"So it has come to this." (Last words or something similar of just about everyone from Ned Kelly to Homer Simpson)
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3264325-housing-starts-unexpectedly-plunge-11_1-percent?ifp=0&app=1
Or note the item about real estate in China in the following - all Australian markets are especially vulnerable to downturns in our #1 trading partner although they and a more muted mortgage availability saved our own housing market in 2008 from the US experience of the 'jingle mail.'
http://seekingalpha.com/article/3268035-now-is-not-the-time-for-greed
It starts with unease, something has been too good to be true and it falls over. But there are millions of believers waiting anxiously in the wings; fretting that there would never be a pullback to let them in. It happens and their capital emerges to put a floor in the market and a new burst of momentum drives it to new heights. But sellers flush with paper profits have been rattled and re-emerge and a fresh new panic begins but is halted (whew!) at the previously defined floor that proved ironclad last time. More capital emerges from the last emboldened hold-outs and again it levitates but barely makes that first turning point. And by now there are no more savings or untapped creditworthiness out there. Again it turns and if it's the share market, governors rush in with legislative packages like the outlawing of shortselling to stem the losses in the near term even as it removes the last floor, which would be those same sellers ultimately covering their short sales. Central banks drop interest rates to institutions again but where can you go from zero? And from there on the poison gas of leverage finds it way into every crack and crevice and boardroom and bedroom on the marketing planet and the virtuous and profitable wall of worry gives way to the downward ladder of hope wherein the exit opportunity of each small respite is ignored in case it is the start of a new bull, and promptly regretted as a lost opportunity to get the hell out as it all grinds lower. Desperate bankers call in margin loans before they are themselves forced to the wall, home owners watch plunging valuations and it becomes obvious that their own equity has evaporated leaving only the mortgage which they were already paying with their credit card anyway.
They called it the 'jingle mail' in 2008 when distressed homeowners left their keys in the mailbox and drove away into the sunset; mattresses tied to the roof like the westward flight of the Okies in the dustbowl days or the Jap attack on Santa Barbara a couple decades later when they fled inland to the Mojave desert.
It having come to this, Chart Reading 100 shows a perfect 'head and shoulders' formation that is the signature of life and then death. Or it can be a slow upward churning within an ever narrowing bound that eats up all the supportive capital until the shoeshine boy gives Rockefeller the heads up, he gets cold feet and cashes out. It's a formation suspiciously like todays' S and P 500 share market index. Whichever, a drop below the trendline is the signature of doom; there is no more easily available personal savings out there and even if the Fed buys their own bonds and lends to JP Morgan at zero percent - no-one dares or wants to borrow it, or at least no-one with a credit rating. But life goes on for a while; Morgan's is a playground of Gen Y or Z in-house trading monkeys at their screens, as yet unblooded and busting for the bonuses they will gain for putting the bank's free money to work at 90 to 1 leverage; playing for pennies front-running retail share investors, churning out 'credit default swaps' or interest rate hedges that take for granted a future of seamless ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) from the Fed. They are backstopped by iron-clad warp-speed computer programs, the fact it is not their personal fortunes being gambled, and the only real known amongst unknowns; that the government will step in with a rescue plan if they inadvertently break the bank when everyone tries to get out the same exit in the same microsecond.
That's called a 'Black Swan' these days. Once it referred to a San Francisco earthquake or the Yellowstone volcano - the pending thirty thousand year on average global disaster that FBI-infiltrated- and- encouraged jihadist groups plot to trigger with Federally- supplied bundles of dynamite so they can be arrested with appropriate fanfare. The last swan can be blamed on the Swiss for reneging without notice on their commitment to peg to the Euro; without notice to all those leveraged hedge funds who had been bleeding them so mercilessly. So the hedgies didn't get bailed nor have time to find the bigger fool and can be forgiven for feeling betrayed. But that was chicken feed, the quadrillion nominal dollars of OTC derivative 'value' worldwide hasn't been closed out or in any way reduced; just re- estimated to a mere $750 trillion. So you don't need a really black swan; it just goes to show that with enough risk on the books anything with webbed feet can toddle out of the pondscum to shake the world.
Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and in the hour of our death. Amen.
The trouble began a long time ago with modern banking - speculative booms and busts have always been with us but it was only in the last century with fractional reserve banking that interest rates began to be set by governments rather than markets. Previously they had to make do with coin clipping and other confidence games and thereby exploit a time lag in market smarts. But now we have easy money; it's always a crowd pleaser and boosted GDP by twice the amount thrown onto the bonfireway back when but was kind of like drug addiction - it stopped being productive or pleasurable and became a necessity. The world was hooked and we need free money now just to keep our heads above the water, puddling around as we do in our oceans of debt. So with exponentially growing populations needing employment to pay for exponentially growing consumption while money supply and velocity and credit facilities have to grow similarly; eventually consumer and national debt; bloated inventories and productive capacity can be pushed no further and there has to be a breather. Normally this is recession and bankruptcies but that is politically intolerable and so we have to dance with the protracted death of money. Fed Chairman Bernanke famously promised to throw bundles of it from helicopters if necessary. But that doesn't mean the lucky finders can use it to buy anything.
Hard money theorists have a smug answer that gold and free markets will solve the problem of inflation and the boom/bust cycle. Maybe it did once outside of the Spanish anomaly when they plundered the new Americas and forged their own social ruination in the process. Maybe it could do now with a limited human population in an infinite world of resources but even gold has hit the wall - we are now mining half a gram per tonne of the stuff where once mines needed grades 20 times better than that. And as before, its scarcity is a function of depleting mines and rising mining costs For those low grades costs and profitability is increasingly being defined by the rising cost of energy. There has to be a better safe harbour for our diminishing fortunes.
Next to come on the Joe Hockey series: "Safe as Houses."
Thursday, June 18, 2015
Saturday, June 13, 2015
Buy! Buy! Buy! The Joe Hockey Real Estate Primer Part One
Normally you think of shills and touts as those shifty, hard- living sociopaths in the movies; drinking their endless cups of coffee in some sleazy boiler room, shouting into phones; living their hard, hedonistic amphetamine-fueled, licentious lives. And on the other end of the line you and I; decent and honest joes with no more than the usual streak of larceny in our hearts. It is usually dormant except when you are surprised in your home or workplace with a great script and you don't get a chance to get a word or thought in edgewise and it rises up; the brain is put on hold and you are only a schmuck who is going to get lumbered with a time-share in Oklahoma; a ridiculous piece of mining moose pasture or an IPO of some revolutionary piece of crap like Twitter or pets.com.
Who were going to make billions selling dog food and cat scratchers on line, and you could get in right at the bottom! And after you have been taken down once or twice you come to understand that these people rank well below pimps, who will at least see you get your money's worth.
Maybe you even heard those three little words from familiar, eminently- respectable and besuited characters on TV in your home -or in a home belonging to some other schmuck who is working two jobs to make it his one day and who DIDN'T get in at the bottom and your rent isn't a patch on his mortgage.
From the treasurer Joe Hockey: "Real Estate is not a bubble!"
"It's supply and demand; It's Economics 100! Get out and build. build, build. Interest rates are at record lows! There's never been a better time to buy! Get a good job and buy a good home!
The last is especially poignant as he not only has a good job, his special parliamentary living-away-from -home allowance is going as rent to his wife in HER home where he stays when he is in Canberra, and no doubt that goes a long way to paying the mortgage, and perhaps that means there is a 2nd capital gains tax- free residence for the Hockeys, with each having a different 'principle residence.' And some of us remember how Joe's Liberal predecessor Peter Costello taunted Senator Nick Sherry for claiming his allowance when he stayed with his mother in Opossum Bay back in Tasmania.
"What does mum say when Nick walks in the door? Oh, Possum!"
And Sherry, even though he is/was a politician had some residue of conscience and shame and had the human decency to go and cut his wrists. Joe just shrugs it off, all these guys do it or some permutation - it's allowed by the fully independent Remuneration Tribunal and not covered by the criminal code so its not his problem. But is the tribunal really independent, like say Gillian Triggs, the Human Rights Commissioner who has been mercilessly hounded by cabinet heavyweights for her own independent moral stand on conditions for asylum seekers in our own little Guantanamo. I wouldn't even ask why a prison corporation can be paid more to brutalize people behind barb wire than I would need to make a profitable business out of it by giving someone a house of their own, living allowance, car and a college education. Maybe this has implications for future conflicts; if we could have corporatized the Japanese Imperial Army, they would have met their Waterloo years earlier, broken and bankrupted at Changi and the 'co-prosperity sphere' laughed right off the world stage.
But back to housing prices and bubbles. Firstly it is self-evident that since real estate prices are at record highs there have been better times to have bought, ANY other time would have been better. I have seen a few bubbles over my lifetime and have done very well by doing precisely the opposite of the tactics touted by our esteemed treasurer. It's Economics 200! You buy low and sell high! And when mortgage rates are at their highest that's when houses are cheapest! But you have to have some capital because nobody wants to lend! So maybe you rented for a while in the boom and saved while the other schmuck paid out the vast difference between the capital value and enterprise value of the house. So you have money when the time comes and its harder to borrow BUT you don't need a big mortgage and no matter what happens you aren't going to lose your butt! And it's stress-free after you have completed the contract it feels comfortable and you don't need to work two jobs! And with "animal spirits" at their lowest ebb you don't expect to make a killing but you probably will! And you can easily hedge against falling rates in the face of your fixed rate mortgage by insisting on a clause by which you can pay more off at any time without a penalty. If it starts looking too uncompetitive just pay it out or refinance with someone else!
