the place seemingly everywhere. I'm pretty certain 'parabellum' means 'prepare for war' in Latin. And, I also think that what it implied was a type of cheap and small round of which vast numbers thereof could be quickly manufactured, in preparation for war, where one might be expected to have to possess, and also to carry, a lot of bullets, that don't necessarily weigh a ton, and that you might also easily fire off in large numbers.

A lot of people I have heard speak recently, seem to think a 9 mm parabellum is some special kind of advanced, especially killing sort of cartridge to be used in semi-automatic pistols. Whatever. Any kind of projectile launched at a vicious speed into a human body in the wrong place can kill. Lots of things can kill.

Anyway, I actually don't want to focus on guns and bullets at the moment. However I make the point that people use words and many times what they mean, is not uniformally understood as entirely meaning the same thing as what they think they are communicating to their listeners...

Conceptions of value and wealth and luxury private material possessions are also nowhere nearly as clearcut 'uniformally defined' as we sometimes take for granted that they are.

Yes, the power or the ability to select from many choices is seemingly universally accepted as a freedom that money and wealth renders to an individual. It is of course nullified by sheer ignorance or lack of culture and lack of a wide knowledge about what things exist: people can only choose from that of which they possess some knowledge. Out of sight, out of mind; out of mind, out of any reason to be desired.



Great Car Art - even Ferrari thinks so...

I look at some modern cars around now and they seem to me excessively convolluted, even for admittedly advanced intricate machinery. A friend of mine just told me today that he found the new Black Series C63 Mercedes annoying and utterly unfunctional for driving long distances in Australia along the major outback highways.

On the one hand it may appear that electronically-fuel injected and/or turbo charged, drive-by-wire, motion sensing suspension equipped, hi-tech modern cars with alloy and ceramic engines beat the hell out of a handcrafted Aston V-8, or a Jaguar V-12 with its double bank of Weber carburettors that need to be tuned regularly... On the other hand, the obscurity of what is going on inside the hood of the car, and the shelf-life of all these modern offerings coming from over-capitalized robotic manufacturing plants in Germany, means that none of it is on the human scale anymore. It's all very – maybe too far - removed from the human physicality of sticking a hand-crank into the front of an Austin or old Ford and firing the thing 'into life.' Not that I'm saying we need to go back to all that, but the physical link to the human body/mind creature is essentially lost when it comes to modern things like cars and even buildings and city planning and art and design. And especially communication. I can still use a leaf of hand-filled deckled edge french linen paper to write a note to someone using a pen and ink – but then, nowadays would that person be able to read it and 'get the message?'

Possibly not.

And then again, I would like to be able to wear an Italian rapier on my hip more or less like an accoutrement (of clothing) when going around in public but such a thing is not legal to do, more's the pity. And by what I mean by 'more's the pity' I mean that, such a thing being illegal in my location of residence where there is no right to bear arms or to have any kind of actual or legal freedom of self-expression, it gives the general public no clue, sign, or warning as to how dangerous a person can be with words alone. I'm a dilletante when it comes to it, and I'm sure that specialized guns do a lot more damage than less-specialized ones might do, but I'm equally sure that the process of the damage and the killing begins earlier on than the moment of simply sticking the cartridge into the clip or the chamber. It begins with words. It begins with the ways in which social communication is carried on. The ideas are the seeds, and the words are the physical beginnings of actions springing from the ideas. Words – are absolutely the physically, and really, deadliest things there are.

 

Calvin J. Bear

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

Bion Again

This is all off the top of my head so I'm not sure I'm going to be able to reference stuff that well...

Hey it took me about twenty minutes to remember the name of Wilfred Bion – one of the most original and influential thinkers of the Twentieth Century in the field of psychology. What with the election and Fox and storms and floods and global warming and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, I stopped thinking about one of the men who began all this 'lead the minds of people to prevent war through the media...'

Bion needs little introduction to most of the people who look in on this blog. But we should remind ourselves that Bion's work was very largely conducted in absolute secrecy because he worked for the Ministry of Defence in the UK, as well as eventually, the US military. Even today, the detail that comes out of his work is, I believe, the tip of the iceberg. Well, okay, the droplets of the water from the melted iceberg that melted because of GLOBAL WARMING.

Armin van Buuren - trance dancers love him

I am grateful to JP who posted an earlier comment directing readers to a Salon article about the effects of rhythmic music. This is a Wilfred Bion idea. He conducted extensive research into the neurological effects of sound and music. A lot of the modern strands of research flow on from the research of Bion and his collaborators. Today, the most advanced researchers have moved on a long long way from the fundamental concepts about 'endorphins' and their capacity to alter sensations of pain and anxiety. 'Endorphins' covers too wide a body of chemical reactions and electro-chemical events in neurophysiology to apocalypse (yes, that's what it really means) the mechanisms of human psychological effects and affective neural pathways.

