Category Archives: Science

December 16, 2020 · 21:06

Dangerous conclusions

We all come to them, conclusions that are shaped in the mind, usually they are based on facts making them speculations, some are based on speculations making them pure delusions, some are in-between and that is the dangerous part, are they visionary, are they speculative delusions? The point is that the writer will see them as visionary, but the writer (even me) is not the best judge in this.

For the exercise I need to grasp back to a story I did recently. ‘Trillion dollar Musk’ was written on December 3rd (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/03/trillion-dollar-musk/), I there ‘accused’ Elon Musk that his value would skyrocket to $1.2 trillion collars. I also gave the readers “The UK (via the Guardian) inform us of “Britain’s electricity will be in short supply over the next few days after a string of unplanned power plant outages and unusually low wind speeds this week”, the UK has an increasing need for Scandinavian power and soon it cannot be met. I reckon that in the next 2-3 years that shortage will be close to systemic all over the EU”, the stage was set and I still believe that we are 2-3 years away, but are we? Bloomberg (at https://www.bloomberg.com/sponsors/jll/seven-ways-to-retrofit/index.html) gives us ‘7 Ways to Retrofit Buildings for Energy Efficiency’, it is a setting and it is sponsored by JLL, a real-estate and investment firm who gives us “We’re here to create rewarding opportunities and amazing spaces around the globe where people can achieve their ambitions. In doing so, we are building a better tomorrow for our clients, our people and our communities”, I believe that we are about to hit an energy snag, a little sooner than I anticipated. 

So as the JLL gives us 

  1. Upgrade you lighting
  2. Upgrade the HVAC
  3. Optimise Performance
  4. Implement a Waste Strategy
  5. Use Continuous Commissioning
  6. Organize “Treasure Hunts”
  7. Elevator Controls
  8. Added by me: Upgrade kitchens.

Now the Elon Musk battery shows the issues, even as we are now hearing more and more on the need for carbon neutral in commercial buildings, the private places are merely one step away.

Forbes reported in August “At first, the state’s electrical grid operator last night asked customers to voluntarily reduce electricity use. But after power reserves fell to dangerous levels it declared a “Stage 3 emergency” cutting off power to people across the state at 6:30 pm” and this is only the beginning. Elon is about to get a massive increase of value and his wealth might go up well beyond $1.2 trillion. 

It is not limited to California, although they are the most visible one, New York, the United Kingdom, and parts of Europe and Australia will see a drastic need for power sooner rather than later. At that point the rich we can ignore, they will get what they need, the middle income section, that is where the massive gains are made, a lot will add a growing carbon neutral stage with the adapted Tesla battery, the power grid adaptions for lights, Air conditioning, water heaters (boilers), fridges and freezers. There will be a massive option for growth there, the adaptation of AC equipment to DC equipment, a stage where some will buy new stuff and some will need adaption with new power units for both. I came up with a new sort of roof tile, made from recyclable plastics, and each tile will have solar cells, instead of putting panels on top (some will still do that), to tiles where people can grow their power creation stage, two tiles, the highest levels which connects to the second grid and the battery and other tiles that will connect to other tiles and a highest layer tile. The benefit of that is that people do not need to splurge on massive panels, with the battery they get tiles, but it is a basic level, as some need more power more quickly, more sets of tiles can be bought, giving the people months to grow their setting and reduce their carbon footprint. In addition, some will add wind-vanes. It is a stage that is as essential and as clear as traffic jams, we have been increasing power needs with an average of 5% per year. How long did you think that the energy companies could deliver? Consider your fridge, what you had 10 years ago and what you have now. Larger families needing more boiler water and the summers require more and more air conditioning units, all set to a lower temperature burning power away and California can no longer cope with the need. They are the first, but they are not alone. How many devices require a charger? In 1990 that was 1 perhaps 2, now it is 5-8 PER HOUSE, routers, Wifi modules, and the PC went from the ‘high end’ of 300 Watts to the average PC now needing 600-1100 Watts. In 1990 there were less than 700,000,000 globally that were into gaming, now that number is 2,000,000,000 higher (globally), two billion additional devices, the consoles do not use that much, but still 150 watts, times a billion is still a lot, they also need a TV running, now, the TV is actually a massively low energy user if it is a LED flatscreen. But the numbers are not looking good and that is before you realise that PC’s were something a company had in 1990, now, for the most, nearly every employee at every firm has one, there tend to be low energy versions, but they are still there and often they are on day and night. When you see this list and do the numbers, you need to see that energy firms needed to double their options in 2000, that never happened and now they need and alternative and Elon Musk has it, and owns the IP no less.

So is my version so much more visionary because Bloomberg had a sponsored JLL article? I don’t think so, but I believe that awareness is being created at higher levels and we need to catch on sooner rather than later, because the prices of electricity will go up again and again in the next 2 years. Consider your budget and consider your energy costs will go up by 10% in 2021, how much more budget will you not have?

That is the stage I foresaw some time ago, I will let you decide how right or how wrong I am.