Even Economics 100 dopes know that markets tend to revert to a mean so if interest rates are at record lows they will probably go higher. Even if inflation draws a line under the book value it might still see you s****ed. So let's go from Economics 200 to some really basic accountancy to glaze over your eyes and tickle your funnybone when you look at the real, enterprise value of a house as a business venture which is a wake-up call if you have been counting capital appreciation chickens on your fingers. Strings of words with capitals denote a popular acronym.
Generally Accepted Accounting Practice defines earnings as Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization, all of which have to be paid off from the rent except for the 'negative gearing' tax loophole for investors by which they can apply the generally negative earnings figure after expenses to their other income, like those his and hers night cleaning jobs where you roam the CBD office buildings with your backpack vacuum cleaner while the kids are asleep. You only get to use negative gearing if it ISN"T your actual primary residence and you sacrifice the tax free capital gain status. But that's no problem, there is unlikely to be anything to worry about when it's all added up at the end. Save your dockets.
Firstly interest on your mortgage: there is a set-up fee after which you have to pay say 4% every year on an average $300 thousand dollar housing loan which is $12000 per year after-tax money for the non-investor which is eating up your ultimate capital gain. And you still have to pay off the whole 300 thousand dollars of the loan on top of that over the period of the mortgage or when you sell the thing. That's the amortization and they generally structure it so you pay the same money every month from start to finish. There are tables you can access. And there are council rates, land taxes, stamp duties in the 'taxes' bracket and depreciation too which means houses and fixtures have a lifetime just like human beings; the house is growing old and frail and slowly falling down around your ears (deep-sixing capital gain) and if you don't do something expensive about it on a regular basis, renters will dodge their responsibilities and it will eventually be condemned as 'unfit for human habitation' and serve only as shelter for itinerants and drug addicts while waiting to be demolished despite your protests.
In the lead-up to the 2000 Olympics I did like a lot of Tasmanian tradies and after a marital tiff loaded my tools in a van and drove up to Sydney. On arrival it took about 4 hours to get work, firstly doing fit-out out above Grace Brothers at Centrepoint for Fairbrother and when that was finished I was everywhere; working for subcontractors on projects run by most of the big general contractors like Multiplex and Horniblow and even some residential work, pubs, the Leichardt Cathedral, Kell and Rigby, shop fitting, you name it. So I was there putting some of the biggest and smallest Sydney real estate projects together in the biggest boomtime ever, and in spite of that every subcontractor I worked for was going out backwards. The big guys would get eight or a dozen quotes for every aspect of a job and some newbie or fool or general optimist could always be counted on to make some glaring mistake or cut it too fine in the competitive catfight. And it is then that you come to realize a fundamental law of business: whatever you have to sell from your own labour to boiled lollies-unless you enjoy some kind of protected position - that the return on all endeavours subject to market forces has only one direction which is downwards towards the fine line between life and death. A month after the races were run I was given a day's notice at Kell and Rigby (I was first to go being a subbie with my own tools on $10 an hour more than everyone else) despite being very well thought of, having had the drive and imagination to be seen always beavering away flat out at the German Club; the foreman and I; getting double pay knocking out 'foreigners' when there had been delays at the factory. Of course the clueless occasional supervisor had no idea or maybe there are times when everybody looks so much better if they know when to keep their mouths shut.
But I could see the writing on the wall and went home for good. Kell and Rigby, the oldest joinery firm in Sydney, lasted another five years or so. In other words there are NO intrinsically good jobs or businesses that someone else who is hungrier or younger or more or less indebted than you cannot do as well in the fullness of time in the hard light of Struggle Street as touted by our political geniuses. Economic rationalism is best born by some other guy. So we seek safe harbour, be it bad ones like the CFMEU or good ones like the AMA, a Macdonald's franchise or the 'independent' Remuneration Tribunal. And if you do too well selling Big Macs they squeeze your territory and sell a closer franchise to another hopeful. Or used to, things have not been going so well as tastes and styles change and that ugly word competition comes ever closer.
Every time I went home I would move out of some shared accommodation and find another on my return, mostly in the inner west. On the job or in accommodation: wherever; I always took note of the particulars of the real estate market. Retirees were selling multi-million dollar north shore homes to vie with Chinese investors and move into something like our Anzac Bridge faux Italianate waterfront units which were essentially stacked two and three bedroom frame or cement block white-trash small town ranch-style pieces of crap or Renzo Piano's supposed masterpiece on Macquarie Street which has top end beautiful apartments but they were very expensive including an extra $10 thou for every layer of persons below.
I stayed in Marrickville with an extended family of kiwis for a while in a four bedroom federation brick terrace which cost $100 per week per person. Somebody I never met was gearing it. He received $400 per week and this place needed $30-50 thousand worth of work which was typical for that vintage. The market value would have been $600 thousand, now around 1 million 15 years later. If he owed 400 thousand then interest at 5% was $20,000 per annum and he received that but with no return for his 200 thou equity except a leveraged capital gain potential and nothing for depreciation, repairs, rates or amortizing the 400 thou. There is a rule of thumb for enterprise value of a rental property. Purchase price equals 100 monthly rental payments which gives you a few percent on your invested funds and enough left to cover all the rest of the taxes, repairs, depreciation etc.attached to your investment. For the Marrickville home that would have been $160 thousand. So supply and demand has engendered this crazy disconnect with reality. The why has to do with old simple-stupid Economics 400! Interest rates define the value and future of ALL OTHER investments whether you like it or not! It's all about rational markets as a price discovery mechanism. If you could get a low risk return of 8% (a real 5% after inflation) on your government bonds or bank account; mortgage rates in a real world would be correspondingly higher and NOBODY would be sticking their necks out to pay more than enterprise value for some decaying little working-class rabbit hutch.
So is there a bubble? The maestro Allan Greenspan said you can't tell until it pops. Which allowed him some margin for error and public approbation all those years until it or they did. Similarly the man who in retrospect won't have been up to turning back used-car odometers much less Treasurer of Munchkinland will do all he can to hold the day of reckoning beyond another election or better yet his retirement to that great inflation-indexed Pollie's Paradise in the Sky. He might stay lucky for a time so go for it kiddies.
Who were going to make billions selling dog food and cat scratchers on line, and you could get in right at the bottom! And after you have been taken down once or twice you come to understand that these people rank well below pimps, who will at least see you get your money's worth.
Maybe you even heard those three little words from familiar, eminently- respectable and besuited characters on TV in your home -or in a home belonging to some other schmuck who is working two jobs to make it his one day and who DIDN'T get in at the bottom and your rent isn't a patch on his mortgage.
From the treasurer Joe Hockey: "Real Estate is not a bubble!"
"It's supply and demand; It's Economics 100! Get out and build. build, build. Interest rates are at record lows! There's never been a better time to buy! Get a good job and buy a good home!
The last is especially poignant as he not only has a good job, his special parliamentary living-away-from -home allowance is going as rent to his wife in HER home where he stays when he is in Canberra, and no doubt that goes a long way to paying the mortgage, and perhaps that means there is a 2nd capital gains tax- free residence for the Hockeys, with each having a different 'principle residence.' And some of us remember how Joe's Liberal predecessor Peter Costello taunted Senator Nick Sherry for claiming his allowance when he stayed with his mother in Opossum Bay back in Tasmania.
"What does mum say when Nick walks in the door? Oh, Possum!"
And Sherry, even though he is/was a politician had some residue of conscience and shame and had the human decency to go and cut his wrists. Joe just shrugs it off, all these guys do it or some permutation - it's allowed by the fully independent Remuneration Tribunal and not covered by the criminal code so its not his problem. But is the tribunal really independent, like say Gillian Triggs, the Human Rights Commissioner who has been mercilessly hounded by cabinet heavyweights for her own independent moral stand on conditions for asylum seekers in our own little Guantanamo. I wouldn't even ask why a prison corporation can be paid more to brutalize people behind barb wire than I would need to make a profitable business out of it by giving someone a house of their own, living allowance, car and a college education. Maybe this has implications for future conflicts; if we could have corporatized the Japanese Imperial Army, they would have met their Waterloo years earlier, broken and bankrupted at Changi and the 'co-prosperity sphere' laughed right off the world stage.
But back to housing prices and bubbles. Firstly it is self-evident that since real estate prices are at record highs there have been better times to have bought, ANY other time would have been better. I have seen a few bubbles over my lifetime and have done very well by doing precisely the opposite of the tactics touted by our esteemed treasurer. It's Economics 200! You buy low and sell high! And when mortgage rates are at their highest that's when houses are cheapest! But you have to have some capital because nobody wants to lend! So maybe you rented for a while in the boom and saved while the other schmuck paid out the vast difference between the capital value and enterprise value of the house. So you have money when the time comes and its harder to borrow BUT you don't need a big mortgage and no matter what happens you aren't going to lose your butt! And it's stress-free after you have completed the contract it feels comfortable and you don't need to work two jobs! And with "animal spirits" at their lowest ebb you don't expect to make a killing but you probably will! And you can easily hedge against falling rates in the face of your fixed rate mortgage by insisting on a clause by which you can pay more off at any time without a penalty. If it starts looking too uncompetitive just pay it out or refinance with someone else!
Even Economics 100 dopes know that markets tend to revert to a mean so if interest rates are at record lows they will probably go higher. Even if inflation draws a line under the book value it might still see you s****ed. So let's go from Economics 200 to some really basic accountancy to glaze over your eyes and tickle your funnybone when you look at the real, enterprise value of a house as a business venture which is a wake-up call if you have been counting capital appreciation chickens on your fingers. Strings of words with capitals denote a popular acronym.
