Category Archives: Law

February 1, 2022 · 16:07

That first step

We have all heard it, the first step is admitting you have a problem. There is of course debate on WHAT the problem is. I am not any different. I hate stupidity, hypocorism and bot to mention short sighted issues. One of these issues is ‘Tax the rich’, we see all these stupid people screaming ‘tax the rich’ whilst the system is set, there is a tax system, there are tax laws and instead of all screaming to adjust the tax system we see the empty gesture to tax the rich, the rich do not care, they adhere to tax laws, so these laws will PROTECT them. Another issue was seen in ‘Greed and Law helping each other’, I wrote it on July 9th 2021 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/07/09/greed-and-law-helping-each-other/). There I set out the short sighted setting of the Oxycontin setting. I wrote “Yes, there are culprits in this story. You see some sources give us that in 1996 316,000 prescriptions were dispensed, it grew to an impressive amount topping over 14 million prescriptions with an estimated value of $3,000,000,000. The issue we see everyone painting over is ‘prescriptions dispensed’, this is not something that a person can get, it needs a doctor and it needs a pharmacist.” You see there are laws and rules, and they were massively broken by doctors and pharmacists. So when do they go to court? 

It is Reuters who give us today (at https://www.reuters.com/legal/transactional/sacklers-near-deal-contribute-more-opioid-settlement-purdue-pharma-bankruptcy-2022-01-31/) the story of ‘Sacklers near deal to increase opioid settlement in Purdue bankruptcy’, I personally do not believe that members of the Sackler family who own Purdue Pharma LP were completely innocent, yet that is not the setting is it? SOMEONE handed a paper to dispense Oxycontin, a pharmacist handed over the drugs. Yet nearly all of them banked the money and did not ring the alarm bell (some really did that) and those who cashed in on 14,000,000 prescriptions? Why are they not in court? Members of the Sackler family cannot hand over prescriptions, they cannot dispense drugs to people, they can merely distribute to pharmacies. So I do not believe that they are completely innocent, but to go after them and not after the doctors and pharmacies is (as I personally see) immoral. 

Yes, I know that in Torts you go after the money.

So in that setting: “Jeff Bezos, I do believe you owe me $50,000,000 post taxation, pay up please!”

But is any of that fair? You might say that fair has nothing to do with it and it is not incorrect but it is wrong. So when Reuters gives us “An agreement involving members of the Sackler family and several state attorneys general could potentially end a legal challenge that has prevented Purdue from exiting bankruptcy, and clear the way for a plan aimed at helping to abate the opioid crisis” my personal thoughts are wondering how many of these state attorney generals went after the doctors and the pharmacies? Justice handed in August 2021 a verdict, ‘Doctor Sentenced To More Than 15 Years In Prison For Conspiring To Distribute Thousands Of Oxycodone Pills Illegally’, there is no way in hell that only ONE doctor did that, so how many are serving 15 years? 

It is U.S. Attorney Audrey Strauss who gives us “Dr. Emmanuel Lambrakis wrote medically unnecessary prescriptions for thousands of oxycodone pills – an addictive and potentially fatal opiate.  Instead of abiding by his oath to ‘do no harm,’ Lambrakis pumped deadly drugs into the community.  Lambrakis put his own greed before his duties as a medical professional, and for that he will now spend a lengthy term in federal prison.” And as stated before, there is no way that there was merely one doctor guilty of that, in addition, there are truckloads of pharmacies that require the same amount of attention and that too is not being done to the degree it had to be done, it is my personal opinion that some state attorneys general’s were lazy and decided to go after the money, go for the easy conviction. Yes, the Sackler family benefitted, but who prescribed? Who handed them over? I see close to nothing on that. It is a simple tax the rich approach to a failing in law and a failing to observe the law and there are clearly a vast amount of doctors and pharmacies more guilty than any of the Sackler family. But we do not get to see that, do we?

As I see it, it started with that first step and the law has a problem, it cannot properly dispense justice to the wrongdoers. It merely went to the richest person and found them guilty. So what happens when it becomes about something more problematic? What happens when someone figures out that any Ponzi scheme can be done online handing the mess to Apple or perhaps Epic systems? So what happens when the hackers find the weakness in something like Nvidia’s GeForce Now service? What happens when 300,000,000 people lose $10-$35 and Epic goes ‘Not my Problem’, and Nvidia goes ‘We know nothing’? Who will end up with that bill of $3,000,000,000-$9,000,000,000 because the people will demand payment and as I see it the Justice departments will be globally clueless on how to proceed. The nice part here is that the court setting makes Apple automatically innocent, they had to open up the system and the people will merely lose their money. 

How a spindled world wide web we weave.

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January 13, 2022 · 17:22

Greed, Consumerism and safety?

There is a dangerous stance, a stance not on the safety of people, but on the revenue that they represent and there is every chance that this level of greed driven consumerism is at the core of a lot worse to come. 

