After The Race

In a few hours the running of the 2014 Melbourne Cup will take place.

One of the runners for tomorrow

This is not a race I personally ever consider seriously betting in because there aren’t really enough lead up races over the distance of two mile over which it is possible to make fair comparisons of the form of all the horses in the Cup field itself. As a handicap race too, with too little ‘exposed form’ for the runners going into the event, it is thus somewhat of a lottery in many respects.  At the same time, those horses that appear to have good form over the rather specialised distance of 3,200 metres can often be far too short priced in the betting to offer any kind of decent risk proposition.

But it is a great spectacle all the same.

After it is all over, bodies are often lying all over the grounds! Usually from the effects of alcohol – that could be an omen this year since there is a horse in the race called ‘Who Shot the Barman.’

I’m certainly not tipping that horse to win but what a great name it has all the same.

Heroes and histories are made in a race like this. The entire nation of Australia literally stops as the race is run and the whole thing has a feel of tremendous occasion.

 

Illuminati?!
No - Aussie bookmakers!

After the race it is very usual for the newspapers to come up with some amazing story about the winner, which, had we all but known beforehand, would have made our task of finding the winner completely simple!

When I am not gambling in a particular race, I am observing the people. Some of the wealthiest people in the world will be attending the Melbourne Cup. Dozens of celebrities too.

Sometimes a huge long-shot outsider wins the race.

For a professional gambler – as I am – the Melbourne Cup is a holiday. I could have something on an outsider, but I would not be disappointed if one of the favourites won.

When a racehorse gets into a big race like this, it will demonstrate its prowess. It will be able to back up its claims to speed, endurance, courage, bravery, heart, skill, talent, intelligence. Not many things can do the same. Modern politicians, for example - by comparison, despite the fact they claim to be human and of a higher grade of life than horses - are cowards in every sense of the word.

 

Risk + Fail = Good

When in 2008 Ben Bernanke decided to tamper with monetary cycle algebra, virtually -, by assuming there was some sound reason to grant liquidity to illiquid banks, what he actually did had a major impact in this area of human psycho-socio economic behaviour.

When business people cannot make accurate monetary and velocity flow assumptions, then one of the main issues that arises which is rarely discussed, is the human social tradition of avoidance of failure...

Right now there is no real knowledge in the hands of any market economist anywhere about the immediate, much less the mid-term future. It is not predictable what the consequence of QE actually means for corporate dividends. And it is especially not predictable what the consequence will be for the ending of QE.

AClub of Rome? Federal Reserve Committee?
No - Haig Welcome Club.

But what is most certain and visibly demonstrable, is that business owners, managers, and entrepreneurs have stopped learning. And this is because on the whole they fear failure, and they won’t take risks when the future is as unknown as it has just now become – compared to the past structure of monetary cycles.

This unwillingness to take risk is of course, a huge mistake, although it separates out the true entrepreneurs from those who had been in the role previously but were relying on the predictability of economic growth rates (whether positive or negative) determined by monetary policy fed through actual market pricing of money, to take calculated risk.

In fact, the acknowledgement of the possibilities for failure, but the understanding that managers must be in a position to learn from failures – is what permits leadership and unique successes in the long run.

Profit-seekers must take risk, and against a background of greater unknowns about currencies and money pricing than ever before – but they must accept when they encounter failure and learn from it and go back and try again.

The one big unknown is however will policy makers deal with the coming discounting of four trillion dollars of QE money, and the subsequent increases in market interest, and which will most certainly break governments as we have known them...

Setting Standards

You take an old-school type guy like the US Navy Admiral, Admiral Michael S. Rogers – the person who is now heading the NSA – and immediately you see so many things different about him compared to a lot of others. I am not a complete cynic, but neither do I want to curse him with impossible expectations – which would tend to be the effect of the fantasy desires or wish-list that I would have for him if I released my own imagination on him for even just one second!

I just hope he doesn’t get ground down by the environment, and the Washington machinery over the next two or three years.

A man of principle,

in movies anyway!