Generally Accepted Accounting Practice defines earnings as Earnings Before Interest Taxes Depreciation and Amortization, all of which have to be paid off from the rent except for the 'negative gearing' tax loophole for investors by which they can apply the generally negative earnings figure after expenses to their other income, like those his and hers night cleaning jobs where you roam the CBD office buildings with your backpack vacuum cleaner while the kids are asleep. You only get to use negative gearing if it ISN"T your actual primary residence and you sacrifice the tax free capital gain status. But that's no problem, there is unlikely to be anything to worry about when it's all added up at the end. Save your dockets.
Firstly interest on your mortgage: there is a set-up fee after which you have to pay say 4% every year on an average $300 thousand dollar housing loan which is $12000 per year after-tax money for the non-investor which is eating up your ultimate capital gain. And you still have to pay off the whole 300 thousand dollars of the loan on top of that over the period of the mortgage or when you sell the thing. That's the amortization and they generally structure it so you pay the same money every month from start to finish. There are tables you can access. And there are council rates, land taxes, stamp duties in the 'taxes' bracket and depreciation too which means houses and fixtures have a lifetime just like human beings; the house is growing old and frail and slowly falling down around your ears (deep-sixing capital gain) and if you don't do something expensive about it on a regular basis, renters will dodge their responsibilities and it will eventually be condemned as 'unfit for human habitation' and serve only as shelter for itinerants and drug addicts while waiting to be demolished despite your protests.
In the lead-up to the 2000 Olympics I did like a lot of Tasmanian tradies and after a marital tiff loaded my tools in a van and drove up to Sydney. On arrival it took about 4 hours to get work, firstly doing fit-out out above Grace Brothers at Centrepoint for Fairbrother and when that was finished I was everywhere; working for subcontractors on projects run by most of the big general contractors like Multiplex and Horniblow and even some residential work, pubs, the Leichardt Cathedral, Kell and Rigby, shop fitting, you name it. So I was there putting some of the biggest and smallest Sydney real estate projects together in the biggest boomtime ever, and in spite of that every subcontractor I worked for was going out backwards. The big guys would get eight or a dozen quotes for every aspect of a job and some newbie or fool or general optimist could always be counted on to make some glaring mistake or cut it too fine in the competitive catfight. And it is then that you come to realize a fundamental law of business: whatever you have to sell from your own labour to boiled lollies-unless you enjoy some kind of protected position - that the return on all endeavours subject to market forces has only one direction which is downwards towards the fine line between life and death. A month after the races were run I was given a day's notice at Kell and Rigby (I was first to go being a subbie with my own tools on $10 an hour more than everyone else) despite being very well thought of, having had the drive and imagination to be seen always beavering away flat out at the German Club; the foreman and I; getting double pay knocking out 'foreigners' when there had been delays at the factory. Of course the clueless occasional supervisor had no idea or maybe there are times when everybody looks so much better if they know when to keep their mouths shut.
But I could see the writing on the wall and went home for good. Kell and Rigby, the oldest joinery firm in Sydney, lasted another five years or so. In other words there are NO intrinsically good jobs or businesses that someone else who is hungrier or younger or more or less indebted than you cannot do as well in the fullness of time in the hard light of Struggle Street as touted by our political geniuses. Economic rationalism is best born by some other guy. So we seek safe harbour, be it bad ones like the CFMEU or good ones like the AMA, a Macdonald's franchise or the 'independent' Remuneration Tribunal. And if you do too well selling Big Macs they squeeze your territory and sell a closer franchise to another hopeful. Or used to, things have not been going so well as tastes and styles change and that ugly word competition comes ever closer.
Every time I went home I would move out of some shared accommodation and find another on my return, mostly in the inner west. On the job or in accommodation: wherever; I always took note of the particulars of the real estate market. Retirees were selling multi-million dollar north shore homes to vie with Chinese investors and move into something like our Anzac Bridge faux Italianate waterfront units which were essentially stacked two and three bedroom frame or cement block white-trash small town ranch-style pieces of crap or Renzo Piano's supposed masterpiece on Macquarie Street which has top end beautiful apartments but they were very expensive including an extra $10 thou for every layer of persons below.
I stayed in Marrickville with an extended family of kiwis for a while in a four bedroom federation brick terrace which cost $100 per week per person. Somebody I never met was gearing it. He received $400 per week and this place needed $30-50 thousand worth of work which was typical for that vintage. The market value would have been $600 thousand, now around 1 million 15 years later. If he owed 400 thousand then interest at 5% was $20,000 per annum and he received that but with no return for his 200 thou equity except a leveraged capital gain potential and nothing for depreciation, repairs, rates or amortizing the 400 thou. There is a rule of thumb for enterprise value of a rental property. Purchase price equals 100 monthly rental payments which gives you a few percent on your invested funds and enough left to cover all the rest of the taxes, repairs, depreciation etc.attached to your investment. For the Marrickville home that would have been $160 thousand. So supply and demand has engendered this crazy disconnect with reality. The why has to do with old simple-stupid Economics 400! Interest rates define the value and future of ALL OTHER investments whether you like it or not! It's all about rational markets as a price discovery mechanism. If you could get a low risk return of 8% (a real 5% after inflation) on your government bonds or bank account; mortgage rates in a real world would be correspondingly higher and NOBODY would be sticking their necks out to pay more than enterprise value for some decaying little working-class rabbit hutch.
So is there a bubble? The maestro Allan Greenspan said you can't tell until it pops. Which allowed him some margin for error and public approbation all those years until it or they did. Similarly the man who in retrospect won't have been up to turning back used-car odometers much less Treasurer of Munchkinland will do all he can to hold the day of reckoning beyond another election or better yet his retirement to that great inflation-indexed Pollie's Paradise in the Sky. He might stay lucky for a time so go for it kiddies.
Monday, June 8, 2015
Mining the Tarkine Part 3 Extra. Stop the Presses!
These things happen; your story has just gone to the press and something earth-shakingly relevant comes on the screen. This time it's ex Tasmanian Premier Paul Lennon appearing on the Queen's Birthday Honours list.
My father had an old army saying that I heard many times in my childhood, more rarely as I grew older and had come to understand that stamping a foot and yelling how I damn well knew something didn't make a good argument. His stock riposte was always; "You wouldn't know if your arse was punched, bored, tapped or reamed out with a big stick."
He had me there and got the last word in every time; something so simple and yet I could never figure out an answer. But it wasn't a bad antidote to intellectual vanity. Maybe it might help sort out the queen.
Paul's ten second sound-grab was that his reign had been controversial "but I gave people hope."
Hope along with faith is something we all need, especially if we are determined to be taken down by persons of low character. But as for making any real improvement to a community's prospects there are those laws of unintended consequences by which hope will most certainly put us ever deeper in the sh*t. If the previous story of the little town of Stewart, B.C. and its top-notch mining experience that generated so much development; new homes, expanding businesses and private indebtedness to bankers and the cruelly drawn-out and painful crash that took them back to square one has been unconvincing perhaps we might look closer at the Lennon era.
There was such a swag of memorable plans! An oceanside residential canal development, the doomed-from- the-beginning Dismal Swamp, and of course there was the Tamar Pulp Mill, wherein he in concert with that fearsome little hillbilly John Gay (from whom a tongue-lashing was rumoured to bring grown men to tears) were going to leverage themselves into our hearts and the boardroom of a world-class industrial behemoth with billions of borrowed, kamikaze investor and public dollars and the rest of us gratefully tagging along for the ride. But the one I liked best was a mining story in my own backyard and so over-the-top you could sit back and chortle if you had no pity for a gaggle of local hopefuls; investors and the usual legion of the damned that naturally included most of our bright-eyed, born-and-bred small-business local government officials at the time.
Golden Triangle Mining was going to transform the magnesite karst at Takone into a giant open-pit with hundreds of jobs and a river of cash, and there would be another huge Comalco- type electric smelter in our own little Burnie and somehow it all came together almost overnight (it seems in retrospect) in a major fireworks display where everything was happening at once. Time was of the essence- I knew that because as a Normandy shareholder I had received a prospectus for Australian Magnesium, in which a star consortium that included Ford Australia, Normandy, and the Queensland government were colluding to put together a similar package at Gladstone, and it was similarly big enough to supply all the magnesium for the Asia Pacific at least. So there could only be one or none, and the credit worthiness, expertise, resource and government backing were already in place but somewhere else. The Queensland government was going to do much more than facilitate; they guaranteed a dividend to all investors for the first three years. Which they gamely paid out in full even though the project failed upon which the share price fell to reflect the remaining dividends owed. But back to Tasmania.
The climax here happened with the drillers; uncertain whether to laugh or cry as their rods punched into the mud-filled voids that would let the Flowerdale River straight into proposed pit while mining industry people who actually knew how things are done looked on at the roadshow in horror. Paul Lennon took a helicopter ride over the proposed railway route which surveyors were busily marking out through Colleen Dibley's chestnut orchard. The CEO Peter Salter was off on a whirlwind tour of the world at investor expense to line up the billions of dollars that would be required; giant financial corporations were thought to be out there somewhere just waiting for people like him to knock on their doors and put all that unwanted cash to work. It was at this time that the share price peaked and this is also the time when clairvoyant friends, touts, children, wives, relatives and associates of company directors dump their cheaply- acquired shareholdings on the market; and didn't he return empty- handed. Years later there was a small item about him in a mining newsletter, some purported misdeeds had seen him thrown off the board of some gold explorer but where he is concerned all seems quiet now on the western front; where all you need is a Perth shop-front, chutzpah, a dog and a pick-up truck.