The actual way the brain functions in concert with its sensory systems, is that there is a virtual constant and continuous flood of signals going on – there are descriminating filters that pick up variance patterns and apply signification to those patterns. Sleep itself, only occurs when another system comes into play that blocks incoming and outgoing sense and nerve signals. Those signals are still going on, they just get 'whited-out' by orthogonal or 'keytonic' additional signals which have the effect of blanking out those patterns that have affective muscular reaction significance to the 'awake state' brain functions. The point really, of what I'm saying, is that there is a lot going on constantly. Nothing is actually dormant as such. And more particularly, the system of pattern recognition/signification is outlandlishly complex, I mean really. Really, it is complex.

For example, if you are familiar with the musical group 'Drum Tao' or 'Drums of Zen' (same people) then you might assume that this is certainly the type of rhythmic sound stimulation that will pump those endorphins of which the article in Salon speaks. And it might, but not because of the rhythm, but because of the pattern variances... And, researchers have found, the more subtle the variances, THE MORE SIGNIFICANCE THE BRAIN ATTRIBUTES.

Black Forest (brand name) wireless speakers

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z0MRzFW7o1w

I recommend Jonas Steur Featuring Julie Thompson – 'Cold Wind' – ( the link above) for an example of extremely subtle pattern variance. And if you want to compare something similar from a classical repertoire one might suggest Vladimir Horowitz playing a Chopin Polonaise. These quick, almost imperceptibly tiny pattern variances are the kinds of things the human brain responds to most of all. Waves forms, shapes, contours, calculative multiplied notes – all these electrify the brain and underscore that 'something important' is going on to the human mind. It is an evolutionary imperative. And I would listen to what these things 'say.' By accident, or perhaps not by so much accident, music shows us the meaning to our lives.

Calvin J. Bear

The Day Of The Burgundy Wine-Coloured Spy

French wine, lingerie, red velvet curtains.

This is the iconographic image of elegant sex that we are used to in the modern West.

Sex is, afterall – well at least it is for the elite in that game - highly formalized and stylized.

I know this because I learned it from a man I interviewed once who was a key part of Helmut Newton's original Sydney (Australia)-based commercial photographic studio. This gentleman – the one I interviewed - spoke of Herr Doktor Markus Wolf long before too many of the even well-read public had ever heard of his name. Of course, I would hazard not many recall now what that particular fellow was all about...

Actual Russian Intelligence Officer - Anna Chapman

I should say too, though, that whilst I am relaxed in saying that the person that I knew, and that I am speaking about here, did indeed also show me all the great secrets of a good Martini - I am slightly troubled by the fact that later on in his life, I suspected him of either having become, or at least having become very deeply implicated with, a serial killer...

Marinus (Martin) - for that was his name - was also a friend of the actor Lee Marvin and they would spend many summers stalking Black Marlin, I believe it was, from memory. The both of them were surprisingly fit, or let's say physically strong, to be more accurate, and good with long-bladed, serrated-back Marlin knifes,

In one particular discussion about things of the world, Martin pointed out to me that a hundred years ago, the finest restaurants served their clientelle a la francaise and not, as we are used to now, a la carte or a la russe (as it is more correctly termed).

Slava Zaitsev fashion - no ushanka today

'A la russe' means in the Russian style, and that means bringing dishes out in a sequential manner. Which is a bit like serial monogamy, you could say...

Laying out a large table with more or less all the dishes already there to be served from, to the diners – this is a la francaise. Such a thing is all very formal, with liveried attendants standing behind the guests like soldiers until a toast is made and only then are people seated and things go on from there. It's meant to inspire awe in onlookers...

Martin told me eventually when I asked him directly about the killings, that it couldn't have been him 'because he loved women too much...' A very poor excuse, I thought.

But, I say! This man was urbane – the most urbane I have ever encountered. Almost theatrical, but not overpoweringly so, so as you would count it against him; he was, I must say, tres subtle.

So... French wine, lingerie, red velvet curtains.

But I also think you can present Russian vodka, Soviet era emblems, and ushankas, and caviar, as iconographic of a certain kind of decadence and thus of course also of sex. At the moment I'm not so much concerned about the social or historic derivation of these symbols as anything remotely to do with sex, more the current nuances they conjure up.

Burgundy wine coloured velvet, really...

