"Interest rates are losing their potency to aid the economy" - Jennifer Ryan (Bloomberg).
"Government spending has converted a private sector problem into a public sector financing problem" - Satyajit Das.
"The Treasury has decided to turn itself, in effect, into a catastrophe insurer" - the Economist.
"This is undeniably grim. Two or three quarters more like this and you're talking about depression, not recession" - Stewart Robinson (Aviva Investors).
"Britain is facing the deepest recession of any big industrialised economy, the International Monetary Fund signalled on Wednesday, as it said that the UK economy would shrink 2.8% this year... and the world economy will suffer its worst performance for more than 60 years" - Financial Times.
"... a once-in-half-a-century, probably once-in-a-century type of event" - Alan Greenspan.
"We are building the foundation stones of a recovery plan" - Gordon Brown.
Look here, Slack Jaw, as a primary architect of the Permanent Depression, should you not have considered the impacts of your economic policies just a shade earlier?
And check out their optimism.
Slack Jaw, Jack Straw, Mandy and Darling don't have a recovery plan.
Slack Jaw et al don't even have the foundation stones available to reconstruct their hyperreal recovery programme.
For Slack Jaw is still building the very stones themselves.
Still, and here is where the unintended consequences of a downturn might work in his favour, there are masses of unemployed Polish construction workers willing to be paid less than the minimum wage to create these foundations of an eventual pseudo-recovery.
The International Labour Organisation envisage that between 18 and 30 million jobs will be lost worldwide if this is merely a Recession.
If, the more likely prognosis by some distance, it is a Depression, then we are looking at over 50 million losing their jobs globally.
That would be normal people rather than bankers, of course...
One of the most entertaining aspects of the Recession/ Depression/ Permanent Depression triptych of Real Probabilities, is the disappearance of publicly available information.
It morphs, in mysterious circumstances, into publicly available disinformation.
They are dissing us as well as robbing us blind.
Government data and statistics have been manipulated in both the US and Britain over the last year at highly disturbing levels. The US election was one reason and Britain being the most fucked industrialised country another.
But this is not all...
Market prices are influenced by systemic tilting eg the banning of short selling of financial companies, in addition to all the everyday shenanigans like insider trading and cornering markets.
But this is not all, at all...
Mervyn King, another primary architect of this state of affairs who, astonishingly, is still in his job of governor of the Bank of England despite his Titanicesque stewardship of the central bank, says that there is another option on the poker table.
Namely, officials could buy up securities in Britain to fakely bolster the market hyperreality into a truly neohyperreal illusion of some magnitude.
We've got news for you...
According to our analytical data, this process is already underway.
Selective purchases have been undertaken to establish a fake floor in the Depression.
Perhaps these are the foundation stones Slack Jaw was wobbling on about?
Well, they are fake too.
Although we must restrict what we disclose in this place for proprietary reasons, the already fake level of the FTSE 100, for example, has been inflated by approximately 2% utilising officials' input since the index touched the 4000 level last week.
Although Slack Jaw and the Spooky Transylvanian-Looking One have allowed illicit and, in effect, public support for the stock market, their reconstruction will not withstand the next phase of this Depression.
"... it won't last long. The most probable mechanism for collapse will be the bond market. The combination of reappearing inflationary trends and a soaring budget deficit will cause "buyers' strikes" at Treasury bond auctions, sending interest rates through the roof. Indeed, the first such buyers' strike has already occurred, in Germany, where a €6 billion 10-year issue on January 7th was only 85% covered by bids. The rise in long term interest rates will choke off economic recovery while the resurgence of inflation caused by excessive monetary growth will force the Fed to reverse its policy and increase short term rates to some margin above inflation" - the Economist.
"The economy will at this point go into a second decline. The second decline will be concentrated in the real economy" - Martin Hutchison.
"[If overseas investors seek to sell their bonds], they will not only ruin the US economy but the value of their existing portfolio as well... At some point, government bonds will surely suffer a horrendous bear market" - Nick Carn (Odey hedge-fund).