So how do these ridiculous loss-making machines actually benefit political people? It pertains to something called 'moral hazard'. They don't put their own money on the line - that would be corrupt and a violation of their oath of office if not the criminal code. Rather it is YOUR money that gets thrown down ratholes and there is an unintended consequence here; a conflict of interest by which a rational market analysis and studied economics of a project are not a necessary consideration of the person doing the investing. His being seen to be battling for your future prosperity, however hopeless the odds and unlikely the prize; confers electoral advantage. If he simply banged your money straight into his own account it would be fraudulent, but it would be a bargain against the squandered millions that it takes to be re-elected and don't you know it comes right back as the pay and perks of public office; all perfectly legal and in order.
So he gave a lot of people hope, and took it away from a lot of others. I hoped that democracy and education might occasionally deliver enlightened leadership. That maybe our species can cut a balance with the world and survive with everything else for the long term, possibly even as a civilization. Or are we just an insensate cancer or unschooled tribe of Polynesians, setting out in the dim hope of making one more killing; another breast or liver or bejeweled string of tiki-scattered islands in the sun where naive birds and fish will fatten another aristocracy and feed another vulgate for a few more generations before they have to eat each other or move on.
My father had an old army saying that I heard many times in my childhood, more rarely as I grew older and had come to understand that stamping a foot and yelling how I damn well knew something didn't make a good argument. His stock riposte was always; "You wouldn't know if your arse was punched, bored, tapped or reamed out with a big stick."
He had me there and got the last word in every time; something so simple and yet I could never figure out an answer. But it wasn't a bad antidote to intellectual vanity. Maybe it might help sort out the queen.
Paul's ten second sound-grab was that his reign had been controversial "but I gave people hope."
Hope along with faith is something we all need, especially if we are determined to be taken down by persons of low character. But as for making any real improvement to a community's prospects there are those laws of unintended consequences by which hope will most certainly put us ever deeper in the sh*t. If the previous story of the little town of Stewart, B.C. and its top-notch mining experience that generated so much development; new homes, expanding businesses and private indebtedness to bankers and the cruelly drawn-out and painful crash that took them back to square one has been unconvincing perhaps we might look closer at the Lennon era.
There was such a swag of memorable plans! An oceanside residential canal development, the doomed-from- the-beginning Dismal Swamp, and of course there was the Tamar Pulp Mill, wherein he in concert with that fearsome little hillbilly John Gay (from whom a tongue-lashing was rumoured to bring grown men to tears) were going to leverage themselves into our hearts and the boardroom of a world-class industrial behemoth with billions of borrowed, kamikaze investor and public dollars and the rest of us gratefully tagging along for the ride. But the one I liked best was a mining story in my own backyard and so over-the-top you could sit back and chortle if you had no pity for a gaggle of local hopefuls; investors and the usual legion of the damned that naturally included most of our bright-eyed, born-and-bred small-business local government officials at the time.
Golden Triangle Mining was going to transform the magnesite karst at Takone into a giant open-pit with hundreds of jobs and a river of cash, and there would be another huge Comalco- type electric smelter in our own little Burnie and somehow it all came together almost overnight (it seems in retrospect) in a major fireworks display where everything was happening at once. Time was of the essence- I knew that because as a Normandy shareholder I had received a prospectus for Australian Magnesium, in which a star consortium that included Ford Australia, Normandy, and the Queensland government were colluding to put together a similar package at Gladstone, and it was similarly big enough to supply all the magnesium for the Asia Pacific at least. So there could only be one or none, and the credit worthiness, expertise, resource and government backing were already in place but somewhere else. The Queensland government was going to do much more than facilitate; they guaranteed a dividend to all investors for the first three years. Which they gamely paid out in full even though the project failed upon which the share price fell to reflect the remaining dividends owed. But back to Tasmania.
The climax here happened with the drillers; uncertain whether to laugh or cry as their rods punched into the mud-filled voids that would let the Flowerdale River straight into proposed pit while mining industry people who actually knew how things are done looked on at the roadshow in horror. Paul Lennon took a helicopter ride over the proposed railway route which surveyors were busily marking out through Colleen Dibley's chestnut orchard. The CEO Peter Salter was off on a whirlwind tour of the world at investor expense to line up the billions of dollars that would be required; giant financial corporations were thought to be out there somewhere just waiting for people like him to knock on their doors and put all that unwanted cash to work. It was at this time that the share price peaked and this is also the time when clairvoyant friends, touts, children, wives, relatives and associates of company directors dump their cheaply- acquired shareholdings on the market; and didn't he return empty- handed. Years later there was a small item about him in a mining newsletter, some purported misdeeds had seen him thrown off the board of some gold explorer but where he is concerned all seems quiet now on the western front; where all you need is a Perth shop-front, chutzpah, a dog and a pick-up truck.
So how do these ridiculous loss-making machines actually benefit political people? It pertains to something called 'moral hazard'. They don't put their own money on the line - that would be corrupt and a violation of their oath of office if not the criminal code. Rather it is YOUR money that gets thrown down ratholes and there is an unintended consequence here; a conflict of interest by which a rational market analysis and studied economics of a project are not a necessary consideration of the person doing the investing. His being seen to be battling for your future prosperity, however hopeless the odds and unlikely the prize; confers electoral advantage. If he simply banged your money straight into his own account it would be fraudulent, but it would be a bargain against the squandered millions that it takes to be re-elected and don't you know it comes right back as the pay and perks of public office; all perfectly legal and in order.
So he gave a lot of people hope, and took it away from a lot of others. I hoped that democracy and education might occasionally deliver enlightened leadership. That maybe our species can cut a balance with the world and survive with everything else for the long term, possibly even as a civilization. Or are we just an insensate cancer or unschooled tribe of Polynesians, setting out in the dim hope of making one more killing; another breast or liver or bejeweled string of tiki-scattered islands in the sun where naive birds and fish will fatten another aristocracy and feed another vulgate for a few more generations before they have to eat each other or move on.
Saturday, June 6, 2015
Mining the Tarkine Part 3
Hope springs eternal within the human beast
Don't mind much if it makes no sense
If I grab some crumbs at least.
Apologies to Alexander Pope
Anyone stupid enough to invest in mining the Tarkine or anywhere else in Tasmania is going to have their heads handed to them on a platter. That is one of the laws of nature around here. Basically there are three kinds of people in the industry. There are working people who get their hands dirty making a basic living for a time. There are the experts - geologists, mining engineers, consultants and accountants who do the smarter tasks which are absolutely necessary to gather the body of information that will progressively de-risk a project so as to allow serious investments by sophisticated investors. And if you are in the mining business and fit in neither of these, there is only one category left which is that you are a filthy little tout. As I have previously explained 99% of these projects fall flat and people fail to realize the multitudinous ways they can and will take you down with them. Shareholdings for yourself, the wife and kids, and your mum are only the most obvious and most likely to generate life-long family splits and recriminations.
Back in the late sixties I spent my summers working at mining exploration in northern Canada. We were looking for base metals and our company was doing contract work for very big corporate names. We went through the motions of minefinding, but what we were really doing was eliminating hundreds of small prospects over huge areas. Copper stains were here or there on rocks, lumps of galena in glacial float, whatever and the first stage was to take sediment samples from lakes and streams throughout the watersheds which were first tested by colourimetric means then chemical analysis in Vancouver. Anomalies were plotted on maps and if they were significant then gravitational, magnetic or electromagnetic surveys were done accordingly from the air or on the ground over lines which I and a couple others would have cut or at least marked; up hill and down dale over our staked claims. And then we did the right thing which was to disappear because we had already spent large sums of money and the probability of doing better by tearing the place up was negligible. Or at least Newmont Mining thought so. All our efforts only generated one drill program in three years as far as I know. They plopped a rig in by helicopter, we put the crew up in our camp, they drilled a few holes up in a cirque and we pulled out in the autumn never to return. Especially the cook who went early; he was supposed to be a reformed drunk but he had taken it into his head to poison the drillers; none of whom were as punctual, clean or nice as us college boys. Whatever demons had taken temporary or otherwise possession of the man, the drillers were unwilling to test his veracity and a plane was sent in especially for him.
Someone else found a mine nearby that we had walked over. We had spent a couple of our days off working an old placer deposit for gold with a sluice box we had banged together. The mine-to-be was the Golden Bear, further up above the creek where the placer gold had originated and it was one of the first successful low-grade heap-leach operations in the world. But Newmont or whoever hadn't been seriously looking for precious metals so neither did we. And it was there I met the geophysics boffin who had found the huge lead- zinc deposit at Pine Point. He was flying an EM survey for us and he had seen the numbers coming up as they flew over the thing and he put everything he could get his hands on into it on the share market and had made over a hundred thousand dollars. After such an easy score he decided to snowball it into a million and put it all back and more into the share market. By the time I met him he had nothing left.