You see I want you all to imagine the launch of some luxury prestige or hot sports car, with a closed invitation guest list. You know what these things are like don't you? They are held in rather large rooms, though usually not big halls as such. There is one wall removed and a modest enough stage behind a large floor-to-ceiling dark red velvet drape. And music plays and champagne is served. And right when the music reaches a certain crescendo, the curtains are pulled back to reveal – the great vision. And everyone applauds. And drinks more wine.

What lies behind the closed curtains? Soviet submarines and ICBM's, Bugattis and Jaguars. And so on. Catherine the Great turns into Mother Russia. Crotchless knickers from Napoleon's Josephine...? I don't know. But what's the great American sex icon deriving from power at the apex? If it's Marilyn Monroe and JFK then it's certainly out of very recent history, comparatively speaking.

The curtains pulled open are like a framed window onto something out there. Sometimes we might be too close to the glass and fog it up with our breath so that we are unable to see clearly past our noses.

See the fact is, without the power factor or the sense of it, no one pulls out their chequebooks.

Anna Chapman again

(P.S. Do we still use chequebooks?)

Get That Edge

One day, when I was twenty-seven, I looked at the bank statement of the private company I owned outright, saw the figure of two million dollars positive balance there, and began to be more careful about the physical risks I was taking – I began to slow down from my usual speed (was never that fast to begin with!) when I was driving, and I stopped thinking about all those extreme sports things like sky-diving and solo glider flying and deep sea diving and so on. That is I stopped entertaining any serious inclination to participate in those kinds of pursuits.

I suppose part of the story was that I was headed into the public listed companies arena and I guess I valued my own being around to complete any saga there that I had decided to commence.

Up until then I was always very athletic, well-coordinated, quite competitive, and liked taking educated risks that seemed like decent challenges to a lot of other people.

Zivko Edge Aerobatic Plane

Theoretically, as my own bank account grew, I could have indulged in a lot of things that had been too expensive previously. My sister flew, I kind of dabbled without putting enough time into getting licensed – but the intent and the interest to pursue such idiotic things like aerobatic flying was definitely there. As time passed I forgot all about this kind of stuff.

My nephew on the other hand, is undertaking most of the things I pulled myself back from in my late twenties. We both go to a few Red Bull air races every year and he has flown with aerobatic pilots as a passenger in two-seaters.

Funny thing is now, I yet might make calculated decisions to get back into certain 'out there' activities. The older I get, and the more I have seen what a waste good intentions are on most of society, and how little appreciated they are (not that I particularly have done anything much in the order of the completely altruistic myself), and certainly how very little use indeed someone with a brain like mine, is to the majority of people – the more I find that it feels possible for me to take huge risks with personal safety. When I say 'huge risks' though, I mean apparent huge risks, because I still believe calculation and judgement and correct assessments are totally paramount.

Professional risk-taking was what I embarked upon early on because I had great doubts and suspicion about what was being cast by society at large as authoritative – either of knowledge, morality, even of science. I had formed the view that I could and should back my own judgement. By about the Nineteen Eighties it was starting to be apparent to me that the world had moved away from broader social reasoning and had become completely drawn to material self-interest as the driving logic for anything that people undertook. I had this view though, that people were not generally that very good at attaining their selfish ends, frankly... There is this hard-nosed 'realism' that has become the sentiment of the modern world, but it is based around a self-important and exaggerated view of capabilities and intellect and talent.

Okay, I DID have an amazing early education and it simply is a fact that for a short while the then young David and Hillary Rothschild stayed in my family's home while my father supervised their University Matriculations.

I don't think I was being necessarily presumptuous or conceited in forming the views that I had about credentialism and trends in science and economics and politics – frankly I was too young and too borderline autistic to be anything other than just plain pragmatic.

However I wish I was as smart still, as I was back then when I could make those calculating and cynical decisions. Because in the back of my mind is another, and newer, suspicion, that society is ripe for something – I know not what...

Anyhow, last Sunday I had an amazing red wine with some older family and their friends: Chateau Tanunda Barossa Shiraz. I think this has been the very very best red I have had in about ten years. It is, in my estimation, at least as good as a thousand dollar bottle of Penfolds Grange.

There are still many amazing things in life in spite of the uselessness of much of what has come to be the establishment and the authoritative platforms for money, science, entertainment and law.

The beauty of the internet is not that it has opened up all of these great things to everyone. But that it has closed them all off and made them intensely private and only privately accessible to the sensible. Most people just don't have the patience to be sensible any more. It takes patience to make a great wine, breed a great horse, cook a great piece of beef.

Old money... is patient, but without losing any of its edge and sensibility and taste for the good things. People who lose their comprehension of what actually is good, waste money on the inferior.

Deep, Dark, Progressional

Do you want a thrill?

The thrill of the most advanced things - you will be
flying in one of these one day soon.

