The Still Of Southern Winter

Sometimes don’t you feel as though you want some real quiet? You know, that perfectly still early morning, where the thick mists make no sound as they hang and gather in the rolling pastures, along the tree line, down in the vales...

A seriously good modern wine

Make no mistake, when people like LVMH buy a winery like the South Western Australian Cape Mentelle Wines, the place is already a highly developed, modern, technically advanced piece of the civilized world. Sure it’s a very beautiful place – the winery itself – and pretty peaceful too. And let me tell you the wines and the food they prepare down there are staggeringly wonderful!

But there is also something to be said for sheer, absolute wilderness – those places where no one goes.

Such places still exist here in Western Australia. And once you get here, if you ever do get here, it takes only a few minutes after you step out of your car before you realise that this place is pristine: kookaburras will come right up to you and look you over to see what the hell this new visitor is all about, and so will the kangaroos. They aren’t afraid of humans because no humans come here.

It’s about to be Spring here in Australia and the mad crowds of the Melbourne Thoroughbred Racing Carnival are going to turn up on that first Tuesday in November for the world’s best two-mile race.

Not saying where this actually is!

Lost in all the buzz will be the years and days gone by, when whalers worked the Southern-most coasts. Now, there are still whales but no whalers. And very few people. In some places there are no people at all. Western Australia is a million square miles. And most of it empty. And some of it is just too far away even for the most ardent tourist and wanderer to go just to get some silence. But my god, what silence. Actually I can hear the condensation of the fog or the mist burble and hiss when it hits the outside camp fire in the cold early morning...

Nisteling

It has been quite a deliberate decision on my part to steer as clear away as possible from any reference to the ‘world at war’ business that has been going on, on all of our television screens of late.

Yeah I have been in one of these -
they are hugely FAST!

For one thing, from a psychological perspective – and don’t forget, I have had some training in a classical school of psychology under the late Paul Ritter, the polymath who was one of the people who laid the foundation stones at the original World Trade Centre sites many many years ago now – so, well, from that perspective of psychology, the talking heads on our screens are exhibiting limited dimensionality in their ‘delivery...’

One of the most important ideas I have come across in recent times is something ‘invented’ I suppose, you might say, by another Australian – Robert J. Burrowes. He calls his idea ‘nisteling,’ which is a way of ‘deep listening’ to people when they speak or deliver a portrayal of their personality, whether in entertainment or in a political message or just generally, any communication that involves and includes their physical person. As you will certainly know, another nearby resident over here – Kate Bush – after many years, returned to the stage in an acclaimed concert in England. And of course, she is another of ‘we’ interested bystanders in psychology, in her case she has been a long-time proponent of Reichian ideas on physiological expression of the human psyche.

Another great mathematician and philosopher, A. K. Dewdney, the person who cast doubt on the technical reality of mobile phone calls from planes involved in the 9/11 affair, was another with much to say about dimensionality and how people use it and how it also ‘shapes’ the ways in which we act and move.

Pietro Frua's Monteverdi -
a 'sharp' design 

With true shape and geometry, you are still able to humanise the outcomes even when you employ very sharp lines and edges. One need only reflect on the work of the greatest Italian designers of recent times to see the subtlety that sharpness may display.

By contrast, current expressions of geopolitics are crude and blunt – and polyphonic. Well perhaps not polyphonic even though there may be some effort being exerted to make it so; it’s more cacophonic.

BNY Mellon was one of the first banks to ‘discover’ the impact of internet and computerised communications and data storing and analysis systems. They started a subsidiary variously called Eagle this-and-that back in the early 90’s – Eagle Star, I believe was an iteration which was quite famous and successful. Now, they are probably the leading financial technology providers who use ‘the Cloud.’ Personally I don’t have much problem with the Cloud at all, it’s another way Boston Intelligence establishments of the US government can have some control over the world – and they do it all quite efficiently. God, without these kinds of logistical understandings, the cheeseburger is going to be quite inaccessible to poor people like myself. I am fascinated that investment funds associated with Mellon are still able to return 12% when everything has been cut-back so much in order to procure what looks like the old school Harvard Business Method calculation annual growth figure.

The only difficulty in my mind, with the nominal results, is in the human delivery of the message. Neil Woodford, the leading light of these ‘investment funds’ sounds like he is talking about a wine brand. Sounds like he is a tee-totalling accountant talking about a wine... Sounds great, just doesn’t sound right to a wine drinker though. What do I know? He’s supposed to be in charge of billions. People give him billions apparently, to ‘look after’ and to invest. Which I suppose, is a great vote of confidence for the LSE where he got most of his academic credentials.

A girl sad because her iCloud
selfie account wasn't hacked.

