Stream Energy

If you investigate Stream Energy or any of the energy sales companies be aware of how energy marketing schemes can affect your pocket.

When signing a contract, you lose a degree of freedom that you may not want to lose when the crunch comes, so move very carefully when signing any contracts for energy.

The Links to Our Own Inner World

Obviously, we know what our world is like in broad visible terms. We see up, down, across, around, and so on in three dimensions. What we perhaps do not grasp is the location of our past and our future, which I claim co-exist. This co-existence of past and future enable the grand cycles of cosmic realities, the world of material, the world of spirit, and the development and experiences of the individual soul. This means that the soul does not die despite what we see as the evident deterioration of our physical selves.

The question is why?

My intuition is that very powerful fields link all the pasts of the universes with all the futures. What we experience as life is a passage across one set of links. Possibly, what we are is light, leptonic light, and it is light travelling so to speak the darkness of our massive, truly massive, world.

Its not that light is moving, but that everything is already there. The light which 'is' the individual soul is exploring a past, present and future that already exists in its fullest form.

The world is so massive that we have no way of comprehending its size.

We think in terms of dimensions, but dimensions are truly the limits of our understanding. Dimensions are the barriers to our observations, the walls to our prison which we call reality.

Out of this understanding, we can draw many intuitive conclusions:

1. We are as it were on islands of awareness in a vast sea of possibilities, so enormous we cannot imagine.
2. We can repeat our lives and re-experience our family associations, and can explore a multitude of the many forms of existence, awareness, possible.
3. Our inner light is exploring our potential realities and can follow many paths of experience in the process.
4. Some of us will repeat a joyful life experience many many times in order to understand it and to enjoy it.
5. BY living true to our inner God, we can build outer and inner realities that give us joy eternally, being saved of the pains of being lost in the vastness of possibilities.
6. The architect of our world has intelligence beyond anything imaginable and so we cannot begin to understand the framework of our repeated realities.
7. Our sense of God is within us individually. God is not something outside our reality, but is within our world though we may not try to recognize the existence of God within us.
8. Our denial of God leads to our choosing of pathways of experience that put us into 'realities' that stress the soul beyond anything we can imagine, and even to the point where it is lost down a meaningless series of cycles ending up as a very partial entity.
9. The meaning of life comes from our potentially very active sense of a single God within our psyche and our constant communication with the inner self that we experience in living.

Thus, in my intuitive Wuh Lax physical world, we have a wonderful reality. My next steps are to see whether the foundations of such a world really do exist.

How Wuh Lax Physics Helps Build the Bridges of Understanding Our Post-Modern Reality

The readers might bear with me a little as I explore with them, the the direction my intuitions guide me about what we are missing in our present interpretations of physical reality as seen through big bang physics and quantum physics.

As some will realize, my starting position with Wuh Lax physics is the notion that light is not moving, but we are. Not only are we exploding outward somewhat as the surface of a balloon expands when it is filled with air, but every part of our world is expanding, and those parts where matter is concentrated are experiencing the more alarming rates of expansion. In a relative sense, the laws of physics hold, but they do so for different reasons than interpreted by conventional physics.

What I see is the reality of all the past and the future existing simultaneously as a single multifaceted entity with a multitude of streams of information linking a multitude of bifurcating realms of reality.

The other aspect of this reinterpretation of physics is that the quantum reality and 'normal' reality are indeed connected through strings, or what I would regard as streams of force. We travel as individuals through a massive reality experiencing only the one that our inner pysche selects. All other exterior realities co-exist, but are not experienced without the cooperation of the 'field' that is our subconscious self.

We are unaware of our inner person except through our dreams. Our inner person nevertheless processes information at amazing speeds well beyond what our integrative consciousness is capable. We are thus governed by an awareness within oursleves of which we are rarely aware.

The Illusive Bridge Between Our Inner and Outer Selves

One of our post-modern challenges is to try to build the elusive bridge(s) between science and mythology in (a) way(s), that are acceptable to the scientific mind as well as the intuitive mind. It is possible, but must be carried out with delicate forbearance.

As the part of us governed by fermionic material reality explodes into nothingness, and as we lose the ability to grasp the totality of our external cosmic existence, we, nevertheless, retain our inner cosmos. Within ourselves, we contain the totality of the past while outside ourselves we also observe the totality of the past. There is need to build a bridge between the two worlds of observation. The outer sequence of events has a rationality that we relate to by way of science and scientific knowledge. The inner sequence of events, our past, is also a reality, but one that we relate to not by means of reason, but by means of intuition and artistic impression.

