Juxtaposition

A Latin word, from 'iuxta' and 'iungo.' 'Near' and 'joined.'

The juxtaposition of 'beauty.'

Different from the commonplace and fallacious 'argument by association' that we see all too many people in the popular media indulge themselves in, and - dare I say - politicians do it too.

A juxtaposition quickly shows up two contrasting things because of their very nearness, which allows the mind to perceive in one scan, the contrasting qualities.

Two things may at the same time be 'beautiful,' but yet in totally different ways, which I suppose underscores the need to always be careful when using the word 'beauty' and to make sure people are sharing the same definitions when discussing anything in terms of its 'beauty.'

Tom Carson's Serrat Shiraz wins
'Wine Of The Year.'

Today the Australian Wine Expert James Halliday declared his 2015/6 Australian Wine Of The Year, giving it to a Yarra Valley (Victoria) boutique wine - Tom Carson's Serrat Shiraz Viognier, a wine going for the retail price of $40 Australian per bottle, compared with the wine which ran second, the Penfolds Hermitage, at $900 a bottle. 

Some time ago I talked about another Yarra Valley label - the Yarra Ridge Late Harvest Semillon - which I may have said along the lines, something like 'that you would be hard pressed to get anything from France in the modern era anywhere near as good at fifty times the price.'

Or something extreme like that.

Tom Carson is an expert winemaker who took out the Jimmy Watson Gold Medal (for wines) when it was first ever run. But Carson is a tiny, virtually hobby winemaker and his Shiraz Viognier hardly runs to 200 bottles per vintage. 

In a world today where you can visually 'see' that all of the huge prestige and luxury product brand owners are dying a quick death across the whole globe - Louis Vuitton made a colossal mistake going after the Japanese luxury buyer (there isn't one), and thereby alienating the China luxury market, and in any case, the China market hit its own wall just now, and the Germans have no idea about luxury anyway in spite of their sense of quality control - in all practical reality none of the new money billionaires have a single clue about luxury and beauty and quality. That's just a fact. And the pricing tells the tale of the tape in that regard.

You will buy superb luxury for $40.

And you needn't seek out specifically, Tom Carson's products either, necessarily. The Hunter Valley in New South Wales possesses as good wine products. And it is a fact that the oldest still-being-made Port Wine in the world is in South Australia and it is easily one of the most luxurious wines in the world. 

And modern can be beautiful too -
but you have to have a mind to 'get' it.

People, of course, seek to make money by buying something at a relatively low price and then selling it for a much higher price when the market realizes the quality of the item, whatever it is. But the market might never do that for you, even when you buy something of great intrinsic substance. It used to be the case, that the 'financialization' of something - an asset - eliminated the 'aficionado' aspect wherein only those in the know be aware of the true value of a particular 'aficionado' type of thing; information became mobile and fluid and dispersed, and the dollar denominator was easy to grasp as the reflector of something's actual worth.

But when you give money out to idiots, it changes all of that. And we go back to the secretive, whispered, aficionado world of wealth and luxury. Beauty is 'in the eye of the beholder,' but not the intelligent owner - there, it has a standard to meet.  

Beauty In The Midst Of Ruination

I constantly wrestle with whether or not I'm about to be irresponsible here on occasions. Just now I deleted a whole segment that I wrote but that I eventually decided, well hey, it's just not worth talking about any of this stuff. It's all so boring, really.

In short, I may summarize the deleted content by saying: 'you say Vallauris, and I say Puerto Banus...'

Says 'parody Tai Lopez': 'this is my new
Lamborghini - it's fun to drive it in Puerto Banus...'

Put it this way, if you think logically about some stories floated in the media, and by the media, sometimes they just plain don't add up to what they're meant to look like on the surface.

Over the last at least a year I have decided to go down a different path from what most people are treading in open public and even private, but topical, discussions.

To some extent I endorse the innocence of people like Tai Lopez - he's good for kids starting out. 

But I mean, I suppose if there are any readers here who are not that young, and not that naiive any more, they will want some meat and potatoes.

So let's talk gold 'for reals...' There has been a lot written about the matter in recent days, due to the drops in its price from this 'stuck' range of around $1200 - $1,300.

Gold is the physical central point denominator of per unit exchange value for the whole entire economic vista. And that is all it is, or what it is. China quanta of capital values down, the mid-point of all economies also down. 

Gold is not meat and potatoes of 'investment;' it is the cherry on the icing of the dessert.

A woman with substance

Investment is juxtaposition. The picture looks like one thing, and you find a discount on the surface obtaining value and invest there.

