From Outside In

You see... people want to see death and destruction and the obvious outward effects of force and power - and this is really the standard of 'proof' and 'evidence' that most people (and I do say most) desire before they will change their minds over a silly proposition or idea. It doesn't matter that something is patently on its face silly - they want to see the sturm und drang.

However, what business do I have with a street urchin, for example? Why do I even stoop to explain to him or her that if they get in the way I will just run them over...? I have an expensive fast car and I am an important and well-dressed person...(!)

City of Power and Light...
And money

There is an old saying that there is no tyrant like a freed slave. But then, seldom do you hear about the slaves who woke up one day to find their masters missing.

Where did they go? Why did they go there? Or, that is, for what reason did they leave? And leave so abruptly.

You even have a common idea today abroad (naturally, in the internet) among the modern religious, that 'when so-and-so comes ba-a-a-ack, there will be hell to pay for (usually our) opponents' - of course.

See? More of this sturm und drang.

Thunderbolts and lightning very very frightening.

Even Bush the first Prez did it with his 'shock and awe.'

What a stunningly composed shot

If you are a slave race and all you know about your masters is what you construe from your perspective 'below' or from the outside looking in, then what hope do you really have of ever portraying any event or events as they might have actually happened at the elite level, or of understanding any of the real reasons behind the behaviour of your masters?

I just want to know what is actually said inside the Lamborghini. Not what some people have surmised from outside of it. Don't you?

"Pull, pull and now I wake up
My foreboding
As soon as all come
Nothing, nothing
I saw the lake and our failings
But present time is over, over

Fever like river
You don’t find my life here

Pull, pull and now I break up
We are feeling
It is not the end
But nothing, nothing
I saw the space and our failings
But present time is over, over

Fever like river
You don’t find my life here"

  

Humans All Think The Same...?

Sometimes I remind myself not to even get close to assuming that other people automatically think in ways that I might otherwise take for granted are 'normal.' (Or my kind of normal, I must add here).

The media, politics, commercial product marketing - all these things are constantly before us operating from an assumption that the next person more or less thinks, given similar data and stimulus, in roughly the same kinds of ways within a broad range we deem 'sanity,' or rationality, and so on.

When there was high unemployment (lol).
And James Clapper knew where to wittingly get info
(pic courtesy Pinterest)

What I mean is that confronted with the exact same facts and from the same base conditions, two 'normal' human beings might come to similar conclusions and make broadly similar decisions as to suitable actions. You would suppose.

And that is not so, and I haven't found it to be so in any business situation I have ever been in that involved other people. In fact, I can literally count on the fingers of one hand, those business-people I know who shared the same basic traits as myself when it came to making decisions at various particular points in the flows of daily commercial and financial business. 

Over the years I have constantly had my head spun around by what people make of the facts and the data they are given, and then, what decisions they make and what prompts or motivates them to those decisions.

In my view it is perfectly useless to try and unpick between the various contenders for instance, for the current Republican Presidential nomination. I am an experienced deal-making business person myself and whilst I can comprehend what a Donald Trump is mostly about, I cannot say the same of any of the others. The only thing that stands out to me is the number of them with lop-sided mouths or faces and one eye squinting slightly tighter than the other...

Trump seems to have a bit of an over-bite but otherwise his mouth seems straight to me. And by straight I have to tell you that my impression about certain kinds of people is that the fixture of their facial muscles is grooved in over years and years - of something, I won't say lying necessarily because sometimes it is a question of someone simply trying to overcome a lot of social anxiety.

Modern politicians do not eat sharks fin soup.

Now you might be thinking to yourself hey but what if you're just observing that many people are motivated by gain and they have various layers that hide it - and that accounts for the way they make decisions. But no, I mean I have  - and you may have too - watched or encountered (although I tend not to personally encounter it directly in my business affairs) people whose real goal was exclusively to cheat or to in some underhanded way achieve a benefit, and that it is the cheating, and not the benefit, they are interested in...

You may not believe me but I have countless examples of people who have knowingly foregone massive and facile profits, in order to pursue a deliberately underhanded and yet complex strategy of work and action and the expenditure of a lot of energy, inclusive of the prospect and often the facts, of financial failure, just in order to secure some private and sly 'effect;' again, I'll not even say, some 'gain.'

Psychologists can put it down to human psychology. I don't. What I conclude is that human beings do NOT all think the same way and are not motivated by what they continually tell you they and me and you and we are all supposed to be thinking about as human beings and wanting.

People will tell you they want sex. People will tell you they want money. People will tell you they want a house with a paid mortgage. Some people will tell you they want a fast car or an expensive new saloon. Some people will tell you they want power or to lead the country or to help other people.

All nothing but cover stories...

These are all cover stories.

It is the most important thing you will ever learn or know about human beings at large and as this big monolithic social group. People speak lies.

Watch instead what they do...

You see, say you told someone right up front what I just said, namely that you believe all humans speak lies but act their truths - and then listen and watch their reactions. It would be an interesting experiment if you were prepared to be objective about the results of what you said to them.

In this blog I speak. Figuratively, this is me speaking here. And just for the sake of the exercise I am going to keep using words, but I'm going to ask you to suspend that bridge of disbelief and assume that what I tell you next, however, is an outside observer's report of my actions:

Now look, a couple of weeks ago I hinted at there being some obvious thing going on in the markets and that The Fed had made a grave miscalculation and a mistake. The way I acted, on my perceptions of things -  was that I shorted the gold price temporarily, as I saw first the platinum price sink what I construed as having been too far, and I also went a little long on platinum at that moment. And the two prices of the two related but different commodities, started to converge. 

This kind of thing is a fairly quick, and time-limited market position to have, and it doesn't constitute what we kinds of directional end-game thinkers would consider the way to conduct our business. It may have a short term positive profit entailed, but it isn't what I am thinking about as the reason that I play around with money and finance in the overall way that I do.

See, the following are a number of things I actually do and why I do anything at all:

1. I buy and use Shahtoosh shawls (an illegal woven cashmere-type of thing made from the endagered Chiku Tibetan antelope;

2. I definitely order and eat shark's fin soup - which is now broadly regarded as borderline illegal because of the over-fishing of shark in many places;

3. I have some real versions of what is mostly now the synthetic 'Ambrox' - which is made from ambergris if it is the real sort;

4. And I have a few broken virus tulip plants as well. Which is said to be illegal in a number of countries.

 

Nearly, a broken virus tulip, but not.

But it is the things I don't tell you about and can't tell you about that mark me out as someone 'different' from the crowd 'normalcy.'

Of course they are illegal things, in the minds of many people.

And I am so very skilled at what I can do...

I leave calling cards where I have been and no one gets them. Well you might get them... If you see them.

What I do is nearly illegal.

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.