The Form, The Substance

I have a lot of time for practical scientists and applied scientists. I think that Luca Turin is one of the very finest minds of the last few years. He has peers in his chosen field, and some of them are women, and you may be very surprised to learn what things these people discovered, invented, and often also developed into commercial success-stories and placed into common use in all of our daily lives.

Industrial chemist Luca Turin

You know, people talk 'billionaire' a lot in places like Forbes and on Bloomberg television, but seldom do they ever these days expose the true billionaire of practical and applied science that is not directly linked to just electronics and computing. Who knows, for instance about the certain lady who invented the lemon scent we all assume (incorrectly) is actually from some kind of extract or synthesis of real lemons and that we find in basically all of the household bleach, washing detergent, room fragrance, and even lemonade drinks and packet food products? She gets a royalty from every single product sold that uses her patented chemical and believe me, she is really a billionaire and now owns and lives on an island in the Mediterranean that has a fairly meaningfully-sized industrial chemical research laboratory and research facility on it. She is not listed on any so-called 'list of billionaires' or 'richest people,' but she certainly is that.

Luca Turin has been reported in leading journals as having recently made several new (he has made some previously!) breakthroughs to do with a more complete understanding of the neuro-physiology and also neuro-chemistry of how we sense things with our nose and tongue.

Turin is, apart from being a very clear thinker, an excellent writer and speaker and presenter of complex ideas, but behind him stand some Russian research scientists that he works with, as well as some of those women scientists of whom I spoke about earlier. To cut a long story short, the Russians visually are a rather dishevelled looking lot and Turin is as stylish as the city whose name he shares.

The Pope of global wine-tasting,
Robert Parker

Far be it from me to say that someone of the public stature of Robert Parker is a charlatan, but ordinary common sense ought to suggest to one's mind that nobody can 'smell roasting violet petals' from out of the chemistry of a red wine, for one thing simply because there is no odoriferant molecule developed by the wine that will create that smell compound! Either people are halucinating, or there is something indeed very chemically mysterious about red wine! But for someone like Parker to continuously say that wines have this or that bizarre non-wine scent or essence or flavour – when no such thing is scientifically possible – is grounds for me to look sideways at him, and everyone like him. Okay, call me an atheist of wine tasting and lump me in the arrogant, egocentric, and opinionated wonderland of people like Richard Dawkins when it comes to smashing people's cherished sillinesses that they insist on clinging onto, even in the face of facts that utterly disprove what they are saying. Oh I know it's oh so desireable to be able to opine intelligently about what bouquet the famous and expensive red wine you bought is giving off, but brothers, it just aint so!

No no no. Something else entirely is going on. Oh yes yes, you are sensing something – but it's not what you think it is.

Here's the rub: if you do what Luca Turin says, or what one of his Russian researchers says, about how you should go about tasting wine – suddenly, what you will experience is enhanced by a factor you would not have dreamed of beforehand. But if you do what Parker tells you, you will go away (albeit possibly not telling anyone else so) that alas, if the Emperor had no clothes you dared not suggest it be so, so esteemed is Parker and his ilk.

But they are wrong. Misguided, at best and entirely wrong anyway.

That a multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around the mythology of wine-tasting, is positive proof of the total lunatic behaviour of Mankind whenever its rational good sense is able to be distracted by brain chemistry rewards to do with material sensations.

Form and substance are of course not always simple or straightforward antitheses.

Out Front of the Royal Horseguards Hotel!
Horse and guardsman look great,
but it's an hotel for gawdsake.

Look at this picture. The horse and the guardsman look fantastic. But where is the substance? Is the building behind them just a modern era hotel? And if that building once housed both MI5 and MI6, do the current era vestigial and corporate memory custodians have secret private pretensions they whisper to themselves about, behind cupped hands over sly mouths...

You may as well say The Dark Ages of Inquisition and public damnation and political and financial rapine are the spirits that rule the air.

