DYSFUNCTIONAL FINANCE

When I looked back last night, and thought back over exactly how much experience I had gained, and how much practical close personal involvement I have had, in various financial asset developments over the years, I realised it gave me insights unavailable to most. People may imagine modern academic degrees will open their minds to a similar level of insight value, if I may put it that way – but it is simply not so. This idea that they can achieve similar practical results when applying what they have learned is a fantasy they have, encouraged by the propaganda of modern academia seeking a commercial existence.

Let's face it, the Paris Lottery was partly invented by Casanova and er, he didn't 'get made' in a Harvard, Yale, Oxbridge or Singapore University degree factory. (And, reference the pic., Stradivari was a woodworker in Cremona; an artisan, not an academic! And no modern academic has ever been able yet to outclass his work.)

Oh certainly, investment banks and financial institutions and funds management groups make money – so they say... Mostly, though, I believe they just copy pathfinders and take money from others, and lose it and/or simply waste it.

In today's context, to raise a very large sum of money in public markets that are both morally dysfunctional, as well as founded on a public mindset which is totally cynical, requires a unique solution. There IS NO textbook in any university anywhere in the world that contains a plainly set-out answer to the economic challenges of our times and which can be relayed to hundreds of thousands of fee-paying mercantile and grasping, middle-class professional, students.

I guess it is with some degree of personal vanity then, that I post that this week I concluded a contract with an Australian mining company over a $160 million rights issue – that I have managed to get fully subscribed – and that is planned to hit the market sometime between November and Dec/Jan 2012.

These things being subject to a lot of rules and laws about informed markets and so on, there is no more that I am able to say in order to detail it specifically. But one thing I can say is that too many claimed-to-be investment bankers have little or no real comprehension of why and what economic modelling works in today's market – and they basically never will have. They spout the names of theories all right, and they know some technical jargon and a few formulae, but do they understand the principles underlying of any of these; absolutely not!

Fortunately in Australia here, where I normally reside, the Reserve Bank of Australia has some of the finer academic and practical economist minds around. Professor Warwick McKibbin, who sits on the RBA, provided the exception to what I was earlier saying about academics and bankers, when he last week voiced the view that the carbon tax debate failed to demonstrate people's understanding that the time horizons of strategic importance of carbon pollution and energy and food consequences thereof – were the next twenty years, the next fifty years, the next seventy years. He is of course correct and what he says only serves to highlight that there will be a long ramp-up of mounting pressure on key markets – energy, food and food production and inputs, technology, and currencies, and that the needs of these markets will crack the force-field of self-interest and self-serving that government and entrenched interests have tried to surround capital with, and that has obstructed and impeded the flow of money everywhere except other than from the taxpayer directly to the obscene bonuses of privileged figures.

The current Greek banking bailout melodrama is morally appalling, and has no basis in economic or money reality and I am wondering when it is we might see Hill and Knowlton turn up with their story of an evil rampaging Greek pensioner, who refused to pay his taxes, and who ran into the offices of a poor banker in Piraeus, and tore out the fifteen humidicribs and spattered the walls with traces of WMD. In short the bankers of the present world, understand only politics and propaganda, and have no understanding of real business, nor have any ability to actually make money other than by deceiving the taxpayer. But they have a very great understanding of how to speciously present themselves as the monopoly holders of all economic and monetary and financial knowledge and authority. And that is just textbook of what all monopolies become; I'm not being perjorative or harbouring some negative animus against banks, I'm just stating the facts. Banks have become monopolies of authorised financial power, blocking out competitors and exploiting their unhealthy relationship with government to the point where no one requires them to fulfill or perform their original role – which was namely, to take risk, be skilled at it, and otherwise go broke when they failed. They don't know how to take risk any more – they presume 'risk' means the length of time till when the government bails them out and the extent that they will.

The business enterprise and the individual is not on the song sheet at all. Funny front companies and competitive bonuses for bank directors are all that is on the song sheet until the bailout stanza. That is the nature of far too much of what modern banking has become. And it is preventing real opportunity surfacing in economies.