"For the government to run simultaneously, monetary and fiscal policies that are breathtaking in their expansionism and expect to escape unscathed is a triumph of wishful thinking" - Martin Hutchison.
"Banks are stockpiling the cash or using it to purchase government bonds" - Satyajit Das.
"It is difficult not to marvel at the imagination that was implicit in this gargantuan insanity" - JK Galbraith (talking about the 'Great Depression').
We are living in remarkable financial times.
We should expect continued volatility.
We should expect a complete lack of incrementalism.
We should expect more instability.
We should expect extensive underground secrecy courtesy of Dark Pools and Basel II.
And Slack Jaw, with his zombied hand gestures, keeps telling us that this is a global problem and, in a sense, he is correct. But the roots of this crisis are in the free market economies, and it is they who are suffering, and will continue to suffer, the most (in the allegedly developed world, of course).
Iceland went bust, not Sweden.
Britain is the most recessed industrialised country, not France.
America is one fucked hyperpower, not China.
Meanwhile, half the world away, it is the Chinese, whose banking system has been the least demolished, who hold all the aces now, boyo...
At Davos this week, Wen Jiabao, quoting the Financial Times, "made scathing comments about "inappropriate macroeconomic policies" of some unnamed countries and the "unsustainable model of development characterised by prolonged low savings and high consumption". He attacked financial institutions' "blind pursuit of profit" and their "lack of self discipline.""
ObamaWorld offers us no respite - Tim Geitner is the new Treasury secretary.
As Geitner was part of the team that entirely misallocated the government handouts to date, we should expect equally informal financing from the man in the future.
No change. No hope, just more of the same...
Still, as Mr Berlusconi capably noted this week, Obama is black and not just tanned. The racist US machine will put up whoever is necessary in order to be able to resell the message.
Net-geners should expect Eric "Respect My Authority" Cartmen and Stewie Griffin as future presidential candidates.
"Attempts to regulate finance to make it safe often lead to dangers as clever financiers work around the rules" - the Economist.
"Ronald Cass, a former dean of Boston University School of Law, has argued in the Wall St Journal that Mr Madoff looks as if he broke plenty of laws that are already in force. His ability to mislead everyone around him "illustrates the limits of the law", not the need for more of it" - the Economist.
Run that pair of nonsenses by me again...
Clever (sic) financiers working around the rules are the foundation of this crisis.
So, the regulatory system has failed.
Although, no doubt, future "clever financiers" will also seek to circumvent any restrictions on their personally profitable psychopathy, their endeavours may be made considerably more awkward and less profitable.
How?
Twist the incentives.
After proper global regulation has been put in place, reward the regulators with million pound performance-related bonuses while market analysts, traders, brokers, investment bankers, hedge-funders etc have their salaries capped at a level of, say, £75,000 per annum.
Sorted.
With the incentives adjusted, we will experience markets that are semi-sustainable within eco-systemic pressures, to allow time to be bought to deliver a system that is open source, sustainable and made social for shared gain, rather than one that is privatised, patented and made proprietary for personal gain.
According to Eichengreen and Gordo, financial crises are twice as common as prior to 1914. This has absolutely nothing to do with the demise of the Gold Standard.
Nothing at all...
Ever since this date, capitalism has been one giant Ponzi scheme, no different in template from the one perpetrated by Mr Madoff.
Shareholder capitalism regressively redistributes assets "up the pyramid" by means of the boom-and-bust matrix of operation.
Consider yourself in three parallel hyperrealities...
In the first, your are an insider at a previous Davos, you attend all the right gatherings, and you are aware that a bull market cycle is to be engendered with immediate effect. The markets progress and profits are made by those who were "in the scheme" from the beginning. The second tier of participants are also financially rewarded, and word of mouth combined with a general state of financial bewilderment, results in more and more people buying into this fake market boom. Obviously, in the end, the really gullible individuals are buying overpriced assets that are guaranteed to decline in value.
