Metanoia Magazine July 2018

METANOIA July 2018

Politics . Art . Health . Economics . Entertainment

CONTENTS

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42 14

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Executive Summary

6

Tim Jenison

By Hank Leis

11

Rant: Pain

By Hank Leis

12

David Walsh

By Cameron Stewart

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Bankers vs Gangsters

By Andreas C Chrysafis

18

The Art of Marilee Nielson

By Hank Leis

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The Notebooks of Paul Rader

By Lynn Munroe

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On Being There Photographs by Saravut Whanset

32

The Power of Sameness

By Dr. Gordon Hogg, MP

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The 20th Annual Leo Awards

36

Vancouver Webfest 2018

38

Panache, Politics and Parties

40

Missives

By Donald J. Boudreaux

41

What a Ride

By Len Giles

42

Dan Walker Chronicles

By Dan Walker

On the cover: Caricature of Raymond Teller, Tim Jenison, and Penn Jillette painted by Paul Moyse METANOIA MAGAZINE

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Executive And Staff PUBLISHERS Salme Johannes Leis & Allison Patton EDITOR Shahid Abrar-ul-Hassan EXECUTIVE DIRECTORS JR Leis & Heino Leis COPY CHIEF Caleb Ng ASSISTANT TO THE EXECUTIVE Jillian Currie PHOTO ARCHIVIST Galina Bogatch INTERNATIONAL DISTRIBUTOR Suzette Laqua INTERVIEWER/PHOTOGRAPHER Britany Snider DISTRIBUTORS AUSTRALIA Peter Storen CANADA GREATER TORONTO AND HAMILTON AREAS Henry Maeots GREATER VANCOUVER AREA Lesley Diana

CONTRIBUTORS Beth Allen, Jaspal Atwal, Gerald Auger, Maureen Bader, Alex Barberis, Mario Basner, Andy Belanger, John P. Bell, Donald J. Boudreaux, Des Brophy, Dr. Tim Brown, Richard Calmes, Andreas C Chrysafis, Anabella Corro, Kamala Coughlan, Brian Croft, Miki Dawson, Shane Dean, Vie Dunn-Harr, Cheryl Gauld, Len Giles, Kulraj Gurm, William Haskell, Greg Hill, Matt Hill, Carly Hilliard, Dr. Gordon Hogg, Marilyn Hurst, Dr. Arthur Janov, Jeanette Jarville, Randolph Jordan, Richard King IV, Peter and Maria Kingsley, Mark Kingwell, Rod Lamirand, Barbara A. Lane, Valev Laube, Suzette Laqua, Marilyn Lawrie, Hank Leis, Nelson Leis, Salme Leis, Chris MacClure, Dunstan Massey, Seth Meltzer, Thomas Mets, Fabrice Meuwissen, Dr. Caleb Ng, Paul Nijar, Janice Oleandros, Stefan Pabst, Dr. Allison Patton, Ivan Pili, Luis Reyes, Danielle Richard, Cara Roth, Dr. Bernard Schissel, Pepe Serna, Diego Solis, Cameron Stewart, Lisa Stocks, Peter Storen, Mohamed Taher, Christopher Titus, Jack Vettriano, Dr. Jack Wadsworth, Chris Walker, Dan Walker, Saravut Whanset, Tom Weniger, Sharon Weiser, Harvey White, Robyn Williams, and Helena Wierzbicki

METANOIA MAGAZINE

Is a publication of Metanoia Concepts Inc. 3566 King George Blvd Surrey, B.C. V4P 1B5 Canada 604.538.8837 Metanoiamagazine@gmail.com Metanoiamagazine.com

MONTREAL Gene Vezina INDIA AND PAKISTAN Tariq Ghuman UNITED KINGDOM LONDON Salme Leis UNITED STATES ALBANY NEW YORK Seth Meltzer LAS VEGAS Mario Basner NEW YORK Valev Laube METANOIA MAGAZINE

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EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Tim's Vermeer is a documentary for those of us who are looking for inspiration. Tim Jenison inspires us simply by having us watch what and how he does things. Most amazing, is how the plot of the story twists and turns, with prominent actors being revealed at each new curve of this meandering. Tim Jenison, the central actor, works with magicians Penn and Teller, who together begin their quest to explain the art of Johannes Vermeer. Then along come Australian billionaires David Walsh and mystery friend Zeljko Ranogajec. And finally there is the MONA; but since this is a never ending story, the rest is just evolving.

Marilee Nielson is a Californian artist introduced to us by actor Pepe Serna, who himself has been the subject of our articles. She is an admirer and follower of the theology of Fr. Richard Rohr of the Center for Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

The art on the covers of pocket books hardly get the artists who do the paintings the recognition they deserve. Jesse Paul Rader was a brilliant American artist and illustrator who is responsible for forty years of hundreds of paperback book covers.

Saravut Whanset is a genius. His photographs represent some of the most beautiful we have published. Language barriers and distance made discussions with him difficult if not occasionally impossible. But finally, here we are.

The Honourable Dr. Gordon Hogg, MP, former MLA, Ph.D. provides us with a written copy of his Ted Talk. Enjoy and learn!

And there is more.

Since the founding of Metanoia Magazine by three Naturopathic Doctors and the Leis family in 2008, we have produced over ninety issues. We have had over one thousand articles written, including interviews of over 100 actors, 100 artists, dozens of politicians, philosophers, psychologists, and experts in other fields. A majority of the writers have post-graduate degrees or have expertise or knowledge of a special nature.

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REPRODUCING VERMEER

TIM JENISON

By Hank Leis

“They” say that to tell a story “you” should start from the beginning. After narrating hundreds if not thousands of stories, I have come to realize that there is no beginning or end to any story. Every story flows on and never ends, and its' beginning is chosen arbitrarily by the narrator as she/he interacts with the story.

A story is neither complete nor accurate; it evolves and spirals. The narrator describes what the story revealed and omits what was not in sight. The reader decides what to pocket and what to leave on the glossy pages of a coffee table issue. No story has confounded this writer more than any other in experiencing these organic manifestations of a story. Each time a beginning was chosen, a new vista was sighted. So, it became obvious that in the telling, without further historical revelation, the story lacked completeness.

And, each time there appeared to be an ending, the story revealed a new scope and

direction. One can get easily perplexed in the maze that the story turned out to be.

One can forget what instigated the telling of it. One can be overawed when subplots cascade from the story as one delves deeper into the story. And, ultimately one can even forget whether the beginning is the end or else, as T. S. Eliot once mused:

In my beginning is my end.

In my end is my beginning. (From "East Coker," Four Quartets) The Idea I watch many documentaries; some of my friends have made award-winning documentaries. Early one morning I was watching a documentary filmed by magicians Penn and Teller about an engineer by the name of Timothy Jenison, who is trying to replicate Johannes Vermeer’s art work using lenses and

Jenison's version of the View of Delft/Geizicht op Delft 1660-1661 oil on canvas, Vermeer's original work is featured in Mauritshuis in the Hague, Netherlands METANOIA MAGAZINE

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Tim Jenison's Painting of The Music Lesson by Johannes Vermeer

In the documentary, one of the reasons I contacted you for the interview was that you appear to exude confidence, calmness and a sense of “this too I will figure out” when you encountered your challenges (a state of mind many of us aspire to achieve). In your conversation with your wife with respect to the state of your health (as CEO), what steps did you take to become the man we see (extraordinary given the circumstances, in my view) in the documentary?

"I

’d say I learned not to take adversity too seriously. I reaffirmed that life is good and that we should try to live it well."

-Tim Jenison

Tim Jenison's The Girl with a Pearl Earring

The building constructed to paint View of Delft

technology that were available during that era. I learned that Vermeer’s works, photograph-like with unparalleled accuracy as to shape and shadows, have been questioned by critics as to how this was achieved.

Already, I had a number of angles to approach this story. But, as I kept watching the documentary, I began to realize how many challenges Jenison was encountering in trying to prove that Vermeer used optical technology in executing his works. In working at a wellness centre and as a business consultant, I am constantly made aware how the stresses of daily life and corporate life cause severe psychophysiological impact to individuals.

Yet, Jenison seemed unfazed by any of it.

I thought this man had discovered a secret to managing life's difficulties, and that uncovering this secret would provide help to many others in their effort to combat inevitable stresses. This man held the secret to stay composed, focused, and dedicated, against insurmountable odds.

It goes without saying that this dawning realization piqued my curiosity, and I wanted to meet this man. And so I did.

Johannes Vermeer (October 31, 1632 - December 16, 1675) was born in Delft, Netherlands. There is not much known about his life other than that the painter Leonard Bramer was a friend, who might have influenced his style, and that Vermeer joined the Delft painter’s guild in 1652.

Tim Jenison painting, using his mirror device

Vermeer’s better known paintings include The Girl With a Pearl Earring, The Concert, View of Delft, and The Girl With The Wineglass. There are over 30 such artefacts that still exist.

Vermeer has been accused of using mirrors to create the photograph-like paintings that he is revered for. This claim was the challenge that Timothy Jenison was faced with, the task of showing proof that the technology available during Vermeer’s life would have allowed him to produce art with the accuracy of a photograph. My challenge was to uncover how Timothy Jenison’s mind worked absent of angst and stress to accomplish this monumental task.

Lightware 3D. His preoccupation with the painter Vermeer began with his interest in the Dutch painter’s art and technique.

Philip Steadman, a British architecture professor, had speculated on Vermeer’s use of “camera obscura” in guiding his technique in achieving his ‘perfect’ renditions. In addition, David Hockney, the British author of Secret Knowledge, spurred Jenison’s interest in recreating Vermeer’s works by using the instruments available in Vermeer’s times.

Penn and Teller are known for magic, comedy, and skepticism. Less known is that they produce documentaries, write, and work as artists. They have been recognized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame as well as the Richard Dawkins Award.

Both Penn and Teller have known Timothy Jenison for several decades, and it was their collaboration that became the basis for a documentary. During the production, the course of the story line was changed to accommodate the various other influences that came to light in the making of the movie.