Would you like to experience something that is utterly mindblowing – yet still fits inside that box 'we intelligent people' confine ourselves into these days, namely, the 'scientific.' And of course, not illegal...

Firstly, though, allow me to just say that all of this is actually incredibly old. There was, as far as I know, a long time ago in Greece, a temple at place called Epidaurus, in which there was a thing called an Enkoimeteria (you know, like cafeteria, only enkoimeteria; a place of mystical sleep). And during your mystical sleep there, induced by the musical enchantment of priests and priestesses, the god Apollo himself would advise you of how to cure your ailments.

Now moving on forward to today, the leading edge of the neuroscientific world is adding some scientific authority to what the avant garde digital electronic musicians call 'auditory driving.'

There is a lot of scientific data available about the mechanisms of neural signalling – an area I personally find very interesting - and the system structures and pathways that are now accepted to be, much more so than previously supposed, genetically pre-determined in modern human brains. Arthur C. Clarke wrote a book called The Overlords, in which an alien species comes here to try to understand why humans spent so much time playing around with meaningless patterns and structures of audial information. Eventually, in the book, the aliens congratulated a composer on his outstanding work and then departed, none the wiser and still failing to understand what was going on, because they had 'no music within themselves.'

Music is like any other endeavour of Mankind; it becomes more and more streamlined as we progress as a species. The apprehension of advanced music, is not as clearly obvious as say the immediate visual significance of innovative and advanced material physical design – and that is because it occurs and unfolds over time, rather than can be quickly 'seen' as a complete body, as one image, as it were.

Alucidnation - Bruce Bickerton

Oliver Sacks, in a recent edition of the Oxford Journal (Vol. 129, Issue 10, Pp. 2528-2532) quotes Schopenhauer as saying that “music was an embodiment of pure 'will.'” Sacks, still a bit behind the bleeding edge, casually and weakly opines that the question in his own (Sacks') mind is still unresolved as to whether or not Schopenhauer is correct. And yet goes on to intimate that music is pre-installed into the design structures of the human neurophysiology and even the muscle-body.

And now, here is my pronouncement on all this: music is the very essence of language of advanced Man. When you want to look for evidence of intelligent communications from the outer Cosmos, or from ancient aliens, or 'gods,' or from seemingly mythical entities and intelligences, in fact there are a never-ending amount of clues and 'artefacts' in the world of music. We don't rapidly pick these up because they demand a greater scrutiny than what is expected by the Fox Television Era mindset. In fact I don't even admit there is such a real thing as a 'soundbite;' a soundbite is not even a large enough data set to represent the equivalent of an alphabet letter in a bowl of alphabet soup!

No, if you actually want to comprehend an intelligent argument, you are required to possess a certain amount of inherent music within. Science can now – and has – stuck a PET scan onto the activity of the brain, and knows without any contradiction, that neurons light up in constellations of sophisticated connections, when the firing rates of synapses reach the harmonic threshold requirements that define our perceptions and apprehension of what we call 'music.'

The word 'trance' is an Old French word itself taken from the Latin 'transire' which implies a 'petrified condition from fear of evil' when someone transitions or passes or crosses over the River Styx.

Coincidentally, the outstanding modern trance music composer BT, has the root word in his own birth name – Brian Transeau.

DJ Anna Kiss

But in fact modern trance music is highly mathematical, rather than simply haphazard or merely coincidental... It is characterized by a tempo of between 110 and 150 beats per minutes, and has a number of other highly consistently, structurally constrained, elements.

Some of the best exponents of this type of music are quite old men, on the whole - and some women too - and a lot of them are classically trained pianists. Craig Armstrong is not a young man. Brian Bickerton is a ginger-haired mature English gentleman at home with British Soccer, and fish and chips, and beer. But what they are doing in engineering the music they make, is inducing brain activity that is in no way dissimilar to what you will experience even from the most sophisticated or highest-level and highest lifestyle hedonic stimulation. Try it: I assume you all can get YouTube – have a look at Alucidnation 'Deep Rez,' or 'The Infinite Variety.' Just try it.

Sables and Psychopaths

What's Real, What's Not Real.

I guess I'm responding here to something posted onto another website by another person. The website is the 'other' Wall Street Bear Discussion Board.

The post was a link to a YouTube clip by a legit shrink on what a psychopath is.

I headed off then next to another nearby clip about narcissism. And here I am now, finding myself more or less setting out to defend why I blog or post anywhere at all – because both of the YouTube clips were a bit tendentious really, provoking you to think 'hey! Is that me they are talking about?!' I mean do I blog because I am self-absorbed? And isn't it true that like all entrepreneurs I might also be a touch manipulative and have little empathy?

