LKY On Life Support

The Singapore Straits Times this morning reported in a fairly vague small column that Mr. Lee Kuan Yew had been hospitalized.

Lee Kuan Yew is in fact on life support and in a coma with mechanically ventilated breathing.

The Singapore government's sudden implementation of taxation increases is somewhat unusual for this country.

It is a largely pointless exercise, given the way all of the Western media has done nothing but philoxenize this individual, to explain to the otherwise unsuspecting, exactly who and what sort of person this person was.

Hoi An Festival -
a celebration of the return of divine illumination
into a dark world. Mark me down as this kind of 'Illuminati.'

And I am not going to expand on what I have already indicated about him, short of saying that he was radically astray of what the general public assumed him to be. It would be instructive to all those who are skeptical about what I am saying, to give a thought to the recent revelations about the so-called 'entrapments' of Jack Straw and Malcolm Rifkin. Only very much later on in people's public careers, can one often get to really see what had been going on under everyone's noses all along.

Lee Kuan Yew was never the man people think that he was. And I frankly doubt that you will ever get to hear or see what he really was like - certainly not in their gory details; especially not with respect to his personal history as a 'translator' for the Japanese Secret Police against local ethnic Chinese, which he seems to think was something worthy of including in his own Wiki encomium.

You should realize, that even with something as close to recent history as Guantanamo is/was, the things that actually went on in there have already started to become blurred and disowned by those who did it all.

But I will tell you this, in days of yore, torture was quite a bit different by quality and degree, than it is now, even under the hands of nutcases like Cheney. The permanent leer on the face of Mr. Lee, was on account of what he got away with and what he thinks of you as a member of liberal open democracy...

Or rather, what he thought of you.

The Political Wolf

I guess there are things you might as well know here, now that you are all grown up...

Things have been going on on this planet, as you well know, for a long time - Herodotus even says the Egyptian priests scolded the Greeks for 'being young, like children, and imagining that things that were recounted to them as stories only happened last week, when they in fact happened millenniums ago, even many times over and over again and again they happened...'  

The remains of the Temple of Zeus
on Mount Lykaion

And so I must tell you that when you see the wild and relatively sparse if not completely barren Mount Lykaion in Greece, and you imagine that this - as the archaeologists say - is the place where there was once a temple to Zeus, you should understand there indeed are many such places, and that they have never been 'out of service' as it were.

What happens in the secret rituals to the god, Zeus, is that items of art; books, writing materials, and especially musical instruments, are presented in a huge iron basin filled with sand, upon a large stone altar. Music and chanting and the burning of ceremonial fires takes place, and some time late in the night, possibly after midnight, lightning strikes the altar and this means God himself would oversee the affairs of those participating in the ritual the whole of their lives. This is all a secret of course and has never been revealed by Greeks as in the first place, it is only known to those not merely of aristocratic blood, but only those who are from the various family lines of regional kings. The rituals of Zeus belong only to royal houses.

'Oh dear.' It is a common enough saying. However, it is from the ancient European appeal to the ruler of gods and men - 'Oh Dias.' (Zeus).

The ancient Greek tale about King Lycaon (who ruled in Arcadia) proceeds along the lines that Lycaon and his entire family were 'nefarious' people, and at one point were so powerful and arrogant, that they sought to test whether a certain traveler in their midst, whom the local people had taken to have actually been Zeus himself appearing openly as a human (the gods never disguise themselves but appear as who they are, though not always perceived by the people as what they are) - and so they mixed a very tiny amount of human flesh in a meal served to this person, who promptly tipped the table over and walked out, though not saying anything.

King Lycaon though, became a werewolf, and established the first of such beings on earth, and burdened with various tasks and edicts about what such beings must do and live like.

Zeus and wolves are linked, and not all wolves
are bad

The moral of the story is this: a man, once having tasted the flesh of other men, is doomed to become a wolf, and is obsessed thereafter with the consumption of humans, and must resist this obsession or else remain an animal until they die. And because the story relates to something about Zeus, it has a political dimension (all stories about Zeus do, because he is the patron god of politics and leadership). A man, once having taken political power by taking life, or tasting the power that comes from having taken a life once he becomes a political leader, is destined to become an animal, and to be obsessed by that which is animalistic, wherein the seeds of a violent self-destruction both of him and potentially any he rules over, are sown.  

