The Expert's Guide

Have you noticed - you probably have - how there are all these pages on the web everywhere: 'the beginner's guide to...' something or other.

I presume they think you need a degree to be able to smoke a cigar as an expert.

Maybe you won't be able to enjoy something unless you have an advanced University education.

Anyway since you are here, you get to have my astonishingly arrogant thinking lavished upon you - and today, we shall be discussing the capacity for the market to send out an obvious winner (race horse) at the luxury odds of 9/1.

This is Shiraz, with the world's best horseman on board

I refer to last Saturday's Randwick Winter Challenge (Race) Winner - Shiraz. 

Shiraz is a horse that can, in theory, gain a start in a Cox Plate - which is the most serious, most important real horse race in Australasia; it could, in theory, win such a race.

Shiraz is a serious, professional, straight-on, intelligent, and competitive sort of race horse. It's been in extremely high class company in its last set of engagements and it hasn't hit the winner's circle for those few starts - which was understandable. Many good, traditional style trainers allow a horse to gain experience and lots of race practice before they push them to the limits with a direct view to 'win.'

Shiraz is by no means any kind of certainty either to start or to win the Cox this year - but the point I'm really making is that it should never have been let to go to the starting gates at the price that they fielded it. So much for those 'in the know;' no one, evidently, knew anything. The horse won well.

I backed it. 

Randwick - but watch the people, not just the horses

So what this all about? What's my message or underlying theme?

Horse race gambling is a skill that relies on patience, and high levels of observation skills.

More than half the race information available to the observing eye, is not just in the horses but also in the people around the horses. 

There are not enough movies and stories about race winning 'detectives' - that is, the detective of the winning horse! The winner is a mystery before the race and an obvious thing afterwards. But frankly, the process of discovering the winner is similar to the mystery story profile of fiction books dealing with murders and crime mysteries.

The guy wears a fedora, hangs around bars and drinks alcohol, and listens to what is uttered from loose lips - and sometimes reads in between the silences thrown from faces that don't want to be silent.

A good racing 'winning horse' detective is good at human psychology and is able to make observations about the standard behaviours of trainers and owners, and compare these with when those people believe they are about to make a bunch of money.

This really is Mickey Spillane, btw

Horse racing is not crooked to this extent - you can't tell an animal what to do. Sometimes they just do what they want and not what you want. Some horses want to win sometimes and they do.

And so to give you a direct piece of information that you can use whether you are an experienced gambler or a novice or not a gambler at all - the way to assess this year's Cox is to focus everything else around the horse Shiraz. And by this I mean that if they start the race with some hot favourite far too short against a horse like Shiraz, then it will be a false favourite and you can afford to bet on something else. Not necessarily Shiraz - because by the time of the race, Shiraz too may have firmed too far in.

And - the way to think about any mystery is to play the part of the good observer...

Shove your fedora on your head, go out to where the barley-corn flows and listen, and watch, and think and assess, and consider. By and by, along will come an occasion and you will be in possession of vital knowledge and information, and others will not, and THEN and only then, must you or even can you, bet.

It's a culture. It's a life skill. You can spend the whole of your life believing if you like, that earning a living, or having a job and earning money is what it's all about and how you support yourself - but it isn't true. 'Winning' money is the ONLY way to make money, serious money. Windfalls - even if they are from entrepreneurship - are the ONLY way to make serious money. Windfalls are about placing yourself or your bucket in the path of what will be cast by the strong wind...

And this is about observation and deduction and intellect. It has nothing whatsoever to do with earning anything. 

A couple of days ago, Rolls Royce launched their new  'Phantom VIII.' The bulk of the market that will buy it consists of criminals and dictators and others who have grabbed power where there already exists a flow of wealth - such as, for an obvious case, in the Middle Eastern Oil 'nations.'

This is Fred Astaire's Rolls Royce on temporary display in London
right now

You will never be able to 'earn' your way into such wealth no matter how much advanced academic education you have indulged in. Those already 'there' are going to see to it you don't step on their toes. And they a very greedy people and won't give you even any of what they have. If you think they have given you some of it, they will control you and 'it.' You will have no freedom. And you may end up with nothing. You could, however, take a leaf out of the Clintons and take er '*s' to get such access. You could know all the secrets of the criminal money launderers and tax-dodgers because you were an accountant in Luxembourg and end up the head of the Euro-Group as a result. And that kind of thing works in the short term.

Or, you could just wait and observe all these fools. And bye and bye, they will lead us all to great prosperity.

And by and by, you will be able to pick their pockets while they are 'leading' us.

The Elephant In The Room

How long do you think it is going to be, by which time expert neurologists will nicely explain to all those corrupt politicians around the world, who have been held in the thrall of the late Mr Lee Kuan Yew - much like Akhenaten in his day too - that Mr Lee had a condition in which he had a severe impairment of some of the functions of his front temporal lobes.

And I do not need to go into various medical terminologies using the Greek words (I am part-Greek) 'Myotonic' or 'Dystrophia' or anything like that, because I am not a modern Western doctor or neurologist, and suggest that the reason Mr Lee had to be propped up by people 'hiding' behind him in later years, when photographs were being taken, was due to the well-known symptomatic on-set of limb rigor when such conditions are advanced - rather than simply 'old age.'

Front lobe deficiencies, are characterized by a complete lack of empathy for others and for a self-opinionated attitude and over-confidence and a domineering stance in social environments and inter-personal discussions.

Generally speaking this thing has obvious bases for diagnosis because it runs down the family line - 'co-incidentally,' there IS a child of Lee who has this type of condition as it happens but naturally, this may not be explained by the usual, traditional normal means. Naturally not, for everything is different and an exception in the case of Akhenaten, sorry, Lee Kuan Yew.