Well – no! I was trained in the subcontracting world of old-school manufacturing/technological Singapore, where either you killed off your subcontractor eventually through restriction and oversight and control – or they sure as hell would kill you off with continual demands and problems!!

As for blogging, I'm sure I do it because of frustration over the usual media commentaries and the pseudo-professionals everywhere capturing the agenda with stuff that is just plain dumb, ignorant, or old hat and dead boring!

...So anyway, I'm watching these YouTube videos and I get this same old feeling that so much of everything everywhere these days is like bad high school teachers preaching fairly tame and popularly established 'knowledge' to minds that cannot possibly be expected to be older than about fourteen to twenty-two at most. So who all decided that the audience of the entire world was made up of people lacking any worldly experience and that had never read a decent text book the whole of their lives?

Not a real spy

Okay maybe I too will turn into a 'self-justifying know-it-all,' (the criticism of Singapore dictator Lee Kwan Yew made by one of his ex-colleagues). I love to get something in about Kwan Yew. He's on his deathbed, you know.

But all the same why are governments for example, so late onto the scene of the crime, as it were. I notice this week the Australian High Court put a stop to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation's idiotic 'adverse report' findings on a few Tamil refugees. This, probably ten whole years after I had written to a few of my own ex-colleagues in government asking them to think very hard about taking the word of a certain Rohan Gunaratne, a self-appointed 'expert on terrorism' from Singapore's Nanyang Polytechnic. And not to mention my extremely long held conversation with a handful of others in responsible positions here in Australia about the virtually certain residence of Osama bin Laden (or the specific important person going by that name on the 'urgent' desks of the Security Services of many countries...) in Pakistan.

Australia's intelligence and policing services are made up of people of integrity but they are not immune from this global wind of overhyping the simply banal, and creating 'complexity' where there isn't any - the result of which is a massive going round in expensive circles when common sense would have reached a correct solution right at the outset. Things which could deserve some priority though are turfed out because they are 'too hot to handle,' and the toothless dramas get dressed up facilely as issues that must be addressed with taxpayer money.

Not a real historical Russian restaurant

I have given up, really. I'd rather spend my time looking at the pre-Nineties Hollywood eye-candy versions of spy stories, for example, and the present-era oligarchic fake culture and historicity in Moscow. I don't read the news anymore. I read the Elite Life magazine in Russian, where the editors have not become jaded yet. I have an ambition to go visit the Pushkin Cafe in Moscow – which is basically a whimsical and entirely fake 'old Russia' building and interior... And I also remain an entrepreneur. Because I basically couldn't care less about... Oh dear. That YouTube video was right then. Anyway I have entirely given up on the modern West just at the moment. I might be saved though, by that private video promotion that Johnnie Walker circulates among embassy staff around the entire globe that hasn't made it into the public sphere yet. Is that perfectly legal for security staff and embassy people to get private marketing privileges that the rest of us don't? I don't know. Though probably not. But as I say – who cares!

Vasta Carthaginiensibus

Fabius Maximus was the Roman General, Consul, Leader, and Statesman, who ended his speeches in the Senate with the phrase 'Vasta Carthaginiensibus.' Carthage must be destroyed.

History records Quintus Fabius Maximus as having been known as 'Cunctator' – 'The Delayer.'

I think he might just as easily have been known as the dripping tap. He was not politically well-supported until he was eventually proven correct in his outlook and his words which had all along been just like a dripping tap, drip drip dripping into the ears and minds of everyone, were accepted and his ideas adopted by the public in ancient Rome.

Fabius Maximus

Fabius Maximus delayed engaging Hannibal as he crossed the Alps.

The greatest problem of the Western world today is not Hannibal (nor is it the Rise of Islam, fundamentalist or otherwise), but the failure of anyone to come up with any kind of policy that can engender economic growth.

Yet, we have had short term growth from time to time in the form of real estate bubbles, and also stock market valuations bubbles before that, and now we have an enormous issuance of money via the US Federal Reserve Bank, which is a kind of a prices-and-values deflating currency bubble that keeps interest rates seemingly, down.

Economic growth can only occur in a way that doesn't terminate in calamity, when tax receipts are matching the government's own demand to spend debt. Real estate is not a good way to engage the taxing power of government because real estate turns over insufficiently quickly to create enough taxing opportunities. At the same time, commercial banks appear to only know how to lend to real estate collateral and they of course are legally permitted to create credit and thereby money, inside a ratio related to the Federal Reserve's total currency issuance. This lawful creation of money falls inside the Money Multiplier principle and is quite a legitimate thing. But, it ceases to be functional or legitimate when the creation of credit by commercial banks ONLY happens through real estate. And, in these circumstances the banks can appear to have a lot of moral credibility because they can establish quite healthy reserves and thereby claim to be acting 'responsibly.'