The documentary that subsequently rolled out, released in 2014, was directed

by Teller, with Penn and Teller as executive producers, Penn Gillette and Farley Ziegler as producers, and Sony Pictures Classics as distributors. The original plans for the documentary were shelved when the filming progressed, as it became clear to the team that given the changes in their understanding of what recreating the work entailed, so new objectives had to be set. The idea of using projected light was discarded as being too cumbersome.

Jenison replaced this idea with mirrors at 45 degrees with lenses, which seemed to give the artist more flexibility with using the brushes and allowing the artist better observations of the results. This innovation seemed to enhance the artist's process.

Tim Jenison, an engineer, is one of the founders of NewTek, a company based in San Antonio, Texas. Jenison work in computer graphics include the 3D modelling software

It is not my intent to comment on the documentary other than that enquiring minds will find it fascinating and intriguing.

In fact, I am more interested in the

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observations I made about Tim Jenison’s own process and its' potential response to the “save our souls” calls of those challenged by the oddities of everyday life, especially with those involved in the intricacies of the workplace. And, in watching the documentary one cannot help but observe that Jenison is a patient man. The many challenges he faces showcases this trait, particularly in the documentary when he finds that the equipment he had purchased for the job of constructing a table leg to be inadequate. But, there is no freak out.

A calm and unfrazzled recognition of the problem is followed by a choice from an array of alternatives. This flash is the magic moment where simple choices become a matter of insightful decision-making rather than seething rage!

In a nutshell, we are all looking at ways of dealing with impossibilities. Jenison shows us the way. In asking him about his responses to adverse circumstances, he explains that it was not always like that. As founder of a high-tech business, the pressures were enormous and were inevitably stressful. While sitting with his wife, who is a nurse, she noticed that he did not seem well. He was pallid, and he was sweating profusely while his extremities were cold. But in that situation, he responded with a realization to make changes to his life that he did. The result of this rational response is all captured in the documentary.

consequences. Or, maybe because all consequences in a mathematical world are a possibility.

Walsh wanted to establish an art gallery in Tasmania, and invited Tim Jenison to set up his technological innovations so that others could enjoin him in painting Vermeer’s. The project was completed two years ago and as a result, thousands have used Jenison’s devices in the museum to paint accurate reproductions.

View of Delft For those with a passion to extract out of life everything that is offered, the team of Jenison and Walsh continued their exploration of possibilities. View of Delft is an acknowledged Vermeer with some controversy with respect to the accuracy of the artist’s rendering of the skyline as it was in Delft, Netherlands at the time it was painted. Jenison and Walsh were able to get approval from authorities to construct a building in the location where Vermeer painted. The reproduction required them

The Denouement Jenison had never painted in his life before his Vermeer experiment. But, his three daughters are all artists. After asking one of his daughters to model, she reluctantly agreed. After hours of having her head clamped in a position, she instructed her dad on the fine art of art.

This intrusion lead to more efficiency and more discoveries on his part in the pursuit of recreating Vermeer's. But that is not the end of the story!

David Walsh is an unusual man. As unusual people have a tendency to want to meet others of the same ilk, Walsh sought out Jenison and the two became the odd couple. But, first about Walsh. To say he is eccentric is to redefine the word. He is a math genius and very wealthy; he gambles and loves art. Unsurprisingly, he has made money primarily by casino gambling, but apparently when casinos barred his entry, he started betting on horses. He has a story to tell, not here, but in a book that he has written. He is a man of philosophical wanderings who thinks about life and appears not to be reticent about them and without seemingly the thought of

Johannes Vermeer's The Music Lesson METANOIA MAGAZINE

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to research archives, and as a result, they stumbled over old records that testified that the buildings in Vermeer’s painting were indeed present during his time.

Waiting for Godot In life, we are all looking for something that explains it as Samuel Beckett's masterpiece Waiting for Godot portrays.

Sometimes we look so hard for something, we miss other things that are equally or perhaps more important for and around us. Perhaps, we are afraid to see what we see. But, here in this story we have the stories of many individuals who are looking to explain life, and by merging their unique perspectives, it makes the whole (or the Godot).

of core beliefs. This helps ameliorate the potential for conflict and most importantly, the ill feeling that is the impetus for causing reactive behaviour. Learning how to detach from these anchors that repeatedly create the illusion that others are responsible for one’s bad feelings and hence responsible for ones reactions, is part of the process of achieving balanced responses. The elimination of reactive behaviour requires an understanding of inappropriate core beliefs that anchor the individual's behaviour to them. Justifiying the motivation, is the motivation. Eliminate the stressor from within and change the behaviour without.

RANT RANT PAIN

BY HANK LEIS

We are alone in our pain. Even more so when we are unable to verbalize these feelings to others, thereby isolating ourselves from any potential help.

A pandemic called stress has spread throughout modern society and each of us carry its' germs as a badge of honour, maintaining the illness as we follow the advice of ‘professionals’ in coping with it.

Evolution has not always been kind to humans. The physiology of humans did not evolve as it did with other animals.

Once triggered, the effects of the fight-orflight syndrome became embedded in the physiology of humans for longer periods and eventually subsumed the response system into an almost permanent state of alarm. Overeating, taking drugs, and various other forms of addiction became medications to combat the uncomfortable state of just being. The medication required to suppress pain required larger and larger dosages. As societies' demands became more and more overwhelming, the drugs became less effective, creating physiological and psychological damage in the process.

The solution has now become the problem, and each step of making us feel better, makes us feel worse, until life becomes intolerable. Being ‘in the now’ anticipates a future without meaning and creates a present of pain and desperation. We are lost in the present without any hope of being found. We lose ourselves in diversions that occupy our attentions.

Detachment is difficult.

Every conversation, act, or event is nuanced to evoke the primal response that anchors the fear which evokes the human response

of physical body pain, causing a reaction that perpetuates the stress response.

Detachment, the reassemblage of our critical thinking assemblage points, may be a theoretical solution, but how to do it?

The comparison to present ongoing events or the anchors that define fear, take less than one thousandth of a second in the brain, much too brief for willful intelligent intervention. Techniques to deal with stress are not easily mastered and most do not.

For a better understanding of this phenomenon I will quote from a paper entitled Stress, Endocrine Physiology and Pathophysiology by Constantine Tsigos, M.D., PhD, Ioannis Kerouac, PhD, and George P Chrousos, MD. MACP, MACE. dated March 10, 2016.

“Stress is a state of threatened homeostasis caused by intrinsic or extrinsic adverse forces (stressors) and is counteracted by an intricate repertoire of physiologic and behavioural responses aiming to maintain/re-establish the optimal body equilibrium (ecstasies). The adaptive stress response depends upon a highly interconnected neuroendocrine, cellular and molecular infrastructure, the stress system.”

In order to achieve or maintain homeostasis, it is helpful for an individual who recognizes that the quality of their life and the nature of their relationships is constantly threatened by their responses to events and having them accelerate disproportionately. In fact, comprehending any response requires an ability to compare the reasons for reaction to an inventory METANOIA MAGAZINE

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“The adaptive response of each individual to stress is determined to a multiplicity of genetic, environmental and development factors. Changes in the ability to effectively respond to stressors (e.g. inadequate, excessive and/or prolonged reactions) may lead to disease.

Moreover, highly potent and/or chronic stressors can have detrimental effects on a variety of physiologic functions, including growth, reproduction, metabolism and immune competence, as well as on behaviour and personality development. Of note, prenatal life, infancy, childhood and adolescence are critical periods in the process of forming the matrix of the adaptive stress response, characterized by high plasticity of the stress system and increased vulnerability to stressors.”

Being alone in pain is just being, not being understood and not understanding the mechanics of this feeling of isolation or being possessed by moods and attitudes seemingly created by individuals or situations that just develop from out of nowhere. The difficulty of eliminating rage or any other response to stimuli that turn an individual on or off is one of acknowledgement, the desire to do so and the persistence in seeking the methods to do so. We are all on edge, and need to admit to it, to persist in seeking solutions to create a desirable mindset, and to have empathy for those seeking the same.

Hank Leis is the author of The Leadership Phenomenon: A Multidimensional Model

“I

t presents economic problems, it presents mathematical conundrums and it presents an understanding of human nature that very few other fields provide."

DAVID WALSH:

From shy misfit to big-time gambler who founded MONA

By Cameron Stewart As Featured in The Australian newspaper METANOIA MAGAZINE

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Is David Walsh really a coward? Does the man who plays so easily with dangerous ideas lack fortitude when faced with physical danger?

It’s a question Walsh has pondered since Grade Six, when he abandoned a friend who fell into a swollen creek (the child survived). But earlier this year, as an Istanbul mob fled the tear gas and water cannons of the Turkish riot police and stampeded towards him and his new bride, the founder of Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art had no time to reflect on courage.

“I wasn’t thinking about danger, I was in the midst of a war zone,” says Walsh.

He and his wife Kirsha tried to hide down a side street but it was a dead end.

Soon they were surrounded by crowds of anti-government protesters, but a lone taxi suddenly appeared from nowhere and the pair escaped.

So did this incident during his Turkish honeymoon in May finally allow Walsh to meet the test of courage he says he failed as a child? It’s a question he dismisses with a wave. “Does childhood make the man?” he asks. “For the most part … I don’t see any direct path from me over there [as a child] to me here, except perhaps for a couple of fortuitous coin tosses.” The gambler fumbles for his mobile phone to look for a “beautiful quote” about chance. He reads the words from his screen: “No one is born with a straight arrow in his quiver.”

“I tend to agree,” he adds, looking up.

“You have some control over your destiny, you can avoid some things, but fortune plays a lot larger part than we normally assign. I have tried to make that argument by looking at my life.”

Walsh, the gambler who built the country’s hottest art museum, wants the world to believe that he is a merely a product of luck, of chance, of cards that fell his way. “The last thing that should happen to an individual is to have their dreams come true because it perpetuates the myth that they achieved their goals through hard work,” Walsh says. Yet here we are, perched atop the kingdom he has built, in MONA’s restaurant overlooking the grounds of his self-described “subversive adult Disneyland” which has lured 1.25 million people from around the world in less than four years.

Tourism Industry Council Tasmania estimates that the museum contributes more than $100 million a year to the state’s economy. It is an achievement that led Lonely Planet in 2013 to declare Hobart one

of the world’s top 10 destinations. No hard work here, just dumb luck?