At the end of my third summer up there I was finished with school for a time and of course I wanted a job in Vancouver with girls and a social life but there wasn't much employment around, and I found myself going FIFO for the winter with thousands of others to remote projects in the north. The FO part of it didn't exist in those days and I spent 12 months mill operating in a brand -new copper mine. It was quite well known; no-one else had yet attempted such an audacious project is so inhospitable a country. The mill was situated between a couple glaciers a twenty mile bus ride up from the coast, the mine was another 10 kilometres away and accessed by an underground railway that went right through the mountain, underneath one or more glaciers. It had been a very expensive proposition. We were processing about 1500 tonnes per day of 1.5% copper on two grinding circuits and after a few months I was running the mill from a control room on my shift; earning $5 per hour plus one flight in and board and I knew the sound of every mill and pump and bearing and destination of every pipe and conveyor in the place which had cost 120 million dollars for the mill alone. That would have to be over half a billion now; god knows how many died; me almost once or twice or what the whole shebang was worth and world copper demand was booming.
So it was nothing like Tasmania. Without the aforementioned de-risking and slow process of delineating reserves and expertly engineering the development it could never have happened. If a government has some expertise or integrity they don't grant a mining lease, talk up some future financial disaster to squeeze money and indignation from the locals and let some dipshit in with little more than a Perth shopfront, a dog and a rented bulldozer. Tasmania is so much older and worn down than the Canadian west. Everything worthwhile has even bigger exposure and geochemical signatures and has been discovered a long time ago.
But yes I have (stupidly) put small amounts of money in mining investments here. Western Metals was interesting; they wanted to reprocess the Hellyer Mine tailings which supposedly contains over a million ounces of gold.. But I had a job at a local engineering firm and we built the tanks and stairs for Intec, who were the brains behind the pilot plant that was going to make it all happen. I was in there one day to install something and I noticed a row of pumps like nothing I had seen before - the workings were behind glass and they were beautiful peristaltic things like our own guts with rubber tubes that were compressed by moving rollers. A light came on in that instant - obviously they were using powerful reagents you wouldn't want touching the inside of a normal pump -they were cracking walnuts with a sledgehammer. That meant the gold would stay in the tailings because it wasn't worth the cost of getting it out , just like millions of tonnes stays in the ocean where it will also stay forever. A lot of people I know had money in it, but there is nothing you can say.
But up in northern Canada I just saved my pay and then I was gone but a lot of my workmates married a local or office girl and did things like buy a house or small supermarket on the coast like it was going to last forever or ten years according to the inventory of mineable ore. Two years later the price of copper collapsed and the mine and mill were put on care and maintenance and everyone tried to get out. But it was too late and many spent another three or four years up there with mortgages and milk bars or supermarkets or homes that couldn't be sold in a ghost town. And then the price of copper went up again and it was all restarted but that didn't last and a year later it closed again and this time everything went for scrap. And so it can all go wrong with the best of procedures and intentions: the only certainty is that nothing is certain and if you come in at the top of anything you are going to get burned; big time; Shree Minerals being a local case in point. I wish I had bought one of those T-shirts. Back in the sixties after the summer of love and its ugly aftermath you could get 'Free Manson' bumper stickers and T-shirts. They would have to be worth a fortune now in the original packaging.
Don't mind much if it makes no sense
If I grab some crumbs at least.
Apologies to Alexander Pope
Anyone stupid enough to invest in mining the Tarkine or anywhere else in Tasmania is going to have their heads handed to them on a platter. That is one of the laws of nature around here. Basically there are three kinds of people in the industry. There are working people who get their hands dirty making a basic living for a time. There are the experts - geologists, mining engineers, consultants and accountants who do the smarter tasks which are absolutely necessary to gather the body of information that will progressively de-risk a project so as to allow serious investments by sophisticated investors. And if you are in the mining business and fit in neither of these, there is only one category left which is that you are a filthy little tout. As I have previously explained 99% of these projects fall flat and people fail to realize the multitudinous ways they can and will take you down with them. Shareholdings for yourself, the wife and kids, and your mum are only the most obvious and most likely to generate life-long family splits and recriminations.
Back in the late sixties I spent my summers working at mining exploration in northern Canada. We were looking for base metals and our company was doing contract work for very big corporate names. We went through the motions of minefinding, but what we were really doing was eliminating hundreds of small prospects over huge areas. Copper stains were here or there on rocks, lumps of galena in glacial float, whatever and the first stage was to take sediment samples from lakes and streams throughout the watersheds which were first tested by colourimetric means then chemical analysis in Vancouver. Anomalies were plotted on maps and if they were significant then gravitational, magnetic or electromagnetic surveys were done accordingly from the air or on the ground over lines which I and a couple others would have cut or at least marked; up hill and down dale over our staked claims. And then we did the right thing which was to disappear because we had already spent large sums of money and the probability of doing better by tearing the place up was negligible. Or at least Newmont Mining thought so. All our efforts only generated one drill program in three years as far as I know. They plopped a rig in by helicopter, we put the crew up in our camp, they drilled a few holes up in a cirque and we pulled out in the autumn never to return. Especially the cook who went early; he was supposed to be a reformed drunk but he had taken it into his head to poison the drillers; none of whom were as punctual, clean or nice as us college boys. Whatever demons had taken temporary or otherwise possession of the man, the drillers were unwilling to test his veracity and a plane was sent in especially for him.
Someone else found a mine nearby that we had walked over. We had spent a couple of our days off working an old placer deposit for gold with a sluice box we had banged together. The mine-to-be was the Golden Bear, further up above the creek where the placer gold had originated and it was one of the first successful low-grade heap-leach operations in the world. But Newmont or whoever hadn't been seriously looking for precious metals so neither did we. And it was there I met the geophysics boffin who had found the huge lead- zinc deposit at Pine Point. He was flying an EM survey for us and he had seen the numbers coming up as they flew over the thing and he put everything he could get his hands on into it on the share market and had made over a hundred thousand dollars. After such an easy score he decided to snowball it into a million and put it all back and more into the share market. By the time I met him he had nothing left.
At the end of my third summer up there I was finished with school for a time and of course I wanted a job in Vancouver with girls and a social life but there wasn't much employment around, and I found myself going FIFO for the winter with thousands of others to remote projects in the north. The FO part of it didn't exist in those days and I spent 12 months mill operating in a brand -new copper mine. It was quite well known; no-one else had yet attempted such an audacious project is so inhospitable a country. The mill was situated between a couple glaciers a twenty mile bus ride up from the coast, the mine was another 10 kilometres away and accessed by an underground railway that went right through the mountain, underneath one or more glaciers. It had been a very expensive proposition. We were processing about 1500 tonnes per day of 1.5% copper on two grinding circuits and after a few months I was running the mill from a control room on my shift; earning $5 per hour plus one flight in and board and I knew the sound of every mill and pump and bearing and destination of every pipe and conveyor in the place which had cost 120 million dollars for the mill alone. That would have to be over half a billion now; god knows how many died; me almost once or twice or what the whole shebang was worth and world copper demand was booming.
So it was nothing like Tasmania. Without the aforementioned de-risking and slow process of delineating reserves and expertly engineering the development it could never have happened. If a government has some expertise or integrity they don't grant a mining lease, talk up some future financial disaster to squeeze money and indignation from the locals and let some dipshit in with little more than a Perth shopfront, a dog and a rented bulldozer. Tasmania is so much older and worn down than the Canadian west. Everything worthwhile has even bigger exposure and geochemical signatures and has been discovered a long time ago.
But yes I have (stupidly) put small amounts of money in mining investments here. Western Metals was interesting; they wanted to reprocess the Hellyer Mine tailings which supposedly contains over a million ounces of gold.. But I had a job at a local engineering firm and we built the tanks and stairs for Intec, who were the brains behind the pilot plant that was going to make it all happen. I was in there one day to install something and I noticed a row of pumps like nothing I had seen before - the workings were behind glass and they were beautiful peristaltic things like our own guts with rubber tubes that were compressed by moving rollers. A light came on in that instant - obviously they were using powerful reagents you wouldn't want touching the inside of a normal pump -they were cracking walnuts with a sledgehammer. That meant the gold would stay in the tailings because it wasn't worth the cost of getting it out , just like millions of tonnes stays in the ocean where it will also stay forever. A lot of people I know had money in it, but there is nothing you can say.
But up in northern Canada I just saved my pay and then I was gone but a lot of my workmates married a local or office girl and did things like buy a house or small supermarket on the coast like it was going to last forever or ten years according to the inventory of mineable ore. Two years later the price of copper collapsed and the mine and mill were put on care and maintenance and everyone tried to get out. But it was too late and many spent another three or four years up there with mortgages and milk bars or supermarkets or homes that couldn't be sold in a ghost town. And then the price of copper went up again and it was all restarted but that didn't last and a year later it closed again and this time everything went for scrap. And so it can all go wrong with the best of procedures and intentions: the only certainty is that nothing is certain and if you come in at the top of anything you are going to get burned; big time; Shree Minerals being a local case in point. I wish I had bought one of those T-shirts. Back in the sixties after the summer of love and its ugly aftermath you could get 'Free Manson' bumper stickers and T-shirts. They would have to be worth a fortune now in the original packaging.
Sunday, May 17, 2015
The Picker's Tax Hike
If you have been following the great Australian Budgetary Emergency its great to know the cavalry have arrived, better late than never. Rorting double-dipping new moms and part-pensioners will get it in the neck and now those back-packing international fruit- picking tourists can pick up their share of the tab too. Er...after the election anyway. They come here and supply their labour when and where it is needed, cheaply and under minimal living conditions, then they spend all that money or send it to destitute families overseas and bugger off. So how can the tax office get its fangs into that? With the tax-free threshold they would be unlikely contributors so the simple solution is to abolish it for anyone on a working holiday. Here I will declare a personal interest in two categories: firstly I am an uncertain part - pensioner; having had it cancelled almost every second fortnight due to non-compliance with reporting requirements. That's to say the understaffed public servants charged with doing the sums on my wife's income can't manage it in the appointed time so my pension gets automatically cut off. Anyone who deals with Centrelink has to have some empathy with Franz Kafka. Its as if you know the guy personally; long dead though he be. And I have done casual agricultural work in Australia from the top end to Tasmania when I was young, single, looking for fun and didn't need much money.
