Franck Montagny repping -273. Click the image to enlarge it.

There is a small resort 15 mins from Salzburg called Dürrnberg and as we finished all the stuff we had to do on Saturday, we visited it for the first time for one run just before the lifts closed.

Many years ago when I lived in England, the only chance to snowboard on snow (rather than plastic) was to drive about 4 hours from London to Tamworth to snowboard once a week at their snowboard night, where they would set out some jumps between 9pm – 11.30pm on Wednesday nights. My good friend Henry and I would drive up there almost every week in the holidays, so stoked at a chance to snowboard on 100m of ice for a few hours, hit the jumps as hard as posible and then make the 4 hour drive back, bruised and  exhausted but happy for another week.

In comparison to that, Dürrnberg was pretty good, with it’s 3 lifts and thousand odd meters of decent. Jule wasnt so impressed, but it’s all relative I guess. We would have died back then for a slope like this so close to where we lived.

Many people I know have visited India and told me how great it is, but I had no idea it was quite THAT nice. The size, quality and quantity of palaces, shrines, castles and temples is staggering. Far beyond anything I have ever seen in England, mainland Europe or America. Was doing some research and came across 36 pages of fantastic photos here. I posted a few below mainly of the landscape, but you should check out the endless temples at that link yourself.

After a comment I left on the americanenergycrisis blog, the Wall Street veteran / investment firm CEO / hedge fund manager who runs it asked me to write a guest post. This was the comment I left in regards to his post about Wallstreet and the government not telling the whole truth:

It struck me this morning that it  is perhaps due to Constraints vs Restraints.
If they admit to the restraint of the impossibility of continued growth in a closed system, they admit there can be no more business as usual, and that the only option is to downsize everything. Instead they focus on constraints which allow them to prescribe remedies and keep up appearances and appear to be in control of things.
However by admitting to their inability to control forces bigger than themselves, they would help a transition into a more sustainable future and help people to take control of their own affairs.
Highly unlikely though as in would also hand over control and power into peoples hands and out of the governments.

As anyone who checks this site regularly knows, I am more into photos and graphics than writing, but after initially declining his request I gave it some though and ended up writing a piece for him. You can read it here…

My bro Luke reminding himself why he left his well paid job in London to go and Live in the mountains.

I had to keep hiking this as Luke blew the shot 3 times in a row. When he finally got it, I kind of blew the method!

This was the day before. The jump had a nice little untracked lip with a gap to clear.

Luke and Flo’s backyard

St. Anton has sooo much terrain.

We wanted to go back and build a little kicker here, but it snowed overnight so the next day we didnt hangaround.

There is not much that beats the feeling of a backside 180 off the side of the piste into the powder below.

but sometimes straight airs feel even better than grabbing and spinning.  

After a white out most of the time, we got lucky on the last day

The first time I fractured my vertebra Snowboarding I mainly  switched back over to skiing, and somehow managed to make my old snowboard boots last 10 years! I finally picked up some new ones this week. The guy in the shop said these might be too soft as I bust my ankle skating in the past, but they felt like my legs were stuck in concrete after my old boots. After a few runs they were amazing though. What a difference 10 years makes!

Thanks for having me to stay bro!

My old friend  Folarin from back when I lived in London sent me some stunning photo’s he took at a fashion show in Lagos for Farafina magazine so I have posted a few below. Thanks man.

Budapest is home to one of the most powerful and shocking museums in Europe.  Illustrating the grim decades of Nazi and Communist repression, the museum is the former headquarters for the secret police of both the Nazi and Communist governments. Many hundreds of people were imprisoned, murdered and tortured and this building stands as a reminder of the inhumanity that once ruled Hungary.

I am not quite sure why we ended up going there, but it is a very well done museum and put a heavy perspective on the city during our trip. It was a fairly depressing few hours, but also a good lesson into part of Europe’s recent dark history. A lot of this occurred as little as 50 years ago. There was a striking disparity between the propaganda of the day and the reality of the situation at the time.

After last weekend I need to go snowboarding.

Been posting some fairly bleak sh!t recently, not only because I think a lot of people genuinely dont get it yet, but there is also a lot of propaganda out there and It seems important to shine a light on these serious issues. Anyway, it is cold and blizzardy outside today so thought I would mix it up with some nice sunny surf shots from Costa Rica.  Balance is always important. Looking forward to a long surf trip at the end of the summer.

Peace

About the only certainty in the stock market is that, over the long haul, overperformance turns into underperformance and vice versa.

As always there is different data depending on where you look, and there are some other charts here showing some slight variations.

Based on historical patterns, it looks like things wont get better than they are now for roughly 17 years and there could be a decline of around 153% from here. Or not.

Due to oil and other resources restraints, I and many others dont see anyway we could return to sustained growth and similar consumption patterns as we have had in the past.

The idea of growth is diametrically opposed to stability. So stability has been redefined as growth, which is physically impossible over time on a closed system called Earth. Because growth cannot go on forever, those advocating it are really the forces of short-term gain for greed. To claim that growth helps people goes with attempts to stave of problems relating to overcrowding in relation to resource limits.

It is only when people (1) finally question the existing system’s ability to care for everyone (which it never could) in the long term, and (2) when people reject the ridiculousness of endless growth, and (3) they take control of their own affairs to assure their local environment meets basic needs (instead of working for a corporate entity to buy things from strangers), will the true economic problems and ecological crisis be dealt with. (from here)

Last weekend we went to the christening of a friends kid and the constant sun symbology in the church really jumped out at me.