One of the few certainties about Walsh’s life is that his luck has never been dumb.

Since his student days, when he learnt to count cards so well that he was banned from casinos, he has used his rare gift for mathematics to tame the vagaries of chance and become one of the country’s biggest gamblers. He claims he wins more than $8 million a year as a member of the world’s largest gambling syndicate, the 12-person group known as the Bank Roll, and ploughs almost all of it back into MONA, which he says loses $8 million a year despite its enormous popularity.

It’s a precarious balance for a man who says he still owes $80 million to his best friend and gambling partner Zeljko Ranogajec for a loan to set up MONA, and who also has undisclosed debts to the Australian Taxation Office. This is why Walsh may be serious when he declares with a straight face that the main reason he has written an autobiography is for the money. “Now that people have something invested [in MONA] and Tasmanians often claim ownership of it — they call it our museum — I am looking to perpetuate it, so now the money does matter,” he says.

“I once said that if nobody came I would pull up a chair, turn off the air-conditioning and watch the art rot — I said that I didn’t care — but now I realise that I did care, even if I didn’t know it at the time.” Yet Walsh admits that his new book began more by impulse than strategy when, on a flight to London in 2010, he simply started writing. This gambler turned art collector says he was lured by the thrill and the fear of wading into yet another unknown world. “It was kind of important to me because writing is one of those things that other people do,” says Walsh, whose only previous book was the MONA catalogue Monanisms in 2011.

Four years and 356 pages later, A Bone of Fact was born. The book is not so much a journey through Walsh’s life as a romp through his eccentric mind, with his life’s narrative frequently disrupted by seemingly random chapters discussing whatever takes his fancy, from the social life of penguins to the sex life of monkeys.

Walsh argues that there is method to the book’s oddball structure. “I’m employing the techniques of postmodernism which is one of the things I am attacking in this book, so there is a strong and deliberate sense of irony there.”

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Yet he also describes it as a “misfit memoir”, an appraisal which appears to be shared by his publisher. He writes in the book of how his publishers were frequently “unsatisfied” with his draft manuscript and of how they kept asking him to return to the topic at hand — his life story. Walsh begins one chapter by writing: “As a result of the publisher being unimpressed with what I have written so far, I fulfil a contractual obligation to narrate the history of my gambling.”

He says one female editor withdrew from the project because she was uncomfortable with his tone when discussing women. He writes about the culture of rape, cheating on partners and the mechanics of sex, and includes passages on each of his 18 girlfriends and two wives. “She refused to edit the book,” he says. “She said it was too sexist and misogynist.” So is it? “Of course I deny those claims but I would deny them even if they were true,” he says.

Then again, why would Walsh write a safe, linear autobiography when there is nothing safe or linear about him? “David is a walking contradiction in many ways,” says his friend, MONA architect Nonda Katsalidis. “Different people see him in a different light, for instance as a gambler, a mathematician, an art collector, an iconoclast. These are all aspects of his character, he is an amalgam of all those — you can select the David Walsh you like.”

The David Walsh I meet on this day arrives in an explosion of colour: his long grey hair flows wildly over a blazing multihued jacket, while fawn jeans lead to bright red shoes which jiggle up and down as he speaks. He doesn’t like journalists or interviews and his reputation for rudeness precedes him, but on this day Walsh is merely intense and restless. His mind is so crowded with plans, quixotic dreams and homespun philosophies that he veers from subject to subject, barely pausing for breath. When he hears a question he enjoys, he gallops off at speed and has to be corralled back to the topic. I feel kinship with his publishers.

Friends say Walsh is the happiest they have seen him. At 53, he has married his girlfriend of four years, Kirsha Kaechele; he feels personally validated by the runaway success of MONA; he has just written his life story and is brimming with dreams of building a hotel on the site and perhaps one day a boutique casino.

This is the same man who, at 20, was an introverted, self-confessed maths nerd with a form of Asperger syndrome from a

poor family in the struggle-town suburb of Glenorchy, Hobart. “He has been on a fascinating journey,” says Katsalidis.

“In his early years he was very shy. One friend described him as having difficulties ordering a pizza, much less giving a speech.

But his confidence has grown enormously since I’ve known him. He has become more sure of himself and confident in his ideas.”

Walsh talks in his book about the “fortuitous coin tosses” that have marked his journey, but he struggles to extract much luck from his childhood. He was two when his father, Thomas Walsh, who had worked as a barman, an asylum orderly and head-waiter, separated from his mother Myra, who raised him and his older siblings, Lindy-Lou and Tim, in a small weatherboard cottage. Lindy-Lou is said to have been nervous about what her brother might write about the family in his book and declined to be interviewed for this piece. Walsh says his father, whose ashes lie in an urn on display in MONA, “spent his last 45 years training greyhounds and waiting for Mum to come back to him”.

Walsh was a sickly child with asthma but he was bright and was forced to skip a year in high school, a decision he says “gave everyone a reason to hate me”. He says he became “a nerd”, reading science fiction, solving maths problems and devouring books on astronomy, spending hours on his roof looking at the stars.

In his first year at university, Walsh moonlighted in unusual ways. He began to gamble while also secretly completing other people’s public service entrance exams to help them get jobs. Eventually he filled out his own entrance exam and started work at the ATO, an employer that would one day make a multi-million dollar claim against him. “They thought me a public service devotee because I always wore a suit [but] I wore a suit because they were mandatory at the casino,” he says.

He and a group of friends had started to count cards at the Hobart casino, using their talent for maths to try to beat the system. If Walsh arrived too early at the casino he would pass the time playing Space Invaders, again using maths, not intuition, to beat the machine — “count 22 shots, then shoot the flying saucer, after that 14 shots”.

Through these friends he met Ranogajec, a charismatic and forceful young Tasmanian who was intrigued by what he saw as Walsh’s unique numeric skills. “I’d spot the opportunities,” Ranogajec said in an interview with The Monthly magazine, “and David would do the maths. He’s

intellectually gifted. Present him with a problem or a puzzle and in a few hours he can solve it.”

The pair formed a gambling partnership which saw them move for a while to Sydney.

They sang If I Were a Rich Man as they drove down the highway. They then formed the Bank Roll syndicate, and gambled from Las Vegas to South Africa and Macau. Walsh studied the literature of gambling and maths. He never went back to university or to the tax office. He had found his calling.

Even today, his wife says he wakes up at 4am and lies in bed playing with algorithms on his iPad, trying to invent new systems to use on the horses.

Anthony Senyard, a friend who works for Data Processors, a firm connected to the Bank Roll, says: “David sees it [gambling] in big-picture terms — the specific outcome of a race is less important that making a system that works long-term.” Senyard’s role is to develop the software to implement the betting systems conceived by Walsh and others.

In his book, Walsh doesn’t say much about the fact that the Bank Roll is now among the world’s largest betting syndicates, reportedly betting as much as $3 billion a year globally. He also only briefly touches on how in 2012, he and other syndicate members reached a confidential settlement with the ATO after it questioned the tax-exempt status of their winnings.

Gambling winnings are tax-free unless they are part of a business and the ATO claimed that the Bank Roll was, in effect, a business.

Walsh claims he supports the notion of high income earners paying high taxes but he pushed back against the ATO’s claim for him to pay tax on his earnings. He justifies this awkward argument by saying that “a retrospective decision [by the ATO] that contradicts all previous assessments in Australia… seems unjust and more than a tad churlish.”

Walsh went public at that time, warning that he might have to close MONA if he lost his dispute. The final settlement was far less than the ATO initially wanted but more than Walsh wanted and he is still paying off the debt. He says his gambling winnings are now subject to tax. “There was a heap of stress,” he recalls. “They wanted more than 100 per cent of all the money I had ever made — it would have closed me down.”

Walsh still loves the challenge of beating the system but he is ambivalent about the morality of being a gambler. “I very much enjoy the scheming, the elegance, the purities of the gambling world,” he says. “It presents economic problems, it presents METANOIA MAGAZINE

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mathematical conundrums and it presents an understanding of human nature that very few other fields provide. There’s no way I would ever stop gambling because I think it is appropriate and morally neutral” — as opposed to slot machines, which he describes as a “social evil” that impact the disadvantaged and are “noisy, ugly and anti-social.”

Yet, in the end, he believes it’s an unsatisfying way to make a living. “If you are a doctor you are creating health, but I’m not creating anything,” he says. “As a pure moral principle there is probably nothing wrong with that but it might well be that part of the crap I do here [at MONA] is Catholic guilt.” As he puts it in the book, “It’s fair to argue that I built MONA to absolve myself from feeling guilty about making money without making a mark.”

MONA’s conception can be traced to yet another “fortuitous coin toss” in 1992 when Walsh enlisted a gambling mate, Patrick Caplice, to go to South Africa and work the casinos. He won $20,000 with Walsh’s money but when he discovered he could not take such a large amount out of the country, Walsh suggested Caplice use it to buy an old Yoruba door which Walsh had seen in a Johannesburg art gallery and bring it back to Australia instead. “Thus,” writes Walsh, “I became an art collector.”

He quickly amassed a collection of antiquities, from Roman mosaics to Egyptian mummies and ancient coins, and set up the Moorilla Museum of Antiquities on the site of the Moorilla winery, which he and Ranogajec bought together and where MONA now stands. But Walsh made the mistake of turning his first museum into a conventional space. “At the opening I couldn’t help wondering why it looked like every other museum — elegant, white, understated and basically generic.” It opened in May 1999 and closed in May 2006, shortly before construction began on MONA. It was a flop. Few visitors came and Walsh vowed never to be trapped again by convention.

But building the extravagant MONA, with its dark themes of sex and death, required deep funds and faith. Walsh says the building and fit-out cost around $100 million (with at least another $80 million for the exhibits), of which Ranogajec chipped in $80 million. In 2009, when Walsh was $10 million short on bank repayments for MONA, he turned to the only revenue source he truly understood — gambling. He plunged on the 2009 Melbourne Cup and won $16 million, securing the repayments.

In other words, he bet MONA on the Cup and won it back. Yet when I ask him which

horse won that Melbourne Cup, he stares at me blankly and shrugs his shoulders. It’s the system, not the horse.