We are composite beings that have inner and outer vision. When we see inside ourselves we do so with less precision and we associate such vision with inspiration and symbolism. What we may fail to recognize is the continuation of all our experiences in life within the inner realms of our reality. This is because our past energies are impressed within us and within the amazing world of the very small. The very small is our past, not only in a cosmic sense, but in a measurable and definable scientific sense.

Our only problem is that while science has concentrated its efforts in the logic of our exterior world, it has neglected the vast interior realms within which we have a storehouse of information and forces yet to be discovered and explored. This is part of the message of quantum physics, but it is also the message of our ancestors, who can communicate with us only from within and never from our exterior.

What we do is project our inner reality onto our external plane of experience. We do this through the sighting of ghosts and through the experience of dreams.

Wuh Lax Primar Dissonance, Rationality and the Search for Meaning

At Sunday lunch, I was engaged in a heated discussion about 'truth'. Across the table, my friend stated that truth exists. My position, a very unpopular one, is that we each have a sense of the truth, but no one truth exists.

Opinions

This is the argument that has often been put to me. Arthur, what you say is only your opinion, and nothing more than your opinion. Everyone has an opinion and your opinion is just one of many opinions out there. Live with it! You have only an opinion.

Fairness

Well! What can one say to that? My thinking is that somehow I know better than the average person and thus my opinion is worth more in finding out the truth. My experience is of remembering that I was right when almost everyone else was wrong. No! I remember most often when I was right, when everyone else was wrong. My opinion does not seem to me to be worth just one view. But, then I have to think deeply about this and about the way society makes its determination of what is the best or what is the truth.

In our democratic elections, we have a system of one vote per person. We see this as a fair system, and it meets our basic requirement for fairness, that of equality.

Political process and opinions

In society, your opinion starts out as just one among many, but if you are elected to a political position because of the democratic process of one vote per person, then your views, all of them, are not just one of many, but one with a premium, a higher status. The higher status is accorded from your being an elected person, a chosen one.

The opinions of elected people is most often deemed of greater worth than the opinions of individuals as individuals. In a sense, the elected person is a hero, and you may realize that heroes tend to be worshiped. The greater the majority in votes going to the elected person, the more that person is likely to be seen as a hero. Out of the election of heroes, we achieve a peace of mind. By having a hero leading us, and making decisions for us, we sense a closer association with what we see as the truth.

Dissonance

It is subtly assumed that the hero is closer to the truth than any individual. However, there is a contrary view that we hold because we know that we search for the ideal of equality. We know that the hero is just one of us and that the opinion of the hero is no better than any one of us. Within our mind, there is a dissonance between the mathematics of equality and the process of electing a hero to make our decisions for us.

Rationalizing

Because of the dissonance in our mental calculations, we have the further process of rationalizing. Very quickly, we attach all sorts of reasons for the hero to be 'the one', who is closer to the truth and the one to lead us. We say, for example, that the person is more gifted. By such rationalizations, we move away from our notions of equality to our reasoning that the world of equality is not where its at. We make an inner assumption that the world is basically unequal, and that the world needs heroes, those that can make decisions for us.

Inequality and the Bell Curve of Opinions

The political process just one of many ways that we 'elect' our heroes to represent us. While still pushing the idea of equality, we introduce something statistical, such as the bell curve and say that in society there are those that are at the top end of the bell curve and those people are closer to the truth and will make better decisions for us. Very often, we do not examine the bell curve notion very deeply, but just assume that it is passed on from generation to generation through some genetics inherited by those we assume to be further along the top end of the bell curve.

So it is that societies making decisions move away from one person one opinion in order to get at some notion of the truth. In the electoral process of choosing a hero, we move away from fairness to reason and rationality, but in the process we can lose something. We can disassociate ourselves from the process of ever possessing the truth. By disassociating ourselves from the process of possessing the truth, we may also stop seeking the truth. Our society may stop searching for what is real and truthful. It may replace the notion of searching for truth with the process of searching for the hero.

The Search for Meaning

When we have our heroes make our decisions for us and seek the truth for us, we lose the meaning of truth. We assume that others have that meaning and that our reality has that meaning because they have that meaning. In reality, our heroes give us something that comes from outside us and we thereafter seek to suppress our inner dissonance with it in order to be loyal members of society. In reality, we suppress our understanding of the truth until the next opportunity to vote. If we do not seek the truth, our vote becomes a popularity contest for the election of a hero who can take us further and further away from the truth.

