Tag Archives: India

December 20, 2019 · 12:29

Two unrelated issues

OK, today is not the day to piss off Alexander Bortnikov, I wanted to do that just to celebrate his 11th anniversary of him being the Director of the FSB, as such my sense of humour demands that I would put a whoopi cushion on his car seat, alas, I could not get close, someone decided to try a novel approach to the concept of Suicide by Cop (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/19/moscow-shooting-russia-people-shot-dead-intelligence-agency), instead of pushing the buttons of a militia officer, we see the apparant acts of a looney tunes person who decided to fire on the reception of Federal Security Service, that is an act that will get you killed and he did. Now, let’s be clear, there is a reason to bring this up. You see there is one building in Moscow (basically in the entire CCCP), where the most vile, the most feared and the most despicable member of any Russian criminal organisation takes a detour, it is the Lubyanka building, the headquarters of the FSB in Moscow. Consider some Bratva captain, 120 Kg of muscles, fearless and life ignoring person ends up shaking and like a little girl that is crying, the cause would be one building in Russia that does that. So when a person comes around shooting at its reception, I tend to call that a novel way to invite Suicide by Cop and I cannot fathom the desperation from life that a person has to pull that off (there are 999 other ways to go with 99.99999% certainty and most of them are 100% less painful and scary), optionaly as distractions go, it is perhaps the worst one yet.

Oh, and there is not some special required form of data intelligence required, we could argue that the fear for that building is handed to any Russian citizen when they start school, so for the life of me I can not figure out why someone would be this stupid, it is like grabbing a bucket of water from the Volga in Saratov and personally dumping the bucket in he Caspian Sea, not only meaningless, but you end up being alive at the end of that journey, attacking the FSB building with anything less than an entire army and your chances to survive become a whole lot less certain. Yet in all that, the fact that the attack made several newsgroups is important, you see, the news never sleeps, yet they do get to filter what we hear.

From the Israeli news desk

The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/dec/19/israeli-spyware-allegedly-used-to-target-pakistani-officials-phones) (as well as Israeli Newspapers, give us ‘Israeli spyware allegedly used to target Pakistani officials’ phones‘, with the byline ‘NSO Group malware may have been used to access WhatsApp messages for ‘state-on-state’ espionage’, news that made a lot less newspapers on a global scale, is that not weird? Now, I am not stating whether there is validity, I am not stating on behalf of the NSO Group that it is false, yet this private firm founded by Niv Carmi, Omri Lavie and Shalev Hulio is showing to be an expert company in acquiring information. The papers need to guard their words and I get that, yet when we see anonymous sources and “those who could have been compromised” I feel like I am in a play that I have seen before. The more important part is “All the suspected intrusions exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp software that potentially allowed the users of the malware to access messages and data on the targets’ phones“, yet it seems that there is not really that much taste for the weakness of the makers, is there?

When get the optional state where we see “The lawsuit claimed intended targets included “attorneys, journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and other senior foreign government officials”” and in that state I would make the demand ‘can we see those names please?‘ Yet it is a personal demand that will not be answered, there is too much doubt on the who did what and who wanted to know. I have a little more faith in “NSO has said it will vigorously contest the claim and has insisted that its technology is only used by law enforcement agencies around the world to snare criminals, terrorists and paedophiles“, you see that is a business approach to intelligence that brings money on the table and Yes, there is a chance that someone wanted to know more about certain Pakistani, yet that list given by Facebook is just a little too weird, yet the names might brighten up the need for it, and as we are treated to “The alleged targeting of Pakistani officials gives a first insight into how NSO’s signature “Pegasus” spyware could have been used for “state-on-state” espionage“, it is the difference of stance, the state of ‘alleged‘ that brings the doubt. In the article I do not disagree with “This kind of spyware is marketed as designed for criminal investigations. But the open secret is that it also winds up being used for political surveillance and government-on-government spying” for that we need to say that John Scott-Railton is seemingly completely correct, yet in all this, we see and identify a timeline and it becomes more and more apparent that not only did other interest groups (CIA, FBI, MI-5, MI-6, DGSE, et al) need this weakness, we see a longer timeline and we wonder what WhatsApp and Facebook have done about it so far. More important, why would any official use something like WhatsApp? I mean for private use, yes, yet for their business phone? It is the application of Common Cyber Sense that is lacking here and to give all that data to Facebook (WhatsApp) is calling some parts into question. CBS News gave the people in 2018 ‘WhatsApp co-founder: “I sold my users’ privacy” to Facebook‘, I get it! Cambridge Analytica changed a lot, but so it would have changed a lot for state players, as such the act of pushing for WhatsApp in government and secure conversations, it does not make sense. CBS also gave us in 2018 “U.S. intelligence agencies have said that Russian actors used Facebook and Instagram to wage a campaign of disinformation in the election” and if WhatsApp and Facebook are owned by the same person we see the even larger lack of Common Cyber Sense. WhatsApp has been the name in Scandals in 2017 and 2018 as well, so when the needed question ‘Why is a state player using WhatsApp in the age of Common Cyber Sense?‘ comes out, we see that the bulk of people, hacktivists and journalists have not asked this question, just like the weird part where we all look at the attack on Lubyanka, and no one looks beyond a certain point.

This view does not exonorte the NSO group, yet it is asking larger questions that take the group out of the field of vision and looks at the larger issues. More important the claim “While it is not clear who wanted to target Pakistani government officials, the details are likely to fuel speculation that India could have been using NSO technology for domestic and international surveillance“, you see pointing at their natural enemy is fun, however the fact that most European intelligence groups want to know about scores of Pakistani is also left off the table, in light of Pakistan and its Middle East connections, so are Israel and America, especially as America is losing foothold in the Middle East, finding any Russsian link to any Pakistani would be worth a lot to them, they lack all plenty of resources there.

You see, there is all the need for action when we see “The government of the Indian prime minister, Narendra Modi, is facing questions from human rights activists about whether it has bought NSO technology after it emerged that 121 WhatsApp users in India were allegedly targeted earlier this year” however everyone is overlooking ‘121‘ as a number. There are 400 million WhatsApp users in India, nobody would get to the 121 users in such a short time, the absence of ‘alleged‘ and optionally ‘so far 121 alleged users have been found‘ is a much larger issue that anyone realises. The fact that there are more questions popping up regarding the alleged NSO software is also overlooked. There is a much larger play in the field and it seems that certain people do not look towards certain players and the absence of Common Cyber Sense is just overwhelmingly staggering. It is almost like you are tired of life and decide to attack FSB headquarters with a gun.

Yet in all this, the amount of users in Pakistan is also the part we need to look at, you cannot merely check in seconds, this is a not an on the fly solution, so there are all kinds of questions, especially with 1.5 billion users of that app, we see a lack of thoughts, questions and especially software engineers treating the software weakness and this has been going on for quite some time. the fact that the larger collection of media is not getting to this question is just allegedly largely insane.

So as we consider “users in India were allegedly targeted earlier this year” we need to ask, how long until this glitch is fixed? The fact that certain glitches have been there since 2017 is a much larger concern, but the media does not stop at this point, does it? I reckon they are taking their time looking at the one suicidal person pointlessly attacking Lubyanka.

Two issues that might seem unrelated (and they are not), yet it tells a lot more about the media and state players than you should be comfortable with, feel free to WhatsApp that question to others, the state players will get to it eventually.

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Tagged as Alexander Bortnikov, Bratva, CBS, CCCP, CIA, Common Cyber Sense, DGSE, Facebook, FBI, FSB, India, Israel, John Scott-Railton, Lubyanka, MI-5, MI-6, Moscow, Mossad, Niv Carmi, NSO, Omri Lavie, Pakistan, Shalev Hulio, WhatsApp

December 6, 2019 · 18:09

Weapons on special

If there is one place where the Status Quo would be ensured, it would be the arms industry. It is as polarised as anything and some long term ‘friendships’ go back decades. So when I see that Egypt is making waves towards the SU-35 (instead of the F-35), the first two will arrive shortly, ahead of about 2 dozen planes compromising of $2 billion in revenue. When we add Turkey who already had moved towards the S-400 missile solution, whilst at the same time pushing for the Russian SU-35 as well. So as Russian hardware is moving towards Turkey, Egypt and India, we see a much larger shift in the military hardware department.

Then there is the UAE where the planes are not merely bought, the UAE is now vying for a building contract, and with that in mind, there is every chance that Saudi Arabia will also get a push into the Rusian hardware environment. Algeria is stated to be on that ship already, yet the issue now is not that the Russian fleet is finding new considerations, it is that as Russia makes headway all over the Middle East, America is taken off the field as consideration, so when people clap themselves on the back on how arms were taken away from middle eastern players, a toxic non option, we see that business partners switch out and US congress might pat themselves on the back on how they prevented weapons to be gained in the middle east, whilst in principle the US was taken out of the Middle Eastern consideration.

In an age where the US cannot afford any opposition as they need to deal with $23 trillion in debt, they merely ended up losing $15 billion in revenue, that has to bite and that is only at this point, if there is a larger contingency towards alternatives there is every chance that Russian hardware will gain middle eastern footing to a much larger degree.

When did the world sign up for that?

Well it did when it started to paint the issues through the media ‘UK arms sales to Saudi Arabia unlawful, court of appeal declares’, or perhaps all that Campaign Against Arms Trade ideology in an age where if one does not supply, the other side will, you did think that through, did you?

It was like watching two teachers and two nana’s holding up a sign, making the statement that Saudi Arabia was naughty and we should not deal with them, well do not worry, for every arms dealer in the UK there are close to a dozen not connected to UK revenue. So the term #StopArmingSaudi was a good way to advertise towards places like Russia that they could get these customers if they were interested, and they were. As I see it, there was a gap of £4.7 billion in hardware needs that Russia could satisfy, as well as any other needs, because when they become the trusted deliverer of hardware they also get all kinds of other deals, deals that the UK needed and the UK dies not get to cry foul at that point, they merely get to point at the CAAT and state “This is what you got us“, and so far so good for Rusia, is it not?

Even as we see places like Defense News give us ‘Russia’s S-400: An offer US partners should refuse‘, we need to see behind the deals and see the change of weaponry to a much larger degree. so as we are told ‘the Trump administration wisely decided July 17 to remove Turkey from the F-35 fighter program‘, the truth of the matter is that the entire F-35 program was oversold and Russia is countering it all by also offering the SU-35 and in some cases the SU-57 stealth fighter. so whilst some rely on “If Riyadh adds insult to injury and procures the S-400, it could represent a tipping point in the relationship with Washington — especially on Capitol Hill“, the truth is that the Hill as well as a few other players have injured themselves in billions, the oldest issue was always a given, Saudi has no intentions to attack Nato grounds, we knew that and we now have the same situation but without the friendship and without the revenue, it was not that simple, was it?