Walsh admits he had no clear vision for his museum. “While I was making MONA, I didn’t know what I was making,” he writes. “The debauched opening weekend [in January 2011] — thousands of people, queues a hundred metres long — left no opportunity for the hospitality staff to go home. They slept en masse, on beanbags.

When I found out, I cried again. MONA could have been crap. I think it isn’t.”

And yet, while he clearly adores the broad praise receives for the museum, he is dismissive of those who claim it ranks among the world’s best. “That’s gratifying, of course, but to me it’s also gratuitous garbage,” he writes. “MONA isn’t even the best museum starting with M.” Walsh also seems to view his private life as a series of coin tosses, not all of them fortunate. He writes in his book about losing his older brother Tim to cancer in 1991, saying that grief still erupts inside him, “infrequently but with undiminished intensity”. He tells me that humans are built to survive such tragedies better than we think. “We are designed to forget and we are designed to deal with pain,” he says.

But Walsh struggles to forget the pain he still feels about abandoning as a child his eldest daughter Jamie, now 23. In the

book he reveals how Jamie was conceived as a result of “cavalier and misogynistic behaviour” when he picked up her mother Lois in a Hobart pub to show his friend how easy it was to score. He says he walked up to the then stranger and made a joke. “She paused, then burst into laughter, then gave me a daughter.”

“One of the reasons I have had very few one-night stands is because the consequences of that one were so extreme,” he now says. Walsh didn’t want kids at that time and ran from fatherhood, especially after Lois’s mother visited and suggested he do the right thing and buy Lois a home.

“Her opportunism was a cause of great concern to me, although in retrospect the opportunism seems to be mine,” he writes.

“I used an uninterpretable incident as a justification for avoiding my daughter, a thing that shames me.”

Even today, Walsh is pained by his decision not to be involved. “F..king oath I regret that,” he says angrily. “I regret making a decision based on limited information.

Given that I didn’t want kids I regret taking the convenient way out, finding the excuse for behaving in a miscreant way.”

Walsh didn’t meet Jamie until she was 16, a meeting he insisted on because by then he’d had another daughter (Grace, then two, from another former lover) and neither knew about the other. He’d told a journalist he had two daughters and didn’t

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want Jamie to read about her younger sister first in a newspaper.

Jamie had been boarding at a Hobart school because her mother and stepfather lived out of town, but after that meeting she moved in with Walsh at MONA and stayed for four years. “She doesn’t call me Dad, however we’re pretty bloody close,” he says of their relationship now. “It has turned out a lot better than I had any right to expect given my behaviour at that time.” Walsh has half custody of Grace, now 10, and also has a three-year-old grandson, Lockie, Jamie’s son.

He met Kaechele in a bar while attending an art show in Basel, Switzerland. “I liked him the minute he walked in,” Kaechele says in her American twang. “Everyone is in ties, cufflinks, well-mannered, and David walks in with these torn jeans and a T-shirt that said irreverent things about God and his shaved head at that time and thick glasses. I immediately adored him, he was just so cute, and those glasses — I just knew he was a mathematician.”

Kaechele is a self-described “life artist” who has roamed the world, working with shamans in the Amazon, living in a remote Lebanese village and using proceeds from a medical marijuana farm in California to fund street art projects in New Orleans.

In June last year Walsh proposed to her in New York by giving her a medieval scroll outlining in meticulous calligraphy “all the

Sidney Nolan's Snake (1970-72), featured in Walsh's Museum of Old and New Art (MONA)

things I will do and she will do” as husband and wife. They celebrated with a lavish dinner served on a table chiselled from ice with Australian flowers frozen into it.

In March, Kaechele and Walsh, a strident atheist, were married at MONA’s gothic “chapel”, an installation by Belgian artist Wim Delvoye, who created the museum’s notorious poop machine, Cloaca. Their 150 guests included 10 bridesmaids who wore fertility symbols, instead of carrying bouquets, to reflect MONA’s themes of sex and death. Fertility is on Walsh’s mind as he contemplates the prospect of being a father again with Kaechele, who is 15 years his junior. “If I had the choice I would say no, but I think Kirsha is old enough that she is starting to worry about not having kids and I think it would be considered another contractual obligation,” he says. “I can’t just consider my own selfish needs at this point so it is our intention to attempt to have a child.”

Walsh spends our lunch denying the oftmade claims that he is a genius at math, gambling, art or museums. “Complete rubbish,” he scoffs with a wave of his hand.

When I ask Kaechele the same question later, when he is not around, she plays with her long red hair and ponders carefully. “Of course he is a genius,” she says finally. “It’s just that he is very anti-genius.”

“He is one of the most complex personalities I’ve ever met,” says Kaechele.

“He has a very layered personality, it is intellectual, it is highly emotional and it fluctuates between being very public and very private.”

Kaechele, who speaks of Walsh with a sense of wonderment, says he has an obsessive and insatiable thirst for knowledge. She claims he reads a book a day and spends “hours and hours” looking

up facts on Wikipedia. After he wakes at 4am he does maths, reads and writes, and rarely leaves home before 11am when his working day starts. Walsh says he divides his time almost evenly between his twin passions of art and gambling.

Kaechele says she rarely notices any Asperger-like behaviour in Walsh, though she concedes that when he is tense she often throws number puzzles his way to relax him. “It would certainly have been fair to describe me [as having a form of Asperger syndrome] when I was young — obsessive, withdrawn and lacking in empathy,” Walsh says. “These days I suspect no one would describe me that way.”

Curiously, in his book he does not discuss the issue. “Because I’ve written about it about 20 times before,” he explains.

“I also realised after I wrote the book that I didn’t talk about the time I was accused of murder,” he says, referring to the time when he was 16 and a teenage girl tried to blame him for the murder of an old woman who lived in his public housing block. Nor did he write about his suspicion that he was the product of the rape of his mother [who died in 2002] by his father during a sexless period in their life. “That’s totally uninteresting to me,” he says.

So Walsh’s memoir is really a book about those parts of his life that intrigue him most. High on this list is the future of MONA and other projects he is hatching inside his crowded head. “I want to build a science museum; I’ve been designing it for years and I’m happy to build it anywhere, but I want a billion dollars,” he deadpans.

“I could do it in a corrupt country applying for readmission to the human race, or for a robber-baron in America. I am completely serious and I would be prepared to devote 10 years to it.”

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In the meantime, he is busy with plans for a hotel on the site of MONA. He already has a design but needs a commercial partner. As always, he has done the maths and calculates that if he could build a hotel and get 30,000 room sales a year he may solve the museum’s financial woes. But for a man who dreams big, Walsh’s most cherished ambition is an unusually modest one. He wants to build a small casino on the site of MONA — a stylish gambling grotto shaped in his own vision. Naturally, he is thinking of calling it Monaco.

“It’s a huge long shot,” he says; in the book he explains that the Hobart casino has a 15-year monopoly and parliament would have to enact legislation. His casino would be a “Sixties-influenced, organic, flower-filled, tree-hugger’s paradise”, full of mushroom and flower shapes with no pokies and probably only a handful of tables. “Maybe it’s a pipedream,” he says.

“Because even if I did it, I wouldn’t make any money.”

But Walsh has a habit of defying the odds with pipe dreams and long shots. “Of course I would like to do it,” he says, leaning back with a lopsided grin and a gleam in his eye. “After all, I am a gambler.”

A Bone of Fact by David Walsh (Pan Macmillan, $55) is out now.

WORLD POLITICS

BG

ankers vs angsters

The Jordanian people took to the streets for 3 days and nights in protest against a new austerity tax bill forcing the Prime Minister Hani Mulki to quit. They could no longer cope with the rising consumer prices and falling salaries; bread subsidies scrapped, fuel costs on the increase and added punitive taxation as part of the Monetary Fund’s (IMF) Mnimonio conditions in exchange for government loans.

Citizens so it seems, have become perfect victims and easy targets for bailing out incompetent (often corrupt) governments.

Banking institutions on the other hand control countries, governments, industry and people’s lives in their pursuit of global economic colonization. Never before in the history of mankind have banks held so much power – they now rule the world! Like Iceland, Russia banned all IMF operations in that country, and yet nobody else dared to curb or stop banking exploitation in their own countries.

This is so reminiscent of what happened in Cyprus and Greece but with a difference; instead of kicking those IMF/Eurogroup Banksters out of the country, they bent over backwards to accommodate them that’s how low the Greek nation has been reduced to in the name of poisoned loans.

Cyprus has to pay back 7.5 Billion Euros by 2031 in twenty instalments on loans that were not really necessary – there were other alternatives available to the government but it stubbornly refused to consider its options. One can only ask why!

to the billions and billions of bail-in cash the government stole from people’s bank accounts? What happened to the other billions of income received from selling Laiki interests? With those thoughts in mind it also triggers more questions; questions the Government and the Finance Minister both refuse to offer an explanation to the public or parliament! Meanwhile the politicians remain silent.

Greece’s debt on the other hand is astronomical; it is so vast Greece will never be in a position to repay its current debt and yet the Tsipras government seeks more loans to finance fiscal incompetence and meet the interest payments on its massive debt. An additional 1.6 billion euros may or may not be released by the IMF on June 21 and if approved, it will bring further austerity hardship for the nation.

This is insanity on a grand scale! As long as citizens refuse to stand up for their rights (like the Jordanians did) governments and petty-politicians will simply ask for more IMF poisoned loans to finance their failure rather than stimulate exports, growth and productivity.

The Jordanian people did well but what happened to that Greek spirit of defiance?

Where is it? Where is that revolutionary leadership? Some say it’s in hibernation.

Andreas C. Chrysafis Was born at Ayios Ambrosios, Kerynia, Cyprus. He studied and lived in the UK and Vancouver, Canada for most of his life where he practiced his profession as an architectural designer. He is a prolific writer of books, press articles including The Vanishing Cyprus Series and the Revolution of the Mind Series both published worldwide. Today, he lives between London and Cyprus devoting most of his time writing and painting works of art. Info@ evandia.com

Misguided, the Anastasiades government did the unthinkable and robbed people’s bank accounts (bailin) to save a corrupt banking system.

That’s unforgivable! Today, it is selling the country’s silver such as: the Harbours and Telephones Authority, (it has already sold Cyprus Airways last year), and is now selling the last remaining national bank and other assets to raise extra cash to meets its debt obligation!

But the most important question of all remains unanswered: Where did the 7.5 billion bailout cash go? What happened METANOIA MAGAZINE

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www.facebook.com/ACChrysafisAuthor www.facebook.com/ACChrysafisArtGallery

ART THE ART OF

MARILEE NIELSON

By Hank Leis

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Describe your early years; where did you grow up, how did your parents, relatives and the people around you influence you?

My father was in the Air Force and I lived in two different countries and four different states before the age of ten years old. There were six kids in my family and I was the youngest. Before I was born, each of the five other children in my family were born in four different states. Quite an accomplishment since the six of us were only seven years apart in total. My father retired in California which was the last state I resided in with my first family and the place I still live today.

My clearest memories that had an impact on my perception of the world came from two places, my birthplace, Albuquerque New Mexico, which was also the place we lived while my father was in the Vietnam war. All six kids under 13 years old with my mom pretty much functioning as a single parent. The other place was Germany and our travels across Europe when I was 4-6 years old. I clearly remember the castles we visited, the artwork on the walls, the historical, rich villages and cultures we lived in. I was young, but when I was in my thirties I went back to the building we lived in and vividly remembered the lilac bush. Yes, the lilac bush that was still there.

Funny how certain things stick in your mind.

The family members who had the greatest influence on me were my older sister Julie and my brother Bill. From my earliest memories of Julie, I remember her encouraging me to find my secret self, to be bigger than who I thought I was, and to listen and sing my song. She was a hippy in the best sense of the word and I still play her guitar today. She passed away in a car accident at twenty years old and Bill took her place. Julie had a soul that surpassed and attracted others to her and her vision for me continued through her memories, but Bill was worldly in an exciting and magical way. He introduced me to sports, entertainment, night life and laughter.

He was the one who picked me up from my high school sporting events and from college my freshman year, playing with and eventually approving of the man who would become my husband several years later.

I was born with a deep desire to fill the what I call the “sacred hole” within me. The “sacred hole” refers to the internal knowing that what the physical world offers is not enough and when seeking fulfillment from this world, you often find yourself left with

pain and suffering and even illness later in life.

I was a very sad child, and in hindsight, I link my sadness to this unfilled longing, although I couldn’t really explain it to anyone. I often times think that the depression and anxiety that so many people suffer from, as well as a constant disappointment in the world and other people in our contemporary society, comes from this encounter with "the sacred hole”.

I call it sacred because if you take the fearful journey into it, you will come out the other side with a new way of thinking.

If and when you emerge from these depths within yourself, your art will flourish and you will find your voice, because at the bottom of this seemingly dark place are the seeds for who you are meant to be. Many artists paint during this journey as well and some never emerge from the journey and their art is painfully beautiful. A piece I painted that marks this journey is inspired by a Vivian Maier photograph and one I call The Presence of Grace.

Love Is What You Do, Not What You Get

This thinking is nothing new. In Christianity it’s the cycle of Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

I even made a series of jewelry pendants that reflected this sacred theology. Buddha made this journey and encourages all followers to give up the material and seek the spiritual, and the wonderful, new phenomena of yoga that has taken hold in the western world is unwittingly introducing so many people to this way of thought. And they thought they were just going for a good stretch and workout!

I’ve since learned to call this thinking Non-Dualistic Thinking, and that introduces us to the most influential voice in my life and thus, my art, Fr. Richard Rohr OFM from the Center for Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He has organized this theology into an ever-deeper search for meaning and application in his writings that come as a daily email that center and challenge me every morning.

One of his concepts is that of the Dualistic Mind or either/or thinking. Let me quote from his writing here to explain this concept:

“The transition to the second half of life moves you from either/or thinking to both/and thinking: the ability to increasingly live with paradox and mystery. You no longer think in terms of win/lose, but win/win. It is a very different mind and strategy for life. In order for this alternative consciousness to become your primary way of thinking, you usually have to experience something that forces METANOIA MAGAZINE

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Roadside Grave Marker

Bruised But Not Broken

either/or thinking to fall apart. Perhaps you hate homosexuality and then you meet a wonderful gay couple. Or you meet a Muslim who is more loving than most of your Christian friends. Or you encounter a young immigrant who doesn’t match your stereotypes at all.

Something must break your addiction to yourself and your opinions... It might be called growing up.”

Adapted from Richard Rohr, Adult Christianity and How to Get There.

So when I apply non-dualistic thinking to my “sacred hole” theory, I realize that the people who left me disappointed in life were only doing their best, were struggling with their own truths or lack of truths, and that even the acts that were done, the pain that I experienced, the illness, the sadness were all part of the story I would eventually call my life and that they all belonged.

Not that they were right or wrong, or that I needed to understand the “reason” for their occurrence, they just are. I learned to surrender, to observe and witness these moments and seek the third way. The nondualistic way of understanding life. Not to seek the right or wrong, but to be the witness, or in Sanskrit the Sakshi. Not to file away the experience giving it a reason for being, but to honor its place in my life and witness what it has to teach me. And when I learned to do that, my art began to flow from this open vessel.

were two kinds of people in my major, the intense artsy ones and the ones who would graduate, understand irrigation and own a business someday. I definitely fit into the first category. There was an unbelievable program to study for a year in Florence, Italy, offered the third year of my major and I practically demanded that my parents fork out the money to send me. It was like I was possessed. I just had to go. My parents had no idea what was going on inside of me but somehow, I convinced them to pay for it. Thank you, mom and dad.

It’s as easy as that!! Just let go, trust and find a good yoga class.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I came back an artist. Everything just came together. I worked as a landscape architect for several years, but only as a designer, throwing fits in the office, being a diva, almost getting laid off (I quit before giving them the opportunity) and then started my own business. Along the way I got married to my lovely engineer husband, the Ying to my Yang, and had a baby. One day, I picked up a paint brush and painted a portrait of my son. I felt the enormity of that moment in my own little, tiny life. It was my first painting and I knew what it was I was born to do, I was born to paint. That’s exactly what I told my husband when he came home that night. Really, he’ll remember.

What were your ambitions and when did you know you wanted to be an artist?

I had an inkling that I wanted to be an artist when I went to college. My first degree was in Landscape Architecture and there

I made the decision to set aside landscape architecture and pursue a career as a portrait painter. I spent the next nine years painting commissioned portraits of children and met many wonderful people who trusted me to paint their loved ones. It was a real blessing and a time to refine my skills as a watercolorist. I earned signature membership in the National Watercolor Society and juried membership in the American Watercolor Society. It was a great way to make a living!

My favorite experience from this time in my life was when a former client contacted me to tell me that her daughter Sara was getting married. She said they had moved several times since I painted her kids and with every new house the two portraits of their kids were rehung. She felt that in a way I was present with them in each house because of the paintings. I had a painting of Sara in my own home/studio as a sample painting for new clients since I only had two boys of my own and Sara was so lovely. It was a full sheet and one of my best paintings, but I knew inside it was time for Sara to go home. I packaged the painting up and sent it across the country to Sara’s mother. It was an emotional homecoming. Sara’s mom said she was once again wearing a white dress as a bride, the second time she would be remembered in her white dress.

Finding Balance

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The Presence of Grace

Which experiences in your life were the most meaningful and how did they influence your art?

The most meaningful were encounters with books, dreams and spiritual experiences. Some had paintings involved, others didn’t. The first book that originally introduced me to the Prince, the guardian of our soul, the lover of our spirit, was Hinds Feet in High Places by Hannah Hurnard. It’s an allegory based off of the Songs of Solomon and taught me the way through fear and into the immense power of love gained through sacrifice. It set the tone for the many books that followed about sacrifice, longing, and finding what is so incredibly present in our world and yet so deeply hidden in the monotony of our everyday life.

The first painting I did where I felt connected to something larger than myself in a striking way was a commission from a woman who wanted to meditate upon the crucifixion during Lent. I painted her at the foot of the cross. I painted a full sheet watercolor in three days, listening to Wagner, holed up in my studio. My husband came home and was so disturbed by the painting he asked me to finish it quickly and get it out of the house. I thought it was beautiful. The client and subject wept when she saw it.

Other pieces that were notable were the series of Our Lady of Guadeloupe images. A priest friend asked me to paint her for a processional banner. I painted Guadeloupe, using the picture of a face from the National Geographic magazine of a 14-year-old Sandinista rebel. If Mary was to appear to the “America’s” she would have been that girl. A fighter for the rights of the ingenious people who since the conquer of the Aztecs in 1519 have been trod upon. I

Marilee Nielsen's first commission

painted her two more times with the final image still hanging in my bedroom, right next to my painting of Frida Kahlo as an icon, the Madonna of course, with her little baby Diego Rivera in her lap.

Your art has changed over the years.

Describe these changes and how they represent your own evolution.

The change in my art comes from my personal evolution. The advantage of getting older is that you have so many memories, so many lessons learned, so many experienced to draw upon and so many wise people who have passed through your life and left their mark. I look at some of my earliest pieces of figure drawing and see the same spirit that I find in my paintings today. My love of precision, of detail and the loss of self that happens when you let yourself go in the observation of that detail.

Over the past several years, since I have been practicing yoga, I recognize the same place I go when painting is the same place I go in my meditation and Kundalini experiences. When I was younger, these places frightened me. Judgement would creep in and break the moment. Fr. Richard Rohr would call this the dualistic mind. The need for right and wrong, good and bad, art or nonsense. Now after twenty-five years of working as an artist, I recognize that fearful voice as my old friend and hug her. I ask her in for tea and observation as I paint.

Age and thousands of paintings and pieces of jewelry, yes, I was a jeweler for ten years, have all taught me that there’s nothing but beauty within us that wants to come out METANOIA MAGAZINE

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Our Lady of Guadeloupe

as art. Even when it’s dark, disturbing… it’s my story and thus, our story. Just like art, nothing is new under the sun and my expression is only another expression of what we all share in, LIFE. What is happening now in your life that gets represented by what you are doing in art and where do you expect it will take you? What puzzles are you solving?

