'All Horses Go Through The Same Mud'

There's a saying in horse racing that 'all horses go through the same mud.'

What this means to racing people is that you shouldn't worry about making excuses for your failures nor for your victories either, and keep looking at what you think 'the other fella' is doing or that he has some imagined 'easy route' down the race track to the winning post - because he basically doesn't. He has to go through the same conditions as you do. And this might also mean he is going to trip up if he himself isn't watching what he is doing carefully - or he might be slowed down. Other riders might cheat all they like but whether they give him a clear way through doesn't alter the fact that he still must go through, and he must run fast enough to beat any competitor who is really trying against him.

And that's where you come in. Once you realize that there are circumstances in which you can prevail even against someone who 'has been given some unfair breaks.'

How the hell did he win from there?
Chautauqua is the grey horse that is clearly last on the turn.
The horses in the front never slowed up, they ran on strongly -
it's just that the grey was stunningly faster than all of them!

I'm posting this to just add another word from the last article on the horse Chautauqua: its win was all the more meritorious because the track conditions were listed as a 'heavy 8' and that is a very wet, muddy, difficult track indeed. It ought to have slowed up all horses and yet Chautauqua came from behind other horses still moving forward against the tiring ones - and it came up behind them very fast and went past them all like a shot out of a gun. Not only is this the sign of a horse that can handle the 'going' (the wet muddy surface), but the sign of a remarkable, and a quick animal; an animal that has application, determination or spirit, strength, of course, and real stamina.

The wonderful thing about most competitive sports is that you can find authentic ways to apply lessons from them into the real world - and especially in the world of business and finance.

Never make the mistake of thinking someone else has all the cards in the world of business or finance. It might be the you have all the cards given the particular conditions and circumstances.

And I have said this before here, and everyone should really take it 'on board:' the best time to bet against the bookies is when you observe they are confused. This usually means they are confused!

Ten of these classics are being made new, this year
by  Leyland Land Rover. New. With modern technology.

Look at what's going on today - the popular media is floundering about not having come to terms with the fact they 'got it wrong' with backing Hillary Clinton's plan to get to the Presidency. They are floundering around in a state of apparent confusion about their loyalties - on the surface, they are doing everything they possibly can, to throw their lot in with foreign interests and dangerous ideologies, and to back law-breakers as far as anyone can tell!

They want to claim they are part of some 'ruling elite' but they are not part of anything 'ruling' anywhere right now.

Now is the time for a clever educated risk-taker to 'place their bets' so to speak.

And we will talk more about this soon.

Those Riverboats

I mean how can I fail to comment on this: the race horse Chautauqua, won its third T.J. Smith Stakes in a row. And has as a consequence taken its earnings to higher than that of the greatest horse we have seen in modern times - Black Caviar. 

The T. J. Smith is named after one of the greatest, maybe three or four in fact legendary Australasian trainers of all time, Tommy Smith. The race itself has a total purse of $2.6 million with $1.5 million going to the winner, who now has amassed $8.36 million in career earnings overall.

Chautauqua after it won the Chairman's Sprint in Hong Kong

How can I fail to comment now when I told you about this horse, perhaps, what more than two years ago? Probably I'm exaggerating but It's a while ago anyway. 

So how can you tell a truly great horse right at that early stage... I will get onto that shortly, but let's face it, nothing's ever really easy - even for millionaires like the horse's owners who do nothing but pay the feed and vet bills and cut a bit off the top for the trainer and the jockey and the stable-hands and track-workers when the cheques clear.

Yesterday, this horse played an April Fool's Day joke on everyone and must have sent the owners into paroxysms as it went around the track perfectly last behind a big ruck of good horses. Two hundred meters out I gave the horse no chance of running a place, a hundred out some chance of maybe running fourth, and by fifty out I realized the thing had already won it on momentum and it was still three lengths behind the leaders.

It isn't an overly big horse, and it
has a large head from this profile and it dances, rather
than walks or runs

It was easily one of the most dramatic wins I have ever seen and one of the fastest finishing runs.

If you ever get to count your money on the plane (or riverboat) out, this is the way to do it. 

There is no thrill in life that comes even close to having your own race horse win big money. The feeling is inexplicable and one can only understand what others in that situation might feel if you've been there yourself and I have.

Great race horses are 'visible' early on as yearlings. They have a style of behaving when you place them together with other horses of their own age. And they are what's called 'good walkers.' Well, they don't walk and they don't run - they dance.

Great race horses have a dancing style of movement and it's very obvious to the schooled eye. And there's always 'something' about their face, and their eyes...

But from this angle, you can see it's head cuts the wind and it has a
naturally aggressive but confident look about it

Is Acoustic James Bond Better...?

Truman Capote, who is one of my favourite writers of all time, could not finish a novel to save his life.

In fact, not only was he completely useless at it, you could 'see' how much of a mess of things he was making - getting himself further and further into a ditch he would never be able to get out of. You could see where his nerves were getting the better of him, not so much the self-doubt, but the sheer anxiety of himself knowing he was so much better and that people would inevitably get the wrong idea.