Sometimes, the use to an investor - or a buyer - of something, is to yourself alone. Hunter Valley wines are some of the greatest wines in the world today, but not that their prices will suggest it, and nor, necessarily will their future prices show the truth of it in hindsight. No. Propaganda and hype dominate the modern world, and will for some time to come. But substance, the 'meat' so to speak, cannot be the propaganda of anything.

It's an old investor adage - 'buy low, sell high.' But I say 'buy great and hold or use.'

Use is what makes something great.

Yes, power is great in certain contexts, and yes big money gives one power. But power... is force into mechanical balance, and sustained action is the absolute effect, of power.

Sometimes if you don't terminate a small force, which is in perfect mechanical balance, you'll pay a price if you ever need to oppose it later on, once it has cut vast swathes into your cloth.

A friend of mine once opined: 'you can't change it, money and banking and finance are the very fabric of society.' To which I laughed and replied: 'alas that is not the fabric you are looking at, my friend; that is the wing of the moth that has already eaten through the fabric a long time ago!'

And it works all ways. You can cut through the fabric of bankers too...

A prototypical Australian winery/restaurant scene.
King Salman doesn't drink Shiraz.

First you need to know what is great. Bankers have no clue. Neither do politicians, nor does the NSA nor the Israeli government nor even self-radicalized islamists, nor American theatre shooters for that matter...

But you do know what is great. Just don't let other people's hype or propaganda dissuade you from your path. They're all going straight to hell in a hand-basket. They even know it too but what they are doing is addictive. Watch out to step out of their way too. They're all going to be moving around like drunken sailors from here on in.

The Hunter Valley

Hunter Valley wines in Australia are famous for their quality. They are respected as much as the Big Barossa Reds, or the South Australian classics. The Hunter Valley is in New South Wales.

Tyrrell's shiraz -
absolutely glorious

The Australian bushland virtually in any State has a timeless, rather than a 'merely' ancient, feel to it. There is tremendous authenticity about products made in the country regions - and even where modernity has entered into the structures and the lives of people living in those regional 'country' districts, sheer distance and remoteness has served to maintain people's use of locally-available raw materials and traditional craft-skills.

Snow is everywhere in the high mountain areas
of News South Wales right now

At the same time however, it is not until you have witnessed life in such remote places first-hand, that you begin to appreciate that luxury is just plain not an invention of cities, and nor is it limited to Milan or Paris New York. In some peculiar, almost metaphysical way, the Australian Bush and country regions, or the 'Outback,' has more in common with Florence, than San Francisco does or some other similar large and modern city with claims on luxury and style leadership.

And it all has to do with authenticity and genuineness.

Cobb and Co was a great Australian transport company a hundred years ago, which was started by American businessmen partnering with local Australians. Today, the name still adorns products manufactured using traditional standards of quality and materials.

All those 'old rich' bywords of traditional luxury - leather, wood, rabbits felt, brass, and even gold and silver - are still available in products made and used in the Australian Bush lifestyle. And 'lifestyle' remains an authentic word in this respect, because there are many people in Australia who still live it in some part in a true sense - that is, genuinely; without affectation. 

Send something in a leather and gold envelope...

There is absolutely nothing genuine or authentic or stable or certain or reliable about so much of today's world. 

There are some people who know this, but not many say it, probably because they will not be believed. Parts of Australia exists outside of time itself, and in those places, you will find the extreme far distant past alongside the far distant future. The 'reach' of human mind, goes all ways - into the past as well as into the future, and can become lateralized across the ambit of present's multidimensional spectrum. The mind is juxtaposition in its best form. But it is also authentic. Remember this, the human mind is authentic, and real. It is not a fantasy, even though it is fantastical, and it is not to be trifled with by lop-sided weaker minds whose obsessive materialistic grasping nature is the result of innate inadequacy, and not power, strength or resilience. There is a time to be glowing with wealth and riches, and there is a time to Winter down. That is, the great secret of gathering authentic wealth in first place. For a flower that blooms in a day, as soon fades and is gone. A day, is but a short time to the gods and to eternity. Mastering the secrets of Time, is a shamanic ability. But this one simply must do, in order to fully understand the day and age in which we all live right now. 

Lightronix - 'Reach' 

The cost and value of things, is not observed sufficiently closely by too many belonging to today's outward world: time plus effort comes at great cost, while instant gratification has a high value. One of these things is fixed and real, and the other, is a movable matter.

Essential beauty - or the essential quality of beauty - can exist in the juxtaposition of ruin and epiphany.

'Money' A Political Construct

I heard a fascinating phrase on a radio program this morning in relation to a quite separate issue - and that was 'political construct.'

The issue being talked about was whether carbon credits were anything other than political constructs at the moment. A fair enough point.

It's snowing in New South Wales right now,
very heavily.

