Why The Human Scale

Sometimes we may look at hypostyle buildings, even hypostyle ideology, really - well that's what it amounts to - and are overcome momentarily by the scale.

It's so big. It's bigger than we are. It's more important.

This is also, the hypostyle

Of course this is not always so. There are some buildings large though they may be, which have totally other objectives than simply the brute force of the megalithic. Or the monolithic.

If you find yourself visiting Chartres Cathedral, and go inside and look up into the vault of the upper space, even before you notice how high it is and how much like the imaginary heavens of religious narrative this space is, you will almost certainly be aware of the fall of coloured shafts of light onto your body.

And, if at night, the glitter and glints of candle-light off gold and silver and polished brasswork everwhere, will instil in you feelings of being in the presence of illumination.

The reason the Greek philosophers spoke of things 'on the human scale,' was because they knew something we don't any longer: they knew that giants, if they were only megalithic monoliths, always fall.

Like so many other Bible stories, the story of David and Goliath is completely the reverse of the truth. David never killed Goliath. Goliath fell all by himself. You see, David himself, was surprised at what happened, never understanding the merely coincident nature of his stone flinging and Goliath's fall. Unlike the Greeks, David presumed the matter to have been an act of god; the Greeks would have said it was about the certainty of failure - the predestined failure of the giant, who was 'not on the human scale.'

The difference between the Greek conception of god and what divinity does and what its purpose and position is in the Universe, and the Masoretic view, is that the Greeks held that there was a material, physical, predictable consequence to patterns, rather than that god or the gods go about making new decisions from moment to moment depending on who worships them 'the hardest.'

More like the ancient Chinese, the Greeks also held that the gods were often quite distant to the simple daily affairs of men, favouring only a very very rare few and for very distinct reasons, and being largely indifferent to the rest.

The Greeks would not therefore, have automatically said that god favoured David to have his stone kill Goliath. Whether he practised stone flinging or not!

All giants - and these are not the same as the titanic, to the Greeks - would of course go through their natural profile of existence, and come back down to the Earth at a certain point in accordance with their inherent necessity to conform to gravity and the fact that they exceeded the ideal scale for living on this planet.

Their centre-of-gravity combined with their weight and mass made them vulnerable.

The idea of not going beyond the human scale in building, and in architecture, and in many other matters is that if you cannot see beyond what is your horizon vista limit, it is pointless to have things built and placed to that distance away. And if things are too high or too deep down, or too far across or too complex to move through, you will waste a lot of energy just having to move around. 

To the Greeks, therefore, if someone created something like this, it would have, far from making the Greek mind be impressed by the 'grandeur' or the awesomeness of it, evoked pathos. 

Not, the hypostyle...
And yet, a shawl made from this - antelope felt -
illegal if from the Chiru antelope, is utterly rare...
Warren Buffett does not own one. The shawl is
called 'Shahtoosh.' It's about $200,000. 

Now, one might say well but what happened to the Greeks - did they maintain their empires till now, unconquered and still advancing, so that we should take notice of them? But Diogenes laughed at Alexander. And few modern people understand 'Greece' is not one country, just as Sicily is not part of Italy except that the Italians believe that it should be...

History tends to tell only of the hypostyle, the exaggerated, the larger-than-life, and refrain to speak of what is just on the human scale.

You see, in reality, what goes up too far crashes and falls back to Earth - if by its own nature and characteristics it is not suited to go to or live in the heavens...

And what persists and abides on the Earth quietly and without too much noise, well, the operative phrase is 'without too much noise' - such a thing remains intact, and well.

The rest is just pathology. And this is why you see so much sneering on the mouths of people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld and Bush, GHW. Or Tony Blair. What you are looking at is pathology; they are suffering. Instead of a smile even when they claim to be on top of things, you see some kind presumptuous and yet sort of cheese-y, feigned naughty, 'am I caught yet(?)' arrogance. There are many politicians like this - Widodo of Indonesia, Lee Kwan Yew bore it too while he was alive. LKY always seemed to be scoffing at the stupidity of the Western White Man.

Never being able to see beyond all the huge, vast complexities of their workings (IE machinations), never being able to go out into any street unguarded, never being able to sit comfortably in a true friend's chair, everything they have and do must be bought and paid for, for it cannot come into existence by harmony with Earthly and natural things...

And so what else can they do but enjoin this life onto everyone else - for you must be so stupid if you do not agree with them, and live the same way that they do, and also use the same ideologies and standards. Come, come with us. For it is pleasing to walk down to hell in the company of others, be they fools or the wicked as they are themselves.

Today, this week, you can be a millionaire, but not a billionaire or trillionaire - they are excessive.

And let your life's wealth come into existence by harmony with the Earthly world as it really is... And it will be.

But you will hardly be noticed.

As the shaft of coloured light through the stained glass windows of some gothic or even exotic cathedral, the unsighted will not sense nor feel your power, and your wealth.