  

Dors Venabili, The Living Automaton

So these Russian bombers have been flying close to the UK yesterday and the RAF sent up some Eurofighter Typhoons to 'escort' them away.

I like the Eurofighter Typhoon a lot; they're very fast, quite manoeuvrable, have an excellent range. A work of art, really.

I suppose one might point out that of course, the Russians were not flying in anything other than international airspace - but that won't affect the way the general media covers this particular item. Even so there is no doubt the flights are a flip to the United Kingdom and NATO about the fiasco in Debaltsova, where a bunch of mercenaries have been captured by the Russians. (90% of the Ukraine army has been able to retreat/withdraw - according to the Kiev government).

This testing/probing/war-game style of messing around is all very well but it is a grave mistake to believe we are in an era in which hot conflict between these very large powers can be 'won' by any particular side, or that they will unfold in quite the same ways that past wars have.

My own personal outlook is that modern society has lost its respect for all of human beings generally because we think we already know so much about everyone 'else.' And familiarity has bred contempt and boredom and the thirst for individual power, rather than the desire to learn about others and culture in general.

Unlike the Merchant Magistrates of Venice, we, know already too much about 'the Forbidden Kingdom' and - there are no new horizons.

Dors Venabili was just a fictional character in an Asimov story, and there are no alien worlds or alien people we in any short time are going to encounter, or thrill over.

There is, however, the 2015 Geneva Motor Show coming up in just a few days (5 March) in which we will see for the first time the new Aston Martin Vulcan, another extremely limited edition (yawn) exercise.

Trust Bertone!

And for me over the next few weeks there is a series of the greatest sprint races that I have seen - in terms of strength of the fields engaged - in the Australian horse racing calendar. 

I will be able to be entertained. 

And shortly, I will relate to you, the Greek myth of Lycaon... But not yet.

Chautauqua Wins Again!

In my post of Friday, 17 November 2014, I mentioned what I considered the two best sprinters in Australasian Horse Racing at the moment - one of which was the considerably talented 'Chautauqua.'

There it is - Chautauqua.

Chautauqua, the bay-grey (a rare coloration for a racehorse) won again this afternoon at Caulfield in Melbourne, first up for this season - coming from last at the top of the straight to win with a dominant performance in its first race back from a spell.

Chautauqua is a nerve-wracking horse to bet money on because it comes from behind and has to make up ground without getting blocked - however it must be a very exciting and satisfying horse to own, because it wins a lot and wins big money races!

Parable Of Zarathustra

Am I the first?

Of all of the reviews and discussions about - I'll not say 'critiques' (no one can do that) - of Eyes Wide Shut, there are none as yet, I believe, that have made reference to Kubrick's interest in Strauss's Also sprach Zarathustra as the actual basis of the movie.

No doubt you will recall the beginning of 2001 A Space Odyssey, which completely relies on the fanfare beginning of Strauss's tone poem (Also sprach Zarathustra), and of course Kubrick himself noted the significance of Nietzsche's great work about the (his) character of Zarathustra, who rushes into a public place seeking god with a lantern, only to be derided by the crowd and deemed a fool or a madman.

Nietzsche by Eduard Munch

Although everyone seems to hold that the movie Eyes Wide Shut is a filmed version of the story The Nightmare by Arthur Schnitzler, this is only a bare 'clothes horse' and in fact it is Kubrick's working of the ideas and philosophy of Nietzsche's Parable Of Zarathustra that is the real story and the intention.

The movie itself cannot be understood merely from the perspective that it is Schnitzler's story, simply because of the symbological discussion that Kubrick makes to go on within the scenes; and these ideas expressed in symbols are calls back to Kubrick's past attention to Nietzsche. There are no such ideas and symbols in Schnitzler's work.

Tom Cruise pointed out that 'Kubrick does not make mistakes, and everything is in the movie on purpose.' I suppose it is a radical perspective of mine to even go so far as to say that very likely Kubrick himself desired both the actors themselves and other directors to finish the film - because that is exactly how Nietzsche concludes the body of his work dealing with the fictional philosopher 'Zarathustra.' And I am sure no one has realised this yet about this particular movie.

A nerd, a genius, and Nicole.

Yes, a lot of people have said that the (this particular) movie occupies an important place in modern literary work, but I'm not sure they know why.

In fact, it is intended that this movie be re-made by future people... That is the whole point of Zarathustra's philosophy.