Category Archives: Finance

November 9, 2018 · 12:51

Condoning terrorism

When do we do that? When do we find ourselves in a place where some acts of terror will be allowed and when do we say it is not? You might think that we do not condone it at all. When you think that, you would be wrong. That part is shown in the last few weeks when we look at the news and the bringers of news. In this the first part of the chain is weirdly enough coming from Denmark. It is the one place where the worst acts of torture will be the slicing of the subject with a knife, gut him and cut him, then roast until there is nothing left. Yet the subject was a dead pig and the result if “Æbleflæsk” (or Apple Pork). Yes those Danes do get around with a knife. So when I got treated to ‘Three held in Denmark over interview praising terrorist attack in Iran‘ yesterday, I was a little surprised. The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/nov/07/denmark-arrests-interview-praising-terrorist-attack-iran-asmla) gives us “Denmark has arrested three individuals on suspicion of having praised a terrorist attack in Iran two months ago that killed at least 24 people, including children“, which would be fine, yet when we are also treated to “Despite the fact that they are suspected of having committed crimes, they [the detainees] continue to be protected by extensive security measures because of the threat posed to them“. So it is not merely the fact that they spoke out. It is the underlying “stemmed from an alleged Iranian plot to kill an ASMLA activist. The person was not named“, is that not nice? For those not completely in the loop, the ASMLA (Arab Struggle Movement for the Liberation of Ahvaz) is about the aggressive consideration for a separate Arab state in Khuzestan Province from Iran. Let’s call it a partial independence of sorts. Iran has labelled Al-Ahvaziya a terrorist movement, which with more intelligence sources and data I cannot really comment on. Yet, does that not beat the clock by hours? In all this, Iranian murder Inc. or not, the EU reiterates commitment to the Iranian nuclear deal. Yes, because facilitating to nations that facilitates for terrorism is what Europe in their desperate economic situation really needs. This is all a month after “France had declared that Tehran was behind attempts by a number of Iranians – including a diplomat – to bomb a meeting of the Paris-based opposition group National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) – also known as Mujahedin-e Khalq (MeK)“, I made some mention of this as well in an earlier blog, yet Europe will still want to continue the nuclear deal. Apparently enough is not enough. I get the Danish position. I get it that they cannot condone the situation. The mere ‘suspected of violating the Danish law … on condoning terrorism‘ should be addressed, even as one party is condoning certain acts, the other is acting certain acts and they are still in the clear, which gives the much larger stage where the EU is condoning terrorism. In addition, the Iranian proxy war where they are arming people to fire missiles into Saudi Arabia to hit Saudi civilian targets is for the most not looked at either. So as we see the absence of: “Saudi air defenses on Thursday intercepted a missile fired by Yemen’s Houthi rebel group into the kingdom’s southwestern Jizan region“, they are all eagerly reporting the other direction traffic with “Saudi-Led Coalition Bombs Air Base in Yemen Capital“. They do mention other elements, yet the part “Iran supplied the Houthi militias with missiles that targeted Saudi Arabia” is left out in many western news providers, giving the people an unbalanced view on what is actually happening in Yemen. In addition we see Miguel Miranda (RealClear Defense) giving us: “Since 2016 not a month has gone by without the Houthis in Yemen sending either large diameter rockets or ballistic missiles into the Kingdom, with successful intercepts by Saudi air defences up for debate. Even with a defence budget considered the third largest in the world, Saudi Arabia’s collection of Patriot’s won’t be able to thwart multiple launches at its major cities and energy infrastructure. Worse, Riyadh’s orders for either the S-400 Triumf or the THAAD have yet to arrive.” It has been proven on several occasions that Yemen never had certain missiles and that production of some missiles would have been impossible, with the current status of its neighbours, the remaining party Iran as a Houthi supplier remains and the media seems to be clearly relying on not mentioning that part. The quality sources that both American and Israeli defence gives us, with added documentation from The Brookings Institution, all having high level data at their disposal, but for the European media it is of no matter, it is merely an inconvenient truth, is it not?

The question becomes twofold. In the first, why is Europe not a lot more outspoken on the Iranian actions in all this?

The second question is why certain parties remain pushing for a nuclear deal, whilst there are clear indications that Iran will break the agreements, optionally before the ink of the autograph has dried. There are indications that operations have been thwarted. Actions by Iranian players (too many question to precisely point a finger), yet the actions allegedly stopped included France and Denmark, as well as in Belgium, Austria, Germany and Sweden. So there is an increasing stage of events in place, but the nuclear deal is still being debated. Is it not time to actually do something about Iran? The Swedish part, which is seen with: “Officers from Sweden’s security police agency Säpo have arrested a suspected Iranian spy for planning an assassination on Danish soil”, would have remained invisible if I was not able to read Swedish. Now we do get that Säpo is not very outspoken on the best of days, yet the media remained largely silent, implying more and more that the media is actively downplaying Iranian events to a much larger degree, is that not a little weird?

So even as the local Sweden reports: “Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen also promised “further actions against Iran”“, we have yet to see a much larger action against Iran in answer to the attacks within the national borders of their European ally, I mean, is the EU actually active in protecting its member states or is that all dependant on some nuclear deal? Denmark might be regarded as limited by merely a good cuisine and Bang and Olufsen, yet I am willing to bet that Denmark as well as the other nations has a lot more to offer. So the absence of actual actions against Iran is making less and less sense. If we compare all the western visibility on the actions of Iran versus all the articles that involve Jamal Khashoggi in the last month alone, it seems that the European media is willing to let Iran get away with murder, how weird is that?

When we are condoning acts of terrorism, we need to start looking at why this is happening and the media is becoming part of something rather distasteful. Not the true journalistic parts that keep newspapers afloat as much as they can, but those having a seemingly other agenda and calling themselves a member of non ‘fake news’ groups, those numbers are increasing and it is strange on how the media is not looking at itself in all this.

Now, let’s be fair, they are not their brother’s keepers, so it is debatable where they should stand in all this. Yet, when we are looking beyond a few curves, we get to see more, in this case a technology part. A side where we are notified of: “In testing, some third-party Windows 10 apps like Adobe Photoshop and Notepad++ no longer work as intended when users go to setting to choose either program as the default for .txt files. Windows 10 will instead absurdly ignore a consumer’s app default settings for both programs and open the file in NotePad on its own“, as well as “Microsoft does not document this bug on any list of known issues and also hasn’t yet issued a public response to related reports. The issue is instead believed to be linked to Cumulative Update KB4462919, initially released on October 9. Oddly enough, the Windows 10 October 2018 Update doesn’t appear to be impacted at the moment. It might be wise to temporarily pause updates or roll back and uninstall the problematic cumulative update if you’re in fear of this issue, or if you are already seeing that your file association settings aren’t holding”

You might ask yourself how this relates.

That is a really good question, you see, from my point of view I believe that the filtering is not merely ‘terrorism’, it is economic. The media seems to have an intensified need to not go against the grain of economic needs (Iranian nuclear deal, Microsoft and Apple, you merely have search a little deeper to see the lack of reports in several parts. There is ‘Protesters are detained outside an Apple store in Beijing as they accuse the firm’s Chinese factory of ‘hiring student workers illegally’‘, which is only shown to people via the Daily Mail and the news is 11 hours old, it seems that no one else thought it was newsworthy, The Microsoft story is one that impacts millions of users and they only link I saw was from Digital Trends (at https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/new-windows-10-bug-messing-up-file-associations/), it did have a reference to Reddit who reported 88 upvotes and 47 comments two days ago, yet I see it nowhere else.

This is where I personally see the problem, when the economic footprint is above a certain level, we see that there is a chance that certain players will condone terrorism and blanket consumer impacted issues with large blankets of silence. When we accept a world that has these slipped values, I would be very critical of anyone willing to voice some half-baked story on how wrong it is to be a salesperson in the weapons industry. I reckon that that person is at least willing to take action; we merely hide behind the inactions of others and flag whatever we consider wrong emotionally, it is perhaps the largest failing in all of us. If you wonder whether you should agree or disagree there; this would be a valid consideration mind you. Merely ask yourself, how many actions by Iran you were unaware of and why were you not aware? You could have a very valid reason to not know. Now consider how many Microsoft driven devices you have and were you aware of the delete bug and the latest issue that popped up two days ago? If the answer is no and you have a PC, ask yourself why you were not aware of it, you see it impacts your daily life pretty directly does it not?

Just as the media kept largely silent on the actions of Sony in October 2012, we have been left in the dark too often, and it has everything to do with shareholders, stakeholders and advertisers. This is where you see the impact, it is the economic footprint liked to all this and it impacts us one way or another.

Yet when we start condoning acts that are not merely illegal, how far have we fallen from grace?

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Tagged as Ahvaz, Al-Ahvaziya, America, Apple, ASMLA, Austria, Belgium, Daily Mail, Denmark, Eu, France, Germany, Houthi, Iran, Israel, Khuzestan, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, MEK, Microsoft, Miguel Miranda, Mujahedin-e Khalq, National Council of Resistance of Iran, NCRI, RealClear Defense, reddit, S-400 Triumf, Saudi Arabia, Säpo, Sony, Sweden, THAAD, the local Sweden, Yemen

November 6, 2018 · 11:54

In the back of my mind

Today is not the same as yesterday. Yes, the same issues are playing still. They will remain an issue for some time to come. Whether we look at Yemen, Iran, Grenfell or the Saudi Consulate at Istanbul, the media has decided to make this a long term event. Some events cannot be resolved easy or quickly, that is merely the stage we find ourselves in and as such I accept that. It was this mindset that was awakened rudely by a thought that I have had for the longest of times. Now, this is pure speculation and perhaps it is all utter BS. I accept that, yet it remains in the back of my mind, it will not delete itself from my thoughts and this morning it woke up again as I read the headline ‘Yes, I ‘cheat’ at video games – it’s half the fun‘.

I respectfully disagree, it just ain’t cricket!

Yet the thought has been there for a while. You see, the latest adult generation is different. It partially grew up with that thought. So as we read the article by Stephanie Munro (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/oct/19/cheat-video-games-gaming-performance), we get a little more than we bargained for.

The cornerstone here is: ‘some games are worth a bit of cheating‘, we can agree that this is a thought every gamer has had, but I believe it transcends gaming. I believe that game makers have created the shits that audited Tesco (and devaluated it by billions). The people willing to quickly skate around the edges of Market Research to create a story that fits the bill, yet when we dig into the data, when we consider the weighting used, we see another issue. Some of these stories are more often than not, not worth the paper they were printed on. More importantly, the people mentoring these ‘younglings’ making (as a mere example) are achieving linear correlation by plotting two points. Even as they know that straight-line relationships between two variables can be achieved, they sometimes forget to tell them (implying that the newbie should have known) that it takes more than two observations. Yet a mentoring position is not about assumption. Even as reality is not this far-fetched, we see that there is a stage that counts. TU in Norway is one source giving us the most common example of unethical behaviour. It is: ‘Taking shortcuts / shoddy work‘ and it scored 72%, which is huge! I believe that there is a growing group of people relying on making deadlines and the entire issue is found there. It will almost always be on the new kid, getting advice left right and centre and not getting proper mentoring. Even when we see some parts not being violated, in some cases we see extreme examples of weighing data where weight values of well over 25 are achieved, an issue to be sure (when the population was increasingly small and unbalanced).

And here is where the shoe becomes too tight for comfort. You see behind this is the ‘golden rule’: ‘It’s important to realize that what is unethical may not always be illegal‘, it is a dangerous truth as it can at times be both.

Now this reflects back to the gaming article.

The quote: “I wonder whether cheating at video games is really anything to feel bad about. While downloading unverified cheat programs and exposing yourself to malware is not something to encourage, there are wider and greyer areas of game manipulation that deserve consideration“. There it is! The intentional push to consider cheating! We have all taken shortcuts; some are glitches within the game. Some are merely flaws in game design, the other part is exploiting a gaming bug and then there is God mode. God mode goes back to the beginning of gaming. A code that will set damage received to zero, or perhaps usage is now staged to a decrease of nil and the final part where build time and cost are set to zero. These are all stages that give you an immediate upper hand in the game. The codes tend to be there for testing purposes and were in the older days never removed, in some cases they still are not. Yet when we see the application done in Business Intelligence it becomes a different issue altogether, it has impact and it is too dangerous at present.

When we go back to Tesco in 2014, the Guardian gave us two parts. The first was: “what has already come out raises profound questions about how one of Britain’s biggest companies allowed itself to be run questionably – and about the role of its auditor. The making up of the profits figures was not in a report signed off by PwC. That happened in August – three months after PwC had given the supermarket chain’s figures a clean bill of health. Even then, it noted that there was something potentially funny with the numbers, and expressly warned about “the risk of manipulation” – but allowed them to pass anyway“, and the second one was “The audit is a key part of the scaffolding of shareholder capitalism. It is one of the primary ways in which investors, business partners and regulators can tell the true state of the company they are dealing with. If you can’t trust the audited accounts, you can’t really trust anything. This is why the vast bulk of public limited companies – and hospitals and charities – are legally obliged to submit audited accounts. And the vast bulk of those are done by PwC or one of the other Big Four auditing firms“. Now we get back to the gamer side. The bulk of people now becoming CPA have a gaming life. Whether they stay in the console closet is up to them, yet in a healthy life gaming will be part of it. It is a social interaction or perhaps a challenge to be among peers and see if you can Fortnite the hell out of your buddy and Overwatch him/her to death at the same time, nothing wrong with that. Yet we see more and more that the stage of normal gaming no longer suffices and we start relying on glitches and weaknesses, which is not altogether wrong, but when we knowingly have codes that give us 10% more, what then?