In other words there is a clear dichotomy between the political needs of elected governments of all persuasions (and therefore the economic requirements of society at large), and the commercially easy road for commercial banks.

THE SOLUTION

The solution is to force the lending by 'the banking sector' to business activities of every description BUT real estate – retailing, manufacturing, technology, food, and many other things – in short all sorts of things where the velocity of credit and money circulation in the domestic economic is high on an annual basis. The tax receipts will naturally increase, and the make up of banking reserves will vastly have changed from the highly-skewed illiquid and non-circulating thing that it has up till now been because of the real estate bias.

Ben Bernanke's insistence on significantly increasing the currency issuance is to do with his attempts to hide the unusually large EXCESS RESERVES of a handful of commercial banks as a ratio of the entire money supply – and this is because there is a systematic looting of the system by banks acting like a cartel to channel their credits through the low tax arena of long term real estate, and structure of pushing off bad debts into brand names designed to fail and to fall, and a strong ideological bent by those banks to deny the rest of the market credit because this is where both the tax risk is and the business risk is too.

Nevertheless, the public and the government have to pull the current thicket of commercial and investment banks in. And one way to do with this is to issue new banking sector licences to structures that will lend to higher circulation velocity business activities. The borrower need not advance any form of real estate security at all, but, they must accept a higher eventual tax rate. It need only be a slightly higher one.

And I think the fact is my concept is not only the only one that will work but the one that is inevitable at some point in the future.

Of course, it may well be quite some time into the future because no one expects the present cadre of special interests to easily depart from the centre of attention that they so passionately appear to be in love with possessing, nor give up their privileged access to fiat unbacked printed money-out-of-thin-air-at-no-cost-to-them, nor their stranglehold on the types of politicians put up for the big elections and the agenda of what is discussed on Fox News and how it is discussed.

Simply put though, the current debate about 'impossibly large national debt' and 'taxing the 1 per cent' and the 'dependent 47 %' is all complete and utter rubbish.

These things are spouted by accountants who are the equivalent of static image photographers taking snapshots of bits of a Mercedes engine on a garage floor and everyone standing around and nodding sagaciously as if it mattered that the pictures are beautiful or the car parts oily. What is needed are engineers and mechanics, not photographers taking pictures of static images. Economics is a thing in complex motion. And accountants and commercial banks biased to real estate lending have gotten away with a claim to importance that is not only overstated but politically and socially dangerous and dysfunctional. Real estate itself, has somehow manage to get away with another false and ludicrous claim about its being 'capital.' It is certainly not, a 'financial asset' for one thing – which is defined as any asset that is guaranteed to be able to be turned into cash within one standard accounting period of one year, and neither is it 'financial capital' which is defined as any asset that is guaranteed to be able to be sold by no later than ten years. Sometimes, and using various sophistications, it is true that some real estate can be sold within ten years, and some can be monetised inside one year – but there are no general guarantees about it and frankly, real estate is only weakly a type of economic 'capital' at all.

Like the case of Quintus Fabius Maximus, eventually, what I have just said will also be widely accepted as irresistably correct.

Return Of The Mack

My mother was on the stage. A lot of years ago of course. So many years ago only people in the theatre would have much of an idea what it was back then to be a contracted J. C. Williamson's artist.

Mark Morrison

Me, I can't dance and I can't sing. And I can't teach school either (my father was a teacher for more than forty years). Okay the truth is I saw what they both did and I figured, 'oh this isn't for me at all.' Way too much hard work. And of course the worst thing was my uncles who were seriously wealthy – one having been a director of Shell Far East. Result: money = good; altruism = silly. That's how little kids think. I still think 'doing good' is largely a thankless occupation. Hey look, at the time I knew my uncles, Shell was already far past just doing something beneficial for industry, middle class lifestyles and the developed and developing world – at the executives' level it was about playboy Malaysian tunkus, Chinese mistresses, British tailors, Aston Martins and Rileys and gullwing Mercedes sportscars, private luncheons and late late dinners with shiploads of alcohol, and the United Nations International Children's Emergency Fund. At least it was from what I could see from hip-height (possibly the place to be to see all the action).

I suppose my only handicap in life is that I have always been fairly athletic with rather low body-fat and that means I can't do much of the alcohol thing. And thus, many people have been pretty suspicious of me. If you want to succeed in business the straightforward way, try not to encourage people being suspicious of you, I would say.

Actually in this post I was intending to focus on the stage and theatre and performance in general actually, rather than on the rich men's club stuff.