It’s too easy for those who reach the top by playing the structured, conservative, almost academic game of not treading on the toes of your peers – too easy for them to see themselves as uncriticizeable. (Is that a real word? Sounds good to me.)  It’s all too easy to be completely certain that your moral and ethical compasses are accurately set to True North. All too easy to employ the Platonic ‘therapeutic lie’ without ever having taken the necessary Hippocratic Oath that goes along with it.

And it is for these reasons – and especially too I suppose, because we live in so much greater of a complicated world than any human before us has ever lived in before. I do believe that anyway. So for these reasons the re-establishment and constant referencing to some kind of independent ‘standards’ of ethics and behaviour and decency is called for today more so than it has ever been in the past. In my opinion.

I am holding out some hopes for the Admiral.

I can’t imagine him saying to himself ‘I am protecting the public by lying to them, and I’ve checked all the details out about which I am lying to them over, and I’m absolutely unquestionably right about them so I’ll just keep doing it. And besides, all of my peers and everyone around me agrees with what we are doing...’

When there is another whistleblower/leaker it wouldn’t surprise me if it were an actual field operational guy, in other words – a firmware executive – rather than a cyber specialist. It actually wouldn’t surprise me if it weren’t even Rogers himself, a kind of a really deep Deep Throat, who would let slip what was really at stake if people continued to ‘get things wrong.’ And that’s a good thing, even if he – the Deep Throat - were never ever revealed eventually, and everything remain the mystery it ought to be. Because what everyone has forgotten in all of the self-interest, the self-protection by the relatively conservative academia-directed security policy, and the desire to also enhance careers after paid public service – is that no nuclear wars took place because at some point all the main ‘sides’ realised each other had total destruction capability.

 

A Russian military display,

very old-school stuff.

Nobody realises what could happen if some opponent covert side started to hit back using the currently actually available technology. Everyone thinks drones and smart missiles and bullets and unsubtle DNS cyber attacks and the like are ‘cutting edge.’ They are not. The cutting edge is austere, stark, and very terrible. There is absolutely no protection against it, it’s even far far far worse than Ebola or that kind of thing and it is utterly undetectable. No Seal Team 6 or anything of that nature can take it down or locate it. My prediction is that at some point, the Russians are going to turn the wick up on what covert action really is, and what countermeasures they truly have available to them to push back on economic sanctions.

I’m going to give you all an iron clad guarantee here – there are things coming down the pipeline that are going to give everyone pause.

The thing about technology is that if one side has something very soon the other will too.

Sooner or later the realisation is going to dawn on the major Western administrations, that things are nowhere near as simple as they had thought.  At that moment, people of great principle are going to be much in demand – because they are the only ones who will be able to devise ways for nation-states to get along and in ways acceptable to their voting public constituencies.

Winner- takes- all and to hell with the loser is totally a thing of the past. People haven’t quite woken up to this yet because no one has seen what weapons the other side has at their disposal. People have made a lot of assumptions about what weapons they do have, and these assumptions are going to fall short of reality.

 

Chill out -

Leffe Royale - a truly great beer.

Yes there is another leaker.

Every ‘end-game’ scenario always has leakers and people of conscience.

Within five to ten years there’s going to be a lot of changes take place. Beyond your wildest imaginings. And that is why the highest human moral and ethical standards are significant now. If mutual trust is the only currency, people of moral worth become the standard of currency. Whilst ever there is a prospect that one side can dominate, trustworthiness is irrelevant. But no one side can dominate any more. You can’t see it obviously just yet, but you will see it. And soon.

Apres La Guerre

‘Nothing much changes under the sun,’ some say.

And yet there are also others who say: ‘you can never swim in the exact same stream twice.’

Pullum Frontonianum

fried chicken ancient roman style

Here is a pic of some fried chicken done in the way of a recipe dating from around the 4^th Century in Ancient Rome. This dish is called ‘Pullum Frontonianum’ (it’s still called that, btw) and its is based around a marinade of olive oil, dill, red wine, salt, dried rose petals, ground coriander seed, black pepper, and fig syrup – with the whole thing fried first to get it crisp and brown on the outside, and then slowly baked with the marinade again added regularly over the top during the baking process.

Those Formula 1 car racing teams and drivers sponsored by Total Oil will not quite be the same as they were before the jolly fat man with the handlebar moustache was a regular figure in the garages and in the hospitality tents.