Which leads me to a last fascinating point for today - can you learn to make a million bucks from ‘zilch’ base at an academic institution? Well... It seems that if you are as bright as Neil Woodford, you can certainly achieve an annual return of over 10% if people give you several billions to play with.

That however, is probably not, what you or I are intending to achieve. We, being on the poor end of the social and economic scales, are after much more absurdly ambitious percentages!

But then that’s what makes Woodford look and sound like a boring twat – he’s not overjoyed by the results he has achieved. But then again, that’s the difference between Pietro Frua and some faceless committee who designs Ford cars in the US to day. Frua’s children all made it to high security museums in Switzerland where people who appreciate them still make pilgrimage. The IRS has not understood enough to thieve the ownership plate numbers from compromised design collection managers – and they never will and they do not even care.

The subtle sharpness of great design is ever comprehended only by the few and the rare. To their great joy.

Real Life

What is real life?

Well, I do spend a lot of time with my nose sunk inside of ‘luxury lifestyle’ magazines – Courchevel, Cote d’Azur, that kind of thing - whether in airports or in a recliner chair at home. Have you noticed how the photographs all have this quality about them within the image, where there is absolutely nothing extraneous in the picture; nothing just plain lying around, the detritus of actual living?

And what about extraneous people? Do you have any of those? I have absolutely none.

I used to have many. But now I haven’t any at all. Not even you. You are of a superior intelligence, I fancy. And are rightfully ‘in the picture.’

For not many will go where I would lead... Only the very clever or the secretly well-favoured by good fortune.

 

 

There are rides and then there are rides:

Would you like to ride in this?
I wonder what gets to ride in here...

 

 

Real Positive Propaganda

Coca Cola is a great company and a great brand. Not only that, but at the top levels are very very bright people. Cultured people. Intelligent people.

You haven’t heard that a lot about Coke, eh?

But here – watch this:

This is positive propaganda that is not only incredibly revolutionary, but extremely Left-Wing too. And it comes courtesy of Coke. Now if you are not a terribly musical type it might take you one or two goes at the first 3 minutes of this to ‘get’ the thing, but really, it’s not too dissimilar to a ‘cowboy song,’ a kind of pop jazz version of an old school cowboy song. If you want to know what the words are, go down to the bottom of the video and check the ‘subtitles/CC’ box and you will get a translation show up as subtitles.

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=u3F7kcLrGvA#t=3

 

'Daanah Pah Daanah' - song from Coke Studio Pakistan

 

Agent Provocateur

What an agent provocateur does is, go behind the scenes, and incite someone or some group of people to rash or illegal behaviour.

Of course though, today, we know that the word is also a branded lingerie product that stresses marketing through images.

We all live in a much more sophisticated world today than ever before.  But wealthy and well-funded and sophisticated though it may be however, even the branded ‘Agent Provocateur’ company cannot spread itself so wide as to sponsor frivolous events in, say, Outer Mongolia. Or Western Mongolia, let’s be more specific, where the Republic of Kalmykia is located. (Between Russia and China). This kind of thing is reserved only for sovereign states to be able to afford.



Amir Ban, a chess engine programmer, with a Kalmyk.
Propaganda with a sinister purpose

I’m engaged in a fairly large commercial negotiation right now, and I am in a virtually unrelenting state of fear and panic. On the one hand it is very exciting, but on the other hand unnerving because I simply can’t trust that things are as airtight shut in terms of confidentiality as I would prefer them to be.

And so to skirt around things, let’s talk about Chess. Chess is most certainly, a frivolous pastime. It has little or nothing to do with strategy, since all the rules are pre-set, and the game itself produces nothing material. One can neither benefit from it by applying ideas from it about strategy to the real world, and nor can one eat the products of the game’s endeavour for there aren’t any to speak of.

Decadence, of course, is nothing if not to do with the sophisticated frivolous.



The Dolmabahce Palace

But of course I jest. Strategy is learned from many pursuits. And those of us who fancy that we understand strategy deeply, usually take the long view, and draw an often rather distant perspective on our ultimate objectives before we step into spotlights at all.



I’m not too sure that the word I’m really looking for is not ‘labyrinthine,’ rather than ‘Byzantine,’ to describe how I personally approach the art of making money.  Perhaps it is a bit of both. And yet it is the style I personally recommend, for at least in the dark and shadowy labyrinths of Byzantium, one may scratch the guilding off the walls and profit even there from alone, if from nothing else. And this means, one ought to always walk where there is money, and not where there isn’t any. Sometimes what appears like power or money is really only the phantoms flitting across the shadows of the labyrinth.

 

Next post, propaganda that is not sinister.