At the same time though, success in any business venture is quite similar to running a successful theatre production. And sometimes, though quite rarely, I observe in popular entertainment the fingerprints of the olden days' professional theatrical producer. I have to tell you, no one in modern politics has this quality at all. In all of the drive to mass-produce talent and garner the broadest popular appeal by standing on as few toes as possible, you end up with utter inanity.

Good theatrical producers know that every superstar talent is ideosyncratic – that's what human beings are at the top level. Individuals, different, unusual, personalities, characters... ...and difficult. Some are not difficult. But a lot are.

I was doing the hotdogs at the school sausage sizzle this week during their interschool sports carnival, when a tune came on the speaker system and one of the mothers stuck her iPhone up in the air with the Shazam App on: in fact she didn't catch the song in time and on this occasion the App didn't get the name of the pop track.

Well I happen to know the tune and it was Mark Morrison's Return Of The Mack, something from the Nineties. Mark Morrison is talent. Rare. Ideosyncratic. Not sure if he's difficult or not. Delta Goodrem – who is also talent – was up the road at a shopping centre during the same week and one of the dad's on the barbecue had a pic of her on his clone Samsung. He's a security guard. Delta Goodrem has a reputation as down-to-earth and a real nice person. All the moms and dads at the school thing said she was a 'diva' but totally without all the diva arrogance and difficult attitude. Lucky agent and producer. It's rare.

You want to see talent get onto YouTube and watch Howlin' Wolf do 'Smokestack Lightning,' or Mark Morrison do 'Return Of The Mack' or Delta Goodrem sing her latest song 'Dancing With A Broken Heart.' Goodrem's song is not raw like the work of the other two but her talent gets the thing across. And for me, I can see the handiwork of a real olden days' producer all over her video clip.

Makes much of the modern world just plain stupid. I've always felt artists, especially musicians, can pick up the trend of the near-term future extremely accurately. ...The world is not going in the direction the dumb politicians and their bureaucrat viziers might like to think that it is. In fact I tell you what; you want to make money and be at the front of the curve start thinking much much more creatively and inventively than conservative politics – which is basically the mindset of both sides.

And buckle-up. There's a ride ahead. Don't worry about money. There'll be plenty. Stop worrying about money; it isn't the problem. The problem is doubt about the avant garde. Don't doubt it though – no successful person ever did. And the public, knows talent. Just watch them stick the Shazam App up in the air to chase it. Talent... is sexy.

Financial Genius

The whole point of artistic or musical genius is that it delivers the 'artistic massage' first, and only subsequently some thinking people then tend to realise there was a serious intellectual message too.

Orgastic Love = Hand on Ass, maybe not arm in arm...

Is there such a profile available when it comes to financial genius...? What would be the equivalent? A mathematical massage? An intellectual massage? A money massage? At least it is clear what the message is – we tell you a story and then justify taking the value of your work, wealth, and efforts and handing it to someone who won't sit down and have a cup of tea with you. The vision of Stanley Fisher and Ben Bernanke walking virtually arm-in-arm at Jackson Hole, Wyoming, tells it like it is. There are hundreds of miles between me and you – and them and a bunch of armed guards.

Taking money from the citizen and from the taxpayer and continually giving it to a few privileged banks certainly creates an ethical questionmark over the purpose of a central bank like the US Federal Reserve. But of course that is unlikely to ever be addressed honestly and directly by Bernanke.

Crucially for professional private investors, assessment of economic risk nowadays falls to the question of who is 'protected' and who is not, rather than who is acting sensibly and who is acting dangerously... Can the banks and the government act sensibly at all or over the longer run? Well, let's just see for how long they can; if they are doing it even now.

The great philosopher and public intellectual Paul Ritter

Although not commonly talked about, there is such a thing as a radical pathology psychologist – or sometimes, 'radical social pathology psychologist.' You won't see much talk about such people in the ordinary media; for they are a thoroughly discredited lot you see. For instance, there is my late friend the extraordinary Paul Ritter – the architect and polymath/polyhistor who laid one of the original foundation stones at the World Trade Center. He personally knew the very thoroughly discredited psychologist and medical doctor Wilhelm Reich – who was one of those Austrian School Psychologists who more or less started all this nonsense about the establishment deliberately misleading and suppressing the masses through a steady diet of fear and crisis. Reich's main problem, it seemed to me at least, appeared to stem from the fact that he had the temerity to suggest the establishment's core dissembling nature resulted fundamentally from a sexual issue they all had! And that, as they say, was the quick end to him.