Currently, my life has been greatly influenced by the great catalyst, Donald Trump. Can you believe it! I was so devastated when he was elected president.

But just like the time I got kicked out of the Catholic Church, yes, that really happened, ugh, it was a paradigm shift for me. I realized my time on this planet was finite and my artwork had to speak in my voice.

There were so many people who voted for Donald Trump, people I knew and loved, and I felt like I had failed them. But a wise friend reminded me that there was a reason for Donald Trump and all I could do was to find that reason in my own life.

I even wrote a letter to President Obama and promised him I’d find that reason and do my part. My part was to be found in my artwork.

My work now is very pretty and not all that shocking, but that’s the point. I have always been drawn to paintings that incorporate words and my goal was to paint exquisitely beautiful botanicals and

our mother’s womb we remembered that journey, wearing vestigial gills and tail and fins for hands. Beneath the outer layer of our neocortex and what we learned in school, that story is in us—the story of a deep kinship with all life, bringing strengths that we never imagined. When we claim this story as our innermost sense of who we are, a gladness comes that will help us to survive.”

Reference:

Marilee Nielson

animal images that can’t help but draw you in, seduce you and then leave you open to contemplate words that mark the moment.

In this place of admiring and reveling in the beauty of nature, you are asked a question or challenged with a thought. These painting are a blend of everything I am. A landscape architect, a painter, a thinker, an observer, a lover of souls. They are much more quiet than my previous work, but so am I. There’s just not that much that needs to be said when you are in the presence of nature or those you love.

My love affair with nature happened at an early age. I remember standing for hours in our family backyard with sugar water on my palms, tempting butterflies to land on me. I was the weird kid who walked home from school by myself and sung songs in my head to the flowers.

Yep! I felt more kinship with the flowers, the grasshoppers that would jump on my shirt and the lizards that would run across my path than the other kids. Once again, I found some references from Richard Rohr that gave my older mind an understanding of this great attraction.

Joanna Macy, “The Greening of the Self,” in Spiritual Ecology: The Cry of the Earth, ed. Llewellyn Vaughan-Lee (The Golden Sufi Center: 2013), 145, 147, 155-156.

This obsession of mine with nature still continues today. I love a challenging mountain bike ride and the other day I was riding by myself up a steep, dusty path and since it was spring, the little flowers were practically singing their way up the trail.

In my previous rides up this hill, my heart would be pounding as I fought for breath and strength to get me up the inclines, but on this day, I swear the flowers gave me strength! Or more likely, my constant stops to take pictures up the hill helped, but my spirit was just shouting when I got to the top of the hill. I was rewarded beyond all measure when I descended the hill and ran into not just one but two roadrunners. I’ve claimed roadrunners as my totem animal since I was born in Albuquerque and once when I was working in my garage a roadrunner came in and had a conversation with me. Okay-not in the crazy sense, she just walked in and started clicking at me until I finally said hello, that everything was okay and that I was pleased to meet her!

Roadrunners have zygodactyl feet which means they have the same number of toes, two, on the front and back of their foot.

This anatomical design leaves a print that is the same on both sides. From looking at their prints you can’t tell if they are going forward or backward. Where they are going is no more important than where they have been. Definitely non-dualistic thinkers!

A tarantula also came into that same garage one day and I was so excited! I put her in a box for my kids to see when they got home and after thoroughly examining her hairy, hairy, beautiful body we let her go. I loved that garage!!

The puzzle I am solving is that there is no puzzle. As Richard Rohr says, everything we have looked for is right there in front of us, it is who we are within. My paintings gently ask questions that are meant to guide you into this place. Have you found balance in your life, do you love more than you take, do you allow the mystery of life to just be, do you run from pain, or surrender your way into it?

Who is helping guide you and/or mentor you?

Father Richard Rohr OFM and the Center for Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Although he doesn’t know me, but his mystical words come through my email every day.

What other interests do you have?

Mountain biking and traveling!!

Preferably both at the same time!

“By expanding our self-interest to include other beings in the body of the Earth, the ecological self also widens our window on time. It enlarges our temporal context, freeing us from identifying our goals and rewards solely in terms of our present lifetime. The life pouring through us, pumping our heart and breathing through our lungs, did not begin at our birth or conception.

Like every particle in every atom and molecule of our bodies, it goes back through time to the first splitting and spinning of the stars.

Thus the greening of the self helps us to reinhabit time and our own story as life on Earth. We were present in the primal flaring forth, and in the rains that streamed down on this still-molten planet, and in the primordial seas. In

Christ Has Died METANOIA MAGAZINE

Maya, Mother of Buddha 22

When the sky When the thesky sky When no longer your limit Whenis the sky is no nolonger longeryour yourlimit limit is is no longer your limit

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THE NOTEBOOKS OF PAUL RADER

By Lynn Munroe

Isaac Paul Rader was a brilliant American artist and illustrator who is still celebrated today for the hundreds of vibrant paperback book covers he created over 40 years ago.

A decade ago, inspired by Rader collector Robert W. Rutherford, I tracked down Paul Rader's widow Edith in Ocala Florida, I told her I was looking for Paul’s list of all of his paperback covers. She told me all his papers had been thrown out after he died in 1986. Disappointed, I tried to create a Rader checklist from scratch for my 2003 paperback list. I utilized the help of many friends in the paperback hobby, and we looked at a lot of book covers, and I used the paperback price guides. Signed Raders (that is, cover art with his distinctive “Rader” signature or sometimes just the letter “R” visible) were a breeze, other covers were just guesswork. I knew some of my guesses were wrong, and I knew there were some covers I was going to miss. But it was a start. After Edith Rader died, I kept in touch with their daughter Elaine. The years went by. And then Elaine contacted me with a big surprise.

Elaine Rader was looking through an old box of stuff in her basement when she found her father’s notebooks. Her mother had been mistaken, she didn’t throw them out, she put them in storage. Covering the years 1920 to 1970, the notebooks listed every painting and illustration he had ever sold, and included information about who bought each one, how much he was paid, and the date of each sale. The notebooks included all his paperback covers and magazine illustrations. Elaine figured this information would be of interest to me. She was right. I compared her father’s notes to my list and was pleased to see we had got a lot of them right. We had also missed a lot, and assigned a few to Rader that he did not paint. We now correct all those mistakes this year with the first ever complete, and authorized, Paul Rader checklist, based on the notes he made in his notebooks.

This checklist covers his commercial paperback and magazine work from 1956 (the date of his first paperback cover) until he retired in 1970. Advertising and portraits and all of his early illustration work in the late 40's and early 50's for magazines like American Weekly, Family Circle and Redbook are outside our sphere of interest here. Around 1957 Paul Rader signed on with the Balcourt Art Service agency, and Ed Balcourt began getting work for Paul Rader in magazines like Swank and with paperback publishers such as Midwood.

On my 2003 checklist I figured Rader’s first paperback was Gold Medal 716, Come METANOIA MAGAZINE

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Night, Come Evil (1957). Later, Robert Wiener shared his Rader cover art for an earlier paperback, Find My Killer (Signet 1448, 1957). So then I decided the Signet was Rader’s first. Now, thanks to the notebooks, I know that Find My Killer was Rader’s third cover, Come Night, Come Evil was his fourth. Rader’s first cover was Girl Running (Signet 1347, 1956), an Adam Knight murder mystery. I had never looked that far back and should have. Rader’s notebooks say his second cover was a Berkley he called “Boo Boo” in his notes. There is no 1957 Berkley called “Boo Boo”, but a look at Berkley 371, Bubu of Montparnasse, reveals Rader’s style.

The information for each painting in the notebook varies. Some listings give the published title and book number; others are just a description of the art. Some detective work was required to locate the latter, but I think I found almost all of them. You are invited to help me fill in any blanks on this new revised checklist.

The notebooks are amazingly detailed, but they are not always 100% complete.

Rader was jotting quick notes as he went along, so there may be book sales that he simply forgot to record, or that he omitted for one reason or another. For example, in February 1963, Rader notes he was paid Second Rights to reprint his art for My Body, Your Bed. There is no first appearance of that title earlier in the notebooks. Either he failed to note it, or it appears under some other title. I can guess what it might be, but there is no way to be certain.

All of Rader’s hundreds of Midwood covers are found in the notebooks – except for two which I believe are Raders strongly enough to include here also: the first one, Midwood 8, Carla; and Midwood 60, All The Way. I still think those are Rader covers although I don’t find them entered in the notebooks.

Carla (1958) is not only Rader’s first Midwood, it is also unquestionably his work, from its style right down to the big “Rader” signature in the lower left corner.

He might have just forgotten to list it, except there is a 1958 sale that I find no book for, so I wonder if it might be the painting Midwood used for Carla. The listing says “Seductive blonde on floor – ‘Tildy’”. The price paid, $150., matches what Midwood paid him for later covers in 1958. Carla features a seductive redhead on the floor, and it’s easy to change hair color (maybe she’s a strawberry blonde?), but that title is wrong. Another reason I think this is Carla is because when Carla was reprinted

three years later, there is a note in Rader’s notebook that reads “Girl on floor - $37.50”. $37.50 was his standard fee for Second Rights payments at that time. So, it might be Carla. But Rader painted more than one “girl on floor”, so it could also just as easily be a reference to a different painting.

Perhaps Rader just failed to make a note for the sale of Carla.

All The Way Midwood 60, is not signed, so technically since it’s not in the notebook there is some possibility that it’s not Rader.

The problem is it looks exactly like a Rader, and has been identified as a Rader by collectors since day one. Midwood reused the art two more times, and when the second appearance was published there is the mystery note: “Second Rights $37.50 My Body, Your Bed.” Could that be All The Way? It is a painting of a woman sitting on a bed.

Or is there a missing Rader painting called My Body, Your Bed yet to be discovered?

Bruce Black’s great website Bookscans. com includes Grahame Flanagan’s collection of foreign paperback covers. This one, from Finland re-uses Rader’s beautiful cover art for Midwood 64, Million Dollar Mistress. If Rader was ever paid anything for these, he does not make note of it.

Also missing from the notebooks are most of the recycled Rader covers found on later publishers like All Star and Private Edition. We were told Rader did these, but if so he didn’t write about it in his notebooks.