Before the birth of Judaism and its stepchild Christianity, the peoples of the world were sun worshipers. From India to Egypt in the East, knowledge of the sun and stars was the basis of religion; from the Incas in the Andes to the Zunis in the American desert, all raised their voices in praise to the rising sun.

The Story of Jesus is the story of the Sun passing through the Zodiac during the year. The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the Sun, in which they put a man whom they call Christ, in the place of the Sun, and pay him the same adoration which was originally paid to the Sun.

There is much evidence that Christianity is Astrotheological in origin. There are far too many parallels for mere coincidence to explain away. First of all, the birth sequence is completely astrological. The star in the east is Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, which, on December 24th, aligns with the 3 brightest stars in Orion’s Belt. These 3 bright stars are called today what they were called in ancient times: The Three Kings. The Three Kings and the brightest star, Sirius, all point to the place of the sunrise on December 25th. This is why the Three Kings “follow” the star in the east, in order to locate the sunrise — the birth of the sun.

Consider our “modern” terms, Horizon and Sun Set. These terms belie their ancient history. Horus-sun (Horizon) was sunrise as Horus was the Egyptian god of light and the day light portion of the 24 hour cycle. Set, was the god of darkness and night. He came on the scene at “Sun Set” and is the Jackal headed god of the Egyptian underworld. When we say “what a beautiful Sun Set,” we don’t realize we are speaking as one might in ancient Egypt. Darkness was the time of Set, god of darkness. Night time was not a good time in most ancient mythologies. This is why many a priest stood every morning acting as if by incantation and arm waving, he could bring back the Sun/Son from the Underworld of darkness and fear. The sun descending into hell is something it did every Sun-Set. There was relief every morning when the sun/son was reborn.

Set murdered Osiris and in turn, Horus, son of Osiris, killed Set. Sunrise on the Horus-Sun defeats the night which began at Sun Set.  Jesus struggles with Satan (Set or Sata) in just the same way Horus battles with Set. It’s all dualism. It’s Light and Dark, day and night, good and evil, God and Satan.

Every time he said Amen I couldnt help smiling, in German it even sounds like Amun.

In nominal terms, the decline in the S&P 500 matches the Dow Crash of 1929 over the equivalent time frame. In real (inflation adjusted) terms, it has surpassed the Dow decline…Chart updated daily here..

The stock market tanked again this week and for 2009 has lost nearly a quarter of its value.
And it is only early March.. Some more perspective here..

For anyone who thinks this will be over soon, the derivatives (debt) market currently stands at $700 trillion whilst all of the underlying assets are still plunging in value. Oil supply constraints will make it unlikely for us to ever return to growth and for this money to be repaid so what happens to that $700 TRILLION?

Still a lot of snow. When almost everything seems to be falling down, looking up can be a simple pleasure.

Interesting article on the oil drum here.

Our financial system is debt based. Since 1971, the financial system has no tie to gold or any other physical standard. Instead, in our fractional reserve banking system, money is formed through the issuance of debt. The more debt that is issued, the more money there is, and the more demand there is for goods and services. As long as the system is growing, the system works well, because paying back debts with interest does not put too great a strain on the system.

When the economy hits limits, such as an oil supply that cannot grow fast enough to support the growth needed to keep the treadmill going, repaying the debt with interest becomes a huge burden. We have been reaching that point in the last few years, as oil production remained approximately flat and oil prices rose. Food prices rose as well, but real wages did not rise fast enough to keep the treadmill going. Soon defaults on debts started.

At this time, there is vastly more debt than there are assets to pay back the debts. Many times, two or three or four people or organizations think they have claims on the same assets. Think of a house. An investor buys the house, and rents it out. The renter pays his rent, and has a claim on the house. The investor is the “owner”, so he has a claim on the place. The mortgage on the property is likely added to a package of other mortgages, and sliced and diced and resold to other investors. Each of them indirectly believes that they have some sort of claim to the property. There also may be an insurer guaranteeing the debt that also has some type of claim. The Federal government, through one of its loan or debt guarantee programs may also depend on the underlying assets. In addition, if the owner doesn’t pay his taxes, the local government may also feel it has a claim to the property.

And from the american energy crisis blog..

Where does the administration, Wall Street, the Media, WHOEVER propose to GET the nearly $3 TRILLION in financing we are going to need over the next 2 years?  The entire f***ing world has less than $7.4 TRILLION in reserves, and that was last year’s data.  Since that time world trade has contracted briskly, and other governments have had need of their reserves to finance their OWN deficit and stimulus spending, (China alone has budgeted over $500 BILLION), so that number is surely less than $6 Trillion as i write this.

Did I mention that the U.S. will not see a budget deficit of less than $1 TRILLION at any point in the next decade or 2 (or 3)?  Or that just to get to the $1.2 TRILLION deficit in 2010, the Obama budget claims the U.S. will grow by 3.2 % in 2010, 4% in 2011, and 4.6 % in 2012?  If not, then what?  What’s “Plan B”?  Look, I don’t make this stuff up.  I am a career analyst and when somebody tells me a + b + c = d, I check their math.  If it does not add up, it does not add up.

The food is pretty good where I live in Austria, but sometimes a little strange. It looks pretty gross, but this dish is actually well nice.