But I think that the establishment has miscalculated – or maybe even failed to calculate at all - that the internet and all it represents, is the very devil's breath itself to the common herd, because it liberates the Id of the private individual and the collective Id of his community, from the constraints and controls and social rules imposed from his political and government masters from on high. I cannot think of a single greater real test that has ever happened in history of whether Reich's style of psychoanalysis and his ideas are functionally sound or merely crackpot thoughts. Dare I say this: Reich is extremely clear about what he thinks will happen, but you will have to read his books carefully to discover what these predictions are...

And yes yes, of course I am being subserversive.

Dancing With A Broken Heart

WARNING - YOU DON'T HAVE TO AGREE WITH THIS ONE!!

Today I was confronted with a frightening fact: Anders Behring Breivik is possibly more diligently well-read than me.

I mean I am a great reader who travels far beyond the typical academic or commercial booklist review-of-books. I used to work near enough to the seriously commercial book-publishing industry to know how to find out who really sells the most books – in other words, what books real readers like as opposed to those books that the marketing department arranges the sales of!

Of course by now I'd actually forgotten that when I was an undergraduate at the University of Western Australia I once tackled a certain Prof. Maund with the complaint that the librarian was being suspiciously deceptive regarding the works of Wilhelm Reich which were supposed to be on the shelves – but which weren't. Only many many years later did I discover that a certain City Councillor – one Paul Ritter (the architect and town planner who had laid the foundation stones of the original World Trade Center) – continually 'removed' (as in purloined...) all said copies any and every time the University replaced them on the shelves by buying new copies, until eventually, they stopped buying them.

Kate Bush - wrote Reich-inspired songs

A further fact was that all of this was because of some dispute or other between Ritter and the University itself – and partly also consisting of an attempt by Ritter to get some free press about his socio-psychology ideas that were being decried by the Heritage (buildings) Council based at the University.

The fact that I was the only person who ever did actually really notice the continual disappearances of these books I guess means that popularity is not necessarily a guarantee of quality, or, that quality is a fluid idea when it comes to the written word expressing the ideas of intellectuals and that not everyone agrees on what intellectualism is.

In the past I have tried to read broadly...

But Breivik not only appears to have read broadly, but to have comprehended the significance of some of the intellectuals he has read. The conclusions he reaches are not ones that I can necessarily agree with him about – but the danger of those intellectuals is if anything, testified to by what Breivik did.

People who read along the same lines as Breivik are likely to be 1. very few in number and 2. rather intelligent to say the least.

Is James Holmes one of these? And does he also have a Manifesto out there somewhere, but one that is being presented in disguise and not presently being attributed to him? I believe there is almost a 100% chance that this is the case. I don't think either Breivik or Holmes are lunatics at all. That is, they are only lunatic if you consider Stalin to have been a lunatic, if you see what I mean. They will achieve a certain amount of their ends through the kind of determination that is, I suppose, a little crazy!

Let me show you an example of the power of people like Reich... Reich, I believe, was not the man people have assumed him to be. He has always been thought of as being both brilliant, and likely also suffering a mental disorder towards the end of his life. And that is the fatal mistake about him. Wilhelm Reich was so brilliant that he realised that to actually have the impact he desired, on the type of society and the type of person in society that he wanted to affect, he would eventually as a form of therapy have to play a lethal and probably self-fatal joke on the pathological and neurotic society in which he was living both during the era of Nazi Germany, and post that in the USA. His basic premise throughout his latter written works was that scientists had to be allowed to pursue completely erroneous paths and be permitted and indulged in pursuing virtually obvious complete failure – in order to challenge the psychological straitjacket of a political society that was severely neurotic, traumatised, and disturbed from centuries of violence that we were mistaken in assuming we had coped with without impediment to the sanity of the very system itself. He thought that by deliberately going down obviously erroneous pathways seeking discovery, we might find solutions where by going down the straitjacketed ones by this time in the pathology of society, we most certainly wouldn't at all and only prolong and promulgate ever more neurotic pathology.

I'm pretty sure he personally regarded what he was saying extremely seriously in the same way any doctor would in treating an epidemic. The other side of that coin is mass murder... Of course.

I recommend that you listen to and watch the video by Kate Bush which employs Reichian psychology – song titled 'Running Up That Hill.'

And then I recommend the extremely recent/current hit by the Australian singer Delta Goodrem – 'Dancing With A Broken Heart,' which is essentially the same idea but revisited in the modern musical idiom. Artists often know before others, what is going on. Well, maybe reflect deep feelings within parts of the society before the whole becomes fully conscious of them. Let us not forget, musicians like Wagner were always associated with the rise of Nazi Germany. We are at a distance now from Wagner -, but too close to Bush and Goodrem (pic on the right there) and the trance beat generation to realise the signs.

Calvin J. Bear