Gamers are actually getting pushed into that frame of mind and the industry as a whole loves it as the person willing to take every legal shortcut is a revenue asset, yet is it a long term solution and what happens when the border of legality was a grey area altogether? Consider the impact of Tesco, the most visible case in the last decade. And that is when we get to the 2017 New York Times (3 years after the event). Here we see: “The regulator said that finding did not suggest that any of Tesco’s directors “knew, or could reasonably be expected to have known, that the information in the August trading statement was false or misleading.” It did note, however, that there was knowledge at a sufficiently high level below the board as to the false and misleading nature of the trading statement to constitute market abuse under British law.” That is now the ball game. The two points ‘could reasonably be expected to have known‘, in opposition of ‘there was knowledge at a sufficiently high level below the board as to the false and misleading nature‘. So someone got a massive raise, someone got an overwhelming promotion and no one went to prison. This is what I would call an orchestrated cheat. When we look at PwC and we see: Tyco, Tesco, Taylor Bean & Whitaker, Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi and MF Global. All stages that are massive and all stages where in the end it is merely about the fine, the pressure for using ‘cheats’ is increasing and it seems that the gaming industry is banking on this. What is more appealing when an almost impossible task is achieved by someone who should not have been able to make it to level 2?

This is where Stephanie gives us the gem: “In the world of competitive sport, the line between a so-called clean win and one in which the performance of an athlete has been chemically enhanced is blurred – but we leave it up to governing bodies to decide what’s acceptable and what’s not. This leads us into the moral quandary of whether something being legal makes it acceptable“.

It is the moral quandary that is the switch, which is no longer an on and off switch, but a level that goes from 100 to zero. A lever that is pushed again and again a staged setting with online and single player achievements where we learn to do what it takes to get all the achievements, yet to keep a much more high profile stage to make us seemingly clean players.

So when we see a Battlefield example: “John is on the extreme end of a spectrum, because his tactics are so lethal, so outside of what the game’s creators intended, so far beyond what rival players can defend against and, oh yeah, he paid some hackers to have them. John pays to be able to kill your character instantly in Battlefield. He’s surely crossed some line, though it’s anyone’s guess just where that line must be” (source: Kotaku), we see the issue that is the stage on all this. This now directly reflects Apple and their mobile battery game. a conviction with a 10 million euro fine, whilst the payout makes crime a joke. The article (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/10/25/crime-as-a-business-model/) where in ‘Crime as a business model‘ we see: “Apple required the sale of 16,000 phones just to break even on that fine“, against “the means to sell 123 million iPhones through what the court is seen as deceptive conduct gets a fine that amounts to 16,000 units. A fine received that represents a mere 0.013% of their cost of doing business” and we see not only the progression of what should be regarded as unethical conduct, governments are actually encouraging it by giving fines that were a joke on a scale that is a mere 1% of what was done here.

So whilst we see: “For some of us, the idea of using a walkthrough is anathema, to others it is a means of bringing us back to a point where we can have fun. I’ll admit that I never completed the Ocarina of Time. It was too hard and I got bored. I’m sorry, Princess Zelda, I abandoned you“, we ignore that Ocarina of time is one of the best designed and most overwhelming puzzle journeys ever seen (I never got to 100%), the exclusivity of getting there is merely brushed on and the cheaters are given a pass. That is actually beyond the point where those with a gaming guide are not really cheaters, they merely walk the journey to get to the 100%. Apart from Ocarina of Time, there is Metroid Prime. A game I worshipped almost forever, I ended up only getting 98%, which is an achievement I was proud of (I never found all the missiles). And I played it a few times, loving that journey again and again. Yet the BI industry is merely hiring those with a 100% score and they had no interest how the player got there and that is actually the sad and worrying part in all this. Wall Street does not care how the revenue was achieved as long as it is and that is a much more dangerous setting in the upcoming future. To get the required numbers some analyst proclaimed no matter what. And when it is revealed in some scandal and the media is all over it, it is the mere ‘could reasonably not have been expected to have known‘ is what keeps the board members out of their well-deserved Rikers Island excursion (3-5 years). This sad evolution is not merely the creation of another Star Chamber, an old reference to a tribunal abolished in 1641, where we saw the king in council exercising criminal jurisdiction. It was inquisitorial, and torture is believed to have been used, with no accountability in any way shape or form. It is an upgraded system, evolved from those settings that allows corporations to do whatever they need to appease Wall Street and other financial centers, to exceed analyst expectations, whilst we see that these findings are increasingly becoming more and more unrealistic because that is what the market needs.

In all this holding these analysts and their formula’s up to scrutiny and accountability in the long run will not happen, making the need for these players to find the people who are willing, not to bend the rules, but to cheat their way across, increasingly more and more important to corporations and as such, the danger is that we get into a world where cheating is not half the fun, it is merely the only way to keep ahead of the curve and avoid being classified as no longer relevant.

When did we sign up for those values in our lives?

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Tagged as Apple, audit, Bank of Tokyo - Mitsubishi, cheaters, Cheating, Fortnite, gaming, Kotaku, Market research, Metroid Prime, MF Global, Norway, NUJ, Overwatch, PwC, Stephanie Munro, Taylor Bean & Whitaker, Tesco, the Guardian, Tyco, Wall Street

November 5, 2018 · 13:33

Ding ding goes the alarm clock

The Guardian is waking us up. I was already awake as I have mentioned this danger close to two years ago; actually I gave rise to the risk even before anyone had heard of Cambridge Analytica. As we see the quote: “The government is launching an inquiry into the use of personal data to set individual prices for holidays, cars and household goods, amid rising fears of a consumer rip-off” from the article (at https://www.theguardian.com/money/2018/nov/04/inquiry-personal-data-dynamic-pricing-consumer-fairness). You see, the issue is a lot larger and people are just not waking up to this danger. They all think that it isn’t really an issue, or that it will not hit them. Well, think again, it is already hitting you and the field of impact is growing on a nearly daily basis.

Setting the stage

The quote goes way beyond “Philip Hammond, has asked a panel of experts led by Jason Furman, a former adviser to Barack Obama, to examine competition in the digital economy, including how machine learning and algorithms are used to set prices and whether firms could gang up to disadvantage consumers“. You see, the large issues are actually the ones that are known in advance. World Business Forum, Forbes Women’s Summit, B2B Marketing Forum, E3, ComiCon, Call Center Week and so on. Some of these places are not merely known in advance, some will go to known places like Viva Las Vegas, so the impact is not as large as one would think, although an additional 2500 hotel rooms is still an impact. No, it is the other stuff, the IP World Summit – Amsterdam, the London Law Expo 2018. Niche markets where we think that it is merely a business venture and the expenses will not be noticed, that is where the coin is found and the impact and influence is felt over a larger group.

Even as it is currently states as ‘could’, the quote “when you think about posting to Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, you probably don’t consider how it could affect your insurance. The truth is, social media could very well become a standard part of the insurance underwriting process in the not too distant future“, I personally believe that it is already impacting people. The example in the US Insurance agent is: ‘Taking pictures while driving and uploading them to social media could result in having your policy non-renewed based on the implication that you are a distracted driver‘, Yet in Ireland alone we see ‘14,000 drivers caught on their phones in 2017 – and some were posing for selfies‘. Now consider that you must comply with: “If you received a fixed penalty notice for a road traffic offence, you will need to disclose this to motor insurance providers for five years if you were 18 or over at the time“, at this point your premium goes up by a fair bit, it is something that can often be checked and even those not convicted can be hit with an increase, you have become a risk. In addition, tat lovely new phone you have is also the issue as ‘Why social media posts could invalidate your home insurance‘. Here it is not merely what you do, but where you were. So as we see: “Insurers are increasingly rejecting claims made by customers whose houses have been burgled while on holiday if they have shared the fact that they are away from home on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram“. Yet, this is the small stuff. Life insurances are seen harsher. Insurance companies are getting more and more savvy in analysing photos online. You see, that one cigarette, or even a cigar to celebrate a birth has impact. The policy is: ‘if you smoke at all, you are considered a smoker and your rates will be higher‘, it gets to be worse. If you claimed that you were a non-smoker and the insurance company can find two pics of you smoking, you could be regarded as fraudulent and it nullifies your life insurance, so as you get planted six foot deep at some grassy field, whomever you left behind ends up not getting a penny. Decades of premiums paid down the drain. This is the direct and clear stuff, yet in that stage, we see the impact of fees, premiums and algorithms. The story takes a deep turn for the worse there.

The real and the not so real stage

Consider that every convention is online, every events is documented. Instead of the airlines setting the stage of the need for an additional plane in advance, they do that and increase the price of the fee. We might think that it is normal when we see: “The average cost of a flight out of the UK to all destinations between the 16th and 31st of December is 12 per cent higher on the big day itself“, yet if you knew this a year in advance, the increase is a little less normal, even as we understand that the bulk wants to get there on that day, now consider that this is applied to a stage where it is not thousands, but hundreds more and the issue is not Christmas, but an event in New Jersey, or a convention in Budapest. Yet, this is still merely the top of the iceberg. What if it is not a flight, but an item you desperately need to buy online? Not some Ubermeal, but the version of ‘John Lewis to launch £10,000 ‘private shopping’ service‘, a service where you always pay premium. Now, we might not care as these people are wealthy and they will not mind paying a few extra £’s on the dollar. Yet, that model will also impact the general population, it’s merely the stage as something becomes a ‘phase’ we all want it, most people tend to be sheep, and there is a loaded part here. Is it wrong for a place like John Lewis to maximise on their stock? It is merely ‘whether firms could gang up to disadvantage consumers‘, is that still the case? The point is that this is becoming a grey area. Even as we see the customer care part of: ‘another new service is called the Shopping List, under which a member of John Lewis’s team can be booked free of charge to gather either a specific basket of items or to help pick out gifts for specific people‘. The data behind it can become much more lucrative. Even as we see the battering that many of these stores have taken, and we are notified (again) of ‘It has also spent millions of pounds on improving its home delivery infrastructure and IT systems to cater to demand for online shopping‘. That data can prove to be invaluable setting the next stage in all this and the question is not merely what the watchdog is saying it is, but the underlying part becomes, if this is about staying afloat, about maximising the revenue, is there a case of ‘disadvantage consumers‘, or are we seeing the data impact of optional fraudulent claims of healthcare benefits whilst the subscriber was not completely honest on the application form. Even as I agree that the people need to wake up, even as I have stated that the people are in a vice, part of it is done to themselves. Now, I am less inclined to stand on the side of the insurance on the burgled house whilst doing the dance party 24:7 on Ibiza. It was not the person; it was the burglar in all this that is at fault. Yet the opposite that ‘telling’ a person that a house is safe and unguarded is still a dangerous step and even as we are so shareable in some ways, we need to see that this data is now a hazard to the quality of our lives. The question is more ‘what should you never do‘ and not ‘did you set yourself up to be the disadvantaged consumer?‘ We all know that Christmas presents are the best bought two days after Christmas, so even as we know that the price is higher on December 24^th; can we blame the seller for charging 110% 21-24 December, knowing he will try to sell it as 65% on December 27-30? We forget on the stage that we set ourselves. On a rainy day an umbrella might optionally be £1 more expensive, yet is this data we are looking at, or can we claim that we know that we are knowingly selling to aquaphobes that day? The second is a clear stage of ‘disadvantage consumers‘. This stage is moving as dashboards can be changed in every way. You see if the answer does not match, you merely change the question which is politics 101. Data is actually almost the same, it is not on the results; it is now the population that makes the result. It is the grasp of an Old Dutch joke: “We see the impact where mothers are no longer working in families with 2.4 children“, so basically a pregnant woman with 2 children is unlikely seek employment, or to be employed; it is the same yet presented completely different. And when you consider the stage (the 70’s) is behind that, we see that this stage has merely matured in both the application of the spoken word, as well as the stage of presented facts. If we see that a number is, or that a factor applies, we automatically assume certain stages. As it is about a gender, or a location, yet it is still a weighted part, a presented population (the people that were part of the equation) and this field is growing exponentially. Consider that Google is adding close to a million facts every hour (highly speculative), this ensures not merely what is known about a person; it also makes its advertisement drive more efficient. Google’s non advertisement share grew by 14% in the last year. The other side, its advertising accounted for a total of 111 billion U.S. dollars. To make this grow, data granularity becomes increasingly important and even as Google does not allow individual access to data, the fact that some facts can be found, means that more and more will be known about everyone and a lot of it through our own actions. Selfies, Geo-tagging, and other parts are making identification and classification happen in all this. Even as we push forward in one direction, we give it away in another. It does not matter whether we move in Google Ads, or push towards Amazon Ads. We give away our details and we think that what one sees, none of the others see it, it is that part that is the folly, whatever we share online is almost instantly known to everyone and machine learning is merely making the exchange (read: collecting) of our details more efficient.

How we get charged

Yes the alarm clock needs to go ding dong, preferably at 100db so that you actually wake up. Even as it was a little over 6 months ago, Miles Brignall gave us: “Next time your car insurance renewal comes through, don’t fall into the trap of describing yourself as unemployed if, for example, you are retired, a student or a housewife/house husband. If you do, you could end up paying 50% more“, a comparison where they merely changed recorded occupation, now consider how up to date your LinkedIn account is. Do you still think that it will not matter your case? When you are confronted with: “MoneySuperMarket says students and retired people who mistakenly describe themselves as “unemployed” have the most to lose – potentially up to £700 a year in the worst cases. Retirees who do the same may have to cough up an additional 37%, it found.” Now we see the danger, this is not maximised ‘retail effort’ this is clearly a stage of ‘disadvantage consumers‘ and it came from an optional direction we never considered, because if LinkedIn is the one place where we can get a new job, how dangerous should their system be regarded when our cost of living could be hit by an additional 50%? And this is not via Hacked Data, this is you the optional consumer and in need of services being as visible as possible, a part you never expected is now affecting you in other ways too.

I have always believed that LinkedIn is a massive force for good, yet others have found an alternative use of that and with hundreds of thousands facing an optional £250 a year extra; we now have merely one side that starts amounting to some serious cash. So when you tell me who ignores such serious levels of cash, I will at that point introduce you to a liar. It is that simple in this day and age, machine learning is merely changing the threshold of you paying extra. It is a great benefit, but in some hands it will be their revenue benefit, and takes your cost of living through the roof.

Yet the question for me remains that even as I believe such a watchdog to be essential, there is a question on how effective they will be at the end of the day, because when the conversation degrades to a ‘he claimed‘, whilst ‘he gave in writing‘ against ‘he posted freely online‘, to the opposition trying to make a ‘disadvantage consumers‘ case, we will end up seeing a case that is unlikely to ever be won.

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November 3, 2018 · 11:41

Media, call it as it is!

I saw the news yesterday and I initially decided to ignore it. It was not really ‘news’ news if you know what I mean. It is sad, it is not a surprise and it was always going to happen. The dice were rolled and the children in Yemen rolled two ones. Some call it snake eyes, but the impact is severe, you automatically lose with that roll and that was the state of things from the very beginning. We start with CNN (at https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/02/middleeast/yemen-famine-amal-hussain-intl/index.html). We see the direct truth with “The three-year conflict between the US-backed Saudi-led coalition and the Iranian-aligned Houthis has devastated Yemen and reportedly has killed at least 10,000 people“. CNN does not mention that Saudi Arabia got involved when the deposed elected president called for help, no we do not get that. We get “the international furor over the brutal killing of journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul“. We get no information that Iran and Hezbollah have directly intervened in making Humanitarian aid utterly impossible there. One Quote gives us: “Yemen’s information minister called on the Lebanese government to stop Hezbollah supporting Houthi rebels, insisting the group’s activity will prolong Yemen’s war. On Sunday, Moammar Eryani said Hezbollah was providing the Houthis with logistical and military assistance, turning Beirut’s southern suburbs — known collectively as Dahiyah — into a centre for media attacks against the Arab-led coalition“, in this CNN decided not to go there. We also get Yemen’s Deputy Permanent Representative to the UN Marwan Ali Noman giving us: “the Yemeni suffering is caused by the Houthi militias, which are executing the agenda of Iran and the Lebanese Hezbollah party in the region. He added that the militias practiced all kinds of murder, torture and forced displacement in all Yemeni cities that they invade“. CNN had no issue using the Khashoggi incident to present an anti-Saudi Arabia view, but fell silent on the actual issues in Yemen, yes: ‘That was CNN!‘

The New York Times gives us (at https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/01/world/middleeast/yemen-starvation-amal-hussain.html), and after that blazingly stages “The devastating war in Yemen has gotten more attention recently as outrage over the killing of a Saudi dissident in Istanbul has turned a spotlight on Saudi actions elsewhere“, yet it merely gives one mention of Iran in: “Saudi officials have defended their actions, citing rockets fired across their border by the Houthis, an armed group professing Zaidi Islam, an offshoot of Shiism, that Saudi Arabia, a Sunni monarchy, views as a proxy for its regional rival, Iran“, and in all this we see ZERO mention of Hezbollah, is that not strange? Neither is the part where the Firing of missiles is a direct result of Hezbollah and Houthi forces firing missiles into Saudi Arabia towards civilian targets. One source giving us that as per yesterday over 200 missiles have been fired into Saudi Arabia. Would you not think that this element is equally important? Let’s be honest it all started with the death of a toddler, but that was not what it was really about for the New York Times, was it? Yet they do give us “THE SAUDI COALITION IS NOT solely to blame for Yemen’s food crisis“, yet goes a little short in pointing on where blame, a much larger blame lies. It lies with Hezbollah, the tool and puppet of Iran provoking Saudi Arabia as much as possible.

The New York Times also gives us: “Tensions reached a climax this summer when the head of the United Nations migration agency was forced to leave Sana after clashing with the Houthi administration. In an interview, the Houthi vice foreign minister, Hussain al-Ezzi, denied reports of corruption, and insisted that tensions with the United Nations had been resolved“, it is a stage where Houthi officials are now enriched. It is a stage where we see that halting towards humanitarian aid and preventing the other 20,000 children from dying too. In this we see one additional quote that is identical in nearly all the newspapers I saw: “In an interview, the Houthi vice foreign minister, Hussain al-Ezzi, denied reports of corruption and insisted that tensions with the United Nations had been resolved“. My question becomes, was it an interview or was it merely a presentation by Hussain al-Ezzi finding a moment to state: ‘I’m not a crook!‘, which he probably learned form an American, namely former president Richard Nixon to be more precise.

The part that most publications are not giving us is that the death toll of children is roughly 130 children per day, in 2017 50,000 children died (Source: Al Jazeera).

The setting is not a nice one, on neither side. The Saudi Coalition includes Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Sudan and Senegal. Al Jazeera also gives us: “Iran has denied arming the Houthi rebels, but the US military said it intercepted arms shipments from Iran to Yemen this March, claiming it was the third time in two months that this had occurred. Iranian officials have also suggested they may send military advisers to support the Houthis“, yet we have seen an utter lack of larger political activities by many nations other than the USA against Iran and Hezbollah, exactly how does that add up?

I particularly liked the quote “Commentators in the Arab Gulf States often claim that Iran now controls four Arab capitals: Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Sanaa“. I like it because it is the first part that gives the light of Iran, of what Iran is trying to achieve. The stage is not merely Hezbollah; it is not merely Turkey who has skin in that game too. It is the stage where we see the foundation of what Iran would call a holy war in defence of their sites. We are informed via “For the last six months the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) has begun using waters further up the Gulf between Kuwait and Iran as it looks for new ways to beat an embargo on arms shipments to fellow Shi’ites in the Houthi movement, Western and Iranian sources say” and most of the western media is not even trying to look into these parts, it is actively avoiding any coverage on Iran. From that side we do get “The European Union is trying to preserve a version of the nuclear deal, but the recent incidents in Denmark and France have heightened the tensions.” In this it seems that Denmark is the strongest pusher against the Iranian actions, with the aid of France. We are all treated to the arrest event that was about a failed operation to bomb a June rally organised by Paris-based Iranian opposition group the National Council of Resistance of Iran, also known as the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), it is a stage of oppositions are to be killed, no negativity on Iran in Europe. This stage is now labelled by Iran as: “Iranian officials view the claims as designed to derail Europe’s efforts to salvage the JCPOA, particularly the planned European economic package for Iran“, the partial impact for now is that the Nordic parties who were initially extremely in favour of sustaining the JCPOA, are now less likely to fully support it.

What happened to the girl?

Well, the question is who cares? The girl is dead now! A photographer got his Pulitzer price, humanitarian aid in Yemen is a joke and the players behind the screen are all playing their own game. On both the Saudi and Iranian side there has been too little on humanitarian aid and that part must be clearly shown. Even as Saudi Arabia is much more on the defensive side of what they do, the clear staging where the work of Iran and Hezbollah is ignored by the media justifies the current position that Saudi Arabia is taking up. In all this the UN has blood on its hands too, even as it is through inactions. That part we get from the Irish Times (at https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/middle-east/saudi-arabia-s-war-in-yemen-yields-hunger-and-devastation-1.3681488). They give us: “Only two famines have been officially declared by the United Nations in the past 20 years, in Somalia and South Sudan. An UN-led assessment due in mid-November will determine how close Yemen is to becoming the third“. Yet the Independent and a few other papers gave us almost a year ago: “More than 50,000 children expected to die of starvation and disease by end of year“. So I would think that the threshold for famine had been long passed. Would you not agree?

Save the Children gave us a little more a year ago, they also gave us: “an estimated 400,000 children will need treatment for acute malnutrition this year, the charity said“, at what point did it require an additional fifty weeks to get the label ‘famine’ attached?

Yemen, once the poorest country in the Middle East is about to become an extinct one. It happened as some nations were overactive in that region and the others are guilty through total inaction on almost every level. So even as we might feel for the title ‘Starving girl who became symbol of Yemen crisis dies‘, we should not be allowed to do so, our inactions give us that. And as the news staging goes on with Al Jazeera giving us: ‘US calls for the end to the Saudi-backed war in Yemen‘, we see again that the absence of Iran and Hezbollah in that equation might give the Saudi coalition additional fuel to continue. It might have been different if 100% of all support to Lebanon would have been halted until all Hezbollah troops have left Yemen, but Europe is not willing to go that far, are they? There are plenty of sanctions on Iran and I am not sure what else could be achieved there, yet barring Lebanon from EVERY negotiation table until Hezbollah is no longer in Yemen has not been attempted has it? It would force Iran to either engage of step back. In the second case the Yemen situation would be quickly resolved in the first case we would have a clear theatre of war with Iran, a war we might desperate need. Not for the fun of it, but until the hurt can be brought to Iran, they will continue their proxy war until they get lucky. Statistically speaking that will happen and the consequence of that will be a lot worse and it could have been prevented if the inactive players would have acted when there was a chance to limit the damage, for that it is far too late and the death on one 7 year old girl is merely the start for an optional 300,000 children to die within the next 30 weeks. Now you tell me, when we get to the 1^st of June 2019 and you wake up to the statistics that in Yemen 453,261 children will have died at that point from starvation and disease, how happy will you feel? Will you have that Coffee with an Éclair? Will you have the steak or the fish that evening, optionally with grape juice? I cannot blame you for not caring, but I can point you out on the hypocrisy you let happen, the stage you allowed for and the media giving us half a story again and again is equally guilty in all this.

It is not merely an imperfect world. This world is descending from bad to worse at the same speed that is currently killing the children in Yemen. I think that we can soon state that we stopped being humanitarians in 2019, so feel free to box that thought wrap it in shiny paper with a bow and place it under the Christmas tree. Ignore that package and watch another version of a Christmas carol on TV whilst you deceive yourself that you are such a better person than Ebeneezer Scrooge.

Bah! Humbug!

P.S. Yet should you genuinely care (and you could optionally suffer to lose a few coins) then click on the link below and make a donation to Save the Children by pressing the donate button. You might just be the hero of the day and safe a life that way.

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October 30, 2018 · 13:08

The stagnant life

What do you do when your life stagnates? What do you do when the next step is a smaller iteration of the previous one and the one that is coming is even less than that? Have you considered this part? It all started in the Guardian, which was soon transplanted to the Verge. Vlad Savov gave the notion with ‘What was good is still good; what was missing is still missing‘, it is about the OnePlus 6T mobile phone. Yet for the same setting it could have been our life, it could have been our career and it could have been our future. It is more of the same, yet for us it is interesting as it is cheaper, and as the Verge gives us: “starts at $549 for a sizable 128GB of storage and 6GB of RAM“, we see that it is affordable. Yet when we look deeper, what do we get?

The good gives us: ‘Strong battery life‘, which is actually important in this day and age. Yet the other side is: ‘Camera remains mediocre, lacks wireless charging, still not fully, waterproof, quiet loudspeaker‘. In this the two I care about is the camera and the quiet loudspeaker. The camera is handy to have and here we see the first part. We get a Rear camera: 16 MP + 20 MP, whilst the front camera is 16MP, which is a lot more than my three year old Huawei P7. In addition a few sources give us: “the OnePlus 6 starts at just £469 for the 64GB / 6GB model, which makes it significantly cheaper than the £869 starting price for the Pixel 3 XL“, is it about the money? For many it is. It is the loudspeaker that inhibits the phone when we see: “the loudspeaker, which sounds very nice on this phone, but is woefully inadequate in terms of volume. Even at max volume, it’s only really useful in a quiet environment“. It is an inhibitor as I have missed calls in the past because I did not hear it ring.

How does a phone set a stagnant life?

You see, the second part is seen when we see the new iPad pro and it has no ‘Home’ button. Is that what we have progressed to, a massive marketing target and the fact that we ‘wow’ the home buttons demise? So as the Guardian gave us: ‘The long-rumoured iPad Pro redesign will be the first significant change to Apple’s iOS-based tablet since the release of the 12.9in iPad Pro in 2015‘, we see the issue. That is the great progress since 2015? No home button? How stagnant are we, and how stagnant has our technology become?

For example, in 2003 I saw the first virtual keyboard. It was projection technology (see image). I saw the impact it could have, to instantly switch between Roman, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Hiragana, Katakana, perhaps even Kanji and Arabic, a true push forward for all notebooks, netbooks, laptops and even tablets. More important was the fact that it took away key logging as intrusion to a much larger extent and in addition to that, a person could start working in a truly international sphere, as well as the fact that pretty much any flat surface would do, so no keyboards to mess with. It was true innovation. So when the first iPad was launched and it had the ‘keyboard’ on screen, it was progress, as it came at the expense of the screen, which was not great, yet much better than we ever had before and now I had direct access to all the Scandinavian characters which was awesome. So in 15 years, we see Apple give us ‘no home button‘, how weird is that? And the virtual keyboard need is more of a reality; the batteries are a lot better than we had them in 2003, 15 years of battery development to work with. The laser would have been a lot better, but Apple has not gone that mile forward as an accessory (even as the smart keyboard for the iPad pro is sweet), you are restricted to ONE keyboard at that point. The union of the smart keyboard and virtual keyboard could have been so much more and in 15 years they never got there?

Is this iterative technology holding us back? Is this a lack of vision, or is it merely the need to exploit the people one keyboard per purchase? If this simple innovation is withheld, how much more are we not getting? I can state that question as the technology has been there for 15 years and I know that there are innovative people out there, brighter than me. So why is Apple trailing that curve and not heading it?

Even as I initially designed what would have been the iTome (or optionally the Google Tome) and we see no plans or patents in any stage where that solution (which could solve many NHS issues) is planned, will we need Huawei to solve it for us and when they do will the USA bitch like a little girl whilst not providing any level of evidence? So whilst we get exposed to another wave of anti-Huawei, in this case by Australian Signals’ Directorate chief Mike Burgess, and when we are given “a potential security threat anywhere in the network would threaten the entire system“, yet no evidence was added to this. So when I see: ‘Fairfax Media and the ABC reported on Tuesday‘, it personally merely reads along the lines of one working the shaft and the other one was it tickling the balls of Telstra (a slightly less diplomatic view on all this). The more irritating part is that we have seen this circus go on for months now and still no evidence was ever given, clear evidence of that risk. More important, the risk by some other players (Apple) was shown as they decreased the battery efficiency of the mobile phone. Apple got a €10 million fine and had an annual revenue of one hundred and twenty seven billion. How flaccid should we consider these governmental player fucks to be (pardon my French here)?

It is even more fun to contemplate when we take Business Insider a mere 3 hours ago (at https://www.businessinsider.com.au/top-spy-explains-huawei-ban-2018-10) and we consider the following: ‘Australia’s super-secretive communications spy agency has explained why Huawei is seen as an infrastructure risk’ (actually the ASD is at Russell Dr, Russell ACT 2600. Source: Google search). So now we get the quote, and it is a good one: “One of Australia’s top spies said the electricity grid, water supplies and other critical infrastructure could not have been adequately protected if China’s Huawei or ZTE were allowed to build the country’s new 5G mobile networks“. This is a realistic setting and it is the job of the ASD to look at this. Yet the same risk would have been there with an American or even a Scandinavian system (Ericsson), even in 5G there would have been all kinds of layers and intrusion is a realistic fact in 4G and it should similarly be so in 5G. That is why you hire the proper experts to set a secure stage. So now we get to: “His warning coincided with a new report from The Australian Strategic Policy Institute, which revealed Australian universities were collaborating with Chinese military scientists at unprecedented levels and failing to mitigate national security risks“, so where is the evidence of that? We see that the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is ‘overly’ advertised as independent. From my personal point of view, as I have seen some networking events. People like Michael Shoebridge and Peter Jennings would have ties with Telstra that are way too strong (merely the impact of networking). So is there a chance that they are driving Telstra opportunities? I have NO evidence of that, and I am not stating that this is happening, yet in that same regard I have seen NO evidence that Huawei is an actual risk, which is what others are stating; is that not the driving part here? Now we need to also consider the second part of Mr Burgess. He was also quoted: “Mr Burgess did not specifically mention Huawei or ZTE, but said it was no longer sufficient to confine “high-risk vendors” to the edges of a telecommunications network“. OK that is fair enough, yet I have an issue with ‘high-risk vendors‘. Not because of the vendor part, but the ‘high-risk’ setting. When exactly is a risk a high risk and is that a systemic situation, or is the lack of knowledge, a knowledge that was not pursued in time, as the foundation of evolution from risk to become ‘high-risks’?

I started to evangelise the need for true non-repudiation 5 years ago, I was confronted with the need 7 years ago and we are nowhere near that today. As the designers and greed chasers were all about facilitating for greed and maximised revenue, we saw the fall of reliability and security on a global level. Windows 10, Sony, Facebook are all events that show this. I see a lack of proper testing; a lack of proper assessing; an insatiable need to quickly patch so that revenue remains up. None of it was done with the need of protecting the consumer, merely to facilitate corporate greed.

So whilst that article ends with: “Fairfax Media is investigating cyber hacking incidents in corporate Australia. Tip off our team confidentially via this secure online system“, we are confronted with two parts, the first is that Fairfax is not the greatest channel to get stuff looked at, whoever does this could be prosecuted as a whistle-blower and more importantly that a lot of these issues would not have existed with proper non-repudiation in the first place. So whilst there is no true evidence that China is the bad individual here and that Huawei is not the great technological evil, we must not remain absent from proper scrutiny and that would have been fine, if there was only true scrutiny brought to the media and that has not been done. When you consider that part you should also give another consideration to: “a potential threat anywhere in the network will be a threat to the whole network“, exactly how badly designed does a network need to be when we see: “a threat to the whole network“? How have corporations failed us when they have not properly instigated protection layers? And in that trend how flawed is authentication technology at present that this could happen to a governmental debilitating degree?

And it is not just Australia, with the lack of evidence in any direction; the US has been pushing for this in the UK, Australia and Canada. Merely an hour ago TechAU is giving a similar view with ‘still provides no evidence‘. There will be a point when not only will we see the demand for evidence, we will demand harsh consequences who force the people in much higher expenditure impacting their quality of life. When that happens, the tidal wave of complaints will be enough to topple any government.

In our lives we need to take leaps forward, no longer relaying on iterative solutions. If we want true new innovation that is the only path that will make sense and in all that, the old farts in 4G trying to keep their fat income in a 5G environment better get with the program faster. There is enough indication that the people are getting fed up with certain settings and the numbers given merely a day ago: “Telstra had a 7.7 per cent increase in complaints” give rise to a lot more nagging by millions soon enough. Some might think that it no longer makes sense to complain. However there is always the option to switch providers and even as most are equally unworthy of our coins, some do stand out and as some are giving us: “With a three year total loss of 31%, Telstra Corporation Limited would certainly have some dissatisfied shareholders“. For me it is different, I actually do not give a hoot about the shareholders (never did, never will). Telstra can only head this up by advancing now through frog leaped technology, to get ahead of the curve, not to follow it when it is economically terrific. It is a path that is over and done with. Huawei and Google are showing that this path will not work in the long run and the consumer will merely be reflecting this as they have to pay for an outdated solution that merely has one less button and perhaps a jack taken out of the equation. We want to see true progress where we can do what we need to do anything I need to do.

You see in 5G it will not be ‘whenever we want it‘, it will be about ‘where ever we are, whenever we ask‘, it is not the same setting and the telecom providers are just not ready. It is exactly that setting that I saw in the Neom plans of Saudi Arabia where I saw the option of solution being addressed. The new stage where we see change; not one that becomes an option to one person but a change giving availability for all. A mere information stage that might seem to start with the information pylon, it goes beyond that, these things can be seen by buildings, in elevators and on the road, a mere place where we can immediately be updated or request to be updated, on the go and on the fly (literally so) and in all that governments are not ready, they left it to people who maximised on their profits with no intent of investing, a stage now coming to fruition as Google and Huawei leaped forward (OK, Samsung too). The rest is merely staging progress through marketing like ‘the most powerful console in the world‘ whilst one game (Red Dead Redemption II) requires close to 12% of the entire console storage, merely one game! That is merely one facet of the short-sightedness that we face today and 5G will bring these issues to the surface on a much larger scale. Not on the phone, but on the total infrastructure and it gets to be worse. You see, in 5G your mobile phone is not your phone anymore. It will be your personal data server whether you like it or not. So when we see ‘high-risk vendors‘, we forgot one element. That is the element we call ‘high-risk governments‘, the players behind the players who left other to do the preparations and now that they are learning the hard way (as I personally see it) that they are not ready, we see all these delays and other 11^th hour grasps regarding the definition ‘high-risk‘. So as we contemplate the excuse “a threat to the whole network“, whilst we see nothing in the air of how such threats are even possible to exist. Whilst we were shown the Sony intrusion, the Facebook screw-up (Cambridge Analytica), we see nothing in the air of ‘we are prepared‘? We saw that excuse that people were prepared often enough for many years and when we look back we see articles (Financial Times) where the discussion was already on in 2012, six years ago and in all that time the danger of “a threat to the whole network” and ‘high-risk‘ did not make the headlines in all this? Is that not weird too? I personally see it as a clear example of facilitation towards greed instead of enabling safety to a much larger degree, security and reliability on a network that should have the non-repudiation ability that 4G never had, that was the foundation of the NHS solution, a safer setting, not a faster setting (which was actually a nice bonus). This is the first part in showing the players as those who propagate a stagnant life through iteration.

This has become a stage where the next generation is worse of then the two generations before us. On the upside, no, there is no upside to any of that, it is merely the recognition of facilitation of greed driven people and have we not facilitated to them enough?

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Tagged as 5G, Apple, ASPI, Australia, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Business Insider, Cambridge Analytica, Canada, Facebook, Financial Times, google, Huawei, Michael Shoebridge, Mike Burgess, OnePlus 6T, Peter Jennings, Sony, Telstra, the Guardian, the Verge, UK, USA, Vlad Savov

October 29, 2018 · 12:25

MI5 to the rescue?

That is what one might think when we read the Guardian. The article: ‘MI5 to take over in fight against rise of UK rightwing extremism‘. The article (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/28/mi5-lead-battle-against-uk-rightwing-extremists-police-action) gives us: “It comes amid growing global fears of the threat posed by far-right terrorists. In the US in recent days a man was charged with sending 13 pipe bombs to opponents of Donald Trump, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton“. It all makes sense, let’s be clear about this. When we look at the MI5 site we get: “The role of MI5, as defined in the Security Service Act 1989, is “the protection of national security and in particular its protection against threats such as terrorism, espionage and sabotage, the activities of agents of foreign powers, and from actions intended to overthrow or undermine parliamentary democracy by political, industrial or violent means”“. This all makes sense, and their mission statement is at (https://www.mi5.gov.uk/what-we-do). The Guardian also gives us: “Four extreme rightwing alleged plots have been thwarted in the UK since March 2017, compared to 13 Islamist plots. But with around 100 investigations into the extreme rightwing currently live, the threat is assessed as growing“, so one would think that a big shout out is due to all the boys and girls at MI5. Yet, it is not that simple. You see when we see the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics giving us: ‘the political right opposes socialism and social democracy. Right-wing parties include conservatives, Christian democrats, classical liberals, nationalists and on the far-right; racists and fascists‘. My issue is not with MI5 or with their mission statement. My issue is with the setting that there is a grey area that lies between ‘Right-wing parties include conservatives, Christian democrats, classical liberals, nationalists‘ and ‘racists and fascists‘. You see, that borderline is getting more and more blurry. It is perhaps a lot more visible in the US where the Washington Post gave us earlier this month: ‘States can’t punish businesses for boycotting Israel, federal judge in Arizona says‘, when corporations will be allowed racism through ‘freedom of speech‘. So when we see: “In his personal life, he avoids companies he considers complicit in Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories. His aim had been to extend his boycott to his one-person law office — for instance, refusing to purchase from Hewlett-Packard because its information technology services are used at Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank“, now we get the setting that companies are getting punished for selling to the Israeli government. When we see this change, we see the opening of a lot more options for both bias and optionally racism, merely as it undermines his First Amendment rights. I understand that there is a touchy legal setting here, yet when we transfer this to the European side of things, it changes the game by a lot. Even when we consider “The ACLU challenged the legislation in both cases. Its success in protecting boycott activity in the courts is notable, as a bipartisan group of lawmakers pushes for federal legislation penalizing cooperation with boycotts sponsored by international governmental organizations. Even after modifications made by the bill’s Senate sponsors — Benjamin L. Cardin (D-Md.) and Rob Portman (R-Ohio) — the civil-liberties group argues that the measure would be unconstitutional“, we see a setting where MI5 has a much larger issue to deal with.

