Abdul al-Ziphr - The Slave of No One

This wine-drenched Christmas-tide we spent a good few recent evenings with a certain Saudi Prince-ling (who shall remain nameless) indulging the wicked Western Jesus culture of wine drinking - although he (the Prince-ling) refrained, of course, being more than adequately inebriated on money and power.

I thought he was being the typical smart-alec rich person, with this silly plastic Swatch item on his wrist, until he casually remarked that it was made entirely of a single piece of corundum crystal - and so I took a second look.

Visually, in fact, it's quite a nice piece... On second glance I realized it was much better looking than your average Swatch watch. 

It was of course, the latest Hublot Unico Red Ruby - lab-grown crystalline aluminium oxide mixed with chromium: ...IE., a ruby. A whole solid ruby casing for the Swiss watch mechanism.

And we are a little like this ourselves on this Blogspot - not exactly what everything at first appears.

You see, the matter one has to be careful of these days, is not to expose things, formats, details, even style, in the open public channels, because unscrupulous and misguided people just plain steal what you are doing whole-cloth and then replicate it in the exact same format but pushed as if it were a viral phenomenon - thereby damaging what you are actually doing by not being able to provide or to carry forward on the substance. 

So, for those of you are relatively new to these pages, we do not say everything here, and nor do we really explain what we are doing precisely - but only offer a few directions. 

As far as the Saudi poker advances thing is concerned, those who have registered formally, get directed to private web-sites and web addresses which cover what is going on in detail.

Lanique is a very Arabic Damask and Taif rose-essence liqueur...

We're operating in a big - nay, a HUGE market space. It's not just that there are 2 billion Muslims who are allowed to play this Baloot game and its money-prizes format, but the whole entire Western casino business would like in... ...and can't get in. And not to mention that what they would really like is to be able to replicate the staking advances process that is inherent to the Gulf B aloot championships, and be able to apply it to the many more billions of Western poker players.

So, don't mistake where you are, and what you are reading...

In The Money!

Ah well, accidental good timing... Well, there is just nothing like it, really. No amount of 'genius' financial logic and thinking will ever beat 'good timing.'

Feeling that 'charter the private jet' feeling...

I have no particular reason to have literally picked the actual bottom of the digital crypto-currency market last month. The market had been nothing but falling knives for weeks and months, ever since hitting the ATH of more or less twenty thousand USD a while back - in fact, on December 17, 2017.

Because of this poker staking ('buy in') advances thing we're running right now, we bought a small chunk of Bitcoin at $3,000.

I've been extremely specific about using digital crypto-currencies as bridges for on-line transactions of exotic, mostly digital 'work' and not trying to invest in them or deal in them as investing commodities as such. And so, booking some kind of profit right now doesn't necessarily mean anything compared to the objective of achieving expanded digital networks and the developing of digital trading or things using crypto-currencies.

Of course, however, one would be rather miserly to fail to allow a fulsome commitment to carousing and wassailing this particular Christmas!! 

'Tycoon Tan's' baked crab (Hong Kong eating place)

Biting The Tax Apple...

PEOPLE DO NOT BELIEVE IN IDEAS, THEY BELIEVE IN POWER

There is no 'apple' in the Book of Genesis, okay. We've already talked about that.

But there also, is no 'Apple' on the US taxpayer register. Not really. But you can 'bite' Apple if you are willing to 'do certain things.'

I think I must tread carefully here.

This is the stuff of Bond movies...

Silk Road oasis 'village.' A veritable 'Garden of Eden' to some;
Eden is a relative 'place.'

You see, what do corporations as large as Apple - do with all of that tax dollar allocation, which they never hand over to the government as actual taxes?

Do they organize themselves and conspire to have a shadow government that they control, against the legitimate legacy 'government' we all believed we were pledging our faith and allegiance to?

The human condition...

No one at the top of these organizations would be so bold, would they?

Now here is the key to following how humans function as groups:

People do not believe in ideas, they believe in power.

There is no known 'bridge' between static mathematics, in their pure 'idea' forms, and material action and motion. Numbers do not move off the page by themselves, nor do shapes, or volumes, but more importantly, not a single 'idea' converts itself into the action and motion of any physical object out in the world we can see; and nor does it even transfer itself by itself, or transform itself from an idea, to a real material thing.