There are great secrets contained in great wine. Here is a Tokaji. If any of Jesus' wine were left over in an amphora till today – god knows, there are rumours of Caligula's Fallernian existing in a Swiss vault... Anyway, if any of Jesus' wine were left today, likely it would be a Tokaji.

I will be drinking Tokaji later this year. Or a Burgundy. No, AND a Burgundy.

Cheers!

Calvin J. Bear

"To Where The Rainbow Ends."

TO WHERE THE RAINBOW ENDS

(Playing chess with Stanley Kubrick)

In a previous post I suggested that tax-dodging was a pursuit best worried about after one had crossed the difficult bridge of actually making taxable profit first. As one particular curmugeon friend and colleague often reminds me, the careless fashion in which the word 'profit' is swung about these days by banks, share brokers, company directors, and investors – detracts from its real and actual meaning, and rarity.

For a profit, is that amount which only comes after repayment of invested principal, cost of funding, unit production cost, contribution towards fixed capital written off – and you may want to even consider comparative competitive returns foregone, or 'opportunity cost.'

As to the occasion of the quote above, it is from Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut, and there are of course, too many words already written about the late Stanley Kubrick, to make much valuable new addition to common understanding of him, or of his work. And there are rather too many experts who know more than I about the movie meaning of this particular quote too.

Personally, I am a collector of books myself, some old, some rare. I used to attend dinner for awhile regularly at the Butcher's Shop (restaurant) out in the mock Venetian Square on the ground floor of the Michaelangelo Hotel in Sandton City South Africa, and ran into quite a few movie land identities, not the least of whom I suppose, was Robert de Niro, who lived in Sandton Towers in the same complex at the time. We never formally were introduced and likely as not, he will only recall me as the merry fellow (too much Thelema Estate red) surrounded by four or five (oh yes, I can and have outdone Charlie Sheen on many occasions!) rather good-looking blondes, brunettes and a redhead. I dare say he will recall one particular evening during which one of the very beautiful blondes crawled around under his table looking for, and eventually finding, a ring that had fallen from the hands of one of his own party at his nearby/next table. A lovely man, friendly and I must say, possessed of the most extraordinary good skin on his face. You can't really know this until and unless you have seen him really close up.

Anyway, back to the thing about which I wished to post some words originally – I purchased, although not from de Niro, a first edition hard copy that had once been in the private collection of Kubrick: Sax Rohmer's 'The Romance of Sorcery.'

Now I realise that everyone who is anyone will want to tell me that Eyes Wide Shut is taken from Arthur Schnitzler's 1926 novella 'Die Traumnovelle.' However, let me tell all you who will listen, that the earlier (1914) book by Rohmer, is what Kubrick was using to inform his treatment of the basic story. And not only so, but the book by Hollywood identity Louise Brooks 'Naked On My Goat ' played a huge role in underscoring the secret world faintly exposed in Kubrick's movie.

Nowhere in Schnitzler's book does the scene occur in which two model-types take the character played by Cruise, and offer to take him 'to where the rainbow ends.' Nowhere in that original book does the same scene detail a room filled with lights or a staircase leading up somewhere and glittering against a wall of a myriad shining tiny lights. This is all Kubrick's own complex subscript directing.

Kubrick was an intelligent, learned, and a well-read man. Versed in all the lore that goes into these kinds of tales. He knew that the word used by the Norse Bard Snorri Sturluson, 'Bifrost,' (we know it as 'the rainbow bridge') actually means 'a glittering momentary pathway...'

The roads both to heaven and to profit are glittering and momentary pathways.

I thought I'd just let you know that.

Oh, and was it not the great Julia Phillips, who had the first film treatment and was trying to sell the movie initially – and expose far far more? Before her mentor and hero Kubrick eventually made it?

Alas, Julia is dead. And thus no longer with us and able to reveal the all that was there to be revealed.

But I am here. Certainly I am short about fifty million to produce any kind of decent attempt at a theoretical Phillips version, but I could make a good go of it for little to nothing right here!! As a kind of blogspot storyboard ouvré.