Carl Jung and Gender Issues as Introduced by David Tacey

If you have not already done so, you might take a walk to your nearest bookstore and pick up a copy of David Tacey's book How to Read Jung. Alternatively, you can spend years not really understanding Carl Jung as I did. What Tacey does is remarkable, almost as remarkable as the books by Jung himself. I heard Tacey, an Australian, explain his understandings of Carl Jung recently on Canadian radio in an interview.

Reading Tacey's book led me to reexamine the form and nature of my own reality and fantasies, quite appropriate as I develop plots within my own Wuh Lax book series further over the next few months.

What a student of 20th century history puzzles over is the question why Christian societies produced such monsters as Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini. Carl Jung explains this as a failing in Christianity. About two years ago, I was asked the same question by a Jew of the persecution by Christians of Jews throughout history. It is not an easy question to answer. Is there something seriously absent in Christianity that those professing top be Christian perpetrate such serious crimes against humanity and neighbours.

We take an untenable position if we think that it is just Christianity that seems to be missing essential ingredients. Only two days ago, a young man from Plymouth was placing a bomb in a restaurant in Exeter, Devon, England. A recent convert to Islam, the young man was evidently missing something in his religion.

It seems to me that what Carl Jung wrote on the subject of our dark side is relevant to our understanding the nature of our future world and our being able to cope with the forces that are present in the human psyche, if only poorly understood. In trying to be scientific, our modern science logic is missing something as serious as what is missing in Christianity. It has to do with human creativity and the expression of our dark side.

As with many things, our nature individually has a lot to do with our sex, our gender. Jung shows how gender affects our perceptions, particularly those that occur below our consciousness. It is a feature of modern society that we are being told to get in touch with our other side. If we are a male, this means getting in touch with our feminine side. What Carl Jung suggests is that the extent to which we are male or female is only a matter of degree. The problem comes when we as humans do not recognize that we are both male and female at the same time. If we assume that we are only one of these two sexes, we hide the other from conscious view. Many of us do not ever see the alternative or dual component of our sexual makeup.

On a very large scale, the Christian and Muslim religions have strayed in their understanding of what we are sexually, and this absence is the mainspring of the missing component in these religions. In both Islam and Christianity, when we have lost the feminine part of our nature, the nature of every member of our religions, we have lost the truth behind these religions and enter a world of fantasy that leaves us groundless in creating the balance that society in any historical period demands. As a result, the vast majority of people in Christian and Muslim societies have be out of balance and tipping toward insanity. Not everyone, only those who have lost touch with both sexual sides of their being!

If you are one of those people who have lost touch, it is not too late to recognize that you are made up of two sexes and you need to give expression of both in your personality. Only by giving expression to both sides of your sex will you achieve balance. In a later blog, I may explain the nightmares that might result if you ignore both sexes of your nature. Alternatively, you might begin by reading Tacey's book and buy a few of the precious gems written by Carl Jung, 'the non-scientist who knew more than science'.

Credit Crunch Spin

Well the spin artists are at work to explain why the economists failed to foresee and prevent the present worldwide credit crunch. The fact is that any idiot could see what was coming and it does not take an economist to add house prices, energy prices, and interest costs into an inflation index that actually measures the cost of living. People were told inflation was low when it was raging at unprecedented levels. Does the modern economist not know what inflation is? Nor Brown, nor Greenspan! It is no excuse not to act when 'you' know how to act. Why are the spin people presently making excuses why 'you' did not act when 'you' should have acted.

Is it because of the collective greed of those wishing subconsciously for their property prices to rise and then letting them go where they should not have gone. Why does the inflation index these days not measure inflation, nor deflation?

No! The reason the credit crunch occurred was because of the inability of American and British financial authorities. A shrinkage of the financial houses away from New York and London is called for. The financial world seems unable to read history and I doubt whether many economists every studied economic history. What has happened is shameful and should never have taken place. So much for the international watchdogs and the supervisory role of the central banks. They have failed and that is all there is to it. Rather than avoiding inflation, they created it and rather than helping us, they have sown the seeds of the next war. What has happened and what is happening is positively appalling!

Mr. Soros and the Head of the European Central Bank! We owe them a debt of gratitude for seeing through the clouds and surrounding fogs of London, San Francisco, and New York.

Redesigning Towns and Removing the Automobile

You guessed it! The automobile has to go, away, far away, zap! But, what do we do for an encore?

My suggestion is that we build trains again, but ones that can go around corners with shorter carriages and more modular in design to fit in almost anywhere, and to run on electricity. We can rethink our town centers to make them castles of commercial and social activity. By so doing, we will acknowledge that the world of the automobile is a dead duck!

