Category Archives: Finance

September 9, 2021 · 05:53

Lemon of the Century

Yes, you have seen it, we have all seen it in some form, but when was the last time you saw a genuine Lemon? Not to mention a Lemon of the century. You would think it is a near impossible task, but Lockheed Martin, an American company pulled it off. In thee cases it is so much sweeter if the accomplishment is American.

I made a case to sell (as a corporate individual) to sell the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia either the British BAE Typhoon, or the somewhat better match the Chinese Chengdu J-20. Now, this is not on principles, but the US making Saudi embargo after embargo, all whilst it is mere puppet play and there was no direct need to stop the sales, especially as the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was under direct attack by Houthi forces directly sponsored from Iran and the people were eager to ignore that fact. So there I was taking a stab at a 3.75% sales commission, and in light of a $11,000,000,000 sales ticket could bank me $412,500,000 over a few years. Now, I know, am I greed driven? Nope! But I am not walking away from such a massive mealticket! 

All that happened and was mentioned before, but now there are more reasons as ABC news gives us. The article ‘F-35 program’s future uncertain owing to design flaws, parts shortages and cost blowouts’ (at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-08/f35-program-design-flaws-part-shortages-costs-opinions-divided/100431664) there we see “He said the combat jet currently had almost 900 design flaws, with seven considered critical.” This is given to us via Former US Marine Corps Captain Dan Grazier. So this is not out of thin air, this comes to us by decently informed people and at what point is anyone accepting a lemon with 900 design flaws? We get it, a plane with a current whole of life cost estimate of $2.3 trillion we need to consider that there is a massive flaw in the entire process. It becomes worse when you see and consider the Naval failure called Zumwalt class destroyers. That is two out of three, so now we merely need to add an army failure and the US forces will be 3 for 3. So how often do major projects on these scales fail? There is optionally the second stage where both China and Russia are not afraid for a war with the US, because the US is lacking in functional equipment. They have functioning 5th generation planes. I cannot tell if they are better, merely that they are. And I am am the mouse who loves that 412 million dollar cheese wheel, whether I retire or eat myself to death is all equally similar and there is a customer base who would want something that actually works so overall there is more than one seller and there is a definite buyer, so I am game.

Yet the article also gives us “It said that would grow to 40 per cent of jets grounded by 2030, if the repair backlog didn’t improve” this implies that the US airforce needs to grow by 250% to keep the effectiveness numbers of 2017, that is one hell of an investment. I am not denying what the pilots are saying, that it is a game changer that it will be effective, we get that, but it has 900 flaws, and there are a lot of questions in the background when we consider the seven critical problems. So when we consider the claim “Mr Grazier said the cost per flight hour in the United States was around $36,000” and the math man in me consider that at present there are (unverified numbers) “1,763 F-35As for the USAF, 353 F-35Bs and 67 F-35Cs for the USMC, and 273 F-35Cs for the USN” it would require the DoD $88,416,000 an hour to get it all in the air, in light of the Afghanistan clambake, which lasted 2 decades, count your losses today. Is someone doing the math here (apart from me)? This is a plane with 900 design flaws. So if China (or the United Kingdom) can beat these costs they have a real chance in getting a new customer in their arsenal and it is one that has money, so that part will be the smallest of concerns.

We could go all (overly) marketing and say:

Chinese
Hellbringing
Equalising
Negotiating
Goalseeking
Defence
Unit

But that might be slightly over the top, what matters is that the US has a real problem and, oh, that reminds me. Is that why they pulled out of Afghanistan? 40% of their flying capabilities wasn’t up to it? I know, it is grasping and it is speculation, but I am trying to get my hands on that 3.75% and that makes me a little giddy. With the Zumwalt it was the principle that it didn’t meet its need, it was too expensive and it was ugly as hell. I still hope to test my new stealth anti naval weapon on it, merely because it is just too ugly to see and congress never approved the shells needed to fire these guns, and a stealth ship with a Raytheon solution is just not a stealth ship. And as a $22,500,000,000 failure it is too expensive for such a failure be allowed. Consider that ABC ends the article with “To respect that dependency, we remain laser-focused on continuing to enhance the capability, affordability and availability of the F-35. With the help of partners and customers, I have no doubt we will succeed.” Which is all fair enough. Now consider that 12 nations have committed to ordering, now consider that if 3 leave that group (Singapore being the most interesting one) and China gets Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE on board as well, the stage changes on a global scale at that point. Now reconsider the military power play where we accept “There are developmental issues that come up because it is a very high technology advanced aircraft. Over time, these issues are resolved.” Yet 900 flaws imply that this will not be resolved until 2029, with spare parts and shortages of equipment lasting until an expected 2036. That implies that these players will not have a real effective airforce for well over a decade, so how many nations will get nervous on that premise and how many will consider a change (please do not change to Russian option, as they give me nothing). So in that light is there really nothing to worry about? And that is before we see the other 9 nations with billions invested all for… what for? 

So whilst I have nothing against Lockheed Martin (I really do not), being in the stage where they are now with 900 design flaws is just too weird. Yes we accept that it is a developing project, but design flaws imply that it is not developing, it was wrongly developed and as such the F-35 should still be in an earlier stage, that is until well over 600 flaws (and the 7 critical ones) were resolved ahead of where they are now. 

So here I am, just a man, a (really) poor man, hoping for his 3.75% before he retires and retirement is not that far away. And in all this, I remain optimistic, because I have things to smile at, especially if I get to test my creative sinking idea on the USS Zumwalt. Yes, it is a gasser (in more ways than one). So feel free to agree (or disagree) but when you see something that should be the lemon of the century, would you not shout that from the tallest building? Especially if it was your neighbour who bought the Ford Edsel. So Ford can now relax, Lockheed Martin surpassed their failure with an impressive larger one.

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September 7, 2021 · 18:41

As banks cut corners

There was news on ABC news, it was not really news, this was a stage that I saw coming a mile away and that was 5 years ago, yet the speed at which this is procreating is cause for concern. The article ‘Protecting yourself from phone porting and SIM card scams’ (at https://www.abc.net.au/everyday/protecting-yourself-from-phone-porting-and-sim-card-scams/100421586) is not just this, the entire COVID registration issues are making things worse. When we take notice of ““At 5:55pm, I got a text message from my telco. It said, ‘Hi, received your port out request for this service,'” he says. “By the time I tried to call them, my phone already went to SOS only. Before I could even react, my number was gone.””, you might think that this is an isolated case, but it is not, when we add ““They had my customer ID [for online banking], and you can do a password reset if you have the customer ID and mobile number,” he explains. “It was really professional. I had daily limit of $10,000, so they sent $10,000. They bypassed that limit by opening another account inside my account, which you can do online, and then they transferred another $10,000.”” There is. massive flaw, the banks refer to this as being customer friendly, I personally see it criminal friendly. All kinds of level of checks and balances are left out of the equation and for now we see banking party-lines that these matters are seldom, the people are protected and it can be reversed. Yet in 5G, within the next 2-3 years the costs will go beyond what the banks find reasonable and we are left with the costs, we are left with the impact and we are left outside in the cold. That is an almost given and matters are merely getting worse. 

The banks (to cut corners) are setting up more and more to be done online, all whilst proper security is lagging and there is a whole range of actions that will not and should not be allowed. I had to check and make sure that online banking was DISABLED, it makes a few issues a bit more hassle, but compared to the damage I could face 2-5 times a year it is a no-brainer. This is a mere beginning when we consider “If I want to change providers, before the [new] standard was put in place, I just had to give my name, my date of birth and my address,”, all whilst the increased made “scammers ask a victim’s existing telco to switch the number to a new SIM”, the effect is the same and because some players are cutting corners the consumer is left with the hardship. There is no easy way here and I get that, yet there is a larger stage of checks and balances missing all whilst cost cutting parties make ‘customer friendly’ needs, whilst parses of verification needs to be at the centre of this all and it is getting worse. 

Why is it getting worse?
Well, There were 5 attempts to scam me in the last 8 weeks, 2 of them were so good that I could not find anything wrong with the information and sources given, more importantly in one case I had to make a separate call to PayPal to make checks to make sure, they had become that good and I know what to look for, yet I have an ace up my sleeve (which I will not reveal here), it stopped numerous scams from being completed.

The first is that YOU NEVER EVER USE A LINK GIVEN! You find the number, the generic number of for example PayPal and you reference the numbers that you write down, they were ready to tell me that no such activity exists. If you click on any link you are causing damage to yourself. But the two (including PayPal) were so well done that finding the differences were close to impossible and I know what to look for. A consumer will have little to no chance at all. 

And matters are getting worse, because 5G will enable the scammers to approach well over 500% in the same time, their revenue goes up and at some point it will cost us, insurances will soon stop paying out and then it will become a much larger problem. You either pay an annual fee, or lose your money. I feel that this is where it is going. 

So whilst we see “to enable to SIM port or swap, scammers will need personal information, like your name, address, and date of birth” COVID give them the name and phone number, the phone number can in some cases link to an address and then only the date of birth is missing and with all these transgressed data bases. Now consider all these places that got hacked, which have a birthdate? Which have a phone number? And the image below completes the picture. 

We see three sources required to get all the data they need and they keep on adding data, data you freely give away in apps, data they captured, data from hacks on the dark web and it is BIG BUSINESS, in the example it is one person with the $10,000 target, now consider 750,000 in the UK alone, 500,000 in Australia, 35,000,000 in the US and consider that $10,000 was a small jab, even smaller would work for them, like a mere $500, with these numbers these criminals become billionaires within a month and these actions need to be done fast. They have per nation 3-4 days at the most, so within 2 weeks they are looking at millions and with 5G they can get more and they can get there faster. Do you still think I am kidding? Take a good look at what data you entered in ANY app or any website, now consider that these people are doing nothing more but to add data as much as they can, at some point (within a dozen sources) they have enough data to port you, to capture your bank accounts and to make changes to your life. They merely needed some time, a $2500 computer and a decent internet connection, the pay off would be a 7 figure number and with the speed they are tracked they would be living large in another country with nothing attached to them. That is the current reality and the level of checks and balances that are missing is just too unbelievable for words.

Enjoy your bank account (for as long as you still have it)

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September 6, 2021 · 01:26

Turmoil of doubt

We all have it, at times and some more often we doubt. Whenever I see such doubt I think back to a story that I heard in primary school. It was about Lakshmi and the greedy beggar. You might have guessed it, or perhaps you know the story. The beggar just wants in the end one coin more and ends up with nothing. This is a setting we know where it goes, but now let’s change the premise. I could end up with $3.7 billion over 3-5 years of Google, Amazon or Huawei buys my IP. I could optionally make $250,000 if I publish an idea of intrusion I have. An idea they all overlooked and could give a certain wall street player the insight on certain patents that would be accepted within 30 days. With this method I speculatively could make another 3 million, yet that would also mean that I can no longer rely on the larger amount to ever become mine. What would you do? The small amount now or hoping for the best? I am not breaking any laws, because I am showing a flaw, two actually and the law has close to no chance of finding substantiative evidence. So I am basically in the clear. So what to do?

Well, I am also a story teller, so here goes (it was a simple riddle).

Between a larger technology firm and a patent office is a link, they mail and they take all the precautions. The messages go from router 1 to router 2 via what some might know a router table. Now no matter what the path is, at some point it will go via router N1. That is how the beans take the high or low road. So I got the idea to place a listener to ANY router one jump away from Router N1, so it could be almost anywhere. That place we call Router X0, it was my idea for the Hop+1 solution. There is a second part, this part means we need to get to that router somehow, whether it is internal solutions of intrusion. The idea was to replace the CF card in that router with an identical one, but there is one difference, it might state 64MB, but it has 256GB and one small internal component sets the 64MB apart and the rest is a floating drive. The floating drive has its own dynamic and it installs a small program in the memory of Router N1, that program will copy EVERY packet directed to Router 2 towards Router X0. There is almost no chance to detect it, when someone resets it, the program is gone, the evidence is gone. The memory card will unless dissected not show anything and there too is nothing to show what is going on, the CF card will know when it can forward packets to the end station when it can hide in other traffic, unless a System administrator reads the ENTIRE log, there is nothing to see. The receiver now has a collection of packets of traffic from Router 1 to Router 2, which also includes a message that Patent acceptance was achieved, the Wall Street Firm now has an advantage to place the right options and stock ahead of all the others and when the rest catches on the larger profits are raked in. 

A setting of not so speculative anticipation of profit and when the deed is done, both routers are reset and the evidence is gone forever. There is one remaining part, that is the CF card, yet id that went to an empty mobile station that might not be the problem, the only issue is getting the card back, leave no evidence behind. These System administrators are often underpaid, so that might not be an issue either. 

An idea that I had when I was wondering how Sony was transgressed upon, because there was no way that North Korea had that level of know how. In this setting it was an internal setting, optionally a disgruntled employee, but it was all speculative from my side, it felt more realistic than North Korea with its lack of technology. 

So will I doubt? Yup, I will remain hopeful the three true innovators will take my IP, if not, ah well. Still time to make it all public domain, what Wall Street tends to call pubic domain, not sure why but there you have it. Have a great Monday!

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September 3, 2021 · 12:48

When one and one remains one

Two things crossed my path, as perhaps a lot of you too. They are not related, but they gave me food for thought. The first are the floods all over NY city. I looked at a lot of YouTube videos and I agree, we have never seen this before, will we see more of that? Time will tell. Yes, it could be due to global warming, but it is not a given. We have tornado’s and we have storms and this one went towards New York. Now, I am not stating that it isn’t due to global warming, but to point the finger from the start is not a good idea. I do believe that global warming is part of the storm surge and as global warming continues there will be more storms. There is no denying that. One can lead to the other, but one is not the definite cause of the other. That setting is here too. So whilst those with a sub-level apartment, they now have a swimming pool. I am not making fun of them, that would be wrong, but it is important to consider that New York has never dealt with this before and it is now August. It will take months to dry, so we are in a setting with thousands of a basement apartments and when the frost sets in, these houses will become death traps. November and December will be close to unbearable and in January if the frost sets in these apartments will be a different setting. It is also a more important setting, if snowfall comes early this December, thousands of places to live will become close to unsurvivable and New York better get ready for that stage, it could kill a lot of people. Is it a given? No, it is not, but the floods are clearly visible, if the subway is flooded, how will these houses fare? And that is only the start, the water brought all kinds of mud and other health threats, so cleaning these places will be an almost titanic task. Then we get to the damaged electrical systems, and all this is before we realise that plumbing and  water will take a while to become decently reliable again. A stage we saw in part, but how much of these dangers did the people see?

The second is not related, but it had my attention. Reuters (at https://www.reuters.com/article/amazon-tv-usa/amazon-to-roll-out-its-own-tv-in-u-s-by-october-business-insider-idUSKBN2FZ00D) gives us ‘Amazon to roll out its own TV in U.S. by October’, this implies that there is another statin on US minds, Amazon will have more than Amazon Prime Video, they are now setting the stage to TV and there is no attack, there is no issue. Yet the stage of them offering  TV with a twist is not out of the question. It is a clever move from Amazon, they have the option to take advertising to a whole new level and it is THEIR TV channel, so the essential attacks on Amazon will not be as effective as the attacks that Apple and Google are facing. But is that what it is about? No, it is not merely the TV part, it is the shifting economy that Amazon gets to push for. This is not meant in a negative way, but consider that thousands will be dislodged, thousands will need a job, a home and Amazon who is out to hire 55,000 tech jobs and that news is a mere 22 hours old. People have relocated for a lot less and that gives Amazon more than a leg up, it gives them a furlong head start in 2-3 venues and in this setting of bad news they become a shining light and optionally a larger staged beneficial noise to a lot of people. The part that New York might not like is that there is a setting where (depending on Amazon choices) 20-30 thousand people vacate for sunnier shores and in light of what happened in the last few days, with the added workforce taking a step in an optional other direction. We will see a larger stage of the economy changing in New York, one New York never anticipated before. So we see the tech jobs, TV and a lot more and Amazon is at the heart of that. These events are not connected, yet the stage of a larger change becomes apparent, or perhaps I need to say ‘speculatively apparent’. because it is speculation from my side. A stage where Amazon gets to promote their jobs, their positions, their TV, their goods at base pries is an advantage that few ever have and thousands are looking for jobs and that advantage is likely to increase over time. I am merely looking at the pharmaceutical side, the retail side and the job side and there we see Amazon having an advantage thrice over. And as I see it, they are not doing anything wrong. They merely take a versatile set in a post covid era and they are decently ahead of the rest. 

So consider what I write, consider what you think and see where you can prosper, because someone who hires 55,000 tech jobs has a larger plan in place and that is not something you should ignore, especially when Amazon takes that setting on an international level. It gives them a larger advantage over several players who aren’t even close to doing what Amazon is claiming to start over the next 4 weeks.

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August 27, 2021 · 20:55

And the mystery is?


It is one of those ‘I told you so moments’. I am not happy or proud, but the profound sadness that hits me when I see the way it is reported on is just staggering. A few are reporting on it, but the larger stage is likely to be found in places like the Verge soon enough. The people who get it will soon understand that it will be worse and that my 90% of cloud transgressions was no joke. Yet to see part of that nightmare, you need to realise that the Microsoft Azure cloud has been in existence since October 2008, almost 13 years. Now it took the business to grow its customer base. Yet consider that the article at Reuters ‘Microsoft warns thousands of cloud customers of exposed databases’ (at https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-microsoft-warns-thousands-cloud-customers-exposed-databases-emails-2021-08-26/) gives us “A research team at security company Wiz discovered it was able to access keys that control access to databases held by thousands of companies” Now we can only speculate how long that flaw was there, or perhaps that design error. Yet the damage is enormous. With “Microsoft agreed to pay Wiz $40,000 for finding the flaw and reporting it, according to an email it sent to Wiz” we might think it is trivial because it only costed $40,000, but it is not. Thousands of firms with BILLIONS in IP values and other values have been in danger for years, at the most 3 years, yet the article does not really reflect on that (which is not the fault of the BBC or Reuters). And when we are told “We fixed this issue immediately to keep our customers safe and protected. We thank the security researchers for working under coordinated vulnerability disclosure”, I wonder just how bad it is. Now, I get it, it might be fixed but if that was an easy fix, it might equally mean that it could have been easily prevented. 

So when we get to “This is the worst cloud vulnerability you can imagine. It is a long-lasting secret. This is the central database of Azure, and we were able to get access to any customer database that we wanted.” We get to see that Wiz Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak (a former Microsoft employee) now working at Adallom LTD and Wiz. Now we get it bugs happen, yet one would think that proper testing would be done and this bug whilst not proven to be transgressed upon went undetected for no one nows how long until an external group decided to test Microsoft access (optionally on Microsoft orders). So whilst some might think that “Microsoft only told customers whose keys were visible this month, when Wiz was working on the issue” passes the mustard, but it does not, mainly because the length of the transgression enabled time is still unknown, and that is not all. When we consider “The company was breached by the same suspected Russian government hackers that infiltrated SolarWinds”, as well as “a wide number of hackers broke into Exchange email servers while a patch was being developed” with the cherry on top of “A recent fix for a printer flaw that allowed computer takeovers had to be redone repeatedly” a well as “Another Exchange flaw last week prompted an urgent U.S. government warning that customers need to install patches issued months ago because ransomware gangs are now exploiting it”, as such one might speculate that they need to adjust their marketing vision, with the first optional change being “We advertise the most powerful console because the other stuff is buggered” and it seems that Microsoft has all kinds of testing and investigation flaws, that is merely my speculated view, yet for the customers who feel threatened by this, consider looking at Open office (at https://www.openoffice.org), I cannot guarantee it is more secure, but it is free and you are now paying for all the transgressions in a multitude of ways (including an annual fee) so you can at least negate one factor. 

So whilst some feel sorry for that multibillion company and how sad things are, consider that Azure is an issue, especially when you realise “Microsoft and outside security experts have been pushing companies to abandon most of their own infrastructure and rely on the cloud for more security”, when that comes to the surface, we see that Microsoft seemingly embraces ‘sharing is caring’ and with everything people have in that cloud sharing everything with EVERYONE, we might see Microsoft as the most caring behemoth in the universe, but I reckon the customers who pay a pretty penny for that ‘privilege’ will see this differently. But there is light at the end of the tunnel (well not really). Compare the logos of Microsoft and the olympics, now consider that only the black elements (the hackers) were not yet represented, but it seems that Microsoft gave them an internal challenge and so far the hackers are leading three to nil, which is the larger danger. 

And that larger danger is given to us at the very end with “But though cloud attacks are more rare, they can be more devastating when they occur. What’s more, some are never publicised. A federally contracted research lab tracks all known security flaws in software and rates them by severity. But there is no equivalent system for holes in cloud architecture, so many critical vulnerabilities remain undisclosed to users, Luttwak said”. 

So it is here that some might realise that 

  1. Some cloud transgressions are never shown the light of day.
  2. Many critical vulnerabilities remain undisclosed.
  3. (Speculated) The makers might not even be aware of some vulnerabilities.

That is the stage that cloud customers are exposing themselves to and in this, with too many corporations reducing their IT security staff and relying on the security of the cloud, how much is this costing the Fortune 500 who created that erroneous overly simple mindset? It was never a mystery to me, I have written about these kind of dangers since 2017, so if people are just now waking up, good morning and enjoy the coffee you have, you’ll need it.

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August 26, 2021 · 22:12

As credibility moves to the arctic

Yes, today is another day to look at the media BS and in this case the BBC. Now, let’s be clear, in this specific case they are optionally not deceiving you, but they are part of the problem and not part of the solution (as I personally see it). The article ‘Climate change: Consumer ‘confusion’ threatens net zero homes plan’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-58306288) sounds nice but they are painting with one brush, a massively large one and they are tinkering towards what I personally expect to be the needs of stakeholders. 

You see, I gave you a few parts (again) in ‘Ignored by media’ a week ago (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/08/19/ignored-by-media/). That pesky European Environment Agency gave a report a little over 6 months ago that showed us clearly (in their way) that 50% of ALL pollution came from 147 facilities, I even added their graphics. Did any of these media courtesans give us that? Did they clearly oppose it with reasons? No, they did none of that. No, they are giving us “efforts to curb emissions from millions of homes in the UK will be at risk”, so whilst we see the BS arrangement to give us “they need the right information and tools, particularly when it comes to adapting their home. “By getting things right now, the government can give people the confidence to make changes and play their part in getting to net zero.”” Which sounds nice and I get that part, but in all this we see the spending by millions of households whilst 50% of the problem is given to us by 147 facilities, so 147 facilities against millions of households, in addition the media to the largest extent has not now, NOT EVER, dug into that lit of 147 facilities and gave us the lit of 147 players and started their name and shame game (I reckon that involved stakeholders will not allow for that). So whilst the BBC is reporting “offers financial support such as grants, low-cost loans and financing”, and I apologise so pardon my French, so where the fuck is that list of 147 facilities, the amounts of taxation paid by the people behind these 147 facilities and how much non taxable funds they are making? Now, we should understand that these facilities might not (most likely are not) be in the UK or Europe, but in the age of the media giving us ‘the people have a right to know’ I reckon that the people should be allowed that part of the equation too, or not?

So whilst the BBC gives us boldly “Government plans to decarbonise homes are too complicated and confusing, according to a coalition of consumer and industry groups”, why are they not going over that list of 147 facilities and make sure that those facilities are fined so that we all get time and funds to do our side? So when we are given “The carbon generated by home heating amounts to about 20% of all UK emissions”, all whilst we see that several media players are ignoring “50% of ALL pollution comes from 147 facilities” are you not equally wondering why environmental reporters are largely ignoring the EEA report? 

It makes me wonder who Matt McGrath is catering too, do you not agree to this? In all this Matt is not completely wrong with his article, but the setting is not that small, it has not be that small for well over a decade and when we see the links to ‘Climate change: Europe’s extreme rains made more likely by humans’ and ‘Nature crisis: Talks resume on global plan to protect biodiversity’ you might notice something, I did. You see in these two articles the word ‘pollution’ is seen once. It is seen in the second article in the quote “the nations of the world failed to fully meet any of the 20 targets which included protecting coral reefs and tackling pollution”, all this whilst the EEA report does not get mentioned, not once. In a day and age where the headlines are about ‘biodiversity’ and ‘extreme rains’, yet pollution and the 147 facilities are out of range (read out of expected bounds). 

So what alleged stakeholder is making a speculated fortune by allegedly arranging the media not to take a deep and informative look at the EEA report?
Which so called journalist dug into the data the EEA has, where the 147 facilities were and which of the remaining 14178 could get its pollution damage smothered (by a lot)? 

These are questions that are out in the open and yes, that is not up to the BBC to fix, yet the utter silence of that part is up to the BBC and they need to be starting to ask the difficult questions. Yes they cannot give all the answers, but in this stage no one is asking the questions that matter, I will let you figure out which is worse. 

So enjoy the polluted air and remember, Amazon sells gas masks ranging from $30 to $150, be weary you might need one in the near future and if you see the BS people attacking others on their freedom of choice for not wearing a face mask, I wonder how they will react to the choice between gas mask and breathing (no more). That is in the end the second option, if we let the 35% of all stupid people of the population die, pollution and carbon emissions will be reduced as well, the scales of balance will not care and if one solution will not work, the other one remains. Life can at times be that simple.

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July 20, 2021 · 15:29

Powers that were

Consider the stage we are in now and the stage we were in once. We were driven by stories, stories with a centre of truth, but what that truth was, we might never know. Even now as we try to set the new stage to the current state we know about, we are almost desperate to see ourselves better than we are. So what if we go back?

In the age of Ancient times there were the gods, the Greek gods for one. They once made weapons of immense power, Devine weapons. Not because they were simply better to anything we hd then, but because they had an element that is not available now, it never was. The tinkerer (smith) in that company was Hephaestus, he had enough for 5 weapons, 5 choices imbued with that one element making the weapon  hundred times more powerful than anything available at that time. One already existed, the hammer of Hephaestus. It is the weakest of them all, but it already existed. A hammer that can hit any object in exact precision in angle and power. It could also hit another person with the strength of a thousand sledgehammers, it allowed Hephaestus to do what needed to be done. The five weapons were tremendous and Christianity borrowed from these ideas, but they were never theirs and whatever they claimed was nowhere near as powerful. So when we hear speak people about weapons of power, do they know what they mean? The third most powerful weapon is supposed to be the trident of Poseidon, the most powerful one is the bolt of Zeus and the stories seem to collaborate that, but why? Because he is king of the gods? The second most powerful one is the one you might not expect, it is the bident of Hades. Yet why are these weapons so powerful? A man named Erich von Daniken looked into this for years and wrote a massive amount of books on the subject. He started in 1968, I became aware on his books somewhere in the 70’s, in total he sold well over 60 million books spanning over 30 languages. Even as some people (to some degree me too) thinks he goes over the deep end, there is something to be said on this and my book (still writing it) touches on that part. So when the Ancient Greek gods came here (after they made a mess in Persia, now Iran), they had technological advantages, for reasons not that much, but they did. 

They brought the secrets of Celestrium, and more important, they allegedly had access to terahertz radiation devices , a substance we are only now considering to have medical implications. In 2019 Joo-Hiuk Son, Seung Jae Oh, and  Hwayeong Cheon found that ”Terahertz radiation has significant potential in medical diagnosis and treatment because its frequency range corresponds to the characteristic energy of bio molecular motion. Advantageously, terahertz-specific low energy does not cause the ionisation of biomolecules” We can speculate on how healing that source is, but it would seem that. Person in those days could not be hurt by arrows, spears and swords. Yes, this is off the deep end, but we are finally looking at the stories and that is not the only part, the same application on observation and identity safety goes on a much longer road, and we have not even scratched the surface. 

It is George Alexander Gazis who wrote “Homer and the Poetics of Hades”, he gives us Hades as a place of darkness, where even the gods cannot see, and from this he concludes that “Hades remains impenetrable even to the omnipresent Muses”, a point never made in the poem. “In this sense,” he adds, “life and death are equated with seeing and been seen or not seeing and been invisible”; hence, the negative epithets characterising Hades. But this is a common conceptual metaphor, and death is also presented as a journey.” Hades has a landscape as well, and it is shut in by gates, features Gazis does not explore and why would he? Yet now we know that the application of TeraHertz technology would have setbacks, It was not bout the dark, it was about what non-TeraHertz technology would not be able to see at that point, not for 4000 years. 

Is this all speculation? Yes it is, but so are the writings of Homer and Aristotle, we merely accept them as they are old, I wonder what they never considered because no one would in those days, and until recently no one had reason to, yet the clues were always n front of everyone, and I am merely speculating, yet if someone looked at specific maps of what is now Iran, if they were able to look at rock pressures, someone might notice an almost perfect square with sides that were about 3500 metres each side. Did anyone make any connection to the this sizeable amount of pressure and the Ancient Greeks? So what is this about?

As I stated, it is all speculation, but I am taking another gander at the classical writings and the paths no one walked on, because we only now start to get access to the technology that alters the view we now have and that is also a setting we need to have for all new IP, games, movies and TV series. Most of the writings point towards Hades and how he is the weakest of the brothers. Now we see an optional path where he is the loner, the most secretive and optionally right behind Zeus in strength. Does that not alter the perception of a lot of writings? And when we see that some of these speculations do have an acceptable setting of alleged truth, what happens after that? In a factual life we need to get evidence, but the creative IP has a few additional paths at their convenience and they merely need to be original. 

The powers that were can imbue the powers that want to be, they only need to grasp what is readily available out there. 

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July 9, 2021 · 07:30

Greed and Law helping each other

I have written about it before, it is my point of view and my conviction. It is my setting that gives rise to what you could see, and gives rise to what you could know, you already did, but you seemingly decided to ignore it, you decided to enable the greed driven and all parties are smitten by greed, they call it different, yet as I see it, it is mere greed.

How it ends
The end is shown by the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/business-57770557) with “It marks the first step towards the OxyContin painkillers maker paying out $4.3bn (£3.1bn) to settle cases related to the opioid crisis”, it was always about the money. There is an old saying “μυστήριον, Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη, ἡ μήτηρ τῶν πορνῶν καὶ τῶν βδελυγμάτων τῆς γῆς;” The book of revelations 17:5. Did anyone consider it could optionally reflect on Attorney General Letitia James from the state of New York? We might see and take notice of “While no amount of money will ever compensate for the thousands who lost their lives or became addicted to opioids across our state or provide solace to the countless families torn apart by this crisis, these funds will be used to prevent any future devastation”, will it though?

The method
We see ‘OxyContin is one of the most commonly abused prescription drugs’, and we see that it belongs to the Sackler family, the members who own Purdue Pharma, privately held. They are not guilty, yet they are also not innocent, greed drove them towards their billions, yet they are not the demons we all paint them to be, to not be innocent and to be a demon is to be a different cattle of fish and any Attorney General could tell you that, but they have the money and they all wanted the money, the real demon.

Culprits
Yes, there are culprits in this story. You see some sources give us that in 1996 316,000 prescriptions were dispensed, it grew to an impressive amount topping over 14 million prescriptions with an estimated value of $3,000,000,000. The issue we see everyone painting over is ‘prescriptions dispensed’, this is not something that a person can get, it needs a doctor and it needs a pharmacist. The top 5 are Walgreens Company, CVS Health, Walmart, Rite Aid Corp and Krogers company. They own a little over 25,000 stores and around 113,000 pharmacists. There are ere players in the game. Yet how many Oxycontin did they hand out? How many doctors did these prescriptions?
You see, the interesting side is not what we see, but what we saw on TV in 1978, it was an episode of Lou Grant and that episode (season 2 episode 1 “Pills”) shows us the larger station that plays here and THEY gave the people (government also) the goods 20 years earlier. We all want one demon, but there was not one, there were a truckload of them, but the US government cannot fill their pockets there.

Innocence
It is the first fatality in any war, there is no exception and this is not different. The Sackler family is not innocent, but they are not the guilty demons that the media and the flaming screamers claim them to be. It was simple and it was out there. 14,000,000 prescriptions and only doctors can make them. Yes, we see “lawsuits regarding overprescription of addictive pharmaceutical drugs” yet it is given out by doctors and it is handed out by pharmacies. Yet the New Yorker in 2020 gives us “Purdue Pharma played a “special role” in the opioid crisis because the company “was the first to set out, in the nineteen-nineties, to persuade the American medical establishment that strong opioids should be much more widely prescribed—and that physicians’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of such drugs were overblown”, I get that and we should understand that, yet in this (at https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/opioid-manufacturer-purdue-pharma-pleads-guilty-fraud-and-kickback-conspiracies) we also get “Purdue also paid kickbacks to providers to encourage them to prescribe even more of its products”, so who were those providers? Who received these kickbacks? We are not likely to see those are we, we will merely see words like ‘settlement’ and ‘undisclosed parties’, innocence was the first victim to fall, none of the players were innocent. And the government is equally guilty. The NPR (at https://www.npr.org/2020/12/22/949309266/doj-sues-walmart-over-unlawful-distribution-of-controlled-substances) gave us in December 2020 “The Justice Department is suing Walmart. In a civil suit filed today, the Justice Department alleges that the company’s pharmacies and warehouses helped fuel the opioid crisis. Walmart’s pharmacy chain dispensed billions of opioid pills, including OxyContin and other highly addictive medications. And this lawsuit claims that the company broke the law hundreds of thousands of times”, so that took a decade? And when we consider ‘broke the law hundreds of thousands of times’, how come that store is still open? And it is Brian Mann who gives us “according to the DOJ, Walmart did exactly the opposite, filling huge numbers of unsafe and illegal prescriptions, allegedly doing so for years without alerting the government”, and there we have it, the crux of the Lou Grant episode, the evidence that set the caper in motion in 1978, but that is not all, the article also gives us “NPR has been looking into this. And we found that some of the company’s own former pharmacists tried for years to raise the alarm about allegedly illegal activity. Ashwani Sheerin (ph) is a pharmacist who worked for Walmart in rural Michigan. He told NPR he saw real red flags”, not all pharmacists are evil, but we see the stage of revenue pushing, it is greed in action and when we see ‘tried for years to raise the alarm’ we see that the Justice department is not innocent either and the media is not innocent either. A stage where they all love revenue, circulation and ringing the bell loudly was apparently not an option. So whilst we see “had reached an agreement with Purdue that would see its owners, the wealthy Sackler family, pay an additional $50m”, I wonder where Walmart is in this and with them a whole range of pharmacies. Because it was never Walmart alone, not with an annual 14,000,000 prescriptions.

Solution
There might not be one, but us all recognising that Justice reacted well over a decade too late, that is as I personally see it, the FDA dropped the ball, likely more than once, especially as this has been going on for years, optionally well over a decade. And it is Attorney General Letitia James with “prevent any future devastation” who has the ball now, I wonder if she drops it, or hands it over to someone else, as NPR gives us pointing the finger at Walmart, but they are not alone and the records of the FDA are also in question. When I look into ‘Federal Regulations for Clinical Investigators’, I wonder if it helps investigations, or slows them down.
You see Oxycontin is a schedule 8 drug and we get “Doctors must follow state and territory laws when prescribing oxycodone and must notify, or receive approval from, the appropriate health authority”, you see this matters as pharmacies need a doctors prescription, so which doctors were behind the 14,000,000 annual prescriptions? 

So there you have it, I made no claim that the Sackler family was innocent, they are not, but they are not the demons we see them to be, this is a much larger problem and it was left unchecked for well over a decade, or there was at the very least a decade of inaction and too many filled their pockets and yes the Sackler benefitted, but they were not alone, Walmart was part, but there too they were not alone and the doctors who prescribed these pills, what is their price for a prescription? As I personally see it, the law enabled greed to continue for too long, the law and greed enabled each other, and the end is still not in sight, no matter what Attorney General Letitia James and in this she is not alone either, doesn’t San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Philadelphia not have any Attorney Generals? Where were they in the 2000-2021?

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July 7, 2021 · 19:04

Choices by media

We all have them, we all have choices, believes and convictions. The media has them as well and they are entitled to them. I never objected to their choices, I merely want them to have accountability towards their actions. To kick this off, I need to confess. I had difficulties believing Bill Cosby was guilty. I went with what TV fed me, his character, his demeanour and I will admit, I was taken in by all of it. I saw the jokes, I saw the accusations and when we got ‘Bill Cosby released from prison after sex conviction overturned’ my mind went to different locations. I am unsure. Yes, I accept “The court ruled that the prosecutor who brought the case was bound by his predecessor’s agreement not to charge Cosby”, it does not make him innocent, yet why would any prosecutor come with an “agreement not to charge Cosby”? From a legal point of view it strongly implies that the prosecutor had no evidence to begin with. If the evidence was there, that promise would never be voiced by any prosecutor. And this got me thinking on Kevin Spacey. When we see “Kevin Spacey accuser who tried to sue anonymously is dismissed from case” (source: ABC) and we are given “A US judge has dismissed all claims by one of two men suing actor Kevin Spacey over alleged sexual misconduct in the 1980s, after the plaintiff refused to identify himself publicly” that is a voiced 50% loss, 50% went out the window just like that. And that is merely the beginning. The media is now in a much larger stage, a stage of denial and a stage of their big mouths that could land them an 8 figure settlement, optionally 9 figure, but that is a stretch. You see, at the height of the ‘House of Cards’ he was cast out, thrown away and that show was the talk of the town. Now we see the impact of the media and their need for a pound of flesh. So when we consider ABC giving us “The other plaintiff, actor Anthony Rapp, said he was 14 in 1986 when Spacey engaged in an unwanted sexual advance with him during a party at the actor’s home. Spacey, 61, has denied CD’s and Rapp’s sexual misconduct accusations. His lawyers did not immediately respond to requests for comment”. Did it happen?  I do not know, but in legal settings evidence matters, flaming opinions do not. Yet for an issue to wait 20 years until Kevin Spacey has his golden moment sounds off by a lot. And is no one asking what a 14 year old person is doing at a party? There might be a valid reason, there might not be, yet the lack of information in the media makes me wonder. A media that is too much about flaming and too little about informing. So I am not upset with Netflix when we see “Spacey starred in Netflix’s House of Cards before Netflix severed its ties with him after sexual misconduct accusations surfaced in 2017”, Netflix had to protect what was theirs, and there was damage, but in all this the media flamed that damage and when we see “the man known in court papers as “CD” said revealing his identity would cause “sudden unwanted attention” and be “simply too much for him to bear””, I have an issue, this could be a blackmailer hoping to cash in, ‘could be’ being the operative part. More important when we consider ‘10.83 The Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution provides that in all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to be confronted with the witnesses against him’, a simple foundation and when I see “Peter Saghir, a lawyer for CD, declined to comment on Thursday” I wonder what had gotten into Peter Saghir. It is speculative of me to think that the case with just Anthony Rapp was too thin to proceed. Yet the media is not looking at that picture or any picture that has the shown image as a picture in picture. And it is Reuters who gives us “Peter Saghir, a lawyer for C.D. and Rapp, declined to comment on Thursday. He has suggested that C.D. might pursue an appeal if his case were severed from Rapp’s”, so he is willing not to be ‘anonymous’ when Rapp is off the charter? It gives us a larger stage that the Rapp case is thin, optionally too thin. And that is when Kevin Spacey will made the 8 or 9 figure claim, he lost that much and that is the ball game and when the media gets that much of a claim, the game changes, the wolves become crying chihuahua’s trying to hold on as much of that money as possible, in a stage where every penny counts, losing over a billion if not well over ten times that much pennies will make them suffer, and with all the BS I have watched over the last decade, the media could do with a little suffering. 