We lived in the Okanagan
Valley for a couple years when I was a boy. It is British Columbia's
major fruit-growing area, and we used to wander about the dry pine
and sage brush- covered hills, armed with primitive weapons. The
irrigated orchards were on the flatter country surrounding the lake.
Once I was cutting across a neighbour's property and came on a
picker's cabin hidden among the apple trees. It was a hovel, just
like now, about 5 meters square with a dirt floor, rough
bunk-bed frame and a rusty stove. But what most impressed my
ten-year-old mind was the décor.
The walls were covered
with small pictures of beautiful girls, mostly in black and white;
carefully cut from the (free) Eaton's catalogue along the lines
of their perfect figures. All the girls offered delighted,
come-hither smiles in spite of their cropped legs and arms as they
posed to show off their massive inventory of old-lady type undies and
unnecessary foundation garments. I must have had a social conscience
at the time because I wondered how the hell could so much deprivation
exist right under our bourgeois noses – Playboy type magazines and Vargas
girl calendars did exist. My dad had been a newsboy in LA during the
depression and they had that kind of thing back then too.
Well up in the hills was the ruins of a fabled hermit's hut. He lived along the
railway line in a little shack made of salvaged material and how he
had survived through the years was not well known. But he picked fruit in season, perhaps side by side with the catalogue cutter. There was nothing else for people like him. Further up the track at a handy distance was a
steel railway trestle that crossed the creek at a dizzying height –
about a hundred metres below, and if you plucked up your courage and
walked out over the void between rare trains, not daring to come too close to the edge but looking
between the ties, you would see substantial Trout Creek as a tiny stream of water; far below and winding through huge boulders on its way to the lake. This is
where the hermit had suicided, throwing himself over and been dashed
on the stones shortly before we came. My friend next door claimed to
have seen it happen but I didn't believe it – his version supposed
the hermit to have had second thoughts, successfully breaking his
fall by grabbing the bottom girder six or seven metres below the
rails and he had hung there by his fingertips, struggling for a while
to climb back up before he lost his grip and fell. The funny thing
was that his shack and small yard had then been completely torn up by
treasure hunters. Obviously anyone who had so disliked and avoided
humanity and its institutions; lived so poor and died so desperate
must have buried a substantial horde of money. But if anyone found
it they weren't saying.
In the seventies I took
the ferry from Melbourne to Devonport, bought a smokey and creaking old EK Holden for a
hundred dollars and drove slowly down the east coast to Huonville
where I worked for a while on apples for Clements and Marshall. They
let me stay in a little unpainted unheated one- man shed behind the
factory. I was the only non-resident and hence occupant of their cabins and was befriended by two of the local boys. One was a sad loner who filled my ear with stories - he had an ongoing feud with a copper who had taken his girlfriend and intended to kill or maim the guy up in New Norfolk and make a clean escape back to Huonville thanks to the incredible speed of his hot V-8 Monaro which I never saw. One morning on the job he was leaning on the steering wheel of his forklift while I stacked apple boxes on a pallet and he said "Get a move on; yer slower than molasses in January."
I answered something to the effect of what he should do to himself including where he could ram all his bulls**t and he never spoke to me again. And there was a nicer kid, who looked (in 1974) like he had been transported in a time warp from 'sixties Haight-Ashbury but his stories gave him away. He was very local, and the stories were mostly about his soft-spoken hero, another forklift driver who punched the sh*t out of people at the pub and was infinitely virile - how they drove up to Hobart in his panel van, drifting around the corners trying to roll the guy off one of his female victims. I similarly tired of him and spent several more nights in that freezing shack, with its single lightbulb and no-one at all to talk to. During the day you could look out the single window and see sheep in an adjoining paddock.
So I left and drove north; back up through Queenstown, during which I had picked up a couple hitch-hikers at a youth hostel. One was a brain-damaged speech-impaired local whose life had been transformed in a car accident. Of course he wanted to drive but I wouldn't let him. We limped along; stopping regularly to add engine oil and water and it was doubtful sometimes whether I was ever going to make it back to civilization. We laboured through Hellyer Gorge and finally arrived back on the coast. When I reached the Bass Highway I turned right onto the main road and pulled over on a wider section of the verge to check the engine again. I had stopped about 50 yards behind a police cruiser, parked close behind a previous motorist. While I was perusing under the bonnet the first car drove away and this plump little cop waddled over and said “You were speeding back there”.
He proceeded to write me a
speeding ticket. Flabbergasted I began to protest and he said “If you give
me any lip I'll take this heap of sh*t off the road!” I knew he could do
that; hardly anything worked. So that's how it goes, the squeezables
get squeezed, by hook or by crook – as Mr Hockey says; “We want
everyone to pay their fair share.” I answered something to the effect of what he should do to himself including where he could ram all his bulls**t and he never spoke to me again. And there was a nicer kid, who looked (in 1974) like he had been transported in a time warp from 'sixties Haight-Ashbury but his stories gave him away. He was very local, and the stories were mostly about his soft-spoken hero, another forklift driver who punched the sh*t out of people at the pub and was infinitely virile - how they drove up to Hobart in his panel van, drifting around the corners trying to roll the guy off one of his female victims. I similarly tired of him and spent several more nights in that freezing shack, with its single lightbulb and no-one at all to talk to. During the day you could look out the single window and see sheep in an adjoining paddock.
So I left and drove north; back up through Queenstown, during which I had picked up a couple hitch-hikers at a youth hostel. One was a brain-damaged speech-impaired local whose life had been transformed in a car accident. Of course he wanted to drive but I wouldn't let him. We limped along; stopping regularly to add engine oil and water and it was doubtful sometimes whether I was ever going to make it back to civilization. We laboured through Hellyer Gorge and finally arrived back on the coast. When I reached the Bass Highway I turned right onto the main road and pulled over on a wider section of the verge to check the engine again. I had stopped about 50 yards behind a police cruiser, parked close behind a previous motorist. While I was perusing under the bonnet the first car drove away and this plump little cop waddled over and said “You were speeding back there”.
It would cost me about a
third of my Tasmanian wages, almost exactly the treasurer's 32.5% from day one on the job. I took stock - the weather had been
crummy, the accommodation was crap, my workmates in the south were drunken ignorant little turds
and according to their hilarious scuttlebutt would soon
join the ranks of embattled family men struggling their whole lives on the
same process lines to feed their families. Vowing never to return I
left the heap on consignment at the same car yard in Devonport where
it all began and scarpered to the mainland; my market logic presaging
not-yet-a-twinkle- in the- eye- of-Steve Jobs' Apple Computers and so
many other good corporate citizens safely hunkered down on low-tax foreign soil like
Singapore or the Irish Republic.
So the cavalry may have
finally arrived with an iron-clad means to screw over the unfortunates- but too late; the Indians have already scattered. Or will
scatter. Those with means will have a revenue-neutral holiday on the beach in Bali instead. The poor from Asia or the islands
will stay home or go to Saudi Arabia to be robbed and brutalized by an even
more evil and indolent people.
“Its a good budget.
Last year's budget was a good budget for last year; this is a good
budget for this year.” In the meantime last year's plans for a
balanced budget within the decade have blown out beyond my lifetime
into the never-never. Joe Hockey's eyes were dull and his voice was
flat and devoid of any conviction. It felt like the last words of
eternal allegiance a condemned lord might have made before the block
for his family's sake. So go his own leadership aspirations.
Because the forward estimates are crap again even as last year's
forward estimates were crap. The end of the commodity boom took
these know-nothings by surprise. And similarly Joe Hockey's glorious
dawn of a broader- based economy (go out and spend, spend all ye
small business people and consumers, drive our ridiculous debt to GDP
ratio even deeper into the hole along with your personal liabilities)
will also be impossible to wash off the blankets.
That the Shanghai share
market index has doubled in the last twelve months thanks to easy
credit and margin lending to first-time investors, our share market
is vulnerable along with the US market also; which seems to have
reached once again a 'permanently high plateau' as famously announced
by economist Irving Fisher in 1929. With interest rates still at
zero from the 2008 GFC; the neo- Keynesian central bankers are snookered
with no downward wriggle room outside of more money printing. Keynes would have puked to see his name so reviled. The US, Euro and everybody elses' bond markets sit at impossible highs such
that when yields are forced up by a couple % to normal levels
all the major financial institutions in the world, leveraged to
buggery as they are, will be underwater when their assets are marked
to market; and 'that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.'*
Does our entitled leadership actually know anything at all about the macro and microscopic facts of life in business or otherwise? Have any of them ever gone beyond fitting straight lines to crooked charts or actually got their hands dirty, even in their youths - beyond enjoying free higher education, schmoozing at Young Liberal fundraisers or risking the accidental begetting of bastards in the manner of weak but deeply- committed .... uh, well, you know. Someone once said 'the future is another country'. Or maybe that was the past. I used to think it was this one.
