Risk and Incentive

I was a bit startled last night while watching a very recent interview of the Kaiser, Karl Lagerfeld..

He casually commented out of the blue that social occasions like cocktail receptions were fewer and fewer these days; almost non-existent really.

The industrialist's son,
'Kaiser' Karl Lagerfeld,
still relevant.

Well, there still are a small number of product presentations and corporate functions and top shareholders' meetings that centre around some kind of catered event starting 'not before 1 p.m.' - as the standard demands for a cocktail reception. But he may be quite right when it comes to the non-business gatherings of the well-heeled social set. Hey, who are these 'well-heeled' folk, anyway, nowadays? I'm sure I don't know...

But Karl has provided me with a scrap of incentive to go down one particular prospective road at least that doesn't look to me to be totally adventureless from the get-go, as most other things are becoming these days: entirely forgettable, dull, thoroughly boring.

Indeed I was also rather taken aback by my own response to a sudden and largely unexpected turn-around in one of my own business ventures. Filled with almost countless ideas while ever I had to stick a lot of things onto the back-burner from lack of a decent budget, as soon as the prospects of having to hand, another round of 'meaningful' moneys (has been a good long while between those...) I found myself suddenly utterly devoid of those thrilling ideas that I usually can generate from simply out of my own head, and found too that I was able to see almost nothing exciting going on around me anywhere else either. Perhaps it was the shock of having money again. It's done something to me perceptions, I think.

Spending, money – just plain spending it when you have it – is one thing but it is a very lazy thing. And it's not what I only desire to do, personally. I like to see and hear the ideas and ventures of other people, especially of those really bright kinds of people who are intensely interesting because of their intellects as much as any other attribute.

Coffee and News - a thing no more...

I remember when my own parents would attend cocktail parties – or what used to be termed cocktail receptions. You might not believe it now but back in those days people didn't simply just turn up when invited to these kinds of things, but they had this remarkable capacity to bring something of themselves that was new and different each time they went to something as swish as a genuine cocktail party. It was like they seemed to prepare to attend. Nowadays things are far less socially ornate, you might say.

Yet there is also a certain risk aversive attitude that has crept into the whole world of the affairs of humans. And a very bad thing it is too.

Actually I believe I need to begin pointing out a few of the incentives for the taking of risk. There is of course as you all know, an art to the taking of risk. And if you get out of the habit of risk taking, pretty soon you forget about all of the necessary methodology.

I intend the next few posts here to deal with present-day risk taking, incentives, and serious methodologies that work, as opposed to the folklore spewed out by stockbrokers and others who are only running promotions for their own fairly weak and contrived 'investment' products.

Circles Of Money And Power

I am absolutely a great fan of His Highness Prince Karim, the Aga Khan. He is, as you know, one of the only real living descendents of the Islamic World's Holy Prophet Mohammed.

The Aga Khan

What you don't know is that he is Greek.

The usual narrative goes that he is partly of Persian descent but let me tell you, if it is 'Persian' it is only Persian in the sense that Alexander The Great's wife Roxana was Persian; and she wasn't really Persian either but sort of Russian, as it would be now called although not at that time.

And what you also don't know is that whilst he is called the Imam of the Nizari Ismaili's (which he indeed is), his religious philosophy is rooted in genuine traditional Platonic teachings. And therein lies a most uncommon understanding about who and what the original 'Holy Prophet Mohammed' was and what this religion is really all about. Now there are things that I know about Nizari Ismaili innermost teachings that few anywhere in the world today would have any clue about, dare I say, not even the NSA!

But let me indulge in my usual Socratic irony - if I might egregiously call it that - and say that some Ismaili learned men hold that the Aga Khan possesses a holy right or privilege, to own and/or be able to befriend, the highest ranks of aristocractic Jinn, and that in fact, both he and his family have actually been photographed with Jinn females many times and that they even marry them and have children by them...

Aga Khan, friend of geniis

The secret of what I know about Ismailis is so powerful that I tell you, if the NSA knew it too, they would be able to quell all the present problems of radicalized Muslims around the whole world. But as they do not know it, I suppose we are destined for much more trouble still to come as they all blunder their ways through the minefields of religious sensitivities and cultural suspicions.