Luca Turin is a rarity; he both looks stylish and is someone of great intellectual substance too.

There are a lot of people today and a lot of groups and let's say 'entities' both corporate and governmental, that can wear the billion-dollar marketing and hype label. A lot of things have their wires crossed in the world today. There are billion-dollar machineries of government and private interests crossing over each other's traces and getting themselves and a lot of other people twisted up in the entangling lines.

The big fish are still in the seas, though. I would fish away from the big boats, and cast your lines far away from theirs... There are too many problems where the bigwigs are; too many problems among themselves, too many blow-in pretenders who actually come close to being bigwigs anyway because of the way modern finance behaves, too many bigwigs who are only big any longer in outward form with little or no substance beneath. And far too many cops and ex-cops who work for private money but who still have access and sway with government agencies despite protestation by politicians that it isn't so. It is so. Half the world's current armed conflicts are to do with programs that governments have lost control of. And you can't trust that lawyers and judges will resolve it all; things get 'stopped' well before revelations can get before an independent authority.

 

Stay well away. It is bound to get nasty now. I would say. Go fishing maybe. In some distant and despised stream.  

 

Sad Histories of Chinese Gold Dealers

I'm going to give you a kind of hypothetical situation of the past, and ask you to think about it and bear it in mind over coming months, and if, perchance anything untoward occurs somewhere on the world stage, then you may be prepared for the meaning of it and not jump at shadows as most others likely will.

Hitler's ring is currently up for auction

Let's say for example it is a war circumstance – say, the Second World War - countries are at war and one of them gets invaded but the soldiers of the invading side do not speak the language of those they have just invaded. In spite of what the current era and much-publicised NSA lets 'be known,' it is not really possible to, by some computer process , 'understand' every single nuance of a region's idiom, and even today, this scenario still applies in its general meaning.

Now – in the hypothetical past event - the invading army takes hold of mainly let's say, ethnic Chinese, and interrogates them to 'gain information...' What do you suppose would be the point of that d'you think? Let's say the place in question is not categorically a Chinese country, but there are ethnic Chinese people there – as there are indeed virtually all over the world then and now. On the other hand, let's say that the invading army interrogates only Chinese gold dealers... Would you think they were after general directions, you know, the meanings of the names of street signs, that kind of thing – or would you say they were after gold, especially any gold secretly held or that had been hidden away somewhere by the gold dealers?

Now Wikipedia is a great resource but it is totally prey to the propaganda machinery that 'winners who re-write history' can manipulate into it.

And so if you ever happen to read somewhere, let's say, on Wikipedia, that someone was an interpretor for an invading army, then perhaps you might want to consider if in any circumstance where that person was interpreting answers given by someone under torture, whether that interpretor may not have perhaps once or twice, failed to deliver the most utterly forthright interpretation of what was being said, prior to the victim having chopsticks ploughed through their ears and into their brains, for example.

Chinese gold shop

Well I apologize that I've had to say that so bluntly.

But, you might want to ask yourself why, if you ever travelled to a certain place somewhere around the world, there are not any major Chinese gold dealers there but mainly only Muslim ones, and where strangely perhaps, the place itself is meant to be largely ethnic Chinese? Now I don't mean simply jewellery shops; I mean actual major dealerships like the gold soukh-style of place... Which there are many of around Asia and India and naturally Arabia too of course.

Oh yes, there are a few contradictions to the 'tales' and 'stories' of personal histories spread about by quite a few notables in their 'authorised' biographies and memoirs; contradictions whose logical flaws have never apparently daunted the fawning that other power-inspired politicians typically, have done over these characters.

Of course they say that history is always written by the victors. I don't subscribe to that idea though.

Bad histories are written by erstwhile 'victors' and victory is itself a revolutionary science. The surfaces of things change. Bananas, yellow on the outside whilst fresh from the tree, turn black when they are yet even just a short time dead.

