The Wallpaper Life

Let us forget, for a while, all of the problems of the world, and open the newspapers and absorb the immediate media cycle, and see if we can find some bright ideas, and some entertaining items...

Nope. I cannot.

And I suppose my own well-tried default, whenever in this position, is usually to fall back on food, and drink.

I must make a slight confession in that I have become rather comfortable with the progress of one particular business venture that is on-going with me. I have several on the go at the moment, all related although separate as actual businesses.

In this feeling of comfort, it is more the ambiance of life that interests me, rather than the substance or real content. I want a kind of 'wallpaper lifestyle' right now...

I guess I've become more than just a little bit of a recluse too; not genuinely one, more like, what do they call it now - 'the closed-in Millennials?' Well of course I am clearly not so young as to really be one, but I have always been a fashion dilettante and I think I am happy to fall in step with the nouvelle vague.

Even so, life in my world is not the bright sunshine of very high speed driver-sim computer games, nor the dark dystopia of 'Halo' wargaming on an 'alien software' PC.

I have decided that life in my world - regardless of whatever happens in the outside world - is going to be something of an 'invisible gated estate.' Something like a sepia detective fantasy - not entirely black or dark, but at least, shadowy, or in twilight. Not noir; that's too austere for me - I like color in the femme fatale's dresses:

All the doors are locked, and Mike Hammer or Sam Spade can sense the violets (which would mean an Orris root butter base in an expensive perfume, probably) even before one of them enters the private office. I could go on, but it just means the detective is not totally surprised by the presence of the hot blonde dame in his office.

"How did you get in here?"

"I came down the chimney - ho, ho, ho.' She answers, in a slow sardonic drawl.

"So waddya want?" I ask (that is, Mike Hammer does).

"My employer has a most intriguing proposition for you."

 (To Be Continued...)

A Superior Win

American Pharoah beat good horses to win this year's Run For The Roses at Churchill Downs.

The horse's name is officially spelled 'pharoah' although usually, the word 'pharaoh' is spelled with an 'ao.'

A strong horse with a decisive galloping action -
Kentucky Derby winner American Pharoah.

This was one of the most dominant displays I have witnessed. The winner traveled three and four wide from the extreme outside barrier (one-in, though, to barrier '17' with a scratching before the race), and yet kept complete cover over the fast leaders at every step and around every sweeping curve.

The placegetters were by no means tiring at the end themselves but the winner climbed all over them with seeming ease.

It was a remarkable win.

I don't like to tip fairly short-priced near favorites in a packed field long distance race, but this horse was always going to be difficult to beat, even though this year's field was strong and the eventual race run very true to previous form.

One thing that stands out to seasoned race followers is the dismal performances of the horses that usually run in Dubai - where there is no betting allowed, and possibly as a result, where the competition is not as fierce as it is elsewhere.

Alcohol and roses,
and wood and mint and silk... What's missing?

Money is a leveler or an equalizer in that sense. And you have to draw that lesson out of these events as far as market investing and just plain domestic economics and street economics goes right now. Banks are effectively, running in the equivalent of the Dubai Cup... Which is fundamentally a race for amateurs.

No alcohol, no gambling, no scantily-clad women. Seems like a world of castrated pharaohs, to me!

 

Cloning Of Winners

There was this horse once, you know... It was called Shergar. And it was one of the most wondrous racehorses ever. The IRA took it and, according to all the official accounts, both of what was left of the IRA itself and the Irish police department, Shergar was killed and its body burned and buried somewhere in Ireland -  and no trace of it has ever been found.

Shergar wins the Epsom by a record margin in a canter

I suppose one of the greatest surprises of Ed Snowden's expose thus far, is that there has been nothing related to any of the more 'out there' covert programs that are supposed - by the usual speculators - to be in active operation. Sure his work is mainly to do with meta data, but within that framework there have still been able to be some military or strategic political programs exposed too - such as the Five Eyes spying agreement with the governments of New Zealand, Australia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom. 

But no aliens, flying saucers, or any of that other usual 'out there/X file' stuff.

No cloning stuff...

lol.

Me personally? On one level, when I think Shergar, I think muslims. And cloning.

Of course, when I think Saudi's, I think London, and even Hatton Garden... And wherever that leads back to. 

Funny thing about horse racing - when you see the evidence of past performances, in hindsight, it should have been a 'certainty' that 'such-and-such' a horse wins this or that big race. But it never is beforehand because gamblers - people on the outside looking in - can never believe what is right in front of their own eyes. People want evidence. But then they also have a floating view of what evidence really is and once they actually have evidence or proof, let's say, what they want next is money as an entitlement to bet on the certainty; in other words, they are on the inside and still they want to be on another 'inside' further along yet again. The 'inside,' is a never-ending horizon. 

But that is still only viewing things from the 'outsider's perspective.' 

Carlyle Group backed Obama. 

And the Carlyle Group, is the inside. Or part of the inside.

When you already have everything,
you get cut flowers!