Part 1
Part one is seen in the article (at https://www.reuters.com/world/china/us-criticizes-china-canceling-some-flights-over-covid-19-cases-2022-01-12/) called ‘U.S. criticises China over canceled flights’. There we see ““China’s actions are inconsistent with its obligations under the U.S.-China Air Transport Agreement. We are engaging with the (Chinese government) on this and we retain the right to take regulatory measures as appropriate,” a U.S. Transportation Department (USDOT) spokesperson said.” OK, we can accept that, but in that setting can that spokesperson please show us the paragraphs that deal with issues like pandemics? The greed driven will see and focus on ‘obligations’, but what of the safety of the people? The Chinese government is obliged to look after the safety of people, so where is that part? I am not taking a side whether one or the other is right and which party is wrong. Yet when I see “identify a path forward that minimises impact to travellers” I wonder who they are working for. In December, Bloomberg gave us ‘Omicron May Double Risk of Getting Infected on Planes, IATA Says’, I heard from a friend who went on vacation that the return flight was filled with people coughing and yes, two days later he had covid too. When will people learn that IF YOU ARE SICK YOU STAY AT HOME? And more important those who get sick on vacation are all about ‘safely getting home’ dangers be damned. And that is the core problem with air travel. So I cannot fault China for its position, I understand the greed driven side for getting people to travel, yet it seems to me that the greed driven do not care as long as they see the revenue, infections be damned. Those stating that they take all precautions are delusional, there will never be a safe route in this.

Part 2
The second part is given to us by SBS. There we see (at https://www.sbs.com.au/news/another-53-people-have-died-from-covid-19-as-nsw-posts-record-92-264-new-cases/4809f03d-d922-4c30-bfe8-6c1251568bfa) that ‘Another 53 people have died from COVID-19 as NSW posts record 92,264 new cases’, the issue is that when we see it next to the UK (120,000 cases) all whilst the population of the UK is 300% larger, we see that things do not add up, in that same setting the US with 829,000 cases are a larger setting. The us has around 500% of the population of the UK, yet they have a lot more infections. Now this is not the proper way to vet numbers, but there should be some linearity and these numbers are all over the place. So in this India with 247,500 cases all whilst they have 4 times the population of the US does not make sense. The numbers do not add up, I get it there could be a dozen elements influencing other facts, but the numbers are wrong, and I personally believe that India has a much larger problem, so when we consider that is it really wrong for China to act the way it does? 

The entire setting of flight have to continue in an era where we live in a pandemic, someone needs to wake up. The entire need to travel all whilst a lot of issues can be resolved virtually gets to be on the centre stage. In addition to that view we see “China has all but shut its borders to travellers, cutting total international flights to just 200 a week, or 2% of pre-pandemic levels”, is it right, it is wrong? It seems to me that it is to stop a wave of infections that have close to free rule in any nation that did not lock its borders. Last November the NY Times reported “At least 13 people who arrived in the Netherlands on two flights from South Africa on Friday were infected with the Omicron variant of the coronavirus, and more cases will most likely be found, Dutch health officials said on Sunday.” We saw South Africa protesting that it was a mild issue, now we have over 3 million new cases EVERY DAY, so how is that mild? How is the drastic shortage of hospital beds a mild consideration?

Is this what happens when greed shakes hands with consumerism? I do not know, but from where I sit, the view regarding the safety of people is close to totally ignored. There is every chance that those who closed their borders stand a much better chance. That is unless you open borders for tennis players who later admit “that he released a statement with new admissions, including the fact that he sat for an interview and maskless photoshoot knowing he had Covid without disclosing his status”, so a person who knew he had covid went knowingly and willingly maskless. And China is the one that is painted as the attacked party? I reckon that our laws and our regulations are blatantly failing in these pandemic stages, I will let you ponder on why that is and before you blame China for anything, wonder why no spokesperson raised issues on pandemic obligations that should be out there. I wonder how consumerism won that side of the battle. And before you think it will be easy peasy, consider what optionally might come AFTER Omicron and when that part is less mild, what will the consequences be? 

I do not know, but more important, the scientists that should know do not know either, it is new turf for them. So when we listen to obligations and consumerism lets also wonder how safe these obligations were in the first place, especially as yesterday gave us an additional 3,201,862 new cases. I will accept that most will be mild, but 1% might not be and that means that globally for 6-8 days 32,018 new beds need to be secured for the yesterdays cases alone. So what about tomorrow and the day after that? How many beds are left then? I do not know, do you?

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December 10, 2021 · 00:15

The reality of non-sense

This was the setting we see in the BBC, it is not on the BBC, they are innocent. Yet the article ‘You apply for a job – only for it to go to an internal candidate. Were you wasting your time all along?’ Should make plenty of people angry, especially if they are over 45. We get to see “Sometimes the requirement exists for immigration purposes, to ensure that a foreign resident is only hired for a job that a local can’t fill. For instance, in Australia, companies generally need to have an open recruitment process, even if they already know the overseas worker they want to hire”, this sounds nice, especially the “companies generally need to have an open recruitment process”, yet the age discrimination in Australia makes that statement a wash. A friend once told me “Australia is great for the young”, I didn’t get it until it was much too late. The phrase actually needs to say “Australia is great for the young, the rest can fuck off”, a setting I have seen rolling out for close to a decade and it is not just the small places, the big players like Google and Apple are every bit as guilty. If you do per level an age comparison these two (optionally several large tech as well) will have numbers that will not make sense, they will look skewed, too skewed. 

So when we are given “all too many job seekers have shared stories of applying for a job, seeing that an internal hire was made and suspecting – or being told – the company’s intention was to hire that current employee all along”, the non ageing affect is seemingly overlooked. So when you consider the story (at https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20211206-can-you-ever-beat-an-internal-candidate-for-a-job) be aware that a few elements are left outside the door, for Australia age discrimination is a real deal and there are plenty of examples out there.

The Australian Human Rights Commission reported this year on several key findings. 

  1. Ageism exists in Australia
  2. Ageism affects Australians across the adult lifespan.

I am merely mentioning two as that should be enough, the report that you can download (at https://humanrights.gov.au/our-work/age-discrimination/publications/whats-age-got-do-it-2021) gives a lot more. We see the article that makes all kinds of references, but ageism is left out of the consideration. There is not one mention on it, and when you see the article on ‘were you wasting your time all along?’ That same thing can be said for anyone applying for jobs when they are over 50, they are seemingly disregarded in every walk of life, even now when we see the massive shortages, the aged worker seemingly does not stand a chance. 

Forbes even came with ‘10 Steps To Proactively Address The Problem’ (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/sheilacallaham/2021/11/29/workplace-ageism-requires-leadership-action-10-steps-to-proactively-address-the-problem/) There we see “10 Ways Leaders Can Take Action Now”, yet the reality is that these so called leaders will have to listen to superiors too, and they will hand out some policy notice that they are working on it. 

In all the reality of non-sense is that there is no sense, it is about sales and populism and when that segment is depending on the young, the old will have to sit in a corner to wait until they die. Harsh but that is how it seemingly is at present.

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December 3, 2021 · 22:03

It is difficult

One one hand, thee was a reason to be joyful. There was another article by Stephanie Kirchgaessner, so let the bashing begin. On the other hand, this is actually a good article. It is also an important article. And there is a stage where we need to consider what is and what could be. The article ‘Rights groups urge EU to ban NSO over clients’ use of Pegasus spyware’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/law/2021/dec/03/rights-groups-urge-eu-to-ban-nso-over-clients-use-of-pegasus-spyware). This is interesting in two ways. We see no such ban on Remington, Fabrique national, Glock and a few other firms. And I would like to add that the NSA has done worse, much worse, so why is it now onto the NSO because their clients are skating on the edge of what some people might seem as ‘unacceptable’?

We see “Letter signed by 86 organisations asks for sanctions against Israeli firm, alleging governments used its software to abuse rights”, we see it, but do we realise what is going on? We are holding the publisher of a law book accountable for criminals using those books to stay out of prison. And it is not mere criminals using the books, it is governments using the books. 

This is a slippery slope and as Stephanie Kirchgaessner illuminates this, we are left with questions. I personally want to see a list of these 86 organisations. I am not saying that the Guardian is lying, I am stating that the NSO and us have a right to see these accusers. Yes, we see Access Now, Amnesty International and the Digital Rights Foundation. But where are the others? We also see “the EU’s sanctions regime gave it the power to target entities that were responsible for “violations or abuses that are of serious concern as regards to the objectives of the common foreign and security policy, including violations or abuses of freedom of peaceful assembly and of association, or of freedom of opinion and expression””, it is here that the problem starts. We see “freedom of opinion and expression”, but who allows for that? Who allows for ‘peaceful assembly’? Consider the US and their ‘Black Lives Matter’ setting. We see “Some states have recently increased the severity of criminal penalties for protesters along political lines”, so where is your freedom of expression and opinion now? 

There is an issue, there is and in this Stephanie is right, but is there any kind of stage where the NSO can be held responsible for the actions of their clients? What do you think will happen when the NSO sells what they have to China and/or Russia? Do you think these 86 organisations will have anything to say then? 

And there is a larger stage, the stage everyone is silent about, the stage we all know but no one is willing to look there. We are so willing to blame the NSO group, but no one is wondering why Apple and Google didn’t have better protection? We can understand that there are always, but they do not seem to work and for some reason, Apple and Google have a massive problem. So when we consider Forbes ‘Apple Starts Sending NSO Hack Warnings To iPhone Users’, why was this not done earlier, and more important why was the problem not fixed 5 years ago? Apple is playing the cautious game, leaving the NSO group out of the debate with “State-sponsored attackers are very well-funded and sophisticated, and their attacks evolve over time. Detecting such attacks relies on threat intelligence signals that are often imperfect and incomplete. It’s possible that some Apple threat notifications may be false alarms, or that some attacks are not detected. We are unable to provide information about what causes us to issue threat notifications, as that may help state-sponsored attackers adapt their behaviour to evade detection in the future.” So why are new phones not more secure? Why are cyber locks a problem? Because Apple (Google too) caters to people who need automation to get better and more revenue and that crosses with the needs of some players who need access. 

In all this, the simplest solution was that no one gets access to your mobile, and it is not a new concept. The Blackberry started that idea and was quickly pushed out of the market (they were not the cheapest either). I saw this come up a few times when I was considering the evolution of a console (name xxxxxxxx redacted) , but the premise is larger and it is all linked to the simple setting that Facebook opened a door and EVERYONE wants to get through. In this case the NSO group saw that as a great idea to collect information and they are not alone, let that be clear, they might be the most visible player, but they are not the only player, but the article does not give that part, do they? You see there were a few nations on the list (that everyone ignores) and they are not NSO group clients, but they have certain abilities, so they are a client of someone and these 86 organisations are about to give that one player (with no scruples) the entire market.

Did you consider that?

Moreover, the accusations from some against the NSO group are still absent of evidence. Several newspapers gave light that the list of 10,000 was bogus and it was from 2017. In addition, I found the financial link missing, 10,000 hacks implied that the NSO group had received in excess of $600,000,000 and they have not. Some give us specifically worded accusations. Like the Citizens Lab giving us that 36 phones might (emphasis on might) have been transgressed upon, 36 out of 76, and we seemingly delete the word ‘might’ with our minds, but I did not. I am not opposing the Citizens Lab, but 36 might out of a debatable list of 10,000 is a long stretch and so far none of the media have given us any clear evidence, but these 86 organisations see there limelight moment, so they are all crying foul (or is that fowl). 

I for one want to see the media become responsible and hand over a dashboard of alleged victims. 10,000 numbers, that would be a massive list, but a dashboard stating how many are government, how many are journalists (which was in one article no more than 180, I think) making that a mere 1.8%. How many infections per nation? The list goes on and the media over all these months presented ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. But now we see “Letter signed by 86 organisations asks for sanctions against Israeli firm”, all whilst no clear evidence has been presented EVER. This is ab out something else and it has nothing to do with the NSO group, it has everything to do with a group of journalists who have become obsolete and as we see event after even (like that running Joke called the ICIJ), how much evidence have we see on their so called 11.9 million leaked documents with 2.9 terabytes of data, and zero (none) dashboard giving a summary, even with all that time and 600 journalists no one had time to give us a run down, that is how pathetic the media has become. Oh and they promised not to investigate the source, interesting is it not?

All flaming for digital revenue and presenting close to nothing, flames and way too little  substance. So when we ask these media players for clarity, their most likely answer will be ‘It is difficult’

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November 12, 2021 · 04:40

Epic downfall

This happens, I saw it coming and today as the BBC gives me (at https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-59234961) ‘Apple v Epic: Court denies delay on App Store changes’ we have come to a point. A point where Epic Games will lose billions, not millions, billions. You see, the larger issue is not the fee, it is that too many ApplePay options are not completely secure, as such the moment we see the first few issues go sour, when people are dented by credit card fees and scams that started with Epic, that is the moment the class actions come calling and they will come calling in a huge way. There will be no defence for Epic Games. There will not be some ‘I know nothing’ approach. It will be on Epic Games. They wanted to cut costs and they did, but the costs in hind-fall will outrank all revenue they would hope to make.

And all this is beside the issues (source: Eurogamer) “Epic Games is also facing a class-action lawsuit following a data breach which exposed personal information from millions of users’ accounts. The data breach occurred back in January this year, when hackers found a flaw in Fortnite’s login system, allowing them to impersonate players and purchase V-Bucks with the bank information attached to their accounts” and the issue outside of Fortnite will escalate a lot faster than they feared it could. I reckon that first issues will emerge within 3 months of the alternative to ApplePay path and it will not take long until lawyers will suit up for class actions all worth billions. Epic will need a lot more lawyers soon enough and it will cost them. It could constitute the dangers (for Epic) that 2021 started the downfall that could have been avoided, a setting they caused themselves and the greedy hackers saw a clear new target, Epic Games with a bullseye. A bullseye that will be painted on their CEO and CFO, what a wild web we tend to weave.

A setting that they could have and should have avoided. An optional first in the dangers of greed. What a lovely day this could become.

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November 8, 2021 · 18:01

The call of a budgie

Yes, that is almost the foundation of a new cartoon, the story of Sylvester the cat and his sunny side show, Tweety. A show that was funny when we were younger than 13, but now? That is the stage we face (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59182278) with ‘Twitter poll calls on Elon Musk to sell 10% stake in Tesla’. What is this? It is like the BBC has lost its senses. Just like the Dutch government who claimed that they gave in to Twitter pressure when they made a deal with Sywert van Lieden, and no one is asking questions that matters. 

In the first Twitter is no valid source of information, none of the vote can be verified. It could will be three politicians each wielding a troll army of 235,000, we cannot tell. Don’t get me wrong, I love Twitter, it updates me from sources that give me information. Newspapers that have a good reputation, movie productions that give me time lines and optionally a trailer or two, new games. And sometimes a link to something that matters, but polls? A shouting app that allows the rude and the loud to set policy? Never! Its like giving the power of policy on meat to the vegetable store down the road. Or perhaps it lets the NBA make NHL rulings. The proverbial ‘fuck that!’ comes to mind. 

So in this case it is about a poll that allegedly (because a Twitter account can always be hacked) Elon Musk put in the field and the BBC turn it into a lie. They give you “Voters in a Twitter poll have urged Elon Musk to sell 10% of his stake in Tesla in order to pay tax.” That is not what happened. Elon Musk (allegedly) put a question to an audience where he stated “Much is made lately of unrealized gains being a means of tax avoidance, so I propose selling 10% of my Tesla stock. Do you support this?” The response was that 57.9% said yes. We see no numbers, but it could be that 579 out of 1000 said yes. And it is a mere question he aired. And the setting is more. Tax avoidance, or black letter law is legally allowed, it merely means that he would pay what he is due, not what we THINK he is due and the larger stage is that it is again about tax laws, a setting both democrats and republicans have never ever adjusted, not in 2 decades. 

Then we see a part that matters, the BBC gives us “In an earlier tweet on Saturday, Mr Musk said he took no salary or bonuses from any of his companies – meaning he has no earnings on which to pay income tax. But he has made billions of dollars through a compensation package, which gives him power to exercise large amounts of stock options when the company meets performance targets and its shares hit certain prices.” He is legally allowed to do this and certain stupid players need to stop baiting the hook, the law is there, he can do this and he does. It is not good, it is not bad, it is allowed. To be honest, it a certain Randy Lennox takes the steps I could (hopefully) end up with 10% of $400M-$600M. Do you think I will not take these steps? You have got to be joking. The tax laws allow me to do this and I will, it is the law. 

And I am not alone, more and more take this step, because the law allows me to do this. The tax overhaul,. The one step that stops this is avoided by politicians, why is that? Why are these (stupid) people relying on Twitter to try to pressure people? We know it is not a valid source, it can be an informative source, but cannot be verified (so you need to take care on what to believe) and the list goes on (and on and on and on). So there we have a setting and the BBC justly adds to this with “Mr Musk has an option, which expires in August next year, to buy 22.86 million Tesla shares at $6.24 each – a fraction of Tesla’s closing share price on Friday of $1,222.

Under plans proposed by the Democratic Party in the Senate, billionaires could be taxed on “unrealised gains” when the price of their shares goes up – even if they do not sell any of their stock.” This would add another $23,000,000,000 non taxable funds (at the moment). The law allows him to do this, I saw some of my bosses (in the past) do this with much smaller numbers and it has been legal for at least 30 years. If it was such a taboo why didn’t they stop it them. In that time the US had Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and now President Biden, and so far none have done anything. Well the proposition is from the current president, but I reckon that the votes will fail. And even if it holds up, I feel 99.335% certain that there will be a hiatus and there will be ways around it. Thousands of tax lawyers ill be ready to take that proposition apart and drive wedges through its X, Y and Z axis. 

And as some players claim, the value does not always go up. Elon Musk is one man but hundreds of others do the same, if one gets taxed up to these hundreds can use that setting to make it all tax deductible a side the people are eager to avoid staring at, because they see this one Elongatedly uberly rich Musk and they forget that the one winner comes with 999 losers. Do you really wanna give a tax cut to the 999 that follow?

And credit to the BBC to add the comment by Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman who gives us “Looking forward to the day when the richest person in the world paying some tax does not depend on a Twitter poll” the one sane view in the article. Especially as one of the other Musk polls or statements got ‘altered’ to attain the flaming audience. I too would have questions for Elon Musk, but it would be on his new mobile and other settings that accompany this. I wonder if there is a side that is the danger of a much larger dangerous issue in the works. I am not claiming it is, I am merely wondering on the chances of this, and not from him or his endeavour, but on the dangers of third parties doing something stupid (as they tend to do when their pupils turn to dollar signs). For now I merely wonder, perhaps I will see an opposing view when the clear facts are presented to the world. 

I know, it is merely the view of little (and seemingly old) me, and that does not constitute evidence, but it calls for all kinds of questions, does it not? The call of a budgie is nice when you are drinking tea (or coffee) yet the stage of Twitter remains that we can switch it off when we do something that is important to us, did you consider that? And I get that the BBC saw this as an opening, but I reckon they could have written it differently, but that is my personal view on the matter. Have a fun day!

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November 5, 2021 · 19:04

Egg-timer please?

Wow! That did not take long. I expected it to take a little longer than now, but here you have it, the first player of COP26 is already making excuses that the deforestation 2030 promise might not be kept. The article (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-59169547) gives us ‘Indonesia criticises ‘unfair’ deal to end deforestation’. I get it, Indonesia is reliant on their brown gold and cannot let go, even as the setting is 8 years away, they already have an issue and when we consider the original statement (by yours truly) “a joke optionally forgotten by January 1st 2029, when most signatories are no longer in office and a landmark adjustment is made towards 2035, optionally 2038”, I made the comment 2 days ago in ‘Fake it till you brake it’ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2021/11/03/fake-it-till-you-break-it/), yet it turns out that I was the optimist, I thought they would take longer, but the BBC gives us “Indonesia’s natural wealth, including forests, must be managed for its use according to sustainable principles, besides being fair”, this sounds fair, but how many people actually benefit this? And when we consider some sources, one giving us that in one month 387 containers of lumber were shipped and we get it, there is a lumber and wood requirement on a global setting and there are 8 years left, but consider the image below.

How much of this you see was needed for a road? On average a road is lets say 10-15 meters wide, and goes on for miles, so how much of this was optionally meant for a road and how much for something else? The ink of the COP26 agreements have not even dried yet and Indonesia is already complaining. I reckon that they are not alone, the others will wait a year, or wait until the next person is in office. And then there is the Sydney Morning Herald. They give us ‘The Greta effect: is Glasgow fuelled by real momentum or just blah blah blah?’. They also give us (at https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/the-greta-effect-is-glasgow-fuelled-by-real-momentum-or-just-blah-blah-blah-20211104-p595ul.html) what is interesting is the time line they give us on times that Greta spoke (an anagram for ‘great’ I reckon). It shows some of her statements going back to December 2018 and she was right time after time (as was I), but the Indonesian setting shows just how much of a joke the COP seemingly is, the ink hasn’t dried yet or the first signatory is complaining. And I get it, Indonesia is in a tough spot. And I reckon I am about to make it worse for them. 

In 1700 a wooden cabinet was only an option for the really wealthy, they got:


Now this is not about the wealth, it is about what they wanted in those days, it is also what others needed and there is the larger rub. You see, I do not mind that we all need bookcases, but the consumerism made a joke about furniture and places like IKEA made a killing, we suddenly were able to get a new furniture look almost EVERY YEAR. That is not on us or IKEA, what was rare was suddenly all around and a brown gold economy was created. Soon there after were investor portfolios in brown gold all over the place and it was a lucrative setting, but we seemingly have reduced the forests by one third over the period 1990 – 2015, a freaking whopping 5,670,000 ha of forest are GONE! Over 25 years one third is gone and we need to wake up, we need to wake up really quick. The sentiment of ‘Planting ‘millions of trees’ may not be the answer to deforestation’ (source: the Guardian yesterday) is wrong, not because of the statement, it comes with the underlying “can impact negatively on hydrology and local land rights, writes Prof Tim Forsyth”, which is fair enough. My personal uneducated view would be that any deforested area could be repopulated with trees and should be as soon as possible. It is essential for several reasons and if it was deforested there would be no local land rights (well in most cases anyway). The larger state is that we see floods and they are horrid, yet how much of that water would be good enough for feeding trees? Not enough I reckon, but it might take have some impact on waters. Tim Forsyth has got a decent point, also one that is made with “The desire to do something about climate change and deforestation should not blind us to asking important questions about whether proposed solutions are actually feasible, or might generate other difficult problems”, he has a point. Yet former NASA engineer Mark Rober showed us forestation options and they work, so far we saw ‘Mark Rober and MrBeast Team Up to Plant 20 Million Trees’ and so far they exceeded this, at this point they are at 23,000,000 trees. They did what the whining political population seemingly cannot achieve, a group of two that did not require a marketing entourage. 

Now they are in a setting of team seas and there they are making waves as well. 

And now the bad news (for Indonesia) they are setting a few more goals and I think that there is more that can be done. You did not think that I pushed a picture of a pretty cupboard just because it was pretty? This would be a decent reason, but my idea goes towards changing place like IKEA as well. You see all that regained plastic from recycling and cleaning the oceans are nice, but what than? I am thinking of uniting a Meccano and IKEA approach to set a new sort of construction kit, plastic fundamentals replacing what we have now as furniture. Do you think that my upholstered bed will care what is under the cloth? If it is a sturdy plastic frame instead of wood? I can’t see that and a lot of furniture is now coated wood anyway. As we start replacing wooden items in the house for recycled plastics we solve a larger setting. As woods are less needed brown gold will lose value. We can to some degree repopulate the 33% of forest we destroyed and after that we can do more. We need to take another look on how we waste materials. Does my nightstand need to be wood? I do not think so and plastic can be just as lacquered as wood or glass is and when the lacquer holds, can we tell, do we need to be able to tell? We need real solutions and we need them a lot sooner then we think we did. Did anyone consider the fact that we destroyed 33% of our trees? To do something we need more than mere  promises, we need to change the way we see wood as brown gold, we ned alternatives and as we see forced changes (there is no longer any other way) we see that the loggers will lose their incomes and will need to go to other places making their margins slim down. It is unfair on places like Brazil, Indonesia and a few others. Brown gold is all they have but it can no longer be seen as fair on us all and we too are to blame, we need to be cool and get something new from IKEA, because we already had that same piece of furniture 2-3 years. Our stupid mindset is part of this problem and I reckon that if we have an alternative, we can feed the sense of change, but now using plastics we kill two targets with one recycled piece of furniture. 

We could time the COP objections with an egg timer, I wonder how many more will object before 2025? At least I am thinking out of the box (as are several others). How many more are needed to change the waves and show the politicians that they are the jokes that too many already claimed they were? And that is before I get angry (like I did with a few others this week) and personally I still believe that Randy Lennox owes me $25M, but that is a fight for another day, yet I am feeling frisky, so it might not take too long and even as he might hand the invoice over to Gary Slaight or Jeff Bezos, is basically equal to me. I played the straight pointless game for too long, so far it got me nothing, time to get the limelights out. Indeed pissed me off today a little more than I was comfortable with. It just sucks to be me today.

Have a great weekend!

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November 4, 2021 · 20:03

Birds of a feather

I altered the expression to a more apt and more temporary version, it is ‘Birds of a feather intersect together’. This view is based on a few different and mostly unrelated pieces of information. To see the string on this loom, we need to make a few jumps.

The first string
The first string is seen with Reuters, who (at https://www.reuters.com/business/finance/spies-lies-losses-credit-suisses-scandals-2021-11-04/) gives us ‘Spies, lies and losses: Credit Suisse’s scandals’. Here we see “Credit Suisse pleaded guilty to defrauding investors over an $850 million loan to Mozambique meant to pay for a tuna fishing fleet and is paying U.S. and British regulators $475 million to settle the case under a deal announced in October”, we see the news and we shrug. I did too, you see the people were caught, but that is not the real deal, the issue becomes all the people who get away with it and it is a massive amount of money. I recently write about about some convicted crypto scammer who when the way Victor Fleming did (a gone with the wind joke). So there is one and there are many more. 

The second string
The second string is given to us by the Dutch NOS, a string that makes me reconsider an earlier statement. They give us (at https://nos.nl/l/2404250) ‘‘Unprecedented fraud’ in Pels Rijcken case, civil-law notaries before disciplinary court’, a case with notaries is pretty unheard of, so when I saw “only one notary was responsible for the embezzlement of approximately 11 million euros. Still, several notaries of the office have to appear before the disciplinary court” I was slightly baffled and it opened a window, or a trap door to a third story, one from the past. You see, we are so set in some of our ways that the event of one is pretty amazing, it also gives us food for thought. This comes from my decades in customer service. You see, for every one complaint that makes it to our desks, there are 30 that didn’t. At times that makes sense. People do not bother, others hide the complaint, or paint over it. Yet the larger stage is there. So if one notary is seen as a culprit, how many get away with it? Now, if someone states that this is an unfair comparison, I will agree completely, but the thought remains and the thought still has merit, even if the one out of 30 is not correct. 

String number three
This takes us back, to a TV series that reigned from 1978-1986. It was the girl Dana Plato, and for many young man she was on many minds. She ended with a terrible ending, but in part it was due to an accountant, who was seen as a much larger culprit. We get “In desperation over these traumatic events, she signed over power of attorney to an accountant who disappeared with the majority of her money, leaving her with less than $150,000. She claimed the accountant was never found nor prosecuted, despite an exhaustive search, and that he had also stolen more than $11 million of other people’s money”, an issue around 1989, the culprit was never found, whether the FBI just couldn’t be bothered (because of case pressures and resources), or because the accountant was too slippery and too good. We can only guess on this part, but the larger stage is true. If numbers hold up, with the right economics degree you can become a more wealthy and more successful criminal than any cat burglar can and that is at the forefront here.

You see, the lack of regulation and proper registration is a stage whey that so called queen of Crypto got away with a massive scam, why we see victims like Dana Plato, the notary scam in the Netherlands and the events at Credit Suisse and those are but a few of a massive pool of events. Being a criminal in this day and age is too profitable and there is no turning the tide at present and seemingly not for a long time to come. The news on Crypto scams is making that clear all over the globe. A stage that was foreseen but the administrations are too busy looking at vague accusations and too often lacking clearly stated evidence and numbers by sources like the ICIJ (just an example). 

There is no present course of relieving dangers for anyone and if you do not do your homework you will lose your money with an ever decreasing chance of EVER getting. Penny back. I believe that in part the cutting corners stage that financial institutions have is part of that, it is only part and not all. There is no clear path towards solving it, because the larger players have all stretched their credit cards for too long and the larger banks see that they have a chance to make a few billions in the process, yet the resource limits that some governments have gives some players a chance to take that risk and that is the problem, birds of a feather intersect together. If three of them play individual games, one will get away and if the one makes a deal with the other two, they all go to their beach house whistling I will alway love you, you £1,000,000 voucher. And with that the financial future is close to secure. It is a setting that is unlikely to change any day soon, no matter what some fraud divisions and the FBI claim. 

A setting we are alas forced to live with, but feel free to find that one accountant the authorities missed and hang him from the highest lamp post on Wall Street as a sign of your frustration.

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November 3, 2021 · 20:17

The citizen model

We have seen the stage where governments all over the world started the wave of ‘Tax the rich’. The stage is wrong on two settings. In the first, we are a nation of laws, most nations are that and taxation is part of law. This results in two groups of people, the criminally inclined people who rely on Tax evasion, not paying the tax and the people relying on accountants and lawyers to set the stage of tax avoidance, which is paying the minimum they have to pay. One is criminal one is not. The tax avoidance people rely on black letter law, not the spirit of the law, but on what the lawmakers wrote down as the playing rules of a game. The rich use tax avoidance, it is not semantics, it is a state where they use the law as they can, as they are ALLOWED to do. 

So what happened to bring this to the surface? 

Well, the BBC gives us a long story and a decent recap (at https://www.bbc.com/news/stories-59062959) where we see ‘The Cryptoqueen’s £13.5m London penthouse’. Here we are introduced to the works of cryptocurrency scammer Dr Ruja Ignatova. 

We are given a lot of emotion, but some of the facts sipe through. There is “facing charges connected to the siphoning of millions of euros from Dr Ruja’s €4bn scam – which consisted of selling something that didn’t exist, a fake cryptocurrency she called OneCoin”, a seemingly clear case, or is it? We add “the lease was signed in August 2016, financial regulators in at least one European country had already issued a warning about OneCoin. A few months earlier, Dr Ruja had pleaded guilty to fraud and other charges in a German court, after bankrupting a metal factory she’d bought and leaving 150 people jobless in 2011”, so we see a stage that tarted in 2011, 11 years earlier. A lease was extended 5 years ago with at least one warning out in the open. Then we get “According to the property deed its owner is Abbots House Penthouse Limited. An anonymous Guernsey shell company – one of 12,000 such companies that own properties in England and Wales – meaning that Dr Ruja’s name would not have to appear on the UK deed, or in public records in the Channel Island.”

Apart from the stage of Fraud and scamming, she broke no laws, she was extremely careful not to break any. Then on 25 October that year she boarded a Ryanair flight from Sofia to Athens, and vanished off the face of the Earth.

So we have an Oxford educated woman who knew hat strides to walk and she vanished with up to 4 billions and the existence of the current laws allows her to remain unfound until she is old, grey and still worth millions at that point. She won’t care what they call her. She will not care as she lives in her private golden cage, surrounded by walls of anonymous stages and staff (mostly lawyers). Consider if the law is useless to capture a criminal who knows the laws, what do you think will happen to a lawful obedient citizen with equal if not more wealth? What I stated again and again for 11 years is that tax laws need an overhaul. All these emotional people shouting ‘tax the rich’ is fun for TV, but useless in the stage of the law, until they are correctly adjusted. 

And the deceived investors? The ‘OneCoin Investors Entirely Dismiss Class Actions Lawsuit’ headline shows it. They no longer stand a decent chance of getting their money back. Het getting found and serving 90 years in prison is the best they can hope for. And those chances do not look good at present. Consider a wanted person named Ghislaine Maxwell. It took forever to arrest her in Bradford, New Hampshire by the FBI on 2 July 2020. It took them years to get a handle on her and she was wanted in plenty of places. The ultra rich are not breaking laws, the are not wanted and they are allowed to move what THEY own. The stage is laughable, the FBI and other parties required years to make a case, in case of one convicted fraudster 11 years and nothing was gained, not even an arrest. So do you still think I was blowing some horn? The flaccid politicians who claim and not deliver, they are part of the problem and them not overhauling the tax laws for well over a decade is a first sign of evidence. Inaction surpassing a decade, consider that evidence and see where that takes you.

The BBC article (beside the added emotions) is quite the revelation, you should take notice, because this helplessness will continue for at least another decade and I do understand it is too early to say, but when deforestation does not end in 8 years, you’ll know I am right and we both get to take that knowledge to our graves, that is where we are all heading anyway.

The model citizen in a citizen model is a joke, because if the law decides what a model citizen is, we also hold the first clear legal evidence that it pays to be a criminal, did you realise that when you read the BBC article?

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October 29, 2021 · 23:38

The blank stage

There is a stage, it remains blank. It is not a real stage, it is a stage in our minds. We all have one, there is no exclusion. Yet there is also a stage that we fill with assumptions, with presumptions and with unspoken accusations. We all do it, I do, and you do too. This all started during the night. I dreamt a new story, a dark one, for my doing a really dark one. It is set around the corrupt, a smitten hard burning love at first sight and the rage that follows. My mind is currently naming it ‘Wrath’, it is not merely the wrath of a person, it becomes an escalation when the people had enough, when they are pushed into a corner too hard, not unlike the main character and their response will be ‘interesting’. I need to do a little more research, but the law cases I saw in Australia seem to cover a lot, I reckon that if I look harder in the US I will have all the legal settings ready for the story (if I get around to it). I am still filling in the blanks in ‘Keno Diastima’ and I only have the smallest of basic foundations of ‘Vita Exhauriunt’. Most of ‘How to assassinate a politician’ is complete, but there I feel that more needs to be done, I need to add a cog, a need to add a few more parts. This is hardly a one hour story. But then, I never published an actual script before. Yet I reckon that ‘Wrath’ might open the doors to two of these solutions. So as I started to surf the internet to see if something could wake up my mind, I saw something else. Something I wrote about, something the media at large seems to ignore. So when we get to the story two days ago by the ICIJ ‘Pandora Papers journalists face government backlash for investigating financial secrecy’ (at https://www.icij.org/investigations/pandora-papers/pandora-papers-journalists-face-government-backlash-for-investigating-financial-secrecy/) something stirred in me. It was the quote “The Pandora Papers is a global investigation led by ICIJ, published earlier this month, that included more than 600 journalists representing 150 partner media organisations from 117 countries and territories. Based on a leak of 11.9 million documents of 14 offshore services providers, the trove revealed the secret holdings of more than 330 politicians and high-level public officials in more than 90 countries and territories, including 35 country leaders. Ambassadors, mayors and ministers,  presidential advisers, generals and a central bank governor appear in the files”, I almost had forgotten about it. The station that this was a leak, it was not. When we see “14 offshore services providers” all whilst at least two of them have above average protection, this has not a leak. This was a hack, a hack by a government player (most likely the USA) the tax issue is setting the wrong steps, there was a delay, but that delay runs out in 8 weeks and in 6 weeks the ‘tax the rich’ BS starts all over again. In all this time the ICIJ NEVER gave anyone a top line summary. Things like nations involved, like nations with the amount of politicians involved. Not names, a mere tally. So far the ICIJ sounds as useless as the stories they give us and when it comes to stories, I am seemingly better then they could ever hope to be. 600 journalists and no one in all that time create a dashboard for the people to see the impact. We see accusations against Tony Blair, yet they also hid inside the story that he did not break any laws, so how useless is that. Apart from the screaming need to overhaul tax laws, something I have been advocating for well over a decade and the NSA hack (the most likely player) was not required. And the agreement, or better stated the quoted agreement that the ICIJ would not go after the source is even more lame. How stupid do 600 journalists need to get? In the end there is a chance that some of them will move ALL their wealth to Nassau, Dubai, or Riyadh giving the other nations ever more to worry about. There are options for Guernsey, Jersey and Monaco. The US and a few more places would lose out, Wall Street would suffer greatly (not the worst idea) and that is merely thee beginning, the EU would also suffer to a much larger degree, all because a few players would not clean their rooms when they were supposed to do that (2009-2011), it has been playing for well over a decade and as people are flim-flammed into looking at environmental issues, we see that the media still has not taken a hard look at the European Environmental Agency report that has been out now for almost a year. Why is that? Is a hard look into the mirror not sexy enough?

Now, we might all think of giving the ICIJ and their 600 journalists time, but they’ve had months, and so far the setting of a dashboard that gives us the stage of no laws broken (especially the billionaires that have pushed through legally available  means their fortune in zero tax havens) should cover well over 60% of these documents (a fictive number). The simplest setting that you all can see is the missing tally, the guardian gave us a tally of what to look through, but they had the 330 politicians, so that part could have been clearly given and a dashboard does not show criminal sides, it is merely that a tally, but I reckon that the tally shows that most of these people are in places the bulk of us do not give a hoot about, just like the billionaires. How many are people of royalty from some Arabian nation? Then we get to the remaining billionaires and we will see that they broke no laws, when you get to that point you get to the stage how useless the ICIJ was from day one and how they blow their own horn whilst these 600 people might be obsolete. I cannot guarantee that, but the assumption might not be far off. 

The blank stage is filled, and as assumption and presumption shake hands the stage goes from black and white to a malleable version of grey where we cannot see the difference between the black and the white. It was that from the very beginning, I pretty much predicted that in the first hour. 

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