Learning From The Jungle

I grew up quite literally inside a tropical jungle. For whatever reasons we need not inquire into right now, I have in fact lived inside two major Malaysian jungle tracts - the first place was called Taman Endau-Rompin, and the other, Belum-Temengor.

Taman Endau-Rumpin

In those days a lot of life was much slower-paced there, as well as in many other parts of the world. There were no tv programs to rush back inside to, the sun was fairly lazy... People went on walks. I certainly did from as soon as I could walk. There were two clever house dogs that accompanied me wherever I went and they barked whenever my mother called out and afterawhile she took to trusting the dogs implicitly and that meant I could go on long walks. Which I did do. Without other people around...

Look, it was nothing for me to go wander into the jungle and stay out from mid-morning to early evening. I mean it was literally true that if the dogs barked you could hear them from a mile away echoing through the crevasses and valleys. There were no machines, no cars, no buildings, no construction sounds. On a good day you could hear the water pumps and generators of the two chinese tin miners washing out the ore-bearing sands from out of the side of a mountain-stream incline – although they were deep into the thick jungle.

I learnt many things in the jungle but one was that there are places humans can go where nothing else can. A human can see, and ajudge, and consider the changing face of risk, and make decisions based on reflected expectations and a kind of creative positive imagining of outcomes. Animals always default to their fear factor, whenever the challenge meets their threshold capability and threatens to exceed it.

A human can go into that particular notch in the rockface, look behind that particular fan of ferns, go under and behind the noisy crashing waterfall – the crocodile will not, and tiger does not. And if you climb up the rocky sides, not even the sunbasking iguana is going to be able to chase you there if it wants to. The black panther might, but it sleeps in the day, the cobra or the python or the viper might but these can be avoided or beaten off with a stick – you can see them if you keep a good eye out for them especially where you are stepping. Spiders are not too great a problem if you know to look for them and besides they don't stay in the flinty rocky wet dark anyway. A strong loping vine will take you out across a hundred foot drop and back to the exposed bright sunny side. Monkeys hang out in moving troupes and they hate fire and I have a Zippo.

The jungle is a safe place.

Modern Shanghai

Great monsoons sweep a lot of things away... I have never personally seen wild animals attack each other when they are on the run from a huge disaster. Animals are fear-based priority responders.

The human civilized world is also a very safe place. Same reasons. In the wild there are occasionally crazed animals of course, behaving crazily; same as there are crazed people in the world.

 

Here's a symbol from the modern, advanced and civilized human world. The Spirit of Ecstasy, by Charles Sykes, carries the fairytale of a secret affair behind it. All round such symbols, a crazed world swirls of course. But such symbols, and the ideas behind them, are all-important to the intelligent mind! 

Quirky People, Quirky Money

There's this quirky Australian songwriter and performer called Lisa Mitchell. She's still only young but she's been writing and performing for a long time now. Even today there are evidently still a few smart producers left in Australia and clearly these ones that work with her decided some time ago to be patient and wait for the superstar to arrive.

Lisa Mitchell's new song release 'Bless This Mess.'

Mitchell has always been a highly quirky songwriter, she's poetic rather than purely lyrical, and what she writes is not the kind of stuff you could say that you entirely expected from a pop song – and yet her material is commercial, having been used in quite a number of television video clips and product advertisements at a top professional level.

Jay-Z's 'Empire State of Mind' is a fine example of a commercial, professionally-made song that also works on many levels – except that it is also so over-produced that on one level it'll make you sick from a feeling of being manipulated into 'having to like it.' I kinda feel sorry for the artists involved – they give what seems to me a very forced performance; that they're trying extremely hard to convince even themselves to like what they are doing...

On the one hand the sales we are told Jay-Z's song made would underscore the value of its professionality. On the other hand, although the words in it say 'this town will inspire you,' it's doubtful that they will, as far as I'm concerned.

'Quirky' means employing a flourish or a twist that is not part of the normal action or behaviour that is expected.

Of course, you can be quirky and not deliver the goods though. And that's not a good thing.

Pink champagne cocktail is a
quirky little drink

In today's money world there is no 'professional/commercial/standard/conservative' way. All the 'standard' operators are making no money, and returning nothingspence to their shareholders, stakeholders, and investors. All the sovereign funds are getting a boilerplate, sponsored yield from a pressured taxpayer.

To make meaningful profits today, you will need to have a twist on the normal. You will need to distort the normal. But out of tiny little acorns great oak trees grow. So I guess I'm making a poor pun on 'quercus' the latin term for acorn, and relating the small and the unassuming and the quirky to something that is yet worth investing in patiently.