Part of that is seen in a paper by the Anti-Defamation League. They give us a top 10 of anti-Israel groups. Here we need to notice Al-Awda, perhaps the largest Palestinian-American grassroots organization. We are informed on: “While Al-Awda champions itself as a Palestinian rights group that advocates for “right of return,” its core ideology is predicated on the notion that Israel’s existence is illegitimate, Zionism is racism and resistance against Israel is justified. Many of Al-Awda’s supporters readily express support for terrorist groups, including waving Hamas and Hezbollah flags at anti-Israel rallies and posting messages to Al-Awda’s listserves demanding violent resistance against Israel” and they seem to be growing. Their Yahoo groups in Sweden and London are implied to be on the rise, they are gaining steam in the US (to what degree is unknown and I was not able to find more data), yet in all settings Universities seem to be the growth foundation going all the way to Sydney Australia; so there is momentum and all this is not merely done through individuals. It is my personal belief that this wave is gaining momentum, partially due to focussed ideology, which is not a crime mind you, but those people become facilitators to a lot more and there is our number two issue. MI5 is now confronted with a lot more work, merely because they have to look into these people and first ascertain whether they are merely ideologists who seek ‘a fair playing ground‘ for those who do not have it, whilst enabling extremism to a degree that they did not intend to give. The entire anti-Israel is perhaps the strongest visible example, yet when we recollect the entire ‘Hezbollah flags fly once again at London’s Quds Day march‘, we see clear evidence that I am right. So when we got treated 5 months ago to: ‘Police: We can’t stop people flying Hezbollah flags on London march‘, we accept that it is a legal part, yet the facilitation in all this is clear, it is given and it is continuing and there lies the issue for MI5. How can they act against the extreme right, whilst the buffer zone between the right and extreme right is large enough to give a protective shield to Hezbollah recruitment drives? So when we recollect the words of Metropolitan Police Commander Jane Conners where she stated: “Purely holding a flag does not necessarily incite religious or racial hatred. It is the words or actions of the person holding the flag that can cause incitement“, I personally respectfully decline to agree with that part, even as she academically is not wrong, she is absolutely incorrect with the given statement.

And it does not stop there, the entire Anti Saudi Arabia setting is evolving as well, it is not merely evolving as an Anti-Saudi-Arabia, it is in part driven as Pro-Iranian, you know the people funding terrorist organisations like Hezbollah (firing missiles from Yemen into Saudi Arabia), a part the media is steering clear from for a few reasons. That too counts as a problem, as it intensifies the complications for the security services. Technically a person is allowed to be as pro-Iranian as they feel like, especially former Iranians building a new life. Yet in all this the plot does not thicken, it merely gets larger. It is seen a few hours ago when Ahmad Dastmalchian, the former Iranian ambassador to Lebanon states: “Hezbollah is an “effective actor” in the Middle East region“, the statement is more intelligent than you might think, as it is actually giving Hezbollah the cloak of facilitation, the mantle of enabling and the shroud of enacting, all settings that Hezbollah is staged in, via and through the acts of Iran and their activities in the UK are growing.

The next part is speculative (some might say highly speculative), yet I believe that CNN when they gave us (at https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/17/uk/uk-anti-semitism-intl/index.html) 10 weeks ago the setting of: ‘Anti-Semitism is so bad in Britain that some Jews are planning to leave‘, I absolutely (as a conservative) disagree with the accusations that Jeremy Corbyn is anti-Semitic. He is also not anti-Semantic and that is where the issue lies. As he is trying to be more pro-Palestinian (or perhaps refuses to be anti-Palestinian, which is not the same) he actually enables anti-Semitic activities (not intentionally) and that is where the shoe becomes too tight for MI5. As we have a field so polarised, finding where the danger lies becomes a much harder mission and as such finding out the truth without revealing your hand is close to impossible. So when CNN gives us “Two people have previously been imprisoned for threatening to murder him for being Jewish, Lewis said. Now, he said, he’s reached the stage where he’s “almost being desensitized to the threats” — from both right and left — such is their regularity“, I am personally left in the understanding that many actions have been enabled by other actions, which is part of the nightmare setting for MI5. The second one is not merely a stage of miscommunications, it is almost hilarious when (using an example) hear that the market researcher who hated polls was offered membership in UKIP, which by the way is, merely my sense of humour acting up. It is a much larger problem. You see, the Independent gives us (at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/tommy-robinson-court-case-live-updates-trial-latest-edl-jail-sentence-old-bailey-contempt-free-a8596981.html) the stage where: “Tommy Robinson has walked free from court again after his contempt case was referred to the Attorney General“. If we see this in its execution, we might see the stage of ‘the Court of Appeal ruled that procedural failings had “given rise to unfairness”‘, yet is that the true setting, or is there support in the legal weeds for right winged groups? That question comes to mind when we see the Guardian revelation ‘Tommy Robinson could make more than £1m from a potential trip to the US next month, making him one of the best funded far-right figures‘ a mere 2 days ago. To see this much support and funding, places clearly places corporations in the line of shielding against acts against some of the far right players and that is where MI5 is about to fall short. If corporations are part of this, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that some MP’s will make demands and ask open questions in the House of Commons that should not be asked. Not because they are wrong to ask, but because they hinder and optionally invalidate the MI5 process of investigation. You merely have to ask how often such questions of hindrance was given in support of the IRA in the last three decades to give consideration that there is polarisation in the UK, giving a larger question mark whether the rise of rightwing extremism can we stopped, or merely slowed down a little.

You merely have to consider the ‘wisdom’ given in Operation Petticoat, a movie (and absolute classic) from 1959. The quote “In confusion there is profit” is very apt to this situation. Nothing entices miscommunication like a polarised political field. The UK with their pro-Iranian and Pro-Saudi think tanks are partial proof of that and there is nothing that loads a field like enticing politicians to seek the limelight with a cause that can be twisted six ways form Sunday, even as the politicians are not doing anything wrong or shady, that part was clearly seen with the entire Jeremy Corbyn thing and it is not close from over, because that part can be seen when we dig into the EDL and their ant-Islam agenda’s. The Guardian gives part of that (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/25/tommy-robinson-and-the-far-rights-new-playbook), yet I believe that it goes beyond what the Guardian has (and I have absolutely no evidence either). It is my personal belief that their quote: “The Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson covered Yaxley-Lennon’s story extensively on his show; Donald Trump Jr, the president’s son, tweeted his support, while the US ambassador for international religious freedom reportedly lobbied the UK on Yaxley-Lennon’s behalf. The UK Independence party is debating offering Yaxley-Lennon membership, while Stephen Bannon, the former Trump adviser and co-founder of Breitbart, has described him as “the fucking backbone” of his country and proposed including him in a new far-right venture, a pan-European network called The Movement“. I think that those people (like Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr and Stephen Bannon) come with corporate cloud. The ‘£1m from a potential trip to the US next month’ is merely the frothing on the icing of the cake. the actual financial support could go a hell of a lot faster, even as Stephen Yaxley-Lennon might not get a penny, $2 to $3 million in Google Ads funding (which is 100% tax deductible) goes a long way covering the UK in text and display ads for a year on keywords from ‘immigration‘ to ‘financial support‘, whilst blanketing a whole range of websites with some ‘the EDL is there for you‘ slogans. That is the stage and that is what MI5 faces on the short term. By the time MI5 has a handle on things, we see that the message is already getting spread by parties where they have no influence and the MP’s will not be willing to hand them any favours. That is the reality of the show we are about to see.

It is not the ‘contempt of court‘ failure we need to fear it is the optional ‘contempt of others through advertisements’ that becomes the worry and these people are clever enough to phrase it as to not upset any filters, they will have the know-how and experience at their back and call for that.

We can in the near future consider that it sucked to be Andrew Parker in 2018-2019, oh K?

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Tagged as ACLU, Ahmad Dastmalchian, Al-Awda, Andrew Parker, Anti-Defamation League, Arizona, Barack Obama, Benjamin L. Cardin, Breitbart, CNN, Donald Trump Jr, EDL, English Defence League, Fox News, Google Ads, Hamas, Hezbollah, Hillary Clinton, House of Commons, Israel, Jeremy Corbyn, London, Mark Lewis, MI5, Oxford Dictionary of Politics, Palestine, Palestinian-American, Police Commander Jane Conners, Rob Portman, Security Service Act 1989, Stephen Bannon, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the Guardian, the Movement, Tommy Robinson, Tucker Carlson, UK, UKIP, Yaxley-Lennon

October 26, 2018 · 13:06

A promised correction delivered

Yes, I have made statements, conclusions I truly believed to be the case. Not because I am smarter (I am actually that), but the fact that everyone started to shout on innuendo and unproven statements by boastful people. I was determined to call their bluff. That is how I am, yet I am also the person that once evidence is given, that I will adjust the views and the position that I have taken before.

So as the Guardian treats us to: ‘Khashoggi’s son leaves Saudi Arabia as prosecutor says killing was planned‘, so as we are now given “Saudi prosecutor’s statement contradicts previous claims that journalist was killed accidentally“, I do remain in the setting that those high and mighty bitches of industry (like JP Morgan Chase and a few others), who were all in some uppity state, are now shown to have walked away prematurely, I reckon that they did many things premature in the bedroom, but to see those same people doing it in the hard cutthroat industry where they are supposed to be the sharks of the 7 giant oceanic corporations was new to many. The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/25/jamal-khashoggi-killing-premeditated-says-saudi-prosecutor) gives us a lot of goods that are important to take in.

You see, I believe that I was never wrong, I merely wanted to see actual evidence, which is a different setting, the bitches of industry merely relied on innuendo. So when we see: “the Saudi public prosecutor’s office for the first time suggested the writer’s killing was premeditated“, a setting where we see ‘suggested‘ as the operative word, but from a legal source that gives the mere word ‘suggested’ at a much higher weight then the journalistic unnamed source could ever be. In addition to the previous we also see: “Prosecutors were interrogating suspects on the basis of information provided by a joint Saudi-Turkish taskforce, a statement from the official Saudi Press Agency said on Thursday“, which also makes me step back on the entire Turkey-Iran parts, there was actual evidence, it was merely presented by the media in a way that I would never have accepted until I watched it with my own eyes. So even as we are presented with: “Riyadh has taken great pains to distance the powerful crown prince from any responsibility for Khashoggi’s murder after it emerged several members of his personal guard and other trusted officials were involved“, we also see that the Crown Prince was true to his word. He stated: “justice will prevail in the Khashoggi case” and that is what seems to be happening. What I had reported on earlier seems to be confirmed now on a few levels. With: “The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Gina Haspel, the CIA director, had requested and been played the tapes during a brief visit to Ankara this week – the first indication Turkey has shared the sensitive evidence with foreign parties“. It is the ‘the first indication Turkey has shared the sensitive evidence‘, it is part of the whole and must be acknowledged, especially by me, if I want to live with myself. You see, I was partially protective of the ‘players’ from team KSA, merely because the journalistic sources have lost too much credibility in the last few years alone. That was the largest setting of my choices and none of the evidence was acceptable by me, especially in the entire Turkey-Iran setting that most media is still not acknowledging at present.

So there it is, I am not sorry on the path I took earlier, I gave my reasoning here and I feel that I remained correct, yet I also disputed evidence on facts and as the disputed evidence is now shown to be actual, I feel that I had a responsibility to bear (or was it to bare) that out.

I also remain in the belief that I had from the very beginning, We need to rely on papers like the Guardian, the Times, the LA Times, the Washington Post, the BBC and a few others to give us the good stuff. There are those papers that rely on emotion to overbear us in any direction that they can push us, which was also the reason of opposing larger players of the press in all this.

You see, we seem to focus on all kinds of matters, except for the location and the entire events that surrounded Mohammed Al-Otaibi, we have not seen a lot there, did we? It goes a little further than that. One source (the Middle East monitor) gives us: “Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said yesterday that Saudi Arabia has dismissed its Consul General to Istanbul Mohammed Al-Otaibi following a phone call he had with King Salman Bin Abdulaziz a few days after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside his country’s consulate in Istanbul. “The Consul is not efficient and I have told King Salman of this. A day later, the Consul General was relieved of his duties and returned to his country,” the Turkish president told the parliament in Ankara“, now we get the ‘good’ stuff. The parts that are important are easily seen. The article is two days old, yet the parts in this are ‘a few days after Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi was killed inside his country’s consulate in Istanbul‘. You see, if that was true, then the entire matter of the audio tapes take on a very different stage and value. If the evidence was there and it gives evidence of transgressions, then President Erdogan was giving Saudi Arabia heads up on certain events, in addition, when we contemplate the audio evidence that is part of all that, the statement that we see with ‘The Consul is not efficient and I have told King Salman of this‘, if these parts are correct, than we see that the Turkish government is optionally directly involved with the cover-up itself! I am also considering that one source is not good enough, yet the connections seen, gives a much larger light to the setting.

In the end, I need to keep the faith I have, I need to remain in the light of not what I think happened (many are doing that), it needs to be ‘what happened that can be proven’, too few players have been doing that. It was also important to raise the Mohammed Al-Otaibi issue as some papers stated that ‘he fled the country’, yet here we see the stage: ‘the Consul General was relieved of his duties and returned to his country‘, or as I initially stated it, he had been recalled; I seem to have been correct on that part too. The question remains important if we are to believe USA Today. There we saw almost a week ago: “Those fired included: one of the prince’s closest advisers Saud al-Qahtani; deputy intelligence chief Maj. Gen. Ahmed al-Assiri; Maj. Gen. Mohammed bin Saleh al-Rumaih, assistant head of the General Intelligence Directorate; Maj. Gen. Abdullah bin Khalifa al-Shaya, head of General Intelligence for Human Resources; and Gen. Rashad bin Hamed al-Mohammad, director of the General Directorate of Security and Protection“, no mention of consul general Mohammed Al-Otaibi, perhaps he is one of the 18 arrested, yet we do not have any names from that group, so for now there is no way to know.