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December 16, 2020 · 04:41

A political stage of nowhere

Less than an hour ago the BBC gave us ‘EU reveals plan to regulate Big Tech’, apart from the discriminatory nature of the stage, are they doing anything else than merely fuelling their own gravy train? Consider the news from last July, there we were given ‘Apple has €13bn Irish tax bill overturned’, a case that started in 2016, had Apple and the government of Ireland in a twist, when you consider “The Irish government – which had also appealed against the ruling – said it had “always been clear” Apple received no special treatment”, I am on the fence, and in this the European Commission wasted 4 years in going nowhere, in the light of that revelation, can we even trust the approach the EU has? When we look at the first option, we see ‘Online harms law to let regulator block apps in UK’, this means an almost immediate blocking of Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and a few more. Local laws have been ‘accomodating’ to large corporations for such a long time, that social media is caught in the middle (and yes they benefitted too), so they re now pushing for changes that end privacy, because that is a conclusion. If we hunt down the perpetrators, we need to coat the materials in identity revealing codes, in addition, the EU government will have to adjust laws to make the poster responsible for what they post and that will lead to all kinds of privacy adjustments (that does not worry me), yet when insurance companies will use that setting to see transgressions on social media and they demand adjustment by handing over the posted evidence, how long until people like Margrethe Vestager start realising that they were clueless from the start? The BBC article gives us “The law would give local officials a way to ask Airbnb and other apps to hand over information or remove listings”, which now puts some players on the dark-web and the chaos (and organised crime involvement) merely increases. For example, when we see “not use data gathered via their main service to launch a product that will compete with other established businesses”, how will that be proven and tested? By handing all data over to the government? How many frivolous cases will that grave train launch? How is it impossible to stop advantage seekers a stage where they use Margrethe Vestager and her gang of idiots to do the bidding of (optionally) organised crime?

Even though I spoke of the Accountability Act, a legal direction that could thwart a few issues from the start in June 2012, 8 years later and this group is hardly even on the track of resolving anything, only to get their grubby greedy fingers on data, the new currency. And in this, the tech companies have their own games to play as Facebook shows with “Apple controls an entire ecosystem from device to app store and apps, and uses this power to harm developers and consumers, as well as large platforms like Facebook”, what Apple does, IBM did for decades, what Apple does Microsoft did for decades, so where is that train station? So even as we see “And they may influence other regulators – in the US and elsewhere – which are also planning to introduce new restrictions of their own” we also need to realise that after a decade, the local and EU laws have done little to nothing to hold the poster of information to criminal account, it seems to me a massive oversight. And in all this there is no view that the EU will wisen up any day soon. 

So as I see it, this will soon become a political stage that goes nowhere and in all this these layers merely want their fingers on the data, the currency that they do not have. How is that in any way acceptable?

Oh and when we see the blocking of apps and localisation, how long until people find an alternative? An alternative that the EU, the UK and the US have no insight over? Will they block apps that interact with data centres in China, Saudi Arabia and optionally other locations too? I raised it in other ways in ‘There is more beneath the sand’ in 2019 as well as some issues in 2018, a setting that was almost two years ago, as such is it not amazing that we see a shortsighted approach to this issue, whilst I gave the option EIGHT YEARS AGO and the laws are still not ready? They are ready to get the data from Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft, as such when the trial goes wrong, hw will these people be compensated for the loss of uniquely owned data, data that they collected over the decades? Will the stupid people (Margrethe Vestager et al) compensate per kilobyte? How about $25,000,000 per kilobyte? Perhaps we should double that? What will be the price and in this, we should demand that Margrethe Vestager and her teams will be criminally liable for those losses, or will the gravy train decide that it is a little too complex to hold one station to order, and let face it, that gravy train has 27 stops to make, all with their own local needs, their local incomes and their local digital wannabe’s.

When a setting like that goes nowhere, you better believe that there is someone behind the curtain pulling strings for their own enriching needs, that is how it always has been, as such, let me give you the smallest example from January 2020, there we see “‘DIGITAL CROSS-BORDER COOPERATION IN CRIMINAL JUSTICE’ CONFERENCE”, with the nice quote “The e-Evidence Project led by the European Commission, DG Justice and Consumers, provides for the e-Evidence Digital Exchange System that manages the European Investigation Order/Mutual Legal Assistance procedures/instruments (e-Forms, business logic, statistics, log, etc.) on European level. The Reference Implementation Portal is the front-end portal of the e-Evidence Digital Exchange System and is also provided by the EC”, yet this is only step one. In all this we can also include the EC (at https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/policies/cybercrime/e-evidence_en), where we see: “However, present-day solutions too often prove unsatisfactory, bringing investigations to a halt”, I get it, you will say, will this not resolve it? Well, consider “provide legal certainty for businesses and service providers: whereas today law enforcement authorities often depend on the good will of service providers to hand them the evidence they need, in the future, applying the same rules for access to all service providers will improve legal certainty and clarity”, in this we need to look in detail at ‘provide legal certainty’, which at present under privacy laws is a no-no, and the poster cannot be identified and cannot (and will not) be held to account. As well as ‘applying the same rules for access to all service providers’, still the poster remains out of reach and the local and EU laws have done NOTHING for over a decade to change that, as such, when we consider this, why should Google, Facebook, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft suffer the consequences, in addition we see the absence of IBM, why is that? Does it not have data collection software, it has data centres, it has cloud solutions, so why are they absent?

And in light of earlier this year, as we were told ‘Google starts appeal against £2bn shopping fine’, how will that end? The law remains untested in too many aspects, in this the entire data stage is way too soon and in that the blowback will be enormous, all whilst the EU (UK too) is unable to do anything about data driven organised crime, other than blame state operators Russia and China, consider the Sony Hack of 2011, I was with the point of view by Kurt Stammberger (before I even knew about Kurt Stammberger), North Korea lacks infrastructure and a whole deed of other parts. I also questioned the data, like “former hacker Hector Monsegur, who once hacked into Sony, explained to CBS News that exfiltrating one or one hundred terabytes of data “without anyone noticing” would have taken months or years, not weeks”, I even considered an applied use of the Cisco routers at Sony to do just that, all issues that North Korea just could not do and in that environment, when we see these levels of doubt and when we get “After a private briefing lasting three hours, the FBI formally rejected Norse’s alternative assessment”, which might be valid, but when we see a setting where it takes three hours to get the FBI up to speed, can we even trust the EU to have a clue? Even their own former director of German Intelligence, gave us recently that they did not fully comprehend Huawei 5G equipment, and they will investigate the data owners, al before the posters of the messages are properly dealt with? I think not!

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December 16, 2020 · 03:02

Within the mind

Within the mind there is a setting we forget, it is pondering, we ponder thins, we always do, at times not ever conscious or frontally aware, but we do. It is a part of us and my part would not let the previous story ‘Intent or Not?’ started something that would not let go, most likely to the stage of my youth, in this, my idea of DECCA gave me another optional idea. Consider any map, as such the map I drew has no features, it has however has three DECCA options and the clever station uses one signal of each to create a 4th option. So the three stations 1, 2, 3 create a new option, there would be the optional advantage of internal checks, as such it is harder to decipher how the data is concluded, there is also the need to find a larger amount of numbers to optionally hack, but how? 

The idea is to create an offset, of all the 9 stations, each in different ways to create a new set of locations, optionally an offset the size of the circle, giving is A2, B2 and C2. It is hard to see the precise location, and if the offset is done, it needs to be the offset of the circle, and all three need to receive the same offset, the station is to create a second location that fits within the application of error towards the home and new DECCA configuration. My mind sees part of the solution, but I do not completely get what I see. If we change the signal according to one, we should change them equally to all, it gives (for now) the setting that the target could not be hit but in this configuration, the best we can hope for I that the missile hits somewhere in the circle, the close to the rim, the more accurate the missile was, but can we direct it exactly in the way we want it? If so, the three coloured circles would set the optional new location, if so, it will be in the area of the intersections where blue and red, or green and red connect, optionally in the space between the two, as such there is some way to guide the missile away from harm if a GOLIS approach is used in these missiles. If the missiles is using GOLIS DECCA, there remains two problems, how to find what and which one they use and second how to offset the received signal. Yet as I see it these are seperate matters, what matters is that I am (again) awake and my mind will not stop pondering. Perhaps this idea is merely between my ears and it would never work in real life, but one can only wonder where innovation drives us towards, it is not always a reachable destination, we can only hope it is.

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December 15, 2020 · 23:29

Intent or not?

This is a question that has been forming in my mind for some time now, and today the question rose again. The article that started it all is “Oil tanker off Saudi Arabian port hit by explosion caused by ‘external source‘’’ (source: the Guardian). The setting is not new, we have seen it a few times in the last year. We all want to point fingers and blame people left right and center, but the truth of it is that the problem goes deeper and the west is largely in denial or refuses to acknowledge the events. Less than a decade ago, an attack on Saudi Arabia was for the most unthinkable. Even as we see the crying blame game, this is not a Houthi issue. You see, the Houthi’s are firing drones and missiles on Saudi Arabia, but everyone is in denial and refusing to look at Iran. There is no Yemeni infrastructure to create and optionally test drones and missiles, there is no quality control, there is no technology available in Yemen for any of this and that has been shown by different sources over the last 2 years. Even as the New York Times gives us an opinion piece that gives us “Saudi Arabia is not entitled to U.S. military or diplomatic support. It’s not a treaty ally like Japan. Its importance to U.S. security has dwindled as the United States seeks to reorient its foreign policy away from the Middle East. And if Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s tutelage is any indication, the kingdom is proving to be a wildly destabilising force in the region”, Saudi Arabia, for the most has been the stability the Middle East (outside of Israel) needs, feel free to give it to Iran, but in this, the next time they elect another Ahmadinejad, all the linked nations will target Israel AND the United States AND Europe, is that what you want?

So whilst the New York Times is slamming Saudi Arabia, or seemingly so, it is actually proving the opposite. Saudi Arabia is entitled and worthy of support. It’s events into Yemen was done by the elected government of Yemen, and that is also ignored most of the time, just like the setting that Houthi forces are getting direct support from Iran, the Houthis are getting Iranian hardware, missiles and drones. They seemingly smuggle it by all naval intelligence operations. It is almost like the EU and the US are keeping the Middle East destabilised. That is at least what it looks like, you see, for the last two years someone is feeding the Houthi forces drones and missiles and that needs to stop. I would venture that the involved parties like the price of oil to go up, up by a lot. 

In this I will tell you right now that this is my speculative view, I cannot prove the latter part (other than the Iranian support which has been proven by several parties), yet the media is silent on that part, why is that?

My mind has been busy considering an anti drone option, but as I see it, the larger part of Saudi Arabia is an empty sandbox, so how to go about it (without creating ecological and environmental devastation), a setting that needs thought, because the cure cannot be worst than the disease. The Brookings institute (at https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2016/03/16/six-ways-to-disable-a-drone/) give us 6 methods, but to deploy them in any rural situation (which is the bulk of Saudi Arabia) is not a good thing, yet it did give me an optional idea, not a great one mind you, but one that might work. 

They had Radio waves (3) and Hacking (4), This gave me an optional idea. What if we create a wifi network, one that actively pushes. Consider 4 jeeps, each jeep is a network node, and as you can see, moving the second jeep to another location sets a larger and a different curtain. Now, consider that the latest Iranian drones can fly up to 250KM/H, now the Houthis will not get those (and they lack monumental amounts of skill to operate them), but the older ones are slower, as the jeeps get a lock on a danger, the remote operator uses the created network to disrupt drone operations. I reckon that a setting of 8 jeeps might be a good start, but how to deploy them? I see the need to create 3-5 clusters of up to 4-8 jeeps, it gives the remote operator a decent amount of time to crash the drones far away and safely, optionally (and harder) is to land them so that the evidence can be collected. A secondary option is to fry the electronics, so that the drones would return to the point of liftoff, giving Saudi Intelligence a place to work from. This is the drones, not sure yet how to stop (in a cheap way) Iranian missiles, but I reckon Raytheon has something they eagerly want to sell. I merely want it to cost Iran the farm, not Saudi Arabia, like in Charlie Wilson’s War, there Charlie Wilson provided the Afghans with stringers to stop the Russians, Stinger $38,000, Russian Hind (Mil Mi-24) $36,000,000, so almost 1000:1, those are numbers to work with and that stage needs to be found to top Iran as well. So as I was looking into the Shahab-1, Shahab-2, Shahab-3, can the same network be used to create a false image, or a setting to fool the missile?

GOT systems
It is one of two systems, and any Go-Onto-Target missile has three subsystems (or so I am told), they are :

Target tracker
We are told that the target tracker is also placed on the launching platform, yet is that so with the Iranian version? If that is true, then we need to find a way to infect both, or find a way to disrupt the link.

Missile tracker
This is where it is, I asked the missile, but it had no sound system installed, hence, I watched a USAF training tape and I learned “The missile guidance computer scenario works as follows. Because a variation has modified some of the information the missile has obtained, it is not sure just where it is. However, it is sure where it isn’t, within reason, and it knows where it was. It now subtracts where it should be from where it wasn’t, or vice-versa, and by differentiating this from the algebraic sum of where it shouldn’t be, and where it was, it is able to obtain the deviation and its variation, which is called error”, this seems effective and simple, I merely wonder what if we could find an automated way to mess with the error so it will assume wrongly where it was, and if this accumulative, it will crash ahead of schedule, optionally in a place where there is only sand.

Guidance computer
Guidance computers are in the missile and in the target tracker, it has the same setting as the Target Tracker, we cannot intervene in time, but what happens if we flood the missile with both disrupting and false information? (At the same time mind you)

This is where I found myself, my only reference to missile technology is pointing my own missile at a biological silo (me, as a once proud teenager), I just had to go there to make this story not too serious. Yet there was corroborating materials (not on the Silo though), it is seen in Northrop Grumman’s Patent US4589610A, the Guided missile subsystem. Here I see a little more, but it also gave me a thought. The patent gives us “The IMU driven Kalmanised radar track loop accommodates the use of a high performance radar, like a synthetic aperture radar, for example, which operates to measure radar data at a low rate on the order of 1 Hz, to generate estimates of relative target and missile kinematics to drive the control loop at rates compatible with high performance missile kinematics”, I believe that Iranian missiles are not that advanced, but the groundwork matters. The idea that we have “operates to measure radar data at a low rate”, so it reads signals to differentiate, what is we mess with that instance to create a different error in the Shabab missile? Radar is basically a radio signal, a specific one and specific signals are more easily messed with, yet can it be done efficiently and not expensive, or can we create a setting where on system can impact the next 200 missiles fired? 

The second system is a GOLIS systems (go-onto-location-in-space), it is autonomous and created for targets that do not move (for example the IRS building at 300 N. Los Angeles St.), I would presume a building almost everyone hates, especially in Hollywood. I will not go into all the details, but it had one option I recognised, it was the Hyperbolic navigation, DECCA. Maritime uses (or used) it. It requires 3 stations to operate and if that is so, that is something we can use. We can actually guid a missile when we alter the signal of any two out of three elements. The nice part, as it is obsolete, there is a decent chance the Iranians are till using it, the DECCA system was pretty decent as a concept and for maritime navigation (before we had satellite navigation) was the most precise way to find ourselves in the ocean, it was precise up to 7M2, when you are 2432 KM from shore, that is pretty awesome. So as we see “Hyperbolic navigation is a class of obsolete radio navigation systems in which a navigation receiver instrument on a ship or aircraft is used to determine location based on the difference in timing of radio waves received from fixed land-based radio navigation beacon transmitters”, that is one principle, there is every chance that if we can intercept and relay 2 of the signals, we can create a different error and as such the missile becomes a lot less reliable.

These are merely a few thoughts and they should be seriously considered (except targeting the IRS building, these people have lives too), if we can change the game for Iran we can support Saudi Arabia in creating more stability, less stability is to adhere to Iran, I wonder if the New York Times considered that part that they are voicing, whether it is opinion or not.

OK, I knew about DECCA from my days at the. Merchant Naval Academy, so that might not be completely fair, but this is me thinking out of the box (and out of bed), which implies that this was another day, another dollar, and all done in less than 2 hours. I wonder what more Iranian stuff I can screw up this week, we all need a hobby at times.

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December 15, 2020 · 00:52

Stage light or lime light?

This morning I had to mull things over. I saw ‘Suspected Russian hackers spied on U.S. Treasury emails – sources’ (at https://uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa-cyber-treasury-exclsuive/suspected-russian-hackers-spied-on-u-s-treasury-emails-sources-idUKKBN28N0PG), I saw the news early this morning, but the stage was not clear. You would think that when you see a title like this, the stage is pretty clear, is it not? But in all this, two sentences were out, or perhaps they were off was more apt in this line of consideration. 

The first sentence that waved like a hammer and sickle flag was “according to people familiar with the matter”, this was not some official brief by the FBI or the DHS, it was some anonymous setting and as that nations current president is mad as a hatter (or in possession of less common sense then the Court Jester entertaining Reniero Zeno) gives rise to worry. Now, let be clear, I am not stating that this isn’t happening. Consider “but three of the people familiar with the investigation said Russia is currently believed to be responsible for the attack. Two of the people said that the breaches are connected to a broad campaign that also involved the recently disclosed hack on FireEye, a major U.S. cybersecurity company with government and commercial contracts”, so now it is not from one source, but one journo has access to ALL THREE? Then there is (the secnd one) “cyber spies are believed to have gotten in by surreptitiously tampering with updates released by IT company SolarWinds”, which also affects the military, and in this, we grb back to the earlier statement “they asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI to investigate”, really? Military integrity is in play and you think that none of the Defence intelligence groups, or cyber command is invited? Then we get the end which gives us “The hackers are “highly sophisticated” and have been able to trick the Microsoft platform’s authentication controls, according to a person familiar with the incident, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not allowed to speak to the press”, that and the consideration (not fact) that “Hackers broke into the NTIA’s office software, Microsoft’s Office 365. Staff emails at the agency were monitored by the hackers for months”, consider that and set the light towards a transgression on the Microsoft Azure cloud that makes their cloud useless, or turns it into a public domain Bulletin board, something EVERY industrial wants to hear. You think that this was not out in force and Microsoft was on every channel on the PLANET explaining to the people that there was no cause for alarm? All this and some Christopher Bing has three sources? Anyone else concerned with the quality of news? And the last line giving us ‘because they were not allowed to speak to the press’ did it for me. 

Is this a ploy to avoid the limelight, or make sure that the stage lights are pointing somewhere else? Now, I reckon that the Russian government is forever trying to get its fingers on all kinds of hush hush details, the CIA does pretty much the same thing, yet in this we see “highly-sophisticated, targeted and manual supply chain attack by a nation state”, what evidence is there? This is important, because it could well be organised crime or a super rich singular player who wants the low-down on deals that syphon his or her money more efficiently and that has been done before as well. In this the entire approach is one of chaos, even if the chaos seems organised. The fact that it was allegedly possible to “Staff emails at the agency were monitored by the hackers for months” with the mention of Microsoft 365 and the news was limited to one person at Reuters? That and the fact that it as seemingly ‘months’ is a larger cause for concern, the fact that this was going on for well over a week and not every Christmas light would shine brightly red at 2624 NE University Village St, Seattle, WA 98105, United States is a first, the fact that not every siren is blasting on EVERY Microsoft 365 and Azure data centre is a second. But no, we get “there was a breach at one of its agencies and that they asked the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI to investigate”, yes because dimensionality in alarms and corporate dangers are passed on forever to the FBI in such a blasé way.

So I have several issues on the matter and in all this I can in all honesty not determine whether the light shining is a limelight to give visibility to someone else, or a stage light to make the people look to the left all whilst the people on the right are running off the stage, hoping no one will notice. It can be either or both, but the picture they are painting for us does not make sense and lust like that Italian dude (read: doge), the 45th no less, had his own battles to fight (mostly with Genoa), it was set in one quarter, but had underlying conditions (like Michael VIII Palaiologos) and in this certain nobility members profited greatly, I wonder why that never got properly investigated. And as such I do not oppose the pointing fingers at the Kremlin, but doing so before we see “the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency and the FBI to investigate” deliver a finished report is a little fast, so fast even McDonalds cannot compete. All whilst cybercrime has a much larger reach to a great deal many more people and still Microsoft remains silent. 

There is a bright light over yonder, yet what it is used for, I cannot tell.

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December 14, 2020 · 00:26

The academic freezer

It is a harsh stage, at times we tend to, according to our own nature, be cold, ice cold. In some cases (like mine) inhumane cold. I am not doing it intentionally, but I do get that some see me as  cold insensitive bastard, and I like ice cream too. So here I am in a setting that does not appeal to many, but outspoken so that you know what is in play. You see, we see and some feel the hrh reality of the Coronavirus, and the BBC gives us ‘Coronavirus: Germany to go into lockdown over Christmas’, I get it, we need to be careful, but the cold numbers (as reliable as they can be) give us 72,221,006 corona cases, 50,607,364 recovered and 1,613,868 cases ended with a heart rate of ZERO. So basically we see 69% made a recovery, 3.18% did not make it, the rest is still in a stage of healing. Consider all the actions, all the ruckus and all the settings for these numbers. Now, I am all for stopping the disease. 1.6 million is not nothing, and as we see all the presented decks on more people dies in the US than in WW2, we are all overreacting. Whilst we see that WW2 ended the lives of 405K Americans, another source gives us 291K deaths, so who can we trust? The numbers are less than a month old, all whilst WW2 ended in 1945. As such when we consider that several of the sources tend to be seen as reliable, who fed them these numbers? 

You see, the reactions we are seeing is on a stage of 3.18%, all whilst we also see “11% of all deaths and 42% of CVD deaths” (CVD=Cardio Vascular Deaths), this was in 2018, so how much fuss was made over heart issues? When we see the numbers next to others, Corona does not amount to too much. I am not stating that we ignore the event, I am showing you that the over reaction is a little much. Especially as we entered a recession in the end of 2018, an economic setting that nearly all governments are trying to avoid, especially in light of the debts that all these governments have. Another ploy that Wall Street is happy about, they got to blame a disease and optionally the CDC as well. 

Am I overreacting?
That remains to be seen and it is a fair question to ask, yet I am showing you the numbers, the charts and the percentages, those you can calculate yourself (you might find a rounding adjustment at best). 

The sight that we see is a scary one, governments have ordered billions in vaccines, a vaccine that we do need to have, but the bombastic fanfare is one we could have done without and no one is looking hard at the recession, are they? ABC gave us last week “The recession is technically over but for wages and jobs, the recovery is a long way away”, is the recession really over? Is the overreaction and shifting of the blame towards Corona justified? Ask yourself that question when you see the extended amount of unemployed people, when you see the lack of controls on corporations when we consider the impact of what should have happened. I said it from the very beginning, the numbers never added up. I was merely unsure what they were supposed to be and when you see numbers not matching on a whole level of fronts, perhaps you will wonder where the numbers came from as well, there is a level of facilitation in play that is happening on a number of levels and it seems that the left hand has no idea what the right hand is doing, in all honesty I wonder if you can figure out what the right hand and what the other one was all along.

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December 10, 2020 · 20:47

Uniform Nameless Entitlement Perforation

As I stated yesterday, lets take a look at the Emissions Gap Report 2020, I wanted to see where the lifestyle change to the super wealthy would solve the environmental issue as Tim McGrath rote in his BBC article, which I covered in ‘Hatred of Wealth’ Yesterday. There we saw in the BBC article ‘Climate change: Global ‘elite’ will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles’ the mention of  “And for the top 10% of earners, this would mean cuts to around one tenth of their current level. But for the richest 1%, it would mean a dramatic reduction”, in this he also makes mention of his friend at chapter 6, who was a contributor, as such we should look there. When we get there we get a few facts. As we see “Average consumption emissions vary substantially between countries. For example, current per capita consumption emissions in the United States of America are approximately 17.6 tons CO2e per capita, around 10 times that of India at 1.7 tons per capita. By contrast, the European Union and the United Kingdom together have an average footprint of approximately 7.9 tons per capita (see chapter 2).” Here we need to take a little gander. ‘per capita’ gives us a Latin term that translates to “by head”, and the UN does nothing without a reason, so why not ‘per person’ does it seemingly looks ‘more intelligent’? You see India has well over 1.3 billion people, America has 325 million people. Which now implies that one nation has a different pattern when we take the whole look. Anyhow, they come to the conclusion of “A range of estimates point to a strong correlation between income and emissions, with a highly unequal global distribution of consumption emissions. Such studies estimate that the emissions share of the top 10 per cent of income earners is around 36–49 per cent of the global total, whereas the lowest 50 per cent of income earners account for around 7–15 per cent of all emissions”, this is not a bad view, I do not agree, but their report does not need to give in to my considerations. It is here that we introduce the data from the European Environmental Agency (EEA) where we get “Half the damage is being done by just one percent of industrial plants”, as such in Europe 50% is done by 147 industrial plants? Where in this view do the wealthy users of private jets stand? You see on page 84 we see the only two mentions of Jet in the entire report, it is “IEA estimated that the mean production costs of aviation biofuels in 2018 were approximately two to three times that of fossil jet kerosene (IEA 2018)”, it is not precise, it is an estimation, and it reflects on cost, not on pollution, as such where did Tim McGrath get his data? I found mine in two minutes, and the BBC let him. So as we consider the impact of this report (which is better then I expected), as such I wonder what the issue was with the lifestyle of the wealthy when in Europe alone, 147 factories would have set the marker of 50% of the damages in Europe, so which (or how many) factories have a similar view in the US and India? I would add China to that equation as well, optionally Russia, so how much improvement can we get if we go after the right targets and not waste our time on the wealthy jet owners (as Tim McGrath want). 

It took two hours to look into the report, less than an hour to look at the EEA and when we consider this against the BBC article, how much time did they spend (read: waste) on something a person without clear present knowledge could debunk in a matter of minutes? It took me 5 times longer to type this point of view against me making the case. 

But this is not enough, Tim McGrath was making his point coming from the graphs on page 89, where we see “Per capita and absolute CO2 consumption emissions by four global income groups in 2015”, you see the chart looks really clever, but here is the data? And when we see the EEA stage where we see that 50% of the damage is allegedly DONE by 147 plants, who owns those 147 plants? This all matters as the report is optionally ‘hiding’ behind “Ivanova and Wood (2020) find that a large share of the emissions of the top- emitting European Union households are transport-related”. This might be true, yet the larger stage is not merely on the transport related part, it is how much of that emission problem is mass transport? Trains, metro’s, busses, how much of the transport emissions are they a part of? You see, the data their will be found lacking. Consider Spain, Italy and Greece alone, this against the UK. Are you seeing the larger picture and how convoluted the setting of ‘transport-related’ emission issues are seen when the EEA gives for Europe a clear stage of 147 industrial plants and 50% of the damage, in all this the entire wealth setting is merely a smoke screen, like the ones we see way too often and in this case the BBC is optionally a co-conspiror of the created smoke.

It is merely my point of view and feel free to disagree, but in this you need to make up your own mind on what is there and what is debatable.

egr20Download

 

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December 10, 2020 · 02:19

Hatred of wealth

We have seen it, we at times observed it, but for the BBC to actively support it is taking this to a new sight. This is the feeling I had when I saw the article ‘Climate change: Global ‘elite’ will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles’ an hour ago (at https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-55229725). We have seen the options, we have seen the banter, but this article by Matt McGrath is taking it into a new direction. You see, some have a lifestyle that is slightly higher in carbon, mine might be a lot lower, I have no jet or helicopter. Yet what gives Matt the setting he has? 

Let’s look at some numbers given to us by Statista. The graph shows us that in the last 15 years plane travel went up by well over 15,000,0000 planes, this implies almost a million lanes per year more. So Matt, how many jets and helicopters are there? Now, we might see their use of a jet as a spillage, and perhaps it is, consider however, that for them there are fuel requirements, staff requirements and here Forbes was very useful (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/douggollan/2019/08/22/private-jet-travel-is-greener-than-you-think). The quote “Two private jets would bring $170,000 in spending, 55% more than the full 737, with just over 25 tonnes of CO2 emitted, one-sixth of the commercial airliner”, and when we see the numbers of 38 million airliners, knowing that there are nowhere near as much jets in the world, I wonder just what the game of Matt is, perhaps it is merely kicking rich people. 

Now, we are all interested in doing something for the environment, so how about stopping 10% of ALL Air traffic? I do not think that Matt McGrath is doing that, he would upset powerful people and the BBC does not do war with powerful people. Or perhaps he might take notice of “It is estimated that approximately 706 million gallons of waste oil enter the ocean every year, with over half coming from land drainage and waste disposal; for example, from the improper disposal of used motor oil”, I did not vet that information, yet it seems that neither did he, and the setting of doing something about the stage of ‘706 million gallons of waste oil’ is as I see it more impactful than slamming some person with a fat wallet and a jet (or helicopter), oh and these helicopters tend to be taxi services, you want to take the car from a taxi driver? Seems a little vague to me. 

So for those in doubt, let me add an image of a jet, something you might silently dream of and never get (just like me). And whilst I am on a roll (yes I am), consider all these flights, now identify the salespeople who are going to some pricey seminar, lets take those as well as sales people on some binge in Vegas to ‘be inspired’, as such how much environment did they waste? 

And when we get to “The global top 10% of income earners use around 45% of all the energy consumed for land transport and around 75% of all the energy for aviation, compared with just 10% and 5% respectively for the poorest 50% of households, the report says” which is a new level of BS. The poorest 50% cannot afford any vacation, due to sliding hourly wages, I will admit that rich people are at the head of that, but not all wealthy people, and the stage of pre-covid 2020, we see 40 million flights, all whilst the number of private jets are set to 4,600, and this includes jets that are corporate jets. So I want to see that report so I can cut Matt McGrath more to size. With the additional ““The UNEP report shows that the over-consumption of a wealthy minority is fuelling the climate crisis, yet it is poor communities and young people who are paying the price,” said Tim Gore, head of climate policy at Oxfam”, I see another person I need to cut down to size. The fact that I saw holes in this article in less than 10 minutes and the fact that the BBC is enabling this is jut too weird. Well at least I have another windmill to fight and bring to attention of the readers. Oh and before you think I am biased, consider that the 4,600 will include the jets owned by royal families and dignitaries and governments, consider this, when you saw the first number, do you really want them to charter a Boeing? To be honest, I cannot tell how many planes are in that group, I did not find any numbers on that, but the larger stage is that instead of them looking into matter that matter, we see a stage of ‘over-consumption of a wealthy minority’, so what EXACTLY is over-consumption? And per jet, how many flights were made? So let’s say a person like Bobby Axelrod (a fictional character), how often was he in a jet in 4 seasons? I am using this example to avoid using real people, because the question stays the same and we can argue that some like the Waltons from Kmart might fly less often than some whatchamightcallit from Wall Street, as such, the article has a few issues all over the place, I am making it my mission to look at that UNEP report, lets see what we can find there and how time was wasted on that report.

From my point of view the UN has become the largest waster of funds and options in the last 10 years, so I am ready to roar at that mouse, you betcha!

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December 7, 2020 · 20:46

Not just a shotgun

It comes back to an old jab I heard somewhere “You get more done with a shotgun and a kind word, then merely with a kind word”, it is true. The bulk of all people require external motivation. Arab News gave me an update yesterday and I was actually a little surprised. 

I had expected that Saudi Arabia had well above the basic needs there, but it seems I was wrong. The article (at https://www.arabnews.com/node/1773046/business-economy) gives us ‘Experts warn businesses in Saudi Arabia to ramp up their cybersecurity’, which is fair enough, but that opens up a whole range of other issues as well. Remember the accusations handed against the KSA (specifically their Crown Prince), I dealt in part with it in ‘Evidence? Why?’ (At https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/01/24/evidence-why/), consider that it was Julius Caesar who taught its armies (now known as Esercito Italiano) “The first rule of war is to install your defences against enemy retaliation”, he did that 2073 years, 4 months and 15 days ago (roughly). So as the Arab News gives us “As Saudi companies become more technologically advanced, cybersecurity experts have warned of a general lack of awareness about industry best practices and are worried that businesses are not adequately protecting their systems”, we see an implied lack of cybersecurity, as to what stage is there a lack all whilst the teams of the Crown Prince were accused of attacking Jeff Bezos? I hd a few doubts when I read the article, I have a hell of a lot more now. The added “95 percent of businesses in the Kingdom last year were the victim of a cyberattack” give rise to additional questions and in all this, when we see the American goods that the KSA is acquiring, no one asked or looked into the cybersecurity issues there? I wonder why?

There is a lot more in the article It starts with “85 percent of Saudi respondents said that they had witnessed a dramatic increase in the number of attacks over the past two year” and it gets to me a lot bigger when we consider that Cisco is lending  hand in the KSA (at https://www.cisco.com/web/ME/sa/netversity/whatis.html). 

So where does the shotgun come in? Well, it doesn’t directly, but when Americans see ‘shotgun’ they tend to take notice. Indirectly, when we consider the activities of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Booz Allen Hamilton, and a few others in the KSA, no one raised the issue of cybersecurity? I have no reason to doubt Arab News, but there is a larger setting and it does not add up. You see the quote “Al-Jaber applauds the new government improvements being implemented by the National Cybersecurity Authority (NCA) and the new Saudi Cybersecurity strategy, and recommends that those concerned brush up on their cybersecurity protocols to ensure that they are being protected”, you see ‘cybersecurity protocols’ is something to some, but a partial solution to others, there is version control, OS update and upgrade protocols, investigation into software solutions and apps, it is nice to know that the KSA has the fastest 5G in the world, but if that is not met with correct cyber protocols, it merely means that more and more data goes somewhere else, the question is where it goes. 

And this gets us back to another piece of evidence, it was given to us in the Financial Times on January 22nd 2020. There we see “The forensic analysis of Mr Bezos’s phone could not ascertain what alleged spyware was used. However, the report said: “It is believed that the compromise was likely facilitated by malicious tools procured by [Saud] al-Qahtani””, the imbalance of cybersecurity and cybertools is way too high, especially when we consider “forensic analysis of Mr Bezos’s phone could not ascertain what alleged spyware was used”, in light of the overall stage of cyber imbalance of the KSA, this statement (at https://www.ft.com/content/83dcdf74-3c9b-11ea-a01a-bae547046735) is equally a consideration for additional questions. As such, the questions I had almost a year ago are now roosting and giving birth to additional questions. That is beside the questions I have on conversations that others should have had with decision makers of the KSA on Saudi cyber security. Do you not agree?