With the present automobile, our problem is the need for petrol/gas and plenty of parking space. Big shopping centers tend to be on the outskirts of population areas rather than in the town centers, which as a result die from lack of patronage. Our challenge with cars is backup space, as with any port. Think of a city center as a port, or port of call. What it needs is arrival and departure areas that feed into the rest of the commercial community as well as providing the system for getting people to and from home, or to and from work.

These days, we tend to think of efficiency in terms of fast travel, but we forget efficiency in terms of getting people to points where they would like to be. If we were to redesign our towns around the community station, we would really be able to get into a more efficient class of design for our travel systems. By building trains that can go almost anywhere we can replace the motor vehicle almost completely while saving money and energy in the longer term. Even if our trains were to run on roads, we could start the process of change our concept of what a train is to build around light-weight curvilinear rather than heavy-weight rectilinear design.

During the next twenty five years we need to redesign our transport systems for small communities and create commercial castles around the ports of arrival and departure. If we think of new designs for small train stations surrounded by activities that people can get to easily by foot after travelling by rail, we can begin to chip away at the dominance of the motor car in our collective preference functions.

To do any engineering redesign on the scale I have in mind would require that we let go our aging love for the automobile. Honestly, the car is not where it should be at. We can invent an automobile heaven and recycle our gas/petrol guzzling vehicles into efficient clean electrical transporters of a myriad of future designs. Face it, the age of gas and petrol is not where its at. We need to think ahead and build for the future by redesigning our town centers and our trains.

The TV Series Lost : Doing and Making Decisions

One of the frustrating aspects about the TV series Lost is that you are an outsider to the predicament of the people who have crashed onto an island in the South Pacific. All of the characters have serious character flaws, which are obvious to viewers, and only gradually do these flaws become apparent to the characters themselves. As a viewer, you become part of the mix. Unless you are extremely detached from what goes one around you, the Lost sequences help you to become emotionally involved with the characters, if only in your desire to move the story line along.

In many respects, our own lives are very much like the series because we frequently observe ourselves making decisions and doing things for which we do not really have any control, for a huge variety of reasons. There is, nevertheless, no excuse available that we do not have the power of choice. The grand illusion of being a human being in the modern age is that you do have control over your actions, and that you are therefore ultimately responsible for everything that you do. There is no room in the modern legal framework for the notion that your actions are predetermined or that you are being controlled.

• When I worked in Washington, I would pass almost every day a man carrying a sign that read to the effect that your thoughts were being controlled and that a secret department of the government of the US had discovered a fool proof method of thought control.


• In the series, Torchwood, there is an episode where an agent of Torchwood is given an amulet by an alien. Wearing the amulet confers the ability to hear the thoughts of others nearby. This new sense gives one an amazing power over others.

Our reality is that we make assumptions about how much we are in control of our thoughts and our actions. The assumptions may not be correct for they are only assumptions.

My feeling, though I have no proof to offer, is that our assumptions that we are in control the majority of time, do not apply to our reality. In other words, we are not really in control, but we have the grand illusion that we are.

Behaviour Arising from Our Subconscious

Many of my readers may have experienced the strange feeling of being controlled by a magician or hypnotist. Deep inside our brain, the older part of our brain, there is possibly an area that results in human behaviour a bit like the behaviour of a moth. Do something to this area of the brain and the response is reliable and automatic. Touch the amygdala as in brain surgery, and the patient may experience anger or fear. Many of our habits have their origins in this type of autonomic response, for example, our breathing. It is a fact, that we have to be shown how to breath deeply. We do not normally breath deeply 'automatically'. When we do, we benefit, but few of us do such breathing.

The autonomic system is only part of the areas of the brain that carry out actions without conscious thought. In fact, we would probably find that most of what we do or decide to do requires little or no thought, and for good reason. Thought slows us down, and possibly those humans that spent a lot of time thinking did not survive the rigors of early life on this planet. Certainly, natural selection would probably weed out those that thought a lot. What remains is a substantial population of human beings that don't really think very much. There is a lot that we would not do were we to think about about it.

Our Predisposition not to Think

We, humans, probably have, as well, a predisposition not to think. The implications of this are quite staggering. What it means is that we do not presently exercise much control over our actions and our decisions. Much of who we are and think we are, is automatically determined. We humans are much like moths and cows though we have the grand illusion that we think and that we have control and that we decide. Our reality is that we do not think, we do not act on the basis of thought, and we exercise very little control.

In the words of Arthur Koestler, we are sleepwalking our way through our lives.