In Other News

The Financial Post reported that ‘Google corporate parent’s third quarter disappoints jittery investors‘, which is always nice to see (even if no one really cares). Yet the stage that we saw two days ago in ‘The ethical threshold‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/10/24/the-ethical-threshold/) where I made mention of “when we consider that “Diane Green, the chief executive of Google Cloud, also pulled out on Monday, according to the company” and gave that ‘Davos in the Desert’ a miss”, which in light of the shown evidence by some could have been the emotional short sighted part to do. Now, we know that Google will need loads of effort to mend the fences, yet souring the seating between themselves and the investors might not have been the best way to go about that. So as I made mention earlier of “those high and mighty bitches of industry (like JP Morgan Chase and a few others)“, especially when we regard that business solutions like Sharpcloud, a solution that relies on Azure AD, now will seemingly get a few additional options in their park, especially as Microsoft apparently opened a few doors. In light of what is going on and what is about to happen, certain dash boarding and investigative tools will have their work cut out for them. If they can please the initial players (like Salini Impregilo), the opportunities will become much larger and will entice a much needed audience to a much larger degree. So in this, Google did not merely disappoint the investors, there is now some indication that they handed market share to their opponents, all because of overreaction? Well that is for them to figure out, I remain a faithful believer of the Robocop phrase ‘Good business is where you find it‘ and any player that is staging the investment setting of a trillion dollars on a 12 year scale is someone you need to look at in different ways, if you do not, which would be your own choice, you end up merely cutting yourself. Everyone so up in arms over a journalist whilst Wall Street, Apple and a few others are quite literally walking away with murder on a much larger scale. You can blame the governmental and legal machines of all the folly that they represent, but as a corporation you still need to get from A to B and that is where it is my personal belief that some people overreacted (to a certain degree).

Yet the entire Google issue is also a stab in another direction. You see, when we are treated to “But Alphabet’s revenue fell shy of analyst projections. The company’s revenue, after ad commissions, totalled US$27.16 billion, more than US$150 million below analysts’ predictions“, the stage here is not merely that the analyst could have gotten it wrong, the loss in all this is roughly 0.552282%, under what amount is the optional miscalculation of something less than a percent the stage of such a reaction? If you need three tubes of Valium just to get back to hysterics whilst the optional loss is merely 0.55% less of an absurd amount of profit, we need to reengage into the folly of maximised profit, in a stage where they grasped at emotional levels of a moral high ground that they should not even be allowed to have in the first place and if my expectation comes through and some Microsoft Azure players do get to give pilots to certain players set to a growing awareness in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Google will lose a hell of a lot more than a mere 0.552282% shortfall, they might actually lose market share, how much value will that be representative of?

the deeper you dig, the more we see that the statement in several newspapers made by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman giving us: “The Middle East can be the “new Europe”” might be more correct than some realise at present, especially when 5G starts its roll-out in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. In case you were not aware of the latter part, the Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corporation, SB Energy and Tadano. They are all licensed for KSA endeavours now. So how much business are some players about to lose? So even as some questioned the statement: “Majid Al Qassabi, Saudi Arabia’s Minister of Trade and Investment, said the kingdom can be a launchpad for Japanese businesses seeking investment opportunities in the Middle Eastern and African markets“, we have a first indication that it is equally opening a double dipping opportunity for the mentioned bank with ties to both Egypt and the UAE. This is not some get quick rich stage, but the long term play will be extremely profitable for all three involved. All this as we see in opposition that investments in Europe are on the decline. Sources like Politico Europe and S&P global where some fields are losing as much as 19%. A dire stage in light of the 3 trillion euro float of its currency is nothing short of an optional nightmare stage for Europe. The escalating budget crises of Italy is merely one of several factors that will soon force Europe to make much larger changes, the slumping European economy is a close second. There are two other elements that I highlighted a few days ago, but we will see more on that soon enough. It was nice to see one source giving us a clear stage whilst pointing at history. the mere “After all in 2008, on the eve of the world’s worst economic and financial market crisis, Ben Bernanke dismissed the sub-prime crisis as a non-event. Meanwhile Jean Claude Trichet, Mr. Draghi’s predecessor at the helm of the ECB, went one step further by ill-advisedly raising interest rates in the months immediately preceding the September 2008 Lehman bankruptcy” should be one clear indication that there are plenty of optional dark clouds on the European horizon. Let’s not forget that people like Ben Bernanke and Jean Claude Trichet were never held accountable or prosecuted for any of those ignored events, were they?

Have a great day!

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October 25, 2018 · 16:03

Crime as a business model

Have you considered that yet? Have you considered that turning towards the criminal side of revenue (and additional spiking profits) you could gain a bundle? That question came to mind when I saw ‘Apple and Samsung fined for deliberately slowing down phones‘. The guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/oct/24/apple-samsung-fined-for-slowing-down-phones) gives us: “Apple and Samsung are being fined €10m and €5m respectively in Italy for the “planned obsolescence” of their smartphones“, So when we see that Apple got a €10m for their application of creative endeavours. Now consider that Apple makes about €450 per iPhone, or €625 after all the tax write-offs and other offsets that they can legally employ. So in all, to break even Apple required the sale of 16,000 phones just to break even on that fine. Now look at the numbers from Statista (at https://www.statista.com/statistics/804398/us-iphone-sales-by-model/). There we see that the latest three models model 8, model 8 plus and model X represented over 60% of their sales share up to December 2017 and 54% up to June 2018. Now consider that this represents 41.03, 46.68, 77.32 and 52.22 million units. So the stage is close to 60% of 88 million units (almost 53 million units), as well as 54% of 129.5 million units giving us almost 70 million units. So there we have it. The stage where the means to sell 123 million iPhones through what the court is seen as deceptive conduct gets a fine that amounts to 16,000 units. A fine received that represents a mere 0.013% of their cost of doing business. How much of a joke does it need to be before we see proper legal reprimanding large corporations? The governments will not properly tax them; the legal institutions will not properly fine them. The fact that the people do not to a much larger degree realise that crime is the only way to pay your bills is basically beyond me. And this is not even including the latest model iPhone which is a lot more expensive (the cost of making one is likely to be equally expensive though). That whilst Samsung and Apple are seen as the only two bad guys seems not entirely correct. Because if Samsung (an Android phone) has it, I feel certain that other Android phones might have a similar setting in play (speculated, not proven or documented), so it is not merely Apple with its IOS. Yet the stage of Apple is now not how they got rich, we see that their unscrupulous practices is an optional the reason why they are the richest company on the planet, and governments are letting them get away with it. When a criminal is allowed to keep 99.987% of their ill-gotten gains, why not merely become a criminal? I myself send my resume to the GRU (a Russian punitive monitoring government corporation relying on creative solutions), for the mere reason that if I can do a better job than Igor Valentinovich Korobov, why not? Not sure if they are allowing an Australian to run their military intelligence operations, but hey! If Apple can think outside of the ethical box, than so can I.

But this is not about me; this is about a growing amount of corporations looking to stage retail growth. Even as we see that this is going on in many retail segments, The path pushed onto people in places like gaming where at the mere saving of $15 Microsoft gave its players an Xbox One (and Xbox One X) with merely 50% of its capacity. Yes as I calculated it for consumers the difference was $15 to get twice the storage, it was that bad and the media trivialised it for the longest of times. So it is not a surprise that 70% of the life sales cycle of the Microsoft consoles was surpassed by Nintendo with its Switch in 15 months, the most powerful console in the world (and initially its less powerful brother) has been around since June 2014, and in 15 months the bulk of all sales is close to being equalled by the weakest console of the three large players. Yet the issue is not that Microsoft had a bad idea, they have had plenty of those. When a console maker knowingly and willingly undercharges a system, is that not deceptive conduct too? The problem is to prove it. Yet when we realise that a 1TB drive gives you less than 1,000 GB, merely because of the operating system (which makes perfect sense). Some give that reserved space to approximately 140GB leaving you with 860GB. Now consider that games like HALO5 and Gears of War 4 are each 100GB, Forza Horizons 4 is said to be 95GB, that gives us 34% for these three games alone and we are already getting the news that Fallout 76 and Red Dead Redemption 2 will be massive too, as are AC Origin and AC Odyssey. So we are looking at an optional 76% filled hard drive with these 7 games. Seven games to fill the drive. OK, I am the first one to admit that not all games are this big. The Lego games are Tiny in comparison, many other games like the EA sports games are between 38-45GB (normal edition) I did not find reliable information on how much extra the 4K part is, but usually the size doubles. So at this point, when that hits you, can we consider (not agree, merely consider) that Microsoft could optionally have been engaging in deceptive conduct as well? It is all around us and there is too much of it. Also, I am not ignoring Sony in this, they solved it by allowing people to change the hard drive from a 1TB to a 2TB (at their own expense), which is currently $119, so 100% more storage, which initially putting it in would have been a mere $15 difference on consumer levels. Yet the question there is did Microsoft do anything illegal or merely something really stupid? If they had allowed for personal upgrades there would have been a much larger Xbox One wave, I am certain of it. The Sony tray solution could have been equalled by the Xbox One X from Day one, giving the gamers actual value for money. That part will of course be looked at when Xbox One Scarlett comes out, which is still set (according to some sources) to 2020, yet this is not about gaming, or merely the Xbox. There is a group of people that is finally becoming savvy enough to look at what they require to have something worth their time and money. We see a growing group of people knowing what to ask on their new mobile, their new console, their new tablet and their new notebook/netbook.

So how does this relate back to the optionally ‘criminally implied through innuendo‘ business model? This is actually more important than you think. There was an additional reason for all this. You see a shop named JB Hifi (the most visible one in Australia) gives the consumer: “Across town or around the world, the new Surface Pro 6 is your perfectly light, incredibly powerful travel partner — now with the latest 8th Generation Intel® Core™ processor and up to 13.5 hours of all-day battery life.“, they even added the footnote: “Surface Pro 6battery life: Up to 13.5 hours of video playback. Testing conducted by Microsoft in August 2018 using preproduction Intel® Core™ i5, 256GB, 8 GB RAM device. Testing consisted of full battery discharge during video playback. All settings were default except: Wi-Fi was associated with a network and Auto-Brightness disabled. Battery life varies significantly with settings, usage, and other factors“, you see, TechRadar gives us another story: “Microsoft promises up to 13 hours and 30 minutes of local video playback from the new Surface Pro. That’s a lofty claim and one that our test unit failed to live up to. That being said, based on our tests of the previous model’s battery, we no doubt see a noticeable improvement. Test results came in 24% and 32% longer than the previous model at 4 hours and 3 minutes, and 6 hours and 58 minutes, respectively“, this is a long way off from the “up to 13.5 hours of all-day battery life“, which is also deceptive (to some degree); you see when we look for ‘all-day battery life‘ ZDNet gives us (relating to the Samsung Note 9: “it seems that what ‘all-day battery’ means is that if you are an average or typical user, then the Note 9 should last you all day without needing a recharge, but a whole bunch of real-world factors can get in the way of that.“, this translates to the Surface Pro that you need to be able to get through the day without needing a recharge when you are an average user, when we see an initial 13.5 hours, we all would agree, yet TechRadar gives us a mere ‘6 hours and 58 minutes‘ (the longest version) which is less than a working day, especially when you are using it on your trip from and to the office (or was that the other way around). Now we get to see the other side of it all and even as the iPads are better, but not by much, it is the marketing usage of ‘all-day battery life‘ that is becoming a much greater issue, in this case (even as I concede that there are several models of the Surface Pro, also there are issues with different models and usage, places like JB Hifi uses that same setting for the Microsoft Surface Pro 6 i7 512GB, and as we acknowledge that the i7 needs more power than the i5, we see that that battery life is optionally misrepresented and it is odd that at this point Microsoft conveniently does not seem to check on how their devices are sold. When we look at The Verge, which gives us: “Thurrott reports that Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella met with Lenovo last year and quizzed the company over how it was responding to Skylake problems. “Lenovo was confused,” claims Thurrott. “No one was having any issues.” It appears Microsoft’s own problems were the result of the company’s unique approach to the Surface Book, with custom firmware and drivers. While other, more experienced, hardware makers were able to respond quickly, Microsoft’s delay impacted reliability“, this is not the end, especially when you consider that the article is a year ago and is a reflection on the ‘Leaked Microsoft memo reveals high Surface Book return rates‘, and whilst this was the Surface Pro 4, a system two generations old, we see that basic stages have not been met with better quality control and a much better information control setting. In addition, the ‘party line‘ response on battery life is as I personally see it a much larger issue that seems to be determined to sell more and hope that the consumers will not bring it back. I believe that there is a failing in the UK and Australia, a fact that is shown in the Daily Mail (at https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-6233259/Microsoft-unveils-899-Surface-Pro-6-iPad-killer-alongside-new-999-Surface-Laptop-2.html), where we were treated to “The Surface Laptop 2 now gets 14.5 hours of battery life, while the Surface Pro 6 still gets a solid 13.5 hours on a single charge“, a quote that should be enough to get the Daily Mail in hot waters with a whole league of unsatisfied users and if the Daily Mail concedes that they were merely going by Microsoft numbers, it will be Microsoft taking a hot bath of people demanding that level of battery performance. Or it is entirely possible that Microsoft will claim that there was an unfortunate miscommunication between their marketing department and Annie Palmer, the Daily Mail article writer. In the end the setting should be regarded as sales through deceptive conduct and even as these two players are the most visible ones, they are not the only ones. There has been the Apple Error 53 issue, Telstra with their interpretation of ‘unlimited’ and Optus with their interpretation of DCB (Direct Carrier Billing) and the less said about my interactions with Vodaphone (aka Vodafail) the better, all whilst that list of corporations that are graduating summa cum laude on the art of miscommunications keeps on growing too.