So whilst the White House notices “the F-35 cannot coexist with a Russian intelligence collection platform that will be used to learn about its advanced capabilities” we see another matter, we see Egypt, Algeria, UAE, India, Saudi Arabia and Turkey all selecting a Russian solution to national defense. that is only 6, there are currently 4 other players all ready to select Russian hardware. All whilst the media gives us ‘The Pentagon is battling the clock to fix serious, unreported F-35 problems‘, ‘Supersonic speeds could cause big problems for the F-35′s stealth coating‘ and those are merely in June, the F-35 has a few additional problems, even as the plane has been on the designer table since 2006 whilst there was a sample flying, it seems that there are setback upon setback and that merely stokes Russian fires. In all this Politico gave it in 2015 “By 2014, the program was “$163 billion over budget [and] seven years behind schedule”“, yet that is something to be proud off.

It is in this environment that we find weapons on special, well perhaps ‘special’ is the wrong phrase to use, they are up for grass from other delivery agents and payment is often a larger debatable issue, especially if a new hardware solution provider gets to make an entrance into other places, places he was not greeted into but that is another matter, it seems that the Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Plant will optionally send a Fortnum & Mason Christmas basket to the manager of CAAT, it’s the least that they can do (and I just want to see those CAAT faces when they get one).

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Tagged as CAAT, Egypt, F-35, Fortnum & Mason, India, Komsomolsk-on-Amur Aircraft Plant, NATO, Russia, Saudi Arabia, SU-35, Turkey, UAE, US, Whtite House

November 17, 2019 · 13:18

A day of fun

Some people are just too funny; yes this is about yesterday’s blog. I have been accused of having moments of grandeur, well yes, we all have those, but the setting I described is not new, and it is happening right now (not by me alas), there are people who take all that feigned ability for ‘no guns to Saudi Arabia‘ and turn that into a business in their need for green, in this 4 places were historically plentiful, I mentioned three but I left Guernsey out of consideration, it has a few benefits, but it is still a commonwealth nation. So it cannot indiscriminately deal with everyone from there, even in transit law application.

It is also why I laugh at places like ‘Campaign Against Arms Trade‘, the government stops dealing directly and starts dealing indirectly, the only thing that places like CAAT guarantee is that the government gets a smaller piece of the pie, It is a laughing situation and the people are not getting informed because the media will not inform them. Do I want to be a part of it?

Of course!

This is an industry that gets the top dog $100M plus (annual) and his disciples (hopefully at some point me) will get around $25M a year for all the hard work, which is about 50% less work then I do for $65.800, so presently there is all the reason to be of service to people in that business. Let’s be fair, with their work and these invoices, when you get the chance between $66K and $25M, what will you choose?

And that is merely when you look at 1-3 customers, there are close to 3 dozen customers and you could get the up and up for up to 2 years, so you won’t get a job afterwards but you retire with an amount that could be up to $55,000,000 (and a house, and a boat, and a model and a car) which is by the way $54,000,000 more then you ever would have made in any other way and more importantly you are not breaking (bending extraneously most likely) any laws. Transit laws are all about location, location, location and location. So you optionally get to redo it three times afterwards, park the money in a nice account and live the life of non-stop being lazy eating 5 star meals.

That is your life in a republic, monarchy and a corporatocracy. Their laws tend to be the same in all nations and the nice part is that it pretty much always works, so why I am not doing it? Without a first contracts and a first contact there is no starting this solution.

So moving to a place like Monaco without any contacts and business on your way, you will end up having no options. You have better options in Lichtenstein and Andorra, whilst living expenses are a lot lower, the amount of contacts will also be close to zero. Guernsey is the one out of bounds, it has commonwealth laws, and even as it has tax benefits, it does have a few setbacks in the arms trade, not for traders initially.

Then there are a few other places where you can trade like there is no tomorrow, yet you need to have your lawyer on standby 24:7 (which is tedious, let me tell you). Still Monaco is a great place for all this, as long there is no transit VIA Monaco you are doing fine, in the past the Netherlands were a great transit nation, but I am not sure if their laws have been adjusted in the last two decades. There is a lot to get through, and that is at times part of the joy to get to the juicy bone. You see, it is not only the Middle East that needs help, there are a whole range of issues with American arms dealers, There are Russian oligarchs that cannot show their face in certain places and they all need dealers, the money will remain good for a long time, because they end up making a lot more and that is the central nail in the coffin, as long as they make good money, you get to make scraps (in their eyes $25 million a year is a scrap). As such you can have the lifestyle you want providing you can swallow that BS agreement called morality. Consider CAAT your destination for the data. They have (at https://www.caat.org.uk/resources/export-licences-eu/licence.en.html) for 2017 $159 billion, now a lot of that is normal arms trade yet there is nothing stopping you from being an in between for 2017 $295 Million, 2018 $260 million and 2019 $305 million (expected). You are basically in a place where you could get 0.1%-0.2% of the arms trade agreements and that is slightly optimistic, you’ll end up with $55M-$65M in 2019, would you not do that? I would!

And in all this, the top 6 recipients are Saudi Arabia, the UAE, India, the US, Egypt and the UK, all decently rules nations, all with a normal seat of power, all needing to defend their borders, that is the Wacky part of CAAT, even as India, the UK and the US are allowed to defend their borders, the UAE and Saudi Arabia are not?

That’s just dealing in double standards. Oh and when it comes to double standards, in that list Iran has less than 1 billion and Lebanon was the destination of 2.2 billion, so what about all the rockets they fire at Israel? As far as I can see it, CAAT has no records of them, is that not interesting as well. OK, I am not counting the 350 missiles they send a week ago as this charter has no 2019 data, but Gaza has been firing rockets on Israel for years now and they cannot build these themselves, so the data is already flawed. That is the problem with CAAT, their idealism is out of whack, for people like me that is a good thing down the road (If I ever get hired) for the arms makers it sucks a little as I am getting part of their profit share, yet in the long run, those board directors would have spent it on blow and hookers (suggested speculation) so it’s good that they lost it (for me in more ways than one).

When you travel the field of import and export and you can handle transit laws the road might seem bumpy yet it still leads to a road giving you 100,000 times the amount you could have ever earned. And this field is not over, because even as we check out the need for arms, we see that several nations have a much larger need for pharmaceuticals. To be the small independent trader seems to be an interesting time, all because we had morals, you tell me how good morals are when you knowingly are not stopping anything, you only indirectly hurt the national product.

Yes it is a fun day.

Oh and Oman, Lithuania, Kenya and Pakistan need hardware too, my day is looking up already (when I get any of these calls that is).

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Tagged as Andorra, Arms deals, Barhrain, CAAT, Egypt, Guernsey, India, Lichtenstein, Monaco, Netherlands, Oman, Pakistan, Transit laws, UK, US

October 30, 2019 · 12:03

And the news is where?

Well there was the news this morning ‘World leaders return to ‘Davos in desert’ a year after Khashoggi boycott‘, but I dealt with that 4 days ago during ‘When we say ‘Ney’ to an event‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/10/24/when-we-say-ney-to-an-event/), complete with the summit time frame, seems like such an interesting delay. Perhaps the entire Nikkei setting is rather more interesting than that. Nikkei review giving us “Mizuho and SMBC among 15 names planned for historic listing“, whilst also giving us “The roster of underwriters could change depending on where Saudi Aramco goes public“, that part will get more visibility in the stage where ‘Aramco proposes two-stage IPO, shunning London and Hong Kong‘, that partially made sense, especially as HSBC took a flounder in the last year, by itself it is not a explanation, yet the events that overlap Jamal Khashoggi and certain times events in that light have not been considered ‘fair play’ by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in that light the events shunning London would make sense. And this is the direct consequence of certain tasks made by certain elements who thought that jerking off the market because the going was good some kind of thing. Well, yes, that is exactly how I would phrase it, especially over the year when we saw Saudi Arabia being hunted and nagged in three different ways; I think it is fair to call it that. I see no reason to call it any other way. Now that the initial plans for a petrochemical location in China is ready to be mapped out at $10 billion, China will have new options whilst Saudi Arabia is opening a new vat of tactics, the US is now up in arms to sooth their longtime partner and they better pucker up. The US made sure that the Khashoggi matter got light and then the lost track of their novelty, they were not prepared for the windfall others made of it and now we are given: “The crown prince denies involvement, but told US TV last month that he took “full responsibility as a leader in Saudi Arabia”” an issue that was out in the media, but did you not consider the cost involved? Did you think that this comes for free? Even as we were given “it triggered Saudi Arabia’s biggest diplomatic crisis since the 9/11 attacks as world leaders and business executives sought to distance themselves from Riyadh“, it does come at a cost and Aramco is the first to exact the cost of doing business, it is the first of several steps, the deals with India and China are too soon, too visible and it shows a Kingdom who was sick and tired of two faced options in oil, now that we see that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has options, now that the west is about to learn that you cannot play certain games, now they will all be about the ‘miscommunication’, they will be all about the freedom of the press even as we see that the freedom of the press is some convoluted story, some story that we tended to warn scholars about, like we see in Umberto Eco, the name of the Rose (post-glad infringed upon for this event) ““Until then I had thought each preacher spoke of the events, human or economical, that lie outside books not told of. Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of white papers: it is as if they spoke among themselves. In the light of this reflection, the gathering seemed all the more disturbing to me. It was then the place of a long, annual murmuring upon an imperceptible dialogue between one vision debated on and another ones paper, a living thing, a receptacle of powers not to be ruled by any human mind, but the cistern of wealth merely a treasure of ill spoken events emanated by many minds, surviving the death of those who had produced them or had been their conveyors.””

I recently had to revisit an abbey in northern Italy so it made sense as well and the years are actually in several ways applicable. The Divine Comedy (Dante Aliegieri) finishes at this stage, the era was founded by double entry bookkeeping, the Italian bankers who designed it had no idea what impact it would have on accountancy or that the practice would survive until today. Yet, Umberto Eco placed his novella in an interesting time, Yet that time 680 years later we see that the question of wealth is very much at the heart of the matter, yet not in hands of the Christian church, it is there that we see the actions of certain members of coinage to be handled from. Feel free to disagree with me, but when you place the events as they were played over the last year and who exactly started these accusations, with the preemptive part of evidence that cannot have any further meaning, including the UN Essay by A. Callamard, can we answer in any other way that something is apparently wrong?