* from Keats; 'Ode to a Grecian Urn'
Update: 2016
The share markets really have arrived at that permanently high plateau that normally lasts until someone starts cashing out. The solution has been to push the reverse Midas touch lever into full throttle, rendering cash into sh*t and sending whole desperate generations fleeing into property or something, anything; even if dicey speculative possibilities far outweigh the logical maths of an acceptable business return. Which is to say capital gains are an illusion that Labour hopes to target anyway; their interest a certain indication of a major peak having arrived. So (as usual) there may be a new tax but there will be no capital gains. Their other target; negative gearing will also be eclipsed by events. It is after all only a symptom of the monetary madness - an opportunity to 'get on the property ladder' now may very well turn out to be an albatross for a couple generations of necks. But it's too late too change it, and in the end the blame will fall on 'animal spirits' when it really is about 'animal instincts' like self-preservation; cynically abused by people who should know better if they are worth their maxi-salaries.
A prediction: Our rulers of whichever barely distinguishable stripe will be caught entirely off guard. As Kevin Rudd said; "No-one could have predicted yada yada yada...." but they will instantly know what to do and small checks will rain down like pennies from heaven to revitalize the economy and so evade any personal blame.
Meanwhile back at the ranch the chains of tax reform and budget balancing seem to have dropped off nearly everybodie's pre-election shoulders. Somehow a corporate tax cut can still be funded, a boon that will supposedly devolve to everyone. It's almost a replay of those legendary free- spending and wasted Howard years. It's almost as good as that original GST and without any of the pain- except for those rorting fruit pickers; the most hapless and vulnerable group we could possibly target without an electoral backlash. And even they have a six month reprieve lest ANYBODY be offended.
Does our entitled leadership actually know anything at all about the macro and microscopic facts of life in business or otherwise? Have any of them ever gone beyond fitting straight lines to crooked charts or actually got their hands dirty, even in their youths - beyond enjoying free higher education, schmoozing at Young Liberal fundraisers or risking the accidental begetting of bastards in the manner of weak but deeply- committed .... uh, well, you know. Someone once said 'the future is another country'. Or maybe that was the past. I used to think it was this one.
* from Keats; 'Ode to a Grecian Urn'
Update: 2016
The share markets really have arrived at that permanently high plateau that normally lasts until someone starts cashing out. The solution has been to push the reverse Midas touch lever into full throttle, rendering cash into sh*t and sending whole desperate generations fleeing into property or something, anything; even if dicey speculative possibilities far outweigh the logical maths of an acceptable business return. Which is to say capital gains are an illusion that Labour hopes to target anyway; their interest a certain indication of a major peak having arrived. So (as usual) there may be a new tax but there will be no capital gains. Their other target; negative gearing will also be eclipsed by events. It is after all only a symptom of the monetary madness - an opportunity to 'get on the property ladder' now may very well turn out to be an albatross for a couple generations of necks. But it's too late too change it, and in the end the blame will fall on 'animal spirits' when it really is about 'animal instincts' like self-preservation; cynically abused by people who should know better if they are worth their maxi-salaries.
A prediction: Our rulers of whichever barely distinguishable stripe will be caught entirely off guard. As Kevin Rudd said; "No-one could have predicted yada yada yada...." but they will instantly know what to do and small checks will rain down like pennies from heaven to revitalize the economy and so evade any personal blame.
Meanwhile back at the ranch the chains of tax reform and budget balancing seem to have dropped off nearly everybodie's pre-election shoulders. Somehow a corporate tax cut can still be funded, a boon that will supposedly devolve to everyone. It's almost a replay of those legendary free- spending and wasted Howard years. It's almost as good as that original GST and without any of the pain- except for those rorting fruit pickers; the most hapless and vulnerable group we could possibly target without an electoral backlash. And even they have a six month reprieve lest ANYBODY be offended.
Friday, January 9, 2015
Imagine
Imagine
all the people
Living for today, hey,hey
Some people say I'm a schemerBut I'm not the only one
I hope some day that you'll join us.....
Apologies to John Lennon
Imagine
Tony Abbott joining the ranks of aging drug-addled
mathematically-challenged dreamers still gimping around the NSW north
coast hinterland; living for today, hey hey. But unless you cash in
your chips by dying or collecting your parliamentary pension
(decently waiting until age 70 on the latter of course), today
becomes tomorrow and living loses some of its attraction when you
have broken the bank, spent your inheritance, chopped your forests-
sorry, in Tasmania there are still some trees standing in previously
protected areas for which we will all chip in to help cover the costs
of removal. No need for greed or hunger, the brotherhood of man, or
even some vestige of mateship, here and now; today, money rules.
Although greed does have its advantages living for today – can't
leave any standing timber or coal wasting in the ground after all.
So
the sea-changed Prime Minister has nailed his colours to the mast at
the G-20 in Brisbane. “Our concern is with the here and now” was
his response to the unsettling climate-change concerns of the other
participants during the record-breaking temperatures they all enjoyed
at the time with over forty degrees C on a daily basis. I have
experienced similar ten years ago in France and Spain. Ten thousand
deaths in France were attributed to the heatwave. But it was mostly
people that didn't matter – old folks with few or no concerned kin,
in homes or homeless, without air-conditioned 5-star accommodation
and on the way out anyway.
And
forty two degrees still gives healthy people some room to move; still
eighteen degrees away from the 'death zone' that was discovered by
Louis Pasteur – ten minutes at sixty degrees Centigrade
sterilizes milk; killing most micro-organisms including human beings.
Only a few extremeophiles can survive, including botulinum which is
handy if you had hoped to go looking good at your funereal viewing.
Of
course Australians are organized for hot weather and air conditioning
is everywhere, just not for the flying foxes, hanging clustered in
their roosting trees. They suffered like the French, with thousands
dropping and dying of heat exhaustion. Their species is unlikely to
disappear generally as a result of climate change, but will certainly
shrink in the tropics while they extend their range to the south and
higher altitudes. But they are essential pollinators for a lot of
the tropical forest and if they move out it will be disastrous for
the forests over the long term, and by extension the reef.
Back
in the early seventies I had gone north and found a job in Tully on a
banana farm. During the dry season the weather was beautiful and I
lived there by the river, shooting feral pigs, spearing black bream
and catfish and sleeping in a tent under some huge flowering gums.
One night it was impossible to sleep, flying foxes feeding on the
blossoms and nectar high above were holding some god-awful
conference. I stepped out with a torch and a .22 rifle to scare them
away and looking up into the branches saw that they were all
peacefully feeding except for one who had better things to do,
posturing and holding forth as cause and sum of all the demonic
snarling and chatter. I shot it. He fell and I picked up and
inspected the body as the rest looked on, animal stupidity writ large
in their beady and unblinking eyes. It was a bat about the size of a
grey squirrel, deep black with leathery wings, a brown mantle, a
perfect little fox face and obviously male.
Silence
reigned for the rest of the night. But at the first light of dawn I
was awakened by a slapping sound on my tent. And I heard their wings
and realized that as each animal was leaving the scene of my crime
for its daytime roost the whole squadron had peeled off and each flew
low, one after another, targeting my tent with a token of displeasure
– a stick, a bunch of leaves, urine or the content of its bowels.
And I lay there like the ancient mariner, consumed by guilt and too
cowardly to step outside and face up to them as they came over.
They
are normally stoic about their losses – to hawks, owls or the
shotguns of orchardists or you see them hanging twisted and burned in
power lines with never a defender or cortege. So I have often
wondered who he was to them; obviously a special individual. Perhaps
he was their leader, who got most of the girls while he saw off
challengers and pretended to lead them all to greener pastures. Or
maybe he was their prophet, offering unseasonal mangoes in the
hereafter and the confounding of their enemies, like me, which came
to pass. Or just the patronized and tolerated village idiot. Or
some confluence of all three, like Queensland's Premier Joh at the
time. Whichever, they are much more like us than anyone would wish
to imagine, and so are our collective fates entwined.
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
The Perfect Sourdough Recipe
The minute you finally get
it right, something bitching comes up like it was a law of nature.
In this case it was a spike in Comex wheat prices; it seems there is
a global shortage of good wheat, hence good flour. I had already
gone organic after hearing about a practice called 'desiccation'. It
seems growers like to kill their grain crops off with herbicide
because when everything dies simultaneously it dries up and goes
through the guts of a combine so nicely. My wife said “Oh no, they
don't do that here in Australia” but I looked on a government agri
website and it had a chart of recommended herbicides for each type
of grain, with the proviso that malting people don't like dead barley
and none of it is very desirable for seed applications. I met my
young neighbour out on the road and asked him what he was going to do
about his own lovely crop of waving barley.
“Its only Reglone”, he
said, and only if the crop is still partly green and/or the weather
is a little iffy. “There's the withholding period and after its
been through an animal I don't mind eating it.”
Presumably he meant
'eating an animal that has been fed with the stuff'. But god only
knows how a withholding period means much when something is dry and
dead and there is no ongoing exchange with the rest of the biosphere.
But back to global forces
which have conspired against the 'perfect sourdough'. The last lot
of organic (same old trusted brand of flour) we bought doesn't work
properly. It is coarse and even a single cup in a blend for any kind
of bread turns a previously successful recipe into some kind of a
brick that might have been pushed out of a bronze-age campfire with a
stick. We can live with this for a season or two. But what about
the Egyptians? Cheap foreign wheat is the base of their staple
bellady bread, which is a sort of plump commercial focaccia that is
everywhere and has fueled their multi-generational Malthusian
disaster. Now what little there is must come out more like Turkish
flatbread and without wheat there will be lean years once again
throughout the land of Egypt. Will they take to the streets like the
Mexicans when the ethanol disaster (that was to make America
fuel-independent of famous Saudi charity) only doubled the price of
tortillas in Guadalajara? In fact they will probably stay indoors
and kvetch, kvetch - after the revolution their new government looks
even uglier, more repressive and corrupt than the old one and it has
to be; because half those people yearn for an Islamic theocracy in
spite of the lessons from Iran or the Talibs in Afghanistan where
life was or is even shittier outside the cabal of wealth and
authority than any of us can imagine. But then I don't know whether
they are Sunni or Shia. Whichever, any honest zealot will admit
that the other lot needs to all be killed before it can/might work.