GOD Blog

One of the worrying things about the way people approach God is the assumption that nature and God are somehow the same, but this is to have a naive moment. Nature has its own rules and at best might be seen as a creation of God, but is not the source, evidence, or even the actuality of God.

The myth is that God created the world and he saw that it was good. We can reject that idea, and say that the world could be much better. We even have the imperative to make the world a much better place. Indeed, it seems that we have a role from God to make our world within nature much better and to work with nature and our own natures to improve upon them. The end of the story is not that we are a product of God, but that we are potentially capable of producing good, and bettering the world that we live in.

It is doubtful that nature, as we see it now, is more than a very minor aspect of what we might conceive of as a God-based or a God-driven world. A world that includes God would be better, and we see that nature is not very good. We can work with nature to make it more like what we would interpret as good or benign. God's natural world is neither good, nor benign, even though we exist within it and derive most of our experience from it.

What we have experienced as the presence of God, or would create for ourselves as an image of God has what might be seen as natural aspects, but that is because of God's association with nature. What we see as nature is not the end product of God. If we thought that, we would probably become faithless.

The reality is that if we were to interpret God through nature, we would become very peculiar entities. This is because nature is so closely associated with creation, the materials of creation, the tools of creation, and our own participation in limited acts of creation, reproduction, and 'above all' imitation.

Our nightmare is that we have invented God to meet our need for a God without the proviso of knowing that the God we have created is our myth and not really God.

The Nature of Our World: Wuh Lax Universe Expansion and Everett's Multispace Fragmentation

One of the interesting aspects of our Wuh Lax world is the permiation of light throughout all the manifestations within each cycle of each multispace fragment.

Presence of Light

Light is the one constant that must attempt to break into each world instance, where the number of world instances is beyond our imagination and continues to grow with each cycle.

Not only is the recycling of the fragments continuous, but each has 'real' fermionic content. The fermionic content is a manifestation of a field influence. Each is unique and obeys the 'exclusion principle'.

Rapid Expansion Creates Space as 'We: All Things' Gather Speed.

The gathering of speed allows for the Everett type fragmentation.

To imagine what is happening, one has to remember that each fragment of the instances of our universe involuntarily partakes in an explosion of itself at such a rate that space is created for each and every 'potential' instances. This is the Everett content of the explosive expansion that we see around us and experience every day and which shapes our gravity, our 'time's, our 'spaces' and all our relativities.

Our World is Much More Complex than our Initial Imaginings.

The nature of our world with its many Wuh Lax Multiverse Vectors does not rely on significant elements being wrapped within their cosmic sphere of influence, but rather in fields of influence creating a multitude of structures that tend to get repeated in a non-linear fashion, i.e. not exactly repeated but frequently close enough that differences are hard to detect. The issue is whether these occupy the same space, or whether they are strung out over a vast continuing expansion of space.

There are obviously different ways of conceptualizing this. The reality is hard to conceptualize since what we sense is not reality, but aspects of our boundedness and a partial image of reality that allows us to interpret structures and to gain a sense of limited control.

The Challenges of Tragedy in Asia

One of my observations is the ease with which our minds protect us. We are not anything like what we think we are. It is the mind's ability to construct a rational world that both excites and frustrates us, which makes us human. When we observe what has happened in China and Myanmar, we can see more clearly why the human brain has an automatic shield than engulfs and buffers our emotions and reactions to extreme change.

Our Grief at What Has Happened in Asia

As humans, we belong to a species that has experienced extreme hardship and pain. It is the culmination of all the suffering and grief of previous people living their lives in extremely bad situations that has produced the human mind and given us the gift of peace at times when there is no peace.

As humans, we share a common past in which there was enormous suffering. We presently share in the grief and hardship of our friends in Myanmar and China as they struggle to survive. We know of their pain and we are aware of their grieving. We grieve with them. We share their suffering because, as human beings, we share and have a common past of extreme suffering by man, and this is what makes us human.

It is this shared past of grief and hurting that makes us aware and makes us human. We care because we have knowledge of pain. We love because we have the experience of peace and hope that others can bring to our damaged worlds. Our hearts go out to the people of Myanmar and of China. Let us help you in your grief and in the challenges that you face. Working together there is more hope! You are in our thoughts.

The Nature of Nature

Nature's Characteristics and Way

In my earlier blogs, I have emphasized that our world and the nature of the world that surrounds and sustains us, follows the natural laws of premature death. Although nature is there to give us food, clothing, shelter, information and comforting, it can not and does not work to the advantage of everyone. As a result, within nature there are systems and processes that are extremely unkind and lethal.