We merely need to look at the impeachment of a Trump card, a mere clown in the entire financial orchestra, when we see the steps allocated by intelligence and civic groups, whilst a Crown Prince was indited on paper with no resulting evidence, do you really think that it is merely a farce? Now that the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has met with two events, it is stronger than ever to settle Aramco, to settle oil disputes and America might not care, but now that their own surpluses and their own economic value is now under attack, its 21 trillion dollar noose will become more than just the chain around a junkyard dog seeking a larger yard to bark in. And now it is only just that I include the bank that was around in the beginning of Umberto Eco’s tale, in 1327, from brothers financing governments the Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena (BMPS) would grow and from its acquisitions in 2008, the hidden losses and the bailout in 2013 it never stopped being the BMPS, J.P. Morgan, Mediobanca, Banco Santander, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs had signed a pre-underwriting agreement with BMPS in July, with all kinds of assurances, several of them all now shunned in the Aramco deal.

There is part of it that I cannot prove, I am not stating that I found certain links that are personally as shallow as it gets, yet certain people made transfers to other avenues, and in those positions they would if that deal went through made huge waves, if nothing happened, then they would be in an interesting place, so we cannot go on anything that flimsy (I don’t work for the UN after all), but the time line is weirdly skewed in certain visibility graphs, one would consider that certain acts would have been ‘concidental’ top a fault if it would have happened and it would have been the savior of what would be the “the industrial plan of the bank was approved, which the bank would be re-capitalized for €8.1 billion, but only €3.9 billion would be underwritten by the Ministry of Economy and Finance (excluding additional shares that would be buyback from retail bondholders by the government), with the rest were the “bail-in” of bondholders, mandatorily converted the bond of the bank to shares” Some would ask questions on the grounds of Margrethe Vestager, yet they would be wrong, I believe that certain matters had been in the frying pan a lot longer than that. And the entire Saudi Arabia matter does not stop there, where it stops is up in the air, because both Wall Street and a wealth banker that is above all this would prefer it this way, so when some are stumping their chest giving you the goods on some deal, just be thankful that it is not your coinage that is depending on this deal.

That is the underlying sound of more than just an Aramco deal, it is all over the place and even if my view is not to be seen as the correct one, consider what evidence you are going from, I never told you the little evidence that I have based this on, for the mere reason that two or three memos could be seen as mere typo’s, but how could my story exist?

Consider that I gave visibility to certain parts weeks ago, and that I was ahead of the curve for some time, after which my interest merely grew in other directions, I had finished the puzzle, I had no real reason to watch it unfold until completion, it was merely an exercise at that moment and like all other people, I hate exercises.

Yet I left two parts out, it is not important, but it gives a larger play towards the entirety, consider Davos in the Desert 2015, who was there and who absconded, consider that this was BEFORE Khashoggi and who came out of the woodwork? That is one part; I let you figure out the second hint. Now consider what options the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia has left when the table is spread the way it is, I wonder if you can see the irrefutable acts of discrimination.

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Tagged as A. Callamard, Aramco, Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena, Banco Santander, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, BMPS, China, Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Davos in the desert, Davos in the Desert 2015, Deutsche Bank, Goldman Sachs, India, J.P. Morgan, Khashoggi, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Margrethe Vestager, Mediobanca, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Umberto Eco, UN report, Wall Street

October 14, 2019 · 13:40

Update to include monsters

I was thinking of some of the old games I used to play, especially one I never mastered. The game was released in 1985; I played the Atari ST edition. The game was called ‘Balance of Power‘ and it was basically the east versus the west and through the interface you could interfere (take control of) the balance of power between east and west. In the end I got overly comfortable to the expression “You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure“, yes diplomacy was never my forte. There was an update 5-10 years later when the 1990 edition was launched, I never played that edition.

I believe that the world is ready for a true update of that game. When we add the atrocities by Turkey only a few days ago, when we add the Khashoggi debacle and the impact of social media and spin doctors at the heads of media outlets we see that the world has changed to a much larger degree and the impact of what actually could happen is perhaps worthy of a new game. We need to see and play with the impact of ISIS minded forces as political parties play with the impact on a global stage. The fact that the USA is no longer a real superpower and the fact that the treasury of Saudi Arabia, the consumer base of India as the technology footing of China are much larger influences than foreseen; we get to debate a much larger spectrum of what the balance of power looks like. I believe that when the people see the impact of these elements, we see that the world reshapes almost like some Sim City version with larger repercussions. When we consider the global powers of Google and Facebook we see that the game of world politics gets filtered by economic markers. The evolution of what was once regarded as the ‘Balance of Power‘ is optionally now the stage for a larger form of balance (or is that a forum of balance) staged in a collection of seesaws where one resets the balance of two others. the old balance of power staged on the bear and eagle are outdone, less valid, the entire proxy war between Saudi Arabia and Iran clearly shows that and the impact of the media as they filter the news is also a larger impact and we have never been able to truly look at the impact there is, hence the idea of a new Balance of power, optionally called: ‘the Power to balance powers‘, the optional new truth that Turkey is the fourth power to instigate multiple genocides (America as it degraded the population of Native American tribes to zero, as well as the Catholic powers who removed well over a dozen civilisations, and Russian combined actions in 1931 and 1932) is something we need to consider in a much larger scope.

It is this stage where we look at the news and we are confronted with ‘The Kurds’ commander in chief explains why his forces are finally ready to partner with Assad and Putin‘, I have no way of seeing how this plays out, but there will be larger repercussions on many stages. It is time that the youth takes a serious look at the large issues that their parents are dumping on their doorstep, we need to figure things out and it is time that this is done out in the open, no longer hidden behind a screen of media filters and silencing diplomatic teams as they are trying to remain ‘non-accountable’ towards actions chosen.

The problem is not merely that we ignore the actions; the larger stage is that all kinds of ‘compromises’ are being made for the long term and the next generation needs to learn what those repercussions are and I believe that the right video game could do this. The previous generation was apparently taught that evil should never be allowed to win, yet 25 years after WW2 we all became complacent and we thought that evil was gone, evil never is and we all have optionally become part of evil as we condone the actions of many, hide behind the shallow needs that social media offers and we remain unaware as the news is decided by the wealthy (read: corporations) as they became the shareholders, stake holders and advertisers; they get to tell the media and the news what is important, what is filtered out. That is the stage where the balance of power can educate a lot of people just how dangerous our status is at present, not dangerous as if a war comes, we are beyond that, I mean dangerous as we have set the stage for multiple generations of anger, hatred and feelings of revenge, and a growing lack of tolerance towards one another. It is almost like a 4 seat seesaw and each of these seats is the balancing point for another seesaw, it becomes a game of trying to stay balanced, it also means that there is a lack of movement available, which implies that some parties will be about claiming actions when none (or that specific one) was not available.

when we see the media, we are pushed to the question ‘What is the omitted Information that Remains Missing?‘, this is a spin on two levels, the first is ‘Which question should have been asked?’, which brings us to ‘Has a quote or testimonial been taken out of context?‘ this is harder to answer, but it is an influence, which gets influenced by: ‘Is someone approaching the issue from a different set of values?‘, as well as the stated answers ‘Are the claims supported by well-done research as well as based on reliable sources?‘ and that is the foundation for merely looking at the media how it filters information, the entire stage becomes a much harder game to program, yet should it not be done because of that?

And that is all before we get to the political and diplomatic stage on “If the answer is not helpful, can we change the question to make it so?” these two elements interacting in media causes all kinds of communication (read: presentation) issues whilst both sides remain intentionally ignorant to the equation. The next generation needs to be educated on what a mess this generation is creating. That part is seen (only in part) with: ‘12 Hours. 4 Syrian Hospitals Bombed. One Culprit: Russia‘ (source; NY times), with the quote “The Russian Air Force has repeatedly bombed hospitals in Syria in order to crush the last pockets of resistance to President Bashar al-Assad, according to an investigation by The New York Times“, which was set to events on May 5^th 2019, many newspapers gave that information when it happened, the repeat from the NY Times gives us the quote “Russia’s position as a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council has shielded it from scrutiny and made United Nations agencies reluctant to accuse the Russian Air Force of responsibility“, this is important as the United Nations Security council is now presented as an umbrella that offers a shield from actions it was supposed to stop, a stage we knew existed, but not to the degree we see now.

So when we see the NY Times quote: “Nabad al Hayat Surgical Hospital in southern Idlib Province served around 200,000 people before being destroyed in a Russian airstrike on May 5” which comes with assisted high resolution graphics of 40 mega pixels or better whilst we look at the exploding hospital, we wonder how lucky that photographer was, or perhaps someone knew in advance what would happen, we are left with too many questions and no real explanation that fits the morality and values within us.

It is becoming more and more important that we see the world as it is now being pushed by the monsters among us, we like to set the stage to merely Iran, Turkey, ISIS and Hezbollah, yet the real monsters are the ones claiming to fight the atrocities and in the end merely facilitate to it, it goes beyond the wear events, the technological feats we see in regards to 5G is also a global impact, and we can go on and on on all the events that are part of the stage, and it would soon become too complex. Perhaps that too would be the strength on any new version of ‘Balance of Power‘ the fact that too many issues are intertwined for several reasons. Yet when we add greed to the mix, the game becomes awfully transparent, add to that the actions by some making claims that they cannot prove; the created stage of carefully phrased denials, all out in the open and when we ask specifics we are left with half-baked answers that are not answers at all. This is a part that plays a role in all this, we seem to forget that governments have a duty to properly inform us, yet in the listing from government, through corporations to media to the viewer, we forget that there are three iterations of information, all bound by their own personal issues. It is almost an applied variation from Mark M. Lowenthal ‘Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy‘, the application of stages towards the drive of any policy (governmental or not) is also baked into the media and is subject to what we are allowed to see. Consider that impact, as well as the impact of data on the whole, it might become a massively complex new game, yet when we are able to show the impact of these elements to the people, we would optionally get a much more informed person, one who ends up asking the right questions, the questions that politicians, CEO’s and CFO’s fear. When that part comes out in the open, we get a first stage to truly fix things.

Yet with my sense of humour, we should make a lot more space to include the stages that Darrell Huff introduced us to when we were given ‘How to Lie with Statistics‘, and this gets us to today, we know that the balance of power is not merely what we have, what we get and how we get there. There is an internal stage where political power is also set to the stage of people in jobs (as enabled consumers) that was proven ages ago. Yet how that stage is managed is an entirely different matter. the pushed stage where enablers, facilitators and consumers become the ‘have group’ the rest will be the ‘have not’ group.