But it drew me to thinking about the present Euro-zone disturbances in the general harmony in terms of the euro currency being a political construct. There is no advantage in arguing about the relative practical usefulness of the euro as money - it is an adequate kind of money for quite a number of purposes, even though it is terribly and possibly terminally flawed.

And then again, yesterday, there was Peter Schiff on an RT panel talking about the gold standard and if it might ever again be adopted somewhere. 

Today, in 2015, what does any Western or developed government really need to buy? Only the support of, and protection from, its own citizens. It doesn't need to go out to some far flung foreign land and buy anything it needs. America owns effective supply of oil and energy via its military hegemony, and China supplies everything else and doesn't need to buy anything for the welfare or wealth and lifestyle of its people. Thus, anything will do as a general government currency because there is no actual trade or mercantile-ism.

We individuals, however, are not governments and we have no means of exerting equivalent power to those bastions of institutional power in the world today - there are no principles by which such bastions are guided which empower the individual. And that is why we, the individuals, need gold. It's for ourselves and our own trading, especially any individualistic, exotic, trading.

What does the messenger carry?

There will never be a day when governments enforce a law against private ownership of gold, and people fail to perceive that when it was attempted in the USA in the past, there was a massive, one again, political construct going on, that the wider population bought into that permitted the restriction, to do with freedom and liberty against European colonial essays or otherwise, various fascist tyrannies and ideologies. 

The world is entirely too wide now, for that kind of thing to be successful anymore.

A lot of the discussion over precious metals is very misleading. It might occasionally be a good investment but that is not the main point of owning them. Buffett tried to compare owership of gold with ownership of some productive financial asset - showing once again, that he is not his mentor Benjamin Graham. The insane risks being invited upon today's investor, to buy into Microsoft or Walmart or Uber-lite or some other fanciful financialised idea presented as a business, are way beyond what is rational. Despite the appearances of high gains, these investments are diabolical. They do not compare in any way with what small individual money can buy or trade on an old-school merchant basis, and make a profit on. 

Seriously, WTF

I think the recent - or current - media interest in whether or not (in my view when) Greece will Grexit the Euro-zone and euro-money system, is overstating the importance and the possible side-effects or consequences of the matter.

"Ask da bagman, where did he put da money..."

Yes there could be a complete destruction of the whole entire Euro edifice including the euro currency system itself because of the Greek template for the re-assertion of national sovereignity and democracy but fundamentally even that in itself is not going to stop the issuers and the creators of the 'euro' currency from doing whatever they please in financial markets. Which was and is the issuing of large nominal amounts of 'money' with debt as its backing and the supposed production capacity of Germany as its 'credibility.'

Money with credibility

The word being used to excess by the Euro Committee is 'credibility.'

What I mean by 'overstating' is that none of us should worry the least about any personal consequences. Governments cannot afford for problems to trickle down to the voting masses to the extent that their own existence is called into question as to its relevance. Governments are needed to stave off the rising tide of islamic extremism, religious intolerance, pandemic disease, guns in the hands of lunatics and truthers and doomsday preppers who have gone 'the full Johnnie Rambo...' Oh and of course not to forget the havoc climate change is about to unleash on those not protected by BB.

In short, nothing of any greatly negative import is going to happen to any of us.

Not from a Grexit. Not from BRICSA. Not from a nuclear conflict near Israel. Not from an arms race involving Iran and Russia.

Nope.

A bubblegum token

These are all just essays in trying to make the sale. Selling something, anything, is the lifeblood of enterprise capital, and I wish them all good luck. Not a lot IS actually selling these days. Anyone who can make a real sale gets my approval.

Trust, credibility, security, financial solidity - all these things spring from principles and ideas, not from bureaucrats or technocrats and the media's dribble.

Science comes from understanding the origin of the triangle, not the origin of the Universe...

And exchange - monetary means thereof - stems from universal liquidity of the token, instant and unimpeded and un-conditional transferability and real market risk pricing of the purchasing of debt.

But when the snow falls, and the stagecoach is still up on the high mountain pass, there is a reason why Werner Herzog had the miasma mark the point of separation between the lower earth and the upper ether of Count Dracula's world.

Snow is falling in Tenterfield, Australia right now

Never a truer word was spoken than that those who fail to learn from history are condemned to re-live it.

This time, it will be more than six million Jews. But it will be at least that many and people should mark my words. This is where we are heading, there is no way back now, and any thin smile on the face of some fool in the Euro-zone ought to be seen in the fading light of common sense, as the usual thugs in black flack-jackets and boots buttress the same evil that takes centre stage time and time again. The worst, the worst villain - is the man or woman inside that black uniform. Without them there would be no criminal elite trying to pretend a bubblegum token is money.