Tag Archives: Al Jazeera

September 3, 2020 · 12:21

Overkill anyone?

There is no going around the news that Alexey Navalny did not slip on a bar of soap in the bathroom. Yet the news ‘Nerve agent Novichok found in Russia’s Alexey Navalny: Germany’ given to us (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/09/germany-nerve-agent-novichok-russia-navalny-200902135330447.html) and other sources needs to be evaluated on a few levels. The media is of course eager to give us “Novichok – a military grade nerve agent – was used to poison former Russian spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter in the United Kingdom”, that event had a few issues and this one has even more. First of all, I do not really know the man, so my information on him has a few dubious sides. Consider his life in Moscow, on his walks in Moscow there are well over a dozen vantage points where his life could be snuffed out with a cyanide tipped bullet (or Ricin), two much more stable compounds than Novichok ever was. From each of these vantage points, I would be able to get to 1-2 streets over and after that simply vanish, the M24, or DVP Druganov equivalent I would leave behind, as a present for the eager beaver. As such Navalny would be dead. There are alternatives with Lithium, and several more opportunities that end life permanently, so we do have options. In this we now get another stage. This is the third known Novichok attack where the person does not immediately die, or does not die at all ‘Comatose Russian dissident Alexey Navalny arrives at Berlin hospital’ (source: CNN). And even as the media hides behind ““Only the state [FSB, GRU] can use Novichok. This is beyond any reasonable doubt,” Ivan Zhdanov, director of Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation, said on Twitter, referring to the FSB internal security and GRU military intelligence services”, I had shown in ‘Something for the Silver Screen?’ In March 2018 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/03/17/something-for-the-silver-screen/) we see that the statement ‘Only the state [FSB, GRU] can use Novichok’ is not true, there are at least two instances where reach of Novichoks are outside of state actors, that is separate from the issues shown in the OPCW papers and in this, there are more questionable acts by Vil Mirzayanov in this. And let’s be clear, if the FSB or the GRU wanted Alexey Navalny dead there are over a dozen of ways to do that. If you need to get rid of the neighbour, you don’t resort to nuclear weapons, it is a level of overkill that is apparently accepted by all the media whilst no one is looking at the larger picture. Novichok is massively unstable and way too dangerous. These are known properties and no one is looking into the matter or asking questions. 

Is that not really really weird?

And it does not end there, Al Jazeera also gives us “Sergei Nechayev, who was summoned to the foreign ministry on Wednesday, asked for evidence and received “no answer, no facts, no data, no formulae”” as such, we see the accusation, we see no facts and no real evidence, and even as I am willing to accept that there was something real here, there is still a larger car where this is not a state operation, but another setting where Russian organised crime is involved. This does not absolve the Russian government but it does show a much larger setting and optionally a case where the Russian government is not guilty. The act of one corrupt official does not make a government guilty, and is that not a nice surprise “In December 2010, Navalny announced the launch of the RosPil project, which seeks to bring to light corrupt practices in the government procurement process”, it seems that Navalny has been dipping his feet in the pool of corruption hoping to see what is swimming there and who the sharks are (a West Side Story reference). Yet the media is not looking too deep there, because someone mentioned the word Novichok. In this the very first setting in this situation is that the use of Novichok is a massive overkill, and no one is catching on, why is that?

And if the west is so about freedom and about being nations of laws, why are they all negated in several cases? 

 

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August 24, 2020 · 04:23

You are what you feed them

I have had my share of obnoxious behaviour, I have on times (when I was young) been a little too not understanding, but I have never see what the Independent (at https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-muslims-xinjiang-pork-alcohol-lunar-new-year-spring-festival-uighur-islam-a8767561.html) is giving us. The headline ‘China ‘forcing Muslims to eat pork and drink alcohol’ for lunar new year festival’ is alarming enough, but the text “Officials have delivered pork directly to Muslim households and insisted that traditional Chinese new year decorations are displayed outside, RFA’s report claimed” if proven is a dangerous one. The additional quote “Chinese authorities have reportedly forced Muslims in the Xinjiang region to eat pork and drink alcohol during the country’s lunar new year holiday amid an alleged crackdown on Islam” merely makes matters worse. The idea that the disrespect given to any religion has taken this form is just beyond acceptable, in what universe does the Chinese government think it has any allowed leverage? I use the setting ‘if proven’, merely because there was one source in 2019 and now we see two more sources two days ago, in this, why has the larger western media, Al Jazeera, Gulf News and a few others all forsaken this? As such ‘if proven’ is the right setting. I understand that there are places where we are not Muslim, not Jewish, or not Christian, but most of us have always allowed others to be what they are. The bible tells us ‘Judge not, that you be not judged’, the Quran states “It is they who follow the guidance from their Lord, and it is they alone who are successful in attaining their object in this life and the hereafter”, and I am certain that the Torah has its own version that is not dissimilar to the others, so why would anyone force feed pork to a Muslim? It is not secular, it is merely a form of unacceptable cruelty. Yet it does not stop there. Forbes reports (at https://www.forbes.com/sites/lisettevoytko/2020/08/19/muslim-ice-detainees-reportedly-fed-pork-told-by-chaplain-it-is-what-it-is/#47cf78a26cc5) “Civil rights lawyers sent a letter to a Miami, Florida, detention facility run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement claiming that its Muslim detainees are being fed pork, a food prohibited by Islam, and have been given post-expiration-date meals that meet their dietary restrictions, but reportedly made them ill—and the facility’s chaplain allegedly dismissed their concerns, saying, “It is what it is.””, it is my personal view that any chaplain or priest hiding behind ‘it is what it is’ should be excommunicated on mere principle alone. We need to reflect on the rarity of this report and even as I hold Forbes in much higher view than most other media, one media does not make it true. That too is a foundation we can align towards. 

When we consider an added part “This isn’t the first time ICE has been accused of giving Muslims pork in their meals; in 2019, a Pakistani-born man with a valid U.S. work permit was reportedly given nothing but pork sandwiches for six straight days” we should consider that there is a lot wrong at ICE. And there is no excuse, as far as I can tell there would be nothing wrong with Cheese or Corned beef, so what game is being played here and in this, are we even surprised that the Middle East has such hatred for christians? 

My concern is not merely that it happened, but the lack of reporting in the widespread media in this, unless it can be proven to be false, is a much larger evil in this. This is the first I hear of it and the 2019 case was completely unknown to me. So why is the larger media avoiding this? 

I can speculate until the building is done, but in the end, it will be speculation and for you the larger question will be ‘What else are they keeping from me?’ Because if the media is willing to make a deal to not report on certain matters, they will do so for a price and when you are the price, they will do the same thing. That is what you must fear, and this is not the first time this is happening, it has happened before and now it is happening again and it will happen again tomorrow, unless we hold the media accountable for their actions and their inactions. 

It is the only way to stop these unacceptable acts from re-occurring.

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August 13, 2020 · 01:03

One sided coin

When is a one-sided coin like a watchdog? That is the underlying question, and the answer is seen in this article ‘When they are shallow’. We all have needs, we all have centred targets, but what happens when that setting makes you miss the larger picture? Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against watchdogs, I have nothing against the media, or politicians, but when they give a one sided brief just to please themselves, how shallow will they be? It is not the first time, but in this case it starts with ‘US watchdog report cites civilian casualties in Saudi arms deal’, now this might be correct, might being the operative word and not towards optionally pointing fingers and not towards the setting. We see “The Saudi-UAE air raids hit farms, schools, water supplies, and energy sources, triggering what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” now, I am not making a statement that they did not do that, but in all that, was it truly some civilian hit target or were there Houthi and/or Hezbollah fighters there? So whilst some focus on ‘precision-guided-munition components’, no one is looking what they were clearly firing on, because that too is an unknown. So whilst some focus on one side of “Tens of thousands of Yemenis, many of them civilians, have been killed by the Saudi-UAE air strikes – often with American-made weapons, targeting information and aerial refuelling support”, in a stage where should consider on ‘how many were civilians (and how many were not)’ in the sentence “Tens of thousands of Yemenis, many of them civilians”, yes we can hide behind ‘many of them’, but precision is essential, even if the weapons are not. In addition Representative Eliot Engel, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee gives us ““This obvious pre-spin of the findings reeks of an attempt to distract and mislead,” Engel said, adding that he feared the classified annex to the report would be “used to bury important or possibly incriminating information””, and I am not debating that, yet in all this, the stage where Eliot Engel is optionally helping our the Iranians, that is still up for debate, is it not? So when we check NPR and we see the question “Congress had concerns about $8 billion in arms sales to Saudi Arabia, and those concerns included how the arms might be used in the war in Yemen” and the only thing that Eliot Engel gives us is “Yeah”? By the way the interview (at https://www.npr.org/2020/08/11/901431799/engel-discusses-ig-report-on-u-s-selling-8-billion-worth-of-arms-in-middle-east) gives us nothing on ‘Iran’, ‘Houthi’ and ‘Hezbollah’, three tags that are essential in the Yemeni war, as well as the current Saudi Arabian state of affairs, so why are they missing? So whilst Engel gives us “Meaning that all the excuses that they give us, all the reasons they give us for doing what they have to do are phony and are made up. It’s just that they don’t – they want to have freedom to operate, not have the public know anything, certainly not have Congress know anything. And this is the way they’ve operated from day one. And it’s not really, you know – on the Foreign Affairs Committee, this is our jurisdiction. We’re supposed to be investigating these things, and they look at us as somehow intruding on their private purview”, a view that is his and might be valid, but the Yemeni war is larger and the three elements (Houthi, Hezbollah and Iran) are left out of it giving us an unbalanced and one sided story. Now, there is a side that accept, the US can decide on how it does business and who it does business with, and consider the hilarity we see when that $8,000,000,000 dollars goes to the Chinese or Russian treasury coffers? The US has been alienating its middle eastern partners to such an extent (all whilst ignoring to a larger degree the activities by Iran), we need to see the way that ball rolls down the hill and away from the congressional weapons sales teams. So whilst some might applaud the activity of watchdogs, the absence of the whole picture is actually rather disturbing. Not merely to the stage, but the fallout is other large. This does not reflect on Eliot Engel, but his congressional party is seemingly ignoring a much larger stage and this stage includes both Hezbollah and Iran, so why is Eliot Engel and his band of naughty congressionals ignoring that? Consider that the people for a week have been aware of ‘Saudi Arabia’s project clears 177,637 Houthi mines in Yemen’, now, we accept that some would have originated in Yemen, but not all and when we see these elements in the equation (and that is merely the beginning of that mess), we need to wonder why the US watchdog is so one sided. An investigation into the forces active in Yemen, as well as the weapons used and one side is left off the table completely. So how does your humanitarian side react to that? Oh and for desert I offer ’84.000 children in Yemen are dead, who is holding the Houthi and their methods to account?’

 

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August 5, 2020 · 05:26

What light is the limelight

We all wonder at times why certain matters are brought to attention, we now automatically assume that issues are revealed to seat the limelight, not merely TV and other media, the press is seen in that same way. It is not that we are bombarded with fake news, there is now the assumed feeling by many that the media is giving us fake news (they tend to call it direct and speculated views from experts). 

This view is supported (to a degree) by Al Jazeera who gave us “Long before “fake news” had a name, the BBC was a master of fake news, in fact fake news of the most dangerous, the most vicious consequences, casting nations, not just individuals, into direct calamities”, they did so in November 2018, they also give us “The role of BBC in the overthrow of Mosaddeq was not out of character or unusual. In a piece titled Why the taboo tale of the BBC’s wartime propaganda battle must be told published by The Guardian, David Boyle writes about characters like Noel Francis Newsome (1906-1976), who “as director of European broadcasts … led what is still the biggest broadcasting operation ever mounted, in 25 different languages for a total of just over 25 hours a day, across three wavelengths.””, in this the BBC does not stand alone, there are scores of producers that have had the ear of their governments. 

The problem now is that the media is flaunting the #Fakenews items and procrastinate on what they regard on what is fake news, yet they themselves have been heralding tweaked news and scores of misinformation through either omission or ‘non disclosed sources’ and the people have caught on, they have caught on for a while, so whilst they disregard newspapers, they embrace another level of debatable news that others publish on social media. 

And everyone is seeking the limelight, yet the most obvious question becomes slowly apparent to some, what sort of light is the limelight? And what sort of light was it supposed to be?

That is the question, in people like Freddy Mercury and David Bowie got to be exposed to the purest form that was discovered in 1837, at that point we had: “limelight was used for the first time to illuminate a stage, at London’s Covent Garden. During the second half of the 19th century, theaters regularly utilized this powerful form of light, which could be focused into a beam to spotlight specific actors or an area of the stage”, the stage was set to illuminate and give visibility to, in this case titans of music. In other forms we see the pink limelight, which in this case is not a version of ‘La vie en rose’, it is a version to make softer the harsh reality of a situation that we face, we see it whenever the limelight needs to be on Iran, we see it when bad news must be tempered for the good of that government or for the good of the political needs of THAT moment. In this stage we also need to see the omissions of news and I am not buying the usual ‘we ran out of space’ BS all whilst digital space costs nothing and any additional space implies more advertisement space too. Some might have noticed on the massive lack of reporting whilst Houthi forces (via Iran) were firing missiles on the Saudi government. To merely quote one of the (many) sources “When important news is omitted, we get a skewed or biased perspective”, as I see it, the Saudi example shows a few issues, as the larger lack of reporting was shown, right around the time several governments were setting the stage of no weapons to Saudi Arabia. And in all that mess, the lack of reporting on the actions of Iran take a larger view and we need to do that. We see a global stage that is changing, whilst a group of politic Ians are setting the stage based on their egotistical needs, and that group is getting too large, all whilst the political field of the US is dwindling down and European politics is getting a dangerous overhaul. In this stage of changes, some have figured out that a new way of setting the tone of news is not changing the story, it is adjusting the limelight. As I see it it will open differently across forms of media, but the readers will have a lot more issues to distinguish between news and fake news, you see, there will be news, adjusted news and fake news. The problem is that all have a professional looking character, yet the impact differs. It gets us back to the 90’s when the 256 greyscale solutions came, but the setting is an important distinguishing one. We cannot distinguish these 256 grey scales. Our eyes are not that good, and our brains are even less distinguishing, as the overlap between real, adjusted and fake messages increases, our ability to distinguish becomes a larger issue. In this a personal view is that there is a correlation between phishing and adjusted news. It becomes harder, if not close to impossible to see the difference. I almost fell for two phishing attacks, even as I knew what to look for, the message was indistinguishable from the real deal and news is going the same way, the media relying on ‘adjusted news’ is not helping any. The one clear part (from factcheck.org) is “Not all of the misinformation being passed along online is complete fiction”, the question is when does it become too hard to see the difference between a story that is not ‘all fiction’ and a story that is not ‘all true’. When can we no longer tell the difference? And as some come with the treated excuse ‘Is there not an AI solution?’, the stage becomes rather large, because AI does not exist, not yet at least. You see, the salespeople are selling AI, because it is marketed at all, just like the 80’s when printers had to be sold, they came up with Near Letter Quality. Wit AI we now have True AI: “True artificial intelligence is autonomous — it does not require human maintenance and works for you silently in the background” and there we see the problem, the identification is still done with human intervention, and the part in this that I did not report on is that AI, or perhaps more clearly stated True AI requires to be learning. That is not yet possible as it requires quantum computing with shallow circuits. IBM is close to getting it, but not completely there yet, only when that is ready, complete and true AI becomes achievable. So whilst that stage is still evading us, the issues of adjusted and fake news keep on going. Yet I am concerned with the question “What is the light they use as limelight?”, in this we consider it as we need to contemplate that news should not change when WE change the light, so real news will remain  the same whether it is rose or lime light, adjusted news will change slightly, but perhaps just enough for us to see the difference. It is speculative, but I believe that it is a future option.

 

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July 22, 2020 · 01:43

A pawn in nuclearity

There was an article, now 7 hours old, but I had seen it before, a day earlier I believe. I left it alone as I had to ponder a few items in this stage. You see the article reading ‘Nuclear Gulf: Is Saudi Arabia pushing itself into a nuclear trap?’ (at https://www.aljazeera.com/ajimpact/nuclear-gulf-saudi-arabia-pushing-nuclear-trap-200718155513128.html) is giving us the part that matters “if Iran gets them first”, and as I see it focusses less on the danger that Iran is to the entire Middle East if they have them first. Even as we notice “The spectre of the Saudi-Iran Cold War escalating into a nuclear arms race is not beyond the realm of possibility”, we remain increasingly ignorant of “EU says Iran has triggered nuclear deal dispute mechanism” (at https://www.politico.com/news/2020/07/04/eu-says-iran-has-triggered-nuclear-deal-dispute-mechanism-348680). The setting is not merely that Iran is seeking to become a Nuclear power, when we see “In January, the European architects of the deal triggered the dispute resolution mechanism provision in the accord, which is aimed at forcing Iran to return to compliance or potentially face the reimposition of international sanctions. They later suspended the action” we see the setting that the EU is sanctifying the Iranian actions, whilst diminishing the powers to stop Iran, this is a path that EU (et al) want this to happen, there are forces that want destabilisation of the Middle East and Iran having a nuclear options achieves that. 

And that is not the end of the EGO of the EU, when we see “EU’s top diplomat said that he remains “determined to continue working with the participants of the JCPOA and the international community to preserve [the deal]” and we see that this was three months ago, all whilst since then  we see no later than yesterday ‘EU Vows Greater Efforts to Safeguard Nuclear Accord’ (source: Financial times) we need to realise that this imbalance will have larger consequences in the Middle East and the players are not of the cooperative type (read: the EU and Iran). So even as Saudi Arabia is not looking forward to becoming a nuclear power, they are pushed by a larger group into this direction, and I wonder why this is. The stated setting that adding to the nuclear pool was to be stopped by nuclear forces is now setting a stage where an entire corridor from India to Israel is nuclear loaded. How is this a good idea ever? Consider India v Pakistan, Iran v Saudi Arabia & Israel, this can only end in disaster and as I personally see it the EU ego is not ready to deal with the fallout from this (literally so), as such I wonder why a larger group of nations is not standing pro-Saudi Arabia or anti-Iran in this (which of the two does not really matter). So as Al Jazeera gives us “Saudi Arabia’s nuclear ambitions date back to at least 2006, when the kingdom started exploring nuclear power options as part of a joint programme with other members of the Gulf Cooperation Council”, they fail to give us the reasoning that Saudi Arabia “Saudi Arabia’s population has grown from 4 million in 1960 to over 31 million in 2016”, as I see it, power requirements have grown somewhere between 300%-500%, making Nuclear power one of the remaining options in the short term for Saudi Arabia, Iran on the other hand has been clear about becoming a nuclear power weapons wise, Al Jazeera also does not give us the fact that Saudi Arabia openly stated that they prefer not to have Nuclear weapons, but if Iran has them, Saudi Arabia feels forced to have them as well, making Iran the instigators in all this, yet the EU is seemingly oblivious to this. I wonder why? So when we look at the Financial Times again and see “He pointed to the beginning of discussions in 2003, which led to the conclusion of JCPOA and said, “It took 12 years to break the differences and to cut a deal. It was a big success for effective multilateralism and it has been a success because the JCPOA has delivered on its promises.”” We see an absence. The absence is that it took only 3 years for the deal to be broken by Iranian violations, but it seems that this part is largely not shown in many places. Yet in all this Saudi Arabia is named the pawn. I wonder why?

So as Saudi Arabia is entering the nuclear stage soon enough, we need to worry in other ways too. The EU was massively ignorant, or perhaps from my point of view it was intentionally ignorant on all these Houthi forces (as well as Hezbollah) have been practicing their missile firing abilities on Saudi Arabia, who what happens when one of them is a nuclear one? What happens when Iran ‘accidentally’ misplaces two of them? One for Israel and one for Saudi Arabia? Where will we find these Eu ego’s? The issues we have seen over the past give rise to this train of thought and Iran is not above the act of misplacing items. Has anyone found all these misplaced drones yet that accidentally made it into Houthi hands?

When we see the amount of pussyfooting around Iran, we need to consider the trap we set up for ourselves, it does not make Saudi Arabia the pawn, it makes us all the payers of high priced oil, because when this goes bad, really bad he price of oil will be close to 400% of what it is today, so when you at the pump, you realise what is about to happen to your budget, all thanks to the ego of some EU officials who should have played hard ball from the start.

 

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July 13, 2020 · 17:07

The Iran and Judy show

We have seen the show, we applauded for Punch and his stick (we were kids after all), yet there is no punch this time around, punch was mixed with watermelons, pineapple, cranapple juice and blackberry juice, with a few added distilled options and he got served in a room a small meeting room on 405 East 42nd Street, New York. The meeting room had a limited population, primarily what most meeting rooms have in that building, so there is nothing special about that, and it is just like the meeting on the use of Sarin in Ghouta 2013, for some reason the important question of WHO was avoided by a whole range of paperback politicians (as well as spokespeople of the UN), so I am not surprised to see the next axe job in Al Jazeera (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/qa-agnes-callamard-drone-strike-killed-soleimani-200711080404877.html). You see the stage is a lot larger and we need to be aware. Not the question, even as the staged outcome is not one anyone not Iranian can agree with, the stage is larger and that needs to get the forefront.

So even as there is no objection to the set ‘UN’s Agnes Callamard on drone strike that killed Soleimani’, anyone who has any clue on the massive amount of stages that Qasam Soleimani was connected to sets a stage we cannot agree with, so as the article gives us “I had been speaking with a number of experts for the last year or so about focusing one or more of my thematic reports to the UN on weapons, particularly those being tested or under development, and what these may mean for the future of policing, warfare and, ultimately, the protection against arbitrary killings.” Now consider ‘the protection against arbitrary killings’, we do not disagree with this premise, as to why the Houthi stage against Saudi Arabian CIVILIANS is a much larger stage. The fact that experts have given evidence that Houthi forces have no options for produce Iranian drones, they have no expertise in building the drone, deploying the drones and managing the inflight stagers of drones sets a much larger decor in all this, the report, or at least the Al Jazeera version of it, goes out of its way to make sure that Iranian involvement in all this is averted. Why is that?

It is also set to the question that gives us: “we have entered what I have described as the second drone age, characterised by an increasing number of states and non-state actors using them, and by drones becoming stealthier, speedier, smaller, more lethal and capable to be operable by teams located even thousands of kilometres away.” It is a decent answer and I find little to oppose it, yet the stage we see in the Middle East is largely avoided, and it cannot be avoided. It is the approach that we see with “operable by teams located even thousands of kilometres away”, the optionally avoided “operable by teams located beyond the strategy of the involved theatre” is the question, she is setting the stage of a limited amount of state actors, optionally invalidating the involvement by Iran, again, why is that?

Finally there is “Drones are not unlawful weapons. What need to be regulated is both the technological development and their usage. The use of drones … must be lawful under three bodies of law: The law of self-defence, international human rights law, and international humanitarian law.” No one disagrees with that, yet the stages in several fields is not the technological side, it is out there, it is the stage where players like Iran deploys their drones via Houthi and Hezbollah forces and the report (read: UN Essay) was written to avoid all that. In a stage where Iran has ignored the existence of both International Human Rights Law and International Humanitarian Law, we see the need to chastise this report on a few lacking merits. 

So when Agnes Callamard gives us “Thus far, courts have largely refused to provide oversight to drones’ targeted killings extraterritorially, arguing that such matters are political, or relate to international relations between states and thus are non-justiciable. A blanket denial of justiciability over the extraterritorial use of lethal force cannot be reconciled with recognized principles of international law, treaties, conventions, and protocols, and violates the rights to life and to a remedy.” We find it hard to disagree with this, but in all this, the larger stage of proxy wars (and therefor Iran) is left out of the equation, out of a equation that matters NOW, so why is that?

It all coincides with “The killing of General Soleimani shows how dangerously close the world has been to a major and deadly crisis”, a stage whether valid or not is optional, but the lack of references that Saudi civilians have been under attack on well over half a dozen stages is left unexplained, as such we could wonder why the hatred of aka Eggy Calamari in regards to the Saudi people is not asked. This is the third report that attacks Saudi Arabia (without proper evidence) or negates the attacks on their civilians, all whilst those attacks were show with evidence and the stage of the refineries is show to a degree that it should have been impossible for Houthi forces to be THIS successful, the attack amounts to a person buying tickets to three different lotteries and getting the jackpot on all three of them, it is statistically so far out of reachable stages that it boggles the mood on how certain players were willing to put their name on such a disgraceful place of strategic thinking. 

I am left with the stage where the UN is massively setting the stage to Iranian needs, all whilst Iran has not now, not ever shown any humanitarian resolve, and there is decades of evidence in that bucket. So what is the UN, specifically Agnes Callamard playing at?

So as the article ends with “War is at risk of being normalised as a legitimate and necessary companion to peace. We must do all that we can to resist this deadly creep.” In that stage, can anyone explain why the absence of the actions of Iranian and Houthi forces give light of the avoidance of the deadly creep? No one disagrees that the entire drone stage is setting a much larger stage, a stage we never held before, yet doing so in a way that keeps a player like Iran out of reach of it does not really solve anything does it? And as for Qasam Soleimani? I mentioned his actions on several occasions, as such we need to read that UN Essay with a different light. The fact that the life and attacks under Soleimani does not get the 50 pages of disclosure is a much larger stage and optionally that is not up to the UN, but ignoring that whilst it matters as to why he was killed, optionally with the entire Iraqi stage as to why he was there in the first place is a little bit weird, but perhaps Agnes had some of that funky punch in the meeting room, I do not know, I am merely hazarding a speculation.