There is too much effort spent on the facade of what is 'normal' these days. Too much substance has gone missing from the normal 'commercial' product. I'd look for the quirky. 'Normal' does not like quirky, which means that quirky may still contain some substance. And that's just plain logical.

Blessings In Disguise

In modern times there are stereotypes about Crazy Charlie, the reprobate uncle, or Aunt Jane the self-medicating schizophrenic chief executive of a Wall Street financial services contractor.

Alas, I have neither of those types anywhere near or in my recent family history or recalled past. And to underscore the seriousness of the Left-Handed tale I am about to recount, I might just add that my own father's aunt was Gertrude Bell. Without whom no such place as the House of Saud would today likely exist at all.

A Blessing, in Disguise, though
following the Left-Handed Path

I could, I suppose end right here and all would be well. But that is of course not my style.

Witnessing Dick Cheney's recent Fox interview in which he mentions the Hezb e Islamia organisation, I nearly decided to break my largely self-imposed silence on this topic, that begun on the morning of this year's Boston Marathon – but I have thought better of it, and shall steer away from disturbing and fruitless complaining about what little the powerful people who claim to be well-informed, really know.

I was blessed by having uncles who were not only exceedingly well-travelled, but deeply – very deeply learned in many cultures and languages. The two of them were both involved in global oil.

The Arabic or let's say Middle Eastern culture in a megalithic sense contains many popular ideas – all of which are entirely wrong when it comes to an accurate explanation of what the sources and actual meanings of these popular ideas are, even in the mouths of local people who are nevertheless not within the inner circles of the initiated. Thus, many ideas come to the West already in a mixed-up state.

In this post I propose to enlighten you on the reality of the Djinn, and how to employ them properly.

Now take for example Christina Aguilera (picture of her on the right, below) who sang the song "Genie in a bottle." She looks tall in this pic but she is in fact really quite a tiny thing in RL. She might be a kind of an embodied genie. And there are a lot of them around the place. Like all the Qin, they are mostly Asiatic.

"Genie in a bottle"

Created from smokeless flame, they exist as structures of sub-atomic particles, and wax and wane according to the strength of an IDEA. The metaphor of the 'smokeless flame' comes from ideas being either like or actually, a form of smokeless flame – an electricity, an energy – that can burn, like a fire.

They are intelligent and because of their general longevity many possess an accumulation of means. They can move backwards and forwards in time, and if a thing 'has not happened' in the future, they are unaware of it; if they are aware of a thing, it means it MUST 'have happened.' Or, in other words, that it will happen, and more to the point, if you can but encourage a genie to think about something in particular, then they will start to work on it diligently at once not faltering until it 'happens' in present reality. And since they have means and can manouevre in time itself, they can bring about the thing's occurrence quickly.

To organise the support of a real genie, you must have a strong idea – one that is logical and possible in reality, and preferably innovative, and because ideas themselves are the breath of life for such creatures, they are attracted to good and strong ideas particularly and may arrange their many means in support of your prosecution of a very good idea. And the idea need not be morally good to be able to recruit their support.

In Sufi Mysticism, the Universal Oneness of intelligent being, implies that the maxim that 'God' simply says 'Be, and a thing Is' is also an expression of the actions, ways, and means of the sub-atomic electric world of the Djinn.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GGUiQ1_IR9s

The Sufi phrase is 'Kun Faaya Kun.' I have pointed your way now to a great mysterious and magical song by an exceptional modern musician AR Rahman which is nothing less than an actual Sufi Mantram disguised in a Bollywood pop song.

Now if you think you know anything about Middle Eastern religious beliefs, I am about to direct you also to some Moroccan Sufi Chanters – who are singing what we here in the West know as the English Christmas song 'God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.' (Edit. Added: well, the music is known in the West as Handel's Antioch - aka Joy To World - but the words approximate the former mentioned Christmas Carol). Salafists, who are creating all the grist to Kissinger's mill, are slightly confused about their own history...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M__pR8a-Sfk

And therein, I suppose, lies the rub.

Lie To Me

I THINK EVERY ECONOMIC COMMENTATOR OF ANY KIND OUGHT TO SAY WHAT MUSIC HE OR SHE LISTENS TO...

It would give you a stark perspective from which to ajudge their mind culture.

For this post I shall give you three that I listen to for your own consideration about what it can all mean or imply:

(You can see them all on YouTube).

Lola Astanova – Rachmaninov's Movement Musicaux Opus 16 # 5.

Above and Beyond pres. OceanLab – 'If I could Fly.'

Three Drives – 'Letting You Go' Greece 2000 (Dabruck Klein Vocal Radio Edit).