And this is the principle reason people viscerally dismiss ideas, and are enthralled with action in front of their eyes. 

They might not openly admit it, but they don't believe in ideas. And they will even deny that they dismiss ideas. ...But they dismiss ideas.

Ideas - numbers, shapes, physics - none of these have emotion contained literally in them as an actual part of them. Humans have emotions; and so you can see, that there is a stark difference in nature between humans and ideas. 

Dostoevsky and Sundar Pichai

Okay so I've been shoving this joke around recently, that I didn't know who or what a 'Sundar Pichai' was - so I 'Googled' it and came up with a picture of an idiot.

As you all know, one of the whinges Congress just had about Google - which they voiced to Sundar Pichai, the current CEO of Google LLC - was that Google was a politically-biased organisation that spun searches in an anti-Right Wing manner: by example, if you 'Googled' 'idiot' it gives you pages of pics of Donald Trump. 

I love Google, I use Google a lot. But it is rubbish. That is, it should be so much more but it isn't.

The androgynous look, was around back in the
day of Leon Bakst and Diaghilev -
absolutely nothing about it is new at all...

You see, for me, this thing about political spin is nasty enough but that is just froth and bubble compared to the hard inner kernel of sheer illiteracy and ignorance that has been allowed to masquerade for too long as 'orthodoxy' and even 'academic knowledge.'

It is a waste of time pointing out the many glaring mathematics and science errors and shocking falsehoods all over Google searches and of course, certainly in Wikipedia in particular (as one of the first line/first page results almost always) - even today's mainstream academia will in fact not accept that they are wildly wrong on a bunch of things... They want the position, and they will cling onto it and they will tell lies. Period. ...Waste of time contending there.

But the most problematic failure of Google is that they are run by illiterate and ignorant people of absolutely zero discernible culture whatsoever.

If you 'Googled' 'idiot' what you ought to get somewhere - at least somewhere close to the top - is Dostoevsky's book 'The Idiot;' a book in which you will find the sentence 'beauty will save the world.'

These people who are running a lot of matters at the moment, pushing themselves to the head of the social pack, seemingly dominating capital and finance, are not mere idiots - they are liars, thieves, ignorant people, illiterate, boring, and they are venomous in what they have done to the minds of young people, and what they are still doing to them. They are causing a road-block to the upward progress of Mankind.

You can 'go around' this road-block, and you need to. They will lead you and themselves into a calamity and they're heading there very fast. Faster than people suppose.

PS (But you watch, now that I've mentioned this, you will see Dostoevsky creep up the results list a little...)

Busy Shots

Well I mean really busy backgrounds in shots.

When I go to see a Bond movie, I go to see the Walther PPK, or the tux, or the jet-pack, or the Aston Martin, or the Bond-girl, or the glossy lipstick red undersides of her Louboutins, or the villain. I don't want to go and see some urban householder's interior design concepts, 'adorning' the set as well. 

The concept of FOUR objects for your eye to fall
on and to send to your brain to think about - the
shot is 'busy,' but not really...

I don't need to see that the actress is so thin that her arms literally compete with the fake pampas grass-tree on top of the never-used kitchenette. Or that she is so short that the armchair back is at head-height when she climbs onto it - so that, later on in the scene, she needs to literally sit astride the chair back! ...Just to be in frame of the other character in the shot.

We built long plywood runways for Mel Gibson in 'Year of Living Dangerously' to accommodate his walking into the ballroom with Sigourney Weaver.

This also seems busy - but again, it isn't.
It's a composed arrangement from a Spanish brandy advert.

In the last article here you will note that Diana Widmaier Picasso was one of only four torsos in camera shot. This photograph is a lesson in human subject photography. It has everything: subject, object, alternative perspective, and the abstract as also a representative 'other' human subject - and with even greater potential depth to that last element than all the rest.

Last night, the television was so boring, that I was avidly looking forward to the Geminid Meteor Shower - and, not letting me down, Nature also provided a lightning storm with limited clouds at the same time. We had thunder, lightning, meteors, and flying Pterodactyls. Okay, we didn't have the Pterodactyls. Although we might have had those but I fell asleep at some point in the hammock.