Archive for October, 2007

The end of ABN Amro

// October 31st, 2007 // No Comments » // My Personal Journey

I don’t often blog about my current employer, ABN Amro. In fact, the only previous post regarded a giant inflatable whale and our funding/sustainability dilemma over Shell’s Sakhalin-II project- a dilemma which was fortuitously removed when Russia’s Gazprom took over the project in Dec 2006. Since then of course there has been a great deal happening here. For those outside the industry, the 183 year old ABN AMRO, ranked eigth in Europe and 13th in the world, with more than 4,500 branches in 53 countries, a staff of over 110,000 and total assets of €999 billion, has been bought out by a consortium of three multinational banks in what amounted to the largest ever bank takeover in history.

The Consortium (Royal Bank of Scotland, Fortis, Santander) were successful in outbidding Barclays (eventually offering $98.3bn including $92.1bn in cash), in a six-month long game of economic, legal and regulatory chess, reminiscent of Burrough and Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate. Much can be said on the dangers and opportunities of this move; the complex financial, labor and social ramifications that will unfold. Speculation at this early stage is merely that, speculation. And the biggest lesson I’ve had in watching this process, has been in seeing the common-wisdom change every week; a new set of “obvious” assumptions adopted to replace the old set- equally “obvious” and equally inadequate in predicting what will really occur. We need too look to actions, to decisions made, policies changed, businesses, positions and markets opened and closed. Until then we can only speculate on all possibilities and preclude nothing. The real game will play out over the next few years to decide whether we have witnessed an evolution in the market or a disaster in the making.

Whichever course is taken by the new owners, something important will be lost with the passing of ABN Amro. Last night I went to the farewell of a close colleague of mine, Jan Versteeg, who has been with the Bank for thirty-six years. There are a surprising number of life-long employees here- individuals who have given decades, given their life’s work, to ABN Amro. They form a great intangible, non-tradable asset, a spirit of trust and loyalty that I’m glad to see is largely mirrored in their treatment by the organisation. It is a common spirit that forms the very heart of this Bank’s identity, a commitment and a belief that has supported it’s growth and expansion over the centuries. Jan’s leaving fittingly symbolises the passing of this spirit and the end of the essence of ABN Amro itself.

Opening to "Om"

// October 23rd, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

An excerpt of a poem by Herman Hesse, set to a Baraka-like scene.

Deus, sive Natura

// October 18th, 2007 // 2 Comments » // Leadership Development

Commenting on Spinoza’s The Ethics, the masterwork of this 17th century rationalist, historian Will Durant begins;

“Page one plunges us at once into the maelstrom of metaphysics. Our modern hard-headed (or is it soft-headed?) abhorrence of metaphysics captures us, and for a moment we wish we were anywhere except in Spinoza. But then metaphysics, as William James said, is nothing but an attempt to think things out clearly to their ultimate significance, to find their substantial essence in the scheme of reality,—or, as Spinoza puts it, their essential substance; and thereby to unify all truth and reach that “highest of all generalizations” which, even to the practical Englishman, constitutes philosophy 36. Science itself, which so superciliously scorns metaphysics, assumes a metaphysic in its every thought. It happens that the metaphysic, which it assumes, is the metaphysic of Spinoza.”


Click for the full piece “Deus, sive Natura“.

Wanderer, Worshipper, Lover of Leaving

// October 17th, 2007 // 1 Comment » // Art, Music & Poetry

“The Sufi poet and mystic, Jelaluddin Rumi, was born in Afghanistan 800 years ago and UNESCO has designated 2007 the ‘Year of Rumi‘. His poetry is astonishing in its beauty, wisdom, and spiritual depth, and we hear from the pre-eminent translator and promoter of Rumi in the West, Coleman Barks. Included in the program are musical excerpts from ‘The Rumi Concert’ held in Melbourne in August 2007, and we hear from one of the world’s great scholars of Rumi, Dr Zeki Saritoprak.”

TheSpiritofThings on ABC Radio National
Listen Now |Download Audio

I cannot recommend this highly enough. If you are familiar with Rumi, it is a pure delight. If you are not, it is as if to catch a glimpse of one’s beloved for the first moment- or rather 54 remarkable minutes. N.B. The podcast will only be accessible for a limited time, after which only a transcription will be available.


All that is left
to us by tradition
is mere words.

It is up to us
to find out what they mean.

ibn al-`Arabi ( أبن عربي), Tarjuman al-Ashwaq

Previously, I’ve posted Rumi’s poem “Quietness”, his “lecture” on “The Dream That Must Be Interpreted”, another poem “All The Hemispheres” and an interview with Coleman Barks.