As we got told today (source: the conversation), we see this stage in Australia, “Centrelink generally requires evidence of looking for 20 jobs per month in order to keep receiving Newstart“, that sounds fine in theory, yet in the applied practice we see that the job search government links to a job search collector, whilst the seeding player of this group is another matter. So when we look at IT jobs in Sydney we see: ‘594 jobs with 715 positions‘, with the largest bulk (over 90%) being Adzuna, yet the reviews from some are stating that this source is riddled with ‘scam’ mentions, as well as overly positive claimed stages. There is a larger issue afoot and there is not enough scrutiny, even as the people can go to really valid places like Indeed, LinkedIn and Jora; the choice we see in the governmental site calls for question of scrutiny.

Why on earth did I mention that?

We see that the balance of power is set to what is done and what can be achieved, yet when we are confronted with a stage that is not available or realistic, how will we interact? When we are set in a stage of age discrimination on a stage where our issues are not heard, or set in a long winded stage of registration where the IT parts fails too often, the government gets to optionally report that no complaints were received. In Australia the mess with Centrelink data matching, the failing Biometrics Identification Services, the UK failures on IT in the NHS and the list goes on where the costs keeps on adding billion after billion, that directly impacts a government, its budget and its waning options, very much issues on a larger scale and the claim we see with “aggressive ICT outsourcing has led to agencies being left at the mercy of external vendors“, whilst there is no proof that growing the internal options would not have resolved the issue. It is a stage where corporations have a hold over the government, pushing cheaper solutions (another reference to age discrimination get pushed to the backbench and no solutions come forward. this is a direct application of the earlier mentioned ‘in the listing from government, through corporations to media to the viewer, we forget that there are three iterations of information, all bound by their own personal issues‘, which in the application of the Balance of Power means that corporations have a much larger option to disable or limit government actions. That is what the impact of corporatocracy is. In the original games there was no real corporatocracy, nowadays there is. The US is perhaps the strongest example and the impact we see in the FDA and DEA (see yesterday’s article) as well as the ATF limited through the powers of the NRA and by corporations addressing attachments to governmental needs we see a larger impact of where governments show limitations on the world stage.

Yes, the entire game has become a lot more complex which in the end leads us to the question, is any application of the ‘Balance of Power‘ still actual and realistic? That is partially seen in 2013 when the NY Times gave us: “Eight major companies, led by Google and Microsoft, are calling for tighter controls on surveillance of their customers’ data by governments“, yet the opposite was never put in place, the existence of Cambridge Analytics, the application of selling consumer data as well as the abuse of data collection through apps has never been stopped. We get all kinds of options to market through mined data giving a larger rise to corporatocracy, whilst the media remains silent on the dangers of corporatocracy. So when we see ‘This is what happens when corporations run the government‘ (Washington Post, March 2019) and ‘Australia’s march towards corporatocracy‘ (the conversation Feb 2017) we see merely two mentions on Google search page one, whilst he situation set the stage that there should have been dozen of clear mentions and investigations, yet the media seemingly have almost zero mentions, how is that? I think that there is a clear stage where corporations do not want to see any mention if possible and as I mentioned earlier ‘in the listing from government, through corporations to media to the viewer, we forget that there are three iterations of information, all bound by their own personal issues‘, and here we see how ‘through corporations to the media‘ is directly inhibiting exposure. The Balance of Power would be an awesome game if we can incorporate it into a new game, especially when we see how the media and corporations make sure that a lot of the information will not be shown, active censorship in nations that proclaim freedom of speech and freedom of expression, when you own the printing house you get to tell the people what they care about, we apparently forgot about that small part again and again.

It is the beginning of a rigged game where the next generation gets to pay for the screw ups of the current generation, feel free to ignore or deny that, yet when we consider the US with a debt of $21 trillion, the EU has around € 10.1 trillion and on a global scale we see that the Global debt had reached an all-time high of $184 trillion in January 2019, we see that the Balance of Power is a term that has become debatable, a stage where banks are basically in charge, limiting or directing the options that any government is allowed to consider. The original game never anticipated that reality, but there you have it. John Perkins tried to inform the audience with ‘Confessions of an Economic Hit Man (2004)’, yet even after Berrett-Koehler published it, gaining an instant bestseller, whilst the major U.S. media refused to discuss Confessions or the fact that, because of it, terms such as “EHM” and “corporatocracy” were now appearing on college syllabi. A stage where the media claiming to advocate freedom of speech, whilst we see that its absence is allegedly corporation controlled, a direct (still alleged) piece of evidence showing that whatever balance of Power we envision, when it is set to nations and governments we get less than 50% of the players in view, making a larger injustice to the people.

In this, I wonder who exactly the real monsters are; are they identified by the acts of nations like Turkey, Iran and North Korea, are they the acts by organisations like ISIS, Hezbollah and Hamas, or are the corporations and the media they control a lot less innocent in all this. Will the next generation be ready for what we, the current generation have facilitated for?

I honestly do not know.

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Tagged as Atari ST, ATF, Balance of Power, Berrett-Koehler, Biometrics Identification Services, Cambridge Analytics, Centrelink, Centrelink data matching, Chris Crawford, Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, Corporatocracy, Darrell Huff, DEA, Eu, Facebook, FDA, google, Hamas, Hezbollah, How to lie with statistics, ICT outsourcing, India, Intelligence: From Secrets to Policy, Iran, ISIS, John Perkins, Mark M. Lowenthal, Nabad al Hayat Surgical Hospital, New York Times, NHS IT, NRA, Saudi Arabia, Social Media, United Nations Security Council, USA, Washington Post

September 6, 2019 · 12:09

Focal points

I am in a slightly darker stage, I got there myself and I will get myself from it as well. The first issue is the United Nations,

The Yemeni Jam

I never considered that I would one day be ashamed of the existence of the United Nations. The article (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/05/australia-may-be-complicit-in-war-crimes-if-it-supports-saudi-led-coalition-in-yemen-un) gives us: “a Saudi-led coalition that has starved civilians, bombed hospitals and blocked humanitarian aid as tactics of war, may be complicit in war crimes“, I will not go any deeper into it, as I reported on this in my article: ‘Unemployed or UN employed?‘, (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2019/09/04/unemployed-or-un-employed/), so doing that again is just doubling up (there is more in the article as well). The media has not released that report yet and I will dig into that one deep the moment I can. Part of this problem was given to the people by the Human Rights Watch in an article giving us: “The May 2019 report of an independent investigation by a Guatemalan diplomat, Gert Rosenthal, raised serious concerns about the UN’s handling of the human rights crisis in Myanmar. The secretary-general should promptly carry out reforms to prevent what the report called the recurrence of the “systematic” failures and “obvious dysfunctional performance” and to ensure individual accountability for those failures“, the problem is larger, even as the articles are all about showing just how exposed the allies of Saudi Arabia are, the word ‘Iran’ is only seen twice in the entire article. There are a multitude of acts that Iran is involved in and they do not reach the media to the largest extent, the unmentioned actions by Hezbollah in Yemen are cause for further worry in all this. Even as we get ‘The UN leadership has taken an important step to learn from its failures in Myanmar‘, we see only a part; the failure of the UN is seen all over the Middle East. Yemen, Syria, Jordan are only three of the places where UN actions fall short, or better stated they fall far too short.

Let’s also see the larger issue, the UN needs more resources and it needs the ability to act, both are presently in short supply. It is important to see that the entire matter is larger than presented, there are more issues. This does not absolve the connected parties, but the accusations become one-sided. There was enough doubt on some of the accusations against Saudi Arabia, but not all accusations are without merit, they need to be looked into, yet in that same setting there is an abundance of issues on the opposing sides to the Saudi coalition, less than 10 hours ago houthi forces fired a ballistic missile into Saudi Arabia, it never got that far and crashed in the al-Safraa region, as well as in Saada (both Yemeni), yet that is a part that does not make the news, in addition, the established fact that houthi forces have no options to create the ballistic missiles imply that Iran is still delivering them and a lot of that had not been mentioned by the media, and as such I want to get my fingers on that UN Report (especially after seeing that essay from Agnès Callamard).

The Conveyance of GGGGG

We see that the US s still playing its trade war game and it found a new tool. That tool is named Poland. Now, let’s be fair, any nation can use whomever or whatever they desire, need or demand to get their business done and there is nothing out there that Huawei is the only player, because they are not.

So why did I call them a tool?

That part is seen in a news article that gives us: “It was signed by U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who’s visiting Warsaw for a ceremony commemorating the 80th anniversary of World War II, and Poland’s Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki. “We believe that all countries must ensure that only trusted and reliable suppliers participate in our networks to protect them from unauthorized access or interference,” according to the declaration, which doesn’t single out China or any companies“, you do not send the Vice President to Poland to implement a 5G solution, you do not send that man to introduce new technology; this was done. The article is all about implied and accusation towards Huawei on “prevent the Chinese Communist Party from using subsidiaries like Huawei to gather intelligence“, which still has not been proven after a few years and the one issue from 2011 was settled and adjusted for. In addition to all this, Mike Pence comes across as an absolute hypocrite when we see “using subsidiaries like Huawei to gather intelligence“, whilst places like Facebook have been spreading data like a prostitute with an STD to anyone willing to listen and store data (Cambridge Analytics anyone?)

The issue becomes even more hilarious when we consider the source FierceWireless. There we get ““Polish counterintelligence have detected certain actions, which might have been an espionage nature”“, a quote given by Poland’s president Andrej Duda, Apart from Polish counterintelligence being too stupid, I meant untrained to shut down the FSB/entrepreneur silver acquirers in Gdynia being one example and those individuals have been active since before 2002. I am basically stating the speculative situation where Polish intelligence could not find a clue unless it was spoon-fed and is it my speculative view that Mike Pence fed the Polish president some CIA reports of a highly dubious nature. so whilst we see the operative ‘which might have been‘, there is a 87.332% likelihood (roughly) that Polish Intelligence can too often not differentiate between FSB, Chinese MSS, Polish Students and Russian Entrepreneurs (Russian Mafia is such an overused term). I have to admit that I have not bothered to look into Polish abilities after 2003, yet in those days SIGINT in Warsaw really did not add up to anywhere near the needed level they needed to be.