Perhaps he kept a separate list of those sales? He does mention a couple Bee-Line recycles, but there are many more BeeLine Raders not mentioned.

Each listing in the Rader notebooks gives the date he finished the painting, who it is for, and, fortunately for us, a short description of the painting. For example, the familiar Rader painting Her Private Hell is in the notebook as: “Sample – girl pressing against her image in large mirror, dressing gown down to hips.” And then the date he finished the painting: “December 12, 1962” When I mentioned to Elaine Rader how delighted I was to confirm in her father’s notes for the Midwood cover Child Bride that he used an airbrush, the tool of his idols Petty and Vargas, Elaine replied:

“As you tell me this I now have memories of exact points in time, in our New York City apartment, of watching my dad doing his air brushing with a mouth piece, blowing gently, with sweeping motions of his hand across the board.”

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When I interviewed Paul Rader’s widow Edith a decade ago, I asked her for information about Rader’s models, especially the classic long-haired beauty that appears again and again on his Midwood covers. “Oh that was just a figment of his imagination,” she told me.

“That was his dream girl, his fantasy.”

After Edith Rader died, I learned from Ed Balcourt and Elaine Rader that the model was Edith Rader. She was never comfortable talking about Paul’s sexy covers, let alone the fact that she was the nude model riveting our attention on so many of them. She preferred to remain anonymous. But now Paul and Edith are no longer with us, and time has passed, it’s a new century. So I celebrate here the remarkable modeling career of a woman known only to my generation as “The Rader Girl”: Edith Rader.

Paul Rader’s legacy, his art, continues to resonate as the years pass. His iconic images have appeared in countless places from refrigerator magnets to postcards. I have a blank journal with Sin On Wheels on the cover, with stunning cover model Edith Rader. This is the cover of a 2006 Cleis Press reprint of Carol Caine’s 1968 Midwood World of Women. The original had a photo cover; this edition uses Paul Rader’s art from 69 Barrow Street. Paul Rader and his model Edith live on.

Fine Jewelry | www.ElaineRader.com

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PHOTOGRAPHIC GENIUS SARAVUT WHANSET

ON BEING THERE

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THE POWER OF SAMENESS CANADIAN POLITICS

FACTS AND BELIEFS IN SOCIETY By the Honourable Dr. Gordon Hogg, MP, former B.C. MLA, PhD

YO- “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

In 2002 Daniel Kahneman became the first psychologist to win a Nobel Prize in economics.

What was Mark Twain thinking? It does sound intriguing, but what the heck does it mean? -"It ain't what you don't know that gets you in trouble; its what you know for sure that just ain't so." We have each believed things that turned out to be “not so.” I remember how sad I was to learn that Santa Claus and the tooth fairy were not so. People were convinced that the world was flat, that we couldn’t go faster than the speed of sound and that it’s not possible for a human to run a mile in under four minutes. Yet these “facts” have proven to be wrong-in 1954, when Roger Bannister broke the four- minute mile barrier, the impossible was proven to be possible and within the next year many more people did the impossible-they too broke the 4-minute mile barrier.

He posed four interesting questions that provide four fascinating insights into our behaviour. Insights that can help us to better understand and connect?

Does what we know “for sure” sometimes prevent us from doing what is possible just because we believe it is not possible?

It certainly appears to!

We proudly talk about our multicultural, pluralistic society and how we live in relative harmony with many different religions, cultural beliefs and traditions-we share much in common- can we be more compassionate and caring?

1. Why do we think that people who agree with us are reasonable and those that don’t are unreasonable?

2. Why do people find it so difficult to change their minds?

3. Why does the same information often lead people to different conclusions?

4. Why does more information often drive people’s ideas further apart?

Kahneman’s research partner, Amos Tversky taught at Stanford University for a few years. He told the story of a very thoughtful, logical, rational economist whose office was just down the hall from his. After years of being laughed at because he drove a decrepit old car, he announced that he was going to buy the perfect car. Over the following weeks and months Tversky checked in to see if he had purchased that perfect car-he hadn’t but his office was covered with consumer reports, graphs of new cars and every kind of analysis imaginable. It seemed to Tversky that the research and analysis would go on forever. Before leaving Stanford for the summer he checked in again and to his surprise the economist had made his METANOIA MAGAZINE

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decision- he was going to buy a Volvo.

When Tversky returned from holidays he asked the economist how he liked the Volvo and the answer was, oh I didn’t buy oneyou see my brother-in-law bought one and it was nothing but trouble.

All that research and analysis and, then in the end, he ignored it and took the advice of a relative, someone he knew and trusted. The thoughtful, logical economist made an emotional decision- but why? Is it because our feelings and connections are often more powerful than our thoughts and our arguments?

I used to sit as a member of the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia and I now sit as a Member of Parliament in Ottawa. I used to believe that a thoughtful reasoned debate could lead to agreement -boy I was wrong- in matters of partisan political importance – that just doesn’t happen. We hold on to our preconceived notions, assumptions and beliefs as though they are family treasures. We interpret information in a way that affirms what we already believe-and we already believe that the other political parties are -in matters of disagreement- unreasonable and wrong -just as they know that we are unreasonable and wrong. These beliefs that we “know as facts” make reasoned debate and agreement almost impossible. Can we find better ways to connect with others? Can we find sameness?

American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s research found, that we have always formed into groups, we then oppose other

groups and then we blind ourselves from the truth. We become rabid Vancouver Canuck fans and then hate the Toronto Maple Leafs and then we cannot talk reasonably about either team as are we blinded from the truth. We join political parties, we oppose other parties and then blind ourselves from the truth again making reasoned debate and agreement virtually impossible.

When presented with evidence we seem only capable of looking at it in ways that support what we already believe and those beliefs then shape how we think, thus making rational decisions almost impossible. It is called confirmation bias and motivated reasoning- but of course it doesn’t affect us.

they should present their information in a manner that affirms people’s beliefsthat they had to sell themselves before they could sell their ideas. Perhaps they should have said, "We thank you for your concern for our safety and for the safety of our communities and we have some ideas that may help you to make us all safer.” We are more receptive to information when the message has a social meaning that is consistent with our group values- when we focus on our sameness.

However, it doesn’t always work, as baseball legend Yogi Berra said, "There are some people; if they don’t already know you just can’t tell em.” Are we content to be those people who you just can’t tell?

What allegiances have you formed?

What groups have you opposed? When were you last blinded from the truth?

Connections and sameness are not easy.

What if we believe some things that aren’t true-things that may prevent us from being more compassionate and caring? from seeing sameness?

As a Little League baseball coach of sixyear-olds I learned that connecting with the kids was what mattered. We did this by running around the bases in relays and by baseball bowling-activities that focused on being together, and on having fun- activities that emphasized sameness rather than skill differences-activities that connected us!

We celebrate diversity; different beliefs, cultures and traditions. What would happen if we added sameness to our list of celebrations? It seems that where ever we go in the world most people and most cultures care about the same things – and share the same values. Can we identify and connect more effectively?

Timmy was a player who seemed a bit out of place- he was smaller than the other kids and he seemed to be there only because his parents wanted him to be-then we found out that he had a stop watch -he started timing the relays – then organizing them- he found sameness, he connected – and he had fun.

I am not saying that we don’t have differences; and

If we connected well the players became much more responsive to learning baseball skills. We started to learn what every good car salesperson knows, that you have to sell yourself before you can sell a car. We had to find sameness- we had to connect.

I am just saying that we should start with our sameness;

Last September, I addressed a World Health Organization conference on violence. Academics from many countries presented their research. Following my comments, an academic told me that if governments acted on the evidence they would use risk-needs analysis and make our communities much safer. I was later approached by two forensic nurses who had another approach to reducing crime and then by an author who had done a meta-analysis of the literature and had yet another approach that he knew would work.

Each of them presented their evidence as if it was obvious what governments should do, however, they didn’t know what the good car salesperson knows – that

I am not saying that we shouldn’t respect our differences; and I am not saying that we shouldn’t celebrate our differences;

That our sameness is the first thing that we should see.

And I am saying that most people throughout the world care about the same things, they care about their families, their friends and their communities and they care about finding a better life for the people close to them; whether it is better physically, emotionally or spiritually By taking sameness and placing it in the middle we focus on a value that unites us while multiculturalism and pluralism tend to emphasize our differences. Sameness helps us to view our complex, difficult and disparate world from a place of common understandings.

However, Margaret Mead has reminded us to, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change our world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”

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What is your hope for our community, our country and our world?

Gandhi Peace Prize winner- Vaclav Havel said; “Hope it’s not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.” And sameness makes sense.

Does what you know for sure allow you to see something of yourself in others?

Do you hold hope for our community, our country, our world?

If we engage with the wisdom of a car salesperson; If we engage with the respect of a little league coach; If we connect in a way that affirms people’s values; Then, just maybe, we will be more understanding.

We have a chance to make a significant shift in how we relate to each other.

Let’s make our community and our public spaces more comfortable and compassionate. Let’s nurture harmony in our families and in our communities; let’s celebrate our place in the world.

Each of us, each one of us, can make a difference and it will make a difference for everyone. Let’s respect our differences and celebrate the power of our sameness.

Martin Luther King said, "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

You matter! We all matter - please don’t be silent!

Thank-You Gordon Hogg

Former B.C. Minister of State for ActNow B.C., Gordon Hogg was a Member of the British Columbia Legislative Assembly for the Liberal Party. A psychologist, he was a Regional Director in the province’s Corrections Service prior to his election in 1997.

Currently, Dr. Hogg is representing the South Surrey- White Rock riding as a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons of Canada. ActNow B.C. is a government initiative that crosses departmental lines to promote healthy living.