The pool room scene that ended the movie, that Sydney Pollack completed for Kubrick, was just plain stupid really, not that that is meant to reflect badly on Pollack – he simply did not have the bits that Stanley Kubrick carried with him in his head and presumeably, also with him to his grave.

Frankly I should add I like Pollack from what I have heard of him, and I generally like his work in any case, so this is not meant to be a shot at him at all; he could not possibly have known what Kubrick was holding in his head if Kubrick hadn't wanted to tell him explicitly about it and I don't think he did do.

What makes me think there really was a separate and different ending in Kubrick's mind? Well the movie is clearly two stories; one which faithfully follows the storyline contained in Schnitzler's book (and which ends with the Cruise/Kidman and daughter scene, although absent the 'let's fuck' line!), and the other which is a modernized Goethe/Rohmer/Brooks sorcery-and-witch clan/coven subtext (which is not in Schnitzler's book) and with European semiotics and what should be the inevitable (and missing) conclusion, namely, that of a revelation as to precisely who Kubrick thinks, actually is the Otherworldly witch king and queen in the waking world of today.

I realize I am being somewhat provocative here... Well one should say there is of course, no particular 'king' and/or 'queen,' but there are ducal identities, I suppose... as it were. But then to follow this argument now, it is crucial for astute people to restrain themselves from this pop culture tendency of blindly confusing the figure of 'Satan' with things to do with Luciferian cults, and to next also throw in tropes of Witchery into the mix along the way. Kubrick is far from some simple ignorant pop culture child who does this type of illiterate mish-mash thing. He was fully aware of the signs and symbols and what specifically they related to. These things all came along in high literary culture long long before 60's paperbacks' sensationalisms dealing with vaguely possible CIA socio-psychological experiments.

It is so really very obvious what Kubrick intended to do at the end of the movie and I am surprised no one has pointed it out yet. And let's leave behind us all this Rothschild nonsense too, and Alex Jones/David Icke slander/gossip mongering far behind us; it is not helpful nor correct at all in terms of what the movie is setting out to say. If Kubrick wanted to say the movie is about politics or money, he would have. And he would have done so very directly.

The movie is about beauty, glamour and all that glitters and is bright. And dark too. It is about power and who has it. The movie is about DEATH!

There is too much more that could be said about the movie itself, isn't there? There is the fundamental effect of Kubrick's film-glamourising of the essentially libertine philosophy, and donating to it organisation – which it simply doesn't have in reality. And never has had. Well, not to the extent that is imagined in this movie.

And the irony of that part of it is that if it ever were actually institutionally organised as part of a social culture, then Nazi Germany surely must have been that real moment in history when it was - albeit in a very stilted way! And yet, even then, actual Nazism had a strict, prudish, almost Gothic-Christian surface morality, and church-Christian ideas about spousal fidelity and anti-homosexuality and so on. Unlike the kinky modern myths of under-the-surface Nazism, and the genuine libertine quantity inside the movie Eyes Wide Shut itself. It is crucial to the deepest understanding of Kubrick's likely intent here, to observe that Arthur Schnitzler was himself in fact the definitive prototypical early-Freudian, Austrian school, sex psychology thinker and writer. And that he was probably the artist most defined as 'degenerate' by Hitler himself; and using the strongest anti-semitic terms to do it. Today Schnitzler is widely historically noted as having been amongst the artists and writers most racially, that is anti-semetically, vilified by the Nazis, along with Egon Schiele – who had of course been already deceased by the time of the Nazi's zenith.

So it is impossible to suppose that Kubrick intended anything along the lines of the contemporary rather too widespread and largely underclass animus against a fictitious but often fervidly imagined, Jewish-implicated, super-wealthy elite – consisting of or including typically 'the Rothschilds,' for instance! (Which is the family name most often bandied about in this type of context). Equally, it is utterly impossible to propose, in the alternative, that he was pointing to the extreme opposite – that of an ultra-modern secretive Nazi Illuminati elite. There are absolutely no clues in the movie that he has taken either of these directions at all. And yet there is so much vivid commentary about implying one or the other of these two diametrically opposed, and logically impossible, viewpoints, is what Kubrick is propounding throughout the movie.