The problem for the US is not that they have 5G equipment; the issue is that it is too inferior at present. It is the price of iterative technology versus innovative technology (a fact I highlighted on numerous occasions) and Huawei has been the innovator for several years now. In this setting we see the accusations of US being nothing but a bully going up against a tech giant that has at present shipped over 200,000 base stations and the delay that some governments are creating (because they know not what they do) will hinder them as per 2021 a lot more than they realise. There is now an additional shift happening. There are early indicators that the Huawei offices in Saudi Arabia have been part of a larger group that are making progress on getting Pakistan on 5G using Huawei, even as the sources are unconfirmed (read: not super reliable), the stage that India now has it that the 3 year delay because of the Huawei issues would give them additional set-backs as well. Not to mention that certain new 5G IP that is openly for sale will also foster additional speed for Huawei in other ways. Huawei now has the created stage to directly instigate advancements to a global community of over 400 million small businesses whilst these players all get to have a larger stage on their own creation of awareness, visibility and marketing. That power directly to the business will leapfrog business in places like India faster and faster (the largest beneficiary when they get it), when that door opens places like IBM and Google will see a loss of revenue growth and a dip in their data soon thereafter, with the Princeton Digital Group (PDG) now in the stage of building their data centres in China and Singapore, more options will open up outside of the US, more important the connections that the joint venture has created with 21Vianet will change a lot more heads in the coming year. I doubt that the centre will be ready before the end of 2020, but there are larger clusters now being made ready outside of the US and Huawei will benefit a lot more than anyone else at present. In addition to that the Colocation Saudi Arabia Data Centres (19) as well as the Google Data Centre (upcoming) changes the cloud even further, with the US losing the monopoly it once had we see a shift and the consideration that data becomes a currency. That seems outlandish, but it is not, it is merely the next step and 5G is essential to that part of the racetrack, a racetrack that the US tried to grease, making it a slippery place to be and the consumer market is waking up to that danger. These elements are visible out there via a whole range of openly visible sources and published agreements.

In the end the conveyance of 5G is starting to get an additional pool of players that are openly out there growing business ventures and those ventures are not in the US. That what the US feared the most is now slowly becoming reality.

The larger concern is not merely these focal points, it is how they take resources away from places where focus needs to be, the actual and proven transgressions by Iran, even as it is removing more and more limits on their nuclear programme, we see Forbes giving us the part that matters to the US, or better to US corporations. the headline ‘War With Iran Would Be Disastrous And Enormously Costly‘ is true on both sides and even as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton are all for military actions (to some degree), we need to see two parts. The first is that corporations want a peaceful settlement and the media is not mentioning large issues with Iran on several levels, the second is that with a debt of well over $22 trillion ($22,500,000,000,000,000) there is no money for a costly war. The US is playing the paper tiger and the slowdown that they are creating in the US-China trade war is having a much larger issue, so the US is depending on tools to do the work for them and even as Poland is on their side, Greece is ready to embrace Huawei with 5G because of the economic momentum they gain. These are merely two of a much larger pool of issues, basically the US needs to fight a war on two fronts (China and Iran) whilst they are out of money, options and technology, a setting that seemingly implies a war but without soldiers and without weapons. It is funny, but this reminds me of a Star Trek episode from 1967 called A Taste of Armageddon.

There the two players have decided on a virtual war to keep their cultural heritage safe. The problem is that both need to agree on the rules, so we see in the translated reality a UN SC versus UNIFIL setting. The United States Security Council intervenes when two parties agree (MFO), the United Nations intervene when two parties disagree (UNIFIL). I personally was in the first force in 1982 (Sinai). In this game we see the US trying to play a virtual game, whilst the evidence is not there, so they rely on tools. In addition this virtual game is not played because China and Iran both disagree on matters and the US cannot afford to send troops and wage a super expensive war.

All elements come to blow in the two given focal points, so until the other players are willing to deal with Iran, there will be no action leaving the pressure on Saudi Arabia, the UAE with Yemen in the middle. Until the US gives actual and factual evidence the 5G stage is moving towards China (Huawei) more and more and all those who support the US will see a slowdown on their future economies and it making more governments reconsidering the Huawei solution. It is optionally seen as a war on two fronts (US vs Iran and China) as well as two dimensions (economy and technology) whilst at present it is almost a given that the US will lose both of them.

The second part was given by the South China Morning Post in July when they reported ‘Nearly 60 per cent of Huawei’s 50 5G contracts are from Europe‘, 28 out of 50 chose Huawei. All in all there is a tactical problem in the US and it is getting worse, the moment that they act against Iran too late is the day that whomever is in the Oval office will have to publicly admit that they would decide to signing an economic trade agreement with Iran. I wonder how Israel and Saudi Arabia will react that day, because it will redefine a lot of global lines that day.

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Tagged as 21Vianet, Andrej Duda, Cambridge Analytics, China, Colocation Saudi Arabia Data Centres, Facebook, FierceWireless, FSB, google, Greece, Huawei, IBM, India, Iran, Israel, John Bolton, Mateusz Morawiecki, MFO, Mike Pence, Mike Pompeo, MSS, National Security Advisor, Pakistan, Poland, Polish counterintelligence, Princeton Digital Group, Saudi Arabia, Secretary of State, SIGINT, South China Morning Post, UAE, UN SC, Uniffil, United Nations, United States Security Council, US, Yemen

March 4, 2019 · 11:18

Warranty for non-use only

I started my Monday morning with a giggle, and that is always a good way to start the day. The Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/03/pakistan-denies-indian-claims-it-used-us-f-16-jets-to-down-warplane) gives us ‘Pakistan denies Indian claims it used US F-16 jets to down warplane‘, the idea that the Indian government is crying over getting shot down Pakistani air (airspace violation), whilst India has bombing attacks in Pakistani (whether valid or not), does it matter how they got shot down? They merely were not good enough. It goes further, not one media outlet is giving us the goods on WHAT was shot down. Either they do not know, or India is extremely silent on what they lost. For the most I did not care, that is until I saw: “The US has said it is trying to find out whether Pakistan used US-built F-16 jets to down an Indian warplane, potentially in violation of trade agreements, as the standoff between the nuclear-armed Asian neighbours showed signs of easing“, so why buy a plane that you cannot use? I know that it is not that simple, we all get that. Yet when we are also treated to: “It is not clear what exactly these so-called “end-user agreements” restrict Pakistan from doing. “The US government does not comment on or confirm pending investigations of this nature,” the US embassy said.” From my point of view, they should have been aware of that before going into pending investigations. The entire setting of ‘It is not clear what exactly these so-called “end-user agreements” restrict Pakistan from doing‘, should the US embassy not have read those agreements before making any statement around an investigation? The fact that all the media hides behind ‘shot down two Indian jets‘ is equally an issue.

Now as for the entire usage of an F-16, I am surprised that Pakistan would accept such terms. It comes across like ‘warranty valid from purchase at the counter, till the exit door‘. Now, we can agree that Pakistan does not have a great track record on incidents, yet we know that there is an issue in Kashmir and India ‘started’ this by bombing a terrorist camp in Balakot Pakistan. I will not oppose that action, yet the humorous and silly statement by foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale, where he called it a “non-military pre-emptive action”, cannot be taken too seriously either. Let’s face it; the Mirage 2000 is a military vehicle, plain and simple.

Still there is a larger concern; it is the stage of conditional sales of war machines. It is not opposing their sale as it was a choice made. And most devices can be used for offense and defence. So as we set the stage where something can only be used for one purpose, we see a larger issue evolve. When a stage changes, does that invalidate the sale? That is behind it all, if the US had clear indications that their places might be used in defence on another plane, should those war machines be allowed to be sold?

We can accept that the sale is set to a governmental stage that machines are to be used for defensive abilities only, yet in the stage of provocation, when do we accept the usage to be defensive? Which parameter triggers the defence option to be valid, especially in light of disputed terrain?

The Indian Economic Times (at https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/defence/balakot-iaf-strike-involved-over-200-hours-of-planning/articleshow/68172274.cms) gives us: “involved over 200 hours of planning that began following intelligence inputs regarding a second suicide terror strike somewhere in India“. When we accept that fact and the fact that it was aimed at terrorists, as well as an intentional incursion into Pakistan, would all the options not have changed? The stage no matter how valid it is to go after the JeM is set, you see unless anyone can give clear evidence that the JeM is in Pakistan backed by the Pakistani government, India set themselves up by proceeding on an act of war. If the camp would have been in Kashmir that entire issue would have been less complicated. It is not what is likely to be the case, it is what we can prove is the case and that is a bigger issue here and from that point of view the entire escalation as witnessed is a loaded one and my $0.02 here is that the actions of the US embassy are merely complicating matters. Whilst their claim ‘It is not clear what exactly these so-called “end-user agreements” restrict Pakistan from doing‘, is extremely sloppy to say the least. And that is apart from the US Embassy relying on the application of ‘so-called’ and ‘restrictions’; it comes across as a double negative of something not yet looked at. So investigating that before we see the howling cries of ‘US demands to know if Pakistan used F-16 jet to shoot down Indian warplane over Kashmir‘, which is still less interesting than finding out what exactly had been shot down. You see it matters, because the news that a 1983 MiG 21 lost against a Chinese-designed JF-17 fighter jet (or optionally a General Dynamics F16) is not that interesting; they lost a plane that had been taken out of production in 1985, so big deal, perhaps the Indian pilot would have made it back if he had a little more up to date equipment (like the Fulcrum or the Raptor) at that point it becomes massively interesting, especially if it would have been done using a JF-17.

So whilst we can look at it from different angles, the entire ‘end-user agreement‘ angle is just too hilarious. As I state before, we get that there is a clear need for passages like that at times, yet what will the US do after selling the F16? Not sell any more? Let’s not forget that there are a few alternatives that are not sold in America, or by Americans, those players are happy to take up the slack of the US at that point. It would be so much simpler if India had never decided to bomb Pakistani soil, which is the real complication. It might have been essential, we cannot deny that option, but it was tactically flawed in more than one way. Even as we recognise that Pakistan has its own flaws as well (the mention of ‘Pakistan immediately downplayed the airstrikes, saying no infrastructure was hit.‘) is also an issue. So either is intentionally not acting, or it is openly making statements for the JeM, either version is a larger issue for Pakistan.

Even as I might oversimplify the issue, I recognise that the entire matter is loaded on a few fronts, and we get that something had to be done, and something was done. However to set the stage where larger players are all about an ‘end-user agreement‘, all whilst the terms were as stated by themselves unclear and unknown trivialises the matter, and that is one part that should not be allowed for.