In the second hyperreality, you set up a dodgy pyramid selling scheme in Albania. Poor people become stable financially within months, while the rich acquire fleets of the black Mercedes that populate Tirana's streets. Once again, the pyramid selling scheme implodes at the moment it reaches the most gullible.
The third hyperreality is Bernard Madoff...
If anybody is able to point out any operational differences between these situations, I'll gladly listen.
Swiss banks understand the Real value of money.
If you are one of the independently wealthy and you wish to store your financial assets in Switzerland, you are paid a negative rate of interest as the Swiss bankers understand that, eventually, all cash will be worthless - wheelbarrows of Deutschmarks buy loaves of bread, remember?
And, as this crisis deepens, Osmium Capital Management is offering to price in Gold for any clients wishing to sidestep the risk of the symbols of money.
As for the banks, pay me my money down.
The risks associated with Fat Wallets are greater than those linked with Stuffed Mattresses.
Everything is fake.
But we're bored of the fake and we need something more fake for stimulation.
The next bubble is in bonds, baby...
... government bonds.
And, besides all this stuff and nonsense, what's this whole truth thing anyway?
Football Is Fixed - We Reconstruct An Order On The Other Side Of Chaos :)
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Thursday, 29 January 2009
Tuesday, 27 January 2009
Shop A Cromwellian! #
ALERT ALERT ALERT
Populism is not our strong suit and support of the surveillance techniques representative of a police state is not something to which we would normally wish to add our association.
But tonight is different...
Last year on May 14th, 50,000 Rangers fans descended on the one true universal city that is Manchester.
They left within the day with the club having allegedly ###########################
####################################################################### and the fans having left behind a sea of wreckage and vomit and destruction and vomit and criminal damage and vomit and a trail of actual and grievous bodily harm and more vomit.
They treated little homes with scorn...
Fortunately I was abroad at the time but Mancunian 'Gers fans were embarrassed by the display.
Tonight BBC Crimewatch at 21:00 GMT is the latest Hyperreality Spectacular to hit our screens.
Shop A Cromwellian!
For Greater Manchester Police, bless their little taser guns, have identified 49 individuals who they would be interested in having a wee conversation with.
Excellent!
Tell your mates. All Hoops should be nestled comfortably in front of High Definition tv screens. Video it. Replay it. Show it to your work colleagues.
Send the 'Gers Forty Nine back to the the one true universal city etc etc and make them clean the bloody place up.
Because it is a disgrace and, when the Depression bites, it will be deeply comforting to understand that our streets, at least, are impeccably clean.
Shop A Cromwellian!
NB: There are a number of Rangers fans who subscribe to the Football Is Fixed blog and, one would assume, there are others who read the freebie bits at this place.
Being a fan of Celtic (well, the principle of Celtic rather than its current roguish incarnation, that would be), I have to take care when attacking a certain other team as I am undoubtedly biased, unconsciously at least.
So, by way of redress, lets finish off on the state of Celtic.
I would gladly support a Crimewatch Iraq War Spectacular too.
This would involve the beaming of a certain Dr John Reid to Den Haag in order to answer questions about his role in the practices of the government, of which he was home secretary, with regards to the Geneva Conventions and the utilisation of Extraordinary Rendition to boot...
Shop An Extraordinary Renditioner!!
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Populism is not our strong suit and support of the surveillance techniques representative of a police state is not something to which we would normally wish to add our association.
But tonight is different...
Last year on May 14th, 50,000 Rangers fans descended on the one true universal city that is Manchester.
They left within the day with the club having allegedly ###########################
####################################################################### and the fans having left behind a sea of wreckage and vomit and destruction and vomit and criminal damage and vomit and a trail of actual and grievous bodily harm and more vomit.
They treated little homes with scorn...
Fortunately I was abroad at the time but Mancunian 'Gers fans were embarrassed by the display.
Tonight BBC Crimewatch at 21:00 GMT is the latest Hyperreality Spectacular to hit our screens.
Shop A Cromwellian!
