Category Archives: Science

May 3, 2018 · 12:18

A Bill of Goods

So when was the last time that you were sold a bill of goods? Have you ever been in that place? Some people avoid most of it by never purchasing 2nd hand materials to avoid that, I am for the most one of those people. I tend to inform myself before I go into anything, like a good person should. Now there is a level that we should attend to and after that it is overkill, paranoia and optionally a few other things. So there is a basic check we all should make. You get that don’t you? So when I looked into Cambridge Analytica in previous articles, I was a little late to the party (4 hours late), but that was because I wanted to look into a few things. So on the 18th of March, I got a few issues that made me wonder, and off course the first question I had was “Here I wonder (for a mere moment) if something wrong was done at all“, you see not having that question makes it all emotional and useless. It is all about the facts. So when we see the utter inactivity of the police and other elements for close to 10 days, I knew that this was about something else and there was even the premise that Cambridge Analytica was not the only player in town. So when I went “Robert Mercer has found a business model that works. The question merely remains on how that data was captured“, I had a little more than you all bargained for. This continued whilst ‘my emotional‘ side also added “for years I have spoken out clearly that these users are all about stating ‘privacy’ no the NSA whilst at the same time sharing indiscriminately on social media like Facebook, whilst not comprehending the system because it was ‘free’. This is the direct consequence and these users will be used again and again because that is what they signed up for“, the evidence (a slightly overstated word), had seen parts of this going back to 2014. The quotes were from ‘How Facebook data flows‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/03/18/how-facebook-data-flows/amp/). Yet today’s article ‘Cambridge Analytica closing after Facebook data harvesting scandal‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/may/02/cambridge-analytica-closing-down-after-facebook-row-reports-say) leaves us with a lot more questions. Consider the following quote “The company has started insolvency proceedings in the US and UK. At Cambridge Analytica’s New York offices on an upmarket block on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, it appeared all the staff had already left the premises“, yet this is in direct opposition to “Although Cambridge Analytica might be dead, the team behind it has already set up a mysterious new company called Emerdata. According to Companies House data, Alexander Nix is listed as a director along with other executives from SCL Group. The daughters of the billionaire Robert Mercer are also listed as directors” and that is not where it stops. You see Metro (at https://www.metro.us/news/the-big-stories/cambridge-analytica-backers-new-data-company-emerdata) gave us 3 days after the news “Emerdata was incorporated in the UK in August 2017, reports Business Insider“, this puts a spin on the previous statement, because as the first liner sinks, the Rigid Inflatable Boat (pun intended) was already prepared for the main cast of it all to vacate the premises onto a different vessel, yet were they visited by the police and other digital forensic instances? No they were not! It seems that when you are backed by a billionaire, the machines of prosecution tend to maul extremely slowly, or the machines is inhabited by cowards that are not willing to press any buttons until they can blame someone else. Whatever the reasoning will be, it is about to get a lot more juicy!

That is seen with “The data was collected via Facebook’s permissive “Graph API”, the interface through which third parties could interact with Facebook’s platform. This allowed Kogan to pull data about users and their friends, including likes, activities, check-ins, location, photos, religion, politics and relationship details“, not only was the Facebook team extremely lazy, the setting of the app could have potentially made things worse. They could have been accumulating data and reset the data against aggregated statistical margins, that means that EVERY market research company on the planet had optional access to additional data they never ever had before, it would have optionally increased value of any dashboard by 400%, now consider that I saw part of this flaw (I never knew that Facebook had made it THIS easy) from 2014 onwards. Even if the system was less able, there was a flaw and there is absolutely no chance that this merely involves Cambridge Analytica. So when we consider this, and add the quote “He told an undercover reporter: “We did all the research, all the data, all the analytics, all the targeting. We ran all the digital campaign, the television campaign and our data informed all the strategy.” He also revealed that the company used a self-destruct email server to erase its digital history. “No one knows we have it, and secondly we set our … emails with a self-destruct timer … So you send them and after they’ve been read, two hours later, they disappear. There’s no evidence, there’s no paper trail, there’s nothing.”” this changes the game on a few levels, this is no longer merely data capturing, or data analyses, this is tradecraft, deleted things cannot be acted on, a truth that has existed even before Facebook existed (ask the horse Pegasus). So when we think that James Brien Comey Jr. esquire, who served as the seventh Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation from September 4, 2013, until his dismissal on May 9, 2017. The dismissal is part of it all because, as I personally see it, he never had a chance, this is not some commercial app; this was tweaked on a much higher level (to where will never be proven, and unless someone kept a printed email, the evidence is gone forever). That part shown that this was no small operation, this was tried and tested on several levels and if there had been no whistle-blower, we would never have known, even if the metropolitan police decided not to sit on their hands for about a week, it still would not have mattered.

It does not stop there, this is a lot bigger and I think Mark Zuckerberg knows this, he must have realised this in the first hour the mess landed on his desk, the question is what he would have been able to do after the fact, I think it would have been very little. The fact that the Guardian had part of this in 2015 also counts, even as there is a large lull in activity, a journalist hands are tied to some extent, no evidence, no setting and even as I knew parts of this earlier, I could not prove it and Facebook was certainly not going to be much help there, because the value of their treasury is their data and someone telling them it is overstated by 70% is not what they are willing to hear or give attention to.

The next part is Cambridge University researcher Aleksandr Kogan, when we see “My view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Honestly, we thought we were acting perfectly appropriately. We thought we were doing something that was really normal“, really? Capturing private data is perfectly normal? We see that part in “Aleksandr Kogan, a Moldovan-born researcher from Cambridge University, admits harvesting the personal details of 30 million Facebook users via a personality app he developed. He then passed the data to Cambridge Analytica who assured him this was legal, he said“, he had no clue on Intellectual Property rights? Because that was already an issue when I attended University years before that, there are Facebook documents on what can and can’t be done, none of that rings a bell? And this statement now completely opposes the mention by Cambridge Analytica that there was never any data. In addition, his title, where he is boasting his title as a Data Scientist, he should be aware of Loshin (2002), Loshin, D. (2002). Knowledge Integrity: Data Ownership, June 8, 2004. Here we see “Researchers should have a full understanding of various issues related to data ownership to be able to make better decisions regarding data ownership. These issues include paradigm of ownership, data hoarding, data ownership policies, balance of obligations, and technology. Each of these issues gives rise to a number of considerations that impact decisions concerning data ownership” the fact that the information came from a protected source, should have been clear indication that Aleksandr Kogan should have clearly known that what he did was illegal to the larger extent, or he could remain in denial and just hand in his degree and title (Cambridge University might like that a lot better too).

All simple points that seem to have been looked over or is that looked past).

Now let’s get back to my previous promise ‘it is about to get a lot more juicy!‘ and go just there. So you all have heard the one truth, ‘If you don’t want your naked selfies to make it to the internet, do not make any!‘ So there is this girl who thinks she might be a photo model, so she goes ‘tits out’ and shows that she is photo model material, she sees the results and realises that she is not, so she makes her boyfriend promise to delete them and he does. At home he undelete’s the pictures, posts them online and he looks for a new ‘fuck of the week’. For her it all goes tits up which is worse that tits out and that is where we are now, Facebook has ‘shared’ the data and now it is out, so when we see the link to Emerdata, and the mention that Alexander James Ashburner Nix has the following company appointments

  • SCL GROUP LIMITED (05514098), as Director since Jan 2016
  • SCL ANALYTICS LIMITED (09838667), as Director, since Oct 2015
  • CAMBRIDGE ANALYTICA(UK) LIMITED (09375920), as Director, since Jan 2015
  • SCL DIGITAL LIMITED (09375055), as Director, since Jan 2015, DISSOLVED
  • SCL SOVEREIGN LIMITED (09375809), as Director, since Jan 2015, DISSOLVED
  • SCL COMMERCIAL LIMITED (08840965), as Director, since Jan 2015
  • SCL SOCIAL LIMITED (08410560), as Director, since Feb 2013
  • SCL ELECTIONS LIMITED (08256225), as Director, since Oct 2012
  • EMERDATA LIMITED (10911848), as Director, since Jan 2018, RESIGNED, Mar 2018
  • FIRECREST TECHNOLOGIES LIMITED (11238956), as Director 2018, RESIGNED same day

This is all form one address in one instance he resigns the day he is hired? How weird is that? Don’t answer, the options are all overwhelming, but in all these instances he would have had access to infrastructure allowing the passing through of terabytes of data, it is also so interesting that they were all called Alexander, perhaps a fluke! Yet when we look at Alexander Bruce Tayler, we see that he is also a Director at Emerdata limited, so the plot does thicken. In addition, these places are all linked to PKF Littlejohn, the chartered accountants, now that last part makes sense as a director might seek one accountant for all companies, nothing weird about that. The issue is that there is a whole web of connections that allow the data to have been moved to Hong Kong and New York with no options to securely obtain the data and have it wiped. So this is not an accusation, this is the realistic setting that the data could (I do say ‘could’) have been spread all over the planet, until proven that the data was illegally obtained there is no crime and no option to get anything done, Facebook should have known this from day one. Even in the mid 90’s it was clear that Intellectual property and Data ownership was the hard-core central point for any corporate setting. If not, why would there have been such a booming business in transferring legacy systems?

Data has value, ask any salesperson!

So are we sold a bill of goods, because that is what it looks like? Let me also add that this is not sold by the Guardian, I think that the players in this game has been a lot more clever than most players and the paraphrased suggestion that the rats pretty much walked away with a whole wheel of cheese (ask any sinking ship) is not the strangest notion in all this. The final part we see (at https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/05/02/cambridge_analytica_shutdown/) with ‘Cambridge Analytica dismantled for good? Nope: It just changed its name to Emerdata‘, yet is that information valuable? I cannot tell because I am not an accountant. You see, I found it interesting that even as PKF Littlejohn, the representative of PKF International was seen in all the registrations, it is “the boards have applied to appoint insolvency practitioners Crowe Clark Whitehill LLP to act as the independent administrator for Cambridge Analytica“, there might be a valid reason for that yet when I seek into PKF international I see: “PKF International member firms lead the world in Insolvency services, we can help you through financial misfortune and the recovery process globally” (at https://www.pkf.com/services/advisory/insolvency/). In this it is merely my speculation that this is the start of a Chinese wall, a level of isolation regarding information and reporting. It protects all the players in the house. It remains speculative, yet is it an optional truth? When was the last time you saw an accountancy firm walk away from revenue? Tesco lunch anyone?

So whilst someone might cry for the people involved, I wonder how much tears an executive deserves when you realise that 2 hour mail deletion systems were in place, what else were they hiding and who else is playing that game, because when we see the 2 hour deletion setting and the police sitting on their hands for around a week (as I personally see it), I have little faith that the actual truth will ever be found through any level of evidence. The whistle-blower Christopher Wylie E Coyote is the one clog in the cog that set this all to an open investigation status; so whilst the rest is doing the ‘meep meep’ roadrunner we are left wondering how many other social media corporate settings are filled with stupid people. The numbers rarely add up, but I never expected the books to be this out of balance, not when we realise that this partially implies that Mark Zuckerberg has been doing open heart surgery on himself with a butter knife (a stupid idea for at least two reasons).

That is what it looks and feels like and it is as I personally see it as the result of being sold a bill of goods by all the reporting players, most of them unaware that they were doing just that (I am referring to the actual newspaper reporters in this instance).

 

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May 2, 2018 · 11:29

Are there versions of truth?