The dispute is old, and the BBC (at https://www.bbc.com/news/10537286) gives us: “before India and Pakistan won their independence from Britain in August 1947, Kashmir was hotly contested.” An issue that has been around for 72 years! Is it not time to talk to Kashmir about them becoming self-sufficient? As the BBC article gives us: “Many people in the territory do not want it to be governed by India, preferring instead either independence or union with Pakistan” is independence really that bad an idea? It seems ironic that a nation fighting to become independent from the UK (1947) is all about annexing a region that does not want to be with them.

I think that it is time that after 72 years of disputes and transitional violence from one side to the others, another solution should be found. And with the need to lower pressures, is independence of Kashmir not a valid option to consider?

We see the news in several ways by several players, yet only the BBC gives us what the locals want. They allegedly voiced: ‘independence or union with Pakistan‘, it is time to listen to the local population and educate or truly assist them in creating a long term future, mainly because all the present actions imply that there is no progress and there might never be progress. How debilitating is that for any local population?

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Tagged as Balakot Pakistan, BBC, F-16, Fulcrum, General Dynamics, India, Indian Economic Times, JeM, JF-17, Kashmir, Mig-21, Pakistan, Raptor, the Guardian, US, US Embassy, Vijay Gokhale

February 27, 2019 · 11:29

Awareness west of India

Awareness is a first need for anyone, there is no exception to this; a person looking for a job or a person seeking to sell a product, or a terrorist organisation. Without awareness they are all equally in the shadows, unknown and disregarded at the spot. So when we were alerted to yesterday’s airstrike by the Indian Air force on Jaish-e-Mohammed, most people had the response: ‘You who now?‘ The group which translates to ‘The Army of Muhammad’ is a terrorist organisation that operates out of Kashmir. Their goal is to relocate Kashmir from India into Pakistan and as such, it would cause great friction with India even under the most docile conditions. It is Al Jazeera, who less than a day ago reports ‘India foreign secretary says jets hit Jaish-e-Mohammed camp in Pakistan, but Islamabad denies casualties in air raids‘, which is now also a much larger escalation in creating a more direct conflict between Pakistan and India. We also get: “Pakistan reported the Indian airspace incursion, with military spokesman Major General Asif Ghafoor saying its air force jets were scrambling to respond, forcing the Indian aircraft to “release their payload in haste while escaping“, I found the term ‘in haste while escaping’, that is no jest, even as the Pakistani air force is merely half the size of the Indian one, the insider gossip is that this Pakistani air force is more than able to deal with the IAF even as it is twice the size, so we could consider that the Indian act, whilst being optionally essential was not the tactically clever. Consider that the act was against a target that was less than 60 Km across the border finding another solution would have been a much better act. This is speculation as I have no terrain intelligence at my disposal, yet hitting a target that is optionally around 225 Km from Islamabad, where one of the more alert airports is was definitely not a great idea, so the ‘in haste whilst escaping‘ becomes pretty much the ruling for India at that point. This does not invalidate the attack on Jaish-e-Mohammed, it merely becomes tactically questionable. Of course there are other considerations, how does the Kashmir population feel about joining Pakistan, because that also impacts the tactical choices available. Any planned attack on Jaish-e-Mohammed from closer to the border whilst that population is loudly singing

Count 1 to 10 in a MIG on high

You go hide, and they come fly!

Better prepare, make a stinger rage in flight

(Source: adapted nursery rhyme)

At that point, we can agree that there are not that many options, especially in remote areas. Yet there is another side, and that is on Pakistan at present. After we have seen that they sheltered Osama Bin Laden only two miles from their military academy, they need to lash out stronger against terrorist organisation operating from their territory. We can agree that Pakistan is too large to keep properly in check with military against extremists, but this escalation could have larger repercussions and in this day and age as Pakistan’s economy is in dire needs of international investment. That setting alone will not go anywhere when operations like Jaish-e-Mohammed pretty much have the lay of the land. Now, be aware that is me not speaking out in favour or against the need of Kashmir that is for the people of Kashmir. I am however of the mind that it is not up to Jaish-e-Mohammed to decide either. The anti-feelings between India and Pakistan have been around long before the Mahatma accepted the separation, it is a setting that might never be resolved, yet in all this a much larger issue plays and I am painfully aware I do not have the wisdom on how to feel (as well as a massive lack of data intelligence on the area and the subject matter), yet the escalation as the IAF pushed for is up for debate. Even now we see ‘It was a non-military, pre-empted action targeted at terrorist activity‘, yet how exactly was that place bombed? So when we are also given: “In an early morning attack on Tuesday, the Indian Air Force Mirage 2000 jets crossed 50 miles undetected into Pakistan and hit Balakot“, my question towards Indian Foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale would be: “Who were the civilians flying the borrowed Mirage 2000 Jets and can I please borrow one? I have always wanted to get my flight wings on that fabulous French jet!” Perhaps the foreign secretary could limit the BS regarding a ‘non-military’ action when it requires the high end Mirage to get there, clearly a non-civilian form of transportation (a crazy assumption from my side). We all agree that actions against terrorists are essential, we all know that rules will be broken under these conditions, yet the essential need and then reflect on the term ‘non-military’ is too much of a stretch.

In addition, when less than 10 hours ago, the news (at https://www.businesstimes.com.sg/government-economy/eu-urges-maximum-restraint-from-india-pakistan-after-air-strike) give us: ‘EU urges ‘maximum restraint’ from India, Pakistan after air strike‘, it needs to be stated that the EU needs to grow a spine and stop being a paperback, a bad one at that. We either accept actions against terrorist organisations, even if they operate from deep within Pakistan. When I see the bloated “exercise “maximum restraint” after Indian warplanes attacked a militant camp in Pakistan, sending tensions soaring between the nuclear-armed arch-rivals” in light of the fact that it was an attack on a terrorist group, and in the second when Pakistan claims “insisting there was no damage or casualties” we see that both sides are to some degree in denial and the comments from limelight seeker Maja Kocijancic are just a little to hypocrite. We understand that the EU is in denial of terrorist activities all over the board and keeps on facilitating for Turkey and Iran for too many reasons, most merely for those trying to instigate another gravy train in the EU, others to keep their desolate economy from completely collapsing, in that day and age as we see the actions of Iran facilitating for the Houthi and Hezbollah forces, the entire matter as well as the call by Maja Kocijancic becomes increasingly distasteful.

That being said, Pakistan is not without blame, finding a common ground with India to take Jaish-e-Mohammed out of their jurisprudential domain seems to be an essential first. It is not a solution that JeM is likely to go for, yet at that point enabling the IAF in these actions would set a much larger stage of trust for foreign investors to take Pakistan more and more serious for serious investments, it will enable Pakistan more and better than Jaish-e-Mohammed ever could. You see the more immediate issue is neither, the more immediate issue is the question on where the people of Kashmir want to be. I actually do not know, mainly because the media has kept many in the dark in that regard, or merely quote some politician seeking the limelight (read: Maja Kocijancic) on a call of restraint from ‘nuclear enabled nations‘ (India and Pakistan).

The first issue for Kashmir is to get awareness, it might not give us information that we like, that we accept or information we hope for, but awareness is a first need. For now the awareness is merely limited to terrorist groups acting from within Pakistan and the fact that Indian civilians have access to military jets for hot rodding and cruising through the mountains of Kashmir and Pakistan. Perhaps it is a great day to upgrade Grand Theft Auto 5, to become Grand Theft Jet 6, hot wiring a Mikoyan MiG-35 at Shatalovo airbase and take it for a nice cruise and land it at Stockholm Arlanda (undamaged), would that make for a fun game or what? And it was Indian Foreign secretary Vijay Gokhale who gave us the idea with his ‘non-military, pre-empted action‘, some half-truths really should not be used ever, it complicates matters as we make light and fun of the situation.

So why make fun?

That is the issue when we give light to NDTV who (at https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/15-years-ago-us-took-note-of-jaish-e-mohammeds-terror-training-camp-in-balakot-1999829) gives us “15 Years Ago, US Took Note Of Jaish’s Terror Training Camp In Balakot“. If this can be confirmed, we see the setting where Pakistan allowed a terror training camp was allowed to go on for more than a decade, unopposed and unchallenged. It is one of the reasons why foreign investors will not consider serious investments in Pakistan. We accept that Pakistan is too large to police to the degree it needs to be, but 15 years is just too unacceptable. The quote “The memorandum talks about a Pakistani national Hafez K. Rahman, a Guantanamo Detainee, who was 20 years old and born in Gujrar, Pakistan, who turned out to be a jehadi” is very much at the heart of the matter here. In addition, the quote: “Rahman has admitted to volunteering to fight jihad against the US and its allies, remaining after the events of September 1lth to continue to fight, and receiving training from the Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM). The JEM espouses Jihad against the US and is directly supported by Al-Qaida, General Miller wrote“, in this light we need to ask a lot more questions form a lot more people, as this is not limited to some Kashmir disagreement, any place that caters and facilitates towards terrorism to a much larger degree is a direct threat to the continuation of Pakistan. Pakistan might seek out to remain in seclusion form world trade, yet they are already learning that Pakistan cannot continue to survive in that way. Pakistan must select a path that gives Pakistan forward momentum and it is clear that JeM training camps cannot cater to that future.

In the end it is up to Pakistan to find a solution that they can live with, the question ultimately becomes, what caters to the continuation of the Muslim State of Pakistan?

If we take three publications, the first being the Business Standard (at https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/pakistan-s-hamstrung-economy-can-t-weather-a-conflict-with-india-119022700052_1.html), where we see: ‘Pakistan’s hamstrung economy can’t weather a conflict with India‘ with the quote “The country has been facing an ever-rising fiscal deficit, increasing debt and high inflation“, is more than a truth and a half, in addition, the dependence and reliance of the IMF will at some point end, there are multiple sources giving indication that the support to Pakistan must stop, at that point what will be left for Pakistan? The second supports the views. It comes from the Nikkei Asian Review (at https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/Pakistan-must-end-damaging-dependency-on-IMF) giving us: ‘After 21 assistance programs in 60 years, time to create sustainable economic growth‘, as well as “the new government is slowly persuading the public that Pakistan will need another International Monetary Fund bailout. At the same time, it has stepped up diplomatic efforts to secure short-term financial support from friendly countries. This approach appears to be bearing fruit. The government recently received $4 billion from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, and is expecting a further $2.5 billion loan from China. Such bilateral support may allow Pakistan to seek a much smaller IMF package than expected“, yet behind the partial truth is that the Pakistani government has no way to pay these loans back in the immediate future, whichever path they take, repaying the loans and interest via a road that is twice as long as projected and merely gets settled with new loans under less optimal conditions is all that the Pakistani people have to look forward to. All this whilst the Indian Business Today (at https://www.businesstoday.in/current/economy-politics/pakistan-trying-to-hide-dead-body-of-terrorists-in-balakot-tries-to-debunk-india-claims-source/story/322532.html) gives us: “The Pakistan Army has cordoned off the entire area of Balakot and are clearing away evidence such as dead bodies so that they can deny India’s claims of the latest IAF strike wiping 300 militants in the area, a source has told India Today“, in my legal view, i would change “are clearing away evidence” into “are seemingly clearing away evidence“, for the mere reason that most Indian publications would more likely than not be too biased in this matter. Yet the given accusation, as well as intelligence from multiple sources give rise to the decent reliability of the Indian claim. Yet the article has a gem at the end. With “A sound relationship and cooperation between the two serves the interests of both the countries and peace and stability in South Asia” we see a much larger truth. Both nations could flourish to a much larger degree if they can find a common not to move forward on and both their economies would benefit in finding in such agreements. If only to learn that several players outside these two are too much interested in those two to lack stability to a much larger degree, when they realise that, and look for stable forward momentum would cater to both economies to a much larger degree and that is never a bad setting.