The Best Plans

I like to take the endeavour of making money, as one of the best examples of the test of applying a deeper knowledge to the world of exterior things. Money functioning in an economy is two things tied together with second-line significations and not just one simple thing: it is what people think, what they believe, plus the token system of exchange itself. From moment to moment, people form this view about whether a particular plan or other is the leading one on the table, and then, whether they consciously want to or not, the whole of their being works away at having that best plan succeed. This is not maths, and it is not science, but it is a type of geometry; people possess a certain invisible shape that always inclines them towards a certain direction.

A velvet Ferrari? Novel...

No matter how many times people want to have it another way – and those who do always argue from a personal interest not an objective one – you cannot credentialize the making of money. I encountered yesterday a friend of mine who told me that he was having difficulties with his bankers and accountants over a decision to expand his business to the tune of around seven million dollars. I asked what the difficulty was and he casually prepared the answer with the statement: 'well, banks cannot lend on faith.'

And I said quickly – 'well actually banks cannot lend period.'

Not anymore, anyway. Not with the Money Velocity as low as it is and the official benchmark rates as low as they have been contrived to go.

I asked him who told him he could not raise equity if lending was a problem, and he said his accountant. And I then asked why he believed him... Answer: 'because he's my accountant.'

'I suppose he invoices you for this remarkable insight?' I cheekily commented.

Now this client has an exceptional cashflow and a positive one. The best plan on the table would merely have been to point him in the direction of the deepest discount government bonds and say there's your expansion capital base – the only one that exists anywhere that is real, absent of the hidden costs from banks and accountants. Now this plan has to compete also with insane or fantastic ideas too, or the subtle power of marketing semiotics, or food allergies, or all kinds of other forces acting on emotions and the brain. The subtle force of these things too are real but they are not science. They are a form of geometry.

Brown food colour E130 goes into some expensive whiskies too and people still think they are buying decent Scotch, and I have even seen them comment on the beautiful amber hue when they swish it around the special whisky tasting glass they bought because they have absorbed some propaganda.

Dalmore-Lutwyche shoes - no synthetic colouring
Anywhere! 

People make decisions often moved by very unscientific causes. You can train a person's taste or educate it so that they are able to make discerning choices. This is the aristocracy of the learned senses. But it is a rare thing to find in a human being these days.

Yet one is far more advantaged to spend the whole of one's life educating the mean senses – and this can be done without resort to exhorbitant amounts of money – rather than spend it chasing money for its own sake alone.

Money cannot get you into heaven. And men and mice are mortal and their best laid schemes et cetera...

But schooled and learned senses can tear down the veil between heaven and the mortal plane. The secret of money is that it never is, about money.

Imogen Heap

Too many of the very undeserving get too much of the world stage, don't they?

Winston Churchill didn't say that – I just did.

'Calm down everyone'

I mean we could fight them on the beaches and all this but we wouldn't win. They'd completely overrun us.

Fortunately they don't know what we know. They don't know the secret code words; not even the NSA knows about Orlando...



The Amazing 'Immi' - Imogen Heap

Here's my message for the moments that will soon quickly rush by us all now, now that the proof of all that is everything has once again been established for the six thirty news' acid scrutiny of truth:

Calm down, and listen to the music.



Here's a pic of the incomparable Imogen Heap. She killed it on a Dave Letterman Show a couple of years ago doing a live performance of her work 'First Train Home.' I think this live version was probably her best one that you can see on YouTube at the present time although her party version video ain't bad either.

Check it out. Listen to the music.

Best,
 

Calvin J. Bear

Mount Hermon

I'm not sure if it's a kind of mischievousness inside of some people with a lot of knowledge of mythology and basically, I suppose, pseudo-religious folk tales, but, it's at times like these – where we all stand on the edge of another (sigh) round of 'shock and awe,' albeit this time 'limited' or 'narrowly-defined' (whatever that is going to mean) – that you get various rounds of esoteric whisperings about 'the true nature of things.'