 

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July 11, 2020 · 00:16

Presidents are us

Yup, the fight for the White House is intensifying. The BBC gives us ‘Biden challenges Trump with ‘Buy American’ economic plan’. Well that is a step we saw coming, in a stage where any corona virus hit nations will rely not merely on the export of goods, but on the locally required spending consumer base. With the FAANG group in its own world, the US democrats have decided on ‘Buy American’. It makes sense, although the claimed $700bn plan is likely to cost close to twice that amount and will only truly be a win if US export does not collapse whilst the US population will rely on US goods instead of importing. If those two parts are met then Joe Biden does have an optional working plan. The current president says that this plan will fail, but in light of all his claims, does anyone care what he thinks? So whilst the BBC gives us “Many voters are concerned by the Trump administration’s handling of the pandemic. His divisive approach to the country’s recent wave of anti-racism protests has also come under sharp scrutiny” and they are correct, even as there are a few more issues surrounding Trump, there is a larger concern on his presidency and as the foundation of the Republican group are in a stage where they are doubting his presidency can show any positive impact for the Republicans, the idea that a Democratic win for them at present is better than the current White House occupant is also a larger concern as the elections draws near. Even as we see “Analysts have urged caution in over-interpreting the polls, but Mr Biden’s lead is far greater than that of Mr Trump’s 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton at the same point in the campaign” the analysts do have to some degree a point, the American population has NEVER EVER been this polarised before and as some see it, there is a much larger white power population, Al Jazeera showed ‘An Al Jazeera investigation identified some 120 pages belonging to bands with openly white supremacist and racist views’, which adds up to another issue that Mark Zuckerberg and his book of faces has been unable to deal with. And these pages tend to flow towards Trump, not Biden. (at https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/07/exclusive-facebook-extensively-spread-neo-nazi-music-200710075507831.html) and that is merely the tip of the iceberg that is optionally the reason that the US Titanic will be sinking in unknown waters. The articles also gives us the PDF and “The 89-page report by civil rights experts heavily criticised Facebook, saying it needs to do more about anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish and other hate speech.” In this the article is important when we get to Chapter 6 (Algorithmic Bias), there we see “algorithms used to screen resumes to identify qualified candidates may only perpetuate existing gender or racial disparities if the data used to train the model on what a qualified candidate looks like is based on who chose to apply in the past and who the employer hired; in the case of Amazon the algorithm “learned” that references to being a woman (e.g., attending an all-female college, or membership in a women’s club) was a reason to downgrade the candidate.” Yet the same model could optionally be used to misinform (or disinform) the person through links that have ‘altered headlines’ One party could use it to flame to larger base of the other party and no matter what claims Facebook makes, the PDF report shows that they are seemingly clueless on how to stop it. You see, even if Facebook decides to block politics, it does not stop one account from posting an image, and even as the image might not be political, it can still impact the political base with the misinformation it spreads and Facebook would be largely unable to stop it until it was too late and as it optionally stops one side, the other side can make it worse, so here we see the application of Shareholder, Stakeholder and Sponsors, the S3 equation of big business. 

So even as the news was that the FAANG group saw $58 billion wiped after Trump slammed the ‘immense power’ of big tech (Business Insider), we seem to forget that that same group saw their stocks rise in excess of of $637 billion, so they still made decently well over half a trillion dollars. When you consider that, who do you think that the FAANG group wants as the next president? In all this the entire China matter remains an issue as the US goes towards the polling booths, yet in the end, there is absolutely no guarantee that President Trump is a one term president, yes there is the wishful thinking group, but the issues seen in the economy and the soaring profits that the FAANG group is making is a much larger concern, especially as their voices are a lot more powerful than anyone realises. In all this, the final touch is that so far I have shown again and again that the media is massively sensitive to the needs of the S3 group they dance for, in all this, do you expect to get any neutral news? Consider this week the insincerity of Fox News with ‘Fox News apologises for cropping Trump out of Epstein and Maxwell photo’ and whilst the Guardian reports on this, not many did, and when we realise the byline “Network says it mistakenly eliminated Donald Trump from photo with Maxwell and Epstein at Mar-a-Lago in February 2000” take a moment to consider the choice of words ‘mistakenly eliminated’, which is bias, it is (in my personal view) a form of censoring, which is interesting as it is the media that are all in arms on ‘censoring’ which was shown by Lord Justice Leveson through a novel that exceeds War and Peace (an apt analogy), even as the media reflected on it like it was the horror story fo the century, we see that the media has no issues to ‘mistakenly eliminate’, optionally hoping that no one will notice and there is every chance that a lot of people remained unaware. So in light of all this, there is no way to predict the winner. Even as we hope that Joe Biden will be supported to a much larger degree and that it will be a fair fight, I am not so sure about either premise in this equation.

 

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June 18, 2020 · 03:09

Vindication is like Maple Syrup

Yes, that sweet taste, the taste that is not equally the taste of ‘I told you so’, but more the fact that ‘You were wrong and I was right’, a taste that is sweeter, thicker and overly disturbingly addictive. Vindication is the stuff that makes it all worth it.

The situation that followed my article: ‘Corona? I never touch the stuff’ 4 months ago, the umbers never added up and there were all the sources stating the ’bla bla bla’ on age, on complicated health issues and so on, but today (6 hours ago) Al Jazeera (via Laura Winter) gives us ‘Data fog: Why some countries’ coronavirus numbers do not add up’, it is a first in the scene where I am proven correct, all whilst some data miners had the stage of making me wrong, I wish them good luck in countering it all and finding a new job soon enough, their “I know what I am walking about, I have been doing this for the government for 15 years” is now likely to change into carefully phrased version of denial with the added “My case was different, here is the data”, yes yes, blow it into a direction where they care.

Even as Al Jazeera gives us “Allegations of deliberate data tampering carry profound public health implications” is a side I never even skated on as I would never have been able to prove the deliberate part. They go deeper with a setting of the Meyer-Resende’s theory versus the International Corruption Perceptions index. It is one way to go, but it is skating on thin ice. It tends to follow the GIGO law of 1991 (Garbage In Garbage Out), yet there is no denying that the differences of what the Corona cases are through reporting on several nations, the difference is indeed striking. In the article example we see Denmark against the rest, They apparently had triple the cases the world had, I saw the larger stage within Europe (Germany versus France) and a few other settings, in my view the mortality rate should be close to equal and I noticed differences on 4% versus 15% even when minimum numbers were surpassed, mortality rate tends to be almost equal, yes there is some impact in age, but the numbers I saw were nowhere near the acceptable level, not in nations with almost equal level of health care. 

The article has more stuff, more excellent stuff, but they already inflicted the first victim, my ego, I was right all along and it is at present annoyingly present, like a silent person screaming in my ear (on the inside) that I was right. I already knew that this was the case, but it is nice that the media is picking up on it and so far it is just them, but that will change in the next week making my ego even less enjoyable (even for me). So whilst governments are in denial on what to do, as 6 US states are spiking whilst reopening shops, the acceleration will only rely on cheaper housing (more dead people), and those who reject my view of it, I say talk to your elected official and whilst they state that it is a complicated situation in this economy, consider that his target keyword is economie, so who did they serve? News is reaching me that the state of Oklahoma has a 68% rise, is the president not going there? Well, we might see two issues resolved if he does, time will tell. Even if I sound a little repetitive (I stated this before) “There is no use hailing an economy when all the consumers are dead, there is no one left to buy your product ever again”, that small realisation should go a long way. On the other hand, real estate will drop in price, so the others will get cheaper housing, it works out for everyone.

And in this setting it is Business News (Reuters) who stated 22 minutes ago ‘New US pandemic watchdog says data, tech issues challenge oversight work’, the premise does not sound wrong, yet the quote “Federal agencies already lacked some data necessary to track government funds and ensure they are spent as Congress intended, a problem compounded by the speed with which the government has shoveled money to businesses, individuals and local governments, the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee (PRAC) said on Wednesday.” shows a much larger failing, I get the fact that things needed doing, but the US is throwing trillions (money they do not have) at something hoping it will stick, all whilst for 4 months the data was clearly incorrect. So when we consider the quote “Congress created the committee, which comprises independent watchdogs from 21 government offices, as part of a sweeping March aid package. Its job is to make sure the funds were used to help save jobs and keep Americans off breadlines and were not siphoned by fraudsters or otherwise abused or wasted” (at https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-usa-fraud/new-u-s-pandemic-watchdog-says-data-tech-issues-challenge-oversight-work-idUSKBN23O2D2) a setting to prevent harm whilst the data they are reacting to is flawed, a stage where 21 offices are involved, which would take weeks if not months to align and we see from more than one source “data, tech issues challenge oversight work”, In all this we also see “Critics say few safeguards have already allowed companies to mop up cash with few strings attached”, not only are hard times ahead, I reckon that when the investigation goes on into the dimes where the American people ask for justification on where it all went, those ‘few strings’ will not go well, more importantly, as the US goes from 3G to 6G (it will take 6 generations to end that debt), they will demand their pound of flesh, I reckon that some people will not be given a nice christmas hamper. It is not a stage I predict, I reckon there will be no escaping that stage in the US soon enough, I wonder who will be found with their hands in the $3,000,000,000,000 cookie jar.

 

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June 14, 2020 · 19:34

What others decide

We see it every day, there is a side that withholds resources, because it is theirs to do so, and there is a side where people decide to keep resources away from others for reasons like margins, profit and needs. They are at times not nice decisions, but the decision was theirs to take, at times we have to accept that. Now we need to consider what the wisdom is in keeping information away from us. Not intelligence, that is up to those grim boffins to decide on, butthe events that have taken place and the news decides to not inform us, so what is the wisdom there and how does that reflect on them? 

ABC seemingly does not inform us, yet the BBC gives us ‘France’s ancient burial brotherhood’, Reuters has no mention of it as far as I can tell, yet the BBC gives us ‘What will clothes shopping look like’, and as I mention the BBC a few times, they have nothing either.

It is Al Jazeera that gives us ‘Saudi-led coalition says it destroyed missile targeting Najran’. The news 17 hours old gives us that Houthi forces are still targeting Saudi civil population and the people in charge of bolstering peace (or so they claim) are seemingly making sure that this news does not reach us. In that news given to us we get the words from the coalition spokesperson Turki al-Malki gives us the part that the missile was launched from Saada, all factual given. What Al Jazeera does not give us (for decent reasons) is that there is still uncertainty how much support the Houthis get from Iran, how ‘supportive’ Hezbollah remains in all this. Elements that matter, but too many sources are intentionally blind to that part of the equation. In Yemen the bulk of all UN support will falter due to a lack of funding, as such the stage of humanitarian aid will close down leaving the Yemeni population to die.

Even now as Iran makes claims that the Iranian-Russian ties serve international security, we see a faltering level of information by the newsgroups. Even as the source can be debated, the information lacks scrutiny because the public was not informed, it has not been informed for months at a time, as some ego driven politicians had the nuclear accords carrot and they needed that carrot to be looking as sweet as possible, and keeping people in the dark on what was actually happening was a first. 

Yet the Russian collaboration with Iran gives Iran the nuclear parts that they need and the Yemeni pressures are almost an insuring valve that the parts are to be used, Saudi Arabia is between the sea of Dammam and a hard case and its so called allies are floundering the support in the empty air. A stage where Iran is the larger evil and the news is either embargoed, or stupidly keeping the people in the dark on the actual setting. Because shopping for clothes is where the actual newsworthy part is at, or is it? 

We can point and blame all we like, but the Houthi events are a larger stage and the news is not covering it, why not? The largest humanitarian collapse in history is about to happen to a nation and the people are left in the dark, optionally merely because of the resources.

A stage we all made happen, and we now need to be blind of the actions that follow, why will we never learn?

We might not have resources, we might not have power, these things happen, yet when we accept that information is filtered to what others decide what we need to know, that is when we give up our own personal power, when did we decide that this was ever going to be a good thing?

 

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May 21, 2020 · 22:08

FaceFlu

Yes, we have had Covid-19 v1, we are about to experience version two of that flu and neither of them speak Spanish, so now we see that the BBC is giving us ‘Facebook defends itself over virus misinformation’ less than an hour ago. Why do they have to? Who arrested David Icke over the spreading of the rumour, the false rumour that the Coronavirus was spread by 5G? Who has arrested him, who has prosecuted him? You see in all this, Facebook is fighting this fight with both hands behind their backs and every ankle has a ball and chain bound to it, not really a fair fight is it?

Another article by the BBC gives us that Malaria medication is used as a trial against the Coronavirus, why? Professor Nicholas White from Oxford University is not even sure if it is  beneficial or harmful, so as such does it even make sense to test this on 40,000 health workers? That is quite the trial, I see it as a massive overreaction, now let’s be clear, I did not study medicine, so I do not know, but I am aware that finding a vaccine is 12-18 months away and we are not even 6 months into that timeline. We see all kinds of media talk about frontrunners, with subtle undertones like “very early findings indicate the vaccine is safe and doing what it needs to do” in that path (source: ABC) can we not consider that this is corporate misinformation? Some company no one has heard of sets a record time, a record time that is close to one third? Whilst another source gives us ‘Vaccine experts say Moderna didn’t produce data critical to assessing Covid-19 vaccine’, something that ABC did not give us, or perhaps I missed it. Is misdirected hope not harmful too?

When we see “The Companies stock valuation also surged, hitting $29 billion, an astonishing feat for a company that currently sells zero products” I see that the economy is impacted several times over and all in the light of recession with a flavour of Corona (not the beer). We are so driven to slap Facebook, yet we refuse to slap the media on several fronts. 

We look at the good, we shiver at the bad, but we refuse to valuate and investigate the media bringing the news. How is that fair on Facebook? The media at large also uses Facebook to get the clicks and the views, yet they are not investigated, the balance of events is spinning out of control and we are not looking at what may be, it works for me, I am seeing an optional surge in my IP and I merely have to wait until the new Corona strikes, my IP will flourish because of it. It was never designed to do that, it was merely a happy side effect and my peers are still not looking in the directions I am and it is brilliant (for me), as there is every chance that there is another path that is opening up for me, I rejoice, yet I might have to rely on my nil existing knowledge of the Chinese language, such is life. So as the US senate is delisting China firms with a reference to the Luckin Coffee accounting scandal, I am not aware of it, but I do remember a grocery store named Tesco, how much action did the US senate take there? In 2017 the probe into PwC was called off, so as far as I can tell, we in the west have a lot more skeletons in our closets than China has. As I see it, we have plenty of problems, we do not need to inherit the short sighted, greed driven American ones. 

These are all elements that hit us and they impact our corona lockdown lives as well, because the news that we see, and the media does not care about us, it cares about its shareholders, its stakeholders and its advertisers, and they all need some bogeyman to exist, so that they can move unnoticed, and as flames are created and evidence is absent is several cases, we get handed a bag of goods, one that pleases the media and its three masters. To those four Facebook is a problem and they are making it a much larger and overly visible one, why do we not notice that? So whilst the media struggle for flames goes on, we might notice some news, but we ignore a whole lot more, because we are not informed. 

And there lies the problem, how can we know what we are not told? In some cases Al Jazeera, the BBC, the Guardian, the Washington Post and the NY Times give a decent completeview, but they are all for the most so deep into Corona issues that news slips them all. And that is the stage smeplayers need to have, yet Facebook can change that and they really do not like Facebook. Facebook can adjust instantly and that is what some do not like at present. Will we see another chapter in that? It is too soon to tell, but overall there is a stage where Facebook cold end up playing a much larger role, and if the timing is good the media will cry like a little bitch stating that they lacked resources, the only question that remains for you is how I could see this coming a mile away, the answer is simple, ithas been going on for a while now, yet the Corona virus was not anticipated, it changed a lot too fast for some and Facebook was there, like a tower, merely facilitating for the message and those messagemakers are often not in the pocket of the three controlling the media. It has been this way for years, the Coronavirus escalations are merely bringing it to the surface.

 

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