coffee futures.

or commodities and the war on drugs.( or what is now no longer called the war on drugs)

futures and commodities are the same thing..

nah..

coffee cocaine cocoa.. the boston tea party. coffee and the price .. prohibition prohibition.. slavery. pressure.. ratm..(rage against the machine..) gary webb.

the chinese I use to stay with drank tea. Mrs. Huang, one old northern lady used to say.. coffee is bad .. tea is good. it wasn’t some kind of economically driven prejudice ..favoring tea over coffee producers as I first suspected…. it was more about health . still we can only believe the studies that indicate that coffee isn’t so bad for you.. see wiki.

in the supermarket the cheapest kilo bag of coffeebeans I could find was au $15. I went to get some a few days ago.. I didn’t even check if it was Arabica or robusta. I don’t drink it so much.

people say its really really cheap.. coffee I mean... years of intensive work and land use for very little return with all the profits going to speculators…. the colombian farmers pulled out their plants and put in a cocaine crop instead. . I wonder why? years and years of rapacious exploitation by monopsonists? some kind of payback?? cant blame them really. business gone a bit bad. they say coffee futures are a pretty good bet… I don’t know what cocaine futures are worth.

for some reason i was thinking about Guantanamo bay when I woke up this morning and the legacy of the bush admin. ( maybe it was a picture of david hicks I saw…) but then I thought…mmmm best deal with the legacy of the Clintons first.. and the ‘war on drugs’. but then I realized that it was Nixon who started it.. but when exactly did the sorry story of u.s. ‘strategic’ involvement in south and central america really begin ??? the feelings generated in places like El Salvador.. Guatemala.. Honduras.. chile.. the list is so long.. the cia involvement. contras and drugs.. the murders.. direct and by proxy.. the list is very long. very duplicitous . very brutal.

cuba.. .. pull the curtain away and there really seems to be a pile of very dirty laundry indeed. bloody filthy laundry.

i dont know if anyone else sees the similarities to the british opium wars/ involvement in china. ( the ol' kick 'em while they're down policy)

its no wonder that movies like the pirates of the carribean are so popular. .. i’m serious. its an old trick. point the finger at someone or something else. confuse the situation. obfuscate. distract. evade.

it’s a can of worms.. its no wonder the usa doesn’t recognise the authority of the world court..

the truth however will out.

people qualified with real knowledge of the situation have written and acted.

hugo chavez for example thought george bush was satan. he certainly didn’t make a secret about it. heheheh. spend even a short time finding out why and the reasons are pretty clear.

believing that obama can solve the problem is like believing in santa claws. stuff like this will take years and years to come out in the wash.

don’t worry too much about the coffee futures,, cocaine leaves too deep a stain.

there is a ad for the movie spun above. seen it?

大金山 big gold mountain.

Or chinese for beginners.

‘The more you learn the more you realize you don’t know’… is a cliché.. though at times the bitter truth.. The more I learn about china the more I realize how it is very different to where I come from..

I was born on a certain australian ex-goldfield and grew up there. They had been as rich fields as you get, attracting (mostly) golddiggers and spivs from all over the globe in the 19^th century.

Many came from china. There is a forgotten cemetery with hundreds of overgrown chinese graves in that town . exquisitely cut granite headstones like posts with finely carved characters now at weird angles.. some broken.. some fallen right over. There was a kind of redbrick structure like a large postbox that rumour had it was used to sacrifice a pig to the ancestors.. I don’t know what it was for. I went there a few times as a kid coz the remains of a great-grandfather of mine were also interred there. (in the catholic section).

By the time I arrived on the planet the gold had gone and so had the chinese. There was maybe one or two families of chinese descent in the region.. government policy officially known as ‘the white Australia policy’ didn’t allow the women to come. So the chinese diggers went back to hong kong ( a british colony at the time) or perished on the foreign soil they mined. There had been a china-town ghetto but it had basically vanished. Or was way underground.

It was a gold town that had burnt out leaving behind little but its great wall of bigotry . I look at it as a microcosm and a shithole from which the lotus doth grow.. hehehe.