In this respect, Capote was a symmetrical writer - well, as in, symmetrically 100% opposite.

This is what the eyes of pure genius look like

His first um, perhaps fifty to a hundred pages were astonishingly good - you know at some point that you're in the hands not only of a master of the modern English language, but someone whose brain was worth listening to, if it was prepared to disclose anything to you. Truman Capote, in my view, understood human beings in ways that not too many even understand themselves about. He was nuanced. And he was far deeper of a personality than - at least in my estimation - the times in which he lived were capable of reaching even if they tried, and they generally didn't try.

Today, we have radically gone off the rails though - we could have reached depths, we could have hit heights; we were on the way there with Orson Welles, Arturo Perez Reverte, maybe even Ken Russell in some a strange sense. Kubrick was personally always too closed off from the public to give the mass public itself a feeling of its own true potential: he pointed to something, but then he also pointed over - with Kubrick there is always a bridge across vast spaces, metaphorical and spatial, between contemporary Man and society, and that 'other' place where there is a deep Man. That is to say, a profound Man.

Man is no longer even close to being profound.

There are good men but they are not profound. Capote was profound in ways that Vidal never ever was.

Where we've gone off the rails is in this mistaken belief that technology equates with 'the profound.' But it doesn't you see; design equates with the profound - it's about why intelligent beings select one thing over another thing. 

It's not about that you do, or that you can do, or how you do (something) - it's always about why.

'Why?'

Financial markets have energy (or lack of it), politicians have energy (so we can see), athletes have energy - life appears to have energy.

I don't believe it does have energy however. It has a dialogue going on: and there is a strict order with a fateful terminal sentence velocity...

Static things exist, and then the question is asked first: 'Why.' 

And then you get an answer from what ought to be a void.

Sure, listen to the voice - but watch the eyes

The Shrink's Couch

So this person I know really well asked me more or less, something along the lines of THE QUESTION: 'what is the purpose of life/why are there more difficult things than easy things that we encounter here...'

Well, it was something along those lines, anyway.

'You know,' I told her, 'if you consider the consultation suites of psychoanalysts and traditional psychotherapists, you have this 'shrink's couch' thing going on, this comfortable, quiet, dim-lit, warm, room, with a chaise that you can lie back on where you can close eyes to think; or not, as the case may be.'

And I of course expanded on the simple image description, and endeavored to weave my own perspective into it - which goes like this: even the learned, deep thinking, and very experienced people like Freud and Jung and Adler and Rank and Reich and Ritter and whoever else, all seemed perfectly sure that for most people the world was a psychologically, or a spiritually, inhospitable place, and that they might as well not add to the problem by assuming urgency, or anything in fact, that was liable to or inclined to, increase anxiety.

Hence the creation of this comfortable and intended-to-be relaxing space in which to set out from, on the journey to self-discovery or understanding of the world.

Human personality is about the clothes -
the clothes and the person are one.

Psychotherapists proceed from the position of assuming that everyone who comes to them is 'suffering.' And generally the suffering has a root cause in a sense of meaninglessness.

Well, that's what I hear a lot of psychotherapists say.

But I think far and away the most important thing is the very first proposition - namely, that the world is or can be, a psychologically inhospitable place. We don't need to employ the word 'spiritual' too much for our purposes here. It isn't necessary right now - we can get away with using the entirely secular 'psychological.'

...There is a road though, and a doorway, to the solution to everything.

Manu Zain - 'Without You'

Very Tempting, But No

There are still a lot of 'amazing' headlines all over the news and commentary channels and papers and platforms. And yes it is a touch tempting to go back and re-visit what are essentially old themes to me now.

But no, I shall not. Things have moved on and only the dogs are still barking. 

This is the new cocktail bar manager
 at the Paris Ritz - Aurelie Pezet

When I say 'old themes' I simply mean the idea of openly revealing something that is supposed to be covert and usually, runs counter the interests of ordinary law-abiding people. By 'openly' I mean actively telling you that I am doing it.

I'm not in the business of revealing anything too much these days. Today, we require more silence and less revelation. Do we not? I mean, for 'truth' and 'revelation' one need but go to simply any 'news' page. The BBC is of course, priceless - here we even have the suggestion that we should just 'ignore it.' This is in reference to something they want you to 'just ignore.' You see, if you just ignore it, then that will mean it never happened.

Whatever you don't care about, never happened, of course.

And they think they can make you care about some things, and less so about others, and not even at all, about others still.

We shall see what we shall see.

What do you think? Do you think the future has arrived yet? 

Do you feel happy and good about today and about the future? Or worried? Depends, I guess, on a lot of things - on the sorts of things you want, the sorts of prices you have to pay, the kinds of income you can attain, cultural and social inputs that are available; cultural and social wealth that can accrue to you and be experienced and absorbed by you.