...But there are a lot of clues, about The Rainbow Bridge between Earth and Heaven, between dimly-aware mortal man and the numinous divine. And like the real thing itself, to grasp an understanding of it is a glittering momentary pathway opening up in your mind. It's fleeting but memorable. Kubrick's last movie was certainly not completed properly. The clues are all there to where he was heading. They are real clues and they are big clues. But he never got there. I can show you where the rainbow bridge is. I can tell you what it is. I can show you its power. But nobody responds here to these blog-posts...! Alas.

Perhaps though someday someone will.

Until that day then,

...to all a merry goodnight. At least for now anyway. (Quote, Zeigler in Eyes Wide Shut: "If you knew Bill, you might not be able to sleep so good at night.")

Calvin J. Bear

OMSF

ps. And don't forget, this blog is brought to you by the commercial website http://mind-decadence.webs.com/

Complex Quorum Sensing And Ultra-Exciting Psycho-Biological Entrainment

Fireflies do it. If you go by the literature which predominates the subject area on the internet, apparently mostly just germs and bacteria do it...

I promised in an earlier post that I would present some ideas and thoughts from a porn star – once I had led the way with the ideas of an investment banker first!

...Well there are some things that perhaps it is not so good for everyone to know about. Like how to construct a nuclear bomb for example, or how to re-create the conditions for the Black Plague.

I guess I'd better background this with a few sentences on what a lot of psychologists say about males and females when it comes to their respective subconscious attitudes to sex: females who have a low estimation of their own beauty and looks tend towards promiscuity, and males seem genetically statistically designed to breed for ugliness in the male.

And of course the problem with all of that is that successful porn stars are not particularly ugly on the whole, and a lot of successful super wealthy male entrepreneurs are in fact also very good-looking.

My take is that at the very peak of the human race, individuals can step over typical social and psychological barriers and they do it by way of accurate and path-finding knowledge and science. Things that are applicable to virtually the entire rest of the population, are almost never applicable to those at the peak. Do I admit to knowing porn stars personally? Maybe... Well, let me put it this way, I have encountered some people in the industry and they are all highly highly intelligent. And I have certainly had interactions with big name mainstream movie celebrities and they are all utterly stupid by comparison.

Maybe it is not so good for the broad public to know that highly sexual, sex-charged, and extraordinarily good-looking people – are not exploited, and nor are they twisted, or without well-balanced self-esteem or brainpower.

Maybe... ...it's better for people not to know exactly how advanced in intellect and ability some others really are.

The science of human sexual art goes like this: quorum sensing is a faculty available to the human brain, but is considerably more complex than what a bacterium might accomplish. Two things are necessary for biological quorum sensing. Firstly, a means of assessing the number of other components the agent interacts with and; Secondly, a standard response once a threshold number of components is detected.

This pop-fashion concept that is contained in books like The Secret miss a really gigantic detail – namely, that the human being is vastly more intricate and mechanically/chemically complicated than some unexplained simple mechanism of wish-fulfillment and dreamology is going to have the capacity to control, much less direct or push around.

To cut to the chase here, Dr. Phil's moralizing is itself a direct result of the mass psychopathology (brain sickness and suffering) caused by the sociological mass-trauma of the Black Death (plague) of the 14^th Century, and which led to the subsequent institutionalizing of either a) atheism and/or god-hatred, or b) a simplistic, servile, self-denying and unquestioning submission to divine authority in all and any form. And we have inherited all this down to today.

Half the entire population of Europe was completely wiped out in the Black Plague. Basically because people did not understand the ecological imbalances of plague rats and y.p. bacteria-infected rat fleas, and the bites that transmitted the lethal germs. At the time we did not understand the vectors and mechanisms.

Today, we mostly do not understand what threshold values constitute sex quorum points on the sex quorum matrix that individuals have within themselves, and that allow them or make them, engage in sex interactions with other individuals.