It is a question that has haunted plenty of people, you see there is just one truth, although, is that ‘there is your side, my side and the truth’; it comes from Robert Evans ‘The kid stays in the picture‘, a 2002 documentary. We have seen the quote is several works including the famous Sci-fi series Babylon 5. The fun part of this is that the three parts are all based on honesty, yet it is more than just a matter of perspective. I have always known that, although the interaction of perception and observations is something that needs to be in a book, not on a blog. So when I was confronted with the site ‘Seeking Alpha‘, which was described by the Wall Street journal in 2014 as “SeekingAlpha.com predicted stock returns, as well as earnings surprises, above and beyond what was evident from Wall Street analyst reports and financial news articles” is from the article more than just that. The article (at https://seekingalpha.com/article/4168001-investors-face-moral-dilemmas-investments-saudi-arabia) gives us ‘Investors Face Moral Dilemmas with Investments in Saudi Arabia‘, can be countered with ‘every investment has a moral dilemma’, so that is not much to go by. Yet the setting of a 500 billion market where we see the foundation with “A component of the Saudis’ Vision 2030 is to create an indigenous defense industry one that will promote volatility, not stability, in a region on perpetual warfooting“, gives me not the shivers, but the contemplation of what game is played. You see there is no doubt that Saudi Arabia wants to create an indigenous defence industry; every nation wants that, especially when it has been under threat for many years. I would have told Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman if he would respectfully consider buying Remington as it is bankrupt and going cheap. The excellence of its weaponry, weaponry that have made it to the most elite parts of the global national defence forces is not just a matter for defence, hunters and others revere the weapon for its standard of excellence and it is not a bad place to start. You see, that is merely one path, in all this the setting of ‘one that will promote volatility‘, is not only not a given, I wonder where Seeking Alpha got the data in the first place to make that assumption. When we accept that there is an optional truth, there should be a look at the antagonising party, namely Iran as well, in that regard we see (at https://seekingalpha.com/instablog/776842-investorideas-com/5152941-cryptocorner-iran-developing-cryptocurrency-japan-s-sbi-launch-exchange-australia-cracks-icos), “Iran is progressing with its own crypto currency project despite having banned crypto trading in local banks according to a report at Reuters. Information and Communications Technology Minister Javad Azari-Jahromi said the ban from Iran’s state bank would not apply to development of a domestic crypto currency“, as well as “Equally, if not more importantly, investments by Russia’s oil and gas companies in the development of oil fields in Iran may exceed $50 billion, presidential aide Yuri Ushakov told reporters in early April” (at https://seekingalpha.com/article/4167229-effect-unilateral-u-s-sanctions-irans-crude-oil-production?page=3) and in finality we see “On Sunday, pro-Iranian Shiite rebels in Yemen launched a missile attack on Saudi Arabia targeting four cities. The Saudi air defense intercepted the missiles, however, one person died and two others were hurt by shrapnel. Saudi Colonel Turki al-Malki made it clear who Saudi Arabia thought was to blame: “This aggressive and random act by the Iran-backed Houthi group proves that the Iranian regime continues to support the armed Houthi group with qualitative capabilities…”“, which we get from the article (at https://seekingalpha.com/article/4159016-7-missiles-closer-iran-war-100-oil) called ‘7 Missiles Closer To Iran War And $100 Oil‘. So now we see two parts, we see Saudi Arabia accused of volatility and ion all this the aggressor Iran is not painted in any way in any of these mentioned articles merely defined as ‘Pro-Iranian rebels‘, the fact that those rebels cannot afford any missiles and for the most they lack the ballistic skills as well as deployment and knowledge of GOLIS firing solution systems, issues like deployment, missile calibration and beyond that there is setting the precision of the missile by making sure that the electronic settings are correctly tweaked and calibrated to interact with the information that the targeting hardware offers. All that requires skills, skills that the Yemeni do not have, but Seeking Alpha is all over that and, oh, actually they are not!

So in the $500 billion setting of growing the Saudi industry, one valid component is now the stuff of moral discussions and the setting of unproven volatility, can anyone explain why Seeking Alpha has released 7 articles in the last 24 hours on Iran, where one shows opposition between the Iranian judiciary and the President on ‘disrupt national unity‘ in the setting of ‘Rouhani opposing banning social media networks, as he attempts to open up the country to the outside world‘, there is not a moral dilemma here? Or perhaps it is not a setting for volatility whilst the growing of Iranian civil unrest is currently seen as a given. So how do we not see in more articles that for the speculative person investing into Iran is facing all kinds of risks from Iranian civil unrest?

Yet it is that setting that we can all easily check on how certain paths are played. We can see this in another way as well, when we see the French visit; we see “Macron had come to Washington in a bid to convince Trump to remain in the deal. He proposed “pillars” for adding to the existing deal, including extending it for the long term, limiting Iran’s ballistic missiles, and dealing with Iran’s involvement throughout the region“, whilst in the article regarding Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman we see “Regardless of his charm, offensive MBS will continue his extreme ruthlessness, admittedly a de rigueur requirement in a tough country and even tougher neighborhood especially because his radical changes have created many internal enemies“, we also saw “Saudi crown prince Mohammad bin Salman (MBS) wrapped up his well-orchestrated and unprecedented “meet & greet”, “press the flesh” two-week April tour of the US with the icons and titans of three primary industries in his effort to diversify the Saudi economy as part of the ambitious Vision 2030 plan“, yet nowhere do we read an optional: “Success can only come from a vision, brought by a visionary. We are a nation with resources, with options and opportunities. We are more than the oil that is acquired from our soil, we can and will harness resources as well as investment opportunities to stimulate our economy and diversify our revenues. Our nation sitting central between Africa, Asia and Europe should have been more about growing that advantage and now we will, we have the foundation to grown in technology, in minerals and in services to be a global player, we must take that opportunity before it is lost to us forever. It’s not a fast path, and to do this properly we must grow over the next 12 years to be able to become that global powerhouse“. Well, there is one place where something like that can be read, it is the introduction (at http://vision2030.gov.sa/en/foreword), where we also see a lot more on the Islamic part on Saudi Arabia, which is perfectly valid. So when we go to http://vision2030.gov.sa/en/node/125 we see a massive amount of programs all set to push Vision 2030 forward and the interesting part in that is that there is not one mention of the words ‘defence’, ‘Army’, ‘Navy’ or ‘Air force’. Even as I am convinced that growing national defence is part of that, my wonder is that with all these options and opportunities, Seeking Alpha resorted to the Moral part of a defence structure that is nowhere near a central part of the Vision 2030 brief. We know that Saudi Arabia has the option to go full G5 from day one and the investment options there are massive opportunities not to pick up millions, but billions. Yet the issue becomes larger when we see that the writer Albert Goldson has plenty of experience and should be well aware of commodities (read: he is a bit of an expert according to sources), so when we set this against the view of Bengt Nordström, CEO of consultancy Northstream who gave us last year “growth in the industry has disguised not only the fact the telco industry is largely a commodity, but also that it has not been hugely innovative for a number of years“, that in light of the upcoming 5G, where ‘first in, soaring profits’ could surely be a given, none of that is shown, merely the fact that Saudi Arabia is allegedly about ‘volatility‘, so whose buttering the bread and who is that sandwich being made for?

Another part not shown was ‘Advancing pharmaceuticals and patient safety in Saudi Arabia: A 2030 vision initiative‘ (at https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1319016417301780). Here we see “A recent conference in Riyadh, sponsored by King Saud University, sought to discuss these issues and develop specific policy recommendations for the Saudi 2030 Vision plan. This and other efforts will require more and more creative educational programs for physicians, pharmacists, hospitals, and patients, and, most importantly evolving regulations on quality standards and oversight by Saudi health authorities“, let’s not forget that we are in the beginning of all this, there is 12 years, which will go quickly I’ll grant you that, yet in all this the opportunity to grow Patent Law, Law firms, and set proper markers in place would be an essential step before such a level of patent bearing change comes. The option for Pharmaceutical investment was not shown in the article, or the mention of the issues shown at https://ncusar.org/programs/17-transcripts/2017-06-20-burton.pdf (attached). So, I am not opposing that there is optionally a need to grow the national defence industry, but is that set in the right light? In the light he gives the investors (which is his right to do), we see “However, for the moral implications mentioned with respect to the development of an indigenous defense industry, check your moral compass. From my perspective, it’s a financially profitable but morally bankrupt undertaking“, yet what morally bankrupt idea is there on growing the pharmaceutical and mobile network industry? they are highly profitable if it is achieved and there is moral question, my moral compass is setting on the field asking Albert Goldson, a member of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and an Associate Member of the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) why he missed on those options. Also in the view of two dozen projects that are openly stated, why would he focus on a part that represents merely 10% and focus on those two dozen programs, where the investors would find the gems that the investors would want to find in a $500 billion layered cake called ‘Vision 2030‘. Oh, as for that military part, the attached Burton presentation ‘Opportunities in Saudi Arabia – Vision 2030 and Beyond‘ spends two slides on it and the most important part shown is “Vision 2030 calls for 50 percent of military equipment purchases from domestic suppliers instead of imports“, whilst also mentioning that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) “spent a total of over $63 billion on defense and security in 2016, including off-budget spending“, so when we see that, we see that for the smart investor there is an optional $30 billion a year available for those who might not have a moral issue working on a government set national defence program. That in light of Iran delivering missiles hardware and support to non-combatants, which are rebels at best, yet terrorists might be more apt when we consider “Nasrallah’s letter is proven evidence of Iran’s involvement in the Yemeni civil war, since it shows that Hezbollah, which is financed by Iran, is taking part in the fighting in Yemen” (source: Jerusalem Post). So where exactly does Seeking Alpha stand? Let’s be fair, they can be in any place they like as they are merely advisors towards their investors in all this, yet even with my high moral (or is that outspokenly oral) I would not turn away from a $32 billion market, especially if I had that level of cash. Oh, and whilst you consider on where morality needs to be, Boeing, Lockheed and Raytheon have already signed up, so the delay you took made that cake a hell of a lot smaller, but even if there is still $2 billion up for grabs, would you walk away? Let’s not forget that next month’s rent is due!

So in all this, I never stated or implied that Albert Goldson lied to anyone. Yet when we consider there is your side, my side and the truth, what did we see? You see, I get back to perception versus observation. Through perception he is focussed on the defence part, but why? The shifted setting towards Saudi Arabia will impact something else, but what else is impacted? That is the question, is it the Iranian setting (when considering the other articles), is it something else entirely, or is Albert Goldson focussed on something beyond all this? It is a speculation from my side, yet the absence of the Pharmaceutical and Mobile Industry absence implies just that, yet in equal measure I will state that this would merely be my perception, based on all my observations. That is part of the setting. In the realm of ‘there is your side, my side and the truth’, it becomes more and more about observation versus perception. In a case like this, when there is $500 billion on the table, is the perception the amount on the table, or the observation of whom else is at that table that matters. Is that merely an observation or does the perception become: where is MY opportunity? Because in the end that is what the investor cares about, and moreover, where and what size their slice of the cake becomes.

In addition, my observation will be that the changes mean that there are new players and some of the old players have been so well fed for such a long time, in this ‘parting might be such sweet sorrow’ (Romeo and Juliet Act 2, Scene 2), yet for the previous players it will be over their dead bodies, that tends to be the gist of it. The change needs to be observed because it shown also where the pressures of the players will be and that pressure can be seen as cost and risk. It is the wiser player that makes it through and gets the slice of the $500 billion layered cake; it is merely the question on the size of the slice and the perception of the profit it allegedly holds.

 

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April 30, 2018 · 11:21

Num, Num, Num

There is a large following that is very appreciative of Jamie Oliver. I was for a long time unsure about the man. I do not mean that in any negative way, I just didn’t know the guy. Literally, my only knowledge of him in the beginning was this ad (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPiNeIV_WY8). I thought it was funny, I was doing consultancy in the UK for a while and that is what I saw, I would remain unaware of his actions for a few more years until I saw one of his cooking shows. It looked nice, and tended to make me hungry watching it. So I reverted to my famous Bambiburger (whilst watching Bambi, because that’s how I roll) and switched to another movie afterwards. I had noticed a few of his cooking books and they looked OK, but beyond that I moved on, no negativity implied here.

