Tag Archives: the Guardian

August 4, 2021 · 02:43

The flavour of a dictionary

Let’s take a look at the stage. The Intercept (at https://theintercept.com/2021/08/01/saudi-arabia-twitter-harassment-jamal-khashoggi/) gives us “Before he was murdered by Saudi Arabia, Jamal Khashoggi faced online harassment from influencers and bots”. I have an issue with this. In the first, Jamal Khashoggi is merely missing. If someone states that it is likely that something bad and terminal happened to him I will not disagree. The problem is that there is no evidence, none at all that there is ANY evidence proving that Saudi Arabia did this. That UN essay writer gave a report that is riddles with ‘it is highly likely’, but in common law it does not hold water. In addition, the UN and the Washington Post did everything to flame as many newspapers as possible to repeat whatever they were giving. As I se it ad as the law sees it, a person is innocent until proven guilty. We can argue in equal quantities that the guilt of Saudi Arabia cannot be proven, yet in opposition, the innocence of Saudi Arabia cannot be proven either. I accept that, yes a person is innocent until proven guilty and if guilt cannot be proven then that person is innocent. I agree, and I disagree. I have been around long enough that the absence of guilt does not mean that this person is innocent. The law does that, I have a few more grey levels, so I do not. Yet I am still moved by evidence and the lack of it as well as the sources are not properly investigated, not by the United Nations, not by the Washington Post and optionally ignored by the CIA. 

The intercept also gives us “A short video clip posted to YouTube and Twitter this March characterised him as a mortal enemy of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The narrator, Hussain al-Ghawi, alleged Golberg’s “entire work aims at smearing Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE” — the United Arab Emirates — “by publishing fake analytics banning patriotic accounts and foreign sympathisers.”” The article gives us the view of Geoff Goldberg, he makes note of al-Ghawi, a self-proclaimed Saudi journalist. I accept that, the YouTube video could be seen as evidence, that is after a forensic data specialist digs into this. Yet there is another side here, it is given to us by Sarah Leah Whitson, the executive director of Democracy for the Arab World. She gives us “The Biden administration should ask itself what it is going to do to protect Americans from these attacks, as long as the Saudis feel that they have this uncritical U.S. backing, they’re going to continue to believe that they have a license to attack their critics in whichever way that they like. These coordinated attacks against people they dislike that begin online have already proven that they can be deadly in the real world.” She is not wrong, yet in opposition, the issues is also, When will the media be held accountable for innuendo and vague references that have for the most no direct imprint on actual and factual reality. 

You see, that same media will not give us “In response to the coup d’état and reckless endangerment of live by citizen Donald Trump, we are now made aware that two more casualties with a deadly end were added to the list of numbers. Two more Washington, D.C., police officers died after defending the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 riot by Trump supporters, bringing the grim tally of such deaths to four. This is merely one of the larger numbers, numbers that are given to us with the added GOP lawmaker who downplayed the Capitol riot as ‘a normal tourist visit’ doubled-down on the remark after police testified about the violence they faced”, is it true, is it false or is it a nuance of events? It seems that the western press is all about the innuendo on outside USA events, but not on internal ones. Why is that? I am not stating that Saudi Arabia is innocent, I am not stating that Saudi Arabia is guilty, the evidence is not there either way. The fact that this happened in a country with one of the most incarcerated journalists in the world, with sources that are massively unreliable, all whilst the full tapes of events were never handed to the people who forensically established evidence on the validity of the tapes as well as the establishment of WHO was on the tapes. Sources relied on mere minutes that are debatable in a few ways, all whilst these same sources avoided mentioning Martin Bashir as the man seen to be guilty of reckless endangerment of the life of Lady Diana Spencer, optionally complicit in the manslaughter of Lady Diana Spencer. Yet they were happy to assist in mentioning of ‘faked documents’ and as they avoided the mention of ‘forged bank statements’ they optionally kept out of the reach of the Crown Prosecution Services, how good is that? But they will continue slapping others on innuendo, optionally absent of evidence.

It is the flavour of a dictionary. Don’t say he has a nightmare, mention that he is now the owner of a female night horse. The dictionary is one, the flavour is given by adding triviality to the facts, or by hiding the absence of it. It seems to me that the media is forgetting that part, which also gives us ‘Sky News Australia banned from YouTube for seven days over Covid misinformation’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/aug/01/sky-news-australia-banned-from-youtube-for-seven-days-over-covid-misinformation) and the message here is that if we can no longer tell the difference between the spreaders of fake news, misleading news and news information, how can anyone expect the media to be held higher regard than a drug pusher on a schoolyard? 

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July 30, 2021 · 23:07

Iterating towards disaster

Yes, that happens, we all consider it, but did anyone thought it through? You see, innovation is essential in staying ahead, iteration tends to give you a 2 year advantage, innovation gives you a 5-7 years leap. That is not new, it has been a ‘fact’ of life for 3-4 decades. Yet that premise is about to change, it will change a lot and it will change towards the bad side of the pool. To see this we need a few items, the first is an article, an article that the Guardian gave us with ‘I’m sorry Dave I’m afraid I invented that: Australian court finds AI systems can be recognised under patent law’ (at https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jul/30/im-sorry-dave-im-afraid-i-invented-that-australian-court-finds-ai-systems-can-be-recognised-under-patent-law), you see there is a danger here, even as the Guardian gives us “Allowing machine inventors could have numerous consequences, both foreseeable and unforeseeable. Allowing patents for inventions churned out by tireless machines with virtually unlimited capacity, without the further exercise of any human ingenuity, judgment, or intellectual effort, may simply incentivise large corporations to build ‘patent thicket generators’ that could only serve to stifle, rather than encourage, innovation overall.” This we get in the article from Australian patent attorney Dr Mark Summerfield, and he is right, you see, there is a larger danger here. It is not merely that only a few companies can AFFORD such an AI, the larger stage is that if we combine this and we add a little statistics to the pile, we get a new setting. 

SPSS (now IBM Statistics) has something called the conjoint analyses. To understand this, we need to take a look at the manual. There we see:

Conjoint analysis presents choice alternatives between products defined by sets of attributes. This is illustrated by the following choice: would you prefer a flight that is cramped, costs $225, and has one layover, or a flight that is spacious, costs $800, and is direct? If comfort, price, and duration are the relevant attributes, there are potentially eight products:

Product Comfort Price Duration
1 cramped $225 2 hours
2 cramped $225 5 hours
3 cramped $800 2 hours
4 cramped $800 5 hours
5 spacious $225 2 hours
6 spacious $225 5 hours
7 spacious $800 2 hours
8 spacious $800 5 hours

Given the above alternatives, product 4 is probably the least preferred, while product 5 is probably the most preferred. The preferences of respondents for the other product offerings are implicitly determined by what is important to the respondent. Using conjoint analysis, you can determine both the relative importance of each attribute as well as which levels of each attribute are most preferred.