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Tagged as Asif Ghafoor, Balakot, Business Standard, Business Today, Eu, foreign secretary, General Miller, Guantanamo, Gujrar, Hafez K. Rahman, Houthi, IAF, IMF, India, Iran, Jaish-e-Mohammed, JeM, Kashmir, Maja Kocijancic, Major General Asif Ghafoor, Nikkei Asian Review, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Shatalovo airbase, Stockholm Arlanda, Turkey, UAE, United Arab Emirates, USA, Vijay Gokhale

February 17, 2019 · 13:56

Two sides of currency

There was more news yesterday. The article that gave me the previous view has been updated with a new one (at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2019/feb/16/shamima-begum-isis-extremism-expert-criticises-sajid-javid). At the foundation of it is the view of Hanif Qadir, CEO of the Active Change Foundation. I disagree with him on a few levels. Now before I begin, we need to look at his ‘resume’, this is important in this case. As such we see: “Hanif once joined Al Qaeda members in Afghanistan, but was deterred by the crimes he saw being committed against civilians and turned his back on them. Upon his return to the UK, he vowed to safeguard young men and women from similar experiences, losing their lives and harming their communities. Having a unique understanding and hard-won experience of the modus operandi of Al Qaeda / ISIS inspired groups and individuals, he is now recognized as arguably the best violent extremist and de-radicalization expert in Europe“, the important part is that he knows the game, he knows what is at stake, yet I still disagree.

When we see: “Hanif Qadir said Sajid Javid’s reaction to the teenager’s predicament fed the narrative of Isis. On Friday Javid said he “would not hesitate” to prevent the return of UK Isis recruits, an approach at odds with Begum’s family in Bethnal Green, east London, who want the 19-year-old to return home “as a matter of urgency”“, I am with Javid on this. In addition there is: “Javid is fuelling the [Isis] narrative and giving wind to the sails of other extremists. If we continue with this trajectory we’ll be sowing the narrative for them to reap and use against us“, it is a fair enough view to have, but that is the setting when all was ‘well’ with ISIS, ISIL, Al Qaeda and such. This is no longer the case. They are not defeated, that much is certain, yet the world is very aware on how desperate they have become. The next part we see is: “If the government doesn’t change their approach to this, we potentially have a second wave of Isis coming, the connecting up and reloading of Isis, fence-sitters who are more sympathetic to another kind of narrative” and finally we get: “Baroness Sal Brinton, president of the Lib Dems, who described Begum’s radicalisation as a form of grooming. “We know that in that particular school three girls went [to join Islamic State], but probably more were approached. Surely our child protection laws have to kick in. As she returns we should look at what happens, as she was 15, and what happened out there“. I think that the cure is much simpler. It is called targeted killing, it is a simple path; if Shamima Begum wants back she has to earn this. As the Baroness points out (a little clumsy) we understand that there was grooming, we know that there was a stage, the fact that 15 year old girls got to fly to Turkey, had access to her passport, got to travel via smugglers, into Syria implies that they have optional intelligence value. It is the price for life, plain and simple. The message needs to be clear and without any level of reservation. Those who embrace terrorism will be hunted down and put to death. The European governments have a clear responsibility to its citizens. And here we see a clear field where we do not negotiate with terrorists. There cannot be a stage of some level of ‘biased’ mercy. People like Shamima Begum will optionally open options for ISIS and become the second wave. It is almost damned if they do and damned if they don’t, in this case the setting of not allowing them back, or merely long term imprisoned might be the safest route in all this.

And again we see the failing of the EU. when we see: “In Brussels the focus has been on trying to raise standards in the swift sharing of information among EU member states, and its dissemination to border databases should there be an uncontrolled wave of returnees“, we think that we are seeing something novel, yet the dangers had been shown since 2012. One year after the Syrian war there was a massive drive of refugees. In December 2012 the number of refugee’s trying to find alternative living had surpassed 500,000. At that point there was the already growing concern that if only 0.1% was ISIS minded, there would be a massive security concern in Europe, the fact that we now see ‘the focus has been on trying to raise standards in the swift sharing of information‘ is evidence that the EU has been sitting on their hands for too long a time, whilst those sitting on their hands remained to be well paid, and you still think Brexit is a bad idea? The intelligence failing in Europe had taken monumental proportions in 2014 as the Greek-Turkish events took a larger stage. Merely 4 years and as it seemingly shows, not actual quality improvement. That is the danger that the UK faces as an Island and ISIS is too large a problem to ignore, whether they get defeated or not, the timeline shows that splinter groups will form and they will take a slow silent step hoping that governments will fall asleep again, people like Shamima Begum will assist in making that happen. So when I see: “Although Begum is likely to be traumatised, Qadir said that if she received the right mentoring, counselling and passed through the necessary security protocols, she could be successfully rehabilitated“, I see a failing in the making. At this point I completely disagree with Hanif Qadir. Only the ego driven and their need for justification will give us the story that they can rehabilitate her. There are too many pressure points for Shamima Begum. At some point some radicalised person will find a way to blame the Europeans and Americans for the loss of her two children and the cloud of terror will be on route to disaster. In addition, she will need to be monitored 24:7 for years to come, if her family failed her once, it will do so again. She will play nice the first 18 months, yet at some point, she will be ‘woken up’ and that is when the problem starts. It is amazing how people cannot learn that lesson. They seem to focus on 9/11, focus on Syria and forget about the sarin attacks (in Syria), they focus on events that the media exploded on mental health cases like Sydney Martin Place, and forget the Charlie Hebdo shooting of January 2015 to a much larger degree. Two people, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi were able to kill 12 and injure 11. What is the damage when 6-8 start having fun with a Belgium FN MAG? Consider that I could with decent ammo, set the stage for a (800 m – 1,200 m) slaughter spree in London, and consider what would not be in range on that distance? It is a direct option for hundreds of deaths in the shortest time. Now consider the impact on tourism and economy if 6-8 did that. I used this example as it is relatively easy to get a hold of one in India, Egypt, and China. Consider that ISIS still has a logistic system in place and until it is utterly destroyed weapons like that can make it into Europe a lot easier than you think. Now consider that one attack will impact a little yet 3-4 events will massively upset all lives. If you doubt that, consider how long France needed to keep its soldiers in the street, merely to make the people feel safer. Consider that impact in London, Amsterdam, Manchester and Birmingham. It will end up doing a lot more than merely spook Europeans.

If a tiger gets out of the zoo, you would like to catch it, when 3 run amok you either consider the death of the visitors, or shoot to kill as soon as you can. We would all like to hide behind the tranquiliser gun, but when there is more than one, the danger of mass carnage becomes a little too large for comfort. You can do this exercise yourself. When you are in a zoo (any zoo that has a tiger), consider three tigers to get out, how much time will you get to get yourself and optionally your children safe, actually safe? How many will not make it? Try doing it on a summer day when the zoo is filled with children on school excursions. How many do you expect to die?

That is the actual situation, yet the area is not a zoo, it is a city filled with people and the members of ISIS are in their stage of ‘doing the will of Allah‘ in the end being nothing more than rabid animals. They will kill indiscriminately. We sometimes look back to videos like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LItKd2VE-NE, yet these are seemingly the most humane ones. Sources filter the video’s away as soon as they can (which we understand completely) and as such we have no reference just how inhumane the actions of these terrorists are, and as the spoof video’s come (like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Momc2e1wHG8) we end up merely persuading ourselves that it is all a joke, yet it is not. The problem is when it happens, the moment you get the real deal the first thing you will do is blame someone else, it was their fault. It is not, you will be just as much to blame as anyone else. So when we consider: “Ferdinand Grapperhaus, recently braved the critics by revealing that the government was cooperating with local authorities in Syria for the return of women accused of Isis membership and their children“, and if this woman is shown to be involved with ISIS in any capacity, at that point will you blame Ferdinand Grapperhaus for allowing this to happen, or will you blame yourself for getting him elected? The problem is that until something happens there is no issue, it is the hidden trap. In my personal opinion, anyone who sided with ISIS remains a danger, to others and optionally to themselves as well. Normally we have systems in place, when someone is a mental health problem we have procedures, we have support systems in place. When they actively engage with ISIS, ISIL and Al Qaeda in the attack on others, either directly on the front lines or in support functions behind the lines, we have nothing and weirdly enough, it is the ISIS support people that become the larger problem down the line, they can really rack up the damage in whatever nation they end up living in.

That is the currency we all forget, that is the danger we allow others to be confronted with and that is why I am in opposition of Hanif Qadir and Baroness Sal Brinton.

Have a great Sunday

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November 20, 2018 · 14:54

Two Issues in play

There is a larger issue in all this, part of it is Wall Street, the gig is up (to some extent) yet no calls are being made to investigate the Analyst game by aspiring new Wall Street kings, and moreover no one is asking questions.