Designers, technicians and fashion creators constantly develop ideas around themes of sex signalling, colour meaning, body morphology and so on – but they are as far away from getting any closer to a genuine understanding, as the Medieval alchemists were for instance, to perceiving germs and germ vectors, rather than lack of religious mortification and God's displeasure, as the true causes of the Plague.

And I am not espousing atheistic ideas here – why should God experience displeasure; his day is like a thousand years, they say. I take this to mean that the slow development and regular mistakes of the human race are not particularly a concern to an eternal God.

In the same way, if there ever were scientific mechanisms discovered that would permit The Secret to function successfully, or at all, it might be far better off for all that the human race not have these discoveries handed out in a profligate way as most scientific discoveries generally have been. I don't personally think it's such a good idea to miraculously empower Dr. Phil to 'have' a large range of extremely good-looking and intelligent sexual partners, all possessing an accord of goodwill and equanimity and satisfaction amongst themselves – do you?

The whole picture is what is important, not just the gimmick factor of one element, even though this always appears in today's commercial world to be the selling point.* And the whole picture is a very vast one. There are billions of people on the planet today. A porn star's actual physical interactions with let's say one hundred different sex partners, is a statistically non-significant number. It is far less than the number of children who get autism from vaccinations – and that is regarded as so low a number as to be 'statistically insignificant...' D'you get my point? This is bad science. In fact it is not science at all. The exact and precise mechanisms ought to be known, then a positive (or negative) statement and conclusion may be made. Otherwise we are just making observations that do not yet permit conclusions to be made.

The complexity of human desire at the thresholds required for real and total satisfaction, consists of more items than just panties that glow in the dark because of the simple, expedient, obvious sign, of body heat.

Do we have computerised algorithms that can assess – and incredibly sensitive instruments that can detect – to a finite degree exactly what accord of sex and sexuality a potential partner has in deep detail with you, say? Oh yes we indeed do! Like a sun flare of streaming ions exciting oxygen and nitrogen molecules in the upper atmosphere above the North Pole to create the Northern Lights, we have that stuff. We have all that stuff today.

*(Hajime Mori of the Kyoto Institute of Technology, engineered a bacilovirus that fused the gene coding for one of the chains of the silkworm fibroin gene, to the gene encoding green fluorescent protein.)

Best Wishes,

OMSF (and friend!)

Tamil Cooks

“You cannot change their mind even if you expose them to authentic information.” Yuri Bezmenov, a KGB officer who defected to the West in 1970 – speaking in an interview with Ed Griffin in 1983. He wasn't talking about Tamil cooks!

Yuri Bezmenov's main message was that much of US society had been psychologically subverted by systematic and deliberate propaganda techniques for over twenty years and was now virtually capable of only Pavlovian patterns of behaviour designed to produce the conditions from which it would easily be possible to critically destabilize the nation. He claimed half-baked, drug-affected, or cycnical and demoralized people with a type of 'programmed education' had risen to all the control structures and social and bureaucratic positions of power, and that there was no longer any means by which the country could any more access its own common sense or rational thought or logic or real human social awareness.

Some of Bezmenov's writing (and recorded public speaking) refers to the years he spent as a KGB agent interfering with the social, economic and political panorama of India. I personally think that a worldwide common impression now of 'Indian people' as avaricious, corruptible, treacherous, middle-class social and mercantile graspers - bespeaks for the utter, comprehensive, success of the KGB's plan for recruiting and grooming and financially-supporting anyone who showed those traits so that they would more let's say 'competitively' rise to positions of power in every walk of life in India.

Surely, Gandhi ought to have been what we most readily associate with the face of the ordinary Indian personality and character traits... Or at least, powerfully alongside any vision of the unworthy type of Indian individual?

Oh dear. I think Bezmenov could have been rather more correct than makes me feel comfortable.

