Honest, Upright, and Truthful.

Even the BBC finally couldn't get away with it any longer - at last, in today's Obit. column for Lee Kuan Yew, the BBC says that he 'worked for the Japanese Propaganda Department during the War and was involved in the black market...'

The reality is, he was interpreting, actually physically present, during Japanese torture of wealthy Chinese professionals and businesspeople, including of their very young children, and he suddenly and mysteriously became extremely wealthy himself after the war, whilst being despised and ostracized by the general Chinese community not from his own extended family itself, and including the Hakka tribe of which he made been a 'black sheep.'

Socony building with
the Chrysler Building behind it

And as for the island of Singapore being a lowly and isolated and backward place before his 'reign,' here is a photo of the Standard Oil Company of New York's head office building in New York, built on the wealth of its major refinery in Singapore before and after the War. Not to mention that Singapore held the prime Asian and Southern-to-Northern hemisphere's shipping routes preferred port location due to its strategic position.

The world's first refrigerated air-conditioned department store was in Singapore BEFORE the War and dozens of major global corporations were located there: Unliver, Fraser and Neave, Palmolive, Dunlop's Tyre Company,  Shell and Socony, Castrol, Wrigley's, Union Carbide, Vestey's Shipping and Refrigeration, and many many more.

Singapore was hardly the Third World swamp that Lee and his cronies like to make out, and never the backward joint that the BBC stupidly has recently also claimed on behalf of the money that is doing its talking - especially since Churchill had the audacity to want to defend it from the Japanese and even worse, the foolishness to regularly go stay at the suites named after him later in Raffles Hotel, and that Somerset Maugham and even that drunken sot Anthony Burgess also stayed in to write their books and short stories. 

Every time you see some big-headed, self-opinionated, and obstinate political leader using heavy-handed tactics, it is always to cover over something wicked they themselves have done, and to intimidate others into shutting up. Always. And remember that, as you watch today's political leaders too - they are no different and they will never be any different and it is useless to bet that they are, due to 'new and different circumstances' or any other 'new' thing. It's always the same. Thieves, get into their positions, by thieving, and then creating drama to obfuscate on the truth of it.

"I GUARANTEE you, the Congress of the United States, that if you get rid of Saddam now, ALL of the problems of the surrounding Middle Eastern countries will be resolved!"

Who said that, and had the audacity to go back and do it again just the other day? Diebold machines. Diebold machines...

And Duly Won

The colt Vancouver did indeed win the Golden Slipper today, giving Gai Waterhouse her sixth Golden Slipper victory, equaling the record of her father Tommy Smith, who is regarded as Australia's greatest ever race horse trainer. One has to bear in mind the lamp-lighting role that trainers from earlier eras had, and so it is difficult to compare with mathematical certainty today's trainers to those of the past - but in my own view, the daughter has surpassed her illustrious father already, and history will place her on as high a pedestal.

Gai Watyerhouse,
Australia's greatest race horse trainer

Vancouver not only won but paid a fairly decent price for such a good thing - 2/1 in many books. Basically you got double your money for the win plus your own stake back.

The Rosehill (Sydney) Golden Slipper is the richest two-year old 1200 meter race in the world, being a 3.5 million dollar race.

These things are nerve-wracking affairs because of the value to the owners and breeders of the win, and it certainly sounded from the immediate after-race interview of the jockey Tommy Berry, that it was a very emotional victory for him for multiple reasons.

For a dyed-in-the-wool gambler like myself, post-race activities are just as much part of the whole deal as the race itself and all of its nail-biting angst. 

At Sydney's 'Prime' Restaurant

The sun goes down, the crowd goes home, the gambler sizes up the day, finds the best place to eat and drink - and to think about life - and waits for the river of time to slowly wend its way back around to the same starting place all over again...

The problem that the entire world of investing makes all of the time, is that winning is a lonely profession... Not only does the shoe not fit everyone, there is no university course that guarantees you will be a millionaire in thirty minutes just by drinking coffees. And there is a massive difference between those who are in the papers today as 'billionaires' and you never hear of them again when times change. The Riverboat Gambler is always stalking the wooden boards at twilight. What does he know, that the others don't?

Golden Slippers!

I've been thinking of inviting a few people I know to emerge from out of the shadows and post a few things here - I'm not sure they will be prepared to, however. We shall see.

Meanwhile, I am having to resort to 'food porn' or 'doomer porn' - I shall have to attribute that to whomever on the Bear Chat Forum used that phrase as soon as I go back and check... (It was 'SpongeRob').

Yellen's Fed has continued what the idiot Bernanke started, and the Euro-Zone gangsters are clinging onto, and this has none too subtly destroyed the meaning of money and risk. On the one hand we are meant to believe interest rates have never been lower, on the other, billionaire Australian mining magnate Andrew 'Twiggy' Forrest couldn't get his corporate bond issue set at anything like decent odds in the market last week and has called the whole thing off - which simply tells me what I already know, 'benchmark' and 'risk free' rates are fictional right now.

And so, here I am, in the position of considering tomorrow's Golden Slipper horse race as the nearest thing to a real money market that I can see anywhere right now. 

Seldom will I 'declare' a particular horse 'the winner' before a race, but on this occasion I find it is possible for me to seriously consider putting my own money on this:

'Vancouver'

If you look closely, you will see that these kinds of Australasian thoroughbreds run with a straighter at the knee action than their counterparts in England and the rest of Europe for the most part. And this is because the grass is flatter here, better cut, and tends not to have the thick, muddy under-surface which characterizes so much of European flat courses. the consequence being that European horses are (possibly) given medications to ease knee problems they get by lifting and banging their legs down on the track surface after trying to extricate their hoofs from the mud.

With the possible exception of the best Japanese stables, Australasian and New Zealand horses are the best shorter distance to derby distance racers in the world, and they are a remarkably good investment from the breeding perspective given the comparative genetic talent available in this location. They almost always 'translate' to other regions, whereas the foreign horses do not always by any means.

I know that either before, or even during, but most certainly after, this year's Golden Slipper, I shall be indulging in food and/or drink porn so here is a suggestion along those lines:

A Golden Slipper from the Purple Bar,
at Sanderson's Hotel in London.

Hope For The World

Were they thinking about Howard Hughes when the creators of largely Sixties mass cultural diversions like Bond and Flint or even The Thunderbirds, for that matter, set 'home base' on some secluded and distant island?

There is a staggering lack of invention and fizz in the lifestyles of the 'said-to-be' stonkingly wealthy contemporary identities of the known world. Hughes was notoriously eccentric, and like Putin, disappeared although for longer than just eleven days at a time...

For the nostalgic - like myself - we may be able to find solace in re-imaginings, as they call them:

And, in the rare instance, recent creations drawn from the legacy of human envisioning:

Where's Vlad?

Who cares? Not me.

There's been a political assassination in a country that is being pressured with 'sanctions' (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean), every Western media outlet is claiming to know that Putin and/or his government is in some way behind the murder, and suddenly the same Western media is pissed off he isn't more around so that they can continue to place the 'searing lights' of Western media wisdom onto him.

Me, I care that Kylie Minogue is in Moscow.

Kyles is looking better and better the older she gets.

Thank god no one reads this blog. It wouldn't do to have old John Brennan worry too hard about where all this stuff is coming from, especially since it isn't the CIA that is getting pissed all over right now.

I understand they do a lot of cycling in Switzerland.

Perhaps our Kyles is heading in that direction next. Who's to say?