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December 5, 2020 · 00:40

Twists of the mind

It started last month when I decided to create a new TV series out of thin air, well, it is in space, so air was not a factor. It was a little homage to RendezVous with Rama, yet I added a twist, as one does. I started that journey in ‘And that was a hard sell?’ (At https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/09/21/and-that-was-a-hard-sell/), whilst I was exploring a few ideas, I stumbled (for more than one reason) on Thalia, the muse of comedy. Leave it to me to seek out the history and optional origin of my bad sense of humour. Now, when we consider the origin of humour, or better stated the muses, Their origin goes back 7 centuries before there was even a christ, and even then there was some correlation to comedy (the muse Thalia) and her mother Mnemosyne the goddess of memory. The heralding of the muses starts (as far as I can tell) in 800BC when the poet Hesiod makes mention of them. Over the three millennia two of his works survived. The first is Theogony, the second one is called Works and Days, describing the peasant life. The Theogony is basically a story of crime and revolt (by Zeus) and set the story of gods and titans, yet I do not want to digress, it is not bout the gods, it is about Hesiod. He sets the stage of muses, he sets the  indication of Mnemosyne and her 9 daughters Calliope, Clio, Erato, Euterpe, Melpomene, Polyhymnia, Terpsichore, Thalia and Urania. They are the depiction of Epic poetry, History, Love poetry, Music and song, Tragedy, Hymns, Dance, Comedy and Astronomy, in all this, we merely whisk them away as the stories of those with angst and superstition, yet in all this Hesiod was apparently a native of Boeotia, a district of central Greece. It is said that he had mastered the technique and vocabulary of the epic by memorising and reciting heroic songs. He himself attributes his poetic gifts to the Muses, who appeared to him while he was tending his sheep. So a sheep herder focussed and learned the setting of entertainment to an almost eerie level of precision in a time when none of it existed (or mostly none of it). In this no one is wondering how that happened? 

I was wondering about the setting of comedy, about the stage of dance and what christianity broke and almost destroyed. Is no one wondering why? A stage of entertainment and insight into the mind and we are seemingly dumb do the notion, I was, and I was this to the largest degree, schooling made me this way. We have been said to a stage of moving forward, all whilst we ignore the past, the past that leaves us with more questions and not a lot of answers. You see, Hesiod did not merely have a muse of poetry, he had two, Calliope the muse of epic poetry and eloquence and Erato, the muse of love poetry. She was also part of the Aeneid almost 750 years later. So consider that we have lost the texts of most of the events between 1250 and 1400, a lot of it destroyed, yet this work survives. It also sets another person, the writer of that work Publius Vergilius Maro, who before there was a christ created three legendary works, the Aeneid, Georgics and Eclogues. In one of hist works we see the growth of tension as a forward momentum and hist work would be the larger inspiration to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, where Virgil becomes the authors guide. 6 notable legendary works in a stage where works mostly did not exist. More important, these works were kept safe, in an age where we now are swallowed by trash, spam and fake news, we disregard deeper works of optional philosophical nature and are left in the dark on their existence. 

Yet in this age, in the age of streaming entertainment, it seems natural that we take a deeper look at the old works, we might have to, even as the Vatican did it best to remove as much of the Rhaetian language as possible, they did not remove all and when we see these old works, we might ask actual questions that matter. You see, if a man herding his sheep sets the stage of entertainment to a much larger degree 3,000 years ago, even as his own audience (the sheep) had no clue what he was on about, he sets a larger frame, that frame is seemingly important, because of the goddess of memory had a sense of humour (Thalia), we better figure out what that is and how it affects us. 

It is perhaps best seen in:
“Do not, I pray thee, do not weep for me, neither pursue me thus ominously as I go to the stern shock of war. Turnus is not free to dally with death. Thou, Idmon, bear my message to the Phrygian monarch in this harsh wording: So soon as to-morrow’s Dawn rises in the sky blushing on her crimson wheels, let him not loose Teucrian or Rutulian: let Teucrian and Rutulian arms have rest, and our blood decide the war; on that field let Lavinia be sought in marriage”

Now consider his assumed past “Virgil was from an equestrian landowning family who could afford to give him an education. He attended schools in Cremona, Mediolanum, Rome and Naples. After considering briefly a career in rhetoric and law, the young Virgil turned his talents to poetry”, which I do not debate, yet consider that he died at the age of 50, he was at home the first 10 years, yet after that he attended 4 schools, over a distance of 1100 KM, which would have taken at least a week per part and in that setting he would have been exposed to all kinds of issues. And when we see this work (one of three important ones) over 12 books, hundreds of words per book, we forget the important question, how was this created? There was no typewriter, this is the work on scrolls, likely several per book and now consider that this would have to survive well over a thousand years. Each fact gives us something more to consider, and when we look at then, perhaps we are doing something really wrong now, have you even considered that part? 

If we consider merely these two writers and the massive impact that they had, what did we lose over time and more important was was removed from sight since the 11th century? These are part of the questions that were plaguing me as I was setting the tone in my idea for a TV series, but here I am, I already forgot the title, but not the setting. And in all that there is the choice, but what happens when we never had a choice? Did you consider that? Some might have seen the movie How It Ends, but did you consider it? Basically Theo James had a lot less options than he thought he had, and we merely see that ending come to us as the movie ends. Yet what if Hesiod and Publius Vergilius Maro were telling us about the fight, the fight that is coming in the only way that they could grasp and we wasted 90% of 2750 years and 99.9% of the 47 years that followed, with the last 3 years 100% wasted due to spam. We consider and we accept that some (in the most weird corners of life) can be the stage masters of life and creativity (JK Rowling being an example), but we have something to look back to, we have (to some degree education), as did Publius Vergilius Maro, yet what about Hesiod, who pasturing sheep on Mount Helicon? Shall we write it all to ‘imagination’?

I am happy to do that, but from what we know now bout then, his work leaves us with all kinds of questions, questions that we (for the most) cannot answer. How many people (of non noble origin) had the ability to write? Were versed in all kinds of manner? And consider that Mount Helicon was close to 150KM from Athens, not a trip sheep herders tend to make. So where did the refinement of his work come from? We are left with questions and some people (academics) will give bright answers that make total sense today, but 2000 years ago, a lot less so.

As such, when I was considering memory and humour as I was trying to find a scientific narrative in season one of Keno Diastima (I had to name it again) and that is where I find myself. A station of choice where the choice is an illusion, because the option of choice was only valid for a while and we decided to waste time and options, as such what would we face then? 

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