My first real exposure to the man was when I was introduced to his McDonald crusade, or perhaps better stated the fast food crusade. A sample is shown in the Rubin Report (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSoJzuUgO6c, as well as CBS at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YC0jMeGTJmA), so when I was aware of just how bad it was I stopped going there, I haven’t set foot into Macca’s for a long time, I might get a lemonade on a hot Sunday morning, yet that is as much as I got. I stopped going to Macca’s. He showed a part I never stopped to ponder. He became a silent hero, like my University friend and fellow student Jerome Doraisamy, how started the Wellness Doctrines and showed to be a true visionary. With his second book The Wellness Doctrines for High School Students, he is showing the younger students the path that every young person should read. With “self-help guide for secondary students struggling with academic rigours, vocational concerns and teenage issues“, we see a path that allows those who had given up, that there is a path, there are options and they can make it, there can be success. As Jerome attends to the mind of the younger person, Jamie Oliver has the physical side in mind. In the Guardian we see the goods (at https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/apr/29/jamie-oliver-criticism-affect-me-childhood-obesity), with “His transformation from cheeky-chappy Essex boy chef to single-issue crusader, facts and figures to hand, about to appear in front of a select committee, is complete. You would think he would have enough going on – he closed several of his restaurants recently and restructured his business“, in all this Jamie Oliver is focused on the issue of childhood obesity. Two silent hero’s making the world a better place, because if they can tend to the upcoming generation, we would as a humanity move forward too. Now even as we, at times might question “It is not only the food industry that Oliver has targeted. He also champions better nutritional training for GPs and other health professionals“, there is a spoken truth that we ignore, we seem to go to the GP for every useless flu shot, and really useful vaccines, but the setting is that the GP has a narrow focus, he needs to be, he might tell us to see a dietician, yet will we? I know that I eat reasonable healthy, less and less Bambiburgers (the price of venison is near murder nowadays), yet I have my decent mixes of greens, pasta’s (with fresh greens) and the optional spinach stew with beef, all easily made and full of the good stuff. This came with the revelation that even as I am still the size of Dwayne Johnson (yet not in the chest section), I eat a lot better for a long time now and I walk nearly everything I do every day. I also noticed that I eat a lot less, so there is that benefit too, but overall, I could still eat better and that is where Jamie Oliver is making the difference “Oliver seems to be coming at obesity principally as a diet problem, rather than a social one, although it may be too much to ask even someone as energetic and ambitious as him to fix society. Obesity disproportionately affects children in deprived areas“. You see, even when we accept that the lifestyle choices in places like London for some is massively limited, where most are still relying on their daily fish and chips, of if fish is too expensive friend spam, we need to acknowledge that the two people are working pre-emptively. If the children are heating healthier, it could reduce NHS needs by at least 10%, which is a massive saving, when we consider the counselling and other issues that some children face in the light of pressure the writings (the second book) of Jerome Doraisamy could also impact the NHS in a positive way, as well as avoid a whole range of other issues, so making sure that every secondary school in the UK (Australia and Canada too), has at least a few copies of this book (as well as some of the Jamie Oliver solutions), we could set the next generation much better equipped on a future path, one that is healthier and ever so likely pointing towards personal success. In that we have seen so little for such a long time that the visibility of these two crusaders (not caped ones, because I still claim the title of Batman), is becoming more and more essential. Yet Jamie does not proclaim to have all the answers and all the solutions, one would be very unfair to demand that. When we see “he does not entirely understand what it is like to live in relentless, grinding poverty: to be unable to afford fresh vegetables (healthy food is three times more expensive, per calorie, than unhealthy food – Oliver has suggested that the government should subsidise healthy food); to be too tired to cook from scratch every night; to take the financial risk on a lentil recipe that your kids may refuse to eat“, now we can go that children who are really hungry will eat nearly anything, is only partially true, the addictiveness to some foods (read: food groups), especially sugar loaded ones is too tempting as the short term sugar rush is there, so it is like getting them to fight a sugar addiction seems to be more and more prevalent. Yet as it is not a narcotic, the large brands can push sugar onto everyone until it quite literally kills them (usually via some form of diabetes). This gets us to the timeliness of it all. You see, when I was young (I know a really long time ago), diabetes was something almost unheard of. Now in the US, the CDC reported that 9.4% has some form of diabetes. That is up from 8.3% 5 years earlier, so the statistics are screaming danger. Yet we remains unable to act and the fact that Jamie Oliver is pushing for larger changes so that the UK (actually the whole world) improves the stats so that we can avoid a nasty and expensive trap is more than just good thinking, it is the stuff of well-deserved knighthoods. It is in that same range that we should see the efforts of Jerome Doraisamy. The body and the mind are two parts of us, needing equal attention and the fact that we get the next generation on top of it all is massively needed, because the mind can too often work out that the rope to hang yourself with versus the rope that will snap under the weight of the 17 year old as he/she weighs 17 stones takes a mere 25 neurons (speculative), me making fun of this is how it needs to be seen, but in a very deadly serious way. Some issues we can avoid, but if healthy food elevates your mood, makes you feel more energised, and thus empowers that person, making changes to your lifestyle on both the physical and mental front become increasingly important. Not because you are saving the NHS thousands of pounds, but because the next generation could suddenly end up having worked and lived for decades in a healthy and happy way only to receive a letter, to which that person asks “What on earth is the NHS?” They didn’t know, because they were never sick. That is what we hope we could strife for and these two crusaders are making it an optional future. So even when we see in the Guardian “he will be accused on Twitter of being the “fun police”; a column in the Sun will call it a nanny-state initiative that penalises poor people“, even as we see the taken step “It calls on the government to ban junk food advertising before 9pm and unhealthy buy-one-get-one-free offers, among other things. Oliver is proud of it. He looks relaxed, sitting on one of the sofas in his industrial, vintage-styled head office – although he knows the attacks will come“, we see that there is a lot to be done, but he has started the path, and even when we recognise that “addressed to the prime minister and signed by Jeremy Corbyn, Nicola Sturgeon and other party leaders” those undersigning is are not in government, yet when we look back to 2005, we see “In a response to the plea from TV chef Jamie Oliver for a ‘school dinner revolution’, the Prime Minister will say that school kitchens will be rebuilt and equipped so dishes can be cooked from scratch, while dinner ladies are given ‘culinary skills’ to help them create appetising menus“, it was a success as the Telegraph reported “A £280 million initiative to improve the nation’s school dinners was unveiled by Tony Blair yesterday following a campaign by Jamie Oliver, the celebrity chef. Mr Blair and Ruth Kelly, the Education Secretary, produced the money just as Oliver arrived at Downing Street with a 271,000-signature petition demanding better meals“, so what happened to that initiative, the fact that there is a second round, how much success did the £280 million get the UK schools, what was achieved and what was not is also equally a question. You see throwing money at a problem does not make it go away, it merely gets the front page for a week at the most, So when we look at briefing paper 3336, Obesity Statistics called SN03336, attached, we see that the increase from 53% to 61%, and from 15% to 26% is shown on page 3, yet it also shows that the curve on overweight or obese is also leveling from 2005 onward, so there is a shown success, what is less shown is the improvement rate among the young population, we see the statistics and total statistics, but as we cannot see if the those obese have become less obese cannot be determined in such an aggregated state.

Another path shown is that when we compare to the mindset in Japan, where only 4% has obesity, we see that studying the Japanese culture on healthy foods is becoming a lot more interesting. I did see an excellent video by Joanne Lumley on Japan, where we actually get to see two culinary sides, the first is that Japanese prison food is better looking and healthier than anything we can get in any fast food place, second was a visit to a primary school having lunch. They were eye openers, so there is still much to be learned for all the dietary players in the world. The one fact that we do clearly see is on page 12 with “obesity rates in the most deprived areas have risen by almost five percentage points but were unchanged in the least deprived areas“, we could go by the need of income, but more importantly we need to find other ways to solve the food system on a parental level, because giving in the screaming kids demanding sugar and chips will not work. Some might want to give in, but the price down the line will be extremely high. Some have no means to afford decent food and when we see that £36 a day is needed when you are on the basic standard, yet this includes rent, utilities, food and clothing. So when we consider that number, we get a lot less to live on, so when we consider rent increase, energy price hikes and other elements not much is left and that amount is actually decreasing. That is part of the ballgame and even as Jamie does not have all the answers, he is giving us a path to consider. If the school kitchens become better equipped and gives better food, the health risks will decrease as they decrease and the children’s physique improves through sports and actual activities (we don’t all like sports), we get to consider a lot more options and now we merely have the mental option remaining, but that is part of Jerome Doraisamy’s The Wellness Doctrines for High School Students, which is not part of this discussion today.

We can argue on how good or how bad Jamie Oliver is doing it, but the one part that no one can deny is that he is actually doing something and that he is at least on the right path and trying to work on the solutions that could work is why he is one of several silent heroes of choice. A crusader who is not playing Don Quixote, he is trying to do good, not chasing windmills. when I see the Guardian article, I see there is plenty of mentions of failure, his failures, yet in all that there was not one mention of greed, or of some basic exploitation setting, merely, as I personally saw it, he tried too much in too many directions and seemingly all at nearly the same time, I am partially amazed that he was able to avoid a heart attack and a stroke in the process. So when it comes to trusting the health of your children, would you listen to Jamie Oliver or to the Marketing CEO of a fast food chain? Now consider that one of the two will get your child killed 20 years earlier, now who do you trust? Are you scared yet, you actually should be!

That is becoming the ballgame, because when there is no NHS, which with the current crises is not merely a speculative possibility, how will you get treatment for your child when diabetes becomes a fact of life? Oh, and in addition, when you are still on that £36 a day (if you are that lucky), how will you afford the medication and other needs?

These few steps alone show that not only is Jamie Oliver on the right path, we need to think the long term impact that are limiting the options we remain to keep, because the list of those options are falling faster than you think. When we accept that in the most deprived areas where child obesity went from 27% at the age of 5 to 41% at the age of 10, when you consider that danger for a mere 2 generations, how will you see the economy where part of the labour is no longer being done because those jobs can no longer be done in 3 generations because the health of that workforce will not allow that to be done, so who will do those jobs? Perhaps the kids who are currently growing up in Beaconsfield, Buckinghamshire or Ascot, Berkshire? You have got to be joking!

We must accept that the previous labour did make steps and we need to see what was not done, why it was not done and what needs to be done, not just done as a mere ‘because we have to‘, but because we desperately need to move away from the downward spiral that too many nations are currently on in the first place.

 

 

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April 24, 2018 · 10:42

Behind Fake News and Business Intelligence

It all started with the Independent last night (at https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/facebook-terrorism-isis-alqaeda-content-removed-mark-zuckerberg-a8319001.html). You see, we have had our fill of Facebook news, some of it seems to hold ground, a lot linked to ‘rumoured’ and some founded through advertisement as Eddie McGuire is now fighting with ‘Eddie McGuire is vowing to sue Facebook over a fake news article that claimed the broadcaster was promoting a cure for erectile dysfunction‘. Even as we see the issues around the Australian TV Presenter, we are nowhere near ready.

There is in addition the visibility through the MoneySavingExpert founder Martin Lewis, who is determined to give Facebook a bloody nose.

Yet at the core we are in a separate standing. The first is given with Facebook generates 4 new petabytes of data per day; this translates to 4,000 Terabytes, or 4,000,000 Gigabytes. That is every day! So when I see “Facebook has said it removed or flagged 1.9 million pieces of content linked to al-Qaeda or Isis in the first part of 2018“, I wonder what they did NOT find. There is no way to tell, but they are nowhere close to the 100% mark. In addition, people like Eddie McGuire and Martin Lewis are not making it any easier. Now, I am partially on their side, if their name is wrongfully used there should be repercussions, yet this is advertisement and they should go after those advertisers, not Facebook themselves. They might do this from the sense of Torts to go after the money, but then they merely want a payday, not a resolution. When we take a look at Facebook Marketing, we see something interesting in the Business Insider, when we consider “Relationship marketing differs from other forms of marketing in that it recognises the long term value to the firm of keeping customers, as opposed to direct or ‘Intrusion’ marketing, which focuses upon acquisition of new clients by targeting majority demographics based upon prospective client lists“. This implies that this system relies on idiots propagating the message of the fake McGuire and Lewis. That is what makes the issue a larger issue. You see people have a god given right to be moronic idiots, with no accountability to the truth or reality. So these two gentlemen are almost on some fools errant. The moment we look into the advertisement policies, the online sales structure, Facebook is likely to have absolved all liability and they become a mere facilitator. And in all this America just doesn’t care, if they did the ‘big dick‘ and ‘huge tits‘ pharmacy solutions would have stopped decades ago, but they didn’t did they?

So in all that light we see ‘Why paying for Facebook won’t fix your privacy’ (at http://www.businessintelligenceinfo.com/business-intelligence/big-data/why-paying-for-facebook-wont-fix-your-privacy), the issue is not the data. We see that when we consider “While Facebook might offer an option to pay instead of having targeted ads shown, it’s also likely that people purchasing such an option will have their personal information collected anyway. Zuckerberg hinted there might be a version of Facebook that is not free, but he never hinted that he might stop collecting your data. And Facebook is only one example of a ubiquitous business model“, this is the one place where Google and Facebook are truly the same. Their operations rely on having that data and collecting more data, the value of data is only a guarantee as long as the data is up to date.

In all this there are some clear issues. You see, the user should be allowed to get the data on ANY advertiser. So, as such if there if fake news, or wrongful advertisers, these advertisers are now in the picture as their records could be pulled by anyone. It would also enable people like McGuire and Lewis to go after the advertisers. As those fake advertisers can no longer hide, they will need to find other shores to dig for cheap revenue. Yet there is no solution for those people, and Facebook themselves have opened that door by their own doing. Facebook Business gave us “Facebook is one of the most efficient ways to advertise online. See how we connect businesses with all the right people on any device with Facebook marketing“. If they ‘connect businesses’ they have the goods on that business and as such we have a right to know. I would not put it past McGuire to introduce those people abusing his good name by introducing those advertisers to the business end of a ‘2 by 4’.

