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.