We start with the impact that Apple has had and the Financial Post is giving us (at https://business.financialpost.com/investing/us-stocks-wall-st-pulled-lower-by-apple-trade-worries) “Shares of Apple Inc fell 3.5 per cent after the Wall Street Journal reported the company had cut production orders in recent weeks for all three iPhone models launched in September“, as well as “Other market leaders — including the ‘FANG’ stocks — also fell sharply, underscoring the view that their leadership was on shaky ground. Shares of Facebook were down 5.1 per cent, Amazon.com was down 4.3 per cent, Netflix was down 4.9 per cent and Alphabet (Google) fell 3.4 per cent“. Now, we can go two ways in this, yet I am concentrating on the mere logical view. It is not the part of loss that is concerning me, it is as I said in ‘Annual medical bill $864,685‘ (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2018/11/17/annual-medical-bill-864685/) “Consider the $2365, whilst their opponent is offering a decently close solution for $1499 (Google) and $1599 (Huawei) all top end phones and the next model is 33% cheaper, in an economy where most people are turning around pennies (just look at Debenhams). It was a really bad market moment; one could argue that Apple believed their marketing whilst it was nowhere near realistic“, when we consider this part, which is the basis application of common sense in a day and age of hardly being able to get by and we see such drops in stock levels, is that because there is underperformance, or a more clear image of overestimation by certain analysts clearing an optional path of short selling? When we consider the definition of short selling as: “The trader sells to open the position and expects to buy it back later at a lower price and will keep the difference as a gain“, is my speculation on a market set to implode that far from the actual truth? Has the entire FAANG group resorted to hiring mentally challenged Business Intelligence enabled accountants, or is someone spiking the Wall Street environment? Is my thought on this that far out or synch with reality? When we see SBS reporting with ‘Nissan chairman arrested in Japan for financial misconduct‘, and we are given: “Besides being chairman of Nissan, the 64-year-old is also CEO of Renault and leads the Nissan-Renault-Mitsubishi alliance“, “Nissan CEO Hiroto Saikawa expressed “despair,” but also suggested that Ghosn had accrued too much power and eluded proper oversight“, as well as “Saikawa gave few details about the nature of the improprieties, including refusing to confirm reports that Ghosn under-reported his income by 5 billion yen, or around $60 million (AUD), over five years from 2011. He said an ongoing investigation limited what details could be shared, and refused to be drawn on whether other people were involved, saying only: “These two gentlemen are the masterminds, that is definite.”“. As we consider the impact of Representative Director Greg Kelly and Carlos Ghosn, we might think that the entire matter is contained, yet is it? The fact that Automotive is a clear element on Wall Street, when we see this and we do not see another part, how wrong have the analysts been getting it? The fact that numbers on Wall Street would not fluctuate to the degree needed as the numbers were spiked by a major players is interesting to consider yesterday’s news (at https://www.zdnet.com/article/nuance-spins-off-automotive-segment-into-new-publicly-traded-company/). You see, just like I found the issue in the Harbour or Rotterdam two decades ago, I looked into another direction. When we consider “Other automotive brands such as Honda, Volkswagen, Ford, Hyundai, Audi, Porsche, Nissan, Kia, Chevrolet, Harley Davidson, Ferrari are ranked by their brand value among the top 100 brands in the world!“, so if we see the SBS part with: “years of financial misconduct including under-reporting of income and inappropriate personal use of company assets“, which looks weird as this is merely an internal part (criminal or not), is there a decent chance that the entire matter is larger and as such, would a provider like Nuance not be hit as they are a component in the Nissan (and Renault, and Mitsubishi)?

In all this, when we consider The actions of one, and the impact on another, yet we see that expectations were ‘firmly’ in the wrong place, at what point will we start asking the damaging questions to analysts who were ‘overly’ positive? So when we see: “Wall Street was looking for earnings of 32 cents a share on revenue of $525 million. Shares of Nuance were down slightly after hours“, were we shown a realistic stage? This gets us to the Sydney Morning Herald, where we see: “Since the FANG outperformance run peaked on August 30, the group has underperformed the S&P 500 by 16.25 per cent. That is their worst underperformance since the first half of 2014 when they underperformed by around 20 per cent“, is it truly an underperformance, or is it set towards unrealistic overestimation and as such, is the foundation of short selling not done on the word of analyts? So in that light, would it not become more and more prudent to ask the analysts certain questions? The fact that certain Nissan events were not on their radar, what else did they not see and as such, would that not have impacted the numbers at Nuance in a similar, yet there unfairly?

What else is there?

Well, that can be seen in one way as these players all need power to be available and energy is becoming an issue in the US. What happens when we put the (big) mouth of Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to the test? As he was ‘kind’ enough to use Bloomberg to state that the current crown prince of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman was “unstable and unreliable”, would it be an idea to ask his royal highness to kindly consider that Oil is a sellers’ market and that it is important to consider the long term future of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, as such, it is important to consider the value of oil and I personally believe that it should be raised to $73 per barrel, in light of this cutting oil production by 12% would be essential.

So when Lindsey gets the news that his lack of diplomacy is cutting oil and raising prices, at what point will he ever feel safe again as the American people will react to the mere stage of commerce, it is a sellers’ market plain and simple. It is a sellers’ market because the buyer is always open to get it somewhere else, and in all that there is merely Iran left. How does it all flow now? Let’s not forget that these are not my rules, they are the consequences of Wall Street. At what point will people wake up?

The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a monarchy, it is one where the monarch of that nation makes decisions that decide what would be the best track for the people of THEIR nation (which is Saudi Arabia). In a time where the life of a journalist does not matter, Turkey showed that and both the EU and America remained largely quiet, so let’s face it, we do not care about Jamal Khashoggi, yet that person has received more pushed and powered visibility than for example Matteo Messina Denaro (I chose him as I grew up being a huge Diabolik comic fan), so when we see his actions and his absence from the press for the longest time, why would we care about Jamal Khashoggi? Because a knave speaking for Iran direted others to do so? We keep on getting the news, the media, the mention of tapes, yet how clearly has the evidence been investigated? The media stays silent, mostly playing on innuendo as much as possible.

You see, it the Crown Prince succeeds in getting the stage of Neom Started, Saudi Arabia will have started and aspired to something never seen before in the history of this world, all the things that America claimed to have done will be seen active in Saudi Arabia, it is optionally the biggest blow to American ego and optionally their economy too and they are finally scared, like the UK was when the 70’s peace accords had a chance, they pushed Egypt in another direction. Now we see the stage where there is so much anti-Saudi news, that it is sickening to me, especially as the acts of Turkey and Iran are smothered. How much news have you see on the 214 journalist jailed in Turkey? most of them all convicted, the last one a week ago, we were given “A court sentenced Turkish journalist Ali Unal to 19 years in jail on Wednesday on a charge of being a leader in the network accused of carrying out a failed coup in July 2016“, Jamal Khashoggi got 60 million hits in Google Search this morning, it is that far whacked out of balance and the industrial next generation all technological marvel that could be Neom, including the Bridge that links the Sinai (Sharm-El-Sheik) to Saudi Arabia, opening even more options to commerce and growth for Egypt and the Sudan? A mere 2.8 million, a project that is well over $500 billion in investments for technological and financial opportunities; that got less than 3 million hits. I reckon that Saudi Arabia also needs additional PR and digital PR on a much larger scale.

I think that America (as well as the European Union) needs to wake up and smell the coffee and they need to do it fast. As they whinge like little children, they are optionally giving additional fields of economy to India, China and Russia to move into a market where the oil revenues will be pressed for a different directions, so as these people are merely trying to bait infighting within the Saudi Royal family, they should start to realise that one of them wakes up and decides to close the tap by 20% and merely adjust the vision towards 2035, at that point whatever comes next will no longer have any America and even less Wall Street, at what point will the American administration have to forfeit on 21 trillion of debts they can no longer pay? Let’s not forget that the entire FAANG group can vacate and move anywhere globally, at what point will we see the news: ‘NASDAQ shuts down!‘ leaves us with the question: ‘is my speculation so outlandish?’ You see, the needs for the next technology is no longer in America and the difference between global and global minus America is not that big, at that point the politicians of the European Union will fold like little bitches and accept whatever deal will keep them employed and on their gravy train; they are that predictable.

The nice part is that there is every chance that I will be around when that happens, getting to tell the economic and financial editors of all the major newspapers: ‘I told you so!‘ and the blatant attacks, the media toolkit against the current crown prince of Saudi Arabia makes my speculation more and more likely. You see, it was merely a week ago, when CNBC gave us (at https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/15/trump-duped-saudis-into-tanking-oil-prices-analysts-say.html) ‘Oil analysts say Trump fooled Saudis into tanking crude prices‘, with the quote: “Oil market analysts say it now appears that Trump hoodwinked Saudi Arabia, fooling the U.S. ally into pushing the oil market into oversupply and sparking a roughly 25 percent drop in crude prices. That accomplished Trump’s goal of driving down energy costs for Americans“, it is optionally a decent tactic, but at present it can backfire, the KSA can take a step back and let it all fall to pieces as the Saudi government can survive a few years in the up scaled oil prices, yet the US and European economies will start to collapse as they have no infrastructure left, so when we see Bloomberg giving us ‘The Oil Price Is Now Controlled By Just Three Men‘, whilst we know that America has pissed of the other two to the largest degree; if truly three man control the price, the names are given to us as Presidents Donald Trump, President Vladimir Putin and Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman. That whilst America needs to import to survive making them actually pretty weak. So at what point do the people in Wall Street wake up and realise that the oil morning special is served at $91+, whilst there are 3-4 months of extreme cold ahead? At what point will they realise that oil is a sellers’ market, not a buyers one and the oil companies can wait, they can watch it all collapse and pick up cheap labour for a mere apple and an egg (quite literally so).

In the end, America can start making a deal with Iran and Russia for oil, yet at what cost will that come? Which concession will the American people have to agree to? I am pretty sure that this moment will become the nightmare scenario for Israel as well as the others get to cater to Iran, and the oil setting makes that an optional reality; the amount of concessions Turkey will get will give the EU something to cry about to a much larger extent; apart from the nightmare that the Italian budget is becoming at present.

There were a few games on everyone’s desk and at least three of them have been handled so badly that the impact needs to be felt in the US, even if it was for the mere reason to get them to wake up and smell the coffee that they spilled and the cost of living that they helped raise soon enough.

Oh, and when the Italian economy stops stagnating and turns to recession again, the mere impact of a 5% oil price rise would be enough to stop Italian traffic in its track, how much will be possible there when that happens? Consider that Italy has the highest fuel prices costing €1.65 per litre. When that goes up by 10%, how many people would be able to afford a car? More importantly, the Italian economy has misjudged this super high price for taxation, so when that falls away, how much of the Italian infrastructure is also likely to collapse?

It is a mere side thought, because France and Spain will be in similar distress on a few stages there too, not to mention the impact in Greece. It would decimate the Mediterranean economy to a much larger degree, yet Wall Street will trivialise it and when there is no more trivialisation left, who will they blame?

Saudi Arabia, President Trump or themselves?

I will let you figure that part out.

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