The question is, how far ahead of popular knowledge, is the inside, and how much absolute control, is the inside elite actually wielding...? Well, it's absolute, isn't it?

They already have absolute political power and they are the inside. So how much further inside then, do they feel they want to go to next?

The question is, what are they planning next - as the next objective? Not, what are they doing now.

People want evidence and proof but they already have a track record to go on.

The Dionysus Statistic

Croesus knew the stories about King Midas and how he bathed for a long time in the river Pactolus to wash off his 'power' of turning everything to gold. As a thinking person, he must have realized that where there was smoke there may be fire, and, investigating, he found that the river in question was full of electrum, the volcanic alloy of silver and gold. And more than that too, evidently, he also was a believer in innovation and technology - such as it was back then - and utilized new ideas about separating gold from silver and other metals in the naturally-occurring alloys in order to make a very well-respected currency. This coin, called the stater, or standard, was actually made of less gold than other similar coins, but of a much higher purity.

A touch of gold, but only a touch,
and not too much!

It cost about 1/2 an ounce of gold per month to pay the salary of a soldier, and Croesus was able to preserve his power and position because of his ability to earn seigneurage on the money that he minted, and thus pay for a lot of soldiers.

Eventually though, his wealth attracted the attention of the lunatic Cyrus 'the Great'(!), who tried to kill him, and by some accounts did kill him.

I think there are a couple of points still relevant to the modern era that may be taken from the Croesus/Midas/Dionysus fables or folkloric histories:

One, that it pays to go where there is a lot of electrum flowing, if you seek to have gold.

And secondly, it probably also pays to keep your wealth as quiet as is practical to do; and this is not a rare idea of course.

What we are confronted with today, is a somewhat new environment in which a lunatic form of government, has succeeded in drawing off massive amounts of currency from the normal internal domestic flows of money and trade, and so it is not so easy to locate any 'river Pactolus' of the modern time...

Turkey, famous for roses,
gold, and King Midas - who was also a rose grower

The god Dionysus, being, as he is hard to grab hold of and stick into a laboratory in order to discover if he exists or is just a figment of someone's imagination - is not necessarily the agency of miraculous incident that one ought to focus on primarily to find out what 'Midas' will be created next, and therefore into whose bathing stream we ought to wade.

The more complex, the more 'attention deficit,' the more hyperactive, the more buzzing, the world gets, seemingly, the more accidents happen - and the more too, humans seem to be in the pathways of hurricanes and things like that.

On the one hand, given the tsunamis, the hurricanes, the floods, the earthquakes, the storms, the fires, and the acts of terrorism and/or revolt, it is notable that virtually no important person has ever been killed in one of them - no one, say, like any particularly important country's leader, or a major banker or industrialist or financier, or some judges or leading counsel.

Dionysus in ecstasy,
a moment from handing out a miracle or two

But, being a thinking and a logical person, I would venture to suggest that it is only a matter of time. And then I think, there is a certain kind of human psychology about political leaders and despots and tyrants and things, that it would pay to understand about, because there is nothing so humorous - or profitable - as to watch when a book-maker (turf accountant/ odds quote-r) looks around with that expression of: 'I didn't organize that! What just happened!'

The Croesus Mindset

There is so much interpretation and re-interpretation of history nowadays, that it is virtually a waste of time doing things like suggesting: 'the TRUTH about so-and-so REALLY was...'

And besides, how is it possible to encapsulate someone's whole life into a few short phrases or sentences or even a book?

Better to look at a lesson from history, or a particular complex idea expressed by way of some particular incident out of history.

And so in this piece I'd like to just look at one or two simple things we know about the legendarily wealthy King Croesus of Lydia (Turkey, today). We know he got gold from the river Pactolus, in which by myth or legend before him, King Midas washed in order to rid himself of the problematic blessing from the god Dionysus, which was namely that everything he touched would turn into gold.

The gold coin of King Croesus -
what are those symbols?!

We know he used innovations of the time, to do with separating silver from gold by heating the mixtures with plain salt - and issued fairly pure gold coins.

And we know that he instituted a treasury inside the Delphic Oracle of the Pythia.

What is less commonly known is that although the main Oracular centers took in gifts, they also distributed them out as well...

In Dodona, where the sacred Oak grove was, that also issued oracular pronouncements, 'mysterious gifts wrapped in straw would arrive from the Hyperboreans." Now the Hyperboreans lived in a place virtually no one had ever been to, way up North where it was both snowy as well as permanently in sunlight, full of pleasant corn fields and where no one got old, et cetera, et etera.

Croesus was a master of trading and he instituted and supported trade centers in his main home cities of Sardis and Ephesus.

In Winter, the god Apollo left the Delphic Oracle and holidayed in Hyperborea, with the gifts left behind, those mysterious ones wrapped tightly in straw, left to pacify the Delpheans in his absence.

And what is this all about?

...My point is to do with Midas, though. And not so much to do with what Croesus did after he got his main wealth.

Who is this Midas, really, and what is the myth about him based on - is it psychological, or magical and unreal; a fantasy of the human social mind?