 

Total is sponsor of Romain Grosjean
and the Infinity Red Bull Team

De Margerie was from the same family that owns Taittinger Champagne, a very fine accompaniment to Apicus Chicken – the other name for the chicken recipe above, named after the recipe book in which the recipe was first recorded – as far as we know – with that book also dating from around the 4^th Century.

So, does everything change, or does nothing really change.

Well, we can hardly go past the French for the answer: ‘apres la guerre – la guerre.’ And ‘plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose.’

Here is a nice memorial to M. De Margerie:

http://www.forumspb.com/

...At the bottom of the page. Until last night his pic and his position were right in the middle of all the other dudes here.

 

 

The Angry People Hit Out Again

If you wandered into a men’s club – pardon me for this textual only and therefore nugatory sexism – wearing the very latest Kiton (which is certainly, the very best modern era cutting and tailoring house) clothing made from the fabric as seen in the pic., how many there would immediately be on guard to see if you carried a message...?

Cord of the king

by Kiton

Or if you wore a garter-like belt and sported a single golden earring with a sword at your side, what would the sartorial aficionados of the Elizabethan era think?

‘Apophasis’ is the word that describes one of the late E. Gough Whitlam’s favourite manners of speaking: “Far be it from me to... But...” Apophasis means talking about something by pretending to leave it out.

 

An actor being Edward De Vere,

Earl of Oxford, as in portrait paintings of said Earl.

He wears a garter and sword in the paintings.

Far be it from me to say who I really think was the actual author behind the works attributed to a certain William Shakespeare... But -, the Earl of Oxford is being described in his portrait here as a Duke or even King of Bohemia, with a ring in his ear similar to the way privateers wore such items, in order that they may purchase a ‘decent burial’ whilst at sea and perchance, die. This is where the pirates of later days got the tradition.

Oxford had rooms at Gray’s Inn at a place which other great writers frequented later on – Dickens, J.M. Barrie, Sir Thomas More, among several luminaries. The specific pub was called Furnival’s Inn, and was something like an insurance company’s headquarters.

Outside in the courtyard we also have a statue of Sir Francis Bacon – often also suspected of being the actual ‘Shakespeare.’

 

Sir Francis Bacon outside

Gray's Inn law library

But who today, readily and off the top of their heads, would suspect anything when an individual wearing corduroy walks in and asks for directions to the oak tree?

For all these things are things of the past, are they not.

Today’s parchment paper is a most expensive item. And if you are ever asked to put on a play for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth, no doubt you will be a tenant farmer’s son, with goodly supplies of such things, and many a confidential word of society to-ing and fro-ing at your fingertips, and the verbal cadence and word stock of a Bacon or an Earl of Exford at your linguistic behest. And balls. Lots and lots of tennis balls.

You will not be a drunken limousine driver, nor a drunken snow-plough pilot (pilot, is the Russian word for driver of a performance vehicle) who has lost his bearings.

For most certainly, the English writers of today’s most droll and incredible fiction, are naught, if not but tenant farmers’ thatchers. And with a very great track record too of scandalous adventuring in foreign lands. Sandline, the Du Toit escapade, The Malaysia government roadbuilding kickback scandal with the chief accountant for Public Works Francis Raj and John Major,The Seychelle attempted overthrow, the BAE kickback deal with Prince Bandar, and the BAE military radar system for Mugabe. No. No indeed, we do not do anything wrong, immoral or grossly improper and illegal! Ever. Fancy saying that we do! Fancy that! My god – CABAL! (Clifford Arlington Buckingham Ashley and Lauderdale). It is not US!

ISIS is a Cambridge Apostles, Cambridge University private magazine by the way. Just thought I’d remind you. Who did buy that Paris property for 900 million last year too – from the ex Head of State Security of Syria? Anyone know?

You would have to have a lot of money and a lot of balls and considerable credibility to push that line of questioning in the media.

It wouldn’t be me, certainly. It would be someone with a huge grudge against the people who threw charges at you for selling oil illegally to Burma. Say someone like, Total Oil.

(A little bit... has been deleted. But just a little bit.)

Signed

William Shakespeare