For Greater Manchester Police, bless their little taser guns, have identified 49 individuals who they would be interested in having a wee conversation with.
Excellent!
Tell your mates. All Hoops should be nestled comfortably in front of High Definition tv screens. Video it. Replay it. Show it to your work colleagues.
Send the 'Gers Forty Nine back to the the one true universal city etc etc and make them clean the bloody place up.
Because it is a disgrace and, when the Depression bites, it will be deeply comforting to understand that our streets, at least, are impeccably clean.
Shop A Cromwellian!
NB: There are a number of Rangers fans who subscribe to the Football Is Fixed blog and, one would assume, there are others who read the freebie bits at this place.
Being a fan of Celtic (well, the principle of Celtic rather than its current roguish incarnation, that would be), I have to take care when attacking a certain other team as I am undoubtedly biased, unconsciously at least.
So, by way of redress, lets finish off on the state of Celtic.
I would gladly support a Crimewatch Iraq War Spectacular too.
This would involve the beaming of a certain Dr John Reid to Den Haag in order to answer questions about his role in the practices of the government, of which he was home secretary, with regards to the Geneva Conventions and the utilisation of Extraordinary Rendition to boot...
Shop An Extraordinary Renditioner!!
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Monday, 26 January 2009
City Umiliato; Delusione Robinho #
Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away, and it was Rabbie's 250th birthday.
Today, there may be trouble ahead, and it is Chinese New Year - 新年快樂恭喜發財.
So, how to celebrate?
With some of Burns' demotic verse?
With a celebration of Harmony and memories of the highly successful Olympic Games, perhaps?
Or shall we just take the piss out of Manchester City instead?
No contest.
Barry Winston is a bearded 28 year old Manchester City/ Abu Dhabi United fan - the beard is only mentioned for comic effect...
So delighted was young Mr Winston that his team had purchased Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite (Kaká) that he had a 12.5 centimetre high Kaká tattooed across his chest, with the slogan "City till he dies" emblazoned underneath by needle.
Not content with this degree of misplaced trust in Garry Cook, the "mesmerically ghastly executive chairman" as Marina Hyde perfectly termed the Slime, Barry then decided to have a life size Kaká head tattooed on his back.
Here, at least, good fortune worked in his favour because the Brazilian head is simply amorphous-latino.
It could be anybody.
So Mr Winston is partially saved by a dodgy tattooist, a Mancunian boom industry, it would seem.
Garry Cook is exactly the sort of man who should not be allowed into the game of football.
Garry Cook is exactly the sort of man that ScudamoreWorld requires to market the brands.
Garry Cook is a triumph of moral decrepitude.
Garry Cook used to work for Nike where he blinkered his view away from the issues of child labour and the global sweatshops, and successfully promoted the brand of Michael Jordan instead.
Garry Cook was the perfect choice to work alongside His ####################### ################### Excellency. That was when his legal status allowed Doctor Thaksin Shinawatra to wander freely around this country, with his ownership of a leading club not suffering any concerns due to the Premier League's alleged fit-and-proper-persons test (FPPT).
Marina Hyde on Garry Cook: "Asked how he felt about working for the former Thai PM, condemned by Human Rights Watch as a "human-rights abuser of the worst kind", Garry replied: "Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things. Whether he is guilty of something over in Thailand, I can't worry … I worked for Nike who were accused of child-labour issues and I managed to have a career there for 15 years. I believed we were innocent of most of the issues. Morally, I felt comfortable in that environment."
He should be fine in East Manchester then...
Over the last week, there has been some stuff and nonsense uttered over the hyperillusory transfer of Kaká to Abu Dhabi United.
Somebody or Other: "[City are] being held to ransom in their search for the world's top players."
Arsène Wenger: "Kaká bid not in the real world."
Garry Cook graced us with "Milan bottled it", before insulting Kaká's father and agent, and then went on a management-speak MBA-based diatribe where he evoked images of "a journey" and spoke of "humanitarian potential factors".