Alexander the Great, as you will also no doubt know from your readings of history, was a great horseman. And so is the Aga Khan. He has owned winners of the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe although not on this occasion this year. This good fortune befell the Qatari Royal Family, which has also won races like the Mebourne Cup in very recent times and so their star must be on the rise, one might suppose.

Frankie Dettori is also a great horseman, and he should have been the jockey on this year's winner but apparently he 'hurt his foot' and couldn't ride on the day.

Dettori has a sore foot

And so I tell you all of this nonsense as a way of demonstrating that when it comes to big money people and big money horses and big money races, all kinds of smoke is blown everywhere obscuring what went on or is really going on and it's hard to see where the fires were or are, if any, and really, whether or not such fires might not even be from the flameless shimmer of geniis in the business in there somewhere. As you know, I do believe in geniis; they make things fall out of the sky that ought to keep flying, and other things fly away that ought to have stayed put.

Ruler Of The World

Ruler of the World... is a racehorse.

Ruler Of The World

It's owned by the world's wealthiest individual racehorse owner - if you go by only what is made through racing and breeding. John Magnier is the gentleman and he owns Coolmore Stud, which is now a global business.

Sheikh Hamdan and his Godolphin Racing, is outranked, I'm afraid, by Magnier.

The Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe - which is run this coming Sunday - is the world's premier horse race for gallopers. The Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe outranks all other races including the Kentucky Derby and the Melbourne Cup - and this year's event strikes me as being one of the strongest for a long time. The top contenders are robust and consistent racers who have the kind of fierce will-to-compete and mature skills and balance as racehorses that mark out the elite racing animal.

Orfevre

I have a firm opinion on this year's race - I favour only two horses: Orfevre (which means 'goldsmith' in French), and Ruler Of The World, Magnier's horse. These are two of the best conformed Derby horses you will ever see, and they have speed, strength, boldness, courage, racing skills, flexibility, and stamina. This will be a good race and worth watching to see what real horse racing is all about.

Donnelly River by Walkinshaw Performance Vehicle

In the 'general' area where I live, I have access to some of the best fly fishing rivers anywhere in the world. These places are almost completely unknown to outsiders. No one ever talks about them much except for a handful of aficcianados who have the money and the time to come all the way out here to fish.

Donnelly River

Most of the year, these places are extremely cold.

Yep. This is Kentucky

Well, hey, so's a Kentucky fly river for that matter so what the heck!

Me, I haven't actually fished for real since my teens I suppose. I jumped pretty quickly from the Marine Base jetty on Penang Island, catching smallish rock cod, to the bowling green turf of Belmont Park (Western Australia) in order to catch bigger fish with silver bait...

Anyways, I don't believe Dick Cheney has ever fished the Donnelly River over in these parts, but then again, I can't be sure about that.

It's not much of an out-of-the-way item to have ex-SAS people and the like, especially, these days, ex-South African BOS intelligence guys – be handed meaningful budgets to organise high-speed road transport of a 'standard' in order to ferry VIP's to parts undisclosed, very quickly hither and yon, and then back again. From what I understand, it is to the Donnelly River area.

Walkinshaw SS V8 Supercharged

I must say, that the choice of the latest Holden SS Walkinshaw – in all black – is a great choice.

Someone might be able to tell me whether this vehicle is some very direct variant of a Chevrolet, or whether it is something predominantly coming out of the Holden design bureau. The build quality is utterly something I have never before seen on Holdens although they have not been too bad recently. Yet this is exceptional. It is also very fast, very handlable, very luxurious inside, and looks quite different in real life compared to the pics available just yet. It is smaller than the photos would suggest, lower to the ground, and the chrome looks like, well, real chrome. The sound is awesome. The look is brilliant.

 

 

Go this way...

In this: 

 

 

 

Why the hell not?!

The Form, The Substance

I have a lot of time for practical scientists and applied scientists. I think that Luca Turin is one of the very finest minds of the last few years. He has peers in his chosen field, and some of them are women, and you may be very surprised to learn what things these people discovered, invented, and often also developed into commercial success-stories and placed into common use in all of our daily lives.