Overall, those that do well within our natural environment do so not because they are particularly bright or alert, but because they are relatively fortunate and are located and associated with relatively more benign situations, times and events. Nature, even in the long term, is not about natural selection, nor is it about survival of the fittest, it is more about relative predestination.

That does not mean that one should be fatalistic, far from it. What is does mean is that your position within nature is relative to everyone else's, and every other entity's existence within nature. What moves natural processes is relatively, but not completely, unpredictable. There is scope to extend ones survival against premature death, which nature demands as a normal course of things.

One aspect of our natural world is that living systems can be created and destroyed, and that living systems are not necessarily like an independent body. Life is more than our visible physics even though we tend to see living things are completely dependent on things physically obvious.

Life and Nature

We know that the nature of nature is about the life and death of living systems. These systems may or may not have self awareness, but they have the capacity to live and reproduce. They also have the possibility of being lucky, being located in places and situations that will further their survival and will lead to benign growth of very fragile communities of existence. One of the capacities of those systems that will survive is that they are not only self aware, but that they are aware also of their good luck, and do not assume that it is anything but good luck.

As the products of nature, we are at the mercy of many processes that we, ourselves, in the here and now, can not ever understand. There just isn't enough time for us. Later on, others may understand, but we have limited understanding and have to deal with the world living our lives within our limited understanding.

Gratitude and Trying to Protect Yourself, Your Family, and Community

The most important element of your survival is gratitude for whatever opportunity that you receive within your community of survival. It may be very small and very fleeting.

What gratitude does is affect attitude and attitude brings you closer to understanding your 'true' situation. Without the right attitude, you will predispose yourself towards nature's rule of premature death. Being grateful, means that you focus on understanding what you can, and that you recognize the fragility of your situation, your life and your present luck at still surviving. Being grateful should mean that you reinforce those things that would strengthen your chances of survival because you are aware of the fragility of your predicament. The less you are grateful and understand your fragile situation, the more likely you will be to die prematurely. This appears to be nature's law.

Comments on Art Magazines

The following comments on two of my favourite art magazines were a feature of my blogspot for April 2008. They are now retired to this blog page.

International Artist # 60

In painting, one is very close to the psychology of colour, and one notices the dominant colour mix in every picture one reviews. The thing is that we like a picture partly because we have a preference for specific colours and very specific colour combinations. There is a whole science emerging from Dr. Max Luscher that details using factorial analysis those vectors of association, mostly subconscious, that drive our preference functions. These can be related to our age, our state of health, our monthly period, the time of day, our internal clock, our genetic makeup, our family relationships, our stress, and numerous other factors that contribute to our psychology.

The colours of the art we like and dislike, thus can be thought of as an accurate deep mirror of our health and psychological well being. It matters what your colour preferences are! In awarding prizes for competitions, the judges are driven by colour preferences as well as by a myriad of other more logical measures of an images value to them. The choices are inevitably subjective, and often differ from what you or I might like, for whatever reason. I put this to the test. There is a competition of still life flowers and gardens. Will I agree with the judges?

In international artist issue 60, I see lots that I like. There is a selection of images of more than a dozen finalists. Out of the 12 plus shown, I would not have chosen the Grand Prize Winner by Elaine Ruettiger. I preferred number 2, by Tracy Williams to it. Part of the reason is the colour mix. I once used to have lunch regularly at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. There was a still painting on the wall with an orange yellow mix that I was addicted to. Don't ask me why, but I would just love to sit alongside that image listening to the waterfall, for those who know the Gallery intimately. It is an amazing place to eat, and the salmon they do is usually very good, and not too pricey.

My next choice would have been a finalist by Sandy Delehanty of California. The texture of her image and the colour mix really get to me. What an amazing watercolour!

It was interesting to note that many of the winning images we done on a black background, which reinforces my theory about colour. Black is a strengthener for any colour preference. More than enough of the finalists were white black offsets, which suggests an inclination of the judges towards fairness. I can't argue with that, but the rest of the population is not all that fair.

AMERICAN art COLECTOR # 30

The American art Collector is a magazine with loads of advertising for collectors who want a quick glimpse of genres of images that show houses my have for viewing. Of the adverts, my favourite was that on page 229 for Lindsay Goodwin's image Table Setting at Johnathan Club. There is something about a seductive room with light on a table set for diners. It may be the time of day, such as just before a meal. I remember the wonderful settings and dining rooms on board the vessel Queen Mary 3.

Burma, the Cyclone Nagris, and the Impotence of the Modern Hero

My heart and sympathy go out to the many many thousands who lost their lives to the 'Myanmar' cyclone. I find that new broadcasts and web images are inadequate to bring home to me the enormity of what has happened. Last week, I watched the BBC weather person showing the cyclone hovering over the ocean. It seemed so far away from Myanmar at that point. This is a strange cyclone was the comment. To the weather person, the cyclone had a nature of its own and just seemed to be staying put and not going anywhere.

The cyclone had grown to an immense scale by the time it struck the Irrawaddy delta of Burma several days later. If one examines the news images coming back from Myanmar, one is impressed with the ferocity of this storm, which must easily compare in scale with the one that hit New Orleans.

What one does not see is the true scale of the horror that this massive storm brought to these lovely people. As in New Orleans, the tidal wave or flow seems to have been the real killer of human beings. As in New Orleans, the true scale of what happened as water engulfed people was not known for many days. As in New Orleans, the authorities seem to have been unable to respond adequately, and though it is still early days for these people, one might hazard a guess that there are no modern heroes coming to their rescue.

On Monday, May 5, 2008, the BBC said that over 10,000 were feared dead after Nagris. By Thursday, May 8, 2008, the death toll speculation number has risen to over 100,000 people, a number that is so large that it staggers the human brain. It is a number so large that we cannot even conceptualize it. Our reality is that we do not know how much suffering has gone on in Myanmar over the past week. My guess is that even if we did we would not be able to comprehend it. Our brains are not equipped to understand misery on such a scale on a community that is largely in poverty as in Nyaung U, Pagan.

Images of Burma before the cyclone give some idea of what a cyclone can do because the new images will look very different. A picture on the internet of a railway station in Taikkyi shows some of the people that the storm would have affected. Compare what you find now for the Dhamma-ya-za-ka Zedi pagode. Perhaps many of the beautiful Bagan pagodas will have been destroyed. What we are going to see will no longer be images like these. Our experience in North America of what a cyclone can do comes largely from our experience with New Orleans, and the experience was not a good one!


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We can see where people have their farms alongside the delta waters. How vulnerable these people must be to a major cyclone. We can't even imagine the time it will take for them to recover. The cost of reconstruction is prohibitive. Remembering that in the Iraq war many have lost their lives over a longish period. In Myanmar and in these delta areas, as many people have possibly lost their lives and livelihood in a matter of days.

Tamara de Lempicka - The National Gallery in London

This morning is a Lempicka morning, as I try to recreate some art deco. My canvas has the greys in place, and while I wait for the oil to firm a bit, I will put down a few thoughts about this wonderful artist. In the event that you have not already experienced some of the beautiful images of the mid-war period created by artists such as Tamara, you should plan a visit to London to see them first hand.

What she does is ad value to the vision that we see of ourselves so that we can never see ourselves the same way again. By taking the ordinary and making it extraordinary, Tamara had the amazing gift of transforming an otherwise ugly world into something beautiful. When we would have ignored what it is that we possess as humans that gives us 'chic' or 'pizazz,' Tamara knew how to extract it.

We all have moles and bumps, bursts and curves. Tamara was able to see these for what they did and while our proclivity would be to damage our self image by focusing on the rough edges, she was able to enhance our form and show it for what it could be. Simple objects of life, she gave a value, they never had. In simplicity and spareness, there is beauty and she was able to find it, enjoy it, and paint it.

Tamara belongs to that period of history when the world suffered in the worst way, and while others created images of determination and iron will, she produced a view of the softer side of life. The thirties were a period of conflict in which imagery played an important role in shaping loyalties and values. While the Soviets focused on red and yellows, and the Nazis on reds and blacks, Tamara is able to enhance sensuality with fleshy images and a sympathetic use of green, the colour of independence. This we see a self portrait of Tamara de Lempicka driving a green roadster which for her symbolized the independence of the female spirit that the fast automobile afforded.

Judge for yourself. Have a look at the way Tamara uses her greens.

Why the British and American Financial Authorities are Actually Doing Nothing

Why nothing is really being done in our financial world has to do with power. Power resides in the hands of the very rich, and they are in control of policy, if not directly, then indirectly. Power in America and Britain revolves around electoral processes and a desire to see what jobs are left, remain. This is a false hope.

We have to release the money and let it float away to the off shore and the oil producing havens where it won't do so much damage. Britain and America are building a future based on very weak foundations.

We see Clinton, Obama, and McCain debating and acknowledge that the Fed has to be even handed before an election. We see Cameron and Brown debating and recognize that the Bank of England has to be even handed before a likely election.

We watch tourist paradises being built in deserts.

We see China wanting water from Tibet to flow on without incident. We see the Yangsee River water diverted to the Yellow River.

We see the majority of the world's work force receive much less than what seems fair.

In the United States and in the United Kingdom, the mood is tending towards change. In the UK, the Labour party has sunk almost to an historically low level for council by-elections. Obviously, some people are hurting badly. In the United States, the mood is to do something different from whatever George Bush did. If he likes his coffee one way, you can be almost sure most everyone wants it the other, at least temporarily.

If one wanted to terrorize the two countries the way to do it would be to do as the financial authorities presently are doing, that is nothing that would actually get deserving people in the middle ranks somewhat wealthier. For whatever reason, income distributions are not moving in the direction they need to. It seems that the faster we grow the economy, the worse things become overall. Why is that?

The problem is not that we don't know that the very rich are getting overly rich, but that we are being black mailed into doing nothing about it for fear that they can make our situation much worse. The truth is that in the short term they can, but ultimately we need to have policies that produce a higher average income and a lower extremely high income that is obscene in a modern age.

Have we not had any progress in economic thought on this issue by any political force, or does the political world just drift along in acceptance, or is it fear?

Removing the Protective Shield Associated with Mortgage Lending

How many people in the UK remember the Big Bang? Well, the Big Bang occurred a few decades ago, and represented a radical change in the way high street banks and other financial entities could operate in the UK, allowing them greater scope to enter new markets and offering foreign financial entities increased room to do 'their thing.' The problem with this whole process was that some of the foreign banks were American, and doing their thing is very different from the way things are normally done in London. You might as well say that their is no rule book because in the States if it isn't illegal and it can make you money, you go out and do it. Perhaps, you do some of the illegal things as well. Innovation in finance begins in America, after all, they have the moxy.

It was a measure to increase competition and its resulted in banks competing directly with building societies for the business of home loans and mortgages. With this change, the building societies essentially transformed themselves into banks.

Of course, the British banks were delighted because they could engage in the business of longer term lending and make huge profits without as much risk as lending to business, which they were frightened to do. Actual lending to business outside of the housing market is risky or didn't you know. And, so ended the protective shield associated with mortgage lending.

Now the world, and especially Britain, has caught a Stateside disease of profligate lending, it looks as though we will go through all the symptoms of this disease. We could, as the authorities are now doing, pretend the disease can be fed and driven away, but that is not to understand the nature of the disease. No, to get to the disease the protective shield for the consumer must come up again, and a higher penalty for profligate lending charged. Yes, interest rates will have to rise!

Hemzel - The German Artist that has a Painting in the National Gallery of Art in London

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I am somewhat puzzled at not being able to find any information on the web about the German artist Hemzel, who has a painting in the National Gallery of Art in London. My first thoughts are that I have memorized his name incorrectly, but don't think so. In any event, this artist has this painting that I saw in the Gallery earlier this week. I know this blog is going to receive a lot of hits 'eventually' because there is a dearth of information available about this artist. When I tried to find a reference for him in the Gallery bookshop, I came away with blanks. Look at what you get from a Google search of Hemzel. Possibly, the note under the painting spelt the name incorrectly. How strange!

Why should I be concerned about the obscurity of Hemzel? I am concerned because I liked his work. I could find only a single image of the artist in the National Gallery of Art in London, if you just happen to be there. I keep thinking that I must have done something wrong. Copied his name down incorrectly, or something. How can information about an artist in the National Gallery be so sparce, especially as he appears to have been such a good landscape artist?

What I liked about the image was the wonderful mix of colour and detail. He was obviously interested in representing real space and could capture detail very well. His image, which I can't show because photography in the National Gallery of Art in London is not allowed ... which only helps to keep some great artists obscure. It would seem!

A few things about his image! Hemzel seems to be able to get croud scenes to look like croud scenes, even crouds of leaves on trees seem like crouds of leaves on trees. The colours are vibrant and the image memorable. Well, if like me, you appreciate that sort of thing.

I'll give you a clue. The Hemzel painting is in the same room as a nude image by the Italian artist Hayez. The Hayez picture is awesome, if only because of the way the eyes of the nude follow you. Very entrancing and seductive, which is exactly what the artist intended. Obviously, Hayez knew much about the psychology of art.

One thing to note. The internet image of the Hayez painting is rubbish compared with the real thing. The only way that you will enjoy the image for its beauty is by visiting the National Gallery of Art in London and viewing it. Be there! I might just be standing nearby admiring also, the Hemzel image!