If Business Intelligence is ‘the strategies and technologies used by enterprises for the data analysis of business information’, Facebook would have no option but to make that effort and change. You see, if business information is not correct of reliably false, it stops having value degrading the facilitator, so it is actually in their interest as Facebook to make that jump. In addition, when we consider ‘BI is most effective when it combines data derived from the market in which a company operates with data from company sources internal to the business‘, which we get from ‘Coker, Frank (2014). Pulse: Understanding the Vital Signs of Your Business. Ambient Light Publishing’, to some extent, we see that Facebook is either willing to lose its markers on effectiveness or adjust its current visions. In addition, when we realise that its terrorist propaganda settings are below nominal, we see that the system needs more than an overhaul, it needs a separate dashboard of flags as to ascertain the volatility of the advertisement space used and that is merely when it is set to advertisement. When we consider the ISIS 2016 recruitment video (removed in late 2017) that was on Heavy.com, we now see a new iteration. What happens when it is not some extreme violence advertisement? What if it is merely fake news and false advertisement? The only way to get through that is to start mapping the users propagating this, there is no other alternative. Let the user face the accountability of their use of ‘free speech‘, the moment it clearly intersects with defamation and liable acts, that is the first moment that the waves of prosecution will warrant the user to start acting responsibly.

I am willing to take it one step further; the user needs to become Business Intelligence aware, all of them, no matter how artsy their stand is. If our ‘survival’ require us to be aware of the value we represent, we suddenly grow an interest in what we propagate is when we start cleaning a system, so these 500+ members (friends) we have, whilst we need to remember that 150 of them were because we needed ‘stuff’ from Farmville, at that point we will start cleaning our accounts and the interactions we have. When we have clean accounts a lot of fake news will start limiting itself to a small circle of ‘facilitators’ and as such the issue becomes a much smaller issue. As the circle decreases, those people abusing advertisements and propagate messages will learn that the effort to grow will take much more effort and as such it will become a lot less rewarding to do so, in addition, as the circle is smaller, it will be the actual circle of those embracing either fake news and extremism, the fake news people will isolate themselves more and more and the extremism people will be more readily identifiable.

So as Facebook is holding onto ‘Twice as much as in the previous quarter‘ I am willing to speculate that they aren’t even close to 25%, that means that their extremism message is still getting through and until Facebook changes their ways, the issue is unlikely to ever be resolved. Now, that does not mean that Facebook is willing to facilitate for them, it merely means that the changes in the propagation through messages, false posts and/or advertisements needs a massive overhaul.

So as we accept the Independent with “It noted that “bad actors have long tried to use” the internet for nefarious ends, noting that white supremacists and al-Qaeda have for decades sought to disseminate their ideologies online“, as well as ““While the challenge of terrorism online isn’t new, it has grown increasingly urgent as digital platforms become central to our lives”, the post said“. We need to see that there is a lot more to be done. That evidence is seen (at https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/04/09/cryptocurrency-ads-facebook), where we see: “The worst part is that the trick is ridiculously simple: all it takes to circumvent the crypto currency ad ban on the popular social media platform is to avoid using any of the forbidden terms. This is why some marketers have begun strategically abbreviating the word “cryptocurrency” to “c-currency” – and other similar variations“, this in itself is could be partially aided by making the advertisers details open and public. When we consider the news ‘the people have a right to know’, then the people have an equal right to be aware of who is trying to ‘sell’ them that information, when those people can no longer hide, they will optionally start receiving the documents for reparations. Yet this all depends on Facebook being willing to change their model in the first place, it will up the quality of their Business Intelligence data as well as the result. It is likely that they will lose thousands of customers with $100 to spend, yet in light of the damage that they are causing now, that loss should be no more than a mere drop of water on a hot plate, the benefits should outweigh anything else in the long run. In addition, how can you have any faith in any product or solution whilst the seller is trying to hide their identity? How does that make sense?

The nice part is that hitting Fake News, not merely some ‘white supremacist’ trying to push their ideology, when we start seeing trolls and “When Storm Harvey displaced thousands in Texas, US, in August, a Canadian imam had to point out he had never been to the state after he was accused of closing his mosque’s doors to Christian victims in a fake story been shared more than 126,000 times“, we need to consider that they either found 125,000+ gullible idiots, or that the issue is a lot larger than we can imagine. That issue is seen in the BBC article (at http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-trending-42724320), where we see “The young people in Veles may or may not have had much interest in American politics, but because of the money to be made via Facebook advertising, they wanted their fiction to travel widely on social media. The US presidential election – and specifically Donald Trump – was (and of course still is) a very hot topic on social media“, which means that greed propagated a direct impact on Fake News as well as skew the Business Intelligence results. So why pay anything at all? It seems that if people have an interest in informing the audience they will and there is every likelihood that not paying anything could have prevented up to at least 75% of ‘locals launched at least 140 US politics websites’, there will always be a select group of jokers, but a mere cost effective cut might have prevented 75% of the damage others faced by not paying those jokers. When we accept that I am not the most intelligent person on the planet (I actually am, but for the moment, let’s just assume I am not), how come that no one in Facebook handed this option? It is all about the money and in that stride we see mistake after mistake, the toll of greed. that is the true fight Mark Zuckerberg faces and let’s be honest, if he (and his wife) bank a mere billion, they will have enough to live an extremely comfortable life. All these issues seem to exist merely because of greed facilitation. I will let you decide how hot the waters are that Zuckerberg needs to navigate, but as the lawsuits are piling up, making the details of every advertiser known might be a first step to change it all for the better for everyone involved, well except the advertisers that is. As the Business Intelligence value goes up he might attract a whole range of other businesses, a group of people that are proud to propagate their brand, their product and their value.

It is a radical idea, but then, I was always a rebel rouser, if only to make people face the value they could have, not the value that other people say they might have.

 

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April 21, 2018 · 11:50

Waking up 5 years late

I have had something like this, I swear it’s true. It was after I came back from the Middle East, I was more of a ‘party person’ in those days and I would party all weekend non-stop. It would start on Friday evening and I would get home Sunday afternoon. So one weekend, I had gone through the nightclub, day club, bars and Shoarma pit stops after which I went home. I went to bed and I get woken up by the telephone. It is my boss, asking me whether I would be coming to work that day. I noticed it was 09:30, I had overslept. I apologised and rushed to the office. I told him I was sorry that I had overslept and I did not expect too much nose as it was the first time that I had overslept. So the follow up question became “and where were you yesterday?” My puzzled look from my eyes told him something was wrong. It was Tuesday! I had actually slept from Sunday afternoon until Tuesday morning. It would be the weirdest week in a lifetime. I had lost an entire day and I had no idea how I lost a day. I still think back to that moment every now and then, the sensation of the perception of a week being different, I never got over it, now 31 years ago, and it still gets to me every now and then.

A similar sensation is optionally hitting Christine Lagarde I reckon, although if she is still hitting the party scene, my initial response will be “You go girl!”

You see with “Market power wielded by US tech giants concerns IMF chief” (at https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/apr/19/market-power-wielded-by-us-tech-giants-concerns-imf-chief-christine-lagarde) we see the issues on a very different level. So even as we all accept “Christine Lagarde, has expressed concern about the market power wielded by the US technology giants and called for more competition to protect economies and individuals”, we see not the message, but the exclusion. So as we consider “Pressure has been building in the US for antitrust laws to be used to break up some of the biggest companies, with Google, Facebook and Amazon all targeted by critics“, I see a very different landscape. You see as we see Microsoft, IBM and Apple missing in that group, it is my personal consideration that this is about something else. You see Microsoft, IBM and Apple have one thing in common. They are Patent Powerhouses and no one messes with those. This is about power consolidation and the fact that Christine Lagarde is speaking out in such a way is an absolute hypocrite setting for the IMF to have.

You see, to get that you need to be aware of two elements. The first is the American economy. Now in my personal (highly opposed) vision, the US has been bankrupt; it has been for some time and just like the entire Moody debacle in 2008. People might have seen in in ‘the Big Short‘, a movie that showed part of it and whilst the Guardian reported ““Moody’s failed to adhere to its own credit-rating standards and fell short on its pledge of transparency in the run-up to the ‘great recession’,” principal deputy associate attorney general Bill Baer said in the statement“, it is merely one version of betrayal to the people of the US by giving protection to special people in excess of billions and they merely had to pay a $864m penalty. I am certain that those billionaires have split that penalty amongst them. So, as I stated, the US should be seen as bankrupt. It is not the only part in this. The Sydney Morning Herald (at https://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/how-trump-s-hair-raising-level-of-debt-could-bring-us-all-crashing-down-20180420-p4zank.html) gives us “Twin reports by the International Monetary Fund sketch a chain reaction of dangerous consequences for world finance. The policy – if you can call it that – puts the US on an untenable debt trajectory. It smacks of Latin American caudillo populism, a Peronist contagion that threatens to destroy the moral foundations of the Great Republic. The IMF’s Fiscal Monitor estimates that the US budget deficit will spike to 5.3 per cent of GDP this year and 5.9 per cent in 2019. This is happening at a stage of the economic cycle when swelling tax revenues should be reducing net borrowing to zero“. I am actually decently certain that this will happen. Now we need to look back to my earlier statement.

You see, if the US borrowing power is nullified, the US is left without any options, unless (you saw that coming didn’t you). The underwriting power of debt becomes patent power. Patents have been set to IP support. I attended a few of those events (being a Master of Intellectual Property Law) and even as my heart is in Trademarks, I do have a fine appreciation of Patents. In this the econometrics of the world are seeing the national values and the value of any GDP supported by the economic value of patents.

In this, in 2016 we got “Innovation and creative endeavors are indispensable elements that drive economic growth and sustain the competitive edge of the U.S. economy. The last century recorded unprecedented improvements in the health, economic well-being, and overall quality of life for the entire U.S. population. As the world leader in innovation, U.S. companies have relied on intellectual property (IP) as one of the leading tools with which such advances were promoted and realized. Patents, trademarks, and copyrights are the principal means for establishing ownership rights to the creations, inventions, and brands that can be used to generate tangible economic benefits to their owner“, as such the cookie has crumbled into where the value is set (see attached), one of the key findings is “IP-intensive industries continue to be a major, integral and growing part of the U.S. economy“, as such we see the tech giants that I mentioned as missing and not being mentioned by Christine Lagarde. It is merely one setting and there are optionally a lot more, but in light of certain elements I believe that patents are a driving force and those three have a bundle, Apple has so many that it can use those patents too buy several European nations. IBM with their (what I personally believe to be) an overvalued Watson, we have seen the entire mess moving forward, presenting itself and pushing ‘boundaries’ as we are set into a stage of ‘look what’s coming’! It is all about research, MIT and Think 2018. It is almost like Think 2018 is about the point of concept, the moment of awareness and the professional use of AI. In that IBM, in its own blog accidently gave away the goods as I see it with: “As we get closer to Think, we’re looking forward to unveiling more sessions, speakers and demos“, I think they are close, they are getting to certain levels, but they are not there yet. In my personal view they need to keep the momentum going, even if they need to throw in three more high exposed events, free plane tickets and all kinds of swag to flim flam the audience. I think that they are prepping for the events that will not be complete in an alpha stage until 2020. Yet that momentum is growing, and it needs to remain growing. Two quotes give us that essential ‘need’.

  1. The US Army signed a 33-month, $135 million contract with IBM for cloud services including Watson IoT, predictive analytics and AI for better visibility into equipment readiness.
  2. In 2017, IBM inventors received more than 1,900 patents for new cloud technologies to help solve critical business challenges.

The second is the money shot. An early estimate is outside of the realm of most, you see the IP Watchdog gave us: “IBM Inventors received a record 9043 US patents in 2017, patenting in such areas as AI, Cloud, Blockchain, Cybersecurity and Quantum Computing technology“, the low estimate is a value of $11.8 trillion dollars. That is what IBM is sitting on. That is the power of just ONE tech giant, and how come that Christine Lagarde missed out on mentioning IBM? I’ll let you decide, or perhaps it was Larry Elliott from the Guardian who missed out? I doubt it, because Larry Elliott is many things, stupid ain’t one. I might not agree with him, or at times with his point of view, but he is the clever one and his views are valid ones.

So in all this we see that there is a push, but is it the one the IMF is giving or is there another play? The fact that banks have a much larger influence in what happens is not mentioned, yet that is not the play and I accept that, it is not what is at stake. There is a push on many levels and even as we agree that some tech giants have a larger piece of the cake (Facebook, Google and Amazon), a lot could have been prevented by proper corporate taxation, but that gets to most of the EU and the American Donald Duck, or was that Trump are all about not walking that road? The fact that Christine has failed (one amongst many) to introduce proper tax accountability on tech giants is a much larger issue and it is not all on her plate in all honesty, so there are a few issues with all this and the supporting views on all this is not given with “Lagarde expressed concern at the growing threat of a trade war between the US and China, saying that protectionism posed a threat to the upswing in the global economy and to an international system that had served countries well“, it is seen in several fields, one field, was given by The Hill, in an opinion piece. The information is accurate it is merely important to see that it has the views of the writer (just like any blog).

So with “Last December, the United States and 76 other WTO members agreed at the Buenos Aires WTO Ministerial to start exploring WTO negotiations on trade-related aspects of e-commerce. Those WTO members are now beginning their work by identifying the objectives of such an agreement. The U.S. paper is an important contribution because it comprehensively addresses the digital trade barriers faced by many companies“, which now underlines “A recent United States paper submitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO) is a notable step toward establishing rules to remove digital trade barriers. The paper is significant for identifying the objectives of an international agreement on digital trade“. This now directly gives rise to “the American Bar Association Section of Intellectual Property Law also requested that the new NAFTA require increased protections in trade secrets, trademarks, copyrights, and patents“, which we get from ‘Ambassador Lighthizer Urged to Include Intellectual Property Protections in New NAFTA‘ (at https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/ambassador-lighthizer-urged-to-include-52674/) less than 10 hours ago. So when we link that to the quote “The proposals included: that Canada and Mexico establish criminal penalties for trade secrets violations similar to those in the U.S. Economic Espionage Act, an agreement that Mexico eliminate its requirement that trademarks be visible, a prohibition on the lowering of minimum standards of patent protection“. So when we now look back towards the statement of Christine Lagarde and her exclusion of IBM, Microsoft and Apple, how is she not directly being a protectionist of some tech giants?

I think that the IMF is also feeling the waters what happens when the US economy takes a dip, because at the current debt levels that impact is a hell of a lot more intense and the games like Moody’s have been played and cannot be played again. Getting caught on that level means that the US would have to be removed from several world economic executive decisions, not a place anyone in Wall Street is willing to accept, so that that point Pandora’s Box gets opened and no one will be able to close it at that point. So after waking up 5 years late we see that the plays have been again and again about keeping the status quo and as such the digital rights is the one card left to play, which gives the three tech giants an amount of power they have never had before, so as everyone’s favourite slapping donkey (Facebook) is mentioned next to a few others, it is the issue of those not mentioned that will be having the cake and quality venison that we all desire. In this we are in a dangerous place, even more the small developers who come up with the interesting IP’s they envisioned. As their value becomes overstated from day one, they will be pushed to sell their IP way too early, more important, that point comes before their value comes to fruition and as such those tech giants (Apple, IBM, and Microsoft) will get an even more overbearing value. Let’s be clear they are not alone, the larger players like Samsung, Canon, Qualcomm, LG Electronics, Sony and Fujitsu are also on that list. The list of top players has around 300 members, including 6 universities (all American). So that part of the entire economy is massively in American hands and we see no clear second place, not for a long time. Even as the singled out tech giants are on that list, it is the value that they have that sets them a little more apart. Perhaps when you consider having a go at three of them, whilst one is already under heavy emotional scrutiny is perhaps a small price to pay.

How nice for them to wake up, I merely lost one day once, they have been playing the sleeping game for years and we will get that invoice at the expense of the futures we were not allowed to have, if you wonder how weird that statement is, then take a look at the current retirees, the devaluation they face, the amount they are still about to lose and wonder what you will be left with when you consider that the social jar will be empty long before you retire. The one part we hoped to have at the very least is the one we will never have because governments decided that budgeting was just too hard a task, so they preferred to squander it all away. The gap of those who have and those who have not will become a lot wider over the next 5 years, so those who retire before 2028 will see hardships they never bargained for. So how exactly are you served with addressing “‘too much concentration in hands of the few’ does not help economy“, they aren’t and you weren’t. It is merely the setting for what comes next, because in all this it was never about that. It is the first fear of America that counts. With ‘US ponders how it can stem China’s technology march‘ (at http://www.afr.com/news/world/us-ponders-how-it-can-stem-chinas-technology-march-20180418-h0yyaw), we start seeing that shift, so as we see “The New York Times reported on April 7 that “at the heart” of the trade dispute is a contest over which country plays “a leading role in high-tech industries”. The Wall Street Journal reported on April 12 that the US was preparing rules to block Chinese technology investment in the US, while continuing to negotiate over trade penalties“, we see the shifted theatre of trade war. It will be about the national economic value with the weight of patents smack in the middle. In that regard, the more you depreciate other parts, the more important the value of patents becomes. It is not a simple or easy picture, but we will see loads of econometrics giving their view on all that within the next 2-3 weeks.

Have a great weekend and please do not bother to wake up, it seems that Christine Lagarde didn’t bother waking up for years.

 

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April 16, 2018 · 10:32

Direction X

It is the Columbian (at http://www.columbian.com/news/2018/apr/15/harrop-facebook-wont-alter-its-lucrative-practices-without-regulations/) that gives us a light to work with today. A light that some US congressman and US Senators have been pushing for, so it is fun to have a go at that point of view. Now, do not mistake my opposition to it as a way to invalidate the view. I do not agree with the point of view, but many have it. So I see it as a way to inform the readers on the things that they need to know. Froma Harrop starts with three events. We see:

  • Mark Zuckerberg in 2006: “We really messed this one up. …We did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them.”
  • Zuckerberg in 2010: “Sometimes we move too fast. … We will add privacy controls that are much simpler to use.”
  • Zuckerberg early this year: “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. … There’s more we can do here to limit the information developers can access and put more safeguards in place to prevent abuse.”

Now, they are valid events, but the dimensionality is missing. With the exception of certain Google products, Facebook has been the biggest evolving platform on a near daily basis, the integration with mobile apps, mobile reporting, stories, clips, annotated pictures, travelling, and so much more. Over a period of 10 years Facebook went from a dynamic page (for each user or group) to a collected omnibus of information available to all their friends. That is a level of growth that even Microsoft has not been able to compete with and in all this, there will always be mistakes. Some small and trivial and some will be bang up monsters of flaws. Compare this to Microsoft who did not push forward with its Xbox360, no it offered for sale a more powerful machine whilst trimming the functionality down by close to 20% (personal projected loss) with the shift from Xbox360 to Xbox One and Xbox One to Xbox One X. A data collecting machine of greed (whilst everyone is ignoring the data that Microsoft is uploading), pushing users like a bully, to do what they wanted the user to do or be left out. So when exactly did Facebook do that to that degree? Sony with its PlayStation at least pushed forward to some degree.

Froma makes a nice case with: “The law will require them to obtain consent for use of personal information in simple language. (Users shouldn’t have to take a night course to understand privacy and security settings.)“, this is nice in contrast to some consoles (like the Sony consoles) who suddenly made it illegal to use second hand games on their consoles in their terms of service, they quietly backed away when it blew up in the faces of Microsoft. In all this, yet with my sense of humour and realising where this article was, it was not without a giggle that I took a look at the Columbia Journal of European Law (at http://cjel.law.columbia.edu/preliminary-reference/2017/mind-the-gap-loopholes-in-the-eu-data-privacy-regime/) where we see “any set of information relating to individuals to the extent that, although the information is not processed by means of equipment operating automatically in response to instructions given for that purpose, the set is structured, either by reference to individuals or by reference to criteria relating to individuals, in such a way that specific information relating to a particular individual is readily accessible“, which now leads to “This language of “specific information [that] is readily accessible” indeed was interpreted by the English courts in a manner conflicting with the Directive. In Durant v. Financial Services Authority, the English and Wales Court of Appeal formulated a two part test to evaluate whether a filing system is caught by the Directive:” and that now leaves us with “(i) [T]he files forming part of [the filing system] are structured or referenced in such a way as clearly to indicate at the outset of the search whether specific information capable of amounting to personal data [] is held within the system and, if so, in which file or files it is held; (ii) [The filing system] has, as part of its own structure or referencing mechanism, a sufficiently sophisticated and detailed means of readily indicating whether and where in an individual file or files specific criteria or information about the applicant can be readily located.”

So in that case Froma is left with a piece of paper to be stationed where the sun does not shine and it merely took the case Durant v. Financial Services Authority to show its ‘lack‘ of complexity, or did it? She is right that ‘Users shouldn’t have to take a night course to understand privacy and security settings‘, it merely took law lord Sir Robin Ernest Auld (a former Lord Justice of Appeal in the Court of Appeal of England and Wales) a hell of a lot more than a night course, more like 25 years on the bench as a lawyer, an elected judge and his ascension to lord justice of the appellant court to get it all figured out.

So as we get that out of the way we also need to look at “The companies will have to notify users of a data break-in within 72 hours of its discovery. They’ll have to give up monopoly control of the personal information; people will have the right to obtain a copy of their data and share it with others“, it took Sony a hell of a lot longer to figure out that they were breached and notify people. So now consider the breaches of Equifax (143 million), eBay (145 million), Yahoo (3 billion) and Target stores (110 million). the implication of alerting that many people is not just weird, it is actually dangerous as people tend to overreact do something stupid and lock their accounts, these 4 events could set the stage for close to 4.5 billion locked accounts. The entire 72 hours, that whilst the discovery does not guarantee that the intrusion is stopped opens the entire system up for all kinds of hackers to have a go at that victim and truly make a much bigger mess of it all. Now the people should be informed, but the entire 72 hours was (as I personally see it) pulled out of a hat. In all this the latest Facebook issue was not done by hackers, it was done by corporations who intentionally abused the system, they set their profit knowingly at the expense of the users of that system and exactly who at Cambridge Analytica is currently under arrest and in prison? It seems to me that Facebook, clearly a victim here, has made mistakes, yet the transgressors are not held to vigorous account, yet the maker of the system is. Now, let’s be clear, Mark has clearly some explaining to do. Yet, when we see “Facebook failed in an attempt to get a handle on the Cambridge Analytica scandal Monday, after British authorities ordered its auditors to vacate the political consultancy’s offices” (source: Fortune), all this whilst the offices of Cambridge Analytica ended up being raided 5 days later, I have never seen authorities giving bank robbers that level of leeway, so why was this level of freedom given to Cambridge Analytica? When we consider that this data could be transplanted to writable objects (Blu-ray) in mere hours, it seems to me that giving them 5 days to wipe the evidence is a lot more questionable than merely thumping Facebook for the flaws.

The one part I truly disagree with is “Many of us have a need to connect and share. But expecting much privacy in a business model that relies on selling your information is highly unrealistic“, you see, here we see two levels of privacy, that what the person shares, free of will and that what is accessed. In one part the privacy from the outside is partially an easy thing, because Google with AdWords has shown that to be a clear option, their advertisers can create and address a population to the granularity available, yet the results of this marketing is done in a level of aggregation, individual records per person are not available. The fact that apps could capture it was a given, but the fact that all unique identifiers were optionally possible was kept in the shadows and that is where Cambridge Analytica worked. Now, this is a generalisation, but it fits the overall issues. Facebook could have done better, yet it was massively naive when it thought that the paying corporations would not try to get their fingers on EVERY part they could. In that I wonder what data the insurance companies in the end got a hold on.

So when I see “Tech investor Jason Calacanis has set up a contest — the Open Book Challenge — to create a Facebook replacement. Finalists will be given $100,000 and residence in a 12-week incubator“, when we see it in the light of “Facebook has delivered Zuckerberg a net worth of over $60 billion” must be the easiest pickings for Jason Calacanis that any entrepreneur has ever been a part of. It is like the pyramid games after 15 rounds whilst the top person stayed on top never having to pay more than 0.0001% of the total earning, not even Las Vegas in its wildest times offered such odds.

So I am very much against regulations, it is merely a way for governments to get a hold of that data. Now I am not against that if it truly serves national security, but the fact that actual criminals and terrorists use such systems to elude identification and strike form a distance merely makes it a waste of time and most analysts know this. Now, we also know that when we know where exactly to look, Facebook could reveal stuff, but to hold those billions of accounts to optionally find merely one person is an extremely bad application of time management.

In the end, the one additional part I liked was Zuckerberg stating “It was my mistake, and I’m sorry. I started Facebook. I run it. And I’m responsible for what happens here”. I like it because of the realisation that in all the bungles of IBM in the last 30 years, especially the PS/2 range, at what point did any of them stand up and tell their consumers that they screwed up? Especially in line of the setting that the average Model 80 (80386) computer was 400% more expensive at merely 28% of the power of a Taiwan clone, in addition the on board time clock battery has given the user more headaches than a hammer and the graphical underperformance offered should be forgotten at the drop of any hat.

So in this Zuckerberg kept his head high and in all this the entire setting of data abuse is still not addressed by either the US or UK government, in all this there is absolutely no indication that the abusers will be facing punishment or prison, so in all this the law failed the people a lot more than Facebook ever did, especially in the light of issues like this have been going on for years, but we do not get to read that part, do we?

 

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April 15, 2018 · 15:28

Overthinking the issue

There is a group of people that have had enough; they are ready to end their lives. Every culture has it and the amount of people contemplating it is a lot larger then you might think. Some statistics give us that 7 people per 100,000 have committed suicide. This implies to some extent that over 200 have contemplated it. If those who do compared to those who considered it is 1:30, then we have a much larger issue than we think.

So when I saw ‘Nitschke’s ‘suicide machine’ draws crowds at Amsterdam funeral fair‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/apr/15/nitschke-suicide-machine-amsterdam-euthanasia-funeral-fair), I wondered what the entire visibility setting was about. The impact is a lot larger than most considered. The machine given here is all about a ‘3d print solution‘, yet the machine that has a full body solution looks like a car for people who cannot drive (preventing suicide in traffic in the process). In the article we see “A controversial suicide pod that enables its occupant to kill themselves at the press of a button went on display at an Amsterdam funeral show on Saturday“, so how controversial is it? Even as we see: “the design will be put online as an open-source document for people to download. “That means that anybody who wants to build the machine can download the plans and 3D-print their own device,” Nitschke said“. My issue is not with the idea, the design or the option. It is the mere contemplation of the facts that in the first, a 3d printer is anywhere between $1500 and $6500.

After that we get the source materials to print the elements of that wheel less car (also costing you an additional fortune, that we get form “Regular PLA and ABS filament for 3D printing costs around $25 per kilogram on average. Specialty filaments can cost as much as four times this amount. Not all 3D printing materials are equal“, which now gets us close to an additional $5000 – $15000. So how is that not exploitation? Did anyone consider a $99 alternative?

So you would need three elements. The first is Temazepam (Restoril), a sleeping drug. Now I must tell you that it has addictive properties, yet in this light you might not need more than one usage and as such addiction is not really an issue. In addition you need a trash bag, a high quality one, which sets you back $4 for 10 of them and in addition you will need elastic band, which is $5. This makes the Temazepam (at $107/30) the most expensive part. What you do is to prepare the elastic band to fit your neck, but not tight. In this path, you basically lay back; fit the trash bag over your head and the plastic bag to hold it together. So after you take a large dose of Temazepam, you lie down and after 30 seconds you tighten the bag loosely around your neck with the elastic band. It need not be tight; you fall asleep and never wake up. The bag makes sure that you lose conscience as your brain is deprived of oxygen. The final sleep! Now, I am not in favour of any if this, yet I understand that some people are forced into this situation. When we see that come diseases are just too harsh on the body I get it. I might not like it or agree to it, but it is a place I understand. In all this, I do have an issue with someone like Philip Nitschke and Alexander Bannink making a ‘3d extravaganza’ that looks nice, but it could be seen by some as a Ponzi based IT exploitation. You see if these people do not buy the printer and the resources, they need someone else to do it and that person would have a legal issue on their trail, that whilst 2 out of three elements I mentioned are available in EVERY supermarket, leaving you with the need to get a fix of Temazepam (Restoril). Yet thanks to David McKinley (R), US reperesentative in West Virginia, we have been made aware that you can get that stuff on Canadian online pharmacies whilst he was trying to blame Facebook for it all. Oh, actually, that is not needed either. If can be found at http://drugs-order.net/Buy-Restoril-Online (thank you Mr Google), and only at $87, so that is still $20 cheaper than initially stated.

?? So why am I going here. Why mention David McKinley?

Actually, I am not. It must be said that overall McKinley is very much a republican, which includes pro-life. So even as we read that as an anti-abortion, I come to the larger personal conclusion that he is also against suicide or for the legal mind the ‘self-assisted death‘. Even as we see my last part as speculation, there is contributing evidence when in 2016 we see ‘House Passes Bipartisan Bill to Fix Mental Health System‘, the quote gives us “Congressman David B. McKinley, P.E., (WV-1) voted to help Americans who struggle with a mental health illness by increasing access to medical professionals and making existing programs more effective“, as well as ““People who suffer from a mental health illness deserve access to the highest quality care available and this legislation is a step towards achieving that goal,” McKinley said” this gives us a path, because in many cases the issues of suicide, no matter how triggered are still to some degree an issue of Mental Health. His setting opposes suicide as I see it. I have not found a clear stance where he gave a clear view on his position towards suicide, yet there are clear sights that most republicans with a strong pro-life view tend to be strongly opposing suicide.

The issue is not merely what his view was or the fact that he wrongfully blamed Facebook for an issue that was not the deciding part in a larger frame of illegal opioid sale. It was the issue that the overall availability reaches far beyond Facebook and many places deliver it with additional ‘customer support‘, so there is that issue. It reflects back to the entire Saturday article on losing one’s life as we see “Nitschke said: “In many countries suicide is not against the law, only assisting a person to commit suicide is. This is a situation where one person chooses to press a button … rather than for instance standing in front of a train”“, which might be true, but the entire setting of printing ones coffin to assisted loss of life whilst the entire contraption looks like a comfortable version of a Suzuki Swift is a bit over the top, especially as my setting for the $99 solution that requires no 3d printer or all the other parts that are required to operate the 3d printer in the first place.

I liked the final quote at the very end the best. With “Rob Bruntink, 52, said: “Well, I think it’s quite silly. It’s stupid. I don’t get it. I’m not interested in a real ‘Sarco’. No.”” we hear all the issues in this that matter.

I am in part on the fence, you see, I saw my mother as she went through the final stages of lung cancer, in the end she was offered more morphine than the average dealer can illegally import in a 20’ft container, so there is that need, when people are confronted with that part, we can offer all kinds of solutions to end their suffering. We can tell them to have faith, take one sleeping pill and fall asleep in the sun, you merely need to find the one person willing to treat that person to the .338 round from a 400-800 metres distance at the mere cost of $3.61 and that person will not wake up (there will be an issue of evidence as well as the legislated criminal local laws to avoid) however on the plus there is the entire 3d printing of the suicide machine gets to be avoided as well and that might be the bigger gain here.

This is not me making fun of the suicide issue, not at all. It is the setting on how willing someone would be to be privy to assisted suicide. Perhaps the machine was not at all about any suicide. Perhaps it was merely to get the conversation on suicide started in a more serious setting.

I remain on the fence. I am not in the mind of people being ‘unique snowflakes‘. Nearly every person on the planet is expendable. When we consider that there were 7.6 billion people in April this year (uncorrected of Syrian and Yemeni deaths at present), I feel certain that most of us all (me included) might be regarded as expandable. So in all this, the entire setting of suicide and assisted suicide is vastly over the top. Now, I understand that the pro-life population (like Congressman David McKinley) will forever be against that and that is fine. No matter what their reasoning is, it is their right to oppose it, yet should they be allowed to prevent others? Should the law be allowed to oppose death and ensure intentional extended suffering? That is perhaps the larger issue in play and as the population grows and resources become increasingly scarce is that in any way a position that we can maintain?

This now gets us to the NY Times, where we saw in 2016 ‘34 Countries Need Food Aid, Report Says‘. So here we see “Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, the Central African Republic, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Guinea, Liberia, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Sierra Leone, Burundi, Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Lesotho, Madagascar, Mozambique, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal and North Korea” having food shortages. Now there is the one case that North Korea vastly did this to themselves, but the other players how did they get into that mess? It is important to recognise that even as there is a clear difference in issues, there is absolutely no guarantee that the absence of war and strife would fix any of it. This now links to an article called ‘Good News, You Will Soon Be Able to Disrupt Eating Actual Food By Buying Soylent At Walmart‘ (at https://gizmodo.com/good-news-you-will-soon-be-able-to-disrupt-eating-actu-1825195058). For those who passed their teenage years by a few decades might remember ‘Soylent Green‘ a gem of a movie with Charleston Heston. It is based on the 1966 book ‘Make Room! Make Room!‘ In the end we learn that Soylent Green is people, to feed the massively overpopulated planet we had to resort to use the dead as a food replacement.

This now all circles back, you see there has forever been a clear link between suicide and food. Some state: “Let’s start a conversation to reduce depression and consequently, suicide. Food and drink choices can lead to suicide, remember it’s the 10th leading cause of death worldwide. Eat better, feel better, live happier.” These were the words of April Chandler. When we accept that suicide was the 10th leading cause of death worldwide a mere 5 years ago, you might start to see the connection. Even as I was on the fence for the larger extent as some have a genuine issue, we need to remember that the bulk of those people do not and at that point it becomes a mental health issue that cannot be solved with a 3d printer. I think that we are getting closer to the verge of a massive breakthrough. A heralded writer and fellow university Student who treated Australia and the world to ‘The Wellness Doctrines for Law Students and Young Lawyers‘ in 2015 and this year to ‘The Wellness Doctrines for high school students‘ is on the ball, I think that the matter is well beyond those boundaries and the setting that good food (an option not always there) for students in the first place is playing a much larger role in all this. If we accept that having certain foods reduced anxiety, can we agree that a good meal is central in mental health as well? If that can be proven is the need of a decent meal not the focal point is setting the right pace for dealing with mental health? If we oppose the entire ‘sarco’ issue, the issue of a suicide machine in a funeral fair, is the need to properly set the dimension of those who have a genuine suicide claim (terminal patients with only pain as a prospect) against those who are considered to have been exhausted to the degree that they are no longer willing to live, if that is a 1% versus 99% sitting, how can we give any kind of value to the wheelless Suzuki Swift with a red nitrogen button, whilst we see that other news gives us “Soylent may have been a polarizing powdered drink when it first went on sale four years ago, but it’s clearly developed a following outside of the startup world as a drink that’s said to be a substitute for a meal. And it may have truly hit the mainstream market now that it’s available at Walmart” (source: the Verge), whilst the linked article gave us: “Rosa Foods announced on Wednesday that it is bringing the signature brand of packaged, flavored sludge—which takes its name from the disheartening 1973 dystopian film Soylent Green, where it’s eventually revealed the product’s key ingredient is uh, “long pig”—to 450 Walmart stores across the country. Soylent CEO Bryan Crowley added in a statement that the move is “a significant step in providing more ways for consumers to get access to our brand,” expanding beyond its current placement in 7-Eleven stores“, if there is clear evidence that gives April Chandler her view and I have personally seen the validity of the views of Jerome Doraisamy. United they give us the missed setting where governments and other places have failed us. The additional ‘evidence’ is seen in the Mercury News, there we see “Palo Alto and Morgan Hill have the highest suicide rates in Santa Clara County among youths 10 to 24 years old“, so what happens when the evidence gives a much larger support to food being the contributing factor in all this? There has been evidence on a global scale from various sources, some better than others, but when we see that the poorly chosen name ‘Soylent‘ is now an actual optional factor, should we consider other issues as well? I am not stating that Soylent is dangerous or toxic or anything bad, but that as a food, or even food replacement stops (read: prevents) people form eating what they actually need for a healthy life, the entire push changes what we should find acceptable. The question becomes how to prove this. We could combine the dream team Jerome Doraisamy, April Chandler and Jamie Oliver as a team to see if there is a clear case and how to raise the health bar through food for students that they can afford whilst not unintentionally endangering their lives is going to be a much larger issue than anyone ever predicted. Part of the ‘sarco’ issue in the Guardian is also seen in the linked article by Polly Toynbee in ‘The ban on assisted death ignores the reality of illnesses like dementia‘. So when I read “Attempts to change the law at Westminster have been thwarted despite overwhelming public support, 82% in the latest poll. But religious objectors have blocked it time and again, with both Houses curiously packed with a disproportionate number of believers in this mostly atheistic country“, I see the flicker of elected dementia, yet in support of their view when we consider that food could be a contributing factor to a decreased mental health, there is the danger that whichever equine burger we got at Tesco, the danger of bad food is actually a lot larger in lowering the health of people in a global setting and that ignored part can no longer be ignored.

So as I tried to lighten the air with a reference to Soylent Green the Medical Daily (not the greatest source of reliable information) gives us “Eating human meat becomes risky due to the presence of prions — versions of normal protein that had their shape altered, losing their function, and becoming infectious. These distorted proteins can influence other similar healthy proteins, and change them, causing a chain reaction, and creating disease. Specifically, prion disease creates holes in the brain, giving it a spongiform appearance, and ultimately causes death. Unlike viruses, bacteria, fungi, or parasitic infections, which contain DNA or RNA, prions don’t, which means they can’t be eradicated with radiation or heat. They could be present in any nervous tissue, including our organs and muscles. However, they are most common in the brain and spinal nerve tissues“, this brought me back to the episode of ‘Our Town‘ from season 2 of the X-Files, where we hear “Scully, I think the good people of Dudley have been eating more than just chicken“, and that is an actual issue. There is an abundance of foods available in nearly every store where we get to eat a lot more elements than we bargained for and not all are healthy. That evidence remains absent as certain foods take a very long time to take a hold on us. This is seen (at https://www.webmd.com/diet/news/20170505/diet-soda-health-risks) in “Numerous studies over the past several years have reported links between diet soda and weight gain, diabetes, heart problems, and other health issues. Most recently, headlines sounded alarms about a higher chance of dementia and stroke among diet soda drinkers” the fact that diet soda drinks are largely available in nearly every store on the planet makes it a much larger issue than most could conceive. Yet in many of these studies it is limited to physical side effects, yet I personally believe that it is impossible for these elements not to have a non-adverse effect to the mental health of a person, the problem is how to show it.

I think that this is the pro-life wet dream, yet no matter how we feel about it, we need to be very careful of the ramification and the acceptance of any reduction of protection to anyone’s life when there is a proven mental health element. The absence of this part and the visibility of both Philip Nitschke and Alexander Bannink, no matter how ideological their view is, especially when the implied evidence all show that there is a mental health issue in place and as such there is now an almost direct link between vulnerable people and the sale of 3d printing goods and resources. I personally believe that the Funeral Fair might have done this as the setting of additional visibility whilst all the players involved forgot or were unaware that what they actually end up doing was to place a minefield around them. A much less humane way to ends one’s life.

So even as I knowingly set the entire Soylent Green matter in different light, the product ‘Soylent’ is a much larger issue to look at. You see I do not think that the food is dangerous; it is what happens when you rely on it to a much larger extent is when we need to look at the impact. Chocolate is not dangerous either, but what happens when you rely on it 5 times a day to still your hunger? How healthy a solution should it be seen as?

Perhaps I am overthinking the entire matter, but the fact that others have been overly avoiding to think of the connected issues to this might be a much larger failure, so I am happy to try and compensate for their avoidance in all this.

 

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April 12, 2018 · 10:13

What surely comes next!

Today I took another look at what the Washington Post reported on Mark Zuckerberg, even as today will not be about that. It will however 100% for certain, soon be about 44 senators, I am collecting data on losers like Rep. David McKinley (W.Va.), who accused Zuckerberg and Facebook of “hurting people” by failing to thwart those who try to sell opioids on the site. So he will soon face my exposure on how Heroin-related overdoses in West Virginia have increased by 200% by Nov 2017 and even more at present since measures were implemented to limit prescription opioid use. In addition a recent source gives us ‘Drug companies shipped nearly 21 million opioid painkillers to a town with 2,900 people‘, which was 3 months ago, so as I see it, the republican loser from West Virginia can join the Texas ranks as one of the least useful persons in the USA. But do not worry, these senators have accumulated loads of visibility and I will save some space for all 44 of them. So as this is coming soon enough, let’s take a look what matters today.

You see, the issues in the Middle East are accelerating and the issues are becoming more and more extreme. Even as we saw “The announcement was made at the High Level Pledging Event for the Humanitarian Crisis in Yemen held in Geneva today, bringing total EU funding to Yemen to €438.2 million since the beginning of the crisis in 2015. Speaking at the event in Geneva today, Commissioner for Humanitarian Aid and Crisis” a mere week ago (source: EU News), the issue is not how much is going there, but whether that pays for any humanitarian relief. You see, Yemeni Houthi’s fired ballistic missiles at Riyadh, which according to Al Jazeera travelled more than 800 Km into Saudi Arabia (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2018/04/yemen-houthi-rebels-fire-ballistic-missile-saudi-capital-180411153418562.html), and when we see “Sharaf Lokman, a spokesman for the Houthis, said the attack came after Saleh al-Samad – president of the Supreme Political Council that runs Yemen’s capital, Sanaa, and other rebel-held areas – declared the start of “a year of ballistic missiles““, can we blame Saudi Arabia for whatever comes next? Whatever comes next is likely to be today and as the papers are all about how civilians were hit in all this, it seems to me that there is an unbalance in what is reported on several sides, giving rise to different levels of scrutiny and bias, whilst those needing to get all the news are blatantly ignored. When we see “the kingdom’s defence forces saying they intercepted missiles that targeted Riyadh and another city, and drones targeting an airport and an Aramco oil facility in the country’s south“, many people forget that all this requires technology, knowledge and heaps of additional logistics. So how are the Houthi rebels getting this stuff? Someone is supplying them and even as we realise that these puppies are not cheap, we tend to forget that the cost is rising quickly, especially when we see “a year of ballistic missiles”. Even under the best of conditions Yemen could not afford any of it, so they shouldn’t be able to get the mere fuel for these missiles, where is the rest coming from? When we consider the players who could afford it, how come the EU is all about “Martin Griffiths initial priority should be to listen rather than act“, whilst someone is ordering missiles by the dozen a day (an assumption from my side), where are these funds coming from? I think that the part “Martin Griffiths has an opportunity to serve as a bridge between international and regional actors and to benefit from European diplomatic initiatives” sounds slightly too much like a joke when we see the adverse actions taken. In this the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR) might be a mere think tank, yet even they need to work on the premise of reality and achievability, two parts that are not coming to their doorstep any day soon if they keep on ignoring certain cash flow issues in all this. You see, Saudi Arabia almost has no option left but to strike back as hard as they can. If they do not, they are merely opening themselves to additional attacks from Hezbollah Al-Hejaz. A group that Iran planned to revive last year and as matters go, there is every chance that they have gone beyond the planning stage. If there is any truth to the entire “a year of ballistic missiles” matter, it implies (to some extent) that certain parts are in play and Iran cannot get caught there in any way. Having a resurrected puppet like Hezbollah Al-Hejaz is the most likely solution for them. Even as they know that it will be a signal for Israel to hit Hezbollah in their region, the outcome is a certain level of destabilisation, which is as I personally see it the first need for Iran. If they have any plans towards hurting Saudi Arabia, destabilisation is a clear first tactical need. In this Saudi Arabia has its work cut out in equal measure. It needs a few solid iron strikes against the Yemeni Houthi’s for Iran to realise that they are truly biting off more than they can chew and that is the only way (without a full scale skirmish) for Iran to reconsider the situation that they are on. In equal measure, Turkey is seeing the initial impact of its actions in Syria as the Turkey’s embattled lira hit a new low of around 4.14 to the US dollar. Turkey suffers from 10% inflation driven by an enormous internal credit bubble, a current account deficit of nearly 6% of GDP, and a US$220 billion corporate debt load in foreign currency. All this the Erdogan response is ““There are games being played on our economy,” he said in a speech in Ankara. “I call to those attacking our economy: You will not succeed. Just like you failed before, you will fail again”“. As I see it the idea that the cost of a war would largely impede ones economy as billions go to the cost of fuel for tanks and the ammunition for troops and tanks and even more resources for feeding the troops, all Trillions of Turkish Lira’s not going to the Turkish civilian needs and infrastructure probable has not yet sunk in with the President of Turkey, so that is that lack of insight to add to the tumbling Turkish economy as well? The good part here is that as they face those elements they need to shy away from becoming the Iranian tool in the Middle East outside of Syria, so that would optionally give Saudi Arabia more breathing space, how these acts could be used to stop Iran remains unclear at present, but there is every chance that Israel and the US are pissed off enough to do something silly like open up a full scale theatre of war in Syria (after the chemical attacks) and as such, if Russia does not respond with actual war and tries the diplomatic path to calm things down, Iran will not be left with any option but to wage war alone against Saudi Arabia, whilst Israel and the US will side with Saudi Arabia, the second part is that Yemen will suddenly lose all Iranian support which will change everything there as well.

The only direct path at present (as I personally see it) is to find out how the missiles make it to Yemen and make sure that the next 3 shipments are scuttled in the Gulf of Aden or the Arabian Sea, making the entire endeavour way too expensive for those with additional agenda’s. Yet the reality is that there are unknowns at present. It is not the missiles themselves, but the support system behind it all. Someone is getting trained there and finding out by whom and how is actually more important, sinking a shipment is one thing, getting rid of the instructors through targeted killings makes the next 6 shipments useless and therefor a tactic to be favoured (if realistically possible). In all this the person(s) training the Houthi are likely to be shielded, but it seems to me that finding them might be easier in the long run. Any Houthi firing team that the Saudi military can dispose of would delay the “year of ballistic missiles” tactic by several months with each successful hit making the statement Saleh al-Samad an unrealistic boast that could drown moral the way it needs to be, because as long as this goes on in Yemen, the 850,000 half-starved children (as reported by Oxfam) will not get to have any chance of survival.

Yet that is the way of inaction, even as action might be worse in the short term, resolving the issue would also imply that humanitarian aid could be possible after that. In all this, no matter what we think might happen, we do know that death is surely coming for thousands, if not for hundreds of thousands of the civilian population, a population of 10 million of Yemeni who are currently out of food, water, electricity and medicine, and their chances for survival? When we consider the mere premise of “The World Bank predicts that Yemen’s oil and gas revenues will plummet during 2009 and 2010, and fall to zero by 2017 as supplies run out“, we might have to realise that the Yemeni’s need to consider not being alive, at the lives of Syrians were set to zero on the abacus of life due to a none economic value, the plight of the Yemeni people might be worse and that is not just in light of their value, that realisation also gives us that this nation has no funds to work with, so how would they be paying for their “year of ballistic missiles“? #JustAsking!

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April 8, 2018 · 14:21

The sting of history

There was an interesting article on the BBC (at http://www.bbc.com/news/business-43656378) a few days ago. I missed it initially as I tend to not dig too deep into the BBC past the breaking news points at times. Yet there it was, staring at me and I thought it was rather funny. You see ‘Google should not be in business of war, say employees‘, which is fair enough. Apart from the issue of them not being too great at waging war and roughing it out, it makes perfect sense to stay away from war. Yet is that possible? You see, the quote is funny when you see ‘No military projects‘, whilst we are all aware that the internet itself is an invention of DARPA, who came up with it as a solution that addressed “A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in information storage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions“, which let to ARPANET and became the Internet. So now that the cat is out of the bag, we can continue. The objection they give is fair enough. When you are an engineer who is destined to create a world where everyone communicates to one another, the last thing you want to see is “Project Maven involves using artificial intelligence to improve the precision of military drone strikes“. I am not sure if Google could achieve it, but the goal is clear and so is the objection. The BBC article show merely one side, when we go to the source itself (at https://www.defense.gov/News/Article/Article/1254719/project-maven-to-deploy-computer-algorithms-to-war-zone-by-years-end/), in this I saw the words from Marine Corps Colonel Drew Cukor: “Cukor described an algorithm as about 75 lines of Python code “placed inside a larger software-hardware container.” He said the immediate focus is 38 classes of objects that represent the kinds of things the department needs to detect, especially in the fight against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria“. You see, I think he has been talking to the wrong people. Perhaps you remember the project SETI screensaver. “In May 1999 the University of California launched SETI@Home. SETI stands for the” Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” Originally thought that it could at best recruit only a thousand or so participants, more than a million people actually signed up on the day and in the process overwhelmed the meager desktop PC that was set aside for this project“, I remember it because I was one of them. It is in that trend that “SETI@Home was built around the idea that people with personal computers who often leave them to do something else and then just let the screensaver run are actually wasting good computing resources. This was a good thing, as these ‘idle’ moments can actually be used to process the large amount of data that SETI collects from the galaxy” (source: Manilla Times), they were right. The design was brilliant and simple and it worked better than even the SETI people thought it would, but here we now see the application, where any android (OK, IOS too) device created after 2016 is pretty much a supercomputer at rest. You see, Drew Cukor is trying to look where he needs to look, it is a ‘flaw’ he has as well as the bulk of all the military. You see, when you look for a target that is 1 in 10,000, so he needs to hit the 0.01% mark. This is his choice and that is what he needs to do, I am merely stating that by figuring out where NOT to look, I am upping his chances. If I can set the premise of illuminating 7,500 false potential in a few seconds, his job went from a 0.01% chance to 0.04%, making his work 25 times easier and optionally faster. Perhaps the change could eliminate 8,500 or even 9,000 flags. Now we are talking the chances and the time frame we need. You see, it is the memo of Bob Work that does remain an issue. I disagree with “As numerous studies have made clear, the department of defense must integrate artificial intelligence and machine learning more effectively across operations to maintain advantages over increasingly capable adversaries and competitors,“. The clear distinction is that those people tend to not rely on a smartphone, they rely on a simple Nokia 2100 burner phone and as such, there will be a complete absence of data, or will there be? As I see it, to tackle that, you need to be able to engage is what might be regarded as a ‘Snippet War‘, a war based on (a lot of) ‘small pieces of data or brief extracts‘. It is in one part cell tower connection patterns, it is in one part tracking IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) codes and a part of sim switching. It is a jumble of patterns and normally getting anything done will be insane. Now what happens when we connect 100 supercomputers to one cell tower and mine all available tags? What happens when we can disseminate these packages and let all those supercomputers do the job? Merely 100 smart phones or even 1,000 smart phones per cell tower. At that point the war changes, because now we have an optional setting where on the spot data is offered in real time. Some might call it ‘the wet dream’ of Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor and he was not ever aware that he was allowed to adult dream to that degree on the job, was he?