Well it is East Manchester, I guess...
Garry Cook is failing in his job - as Marina Hyde correctly concluded: "... the City chairman would do well to admit that for all its vaingloriousness, and for all its farce, nothing about the entire Kaká saga has made the club look more amateurish than his charmless bleating about it afterwards."
And then there were the failed bids for Henry, Buffon, Santa Cruz and Villa (although Valencia's financial plight might secure the latter for a vastly over-priced £70 million).
And then there was paying £43 million for Bridge, Bellamy and de Jong (although the transfer fee for the latter would have ebbed from £19 million to just £2.3 million if Abu Dhabi United had waited for the summer - its not like they're going to win anything, after all).
And then there was the inability to create a big picture and a longer term strategy that might entice Kaká the footballer, as opposed to Kaká the brand to East Manchester.
Cook simply reasoned that the £500,000 per week wages and the chance to be as famous in capitalism as Mr Jordan would be temptation enough.
When the Kaká camp asked about future transfer and business strategy, Mr Cook did not have an answer because no such longer term strategy exists, Cook's City Energy Drinks nonsense aside...
And then there was letting down the one prized asset that Abu Dhabi already possess, Robinho.
So delighted was he with Mr Cook's negotiating talents that he walked out on the club.
And to help explain this business model and the integrity of the operation of which he is a part, Mr Cook stated helpfully: "... the expectation that is set by the public space of who we are and what we represent is not truly who we are or what we represent."
It's like the Enlightenment never happened.
Nike's gain is our loss.
"Finance is full of illusions and uncertainties" - J.K Galbraith.
Abu Dhabi United is not a sustainable business model in the longer term.
Here's why.
Last summer, when oil hovered around $150 per barrel, the sovereign wealth-funds (SWFs) of the oil-rich nations rushed in to support western capitalism that was reeling from both the credit crunch and the corrective strategies of Hank Paulson et al.
Oil is currently less than one-third of this price and the Depression has not yet begun in earnest.
We need to check out the impact of such price volatility on incentives.
Within a year, the flow of capital from SWFs has largely dried up due entirely to the oil price and the economic climate.
But there has been an additional impact.
Funding for clean-energy technology has also plummeted in the Recession/Depression, as capitalists make the choice that oil is still viable for now on a profit and loss basis, obviously ignoring the impacts on climate change.
The oil industry has a built-in strategic assured self-destruction built into its business model.
When the price is low, profits are low, and clean technology is held at bay to the detriment of the super-eco-systemic risk. The planet deteriorates...
When the price increases, profits increase, but clean technology becomes price competitive to the detriment of the oil industry and the countries dependent on Black Gold.
Either way, Manchester City are not sustainable in the longer term under the current ownership.
Garry Cook's vision thing fails on another level too.
The pursuit of Kaká was primarily for control of the man's global image rights.
Garry Cook wished to possess the Kaká brand, steal the public face of the man for proprietary profit.
He should look back to the 1920s and 1930s - image rights will seem just a trifle superfluous in the Depression. The narrative will no longer be able to be told.
Depressions give you Woody Guthrie not branded hyperentities promoting a dead consumerism.
There is also the issue that is being carefully ignored - His Excellency Thaksin Shinawatra.
The Smiling Assassin still owns 25% of Manchester City and remains as an honorary president of the club.
Being barred from Britain due to his corruption and fraud issues in his native Thailand, Shinawatra is currently jetting around Asia and the Arab world trying to do deals. He is also trying to foster a revolution against ######################
############################################ but that is neither here nor there...
When Shinawatra was prime minister of Thailand, he was ######### responsible for what Amnesty International called the "systematic" murder of Muslims in the restive south of the country.
Why is this man still allowed to own ANY of Manchester City?
Why is he still an honorary president, alongside truly honourable characters like Tony Book?
And why are so many City journalists, David Conn springs to mind, undergoing selective journalistic revisionism regarding their euphoria and adulation of Shinawatra after the rigged Munich 50 year anniversary match?
And still their silence will not do.
Where is the call by City fans for Shinawatra to be stripped of all links, financial or otherwise, with the club?
Where is the incentive from ScudamoreWorld for this to come to pass?
Or do Shinawatra's continuing arms-length sponsorship arrangement with the PGMOB match officials via the AirAsia entity and his value in other aspects of the Premier League's expansion into Asia mean that he can order ######## so long as his cash is ofshorky and his tee-shots are straight and true.
Aside from issues relating to the Depression, the football world has other issues that will limit the future growth of the industry.
When Victor Chandler International relaunched their spread betting operation last week, Chandler stated: "The reason why the Premier League and all the big [football] leagues are so popular in Asia is there is no question about football's integrity. Any reports of irregular betting patterns are just 'blips'".
Where to start?
Firstly, the Premiership is so popular in Asia EXACTLY because of how fixed the games are.
Secondly, ScudamoreWorld wishes to market itself to British customers as an operation based on integrity.
Thirdly, we would ask Mr Chandler whether the £12 million in bets placed with his company in Gibraltar #########################################################
################################################### was just a 'blip'?
When the full effect of the corruption underpinning football is in the shared consciousness of the football fan, the game will be lost.
When betting money takes over a sport, you get horseracing or greyhound racing.
The markets are dominant, the sport is hyperreal.
Football is not a sport.
It is a corrupted product - a product existing outside the bounds of its original purpose.
When the current wave of hyperowners retreat to their offshore financial centres, football will be left totally in the clutches of the gambling industry.
Perhaps then ScudamoreWorld might be good enough to campaign for a levy on the bookmaking organisations who leech their profits off our sports without providing anything in return.
Michel Foucault: "The last crime cannot but remain unpunished."
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Today, there may be trouble ahead, and it is Chinese New Year - 新年快樂恭喜發財.
So, how to celebrate?
With some of Burns' demotic verse?
With a celebration of Harmony and memories of the highly successful Olympic Games, perhaps?
Or shall we just take the piss out of Manchester City instead?
No contest.
Barry Winston is a bearded 28 year old Manchester City/ Abu Dhabi United fan - the beard is only mentioned for comic effect...
So delighted was young Mr Winston that his team had purchased Ricardo Izecson dos Santos Leite (Kaká) that he had a 12.5 centimetre high Kaká tattooed across his chest, with the slogan "City till he dies" emblazoned underneath by needle.
Not content with this degree of misplaced trust in Garry Cook, the "mesmerically ghastly executive chairman" as Marina Hyde perfectly termed the Slime, Barry then decided to have a life size Kaká head tattooed on his back.
Here, at least, good fortune worked in his favour because the Brazilian head is simply amorphous-latino.
It could be anybody.
So Mr Winston is partially saved by a dodgy tattooist, a Mancunian boom industry, it would seem.
Garry Cook is exactly the sort of man who should not be allowed into the game of football.
Garry Cook is exactly the sort of man that ScudamoreWorld requires to market the brands.
Garry Cook is a triumph of moral decrepitude.
Garry Cook used to work for Nike where he blinkered his view away from the issues of child labour and the global sweatshops, and successfully promoted the brand of Michael Jordan instead.
Garry Cook was the perfect choice to work alongside His ####################### ################### Excellency. That was when his legal status allowed Doctor Thaksin Shinawatra to wander freely around this country, with his ownership of a leading club not suffering any concerns due to the Premier League's alleged fit-and-proper-persons test (FPPT).
Marina Hyde on Garry Cook: "Asked how he felt about working for the former Thai PM, condemned by Human Rights Watch as a "human-rights abuser of the worst kind", Garry replied: "Is he a nice guy? Yes. Is he a great guy to play golf with? Yes. Does he have plenty of money to run a football club? Yes. I really care only about those three things. Whether he is guilty of something over in Thailand, I can't worry … I worked for Nike who were accused of child-labour issues and I managed to have a career there for 15 years. I believed we were innocent of most of the issues. Morally, I felt comfortable in that environment."