A lot of it is only visible after a long time and after the damage is done. We all agree something needs to be done, yet when we realise that the fine is merely 0.013% of what some end up gaining, there is absolutely zero chance that this situation will be rectified within the lifespan of us, or our children, the profit margins are just too large.

for me, my interactions with Apple costed me $5599 in the end, money I did not have to spare and even as I still love my G5 PowerMac and my iPad one, I remain sceptical and cautious of anything new that Apple released after 2006, the price has been too high and I am merely 1 of one billion active Apple users, they have that much to gain by continuing on the path they currently are.

The law is seemingly slightly too flaccid to resolve the situation at present, how sad is that?

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Tagged as AC Odyssey, AC Origin, Annie Palmer, Apple, Bethesda, Daily Mail, deceptive conduct, Direct Carrier Billing, Fallout 76, Forza Horizons 4, GRU, Igor Valentinovich Korobov, Microsoft, Nintendo, Optus, Red Dead Redemption 2, Samsung, Satya Nadella, Surface Pro 6, TechRadar, Telstra, the Verge, Thurrott, Ubisoft, UK, Vodaphone, Xbox One, Xbox One Scarlett

October 24, 2018 · 14:45

The ethical threshold

When is it too much? That is the initial question I had. I am a tweeter, I love my twitter, I will be honest on that. I tend to merely be nice there, with all the negativity in the world thinking only positive there is merely a choice. Also, why would you want to waste time attacking a person there? OK, I have to admit, when Jimmy Kimmel decided to take the mean tweets as a segment, I ended up laughing out loud, especially the Marvel cast ones. Why would anyone do this? Why would Chadwick Boseman (Mr. Black Panther himself) get confronted with: “Okay, how did the coolest blackest dude in the galaxy end up with a whitebread-a– name like Chadwick” It was fun and he laughed too, but why do that? OK, if it was just a little friendly jab, I would get it, but why would you state to Scarlett Johannson: “emotional range of a f–ing celery”? It makes no sense to me. Sometimes we have an aversion to an actor, or perhaps more direct to the role that an actor portrayed, which makes perfect sense, but why vent it? I loved her work in many movies, and if there is one I did not like, then it is ‘The Other Boleyn girl‘, I personally believed it fell flat after the Tudors, which had nothing to do with her, Natalie Portman, or Eric Bana. In the end, it might not be the actors at all, merely the vision and choices of the director. It does not matter, I was no fan of that movie, yet to go out and tweet to her (or any of the other two) on how bad they acted seems like a waste of time and totally uncalled for. Many people feel that way, when we consider she gets hundreds of (optionally mean) tweet, yet each of them has tens of thousands of fans. Is it an ethical choice not to lash out? It might be, or it is merely good manners. Whatever it is does not matter, it is a visible part in all this.

In opposition, when do you professionally make choices based on morality or ethicality? We all do them and even as my threshold there is slightly higher than the Eifel tower, I do have them. I also believe in loyalty (even as some of my bosses have never shown that distinction themselves). There we have another setting do we not? So even as some might rage on how we need to make choices, as some rage against certain settings like playing hide and seek with the corpse of Jamal Khashoggi, whilst some claim to have evidence of recordings, that recording still has not been revealed to the world, these sources have now stopped mentioning that claimed piece of evidence, so when you seek political opportunity over a cadaver, how does that go over with some people? When you are merely an Iranian tool making claims and then leaving the accusation in the dirt, how does one ethically consider that person to have any intrinsic value or reliability?

So as Reuters gives us: “CIA Director Gina Haspel, in Turkey to investigate the death of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, has sought to hear a purported audio recording of his torture and murder, four sources familiar with her mission told Reuters on Tuesday” and now a week after the claims, the evidence is not forthcoming, why consider that government to be any level of ally?

Yet that is another matter, the ethicality of this is part of it all, not the rest of that stage. The entire stage of ethicality is seen in fortune as we are faced with: ‘SoftBank’s CEO Won’t Speak at ‘Davos in the Desert‘ Even Though Saudi Arabia Put $45 Billion Into His Vision Fund‘. There we should have some issue, when you get $45B invested in, should there not be some ‘tit for tat’, or is that what they sometimes call in the UK ‘tits for dad’?

So when we see: “However, according to a Tuesday report, Son has now cancelled his speaking appearance, though he may still show up at the conference“, how does that go over? I had the idea for an alternate information system that is based on something that does exist, but now on a much larger scale, a new way of driving 5G data forward, a new information system. I even came up with a new 5G device type called the ‘dumb smart device‘, not only did I not get any penny of $45 billion (which would have been way too much), I also did not get an invitation of speaking option at “Davos in the Desert”, which in hindsight makes perfect sense as I never gave my email and phone number to Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, so it all partially makes sense. So as we see that list of important people like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase, Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone and AOL founder Steve Case had pulled out in protest, we need to also realise that they are part of a setting where the pot is calling the kettle black. Remember JPMorgan’s and their $12 Billion Bailout? They want to talk morality? And in the end, we know that Jamal Khashoggi met his death in the consulate, we do not know the details, yet the people claiming to have evidence are not showing it and in addition those people are allied with Iran who is in a proxy war with Saudi Arabia. I know I have said that perhaps a little too often, yet the newspapers and online media REFUSE to add that truth to their articles, is that not strange? Yet this is about certain poor choices, however they were not the poor choices of those behind ‘Davos in the Desert‘. When I see the highlighted Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son and how he is not speaking at a multi-billion dollar event, is he merely proclaiming that he has ethical boundaries? Let’s not forget that apart from the fact that a journalist died under weird conditions, we have seen no actual evidence of ANY kind. We have seen actions that imply a cover-up, yet there is still not one clear piece of evidence that Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman did any of it, or even order it. That evidence was never shown and the Turkish claims have never been supported by evidence, was it? That part is more important than you know, because when we take ethical and morale based evidence from equity people like Jamie Dimon or Stephen Schwarzman we truly have gone off the deep end. So whilst he might be there, he is now optionally missing out on opportunities that go beyond merely Saudi Arabia, when we see that Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice President of United Arab Emirates, you better believe that you are selling your investors short and how does that usually go over with those ‘return on investment chasing accountants‘?

He is important in more than one way. You see, he has been very active in growing the impact of the UAE on a global scale, the vice president is using LinkedIn at every option there is and his industrious nature gives rise to forwards momentum for the UAE and that means more investments and more optional profits, so why walk away from the opportunity to speak out, whilst the cold light of evidence has shown doubt on events, no evidence is presented, not even claimed evidence; when we abandon innocent until proven guilty in light of business we merely set the stage for bias, discrimination and abandonment of good business. That is the actual reality and the media is steering clear from that one as well. Even as everyone knows that the US is broke, it claims industrial momentum, yet it is not taxed momentum, hence where ever that profit goes is beyond the US government. They are desperate to get the money flowing their way, not the other way and we see now that the demise of the US is closer than we thought it was, as Saudi Arabia and its neighbours are steaming ahead, their footprint is pushing in positive technology ways and the rest is lagging behind. The ethical threshold is not who we do business with, it is becoming, what are we willing to accept as a norm and that is the baseline that follows us to a much larger degree, especially when you realise that the baseline of this norm is slowly moving towards an Islamic one. That part is scaring the people way too much, so even as these same people ignore the fact that the Vatican has no women in places of power and that the Reuters quote “Sister Sally Marie Hodgdon, an American nun who also is not ordained, cannot vote even though she is the superior general of the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery” gives clear indications that the Vatican is still as backwards as it was 920 years ago when it decided to take over the Middle East in a setting that we called the Crusades. So how far has our faith taken us? Even as we see that members of the clergy get off on Luke 12, Matthew 10 and John 11 (boys, not passages), we claim to protect children, yet the prosecution of the church members never got there, did it? So as most pushed for agnostic and atheist values, which makes sense to some, there is still a large part that drives their forward momentum through their inner faith and is there any evidence that Islam is evil? We get the ‘terrorist’ claim left, right and centre, yet how many are Muslims are truly evil? Now take the members list of the Ku Klux Klan, the member list of the IRA, White power and Neo-Nazi’s and set that in the scale against the names of terrorists that actually acted, suddenly Islam is not that evil anymore is it?

It is not important that we become Muslim, but would it hurt to learn about Muslim law and customs? If we embrace the next age of technology drive, having that knowledge makes us more and more valuable in places where the next trillions are actually spend, is that anything but our willingness to embrace some cultural change and adapt ourselves to the work sphere that we are ultimately confronted with?

How does our moral and ethical boundaries shift as we accept the religion of others, not to become Muslims, but to merely know enough to not cause offense, is that not a good first step? The BBC gave us less than a week ago the setting that we are now too poor to consider being ethical. They did that whilst posing the question: “Would you quit your job on ethical grounds?“, we are presented with Google employees who did that, yet the jackpot was gained with: “Research by Triplebyte, a start-up which recruits technical talent for technology companies, found 70% of those who get two job offers choose the highest paying one – exactly as our parents’ generation would have done“, if we accept that income is the driver, when we realise that ethics are almost no consideration in a job, would it matter if we embrace an Islamic employer? As we see that the answer is one we can live with a lot more than a job by ethically coloured and filtered Christian employer, can we truly ignore the optional long term life and security that some growing employers are giving us. That will be the driving factors to many and as such we will see that the Middle East influence will grow straight into the Common Law nations. When we realise that last year we were confronted in the UK with the notion that ‘Just one in five Muslims are in work as report finds they are held back by racism‘, what happens when the Muslim corporations see that this could be the driving force to open shop in a much larger audience all over Europe and even in the US. It is merely another facet in ‘the cost of doing business‘ versus ‘the cost of being in business‘. We have forfeited a large option by being choosy on who we choose, often on race, age and looks and that is how the cream evaded the corporations for a much longer time. Now as we see that the momentum is no longer in their corner, the work sphere will change a lot more than we ever could have realised.

A change we started in 1095 when Pope Urban II gave us: “calling all Christians in Europe to war against Muslims in order to reclaim the Holy Land, with a cry of “Deus vult!” or “God wills it!”“, now that we are entering an age where the roles are reversed because we decided to focus on profit and greed, we have no one else to blame but ourselves and the people we ourselves elected. So when we accept the history channel with: “between 60,000 and 100,000 people responded to Urban’s call to march on Jerusalem. Not all who responded did so out of piety: European nobles were tempted by the prospect of increased land holdings and riches to be gained from the conquest. These nobles were responsible for the death of a great many innocents both on the way to and in the Holy Land; absorbing the riches and estates of those they conveniently deemed opponents to their cause. Adding to the death toll was the inexperience and lack of discipline of the Christian peasants against the trained, professional armies of the Muslims. As a result, the Christians were initially beaten back, and only through sheer force of numbers were they eventually able to triumph“. How does our morality fare at this stage? In the end, whether we call them nobility or captains of industry, how many of them walked away with the setting that the benefit of all was merely their bottom line, and after all these years are you still accepting that excuse of as their profit drive?

When we see that a mere 12 hours ago we were given a Microsoft issue through: “But there’s evidence that Windows Insiders knew about and reported this problem, and Microsoft didn’t follow up on it, apparently not realizing the severity of the issue.” (at https://www.extremetech.com/computing/279368-windows-10-1809-may-have-another-file-deleting-bug-problem), another setting of profit and time pressure over quality and reliability, and this is not merely one of a few issues, this have been going on for well over two decades and in the end we end up in the same place, with a more expensive device making no headway. That part alone is part of the success that Google and Huawei gave them the forward push via their vision, driving forward momentum, so why would we want to stay in a place where the ‘status quo’ (not the band) is considered sexy?

So if my views are evil, then I am the Ifrit, the rebellious spirit that yearns for change and momentum, something that has been lacking in technology for too long, as profit boundaries has replaced ethical ones and therefor iteration trumped advancement a race that is now pushing the advantage to the Middle East and let’s not forget that Israel is part of the Middle East and they are also pushing technology boundaries through a whole range of tech start-ups, another reason to accept a much larger range of changes in our lives.
In the end, it is not where we need to go, it is where the opportunities are grown, and when we consider that “Diane Green, the chief executive of Google Cloud, also pulled out on Monday, according to the company” and gave that ‘Davos in the Desert’ a miss, whilst in the end, no evidence was given on several parts of the now accepted act of manslaughter by unknown parties, so not murder as the legal difference is proven intent, we need to ask more questions, not on merely the guilty parties, but those acting on alleged accusations that have not been met with evidence three weeks later is a much larger failure by those same people who kept quiet on years of endangered data safety (The Google+ issue), those needing a dozen billion dollars for bailout (and therefor their poor judgement) all clearly shown and proven, they are claiming some level moral high ground whilst evidence of the other act is still not given, where is our fake sense of ethical borderline now?