But there can be no doubt, that every now and then, you get someone whose brain structure has
or can overcome the speech issues that often attend front lobe deficiencies - and further, you will get, every now and then albeit relatively rarely it must be said, someone whose calculating capabilities are very prodigious and who can pass themselves off thereby as, intelligent.

We do not need to slander alien civilizations with this foolish notion abroad on the internet and elsewhere, about how aliens have turned up and taken over things and built a lot of sizable 
structures and buildings in the guise of a 'pharaoh' or a dictator, sorry, 'democratically elected tyrant.'

As they did in the past though, we must expect a lot of the ordinary population to bow down to 
Akhenaten - and to keep doing so at least for a few years to come, before they come to their senses.

No pics. It didn't happen like I said. Did it.

Let's Go Out

Big three-storey mansion... At night with crystal chandelier lights on, glowing through the large traditional four-pane heavy-framed windows throwing warm golden and yellow beams into the lush, now night-time dark, old wooded deep green gardens; thick velvet drapes drawn in some rooms. Many people, all dressed in very sophisticated and glamorous evening-wear. Scary adult people. ...Be strong. It's just sex.

How do you like to get there?

What do you like to have there?

Don't get your feathers ruffled...

And in the end, everything becomes really clear. With all the deep underlined bass rhythms accentuated:

Le Corbusier Extended

Even I am stopped in my tracks, if relatively briefly, by the present insanity of the press.

Never mind, there is nothing of value to be said about them, and there are people around the place about to cut the oxygen from them.

Let us look again at the previous post regarding the political thinking behind the architecture of Le Corbusier - namely, the proposition that (his idea of) an Industrial Age needed people to be units of production, stacked together like something to fit into shoe-boxes, and then stuck onto fast moving transport systems to rapidly get them to their places of active slavery.

Take a look at Singapore. This is the ultimate upside of Le Corbusier.

You even have today, a high-rise building there of the usual crass steel frame design, with visually open-to-the-outside glass windows as walls, and in which 'luxury cars' are stacked as if the whole thing is a dispenser of 'luxury vehicles.' And that's what it's meant to be. 

So do we consider the possibility that these ridiculous ideas have seeped their way into other areas of human endeavor - let's say, to attire, fashion, even food? Well, certainly, of course they have.

So would you be able to tell the difference between a classic old building designed for human habitation and normal society, and the meaningless drivel that is passed off as architecture for today's city buildings? Certainly you would. 

A little further north and you have Penang, which has managed to
retain and maintain authenticity about itself

And would you be able to tell the difference between the signature style of a dish invented by Auguste Escoffier, and some nonsense vended as contemporary food?

And have you ever observed that for many a good long year now, fashion and designing for fashion has completely lost touch with any insinuations of actual, real sex...  

We must explore these themes more...

Preparing For The Future

A few days ago, Paul Joseph Watson, the YouTube new media journalist, put together an excellent piece which he posted to YouTube called ' Why Modern Architecture Sucks.'

I rarely refer to actual YouTube videos so when I do, it would tend to mean that particular one is something special - and it is, this one from PJW. 

Paul Joseph Watson, with Alex Jones

Taking a step back from the glittering, fizzy delight that this short video is, I can say that Watson is overdoing things more than just a bit - even though the fundamental points he makes about the suppressing nature of post-industrial 'gigant-ism' and 'industrial efficiency' brutalism in architecture are very sound. If we just jump up on his bandwagon it's satisfying to be accusatory and more or less, a 'conspiracy theorist' about modern architecture. But if we want to really understand things, then it is crucially important to realize that not all the mistakes started out from the beginning as conspiracies to suppress the 'ordinary' people and turn them into compliant slaves. Many architects had very romantic and positive conceptions about industrialism - but these ideas and ideals were completely subverted and the power of architectural design exploited through its philosophical points of vulnerability, for political ends. And only thus can we say that eventually, yes, there is a systemic fascist control mentality at work in modern design and building design.

It's not about (just) being fair to history and to the architects themselves - it's about understanding how the human race operates, how its own group psychology quickly alters and removes real human motivations and supplants them with specious justifications that cover over the crimes of idea theft and financial corruption that feeds off public building programs.

Some people used Le Corbusier - and he might not have been wise enough to pull his ego back from being tricked and his 'soul' (the energy and life of his work and ideas) manipulated for material gain by those people.

The sci-fi futurism of Le Corbusier was attractive - and easily attracted victims to itself to be slaughtered by the exploiting interests whose only objective was the theft of easy tax-payer dollars.

Sci-fi futurism is not in its own right a problematic thing; far from it. How it was appropriated by money interests running government and councils and politics is the problem.

Paul Joseph Watson, as a new media video journalist/YT blogger, must take advantage of the opportunity that news coverage of the recent massive (Grenfell Tower) building fire provides to his platform - and so it's understandable that he would be reactive to the tragic incident.

But really, if you intend to be of use to people, then you can't always just be 'reactive,' and you must place an importance on leading, trying, implementing the entirely innovative, from scratch, being prompted by positive creation and creativity, and not just reactive knee-jerking.

We talk a lot about architecture and design here - and always have done. The reality is we've talked about these things long before any tragic disaster had to take place to force our focus.

PJW will get a large audience and I will get almost no audience at all. 

But I will tell you what to do now for the problem that hasn't been foretold yet, and how to avoid future disasters that will happen but that no one or at least not many, foresee right now.

In the meantime, we can note Watson's excellent piece of journalism: