Category Archives: Law

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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October 28, 2021 · 19:15

Baffled

I have that at times, don’t you? We see something, we see a statement and we go towards the ‘Are you for real?’ queue. This happened to me this morning. It was an article about the ‘Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’ I had seen a few pass by on earlier occasions and for the most I do not care. There is nothing novel and news about someone blowing its own trumpet trying to be as important as they could never be, to be as innovative as they dream they are and as clever as they could hope to be. Even Google takes a gander as she is now seen as a ‘American former businesswoman’, former being the operative word. We see some papers throw ‘How Elizabeth Holmes lured rich VIPs like Rupert Murdoch to back Theranos’ at us, with the optional “to avoid the potential pressure from larger investment firms to go public, according to an investor at the DeVos family office who kicked in $US100 million for the blood-testing startup”, and there we have the first part, even if it is hidden between the lines. It is ‘to avoid the potential pressure’, and no one here beckons the thought that some (especially investment firms) going with ‘to avoid the gaze of scrutiny’. Then there is ‘Elizabeth Holmes trial hit by new concern: losing too many jurors’ for whatever reasons (one involving Sudoku), and I see no real interest, but in the first setting with what the BBC gives us now, I see a much larger flaw, a flaw of stupidity. You see the article (at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-59071205) gives us that one part, that one statement ‘Are you for real?’ It was not the headline ‘DeVos family ‘misled’ before investing $100m’, it was the quote “Lance Wade, suggested the DeVos family had not done proper due diligence, to which Ms Peterson replied: “We didn’t think we needed it.”” In this my personal view of Lisa Peterson, a representative of the DeVos family’s investment office, states that it was not needed? How blazingly stupid is this investment office? More important when we consider that Betsy Devos, a Republican, served as education secretary under Donald Trump. We need to wonder if the defendant shouldn’t be let off in line of the old expression of ‘A fool and his/her money are soon parted’. It is one of the reason that only three players are allowed onto my 5G IP, but to be honest, it was done for very different reasons, the idea that an investment firm is too stupid to be allowed anywhere near my IP is a novel idea and I have to admit that I never considered that. The idea that $100,000,000 does not require due diligence with the optional “We didn’t think we needed it” is the wet dream of any organised crime endeavour. So what on earth is the case here? In the setting of Elisabeth Holmes, if she gets nicked for her actions, fine! And in this case, if she is seen as a person who was delusional yet not guilty would be just as as fine as the first option. To be honest, I have no issues with people being delusional, at times we all are. Yet the idea that she might walk because the prosecution side didn’t think it was essential to have due diligence on investing $100,000,000 makes me giggle and if she is released because of that so much the better. To be honest, this is seemingly turning into a new version of war of the Roses, a stage of dumb and dumber part 3. Devos versus Holmes and the one more stupid gets the other one off the hook, a novel setting indeed.

Even as we all recognise that Fraud is a serious crime and a more serious accusation. I now wonder on the diligence that Wade Miquelon, the former chief financial officer of pharmacy chain Walgreens did. This is not an accusation, it is a question. I do not have access to an active case and I do not have insight into what happened before, hence I ask. There is now also the question on ‘Former Safeway boss Steve Burd said his company spent 100 hours doing due diligence on Theranos’ I am not doubting Steve Burd, I wonder how complete the cover-up was to get this man on board. And the less said about Sunil Dhawan the better, from what I gather, he seems to be the putz, an optional shield for Elisabeth Holmes to hide behind, one that didn’t pan out as far as I can see. 

And as I started today, I saw a side of a fraud case that had me baffled, for most of us (ever republicans) this is a case that is loaded with entertainment and that distinction would make me want to put down my game of Sudoku, it honestly would. 

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October 27, 2021 · 19:53

The petulant bully

Yes, we have met them before. The bully screaming ‘Foul, foul!’ Often enough we are nice enough to ignore them, yet not this time. It was the BBC who brought me ‘WikiLeaks founder’s extradition appeal explained’ (at https://www.bbc.com/news/av/uk-59053803) The setting has two sides. In the first it is a legal stage that the US has, an appeal is a legal right to any party. Yet in opposition, there was clearly established that Julian Assange did not do an act of treason, there are laws in those days (much stronger ones) that gave him the optional status of distributor. For those interested in a history lesson lets jump back to the age of Grunge (1991).

“the first websites to be sued for defamation based on the statements of others argued that they were merely distributors, and not publishers, of the content on their sites. One of the first such cases was Cubby v. CompuServe, Inc., 776 F.Supp. 135 (S.D.N.Y. 1991). CompuServe provided subscribers with access to over 150 specialty electronic “forums” that were run by third parties. When CompuServe was sued over allegedly defamatory statements that appeared in the “Rumorville” forum, it argued that it should be treated like a distributor because it did not review the contents of the bulletin board before it appeared on CompuServe’s site. The court agreed and dismissed the case against CompuServe”

Wikileaks can rely on that stage as well (as can Julian Assange). In the second degree, let’s take a look at an actual traitor (nor Dirk Benedict). So in those days Bradley, now Chelsea Manning betrayed the service, handed classified materials to people who should not have them and as such Manning was sentenced to 35 years at the maximum-security U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth. Yet, then President Obama bowed to bleeding heart pinko’s and commuted the sentence after 7 years. Manning now gets speaking engagements whilst the US is still bleeding from the acts of Manning 12 years ago. As such, Julian Assange spend twice the amount in seclusion and imprisonment that Manning, an actual traitor did. 