And so in human desperation we collectively and respectably grasp at
straws that would be grounds to send an individual to the funny farm.
When Herodotus was touring
the battlefields of Egypt he noted that the skulls of the Greeks were
easily distinguishable from those of the Egyptians. Greek skulls
were thin like eggshells while the Egyptian skulls were thick as a
brick. You can still see this in any of the great museums of the
world, the collected exceptions being mostly among the aristocracy;
for instance in the ferret-like and effete remains of Rameses 2. But
the upper crust were victims of their own hubris and to maintain
royal purity they kept reproduction within the family. And so they
ended up carrying and expressing damaged genes like backwoods
rednecks be they in Tennessee or here in Tassie. Not only did they mate with
their own families, they also met their ends at the hands of the same
people. Maybe incest and a sacrifice of romantic choice for duty
leaves a residue of resentment. Maybe there was no viable
alternative.
I lived alongside a Greek
guy in a share house for a while. He was personable, hairy and
huge, about 6ft.2, had a trade but was an organized crime tragic and
wanted most of all to get a handgun and become a stand-over man. His
leisure time was spent on internet porn sites where his obsession was the
.1% of humanity that actually needs reduction surgery.
Occasionally he would find something so wonderful he couldn't contain his excitement and would call me in to see the latest discovery. There was a mortified Micronesian who had doffed his gargantuan penis gourd, and obviously no amount of cash could compensate for his loss of dignity. And another time it was a Hottentot lass who appeared to be birthing Dumbo. Negatives aside, he was certainly more fun and interesting and alive than the average grab-bag, garden variety housemate; like the third occupant; the troubled and gentle lessor to whom we paid rent; who was obviously and admittedly afraid of this guy and was repaid with his contempt.
About the time I left he made an awful mess in the laundry; emptying the oil from the shock absorber struts on his Japanese car and refilling them with axle grease, thereby converting it to a sportier version or so he thought. Some time later I went by the house. He was gone but his car had been rolled and still sat crumpled in the backyard. I know he survived - he must have seen my vehicle back in the area and I received a rambling text message, something about his knuckles getting familiar with my head. This was in regard to a deposition I had made for the other housemate in a court case about the rent. The Greek had run up the phone bill gratuitously and secretly moved out without paying either. He had intimated he had something fun like that planned although I didn't reveal that in the statement. There seems to have been a lot of healthy genetic mixing since the time of the pharaohs and had he not survived the accident, his undamaged skull would have made a great doorstop or footstool.
Occasionally he would find something so wonderful he couldn't contain his excitement and would call me in to see the latest discovery. There was a mortified Micronesian who had doffed his gargantuan penis gourd, and obviously no amount of cash could compensate for his loss of dignity. And another time it was a Hottentot lass who appeared to be birthing Dumbo. Negatives aside, he was certainly more fun and interesting and alive than the average grab-bag, garden variety housemate; like the third occupant; the troubled and gentle lessor to whom we paid rent; who was obviously and admittedly afraid of this guy and was repaid with his contempt.
About the time I left he made an awful mess in the laundry; emptying the oil from the shock absorber struts on his Japanese car and refilling them with axle grease, thereby converting it to a sportier version or so he thought. Some time later I went by the house. He was gone but his car had been rolled and still sat crumpled in the backyard. I know he survived - he must have seen my vehicle back in the area and I received a rambling text message, something about his knuckles getting familiar with my head. This was in regard to a deposition I had made for the other housemate in a court case about the rent. The Greek had run up the phone bill gratuitously and secretly moved out without paying either. He had intimated he had something fun like that planned although I didn't reveal that in the statement. There seems to have been a lot of healthy genetic mixing since the time of the pharaohs and had he not survived the accident, his undamaged skull would have made a great doorstop or footstool.
A similarly bastardized leven is
also the essence of a good sourdough starter. I began mine during a
trial batch of sauerkraut, and at the height of its bubbling ferment I
skimmed a friable white powder off the top along with all the rest of the
scum. This would have been candida yeast, probably albicans (white
it was) but just because you have a name for something doesn't mean it's the same pathogenic organism that will give you thrush or trench foot. These things have broad genetic variations but are opportunistic as they must be to survive. Like the 'Liberal' party is a broad church. The other major part of the starter is lactic
acid bacteria and it is in the balance of these competing organisms
that the rise can be controlled. The warmer the rising, the more
lactic acid is produced which inhibits the yeasts and carbon dioxide
production. In other words there is a point at which the rise stops
anyway, flour quality not withstanding.
My number one criterion
for a 'perfect sourdough' is to avoid all the work of mixing,
kneading and cleaning up, so it is best to have someone else do all
the work; in my case it's a Panasonic bread maker. But since there is
a limited rise, the bread should not be punched down which is
unfortunate because electric bread makers are programmed to do this.
The cheat is simplicity itself.
Use the bread maker basic recipe. This is 350 mls. water; salt, three cups of flour (50% white at least.) Add a tbsp. of oil or butter. Substitute the 50 to 100 gram lump of your starter from last time for yeast (you might try premix but there is a lot of odd gunk in it) and use at least a quarter tsp. of salt. Don't try and do some alternative life-style thing without salt; those organisms don't work well without it and neither do you. You have to replace it in your own body all the time and if you disbelieve try tasting the sweat or urine of yourself or a significant other. And low salt bread tastes like hell too. You may also add a tbsp. of whole or skim milk powder as a treat for the lactic acid bacteria or even better add a teaspoon of sugar which will turbocharge your rise. Punch the menu button until a short 45 minute dough cycle comes up. When that is finished put some flour on your hands, reach in and remove some dough for the next starter, and put it in a glass jar with a lot more space than it takes at this point. Don't screw the lid on tight for reasons that will become apparent. Remove the paddle because you won't need it again and there is no sense having the hole in your loaf. Repair the damage with your fingers, patting the ragged bits flat, spray or wipe the top of the dough with olive oil and put the thing aside until you are happy with the rise and lactic acid content, somewhere between 12 and 24 hours. Cool actually rises slower but better, warmer makes it more sour. Put the starter in the fridge before this, it will grow stronger slowly until next time. I make two loaves simultaneously with 1 breadmaker by doubling the recipe with perhaps 100 mls less water altogether and after the dough is mixed turn it out onto a floured countertop, knead a little bit, divide in two and press into bread pans.
Use the bread maker basic recipe. This is 350 mls. water; salt, three cups of flour (50% white at least.) Add a tbsp. of oil or butter. Substitute the 50 to 100 gram lump of your starter from last time for yeast (you might try premix but there is a lot of odd gunk in it) and use at least a quarter tsp. of salt. Don't try and do some alternative life-style thing without salt; those organisms don't work well without it and neither do you. You have to replace it in your own body all the time and if you disbelieve try tasting the sweat or urine of yourself or a significant other. And low salt bread tastes like hell too. You may also add a tbsp. of whole or skim milk powder as a treat for the lactic acid bacteria or even better add a teaspoon of sugar which will turbocharge your rise. Punch the menu button until a short 45 minute dough cycle comes up. When that is finished put some flour on your hands, reach in and remove some dough for the next starter, and put it in a glass jar with a lot more space than it takes at this point. Don't screw the lid on tight for reasons that will become apparent. Remove the paddle because you won't need it again and there is no sense having the hole in your loaf. Repair the damage with your fingers, patting the ragged bits flat, spray or wipe the top of the dough with olive oil and put the thing aside until you are happy with the rise and lactic acid content, somewhere between 12 and 24 hours. Cool actually rises slower but better, warmer makes it more sour. Put the starter in the fridge before this, it will grow stronger slowly until next time. I make two loaves simultaneously with 1 breadmaker by doubling the recipe with perhaps 100 mls less water altogether and after the dough is mixed turn it out onto a floured countertop, knead a little bit, divide in two and press into bread pans.
The rise will eventually
come close to the top. Where it stops is all you get. Prick gently
here and there with a toothpick to keep the top layer from collapsing if there are gaseous lumps
and bake 45 minutes to an hour (if you like it crusty) at 190 -200 degrees starting in a cool oven or use the
breadmaker again if you are doing a single loaf which will give you an identical result if you
simply let it churn through a whole cycle without the pan and dough
which you delay putting back in until the last hour or thereabouts;
any time after the last punch cycle has finished.
With a whole ecology
evolving at your fingertips some organism will arise in time to
occupy any available niche. So a lot of gluten and many other things
will already be partly metabolized. It will be heavier than you are
used to but less likely to produce that heavy feeling in your stomach
after lunch. No more baker's yeast ever; as long as you cycle it
regularly the starter is immortal yet constantly refining itself.
Just be sure to remember to remove some dough and save it for next
time you bake or you will have been witness to your starter's very
last incarnation. If you are over forty and no longer enchanted with
the new age hypothesis, just save your starter and don't worry about
a few micro-organisms. They were born to die and accordingly have
their own agenda and if it coincides with yours (which it does), you
can find each other and that's beautiful.
*This may be
freely transmitted or reprinted for study or non-commercial purposes
(in a literary sense) if correctly attributed to my blog.
Thank you.GS.
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