Industrial chemist Luca Turin

You know, people talk 'billionaire' a lot in places like Forbes and on Bloomberg television, but seldom do they ever these days expose the true billionaire of practical and applied science that is not directly linked to just electronics and computing. Who knows, for instance about the certain lady who invented the lemon scent we all assume (incorrectly) is actually from some kind of extract or synthesis of real lemons and that we find in basically all of the household bleach, washing detergent, room fragrance, and even lemonade drinks and packet food products? She gets a royalty from every single product sold that uses her patented chemical and believe me, she is really a billionaire and now owns and lives on an island in the Mediterranean that has a fairly meaningfully-sized industrial chemical research laboratory and research facility on it. She is not listed on any so-called 'list of billionaires' or 'richest people,' but she certainly is that.

Luca Turin has been reported in leading journals as having recently made several new (he has made some previously!) breakthroughs to do with a more complete understanding of the neuro-physiology and also neuro-chemistry of how we sense things with our nose and tongue.

Turin is, apart from being a very clear thinker, an excellent writer and speaker and presenter of complex ideas, but behind him stand some Russian research scientists that he works with, as well as some of those women scientists of whom I spoke about earlier. To cut a long story short, the Russians visually are a rather dishevelled looking lot and Turin is as stylish as the city whose name he shares.

The Pope of global wine-tasting,
Robert Parker

Far be it from me to say that someone of the public stature of Robert Parker is a charlatan, but ordinary common sense ought to suggest to one's mind that nobody can 'smell roasting violet petals' from out of the chemistry of a red wine, for one thing simply because there is no odoriferant molecule developed by the wine that will create that smell compound! Either people are halucinating, or there is something indeed very chemically mysterious about red wine! But for someone like Parker to continuously say that wines have this or that bizarre non-wine scent or essence or flavour – when no such thing is scientifically possible – is grounds for me to look sideways at him, and everyone like him. Okay, call me an atheist of wine tasting and lump me in the arrogant, egocentric, and opinionated wonderland of people like Richard Dawkins when it comes to smashing people's cherished sillinesses that they insist on clinging onto, even in the face of facts that utterly disprove what they are saying. Oh I know it's oh so desireable to be able to opine intelligently about what bouquet the famous and expensive red wine you bought is giving off, but brothers, it just aint so!

No no no. Something else entirely is going on. Oh yes yes, you are sensing something – but it's not what you think it is.

Here's the rub: if you do what Luca Turin says, or what one of his Russian researchers says, about how you should go about tasting wine – suddenly, what you will experience is enhanced by a factor you would not have dreamed of beforehand. But if you do what Parker tells you, you will go away (albeit possibly not telling anyone else so) that alas, if the Emperor had no clothes you dared not suggest it be so, so esteemed is Parker and his ilk.

But they are wrong. Misguided, at best and entirely wrong anyway.

That a multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around the mythology of wine-tasting, is positive proof of the total lunatic behaviour of Mankind whenever its rational good sense is able to be distracted by brain chemistry rewards to do with material sensations.

Form and substance are of course not always simple or straightforward antitheses.

Out Front of the Royal Horseguards Hotel!
Horse and guardsman look great,
but it's an hotel for gawdsake.

Look at this picture. The horse and the guardsman look fantastic. But where is the substance? Is the building behind them just a modern era hotel? And if that building once housed both MI5 and MI6, do the current era vestigial and corporate memory custodians have secret private pretensions they whisper to themselves about, behind cupped hands over sly mouths...

You may as well say The Dark Ages of Inquisition and public damnation and political and financial rapine are the spirits that rule the air.

Luca Turin is a rarity; he both looks stylish and is someone of great intellectual substance too.

There are a lot of people today and a lot of groups and let's say 'entities' both corporate and governmental, that can wear the billion-dollar marketing and hype label. A lot of things have their wires crossed in the world today. There are billion-dollar machineries of government and private interests crossing over each other's traces and getting themselves and a lot of other people twisted up in the entangling lines.

The big fish are still in the seas, though. I would fish away from the big boats, and cast your lines far away from theirs... There are too many problems where the bigwigs are; too many problems among themselves, too many blow-in pretenders who actually come close to being bigwigs anyway because of the way modern finance behaves, too many bigwigs who are only big any longer in outward form with little or no substance beneath. And far too many cops and ex-cops who work for private money but who still have access and sway with government agencies despite protestation by politicians that it isn't so. It is so. Half the world's current armed conflicts are to do with programs that governments have lost control of. And you can't trust that lawyers and judges will resolve it all; things get 'stopped' well before revelations can get before an independent authority.

 

Stay well away. It is bound to get nasty now. I would say. Go fishing maybe. In some distant and despised stream.