And yet, this is the real thing.



  

And Oil Drops, Because...?

OH YEAH THIS WILL BE DELETED IN A FEW HOURS ALL RIGHT!

A figure of '50' has been placed on the number of US spies who have supported the complaint that their intelligence reports are being doctored by 'higher ups' in Washington.

'I guarantee you -' Netanyahu, telling Congress, 'that if you take out Saddam, all the Middle East problems will be solved.' 

A Dubai kid's Lambo, airlifted in to Londonistan/Richistan
and parked outside of a VERY expensive joint next to Hyde Park.

Apart from these two sentences all the rest of the initial post has now been deleted.

But in summary, basically what was being said was that oil is in an importance sense a form of a currency too, and it is in fact THE main highly liquid daily 'physical trade' that use US Dollars.

And the global industrial elite will not pamper the US government and FED System administration anymore to pay expensive numerical amounts of what is essentially, a defunct 'hard money,'  and a very soft non-industrial, paper bankster money token - for the commodity of oil. And that is why the oil price is going down. 

  

What If You Have 'Good' Ideas?

I recently watched a video recommended by a fellow Wall Street Bear Chat Board long-time member, in which the demise of the American Dream was portrayed, and the cause or blame placed more or less on decades of bad ideas, political and moral.

On the one hand, if a true reflection of what has occurred, then it is testament to the power of ideas - at least the negative power of bad ideas, certainly.

I find that in warmer zones, I have almost
exclusively Italian tailoring, and not Savile Row!
Most job interviews I have ever been to, I start by saying:
"you can't afford me." Jobs are a bad idea. Don't get involved with this
kind of nonsense that modern 'society' pushes.  

I suppose we all believe that we know what constitutes 'good ideas' of course; I know I do.

My presumption is also filtered through years and years of formal involvement in an Eastern European philosophical school - not one which we need to disclose in detail right here and now, but I will say it is Eastern, in the sense that it goes back possibly to ancient Phoenicia... And so I say I do know what good ideas are based around, and what they must metaphysically 'look' like in order to be correctly termed 'good.'

But might we be able to say that if we held 'good' ideas, then at some point 'our' society or societies will take on the forms of those ideas and become, themselves, good societies?

How might this work if we ourselves live inside of a very vicious and flawed, as well as corrupted yet large and powerful society - even whilst we try to hold in our minds some ideal of moral and social and human 'good' that we attempt to live by?

An ancient philosopher once reckoned that the happiness - or, as we modern era socio-economists like to term it, 'units of happiness' - that a tyrant or despot experiences is far less than what a free man experiences. And by 'free' the philosopher meant mentally and intellectually free. At the same time, the opposite was held to be also true, namely, that the fears and anxieties and pains that the evil man experienced were far higher than those the free man felt. In a world of unbridled materialism and materialistic objectives and idols, this concept appears quite unproven.

Until we qualify materialism.

I am of a mind to start a new segment within this blog, that I intend to call 'Destination Materialism.' I am not one of those religious people who perceive of an ethereal paradise beyond, where good people ultimately go, in order to enjoy absolutely nothing. Why, if anything, that is surely the heaven for today's academic specialists, who, in the words of the British comedian Kenneth Williams became so astute at being ever more specialized in smaller and smaller parts of things, that eventually, one of them became the world's greatest expert, in absolutely nothing at all.

The quality of things is the thing. The substance of a particular thing is key to that thing.

Unfortunately we do not live in world in which going to a job interview holds substance any more, if the quality and productive meaning of jobs no longer exists in any realistic human and social or sociological (at least) sense. We have what Professor Stephen Keen calls 'unproductive complexity' going on.

Young people face bleak and uncertain times.

This was created by an actual designer...
And most car companies cannot afford them.

The processes by which they become economically viable even at subsistence levels is complex.

I do not agree with the nostalgia about 'dressing for success' in job interviews. 

One of the great mistakes that many people make today is that they don't envisage that there in fact certainly are pockets of liquidity and real cash wealth around! In spite of the clear paucity of monetary circulation velocity and the enormous margin debt in play. Or they go to the wrong places having been overwhelmed by the illusion that size equals substance. 

Young people ought to acquire skills and hone talents that are in tune with the social currencies in those pockets of liquidity. Never before in the history of the whole human race has it been more true than that people casually assume craft, medicine, health, education, knowledge, food, materials and textiles, fabrics and liquids - are all easily accessed by the broad consumer channel. Product substitutes are easily available for most things. But most actual things that should be around at this time in history and human progress, are not available at all.

I watch, for example, in horror, at the local Chinese Kung Fu schools - some, or in fact most of which, are run by people I personally know and watched as they grew up under the tutelage of older Masters decades ago. I do not have students that I personally train and this is largely because I have not come across anyone I observed might have had the necessary application and focus and even frankly the interest or the desire. Yet in some of these present day schools, thriving as they are, the classes are filled with high fee paying, sloppy-actioned, and utterly misguided people and young people. I barely - barely - recognize the things being taught. But whatever is being taught it bears no resemblance to what we all had to learn those many decades ago. The old Masters are spinning in their graves.

Long gone from YouTube was the very first black and white, Super Eight film of the 23-year old Tibetan Kuten wearing the 120 pound war god headdress and floating all across the small clearing... 

Nod nod, wink wink.

You don't know what is possible.

"Millions Saw The Apple Fall..."

This was something the giant of modern trans-national economics, Bernard Baruch, said. He was talking about Sir Isaac Newton.

Observational scientific method starts in a formal and modern sense around the time of Cosimo De Medici and one of his mathematicians, Biambattista Della Porta.

The Inferno - still a concept

Della Porta was a member of an association of scientists and naturalist philosophers who called themselves 'The Lynxes,' due to the reputed ability of these animals to see with great keenness.  

Today, we all watch as the leaders of government virtually everywhere stand by and encourage fictions on a grand scale in the world of money and finance. Nothing could be further from the truth than that The Fed is a good force - it is utterly wicked beyond anything that has stepped the world stage politically and institutionally at any time in the past. The Fed punishes savers and savings, and rewards a kleptocracy. And has therewith turned every social and moral tenet of the entire history of the planet on its head.

Fear of an increase in Fed interest rates - any increase - catapulted markets into a frenzy and a panic of selling across the boards. Things stabilized as the mooted increase was presumed to still be some way off... But an increase must come.

Skirt hemlines are rising...

And yet, at the same time, it cannot come. It need not come. The Fed sits in its Ivory Towers and is not compelled by any force in the market to turn interest rates upwards. Access to the kleptocracy has been maintained a closely guarded secret among the so-called 'elite.'

All's right with the world.

Adolf Hitler - a certain gentleman who in his own words, came from being an unknown - started out his early speeches with the words: 'we appealled and appealled and appealled to those who had brought about Versailles..."

No. Sadly, today's crop of bums pontificated upon in the criminally insane media as responsible and worthy, have learned absolutely nothing at all from history.

Today of course, the kettle boils less obviously, since street protests are dismissed by the media, and mob gatherings are only on the cold medium of the social media internet.

GET OUT NOW!

Volatility Becomes Intelligent Energy

The Federal Reserve (formally called 'The Federal Reserve System') has made a mistake.

And it is a big one.

Let us just dwell though, for a second, on the word 'system.' The actual proper name for what we have all come to know simply as 'The Fed,' is The Federal Reserve SYSTEM. Yellen is chairman of a 'system,' and not a bank, or an entity, corporate or otherwise, but rather - a system.

There are THREE colours in this scene... Clue.

It is a racing aphorism that whoever has a gambling system will go systematically broke...

On the surface, it would appear that 'The Fed' is the house in the gambling analogy and therefore should not go broke. The players should go broke. The Fed however, is owned by the biggest players and it hands out free money to these so that they can go on gambling - and losing - forever. The nominal counters - or gambling tokens - are asset prices, specifically real estate prices, and listed equities. If you look at it in terms of say the board-game of Monopoly, the desirable tokens or playing counters, are equities and real estate. Not factories and technologies or research and development or food production and logistics. I am not considering the status of military industries in this analogy at the present moment...

On everyone's lips right now is the question of whether or when The Federal Reserve SYSTEM will move to increase their interest rates. And this question has increased volatility in markets, and in combination with China falling for the three card trick of following a discredited Western SYSTEM - albeit one that favours elites of course - volatility has become simply enormous.

If not for the never-ending supply of fantasy money Big Banged into existence by the gods at The Fed, we would have witnessed a descent into pretty much a Thirties' style Depression by now in this era of absurdly low interest rates and economic anaemia.

The media points to 'bots' or electronic automated algo-rhythm based trading for the cause behind all the recent volatility.

Now while the financial market volatility is occurring, there is no change in interest rates. Risk, therefore, is suddenly seen to be non-existent as far as bank capital and financing is concerned and not a factor to be calculated in the interest rate formula...

Now I don't know whether there is anyone reading here that could care less, but it is the case, that a smart investor can now begin to make serious - and I do mean serious - sums of money because of the foolishness of what has been going on with this criminal mob now in charge of all money and all markets everywhere. The Fed has miscalculated and by a huge huge margin.

Think Douglas Casey. And that is all I am prepared to say about it.

Pirate Captains are elected by the crew;
they are not quite the villains that landlubbers suppose
 

If all the readers here were bound by what the privateers and corsairs knew as 'Chasse Partie' then I would go into details. As it is, most of you will have to work it out yourselves. But let me say just this, and let me make it perfectly clear: The Fed has made a huge mistake and you can start making money at will from here onwards and I don't even think they know where the problem for them is. Misdirection being the greatest secret to prestidigitation, I am not about to let it slip so easily as to blurt it all out openly here.