Lessons From the Magister

// October 16th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development


(Hesse at Montagnola)

Thus spake the Magister,

“To be capable of everything and do justice to everything, one certainly does not need less spiritual force and èlan and warmth, but more. What you call passion is not spiritual force, but friction between the soul and the outside world. Where passion dominates, that does not signify the presence of greater desire and ambition, but rather the misdirection of these qualities toward an isolated and false goal, with a consequent tension and sultriness in the atmosphere. Those who direct the maximum force of their desires toward the center, toward true being, toward perfection, seem quieter than the passionate souls because the flame of their fervor cannot always be seen. In argument, for example, they will not shout and wave their arms. But I assure you, they are nevertheless burning with subdued fires.”

“Oh, if only it were possible to find understanding,” Joseph exclaimed. “If only there were a dogma to believe in. Everything is contradictory, everything tangential; there are no certainties anywhere. Everything can be interpreted one way and then again interpreted in the opposite sense. The whole of world history can be explained as development and progress and can also be seen as nothing but decadence and meaninglessness. Isn’t there any truth? Is there no real and valid doctrine?”

The master had never heard him speak so fervently. He walked on in silence for a little, then said: “There is truth, my boy. But the doctrine you desire, absolute, perfect dogma that alone provides wisdom, does not exist. Nor should you long for a perfect doctrine, my friend. Rather, you should long for the perfection of yourself. The diety is within you, not in ideas and books. Truth is lived, not taught. Be prepared for conflicts, Joseph Knecht – I can see that they already have begun.”

-Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game.

In his magnum opus the Nobel Laureate expands, clarifies and even further engages the reader upon the way. For those unfamiliar with Hesse, I strongly suggest to first read his elegant and succinct Siddhartha. As much as The Glass Bead Game is a masterclass of a thousand lessons, Siddhartha is an single and singular realisation.

Who’s Tripping?

// October 13th, 2007 // No Comments » // World Issues

“THE HAGUE (AFP) — The Dutch authorities agreed Friday to ban the sale of magic mushrooms, a move sure to annoy many tourists visiting the Netherlands, known for its liberal drugs policies. The Dutch health and justice ministers said Friday that they have agreed to change the drugs laws to ban the sale and cultivation of hallucinogenic mushrooms. The move comes during an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about the safety of the so-called magic mushrooms after a number of incidents involving tourists who had taken them…

In March, a 17-year-old French girl on a school trip to Amsterdam ate the drug before jumping from a bridge over a canal in the city. She died, and the case resulted in a majority in the Dutch Parliament calling for a total ban on all forms of the drug. Since then, a media debate has raged over that and other cases, including that of an Icelandic tourist who broke both legs jumping from a balcony and a Danish tourist veering his car wildly through a camp site.”

The Independent

“Around 500,000 “doses” of packaged mushrooms are sold here annually. According to a study published in January by Amsterdam’s health services said the city’s emergency services were summoned 148 times to deal with a bad reaction to mushrooms in 2004-2006. Of those 134 were foreigners, with Britons forming the largest group…

Marjan Heuving, a spokeswoman for the country’s Trimbos Institute, a drug policy think-tank, said mushrooms are not toxic and themselves pose no physical risk to users. But she agreed that people’s reaction to them is unpredictable, depending on factors such as weight; how much food they have eaten recently; their past drug experience; psychological health; and the setting in which they are taken.
“The main danger to the user is that he will somehow hurt himself,” she said. “I should add that that’s extremely rare.”

Half a million doses sold per year in the Netherlands and an average of fifty emergency calls related to mushrooms each year. Thus, only 0.01% of doses lead to emergencies. Far lower still is the chance of accidents resulting in death. There are zero cases of overdose from psilocybin, and as opposed to alcohol or aspirin the lethal dose for psylocybin is far more than can be physically consumed. No psilocybin mushroom related deaths are even counted in the UNODC literature, and the examples hyped up by the Dutch press contain only one fatality. Compare and contrast to the number of emergency calls for alcohol related accidents, sexual abuse and deaths. Not to mention any potential benefit in psychological treatment or development that might derive from these entheogens- as showcased in the medical studies referenced below and the thousand years of indigenous use in the Americas.

No need to reiterate the case. Here is a 2000 Risk Assessment by the Dutch Government’s “Coordination Centre for the Assessment and Monitoring of new drugs”, (CAM).

The late and great Bill Hicks should have closed the debate fifteen years ago.

Other interesting references: The Harvard_Psilocybin_Project from the 1960′s, the current DEA approved Psilocybin studies from MAPS, a BBC documentary/thought experiment on the effect of a radical liberalisation of drug policy, the informed and insightful writings of the late Terence McKenna- ethnobotanist and philosopher.