Occasionally, it's a lot of fun to wander around inside of YouTube, watching the frothing prophets specialising in the End of The World stuff (which muslims call 'ilmu akir zaman') deliver their sermons on the signs and symbols that portend of the final battle.

You will find prophets of every brand: Jewish, anti-Jewish, Islamic, modern Christian, everything, really, if you waste enough time looking.

The fabled Mount Hermon

At least I guess, it's worth mentioning that the border of Syria and Israel is marked by the beautiful, and religiously significant, Mount Hermon, the spot upon which, it is said, that Grigori descended to have sexual relations with the daughters of men – whom they found 'beautiful.' This worries me, actually, because rather than indicating something wicked within the mindset of the Grigori, it tends to indicate that their idea of physical attractivity must have been like our own (although we have no indication that any among them were gay – and this should please the Russians...) and thus it tends to indicate that the non-human Grigori were themselves, not dissimilar to us. Yet the standard opinion appears to be that they were 'traditionally' angelic (you know, like in ikon paintings), of incalculably large actual metaphysical size and more or less of ineffable shape (five thousand wings ten miles long going in every which way et cetera, and endowed with hundreds of eyes looking in all directions), very advanced in knowledge and power, and whose mismatched genetic offspring were ugly, gigantic, voracious in appetite and violent. According to the beliefs, somehow these descending beings went against the intention of god by finding themselves attracted, to the attractive; as we would know the meaning of the word, ourselves. This strikes me as rather odd, the spin that has been cast onto the ancient myth, even by the writers of the various mainstream scriptures themselves. Frankly I discount these versions we are most generally presented with today, as being accurate – or even vaguely accurate -, accounts of some ancient event or incident that might have happened in the distant past in the vicinity of what has ever since been called Mount Hermon, or: the Mount of the Chieftains.

Today's 'ever-alert Watchers...'

Recently, among my muslim friends, I have once again heard the colourful story they have about ancient Gog and Magog rising up to cause tremendous death and destruction everywhere and even including trying to strike at the current (modern) band of angelic beings now above the earth, by the shooting of powerful arrows up into space. According to this tale, the modern angels send the arrow-heads back covered in some red dye giving the bad guys the impression that they had indeed injured the 'hosts of heaven...'

Much though I probably shouldn't say this, I did witness a year or so ago, one of the test firings of the Israeli Arrow 3 missile that goes into space and can knock out satellites and controlled space craft. Quite an amazing piece of technology, really. And of course, the Syrians might have the Russian-made Yakhont missile, and they certainly do have a few anti-Tomahawk missile Kashtan-M batteries. And so we shall soon see what all transpires, when a mini run-through in real life of the popular folk tales about final battles, takes place, covered by Fox and CNN.

Russian Yakhont missile
not a joke, by any means

Alawis belong to a most peculiar 'religion,' if it can be called that even. Bashar Al-Assad is a totally weird-looking fellow, to me. He has snake-ish eyes. I don't like him when I look at him. Frankly don't care what weapons he uses or has used. And when you hear him speak you can easily get the notion that he is a most self-involved, arrogant, mindlessly self-important, and utterly stupid person. And so there, you have my declaration of where I stand on this subject. But he is a very small snake compared to the bigger ones there are in the Arabian World. Let's see how long it takes to get rid of a small snake, because there are some big ones that will have to be dealt with sooner or later. Abdullah will soon enough go into his 'unmanifested form' as the Tamilian friends of my childhood would say. He is a huge snake, but there are others ready to grab his spot, and for the most part, the ones being supported by the West are, as usual, the same wrong ones 'we' supported like we supported Saddam, Al-Assad, and even bin Laden (or whatever his real name was). The right ones, in my view, have names like Kaled, or Talal, or Rashid somewhere in their names. (You don't know how many times I redact stuff from this blog... You can be assured there are a lot of names that I simply cannot mention.)