It's from the last of these that the following words occur:

“You can say what you want to/Cry me a river if you need to/Go put my name in a tattoo/and you can spin me lies if they come true...”

The last line has complex possible meanings and I approve of it. The problem with 'Jesting Pilate' is that he never stayed around to hear the answer to his infamous question.

The name of the game in the financial media today appears to be the spouting of data to justify a prognostication. I have a view that the G30 itself essentially consists of manufactured credentialists, driven from a long time ago by strong and powerful political elites in countries where democratic transparency has never existed – let's be kind and say: 'never properly existed...'

Nobody is prepared to contradict the 'data' and the spun versions of economic ground truth (as Rumsfeld might say) from groups or people speaking from the platform of G30 membership.

The fifteen seconds of fame and the mantle of the fifteen-second 'wise guru' that is the reward of the damned souls of economic limbo and tv-land virtual reality, includes all of the members of the G30.

To put it simply, my own view is that right now, they have no clue. And it's not a good idea to steer your course by anything they might say.

Certainly they have massive effects on markets of all kinds from moment to moment daily, but that is the same thing as the falling man claiming to be flying as he drops past the 12^th floor of a 13 storey building. Actuality, is critically a different version of the facts.

All of us who are actual professional investors of some kind, whether on behalf of official funds, or privately, must of necessity go back and consult our own waypoints of investing – that is, we must consult our own actual records of what we did, when, and for how much, and examine these in light of actual results. And this is relieved of the dictats of clever and manipulative prognosticants.

Having largely made my own personal biggest plays in the go-go era of the mid to late Eighties, and having necessarily been acutely aware of the types of mindsets abroad at the time, I often told the less experienced not to swing the words integrity and credibility around too much; for one thing I always feared those who made too big a thing about these qualities, and quietly questioned why they did it. For myself, these things are absolute givens and not subject to serious question. Full stop.

A businessman with this suit has integrity.
Soros gets close, which is good enough.

It's certainly not that I have changed my mind now or my view of things or the principles involved, it's just that I can't see modern era politicians and bankers in any other position than one which must be experiencing a sense of vertigo that they cannot admit to having. There is no ground under them, and there are no safe holds for them. The Dow is at great heights and sales and profits are under great question. Circulation velocity is anaemic and the notion of austerity matched to spectacularly unrealistic interest rates and simpering, keening, prognostications about economic growth abound in the mouths of everyone from Stanley Fischer to Bernanke to Dimon and/or Levin.

Notably Soros and Faber and Rogers and the rest of the private investor old guard are saying something else quite different again.

Currently the Yen via Japanese Government Bonds is adjusting what performances can be expected over the short run from Japanese corporates. I expect a phase of stunning and amazing superficial technology presentings to be brought about by the monetary policy currently being unfolded in Japan.

When taking serious market positions I personally tend not to go by particular views about the future, but rather, I structure or 'wind-in' a set of positions based on the immediately obtaining dynamics of the situation.

Mansory Maserati - definitely NOT the banker's version
of Punxutawney Phil's hutch!
Stockbrokers with integrity drive this car.

Thus, if I were to utilise positive revenues from equity upside positioning (adopting what is currently being claimed as the relatively attractive 'equity risk premium') then I would certainly also be positioning myself in low dollar priced long-dated Calls.

I have never been more confident of the directional pull of the existing dynamic tensions. And because of it I am most unlikely to go around making predictions or prognostications about the future or the outcome of markets' trajectories! There is no way I would want to alter what is being offered cheaply right now, just because I happen to have some kind of mathematical calculation that, if seen, would cause Bernanke's carefully-trimmed bearded jaw to drop and Fischer to look for a hole deep down Jackson way to crawl into. Which is where he belongs in the first place. A kind of Punxsutawney Phil of the financial world.

Calvin J. Bear

Hot Chillies, Hot Money

With very many things in this life, words and their meanings have a great significance on the likely outcomes of any venture! Stick a really hot chilli in your mouth and YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN IN THE PAIN AND DISCOMFORT! Doesn't matter what the public egging-on conned you to try.

Take the phrase 'precious metals.' Precious to whom? To the guy who wants to sell it to get cash money? To the obsessed person who wants to horde it?

It's part of this typical modern generalised nomenclature that means just about anything anybody wants it to mean! 'The precious metals markets...' What is that? I don't know.

Whenever gold does a sudden backwards summersault, the top end advisers bring out this idea that well, it only ever was insurance against some kind of cataclysmic event in the paper currency world – and of course, everyone knows that you have to pay for insurance, and the small percentage of time during which the gold price was down is how you 'pay for that insurance' overall. Or some variation on that argument.