This is all statistical science and it works, but the application can be changed. If data is the only premise here, we see the application in another way. What if the AI is taught the categories that enable a unique stage to own ANY patent field. Consider that this is not about a flight, what if this is about a processor.

Product Speed Processor Sampling
1 X Sycamore Bozon
2 X Sycamore Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial
3 X Tangle Bozon
4 X Tangle Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial
5 Y Sycamore Bozon
6 Y Sycamore Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial
7 Y Tangle Bozon
8 Y Tangle Instantaneous Quantum Polynomial

I am merely making a fictive sample with existing names, but what if the math of conjoint is tweaked to cover the quantum field to a larger degree, a computer can do this faster than any person and it can even start making the documents, so the AI can create a set of patents that cover the entire field, with a setting where less than 20 patents will stop commercial competitors to get traction in this field and this is not merely speculation, I feel that this is where we go to and now the big tech companies will own it all and the AI’s will have the entire patent field. Yes, there will be holes in the beginning, but as patent filing will overturn normal filings, the patent field will end up being owned by Google, IBM and Amazon. I have nothing against any of these three, but this is not what I (or anyone else) signed up for. I might just put all my 5G IP online making it all public domain, just to temporarily deflate the AI premise.

And personally, there is no way that either of the three had not considered this application, making the AI patent field a lot more debatable and I reckon that the larger law field is looking into that. In 2012 a total of 1,892 filings were made, now consider that an AI could cover a larger field with a mere 300 filings. That is not out of the realm of considerations, as such the Australian case we see in the Guardian could well end up with all kinds of nasty surprises if the stage of “The decision by the Australian deputy commissioner of patents in February this year found that although “inventor” was not defined in the Patents Act when it was written in 1991 it would have been understood to mean natural persons – with machines being tools that could be used by inventors” is not overturned. Will it? I cannot tell, but it opens a whole range of doors and some of them will end up being rather nasty.

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July 30, 2021 · 01:53

In retrospect

I (for the most) react to facts, as I do now, but the results are not anticipated new facts, what comes next is pure speculation, no matter how correct I think I am, it is speculation and that needs to be said up front. Even as I start now, my mind is racing through speculative ideas and options in other realms (science realms no less), but I digress. The thoughts started with a Reuter article called ‘Analysis: Biden’s COVID-19 strategy thwarted by anti-vaxxers, Delta variant’, the article (at https://www.reuters.com/world/us/bidens-covid-19-strategy-thwarted-by-anti-vaxxers-delta-variant-2021-07-29/) gives us “Dr. Peter Hotez, a vaccinologist and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, said the Biden administration’s acknowledgement of the “terrible impact” of the anti-vaccine movement was important, but he said the government could do more. “Anti-science is arguably one of the leading killers of the American people, and yet we don’t … treat it as such. We don’t give it the same stature as global terrorism and nuclear proliferation and cyber attacks,” he said”, it might be a mere quote, it might be the paraphrasing from the article writer, which is not a negative view, but it got me thinking. When we see the anti-vaxxer movements in the US and EU, they are uncannily effective, they are almost too effective. For the most and proven since the 90’s, the anti-vaxxers are either religiously inclined like the Dutch people in Giethorn (their ‘sort of’ version of Amish) or loons (often people who are one shade away from being absolutely bug-nuts). In the first, these people are driven and they are also self isolationists, it is merely about them and their community, it makes them a danger to themselves, not to others. The second group is a danger to all, but often so stupid they merely hit other stupid people. These anti-vaxxers are driven, not merely by intelligent people, no, they are driven like they are terrorist tools, like biological DOS agents and they are growing. These people are not accepting any scientific evidence, they forward non-scientific papers as ‘their’ evidence and they are not merely more effective, they are almost centrally driven by a similar source. 

In the UK the Guardian is giving visibility to Kate Shemirani, in the USA we see Alabama Curt Carpenter and the list grows. Someone is somehow fuelling this, yes this is speculative and this is not merely the power of social media, someone had months to prepare the weaker minded and target them in a direction, limelight seeking nobodies all wanting their limelight with as large as an audience as possible. The evidence is not clear and as such this is speculation, yet consider the timelines of each of these Anti-vaxxers, what their audience was a year ago and each month after that. This goes beyond buying likes on places like Facebook. Some people are fuelling these ‘bright’ illumination spots and they are not done, even as they are retracting their ‘assistance’ there is still a digital footprint and it is now diminishing. Yes, I admit upfront that my view is speculative, but my speculation fits the profile, are the US and the EU under attack from bio-terrorists? You might think that they are not the same, but there you would be wrong. In this I grasp back to a writing from 2012 called ‘A Proposed Universal Medical and Public Health Definition of Terrorism’. Here we see “We propose the following universal medical and public definition of terrorism: The intentional use of violence — real or threatened — against one or more non-combatants and/or those services essential for or protective of their health, resulting in adverse health effects in those immediately affected and their community, ranging from a loss of well-being or security to injury, illness, or death”, in this, if even one of my speculations are proven, these anti-vaxxers become complicit in acts of terrorism. Did you even consider that? Now, there is a dangerous fence. I am not debating THEIR right to be anti vaccinated. If they die, they only have themselves to thank, just like Curt Carpenter. Yet by attacking science by non-science and debunked non-facts, the setting changes and that is where we are now. What should have been a straight path to recovery is now a much larger issue. The delay is not on President Biden, and now that we can optionally see that the US is yet again under terrorist attack his priorities need to change, attacking big-tech is futile and counter productive, the laws needs adjusting free speech, it needs to be validated by accountability. 

And for the love of god, can some well trained data analyst please take a look at the timeline of these anti-vaxxers? I think it is time to look at timelines here and that is when my brain went into some sort of overdrive. It goes back when I designed an intrusion system that stayed one hop away from a router table between two points and to infect one of the routers to duplicate packages from that router on that path, one infection tended to not be enough, 2-3 infections needed to be made so that the traffic on that route between two points could be intercepted, I called it the Hop+1 solution, I came up with it whilst considering the non-Korean Sony hack. That  thought drove me to think of an approach to find the links. In the first we most likely need to find on where and when they accessed the dark web, then we see another part, because if we can find their access, we can optionally see others too, when we have that list and we can correlate it to other anti-vaxxers we have an optional pattern for action. No matter how this is seen it will be staged towards my speculation, something that needs proof, proof is required to give validity to actions that follow. I believe that I am correct, but I admit that it is a speculative push in a path towards thinking something is what I personally think it is, not a path towards evidence, evidence needs to be found and the evidence that is made to fit the solution, is no evidence, it is like stating that there is a linear relationship when you only have two plot points. A pattern of evidence is required, it is always about the patterns. 

So when I look at the ‘in retrospect’ part, I am wondering when the connections were there in the early stages and I also wonder why the others are not on that path yet (or seemingly yet). The media is only partly to blame, yes they give limelight, but that was their job from the early days, like the people exploiting Google cookies, the media can be exploited too, seeking the limelight is not a crime, but in conjunction with a terrorist agenda we are on new shaky grounds, and that is the problem, any law eagerly over-quick created is pointless whilst inaction is useless, caught between two rocks whilst the floor is not lava it is the ever exploiting media, exploiting for clicks, for visibility and circulation, whilst calling it ‘the people have a right to know’. This has the option of heading into a really bad direction soon enough. Will it? I have absolutely no idea.

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July 28, 2021 · 01:42

Retry or retrial?

It is time to revisit a few issues, actually one issue and a whole lot connected to it. To start, I decided to go with The Verge, it has its ducks decently in a row, the article ‘NSO’s Pegasus spyware: here’s what we know’ is the best of them all, they also make reference to a lot of articles, and they have a decent line. The article (at https://www.theverge.com/22589942/nso-group-pegasus-project-amnesty-investigation-journalists-activists-targeted) is best if you read it yourself. Mitchell Clark did a good job, and as you have read the article, I can make a few jumps. The important jump gets us to the Washington Post (at https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2021/nso-spyware-pegasus-cellphones/). This came from the link in “However, much of the reporting centers around a list containing 50,000 phone numbers” and when we seek the Washington Post article, we get “reporters were able to identify more than 1,000 people spanning more than 50 countries through research and interviews on four continents: several Arab royal family members, at least 65 business executives, 85 human rights activists, 189 journalists, and more than 600 politicians and government officials — including cabinet ministers, diplomats, and military and security officers. The numbers of several heads of state and prime ministers also appeared on the list”, no evidence mind you, merely statement and boasting. I call it boast, because we see there that the Amnesty’s Security Lab examined 67 smartphones all whilst close to 50% had an inconclusive test. If this is 67, what about the other 49,933? So when we get to “NSO chief executive Shalev Hulio expressed concern in a phone interview with The Post about some of the details he had read in Pegasus Project stories Sunday, while continuing to dispute that the list of more than 50,000 phone numbers had anything to do with NSO or Pegasus”, my support goes to Shalev Hulio. The Washington Post has a declining amount of credibility and this does not help. From my point of view, I would have made a dashboard based on the 50,000 numbers with a clear separation, In the top layer the continents, then the countries, where we see number of mobiles, versus number of landlines. This basic setting was never done, how stupid is that? A second dashboard could be the identifying class (journalist, government, lawyer, NGO) just to coin a phrase, the Washington Post was all about emotion, not about fact. I see this as a prime time hack job, with the alleged journo’s being the hacks, we also do not get any level of trustworthy setting on how the leak got to the Washington Post. Question upon question and in the mean time we get to see “In Hungary, numbers associated with at least two media magnates were among hundreds on the list, and the phones of two working journalists were targeted and infected, forensic analysis showed” 4 people and 50,000 numbers, could the article be any less relevant? And the stupidity of the Washington Post does not end, no it goes further with “Amnesty’s forensics found evidence that Pegasus was targeted at the two women closest to Saudi columnist Khashoggi, who wrote for The Post’s Opinions section. The phone of his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, was successfully infected during the days after his murder in Turkey on Oct. 2, 2018, according to a forensic analysis by Amnesty’s Security Lab”, we see ‘two women closest to Saudi columnist Khashoggi’, so how did they get there? Because the numbers were on the list? And when we see ‘The phone of his fiancee, Hatice Cengiz, was successfully infected’, so how was that evidence obtained? From my point of view the text “according to a forensic analysis by Amnesty’s Security Lab” just does not cover it. It even gets worse with “Also on the list were the numbers of two Turkish officials involved in investigating his dismemberment by a Saudi hit team”, I see it as a weak approach to mention “investigating his dismemberment” which was NEVER proven, the proof requires a body, they never got that, at best the man is theoretically still merely missing. And from there we get to “Khashoggi also had a wife, Hanan Elatr, whose phone was targeted by someone using Pegasus in the months before his killing. Amnesty was unable to determine whether the hack was successful”, consider the text “Amnesty was unable to determine whether the hack was successful”, if that is true, how come we get “targeted by someone using Pegasus in the months before his killing”, how was that timeline proven? It is a simple question, the article is a bad approach to give more visibility to a journalist no one gives a fuck about. I like the quote ““This is nasty software — like eloquently nasty,” said Timothy Summers, a former cybersecurity engineer at a U.S. intelligence agency and now director of IT at Arizona State University”, is it eloquent because the NSA never made it, or because an Israeli company has the lead on this? I wonder what Timothy would have said if this was an NSA application? 

And the Verge is on my side, they give us “WAIT, WHO MADE THIS LIST?”, as well as “At this point, that’s clear as mud. NSO says the list has nothing to do with its business, and claims it’s from a simple database of cellular numbers that’s a feature of the global cellular network”, which is supported by “A statement from an Amnesty International spokesperson, posted to Twitter by cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter, says that the list indicates numbers that were marked as “of interest” to NSO’s various clients. The Washington Post says that the list is from 2016” and when we consider these quotes and we read the Washington Post article for the shite it seems to be, I wonder who is waking up to the fact that the media, all the other media is merely re-quoting what the Washington Post stated and it is absent of all kinds of facts, or they merely didn’t bother putting the facts there. 

The entire Pegasus setting seems like a Wag the Dog approach to whatever these papers want to create and it is optionally a setting (a speculative one) that this is the push from stakeholders who have an issue with the NSO group, all whilst no credible evidence is given to us that there is an actual issue. And in all this the money trail was ignored, I ignored it too, mainly because I was unaware, yet the Verge was aware and they give us “At the time, the costs were reportedly $650,000 to hack 10 iPhone or Android users, or $500,000 to infiltrate five BlackBerry users. Clients could then pay more to target additional users, saving as they spy with bulk discounts: $800,000 for an additional 100 phones, $500,000 for an extra 50 phones” this implies that the cheapest option would be 500 times $800,000, which gives us $400,000,000 that is a whole lot of cash for a lot of people no one cares about. Yes, there are a few alleged targets that makes the pricing worth it, but with the setting I have, there is no way that the 50,000 numbers make sense, oh and before I forget, if this is a list for multiple sources, how many of the numbers doubled up? Too many questions and the media stupidly reprinting what the Washington Post is giving us makes no sense at all, unless you are a stakeholder with anti-Israel sentiments. 

In this Shalev Hulio is right that he is “continuing to dispute that the list of more than 50,000 phone numbers had anything to do with NSO or Pegasus”, I would too and I found a lot of the disputable issues within an hour, I wonder how shortsighted the media was when they decided to reprint what the Washington Post gave them. So whilst the Guardian gives us ‘the global impact of the Pegasus project’, I merely see a storm in a teacup, because the issues in the Washington Post were never decently vetted on a few levels and that is likely the biggest failing of the media at present. It is merely my point of view and I am happy to state that I could be wrong, but the lack of credible evidence, all whilst the media has a declining level of credibility makes my view the most likely correct one, most likely, because I have not seen the evidence, but as you read the articles, that are all about details, lacking generic evidence, how would you see it?

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July 19, 2021 · 11:56

The devil rang

This is too good, I had just finished yesterday’s article and the Guardian gives me ‘Spyware can make your phone your enemy. Journalism is your defence’, in this that I have some troubles accepting that journalism is my defence, they are al about circulation and satisfying their shareholders and stakeholders (optionally advertisers too). But the article came at the right moment, even as this is about Pegasus and the NSO group. Whenever I look back at the title ‘Pegasus’ I think back to Pegasus mail and windows 3.1. It is a reflex, but a nice one. So, the article gives us “The Pegasus project poses urgent questions about the privatisation of the surveillance industry and the lack of safeguards for citizens”, which is nice, but Microsoft, Solarwinds and Cisco made a bigger mess and a much larger mess, so pointing at Pegasus at this point seems a little moot and pointless. (Microsoot’s Exchange anyone?)

Yes, there are questions and it is fair to ask them, so when we see “This surveillance has dramatic, and in some cases even life-threatening, consequences for the ordinary men and women whose numbers appear in the leakbecause of their work exposing the misdeeds of their rulers or defending the rights of their fellow citizens”, yes questions are good, but the fact that millions of records went to the open air via all kinds of methods (including advertiser Microsoft) is just a little too weird. And it is not up to me, it was The Hill who asked the people (5 days ago after the Kaseya hack gone public, the larger question that actually matters ‘Kaseya hack proves we need better cyber metrics’ and they are right, when we see “Once “infected”, your phone becomes your worst enemy. From within your pocket, it instantly betrays your secrets and delivers your private conversations, your personal photos, nearly everything about you” we read this and shrug, but at this point how did a third party operator (NSO group) get the data and the knowhow to make an app that allows for this? Larger question should be handed to both Google and Apple. The fact that the phones are mostly void of protection comes from these two makers. This is a setting of facilitation and a lack of cyber security. The NSO group decided to set a limited commercial application (more likely to facilitate towards the proud girls and boys of Mossad) and they took it one step further to offer it to other governments as well, is that wrong?

So when we see “All of these individuals were selected for possible surveillance by states using the same spyware tool, Pegasus, sold by the NSO Group. Our mission at Forbidden Stories is to pursue – collaboratively – the work of threatened, jailed or assassinated journalists”, if that were true, we would see a lot more articles regarding the 120 Journalists jailed in Turkey, not to mention the 60 journalists that were assassinated (read: targeted killing exercise) there as well. The papers are all about a journalist no one cares about (Jamal Khashoggi) but the other journalists do not really make the front page giving pause and skepticism to “the work of threatened, jailed or assassinated journalists”, my personal view is that the advertisers and stake holders don’t really care about those lives. Then I have issues with “This investigation began with an enormous leak of documents that Forbidden Stories and Amnesty International had access to”, was it really a leak, or did one government take view away from them (by Amnesty International) and handed it towards the NSO group? A list of 50,000 numbers is nothing to sneer at, as such, I doubt it was a leak, it was a tactical move to push the limelight away from them and push it somewhere else. As we consider Kaseya, Solarwinds, Microsoft and Cisco, the weak minded democratic intelligence players from the Unified Spies of America come to mind, but I admit that I have no evidence, it is pure speculation.

And then we see the larger danger “But the scale of this scandal could only be uncovered by journalists around the world working together. By sharing access to this data with the other media organisations in the Forbidden Stories consortium, we were able to develop additional sources, collect hundreds of documents and put together the harrowing evidence of a surveillance apparatus that has been wielded ferociously against swaths of civil society”, who did they share access to? Who reports to another faction that is not journalism or is purely greed driven? In this, the article (at https://www.theguardian.com/world/commentisfree/2021/jul/19/spyware-can-make-your-phone-your-enemy-journalism-is-your-defence) gives us one other gem, it is “not to mention more than 180 journalists from nearly two dozen countries”, as such we see 0.36% of the data is about journalists, so if I was to look at a slice and dice dashboard, how will these 50,000 people distribute? So when we see “If one reporter is threatened or killed, another can take over and ensure that the story is not silenced”, yes, how did that end up for those journo’s in Turkey? What about outliers in data like Dutch journalist Peter R. De Vries? He is not getting the limelight that much in the last three days, you all moved on? You pushed the limelight towards Jamal Khashoggi for well over a year, who achieved less than 0.01% compared to Peter R. De Vries. I reckon that this article, although extremely nice is there to cater to a specific need, a need that the article does not mention (and I can only speculate), but when we see all this holier than though mentions and we see an inaction on Turkey’s actions, as well as a lack of news regarding Peter R. De Vries, I wonder what this article was about, it wasn’t really about the NSO group and Pegasus, they are mentioned 4 and 7 times, the article was to push people towards thinking it is about one thing and it becomes about the 0.36% of journalists in a list of 50,000, all whilst the number is mentioned once in the article without a breakdown. Someone else is calling, when you answer, just make sure the local number is not 666.

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July 1, 2021 · 00:21

Big Oil in the family

We all have moments where we look at the sky and roll our eyes. Today was my moment when I was treated (by the Guardian) to ‘Big oil and gas kept a dirty secret for decades. Now they may pay the price’, in this I start with “Was it really a secret?” You see, we all want to blame someone else for the problems we helped create. And  when the (what I reverently call) the stupid people are bringing about “An unprecedented wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US, aim to hold the oil and gas industry to account for the environmental devastation caused by fossil fuels – and covering up what they knew along the way”. You see that is is merely one element of stupid. I gave light to ‘Uniform Nameless Entitlement Perforation’ on December 10th 2020 (at https://lawlordtobe.com/2020/12/10/uniform-nameless-entitlement-perforation/), I emphasised on a report by European Environmental Agency (EEA) where. We see that 147 industrial plants create 50% of the pollution, the media seemingly ignored the report I have not see the media go out and bash the nations for these 147 plants, we even had a joke (read: BBC article) by Tim McGrath on how the “Global ‘elite’ will need to slash high-carbon lifestyles”, so how stupid do people need to get?