I call to some degree that the ethical threshold is one we live by; it is one that others call us on; that distinction is large and ignored by a lot of players. So when Al Jazeera gives us: “Fadi Al-Qadi, a Middle East human rights advocate and commentator, also denounced the photo-op as “ruthless”“, as well as “And here is the video. Salah (#JamalKhashoggi son, banned from travel) had to shake hands with who is believed to be his dad’s killer. Ruthless. Ruthless. Ruthless #Khashoggi pic.twitter.com/EKS9UZQ8Jc” that whilst evidence of ‘his dad’s killer‘ has not been given in any way shape or form, mere accusations from one of the tools that Iran employs, and until the evidence is clearly brought, that is how I will remain to see it. I feel for Salah Khashoggi, I truly do, and the pain of losing his father would be there, but is he merely in pain because of the hundreds of unsubstantiated accusations in almost all the large media? Is that not an important question in all this?

So as we see the impact of the accusations on so many levels, yet all in a setting where no evidence is handed out and whilst the global media is still using the extensive news leaks alleging that Turkey has audio recordings documenting Khashoggi’s demise and even dismemberment, no evidence has been given to the people. Claims of handing out the evidence were knocked back again and again, so how long until we make the ethical demand: “Hand over the evidence now, or be ignored for all time“, that will not happen, will it. The EU is too desperate to keep any talks with Turkey and Iran going and Turkey is taking advantage of that situation, whilst many claims by the Turkish government are a joke on many levels, even legal ones.

When will we learn that ethical, moralistic and emotional considerations are not merely different coins, they tend to be different currencies as well.

We can only choose out own path and make it the best path as we can, we need to realise that the high ethical and moralistic path is not a comfortable one and for the most, we are all about comfort, we have been so for much too long and through that we forgot what true values are, the media merely made it worse.

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Tagged as Al Jazeera, Black Panther, Blackstone, Chadwick Boseman, CIA, Davos in the desert, Diane Green, Eric Bana, Eu, Fadi Al-Qadi, Gina Haspel, google, Google cloud, Huawei, Ifrit, Iran, Islam, Jamal Khashoggi, Jamie Dimon, JPMorgan Chase, Masayoshi Son, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Mohammed bin Salman, Muslim, Natalie Portman, Pope Urban II. Crusades, reuters, Salah Khashoggi, Saudi Arabia, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, Scrlatt Johannson, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Sister Sally Marie Hodgdon, SoftBank, Stephen Schwarzman, the Guardian, The Other Boleyn girl, the Tudors, the Vatican, Triplebyte, Turkey, Twitter, UAE, UK, United Arab Emirates, US

October 19, 2018 · 13:12

Raging against the media

Last night I lost it, I will be honest, at roughly 02:23 I went slightly berserk. You see, I have had the longest of issues with the media for the longest of times. The media has no interest in you or me, it does not care about the individuals, whenever they say so, and they are lying. You see, the media has shown to care for 4 allegiances

the shareholders
the stakeholders
the advertisers
themselves

In that order of business! I will disregard actual investigative reporters here; they hunt the story, some of them really good. Overall this is about money and journalists are in that regard, merely catering to the economic three and after that person called self. It does not matter whether you are in the US, UK, Australia and to some degree even most European countries. The reverence of journalists is no longer valid for well over 90% of them.

The entire Jamal Khashoggi event escalated. Now, I am not stating that nothing happened; I am not stating that Saudi Arabia in innocent, but their guilt has not been clearly established. All the actions so far seen were aimed at the clear exploitation of the audience to increase circulation and keeping the webpage clicks high. Some (like the BBC for example) are doing their job and asking questions, the right questions. The entire matter is more of an issue as it is a person that matters in this case, if it was a reporter from the Daily Mail, no one would give a fuck (pardon my French), no, it was a reporter (or columnist) for the Washington Post, and actually really good newspaper, and of course the ante goes up by a fair bit.

According to BBC News, the so called recording of his torture (according to Turkish sources) has been requested. We see the quote “Mr Trump said America had already asked Turkey for a recording said to provide strong evidence that Mr Khashoggi was killed inside at the consulate” and that makes perfect sense. So why has it not arrived at the White House? If I can mail a MP3 in 17 seconds, why has it been 17 hours and why have we not heard or seen anything acceptably reliable concerning the evidence?

In my speculative view, the statement of the recording is a fake and the media has been playing with ‘Journalist Jamal Khashoggi ‘butchered while still alive’, horrific audio of his murder allegedly reveals‘ (NZ Herald), as well as ‘Audio Offers Gruesome Details of Jamal Khashoggi Killing, Turkish Official Says‘ (NY Times), the list goes on and on. Now we get that some titles merely seem unacceptable. Yet the misrepresentation through flawed reporting is still on the papers even the New York Times. The Washington Post should get a pass on this as they seemingly lost one of their own.

Why is it an issue?

You see, Saudi Arabia is in a proxy war with Iran and Turkey as a puppet of Iran is getting into the good graces of Iran as much as possible. that part is not shown in ANY of those newspapers. Then we get the kill squad references. references like: “A still from surveillance camera footage shows a man thought to be a member of Mohammed bin Salman’s security detail“, really? Based on what? You see if these reporters had done their job they would have added footage from that person in the details of the crown prince. I have not seen that footage, have you?

Then we get to the Guardian. there we see “Over the past two weeks Turkish officials have leaked increasingly shocking evidence that they say proves that the journalist, who was critical of the Saudi crown prince, was tortured and killed inside the building and his dismembered body driven to the nearby consul general’s house where it was disposed of“, here the Guardian is also in a questionable stage. You see, the link there merely gives us the recording request that no one can produce. In addition, we see ‘Turkish officials have leaked increasingly shocking evidence‘, so exactly what evidence was released? Is that not a valid question?

Now, we can all accept that something happened, that there is a more than likely chance that Jamal Khashoggi is not in a good place, the chance that he is optionally is dead is also not lost on me, and I can accept that, yet the media is pushing it into a frenzy of speculations and allegations with no support, or at least support of the most dubious kind, that whilst the tether between Turkey and Iran remains unlit and no one mentions that Turkey has reasons to be set in a anti-Saudi Arabia stage, we see none of that.

In addition, over all this we have been given “Liam Fox, the UK trade secretary, and the US Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, joined key European partners in pulling out of a major economic forum in Saudi Arabia nicknamed Davos in the desert“, ok that is fair. It is their choice. So exactly what actions were taken against Iran regarding Syria, what actions were taken against Iran regarding Yemen? We were treated to “Iranian and European officials are meeting at the United Nations to try to salvage a nuclear deal that the US pulled out of” less than a month ago, in light of the hundreds of deaths in Yemen, a slaughter that Iran is part of, why are they even talking to Iran?

Yet if Neom is pushed through, if it becomes a reality, the IT infrastructure and interne options could optionally represent between $2-$5 billion a month if the full coverage is obtained after 2030, and a lot more besides that, such values and some people are walking away form that table? It seems hypocrite and it does not make any sense after the willingness shown to make deals with Iran. In addition the notion of walking away from serious cash and walking away from that ‘on principle’ whilst that same principle stops them from properly taxing the FAANG group is just a little too hypocrite to stomach. If I get the option, I would move in in a heartbeat, even mere crumbs from a $2 billion a month pie is still serious cash to many players, and as we are told: “Bruno Le Maire said on French TV channel Public Senat that “I will not go to Riyadh next week” for the conference known as Davos in the desert“. Russia will not have that issue, they will most likely state: “Who the fuck was Jamal Khashoggi anyway, and who do we thank with a bottle of Vodka for ignoring such massive economic opportunities?” There are plenty of players who will think the same. Some will state that it is a good thing to take a distance and set the stage in a less friendly way, yet they never had that consideration after Wall Street made millions of Americans live the life of destitution, did they?

ABC News added flavour to it all with the report: ‘Pompeo listened to an alleged recording of the murder of Jamal Khashoggi: Turkish Source‘, yet the article also gives us: ““The secretary addressed this yesterday. He has not heard a tape,” his spokeswoman Heather Nauert told ABC News in an email. Asked about receiving a transcript of the recording, Nauert told ABC News: “I don’t have anything on that.”“, so is there a recording? Why is no one jumping on that story plane hitting Turkey with that question EVERY HOUR? The story is 24 hours old and inaction on the truth prevails whilst actively pushing the alleged unconfirmed reporting is winning; it is that part of pushing hype towards emotion and not true journalism, keeping the emotions high, instead of properly informing the people. Last night that stage just got to me.

That whilst we understand that governments are walking away from economic events, yet they do not get to cry on the entire Brexit setting either, at that point their useless and fear mongering attempt to fill the bucket with false staging needs to be met with the very same tenacity, but that is not going to happen, is it? Wall Street will not allow for it, will it?

So as the New York Times gives us: “Investors raised concern that if Saudi Arabia were sanctioned, it could restrict oil supply and prompt a rise in energy prices. “As soon as the news came out it increased the selling,” said Robert Pavlik, chief investment strategist at SlateStone Wealth LLC in New York. “Anything that has a semblance of the possibility of trouble, people in this environment see it as a much larger problem than it may really be.”“, the article (at https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2018/10/18/business/18reuters-usa-stocks.html) will get a twist or two before the end of the weekend and when we contemplate the message from Robert Pavlik, chief investment strategist at SlateStone Wealth LLC in New York. The answer is simple, you have the media to thank for that (as I personally see it)!

so when we are in a stage of what happened, I wonder how many of these reporters remember the entire Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles case and how it all came to an end after 30 years, or did it?

In the end, it is the lack of journalistic integrity that gets to me. It is all about staging the story; it is no longer about reporting the news. There will be the players that do the right thing and the BBC is currently topping that list, but the issue is that this list of better journalistic publications is shrinking and it is not getting better or larger.

One of the players who set me off was TalkRadio (UK), she is not the best soul on this planet (in more ways than one). I think that when Tweeting a bombing pic as satire is just as low as any person can get and I do not fault her for being stupid, but she should not be that blatantly obvious about it, and in her defence that she is a staunch republican, I would say that so am I, yet I try to push for higher values within my own party and other parties. that does not mean that I am absent of humour, mine can be direct and perhaps to some offending at times, but it is never done in malice, Julia Hartley-Brewer tweeted in malice, which is not the same. Perhaps it was not satire, but sarcasm and when it bites back, it will merely be irony.

The example is actually important as we see at times the satirical presentation of events, and making sure that this is filtered out is equally important. In addition there have been places like Today, where we saw former CIA director John Brennan. Here we see direct answers on good questions, yet here we need to see another filtering. Here the filtering is that this is a former operative who was in Saudi Arabia, who knows the country and the people. It is a much better level of reliability and we should not ignore that, in opposition to other reporters who are unlikely to find Saudi Arabia and Riyadh on a blind map. In addition the other reports never added any reliable parts like John Brennan to the equation, merely their anonymous source, one that has more likely than not an anti-Saudi state of mind.

Whatever!

In the end, we need to look into ourselves too, I am doing just that and even as I understand why I was in a rage, I am still looking into the matter how that rage got to me. Just an hour ago, we see the BBC giving us: “The Turkish authorities say they have audio and video evidence of the killing – although these have not been made public. Turkish media with close links to the government have published gruesome details on the alleged audio, saying screams, and the voice of the consul, Mohammed al-Otaibi, could be heard in the recording“, yet the latter part cannot be proven at present, can it? that remains at the heart of the matter and as the BBC adds: “Russian President Vladimir Putin has said it is a pity that Mr Khashoggi has gone missing, but that Russia cannot damage relations with Saudi Arabia without hard facts” we are again confronted with the issue, there are for now no facts, nothing tangible and that is what matters, the additional disregard of the media because they are no longer trustworthy is making matters worse, they are worse as they could have been prevented. For us we are lucky that BBC news is still there to give us the quality goods.

There is one ironical part in all this, the final column by Jamal Khashoggi give us: “it left Saudis “either uninformed or misinformed”“, we are for the most in that very same position, in our case it is not the freedom of the press, it is the overly large freedom that allows the press to play with us for their direct needs and the need of the first three priorities that leaves us either uninformed or misinformed by making us ‘informed’ allegedly and though insinuation, which in the end is still misinformation.

Even now in the last hour, we get: “But a steady stream of unconfirmed leaks from officials to Turkish media have painted a detailed and horrifying picture of Khashoggi’s last minutes, allegedly at the hands of 15 Saudi agents waiting for him when he came to the consulate for paperwork”, all about unconfirmed, yet the setting that Turkey is an Iranian puppet is still kept out of the entire equation, is that not interesting too? How far can we be deceived and when it falls to holding the media accountable in all this, when we force that discussion to the table, how will the media react? How many politicians will suddenly take a step back and forget to voice concerns on properly informing the public?

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