Even as these people are throwing AI around like it is Steven Spielberg’s chance to make a Kubrick movie, in the end it is a new scale and new level of machine learning, a combination of clustered flags and decentralised processing on a level that is not linked to any synchronicity. Part of this solution is not in the future, it was in the past. For that we need to read the original papers by Paul Baran in the early 60’s. I think we pushed forward to fast (a likely involuntary reaction). His concept of packet switching was not taken far enough, because the issues of then are nowhere near the issues of now. Consider raw data as a package and the transmission itself set the foundation of the data path that is to be created. So basically the package becomes the data entry point of raw data and the mobile phone processes this data on the fly, resetting the data parameters on the fly, giving instant rise to what is unlikely to be a threat and optionally what is), a setting where 90% could be parsed by the time it gets to the mining point. The interesting side is that the container for processing this could be set in the memory of most mobile phones without installing stuff as it is merely processing parsed data, not a nice, but essentially an optional solution to get a few hundred thousand mobiles to do in mere minutes what takes a day by most data centres, they merely receive the first level processed data, now it is a lot more interesting, as thousands are near a cell tower, that data keeps on being processed on the fly by supercomputers at rest all over the place.

So, we are not as Drew states ‘in an AI arms race‘, we are merely in a race to be clever on how we process data and we need to be clever on how to get these things done a lot faster. The fact that the foundation of that solution is 50 years old and still counts as an optional way in getting things done merely shows the brilliance of those who came before us. You see, that is where the military forgot the lessons of limitations. As we shun the old games like the CBM 64, and applaud the now of Ubisoft. We forget that Ubisoft shows to be graphically brilliant, having the resources of 4K camera’s, whilst those on the CBM-64 (Like Sid Meier) were actually brilliant for getting a workable interface that looked decent as they had the mere resources that were 0.000076293% of the resources that Ubisoft gets to work with me now. I am not here to attack Ubisoft, they are working with the resources available, I am addressing the utter brilliance of people like Sid Meier, David Braben, Richard Garriott, Peter Molyneux and a few others for being able to do what they did with the little they had. It is that simplicity and the added SETI@Home where we see the solutions that separates the children from the clever Machine learning programmers. It is not about “an algorithm of about 75 lines of Python code “placed inside a larger software-hardware container.”“, it is about where to set the slicer and how to do it whilst no one is able to say it is happening whilst remaining reliable in what it reports. It is not about a room or a shopping mall with 150 servers walking around the place, it is about the desktop no one notices who is able to keep tabs on those servers merely to keep the shops safe that is the part that matters. The need for brilliance is shown again in limitations when we realise why SETI@Home was designed. It opposes in directness the quote “The colonel described the technology available commercially, the state-of-the-art in computer vision, as “frankly … stunning,” thanks to work in the area by researchers and engineers at Stanford University, the University of California-Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a $36 billion investment last year across commercial industry“, the people at SETI had to get clever fast because they did not get access to $36 billion. How many of these players would have remained around if it was 0.36 billion, or even 0.036 billion? Not too many I reckon, the entire ‘the technology available commercially‘ would instantly fall away the moment the optional payoff remains null, void and unavailable. $36 billion investment implies that those ‘philanthropists’ are expecting a $360 billion payout at some point, call me a sceptic, but that is how I expect those people to roll.

The final ‘mistake’ that Marine Corps Col. Drew Cukor makes is one that he cannot be blamed for. He forgot that computers should again be taught to rough it out, just like the old computers did. The mistake I am referring to is not an actual mistake, it is more accurately the view, the missed perception he unintentionally has. The quote I am referring to is “Before deploying algorithms to combat zones, Cukor said, “you’ve got to have your data ready and you’ve got to prepare and you need the computational infrastructure for training.”“. He is not stating anything incorrect or illogical, he is merely wrong. You see, we need to realise the old days, the days of the mainframe. I got treated in the early 80’s to an ‘event’. You see a ‘box’ was delivered. It was the size of an A3 flatbed scanner, it had the weight of a small office safe (rather weighty that fucker was) and it looked like a print board on a metal box with a starter engine on top. It was pricey like a middle class car. It was a 100Mb Winchester Drive. Yes, 100Mb, the mere size of 4 iPhone X photographs. In those days data was super expensive, so the users and designers had to be really clever about data. This time is needed again, not because we have no storage, we have loads of it. We have to get clever again because there is too much data and we have to filter through too much of it, we need to get better fast because 5G is less than 2 years away and we will drown by that time in all that raw untested data, we need to reset our views and comprehend how the old ways of data worked and prevent Exabyte’s of junk per hour slowing us down, we need to redefine how tags can be used to set different markers, different levels of records. The old ways of hierarchical data was too cumbersome, but it was fast. The same is seen with BTree data (a really antiquated database approach), instantly passing through 50% data in every iteration. In this machine learning could be the key and the next person that comes up with that data solution would surpass the wealth of Mark Zuckerberg pretty much overnight. Data systems need to stop being ‘static’, it needs to be a fluidic and dynamic system, that evolves as data is added. Not because it is cleverer, but because of the amounts of data we need to get through is growing near exponentially per hour. It is there that we see that Google has a very good reason to be involved, not because of the song ‘Here come the drones‘, but because this level of data evolution is pushed upon nearly all and getting in the thick of things is when one remains the top dog and Google is very much about being top dog in that race, as it is servicing the ‘needs’ of billions and as such their own data centres will require loads of evolution, the old ways are getting closer and closer to becoming obsolete, Google needs to be ahead before that happens, and of course when that happens IBM will give a clear memo that they have been on top of it for years whilst trying to figure out how to best present the delays they are currently facing.
 

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April 4, 2018 · 09:47

Evidence by candlelight

This was coming. It took me less than an hour to fathom this outcome when i wrote the initial articles on Novichok and the Skripal family. On March 17th, within ‘Something for the Silver Screen‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/03/17/something-for-the-silver-screen/), the situation was clear to me and it was given by the media with ‘U.S., France and Germany join Britain‘, as I see it this was about something else. The additional ‘evidence’ as we saw it in the Guardian, the Washington Post and the BBC gave us a lot and when read and put together, the evidence was not stacking up. That is now seen in ‘Porton Down experts unable to verify precise source of novichok‘ (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/apr/03/porton-down-experts-unable-to-verify-precise-source-of-novichok). Now, let’s be clear. It does not make Russia innocent, yet whether it was a Russian or the Russian government can’t be verified and when we consider that truth we need to realise that PM Theresa May overreached her abilities and her office by a long stretch. The fact that Porton Down cannot identify whether the Novichok was made in Russia is merely one side, it does not absolve Russia, yet in similar thought, the fact that the origin cannot be determined also implies, or better stated, clearly indicates that the premise ‘beyond all reasonable doubt‘ goes straight out of the window. Now, do not get me wrong, I am just as eager for the next cold war as the next guy, but let’s do it for the right reasons!

You see the quote “Aitkenhead said the government had reached its conclusion that Russia was responsible for the Salisbury attack by combining the laboratory’s scientific findings with information from other sources” is window dressing at best. You see, the nightmare scenario is about to get to the surface and the second quote gets us there. That would be the quote “He said: “It’s a military-grade nerve agent, which requires extremely sophisticated methods in order to create – something that’s probably only within the capabilities of a state actor.”” You see, they shot themselves in the foot there. With: ‘state actor’ we see ‘evidence’ of optional locality, yet they cannot establish that. So now we get back to the original setting that I had on that day and that was that someone had personal skin in the game. It is overkill on a very different level, whilst we know that there were other ways to do this, the choice of weapon made it emotional and governments tend to not be emotional. Now we can go all conspiracy theory on the statement ‘There’s no way that anything like that would ever have come from us or leave the four walls of our facilities‘, yet the reality is that Porter Down is not the most advanced place in Europe. In Germany Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals LLC have the research locations that equal, if not surpass Porter Down. Even as we agree that this was not made in Russia, Russia is still not absolved and that is where the nightmare starts. You see a Novichok is a NBC weapon and whilst we are pushed towards the ‘state actor’ Russia, we forgot that once out, it Jinn will not get back in the bottle. The Ivan Kivelidi and Leonard Rink part took that out into the open and that happened in 1995. So for the larger part of 23 years this has been out in the open and now that someone trying to score a name for him (or her) the issue is out in the open and I am fairly certain that the UK and France (with their lovely chemical experimental places in Lyon) are now becoming an issue. These places have been unmonitored to the larger extent and someone got to be creative. In a world where the cost of living is rising someone has a commodity that the bulk of organised crime is willing to pay for and they are willing to pay through the nose. That is not withstanding the lone wolves and the terrorist cells that are getting funding from some ‘state actor’.

that is now the ball game and it is reinforced with “He said the location of manufacture could be established through “a number of different input sources which the government has access to”, adding: “Scientific evidence is only one of those sources“, so as Gary Aitkenhead is now hiding behind ‘different input sources ‘, we can see that his PD location failed to establish that and if we comprehend Novichoks than we should see that this is not a surprise, even as the sources could be basic composites, those sources are not always possible to be determined. Even as Dmitry Peskov is crying fowl play (pun intended), Russia is not out of the woods. You see even as Russia was the designer, it falls on their heads that Novichoks possibly got out into the open. The setting of responsibility seems to be clearly there, even as the papers I talked about three weeks ago shows that the executive council of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) fumbled the ball, their own meeting minutes shows that to be the fact. In a similar light we see the quote from Boris Johnson as an issue (not merely his haircut). As we are introduced to: “When I look at the evidence, the people from Porton Down, the laboratory, they were absolutely categorical. I asked the guy myself, I said: ‘Are you sure?’ And he said: ‘There’s no doubt.’ So we have very little alternative but to take the action that we have taken” and there is the issue, because the entire setting of evidence would have taken weeks not hours, which was a clear indication for me that the entire matter had been bungled by adding ‘projection weight’ into the fold in a place where there was no lighting, no electricity and no illumination of almost any kind. In this day and age evidence by candlelight is no evidence at all.

So it is my personal belief that gives us the last quote in this and the opposition it also creates. With “Alexander Grushko, called the attack a “provocation arranged by Britain” to justify high military spending because “they need a major enemy”“, Grushko might not be wrong, but he failed to add to this that there is every chance that Russia let slip the chemical dog of war and leave it in the hands of Russian organised crime and that is the nightmare that the European State actors were not ready for. The papers of the State Advisory Board (SAB) and the OPCW gave us that part when we see the gap of well over a decade. I am also decently certain that when we ‘grill’ Vil Mirzayanov in a toaster we will learn a few additional uncomfortable truths, the kind that the media is skating around as fast as they can, and in this one instance I actually do not blame them. In the end it still makes for one awesome Matt Damon movie and in light of the shown governmental shortcomings (and adding that to the script) it might just be a billion dollar hit, which is good for whoever decides to produce it.

So even as the media focused on that one place named Shikhany where that bad demon came from, we all forget that places like Dow, Bayer, Unilever, Laboratoire de Chimie ENS de Lyon and at least three more places where the setup could possibly facilitate for its creation and that is merely in Europe, that list gets to be significantly larger when we widen the net. Someone has played a very dangerous game and it is my personal belief that the global intelligence branch was so focused on optional terror cells that they forget that organised crime has a ‘mere’ need to satisfy their need for greed in any way they can and they forgot to look into that direction. I wonder how long it will take for me to be proven right yet again. Don’t get me wrong, I would love (read: prefer) to be wrong. Yet so far that has not happened. The idea of the Russian Mafia, or any large enough organised crime group to have their fingers on the C of NBC is scary, more so than a lone wolf terrorist. Because a lone wolf is likely to get emotional and would therefor fuck up, the calculating nature of organised crime is a much harder puppy to crack.

Yet that is merely my view on the matter.

 

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