Some of my family being high up in Shell Far East post-World War II, I spent some time growing up in places like Malaysia (or Malaya, in those days) and it was there around the age of ten that I met the gentleman in this picture. I recall he let me feel around on the area of his head (to prove it) where he had a metal plate – the result of battle injury –, demanding little so-and-so that I of course was! And for which generosity I let him call the orders out for when I had my small 'toy' cannon arrayed, and ready to fire. I recall he was quite thrilled that I had one tiny little piece that actually fired wadding out with the exploding of a small cordite charge. I remind you that by 'cannon' I do mean plural; that is, several cannon. This is the English language, you see. Odd thing, isn't it.

Lt. General Harbakhsh Singh (late). An amazing man.

When I am bored with the banality of modern life, I cook a curry. And I am very good at cooking curries as I grew up with Tamil house staff – who later, by the way, went on to Washington with the American Ambassador when my father and mother decided to retire to a quieter Australian life, away from the embassy party circuit and the twenty-one course Chinese dinners a million light years before the BRIC glamour... And now you know why I smile in my photographs; nothing ever changes. I've seen it all before and I know how it all ends. How it always ends.

Ten was a true vintage year for me – I met J.Paul Getty on the steps of Raffles Singapore that year too. You can't Obama or Bill Gates me none. They are nothing people in a nothing age compared to what has gone before. And they don't have Tamil cooks. A big point. Programmed Pavlovian Australians don't want Tamil boat people, apparently. Why, Malaysians don't even want Tamil cooks now! You have billions (or you owe billions) but you don't have a Tamil cook??! Ridiculous.

All the best,

OMSF.

The Money Room

Bearer Depository Receipts are the big league of finance. Always have been... Don't get confused by the fashionable buzz-words like 'Hedge Fund,' or 'Chinese Market,' or 'Sovereign Wealth Fund.' The amount of 'billionaires' who fall out of media skies and are made, or even self-made, apparently, out of thin air, are simply part of this fantasy world which the popular media tries to make us all live in. ...A lot of it, is sheer promotional marketing to sell a brand.

I have a Money Room. That is, I have companies I own that do.

We issue bearer certificates on vault deposits. And these bearer certificates have active secondary markets here and there around the world.

Bearer Depository Receipts and their secondary trade is generally a private treaty affair between large cash-rich experienced numeraires whose business networks have a global reach and have the requirement to move liquidity or goods from time to time to different locations – and usually for a business purpose, not just for financial speculation. They are not, strictly speaking, public market financial instruments at all; they are private contracts between companies and their fiscal agencies.

I will show you my Money Room (maybe...) and describe a few deals and trades and keep a regular segment here logging the value of our bearer certificates.

TODAY'S VAULT POSITION (per unit bloc):

as at 6 p.m. (UCT) on 12.5.2011...,

Per each One (1) bearer certificate, nominally USD2,000.00 ;

being,

• silver bullion bar 20 ounces @US34.78; $695.60
• listed shares with placement agreement 1 year at 25%
  call discount to lowest average market price last three months. $1,000.00
• attached 25% call  $ -

Total: $1,695.60

Now the benefit of all this if you can't immediately see it, is that effectively it is an entry price positional trade for PHYSICAL SILVER, with a 25% safety valve; if the silver price drops up to 25 per cent on your entry price, you make the call on the share discount, and your second line is topped up with the 25 per cent you lost on the silver entry price. You liquidate both lines and you have lost zero dollars. And then you can re-enter at the new price point. In our companies, we spend most of our time talking to listed companies who want some cash invested now and are prepared to risk the 25% in shares – and then we write unique private contracts and agreements with them and this becomes our second line risk stock. We check that the listed companies have adequate cash resources and we try to satisfy ourselves they will stay around and have adequate market liquidity.

We charge 2.5% combined In and Out and can talk about vault arrangements. We do many variations in the basic design and have done one treaty recently in which the other side requested they vault their own metals and we agreed with that so long as they forwarded us 20% of the metal side. (Therefore they maintained 80% in their own vaults and we stored 20%).

Let's keep a track in this blog of what happens... It will come up regularly as 'The Money Room.'

...And don't forget, this post - as always - is brought to you by the commercial website http://mind-decadence.webs.com/  So please take a look there too if you can.

Yours Truly,

OMSF.