Seinfeld: Back to Stand Up

// October 12th, 2007 // No Comments » // Uncategorized

It’s Friday, I’ve got the flue, the company I work for was just bought by The Consortium and our CEO resigned- no energy to blog about strolling the Vatican or Forum Romana. All I can do is chuckle slightly and pray to the patron saint of Kleenex.


Seinfeld: Back to Stand Up

Deep Listening

// October 4th, 2007 // No Comments » // Leadership Development

An extract from an edition of the ABC podcast All in the Mind, on how non-Indigenous mental health professionals entering Aboriginal communities can be adequately equipped to work with the particular psychological distress they encounter. Natasha Mitchell interviews Dennis McDermott, psychologist and senior lecturer in Indigenous health at the Muru Marri Indigenous Health Unit at the University of NSW.

Natasha Mitchell: Well the key Indigenous way that you weave in to your workshops is this concept of deep listening — tell me what it is.

Dennis McDermott: It’s definitely not an original idea, definitely not. I’ve picked it up from a number of sources, most notably from a woman called Miriam Rose Ungunmerr-Baumann who is from the Daly River mob in the Northern Territory. But from her cultural group comes this notion of dadirri, and she describes it as a kind of inner deep listening, a kind of still awareness.

But there’s similar ideas I found when I started to look around, around various Indigenous cultures around Australia, in Sydney from the Eora language there’s a word called ngara. And ngara in this language means to hear, to listen. But with the added dimension of thinking at the same time, a self reflection. And as a Victorian Koori organisation board member pointed it out to me just this last week in Melbourne, it has the additional dimension of actually finishing off what you’re hearing with an action. So if someone is actually telling you something, your obligation, if you like, is to follow that through. So it’s a link and a reciprocity going on.

So from these and lots of other cultural notions I started to pay serious attention to this idea of deep listening, Indigenous ways of listening, that involve tuning in with the whole being if you like, of listening to the silence, or listening to that noise as well as the signal. It makes sense — the hiss.

Equally Meaningless Differences in the World

// October 3rd, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry


The late Adam Finley interviewed Achewood’s creator, Chris Onstead, at The Black Table.

“AF: Should an artist avoid giving his/her audience what it wants? A recent strip featuring a fully cooked and fully anatomically correct rooster seemed to arrive from a different place than most of your other ideas.

CO: The rooster penis was an element that relieved the incredible tension between Roast Beef and his dinner date. That they could both laugh about it brought them down to earth with each other. I thought it felt perfect given the situation — a tension breaker appropriate to the fundamental problem of the first date, which is that the basic purpose of dating is to mate and create offspring via the genitals.

This isn’t a toilet humor strip, but I’m not beholden to any sort of oppressive distribution syndicate, and I can draw a chicken penis if I think that’s funny. Some days I think chicken penises are not funny at all. Some days I hate them. Some days I think stuff like that just belongs in the trash. But whatever, I write a comic strip. Who cares. Greater men than me have gone to their graves having made equally meaningless differences in the world. I just fuck around on the Internet and later some dude buys a shirt so that I can live my life and pay Driveway Tax or whatever. I sleep at night, and one day I won’t wake up. On that day, people in BMWs will drive past my house and honk at my neighbor as he tries to back out of his driveway. Fog will roll in. A grown man will get fired from McDonald’s. Someone will ride the train home, and it will clang as it passes my street. I will be dead, and they’ll put me out with the Monday morning trash, my feet sticking comically up out of the can.”

Full interview.

In Rainbows

// October 1st, 2007 // No Comments » // Art, Music & Poetry

Radiohead are pretty much my Beatles. I saw them on an island in Budapest last summer and experienced something I haven’t been able to define or recount and am almost fearful recollecting in case I somehow damage the fragile memory of that one perfect hour.


Radiohead – Paranoid Android

Through six incredibly different albums they’ve carried a generation of fans to a genre-transcending appreciation of music. And now, through their low-key blog Dead Air Space, they release their seventh.

Wed, 04 July

things are quiet here right now. we are unable to explain.
nothing can be revealed.
we have not disappeared.
merely become invisible.
for a short time. we may be hiding in the woods.

Thom


Mon, 01 October

Hello everyone.
Well, the new album is finished, and it’s coming out in 10 days;
We’ve called it In Rainbows.
Love from us all.

Jonny

The album will be available for download from October 10 or in a double vinyl/double CD set shipping December 3 and includes the digital downloads and a book. Through the website the customer is able to choose their own price for the album in download form.