In case you forgot

This reflects on the now when we see (at https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/jun/30/climate-crimes-oil-and-gas-environment) “Coastal cities struggling to keep rising sea levels at bay, midwestern states watching “mega-rains” destroy crops and homes, and fishing communities losing catches to warming waters, are now demanding the oil conglomerates pay damages and take urgent action to reduce further harm from burning fossil fuels”, just when you think that Americans can no longer become any more stupid, we get the next iteration of ‘stupid is as stupid does’. Statista shows us that in 1975 the US requires 1.747 BILLION kilowatt hours a year, this went up again and again until that number was well over doubled in 2005 (3.8B KwH), then it roughly stays the same. There was one spike in 2018, yet one source gives us “From 2003 to 2012, weather-related outages doubled”, I personally believe it is not all weather related. I believe that energy delivery hit a saturation point around 2005. This is why the last decade has so many of these failings and outages. Consider that it was not merely oil and gas, it was energy, the underlying need that drives this. If you doubt this you need but to read the entire ENRON scandal papers to get a clue on how it has always about greed and not about big oil and gas. When I see ‘Big Oil and gas’ I personally think it tends to be a hidden jab towards the Middle East. There have been carbon neutral solutions for almost two decades. Yes, they were expensive in the beginning, but how much effort was made to push this? It is about profit margins, it is about cheap and it is about exploitation. Oil and gas check most marks, but are they to blame? We can ignore settings like “In the early 1990s, Kenneth Lay helped to initiate the selling of electricity at market prices and, soon after, Congress approved legislation deregulating the sale of natural gas” that was almost 30 years ago, so how was electricity created? How do we get energy? And why is Congress not in the same accusation dock? Until the late 80’s the idea of Electricity at market prices was a lull and instead of protecting that part, it was left to the needy and the greedy.

So when they have another go at ‘Big Oil’ (to be honest, I have no idea what they are talking about), consider that the drive to have your own car started in the 50’s. Forbes gave us in 2020 ‘Traffic Congestion Costs U.S. Cities Billions Of Dollars Every Year’, which is fine, but that too relies on fuel, so when they gave us “New York had the highest economic losses out of any major U.S. city with congesting costing it $11 billion last year. Los Angeles lost $8.2 billion while Chicago suffered the third-worst impact at $7.6 billion.” And how much fuel is wasted in that setting? Do you want to blame ‘big oil’ for that too? This is a case that will go nowhere, the only thing it enforces is something I will touch on a little later. You see, when we saw the messages on how companies had enough of California, they vacated and left, Texas is such a much better place (it actually might be), and Forbes again gave us in February ‘Texas Energy Crisis Is An Epic Resilience And Leadership Failure’, yet how much consideration are we seeing when we get sources feeding us “There are several reasons tech companies shave been moving to Texas – lower housing costs, lower tax rates, less regulations have made it easier for companies to operate in Texas. There is already an abundance of technical talent all over Texas. Any company moving here can tap into a well-experienced talent pool. There is also a well-educated stream of new talent graduating from top schools like Texas, Rice, University of Houston, and Texas A&M.” I am not debating the act, I am fine with the action taken, but when you consider that the following companies moved to Texas, how much of a drain on energy in other places will that give you and when you see the sudden spike in some places requiring a lot more energy, all whilst the other places are not diminishing their offer, because people will always need power, how is ‘Big Oil’ to blame? So lets take a loot at that list and most names moved less then 2 year ago (or are about to move)
Guideline, Contango, Done, Carbon Neutral Energy, Tailift Material Handling, Estrada Hinojosa,  GBS Enterprises, Wedgewood, Verdant Chemical, Ranchland Food, Drive Shack, Invzbl,Markaaz, XR Masters, Elevate Brands, Harmonate, Einride, Green Dot, NRG Energy, Caterpillar,Flex Logix, Leaf Telecommunications, Katapult, Wayfair, Ribbon Communications, BSU Inc, Avetta, First Foundation, 5G LLC, TaskUs, BlockCap, Element Critical, City Shoppe, CrowdStreet, Lalamove, NinjaRMM, Gilad & Gilad, MDC Vacuum, FERA Diagnostics, Roboze, Leadr, SupplyHouse.com, Eleiko, Firehawk Aerospace, International Trademark Association, ZP Better Together, Precision Global Consulting, Loop Insurance, QSAM Biosciences, AHV, Dominion Aesthetics, Sage Integration, Quali, Samsung, Truelytics, Alpha Paw, Sentry Kiosk, ProtectAll, Optimal Elite Management, Ametrine, Digital Realty, Amazing Magnets, Lion Real Estate Group, NeuraLink, Maddox Defense, DZS Inc, The Boring Company, Oracle, Hewlett Packard Enterprise,Tesla, Optym, Longevity Partners, Iron Ox, Palantir, 8VC, Bonchon, Titans of CNC, Saleen Performance Parts, CBRE, Slync.io, Baronte Securities, Omnigo Software, Incora, Vio Security, JDR Cable Systems, FileTrail, Sonim Technologies, Murphy Oil Corp, Buff City Soap, Origin Clear, QuestionPro, SignEasy, Sense, Astura, Charles Schwab, Splunk,  Bill.com, Chip 1 Exchange, McKesson, and Lonza. This is not a complete list and I am not considering (at present) which ones are doing it for all kinds of tax hypes. Now consider how many people will move as well. I get it, California is expensive, but how will this change that represents the population of more than one large city impact the power needs in Texas that is already has it fair share of brownouts, and that is just for starters, how many gas and oil energy producing plants will Texas get? Is ‘Big oil’ to blame, or do they merely offer a commodity that EVERYONE needs? Consider that a powerful computer required a 200 Watt power unit in 1997, today it is 600Watt or even higher. There were roughly 51 million units sold last year alone. I cannot state how the division on laptop and desktop is, but the need for energy is unrelentingly large, how large? Consider all the staff moving to Texas and consider how many more energy issues Texas has in the next two years, that is your marker and ‘Big Oil’ had nothing to do with this. 

So when we reconsider “wave of lawsuits, filed by cities and states across the US”, how many of these claimants voted against wind farms, against solar power and against nuclear power? They did it for all kinds of reasons and we get it, some are expensive and you do not want your children to go to school glowing in the dark (yet in winter that is a case for less accidents), but in all this blaming ‘Big Oil’ is just too ludicrous to mention. So as for a promise earlier in this article. When the US goes on with silly and stupid court cases, how long until the owners of IP and Patents will consider the US to be too dangerous to remain in? Consider that the US has an IP value of $21,000,000,000,000 (trillion), it represents almost 90% of the S&P 500 value, so what do you think happens when a massive slice of that moves to Asia or the Middle East, optionally to Europe? I reckon that over 70% of Wall Street executives are on a floor above the 30th and there is every chance that well over 40% of them will do a (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEpKcBkkVMY); now consider the stage of blaming the wrong  party. I am not stating that any of the energy delivering components are innocent, yet we are all guilty, in almost every nation. We remained silent when energy prices remained the same (somehow), we have known about alternatives and most people never pushed their politicians, we have known about the dangers of erosion for decades and we see pollution report after report, yet nothing is done. We are all to blame and putting ‘Big Oil and Gas’ in the dock will never ever go anywhere, I reckon that Kenneth Lay set the charter for that. When we realise that we allowed a utility to become profit driven which we clearly get from ‘the selling of electricity at market prices’, we changed a whole range of processes and now that we see the impact we should not cry, we should look into the mirror for blame.

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June 23, 2021 · 21:46

Thought for imagination

Consider the next setting, I am in the Harrods foodcourt, I feel the meat-pie as my right hand caresses the side pf the pie, I see two small basins of ketchup, I grab the knife in my left hand as I slowly use the sharp knife to cut a part of the left side of the pie. I cut through the pastry and the what I think is minced meat. It looks a little dry, but the overwhelming scent of fresh and warm meat enters my nostrils. I add a small bit of ketchup to the pie. The slice is cut in half and I slowly eat the part on my fork. My senses overwhelm with the spices in the meat, the pastry and it does not taste dry, it is an amazing experience and this is merely the first bite.

All what you saw before is true, all came from my imagination. You see I have had meat pie in the past and I envision what might be the perfect meat pie. I have been to harrods twice, but I never set foot in the food courts. Not for any particulate reason, I just never got around to it. I hope to do so in the future, but that will be part of the future that I see, or it might never happen. This is life. So what was this about?

The train of thoughts started a little while ago and that train entered the station again when I stumbled upon same article today ‘Netflix reportedly plans push into video games market’ by the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jun/02/netflix-reportedly-plans-push-video-games-market). The thing that got to me was “Streaming company said to have approached game industry executives with project at early stage”, one could argue that they kill their own project by approaching Ubisoft, Ubisoft has another setting of needs and their product is what I personally would call ‘faulty at best’. Yet it is not all bad news “Netflix has been approaching senior game industry executives about joining it to lead the creation of a subscription games service, according to reports from the tech news site the Information and Reuters”, is the right sentiment, but as I see it, the safest route is to take the route Apple is seemingly taking. Games absent of in app purchases and absent of advertisements. These two elements will spell a much larger stage of doom on the industry than you know. Places like Android and iOS are now filled with phrases like “These ads are driving me insane, every level again”, and it will not be long until people have had enough. Then there is the stage of deceptive conduct in advertisements, a decently new approach to getting people to install your software. But these two elements will have a disastrous impact on gaming soon enough, and it will hit Apple as much as it will hit Google. Then there is the competition, Amazon did a lot better than I expected it would. I (personally minded) thought that it would be an easy win for Google, a tech maker if ever these was one. And it is ahead of Amazon, but I never expected Amazon to be this close to Google in the first place, as such the Amazon Luna remains in the race and there is an element that might not make Google the winner in the end. Google’s approach to exclusive games is not that impressive (as far as I can tell, they have none), Amazon Luna has acquired the knowledge it needs to make that difference. And the article repeats my thoughts towards gaming, with “However, the new offering is at a very early stage, with executives focusing on Apple Arcade as the potential competition. Users of that service, exclusive to Apple’s iPhones, iPads, Macs and AppleTV, pay a flat monthly fee of £4.99 for access to a library of downloadable games, spanning genres and target audiences. Apple sets strict rules on developers, banning them from monetising their games through in-app purchases or advertising, in order to try to keep Arcade a premium service” is the right move, but they made one mistake, a big one, there is no mention of the Amazon Luna and the Luna is in a primed spot to become the number three system behind Sony and Nintendo (yes, I have written off Microsoft to remain a competitor), so even as Netflix has the advantage of a subscription group that makes the head spin of all streaming gaming solutions, good games is where it is at, innovators and makers of original creators that is the winning combo and Netflix (might or might not) move into a field where it is not certain it will become the third position player, or what they classify in the Tour de France, the polka dot player. On the plus side (from my point of view) it will soon thereafter reduce Microsoft to the 6th position, behind Sony, Nintendo, Amazon, Netflix and Google. So as I see it, their investment $7,500,000,000 investment in Bethesda goes tits up and Bethesda is not to blame, the board of directors at Microsoft is. 

I remain a Sony person, hence my Playstation remains on its pedestal, I would say right next of the shrine of Panigale, a Ducati shrine where the executives of Ferrari, Lamborghini and Maserati come to pray for inspiration, OK, there is no Panigale there, because I could never afford one and I am not a racer, but engineering perfection can be recognised by plenty of people, so there! Yet the stage is given, inspiration comes from excellence in creativity and that is what a good gaming provider offers. I wonder if Netflix is considering what they need to do to get there. Microsoft merely bought the IP out there hoping it would thrust them there, but they had too much against them, like the most powerful console in the world that has nothing to offer (at present). They might in the future, but with all the bad decisions haunting them, all whilst Amazon is already on the run towards an upcoming third position, they might not be in time to make a real difference anymore. All this whilst they are trying to bash xCloud streaming everywhere. They become their own worst enemy and when it happens, the people will not trust Microsoft, I see elements of that everywhere and they, what I personal regard as a push towards whatever influencer they can muster is more than a bad call. 

Microsoft (as I personally see it) forgot that good games come from the mix of imagination and creation, they used to know that, yet it seems that they forgot, I have no idea why, the wrong board member, the sentiment of revenue over substance, it could be a boatload of things, but there you have it. And Netflix? 

Well the article gives us the important stage “One key decision that has not yet been finalised is whether a game subscription service would also require Netflix to develop games itself. Apple Arcade is filled entirely by third-party developers, but other gaming subscriptions rely on first-party exclusives to drive signups.” They are hitting the nail on the head, it is the exclusives, Microsoft forgot, Google never embraced and that is the stage why Amazon Luna is in a good place, Netflix could be too. One of these two needs to get these 2-3 exclusives that no one thought about that they are locked into third position and in an industry that is about to have a relevance of 90.7 billion, with a stage that has an annual increase of 24%, it matters, the difference between third and fourth position implies the stage representing several billions, when you consider that good AAA games cost (according to some) $500,000,000 to make, but that result in a God of War with a 97% rating, it is the price of an original masterpiece and it sold over 10,000,000 copies, implying that the game close to a billion. In streaming land, that setting will be a nail driver, 2-3 games like that and people will jump on that bandwagon a lot faster than you think. So as Microsoft gave us (via sources) that they will build native games for the cloud, why would anyone buy one of those overly stated powerful Xbox’s? And in that stage, would you trust a provider who dropped the ball three times in a row to provide you with original games, all whilst they bought the talents and are trying to grow through that premise? So far Netflix might make it, but as far as I can tell, Amazon Luna is most likely primed to get there at present.

And that too will set the indie developers off into a direction, where they end up I cannot tell (it will be their choice), but there are a few indicators that it will not be in a direction Microsoft will like. As I see it, outsourcing gets you a labour force, hiring creation and imagination grants you a universe of opportunity. I will let you work out the rest.

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June 4, 2021 · 03:32

Any more staff in the range of stupid?