Am I happy? No! Assange and Wikileaks did something stupid and massively dangerous, especially the diplomatic cables, it screwed up US interests on a near global scale. Yes, they lied, yet so does the bulk of all other governments (they call it denial), as such the US will be playing with a loaded deck for several more years to come. We can go into some deep version of she dais, she said but that is no progress. The critical stage is that the traitor got off (in more than one way) and for years the US government hunted and haunted Julian Assange and they keep on continuing to do so. As I personally see it it makes the US a petulant bully. Let’s not forget that they are entitled to do so, yet in all this what will it bring them? There would be a minimal case if Manning was still in Leavenworth, but that is not the case is it?

And to rely on the courts having a right to their day is also fake. Consider all the cases where the courts never had a chance (Epstein anyone?) and that happened all in the US of A. We cannot tell how the appeal will go and I do not have the legal insight for this, but there will be a lot of eyes on this case, not in the first for all those fearing extradition to the US, this appeal is important to the US too, I get that. Yet the reason behind it is no longer the larger limelight, especially as the traitor behind this was released years ago and is making a living (as I personally see it) in questionable ways. I always wanted to be the IT intelligence guy, they gave it to some traitor, two actually when you consider Edward Snowden, he at least had the common decency to defect to Russia. 

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October 15, 2021 · 01:49

The rule of guns

This is not new, this is not even novel. It is the continuation of something that has been going on for decades, I saw it with my own eyes in 1982, others saw it too. Some objected, others did not. And when Beirut had its fireworks party on August 5th 2020, so many voices were eager to give rise to a setting that could never be, and all rejoiced when the media forwarded those messages. They must have thought it was in the bag. But I knew a think or two and I gave the readers ‘Boom goes the dynamite’ that very same day (about 6 hours later, might have been 12). And I gave the readers “It is speculation, but consider the blast, according to some the blast was noticed well over 100Km away. I do have a point of reference, the Fireworks blast in the Netherlands (Enschede) had a similar effect, but nowhere near the size, the video’s I saw told a different story, one car on the highway with a distance of around 2000 meters away got its windows blown out and the rear view mirrors got blown off the car, and that is one of a few video’s that show me that this was no ordinary blast”, so there was a lager stage and the people who were behind it went under the rocks like cockroaches. I calculated that it took a massive amount of 40’ containers and the cargo, 125 40’ containers worth cannot go up like the way it did, not in one go. And I rote more than one article about that. So when we now see in the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/oct/14/gunfire-beirut-protest-judge-leading-port-blast-inquiry), the setting of ‘Five dead as shooting breaks out at Beirut protests over port blast inquiry’, we now see “demanding end to judge’s investigation of huge blast last year”, all whilst we see Hezbollah types being brave behind their balaclava’s. So whilst we get the terrorist spokespeople Nabih Berri and Hassan Nasrallah make noise, we see the attacks on judge Tarek Bitar continue. I see no surprises, once a terrorist, always a terrorist. And when we see “However, demands that all aspects of the explosion be investigated seem almost impossible to deliver, with ministers summoned for investigation refusing to turn up”, something that I saw and I feel certain plenty of others saw that too, we wonder when Hezbollah will be held to account. So whilst these political chihuahua’s refuse to appear we see the stage changing, a stage where a lot of people are demanding that ALL HELP towards Lebanon will stop until someone correctly muzzles Hezbollah. And I see a reason to divert those aid funds to Israel (if needed). A larger stage erupts as the smaller (2020/8/5) subsides. This is not about local rights, this is about Hezbollah is showing itself as the bully it always was, it was that in 1982, it still is that now. In this I am not making judgement on judge Tarek Bitar, I know too little about him, but the stage that Hezbollah wants it stopped and they are happy to show themselves (often with balaclava’s) exercise that right wielding an RPG-7, or other hardware of the ‘firearms’ variety shows them to be the aggressor, to be the bad apples and now as the energy crises is pushing into winter, the stage of anger changes even more. Now there is a larger explosion and it could go on into its neighbouring places and one of them is Israel the other one is Syria and neither accepts the Hezbollah approach. I nice stage to set and the people of Lebanon do not get a choice in the matter, they let things slide with Hezbollah for too long and this will implode in all kinds of wrong settings. Even now we see all minds of media including Iran in this mess. I cannot follow that as I remain a follower of evidence, but it does make sense. And even in light of the humanitarian side of ‘Hezbollah-run oil shipments from Iran’, enough players were willing to let that slide, but it would not take long until Hezbollah thought it was in control (because to some degree they are) and now the world has had enough, some will stop funds, more will stop goods and Hezbollah will learn what war against hungry and cold fellow citizens look like, they will not give Hezbollah any consideration in all this and neither should we. There comes a time when enough is enough and too many have hit that point now, so as Hezbollah and Amar will seek ‘compensation’ (optionally for their lost explosives), the larger station is no what they want, it is what they were part of and that is what fears them. The Times of Israel gives us “Local commentators said Washington, worried about chaos in Lebanon amid raging, multiple crises, may have decided to look the other way”, but that is not the real deal. The slightly more real deal is “humanitarian assistance in Lebanon to more than $372 million in Fiscal Year 2021” and it has become time to stop that. Let the cancer die, let those people die. This in not inhumane, it is an essential part of stopping terrorism by Hezbollah. If there are no people to care, there are no recruits, there is no Hezbollah and the times and the economic pressure are growing in this direction. It would have been less of an issue if someone muzzled them, but no one did so we have a new stage to look forward to. In the first the UN trying to smooth things over, the other all the heart bleeding people who ache for the people of Lebanon, yet none of them are willing to hold Hezbollah to account, why is that?

To keep instability around? It is too late for that, Wall Street solved that problem for you all. 

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October 13, 2021 · 20:06

We are the tools

Yes, we are, you, me, we all are and the evidence is all out there. So let’s start with the global comic relieve that we call the ICIJ (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists). We all see the headlines, global headlines and 600 secretaries (they call themselves journalists) are out there giving us what we think are the goods. To phrase an example we take a look at the Sydney Morning Herald (at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/australia-has-become-a-go-to-destination-for-dirty-money-leaks-reveal-nation-s-tax-weaknesses-20211007-p58y2i.html) it is a mere example what is going on out there. A collection of people no one head about, no one cared about. A collection of tits and dicks all striking their own ego, their own needs and the audience is gobbling it up. So when we are given phrases like “ALP senator Deborah O’Neill has launched an inquiry into Australia’s AML-CTF regime and is seeking industry feedback on the costs and benefits of broadening our laws to include accountants and lawyers to bring Australian laws into line with international standards to prevent financial crime” Yet here is the problem. It is ‘prevent financial crime’, in this that we also see from other sources “the line between tax avoidance and tax evasion has become so blurred we need to act against both” and there is the real problem, a stage I told people for well over a decade. Tax laws need overhaul on a global stage. And the setting too often is that there were no laws broken, these people might act against the spirit of the law, but they NEVER broke the law. And that is the stage, 600 typing tutors cannot give us the goods, because as I speculate, the real goods were never there. Yet someone in the ICIJ decided not to investigate the origins. Interesting not? So whilst we focus on “Avoidance meant arranging your affairs so tax wasn’t due”, whilst we consider that politicians have given the wealthy and rich a little too much leeway these politicians are now hiding under rocks and they do not want the limelight. And whilst some are considering “It isn’t illegal for the celebrity or a politician to move their money (so long as it is theirs to begin with). Assets within the trust are subject to local tax laws (sometimes zero tax) and local secrecy laws (sometimes complete secrecy)”, they will get the idea that places like Monaco, Cayman Islands and Dubai have appeal to many people with a piggy bank that holds an 8-figure number or more. So when we see all these papers give us “the documents were linked to more than 330 politicians and public officials, including 35 current and former national leaders, in more than 91 countries and territories”, as well as mentions of billionaires and no one gave us a clear top-line setting, I saw one, just one in a stage with dozens of papers and on less than 50% of the politicians involved. Yet none in the US, none in Canada, none in Australia or New Zealand, it is optionally possible, but 50% of that rundown was missing. And 600 secretaries had no time to look into it? As papers keep on handing us “a two-year effort to sift through 11.9 million confidential files leaked to it, aided in that effort by more than 600 journalists from 150 media outlets.” No one had the idea to give us a tally, a top-line? So far how many give us a list of ACTUAL criminal events? Tax Avoidance is not illegal, owning and residing in a zero tax nation is not illegal, so what is this about?

Now consider another station I made mention on. Consider the names Jacob A. Frenkel, Tharman Shanmugaratnam, Guillermo Ortiz, Jean-Claude Trichet, Geoffrey Bell, Roger W. Ferguson, Jr., Arminio Fraga, Kenneth Rogoff, Janet Yellen, Zhou Xiaochuan, Domingo Cavallo, Mario Draghi, Yi Gang, Carmen Reinhart, Maria Ramos, Klaas Knot, Philipp Hildebrand and Kenneth Rogoff. All part of the G30 bankers list, no mention at all? These people move trillions, there is no way that there is no mention of them in any way, but the press seemingly avoided that small part, or the source data was stricken of them, making this an exercise of some sorts and no one caught on? How come?

And this is not in you, that is on the members of the media (including those who think that they are journalists, or got the degree and faked their way through life). 

A simple setting of bankrupt nations painting the wealthy as the criminals, all whilst the politicians were a lot more to blame in all of this, 2 decades of ignored overhauls and no one catches on? 

The sanctimonious BS that the media is feeding us sickens me, it really does.

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