Some people are all about Bill Cosby and Kevin Spacey, I am on the fence because we are lands of law, evidence is part of that and when the media is all about emotional flames, it tends to be the setting for a lack of evidence. Yes, this is speculative, but in that I have been proven right a lot more often than I was proven wrong. 

So what is next? 
When you see the flamed accusations against Spacey and Cosby, all whilst the media is going with excuse after excuse against Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of dead media mogul Robert Maxwell. It seems that the media seems to be a protective shield for anyone with strong ties to media. So when you see the slams against these two gentlemen and we see ‘SHAMED Ghislaine Maxwell was left “broken” by her “horrendous childhood”’, ‘Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison cell flooding with raw sewage’ and more, yes she is so sad and so broken, but these people cannot afford a ‘$1 million home paid for in cash’, can they? When you have enough money to get a “4,300-square-foot house sits on 156 acres of land, at the top of a half-mile driveway” (source: NBC News), things do not add up. Especially as her daddy forfeited (read: default) on £50,000,000 in loans and went yachting. Yes, poor, poor little Ghislaine. 

Do you see the problem? The media has two measures and none are holding evidence too high and in all this we become the flock that relies on flamed materials, too often devoid of evidence.

So when you see this and we reconsider the hack (Kaseya) and now we add Government Security Info (at https://www.govinfosecurity.com/kaseya-ransomware-attack-this-dramatic-escalation-a-16996), I wonder what is true (I really do wonder) they give us “There’s one big question that hasn’t been answered, says Tom Kellermann, head of cybersecurity strategy at VMware Carbon Black. “Who gave REvil the zero-day?””, yet Fortune dot com gives us “The Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure said it had alerted Kaseya to multiple vulnerabilities in its software that were then used in the attacks, and that it was working with the company on fixes when the ransomware was deployed”. So one side gives us ‘zero-day’ the other gives us ‘multiple vulnerabilities’, as well as ‘it had alerted Kaseya’. Yet no one will give us how long this was known by Kaseya, how long the issue was out there and for how long Kaseya did too little in protecting their customers? The media is on both slots and the lack of voiced investigations are staggering, so when will we get the real deal, the state of matters drowning in facts and evidence? 

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July 6, 2021 · 21:38

Dream number three

I am trying to remember something. Yesterday I came up with short story number three, I dreamt the story and the big lines were done, but now I forgot the dream, only fragments remain. A stage where it is about one thing leading to another, I see the ending but I can no longer see the beginning. It is a shared setting that eludes me, and every time I my mind moves back to the story, it is overwhelmed with other facts. It takes me back to yesterday as I was writing the Kaseya story. The BBC is giving us “Researchers from the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure found the problem and were helping Kaseya plug the hole long before the hackers found it”, yet if we are to believe ‘long before the hackers found it’ I wonder why Kaseya was continuing on the path they were. More important, if that was really true, why was Kaseya not monitoring the situation 24:7? In my case the story is not completed, I am creating it (almost) on the go. Kaseya is seemingly in a stage where they are in denial. First a few, then up to a 1,000 and now, after other sources give us a stage that sets the premise to up to 100,000, some sources give us ‘Between 800 and 1,500 companies potentially affected by Kaseya ransomware attack’, I get it, it is optional a seesaw that is balancing between optionally managing bad news and the speculative media on the other end of the seesaw. Neither side is overly reliable in my personal view. Yet the BBC gives us “the way the cyber-security world has pulled together to reduce the impact of the attack has been incredible”, you see, I have been involved in IT work since 1982, I have never seen competitors pull together, so the story of ‘the cyber-security world has pulled together’ remains debatable. They are all scared, they wanted solutions faster, automated and cheaper, it is like the house where you can choose 2 out of three, now the choice is nil, because the underlying factors are haywire. In this setting, and yes, this is all speculative. We have a solution that is faster/slower, automated/manual and cheap/expensive. They wanted it fast, but that requires matching hardware and software. This is where ‘plugging the hole’ is a problem, as such there was never a cheap solution. Then there was the automated setting, that is the one that they could pull off, but in a stage where there is too little security, and if ‘long before the hackers found it’ is to be believed, I speculate that the need was manual when the wrong parties opted for automated. And in the third we have cheap and expensive. They needed a solution that was cheap, but they needed a lot more expensive elements. This is ALL speculation, but the setting where we see system after system fail, in my personal opinion is all a setting towards shortcuts and that led to the weakness we now see exploited. I personally believe that players like Kaseya are too plenty and when we see ‘the cyber-security world has pulled together’, we see a stage where they all have a seemingly fat meal, they all get to set a field of limitations for all others and that will have long term repercussions. Microsoft, Solarwinds, Kaseya are examples that how us that the hackers are gaining more and more advantage and that is the larger stage. In this setup hell will get one happy resident and it is not the ruler of hell, I will let you consider who I am talking about and it is not a player that is mentioned in this article, neither is REvil, they seemingly found a gap that they exploited hoping to bank $70,000,000 but the stage is out there and the snippet “were helping Kaseya plug the hole long before the hackers found it” is merely a factor, so how long did the plugging take and why was it not successful? The words ‘long before’ should be an indication. So why are we (clearly) seeing several facts and the hack was still successful? The article is (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-57719820) merely one factor, the amount of MSP’s are another and the lack of alarms is a third part. A dangerous setting of cheap, seemingly fast and proclaimed automated systems in a stage where no one was the wiser. Consider a fast automated system without proper alarms and without logs, and that is merely one player using (or claiming to have) cloud solutions. A stage that is no solution (ask COOP in Sweden if you doubt me) and one that hands over cash to organised crime. How much risk are you willing to take with your business?

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