It is a question that is seemingly asked in political circles, but these questions never get the limelight it deserves. There are numerous examples, but the clear ones are starting 11 years ago. ABC at that point gave us ‘The $77 Billion Fighter Jets That Have Never Gone to War’ with small raised issues like “the U.S. led an international effort to secure a no-fly zone over Libya last month, the F-22, the jet the Air Force said “cannot be matched,” was not involved. The Air Force said the $143 million-a-pop planes simply weren’t necessary to take out Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi’s air defences”, the US armed forces spend (read ‘optionally wasted’) $80,000,000,000 on a plane and over a period of 3 major combat operations it never saw the light of day in active combat testing. Yes, as I see it the most advanced plane is one that never tests its ability in combat, it makes perfect sense, like the cold war did. Then we go to 2016, a bombing target that I have written about a few times, the USS Zumwalt. A ship so ugly that it is optionally too ugly to be used as target practice and sunk in a place where we can regrow coral reefs. The Guardian gave us ‘US navy’s most expensive destroyer breaks down in Panama Canal’ with the added “The Zumwalt cost more than $4.4bn and was commissioned in October in Maryland. It also suffered a leak in its propulsion system before it was commissioned. The leak required the ship to remain at Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia longer than expected for repairs”, with a few other sides of failure, even as the Guardian gives us “One of its signature features is a new gun system that fires rocket-powered shells up to 63 nautical miles”, a side that never ever worked. That is because and this is merely one of the sources ‘The USS Zumwalt Can’t Fire Its Guns Because the Ammo Is Too Expensive’, yes a side that was never charted properly, was it. It came down to the setting that “The two Advanced Gun System howitzers are fed by a magazine containing 600 rounds of ammunition, making it capable destroying hundreds of targets at a rate of up to ten per minute”, however, “now the U.S. Navy is admitting that the LRLAP round is too expensive to actually purchase, leaving the nearly $4 billion dollar destroyer’s guns high and dry”, now the class were adjusted for Raytheon solutions making the ship a joke on a few levels. So at this stage a group of people wasted $84,000,000,000 and it adds up that the tax payer has nothing to show for it. How is that for a sense of humour, but now, wait for it…..Now the BBC gives us ‘Major design flaws in Army’s new armoured vehicles, report shows’, a stage where we see “An internal leaked government report also raises serious doubts as to whether the £5.5bn Ajax Armoured Vehicle programme will be delivered on time and within budget. Problems include excessive vibration and noise”, yes that makes total sense. You see the two governments should be considered guilty of wasting $91,000,000,000 of the taxpayers funds, and that is the group that thinks my £50,000,000 post taxation fee on 5G technology is a waste of time and space? Hah! I found a way to sink the Iranian fleet in new novel and slightly overt ways (the sinking of the Kharg was not my doing and a complete coincidence). I also had a novel idea on melting down the Iranian nuclear reactors, but I hope to test that one in the near future, someone has to do something about that lot, don’t we? But this is not about me, this is about alleged stupid people, so when we get told that “the Ministry of Defence signed a contract for 589 of the Ajax armoured vehicles in 2014”, and we see the flaws, optionally massive ones with the added “successful delivery of the programme to time, cost and quality appears to be unachievable”, oh wait, didn’t the article start with “will be delivered on time and within budget”? Oh no, that too was wishful thinking, because if we see “An internal leaked government report also raises serious doubts”, it implies that some level of stupid thought that on time and within budget was achievable at some point, although there has been 7 years of budget (w)holing, or was that a political seven year itch?

And I need to restrain myself, because I came up with an idea that all the boffins at DARPA did not see coming and at present I am realising an additional stage that is a nervous one and letting my ego get the better of me is not a good thing as it opens up the theatre of war to a much larger stage. And even as I might not feel completely nervous, the fact that two governments failed the Army, the Navy AND the Airforce implies that there are a few issues all over the field and the media is not going after these political names who were buttering their sandwich on both sides of every slice, so there is a lot more to come in the near future.

So when you realise that “The MoD has already spent nearly £3.5bn on the flagship programme, which is meant to provide the British Army with a “family” of modern tracked armoured fighting vehicles. The Army describes it as a “core capability’ and key to its modernisation.” And that core capability does not work, float or fly. Did you honestly believe that the Chinese and Russian problems are real ones? If we cannot counter what they have to offer we are merely sitting by watching politicians draining funds and we see another iteration of ‘Tibetan exile leader warns of Chinese aggression: ‘China will transform you’’ by Fox News and others. Did you think that Chinese and Russian opponents have not figured out that large projects are now showing a fail rate of 80% or more, I will agree that a 100% fail rate is too exaggerating, yet consider that bucket of bolts (USS Zumwalt) that ended up with no shells to fire and now relies on conventional Raytheon technology on a ship that is $3,000,000,000 too expensive for its firing solution. Did you think that they had not noticed the issues, or the Issues with an untested Raptor even though it could have been taken through its paces three times over, you think the other players overlooked that?

As I see it There are a few sides of US and UK governments that require massive overhauls. And I am not trying to win them over for my £50,000,000 post taxation solution, for that I merely need Sundar Pichai, Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk to wake up and smell the coffee (and opportune stage for yours truly). When you consider the waste of $91,000,000,000 is am merely a wrinkle in the fabric of economy and a small one at that. So in all this as we are all trying to get by, fear not, there are players in this field wasting well over 100 times the funds that would keep you alive, so in this age and in the era of Covid, where almost 4 million are dead and 172 million got sick with 250K new cases a day added, we can relax knowing that funds for survival are wasted on all kinds of military problems and we need not worry about war, the wasted funds are for systems that seemingly will not ever work at present. So world peace is within our grasp, we merely had to spend it on systems that do not operate.

Can we hire any more in the range of stupid so that world peace becomes a reality? Although if Russia and China do not embrace that political arena we still have a problem but I might be the one negative thinker here. What do you think?

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May 17, 2021 · 10:21

What makes us fall?

We are feeling all kinds of weird at times, we fall for someone, for something, and we also trip at times. These things happen and more often than not we have ourselves to blame, but is that the case all the time? In this I refer to a BBC article 3 days ago called ‘Victim of ‘Elon Musk’ Bitcoin scam loses home deposit’, first of all, the scam used the name ‘Elon Musk’ the man himself has no dealings here. But it was part of the article that woke me up. It is “Ms Bushnell, an investor in cryptocurrency, spotted an item on a website that appeared to use BBC News branding, claiming Mr Musk, the billionaire boss of the Tesla car firm, would pay back double the sum of any Bitcoin deposit”, now in my case the part where I see ‘pay back double the sum’ would raise all the red flags, but it is “an item on a website”, not merely “appeared to use BBC News branding” that got my eyes. 

There are two elements here, the first is that more and more advertisements (and scams) rely way too heavily on ‘deceptive conduct’ and the law has been dragging its heels here for 2-3 years on drowning that issue. Stronger laws against deceptive conduct needs to be there, not some political loon relying on some complaints department, but laws that give power to the law to chastise the advertisement agency that allowed for this with fines in excess of £1,000,000. I reckon that these people will clean up their acts when the fine equals a quarter of their revenue. Do you think it is overreaching? I myself thwarted 5 attempts to get scammed last week, and I believe it is getting worse, with Indian developers learning that for a mere investment of $250 they could reap $250,000 matters are getting worse and it needs to be halted, or at least diminished by a hell of a lot. In this I am willing to point the finger at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and optionally Amazon as well. Some advertisements should not be allowed to continue. 