I left it behind and as an undergrad in the big city, shared house with chinese (prc) students. I began to learn a few words of kitchen mandarin. (1980) we got along very well.. J

One of the strangest stories I have ever heard about the chinese is that they are descended from people from one of the islands of atlantis who, after their island sank, settled around one of the rivers in the peoples republic of today.. around an hui province. This is a myth* about the origional chinese. long long 龍龍 ago. frankly, i dont think the fundamentals have changed much since then.. There have been poetic points of culmination and low points like the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s and 70s which basically outlawed traditional Chinese culture. It is a bitter memory for many I have spoken with.

(I really feel I have to watch my words at this point. Here)

by the start of last century they had fallen to such a low point that the revolution of mao zedong was the revolution that they had to have.

The point about the descent from Atlantis is that the Chinese don’t owe anything to anyone in terms of fundamentals. They have their own. They have come to expression in people like lao zi and Confucius and in the lines on the art of the tang dynasty... the ancestors resonate very deeply with the teaching of the Buddha ….the buddha is said to have learned from lao zi himself a mandarin and sage who disappeared off the radar riding on the back of a yack some time in the first millennium at the age of 300 and something. Hehehe. China has its own sense of direction. Its own language, philosophy, literature, cuisine, dynamic, law, economy, the works..

The Qin dynasty ( whose final days are depicted so colorfully in the movie 'the last emperor ') wasn’t chinese.. they were Manchu and ran down a lot of what had been built up from earliest times.. that was really when the rot set in.. They way outstayed their welcome. Best not to confuse them with the chinese who tried to be rid of them on more than one occasion. (boxers)

.

han chinese is a culture independent of the Tibetan and the Indian both also ancient. .. .. maybe they came from some other islands. You would have to ask the ghosts of time.

My feeling is that one either admires chinese civilization or one is ignorant of it.

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* when I say myth I mean another dimension of reality. The myth from one angle is the absolute truth which the exemplars on the planet imitate.. the exemplars are the fakes.. just trying to approximate the ideal. Maybe you aren’t interested in neoplationsm.. I don’t know what you are doing here then.

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li ching yuen and the money supply.

First of all .. the economics business for the day is soi disant in the graph above right... your guess about where it is going is as good as mine. its so far beyond the danger level that the thing is going to melt. obviously. as soon as the fecal matter hits the recirculation device.

J.M. Keynes is remembered mostly for his position on government intervention in the market. not many people I know have read his general theory.

He is also accredited with the quip that in the long run we are all dead.

Keynes was a successful trader. He made a heap out of the market. But his top job was as a politician. .... he authored works on economics as well. He was a statesman and an ambassador. he had enemies who still say dreadful things about him.

Now. I want to talk about longevity today not because it is something that occupied keynes. It is a concern of every true economist. Hehehe.

Of course humans are polarised in their emotional selves and are wont to go to extremes.

Animal spirits tend to rule.. So one eats herself to death the other smokes. Deadly sins are all the rage: its nothing new.

>>>yet some take it as a task to control the emotions and become polarised in the reasoning self. This is where philosophy comes into the picture.<<<<

death is very hush hush where I come from.. the reason I have discovered is because it is usually one’s own excesses that kill the physical self and . well …people are ashamed. It’s a human trait.. we have to be forgiving of our humanity but by the same philosophy we have to try harder. :)

.. Misadventure accounts for very few cats losing their lives.. they seldom lose it that way.. it is the bad habits of a sedentary life that wreck a cat.. too much whiskas and cream licking

.. Lying around in front of the heater.. tv. It gives a cat the wrong idea about life and she goes astray.. heheh. it’s a general rule. wrong thinking doesn’t last long..

Adventure on the other hand seldom kills a cat. Sometimes.. but heck.. its usually quick anyway..

One of my favorite authors on the subject of good medicine is Mantak Chia. I came across him about 10 or 12 years ago. His work offered me a huge shift in thinking about health, life and death. I took it on board.

The picture above is of a celestial master li ching yuen .. he is reputed to have lived over 200 years.. check the wiki.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Ching_Yuen

It is a remarkable photo of a remarkable man. Personally I believe the story. anything could happen in china.. hehehe we'll talk about that tomorrow.

I believe a free man can live forever.

tejas fu

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