Nicol Munoz

Metanoia Magazine at the Leo Awards June 3, 2018

Patrick Sabongui

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Justin Pillay and Justin Voitec

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Ali Liebert

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VANCOUVER WEBFEST 2018 BEST ANIMATION This is Desmondo Ray! (Australia) BEST COMEDY The Dangers of Online Dating (Canada) BEST DOCUMENTARY KYNNSTLAH - A Series of Artist Portraits (Germany/U.S.) BEST DRAMA Nasty Habits (U.S.) BEST DRAMADY Adulthood (Canada) BEST FAMILY Scout & The Gumboot Kids (Canada) BEST FANTASY The Dreamcatcher (France)

BEST HORROR Burkland (Belgium) BEST REALITY House Call with Dr. Yvette Lu (Canada) BEST SCIENCE FICTION Restoration (Australia) BEST PILOT (UNDER 30 MINUTES) The Last 7 (Malaysia) BEST PILOT (OVER 30 MINUTES) The Gamers: The Shadow Menace (U.S.) BEST VR The Great (Mexico) BEST ACTOR Jason Gedrick, Trouble Creek (U.S.)

BEST ACTRESS Odessa Young, High Life (Australia) BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY Filth City (Canada) BEST DIRECTOR Stacey K. Black & Shea E. Butler, Trouble Creek (U.S.) BEST ORIGINAL SCORE Spiral (Canada) BEST SCREEN PLAY Fluffy Marky (Canada) BEST SOUND DESIGN The Drive (Canada) BEST SPECIAL EFFECTS The Last 7 (Malaysia) BEST VISUAL EFFECTS Strowlers (U.S.) BEST OF BC Girls vs. The City (Canada) BEST INTERNATIONAL Thesha (South Africa) BEST CANADIAN Teenagers (Canada) BEST OF FESTIVAL Inconceivable (Canada)

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A Highlight of Clients Represented by The Promotion People

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PANACHE, POLITICS AND PARTIES Metanoia Magazine at the filming of Get Cooking With Celebrities. Get Cooking With Celebrities featured Celebrity Chef, author, and Dragon's Den star Vikram Vij alongside the Juno-award winning DJ and actor, Maestro Fresh-Wes. Chef Vij is the owner of the awardwinning Vancouver restaurants, Vij's, Rangoli, and My Shanti. As well, he is the author of several books, including the winner of the Cordon d'Or Gold Ribbon International Cookbook Award and the winner of the Canadian Culinary Book Award, Vij: Elegant and Inspired Indian Cuisine.

DJ Maestro Fresh Wes is an Juno awardwinning Rap and Hip Hop artist as well as a actor on the CBC show Mr. D. Hosted by Laurie Belle, the show shared stories of the two celebrities as they cooked Punjabi Daal and Vij's family recipe chicken curry.

MISSIVES

WE'VE YET TO DISPEL THIS SUPERSTITION “Everything that is correct in Hazony’s Wall Street Journal essay was said earlier, and better, by Hayek.”

FRIEDRICH AUGUST VON HAYEK

DONALD J BOUDREAUX

Economist and Philosopher, author of Theory of Money and Credit (1912), Monetary Theory and the Trade Cycle (1933), Prices and Production (1931), and The Road to Serfdom (1944)

Professor of Economics and Martha and Nelson Getchell Chair for the Study of Free Market Capitalism at the Mercatus Center George Mason University Fairfax, VA 22030

Editor, Wall Street Journal 1211 6th Ave. New York, NY 10036 Editor: Yoram Hazony wisely warns against the hubris of unreasonably substituting abstract human reason for the wisdom embodied in many evolved human institutions and norms (“The Dark Side of the Enlightenment,” April 7). But his nearly wholesale rejection of the enlightenment is overreaction. A much more nuanced evaluation of the power and perimeters of human reason is offered in F.A. Hayek’s 1945 essay “Individualism: True and False.”

There, Hayek distinguished what he called “Cartesian rationalism” from the correct rationalism of thinkers such as David Hume, Adam Smith, and Edmund Burke.

Like Mr. Hazony, Hayek (along with Hume, Smith, et al.) understood the irrationality of failing to recognize that institutions and norms that stand the test of time often contain wisdom that no human mind, of whatever degree of genius, can fully comprehend and much less improve upon. Yet unlike Mr. Hazony, Hayek (along with Hume, Smith, et al.) celebrated enlightened human reason that recognizes not only the wisdom of the ages

but also the ever-present opportunities in our imperfect world for the rational human mind unfettered by tribal, political, and METANOIA MAGAZINE

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religious superstitions to improve human well-being.

And among the most backward and dangerous of the superstitions that Hume, Smith, Hayek and other ‘true individualists’ fought to dispel is the notion that a nation’s borders are economically relevant. Central to Smith’s 1776 work - An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations - and to the mainline of the discipline of economics to which this great work gave birth, is the demonstration that commerce is not naturally confined to the nation, and that attempts to so confine it enrich the few at the much greater expense of the many. Starting with Hume and Smith, true (“classical”) liberals have correctly argued against the false rationalism of those who, slathered with the hubris that is fueled by nationalism, fancy themselves fit to surround the borders of each nation in order to obstruct the peaceful commerce that would otherwise productively span these borders.

CONTINUING FROM THE LAST METANOIA

A BOOK BY A CANADIAN RCMP AND A CSIS OFFICER

WHAT A RIDE

BY LEN N. GILES

After the dust settled, life on the Salmon Arm detachment became routine.

Complaints of theft, breaking and entering, intoxication, fighting and motor vehicle accidents were commonplace events with deaths from various causes, thankfully, being less frequent.

Nevertheless, conditions at the detachment continued to be fraught with tensions due to actions of the Corporal that were unacceptable.

A senior constable–Rolly Thoms–had charged a local lawyer with impaired driving on a Friday night. The lawyer was known to be a heavy drinker and in this instance Rolly was not prepared to ignore the condition in which he was found driving. Rather than arrest him on the scene, he advised the lawyer he would be charged, then allowed one of his friends in the car to drive him home. When they departed, Rolly returned to the office and had the paper work completed by about 10:30 p.m.

Leonard N. Giles joined the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1960. When the Canadian Security Intelligence Service was proclaimed in 1984, he crossed over after twenty years in counterespionage. In his career, Giles had assignments in the United States, Japan, Singapore, Thailand, India, Macau and the Philippines, retiring in 1991.

It was not uncommon for the Magistrate–Noel Dawson–to stop by the office to chat after he had been to a Friday night movie. He was a lonely and kind old gentleman and seemed to enjoy the company of the members. On this evening, he did so and Rolly mentioned he had charged the lawyer and a friend had driven him home. Rolly said he had finished the paper work, so Noel asked if he wanted to swear in the information then rather than do it at 10 a.m. on Monday morning.

This was the usual time the Magistrate came into the office, which meant Rolly would have to come back that morning even though he was not on duty until 4 p.m. in the afternoon. Consequently, the information was sworn then and there before the Magistrate. Therefore it became a legal document, signed and filed in the Corporal’s office, which doubled as an office of the Court for the filing of documents and for minor hearings. On Saturday, when METANOIA MAGAZINE

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the Corporal found out about the charge– obviously, from a telephone call from the lawyer–he came into the office in a fit of rage and tore up the documents and the related file that had been opened. To my knowledge, nothing ever came of this issue other than Rolly and the Corporal having heated words over the matter.

From time to time, if the Corporal ran out of beer he would take what he wanted out of the exhibit locker that was located in his office. He would replace it the following day or soon, after the liquor store opened.

In one case, an individual appeared before the Magistrate in the Corporal’s office again doubling as the Courtroom. On hearing the evidence, the Magistrate levied a small fine for the offence and ordered the beer seized be returned on the understanding it be taken directly home. The Corporal was present as the Constable, who made the seizure, retrieved the case of beer from the exhibit locker. The member noted several of the bottles were not of the same brand name as he had seized. He thought he had the wrong exhibit but did not. The person charged observed this confusion and the fact some of the beer in the case on the table was not his. He commented accordingly.

The Corporal snapped at him stating, “Beer was beer!” and the fellow should take it and be content with the fact he was getting anything back at all. Magistrate Dawson, a kindly, older gentleman and ex-Colonel in the Canadian Army during World War II, quietly stroked his balding head and said nothing. It was evident the Corporal had replaced the seized beer with another brand sometime earlier.

I had learned at my first detachment that liquor seized was to be strictly controlled.

It was to be destroyed under supervision, as and when so ordered by the Court or under the supervision of the Sub-Division Section N.C.O., usually a Staff Sergeant.

The Corporal in Princeton was very strict on such matters. This incident with the Corporal in Salmon Arm, again, flew in the face of everything I had been taught.

The Corporal in Princeton taught sound personal and professional values for being in the police service. Those teachings would serve me well through the years and undoubtedly were the foundations upon which I based my decisions with respect to the questionable activities that were going on in Salmon Arm. To be continued in the next issue of Metanoia Magazine

TRAVEL

The Dan Walker Chronicles SANTIAGO DE CUBA DAN WALKER

Is an adventurer, a businessman, and raconteur. He has visited every country in the world. His trusty Rolls Royce has taken him across many continents. He includes his grandchildren in some of his travels allowing them to select the destination. Originally, he hails from Victoria, British Columbia, but now resides in Costa Rica. We are pleased to present the Dan Walker Chronicles.

We walked to the main plaza and hired a 1953 Chevrolet taxi and guide for $40. More than half the cars on the road are still from the late 40's and 50's. We went first to El Morro, a large, well preserved fortification at the mouth of Santiago harbour. Santiago was established in 1515, and sacked regularly by English, French and Dutch pirates, so El Moro was part of the defence against them.

We also saw the original Bacardi Rum factory, now producing under another name by the government, and the Bucanero brewery, also government. Neither have tours, so it was from the outside only. We stopped at a large, ornate cemetery where a burial service was in process, and then on to San Juan Hill, site of the US victory that ended the Spanish American War. Dropped back at our home plaza we walked a shopping street, where once again METANOIA MAGAZINE

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it seemed the shops pay as many people to keep people our as to serve them. Only so many are allowed in a shop, so someone must leave before the next person can enter. Line ups are outside. Marilynn did get into one place to buy a blouse, but there was little selection.

After a good lunch of pork chops we retreated home for a siesta. We have been trying for internet, but so far without success. We thought we had it at the Pilon all inclusive, but while they had internet they had run out of the cards that must be purchased to use it!

In the evening it was drinks on the Hotel Casa Granda balcony. There was a cabaret at 10 PM but bed sounded like a better option. The plaza in front of the balcony was lively, with a band playing and lots of people enjoying themselves.

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