Even when we see the Guardian giving us (some time ago) “investigation shows apparent ease of promoting fraudulent services online”, we see the lack of actions by all. They made these AI claims, so use your AI (actually AI does not yet exist), but there needs to be a much larger level of checks and even as the BBC watered down the stage towards “spotted an item on a website”, which due to a lack of presentable evidence makes sense, the setting is not all towards the victim. Yet in that light, If I had a real option to double your money, do you think I would go open, or go to my best friends? If I had an option that there was a 100% chance of a 100% gain, do you think I would give this to strangers, or to close friends? Consider that question when you go out and spend (read: donate) your money on something that is without evidence and without verification. 

And there is a reason to blame big tech in this instance, it is seen in “The fake site is still currently online”, this implies that there was advertisement, there is a trail and I reckon there is a need for action and an option for action. You do not need a big degree in IT (I do have one) and we do know that there are ways to mask one’s digital identity, but wonder should those with a masked digital identity be allowed to advertise? 

The article gives more questions than answers, but that is not a bad thing. Getting the questions out into the open optionally raises the bar or perception and if we get that bar high enough, my peers in the House of Lords will wake up and demand action, which gets us at least part of the way there. 

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April 22, 2021 · 21:55

Who makes the congregation?

Yes, there you were outside and you suddenly see a church, so you wonder who decides on that congregation, the Bible (the third edition reprint with 5 chapters omitted), the bible of King James, the members of the Holiness Baptist Association or the disgruntled members who created the Baptist Purity Association? Yes, it is out there, all versions all creeds and they all have their version of the truth, also optionally the true version that whoever is up there finds the most appealing. But the new religion is sport and we saw that unfold really fast, did we not? With pope Aleksander Ceferin and pope Gianni Infantino at the head of their churches, and they will not tolerate anyone falling out of line. The addition here is that politicians (David freakin Cameron) as well as the media as a whole are really happy to lend a hand to these two popes.

Yet, the media also gives another side. In this, the Guardian (at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/apr/22/esl-european-super-league-global-capitalism-football-tech-giants) gives a really good version, a good story. The writer is giving us the lowdown and Larry Elliott does a really good job of this. He gives us a lot of the goods, not all but a lot. 

And it was then, that this article that gave me an idea. You see, there is a lot of good in the article and all of it true, but there is a part missing. You see, I have no doubt that they were all in it for the money. In this I have no sympathy for a person like Ivan Gazidis, Andrea Agnelli or Florentino Pérez. I do not hate them, I merely do not care about football, I (for the most) do not see the need to care about people who make more per week then I will ever make a year. OK, there optionally 4 exceptions, but this is not about my 5G IP. But money is the foundation used and we need to see this.

So when we see in the article “Free-market purists say they hate the idea because it is the wrong form of capitalism”, it is correct but incomplete. Then there is “The ESL has demonstrated that global capitalism operates on the basis of rigged markets not free markets, and those running the show are only interested in entrenching existing inequalities” which is almost dead on the nose. You see the media has a role to play, as I have stated many times before, the first three parties the media pleases are the Shareholders, the Stakeholders and the advertisers, the audience is a distant fourth. In all this, if there was really an impartial media we would have seen all kinds of interviews with the owners of those 15 teams, but did we? You tell me, where and when were they interviewed? Then there is the stage we see presented as “Having 15 of the 20 places guaranteed for the founder members represents a colossal barrier to entry and clearly stifles competition. There is not much chance of “creative destruction” if an elite group of clubs can entrench their position by trousering the bulk of the TV receipts that their matches will generate”, there is actually a second truth hidden there and it is ‘trousering the bulk of the TV receipts that their matches will generate’ and this is where the media gets involved, you see there are no arrangements with the media when it comes to the ESL, as such the 15 biggest teams will not fall under some agreement with the media, FIFA or UEFA, that money is theirs, the media will have to make new arrangements, and do you think that advertisers will pay the amount we see for the other teams? That is why the media is the larger problem and those two popes, they would lose out on a lot, so whilst we see “he called on the football world to keep fighting against the “disgraceful” plan for a breakaway European competition, worth an estimated $20 billion to the clubs” (source: Fox Sports) we also see that UEFA and FIFA and the media would lose out on an optional $20 billion, this is the larger issue. And the media has remained silent on it, even at the end, the news was all about the fans, the fans were never part of this. We saw “Forget coronavirus travel lists, when it comes to football the UK was being put on code red”, the money involved is too big. 

In the end I do not know whether the ESL was bad or good, the issue is that 15-20 teams of the upper setting would be playing football, the fans do not miss out, they get their football, these teams are merely in a stage of the same level, the same highest level and they are all playing against one another. So the actual losers would have been Aleksander Ceferin, Gianni Infantino and the media, it got to the point where David Cameron got involved, they were THAT scared and made it a political game from the start. If it was real, if there was really care of football, the UK would also be playing the games from the Russian Premier League. Yet the stage is that those fans can find them on YouTube. Where is the Greek league? Yes it is quite the setup, locality for added local advertising. But on a lot of there there is silence. 

Yes, Larry makes a good case with “the men who made their money out of nuts and bolts and waste paper firms in north London have been replaced by oligarchs and hedge funds. TV, barely mentioned in the Glory Game, has arrived with its billions of pounds in revenue”, it is not merely that these teams were changing the levels of loyalty, they took food from the through of pigs and those pigs can squeal, all whilst the media (who would lose a lot too) were the helping hand these two popes needed. 

What I saw was a massive one sided tsunami of flaming and colouring against anything that was not them three. And the people for the most bought it. So when we see “Asked about the Chelsea fans that gathered outside Stamford Bridge, he shot back: “There were 40 of them and if you like I’ll tell you who brought them there.”” We see in part a larger truth, the throughs are in a stage of added protection and the pigs are swarming to blame whatever they can for the image and view to be pushed to other places, but when we see “Ex-FIFA president Sepp Blatter and former secretary general Jerome Valcke had their bans extended by six years this Wednesday after the pair were found guilty of financial wrongdoing” whilst actions that took millions from the coffers of FIFA hd been going on for well over a decade and nothing was done, whilst the BBC (Andrew Jennings) pulled the alarm, all whilst we now see “when it comes to football the UK was being put on code red”, we see the stage of corruption and intentional avoidance, whilst for 15 years these same organisations did next to NOTHING. 

A stage that is not seen and actively avoided. As such we need to see that there is a larger stage and greed is only allowed by some, weird is it not? More important, this is not over, I reckon that all kinds of agreements are signed up, agreements with the media, the advertisers and the teams, as I personally see it, the throughs will be protected, greed is all.

Enjoy the week!

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