The important thing to watch for is if ever there is a falling-out between members of this all-pervading global cartel of paper currency printing and political elite. Just as what happens when a rigged horse race suddenly comes unstuck for any number of possible reasons, the rich owners and powerful bookies all run for cover and get this look on their faces similar to Bruce Banner's Hulkian colour change.

Which leads me to what I really want to post about: the 'world's hottest curry...'

Ghost Pepper - world's hottest, they say...

In England, the 'world's hottest curry' idea is based around the 'world's hottest chilli' idea – which relates to what is called the 'Bhut Jolokia' ghost pepper chilli. By official accounts, this thing can rate up to six million Scovile units. Which is great and all and I have seen the YouTube video clips showing a few english lads and one famous doctor undertaking the adventure of consuming a plate of the world's hottest curry made using six of these super hot chillies.

Now I grew up in a kitchen full of Tamilian people who knew stuff from days of yore. Everybody who cooks traditionally, using chillies, knows that as soon as you cook them, you tone down the heat. Not that I am rubbishing what these english fellows are saying or doing – just that you can get a curry up to even higher (if you want to do that) heights of 'chilli power!'

Bhut Jolokia chillies are firstly, not the hottest chillies in the world – but there is absolutely no way that I am going to say which are – DHS might prevent people from acquiring them. Any of the really super hot chillies – Jolokias, Nai bird's eye, even certain Scotch Bonnets, are so potent that the steam off them will blind you if you get too close to the plants when the chillies are ripening in hot sun. And by the way, I don't tell lies here so if you check up about it you will find that what I am saying is the plain truth. The steam alone, will burn your eyes badly, and you won't be able to see properly for a day at least. Police and military pepper spray is not significantly more potent than what you can extract from a Bhut Jolokia.

However people – including the police – are confusing the effects of capsaicin, with other compounds that produce the longer term burning sensations when you actually ingest certain 'hot' natural substances. What produces the truly hottest HOT curry, is the combined effects of ginger and black pepper. Whilst in the case of chillies, odorant (smell) compounds from off chillies produce a sensation of pungency so strong when in combination with the capsaicin in the chilli, that you can think the experience is overwhelmingly burning.

But, simple though it sounds, putting too much ginger in a curry together with fresh ground black pepper, will utterly destroy the eater in a way that will send that person to hospital. Adding real fresh uncooked Jolokia chillies after you have cooked the curry and are ready to serve it, will produce an odorant gas that will literally burn your face before you get the spoon to your mouth.

Of course, those who can eat a curry like a proper Indian – with your fingers and not with a fork and spoon – will not marvel as to why some Indians have very red tongues and very pink skin on the sub-liminal faces of their skin.

...And what does all of this have to do with money. W-e-ll, I'll tell you. Eating at the spiked monetary curry table of the Fed, or the ECB, is like those english lads laughing and falling about when they are testing the 'world's hottest curry.' Yes, it's hot. And no I personally would not necessarily try it. Some people say the english doctor hallucinated in the middle of his 'hottest curry' adventure, although he claims not. Hallucination, wild and exaggerated claims, and a lot of knock-about humour, is however, closely equatable with attempts of the Fed and others, to manufacture value from out of nonsense. The yardstick of value – and values – is distinctly different, from what the Fed has any brains to think about, in terms of creating and sustaining economic growth in a worthwhile society of human beings.

'Worthwhile,' and 'human,' being very key words.

Jaguar customized in Iran by designer Hossein Yekta.
No special reason for pic!

The Australian economist Ross Garnaut, who was tasked with the Australian Carbon Tax report, recently commented that central banks had been arranging the flow of low interest 'money' into economies pressured by conditions that could have led to a Depression and had thus averted such a thing (I'm freely quoting him, but it's close enough). However the thing they are required to do is arrange the flow of CREDIBILITY into governments, banks, financial ventures, stock markets, politics, and risk/reward situations. And failure to admit that THIS, is in fact THE MOST IMPORTANT THING OF ALL, is going to wind up with a visitation of fate befalling all those knock-about lads pretending to know what it is all about when it comes to economics.

For if a government lacks credibility, and they resort to the power of their enforcement arms to have their way, they automatically lose the moral authority that allows them to have a government at all. We in the West have pillaged much from Ancient Greece, and have yet forgotten that the Greeks also invented anarchy. Anarchy actually simply means not having one overarching government for all and thus forcing each individual to be his own government for himself. In this situation, tell me, what is the form of money that you will be prepared to use and can rely will work for you?