He should be fine in East Manchester then...
Over the last week, there has been some stuff and nonsense uttered over the hyperillusory transfer of Kaká to Abu Dhabi United.
Somebody or Other: "[City are] being held to ransom in their search for the world's top players."
Arsène Wenger: "Kaká bid not in the real world."
Garry Cook graced us with "Milan bottled it", before insulting Kaká's father and agent, and then went on a management-speak MBA-based diatribe where he evoked images of "a journey" and spoke of "humanitarian potential factors".
Well it is East Manchester, I guess...
Garry Cook is failing in his job - as Marina Hyde correctly concluded: "... the City chairman would do well to admit that for all its vaingloriousness, and for all its farce, nothing about the entire Kaká saga has made the club look more amateurish than his charmless bleating about it afterwards."
And then there were the failed bids for Henry, Buffon, Santa Cruz and Villa (although Valencia's financial plight might secure the latter for a vastly over-priced £70 million).
And then there was paying £43 million for Bridge, Bellamy and de Jong (although the transfer fee for the latter would have ebbed from £19 million to just £2.3 million if Abu Dhabi United had waited for the summer - its not like they're going to win anything, after all).
And then there was the inability to create a big picture and a longer term strategy that might entice Kaká the footballer, as opposed to Kaká the brand to East Manchester.
Cook simply reasoned that the £500,000 per week wages and the chance to be as famous in capitalism as Mr Jordan would be temptation enough.
When the Kaká camp asked about future transfer and business strategy, Mr Cook did not have an answer because no such longer term strategy exists, Cook's City Energy Drinks nonsense aside...
And then there was letting down the one prized asset that Abu Dhabi already possess, Robinho.
So delighted was he with Mr Cook's negotiating talents that he walked out on the club.
And to help explain this business model and the integrity of the operation of which he is a part, Mr Cook stated helpfully: "... the expectation that is set by the public space of who we are and what we represent is not truly who we are or what we represent."
It's like the Enlightenment never happened.
Nike's gain is our loss.
"Finance is full of illusions and uncertainties" - J.K Galbraith.
Abu Dhabi United is not a sustainable business model in the longer term.
Here's why.
Last summer, when oil hovered around $150 per barrel, the sovereign wealth-funds (SWFs) of the oil-rich nations rushed in to support western capitalism that was reeling from both the credit crunch and the corrective strategies of Hank Paulson et al.
Oil is currently less than one-third of this price and the Depression has not yet begun in earnest.
We need to check out the impact of such price volatility on incentives.
Within a year, the flow of capital from SWFs has largely dried up due entirely to the oil price and the economic climate.
But there has been an additional impact.
Funding for clean-energy technology has also plummeted in the Recession/Depression, as capitalists make the choice that oil is still viable for now on a profit and loss basis, obviously ignoring the impacts on climate change.
The oil industry has a built-in strategic assured self-destruction built into its business model.
When the price is low, profits are low, and clean technology is held at bay to the detriment of the super-eco-systemic risk. The planet deteriorates...
When the price increases, profits increase, but clean technology becomes price competitive to the detriment of the oil industry and the countries dependent on Black Gold.
Either way, Manchester City are not sustainable in the longer term under the current ownership.
Garry Cook's vision thing fails on another level too.
The pursuit of Kaká was primarily for control of the man's global image rights.
Garry Cook wished to possess the Kaká brand, steal the public face of the man for proprietary profit.
He should look back to the 1920s and 1930s - image rights will seem just a trifle superfluous in the Depression. The narrative will no longer be able to be told.
Depressions give you Woody Guthrie not branded hyperentities promoting a dead consumerism.
There is also the issue that is being carefully ignored - His Excellency Thaksin Shinawatra.
The Smiling Assassin still owns 25% of Manchester City and remains as an honorary president of the club.
Being barred from Britain due to his corruption and fraud issues in his native Thailand, Shinawatra is currently jetting around Asia and the Arab world trying to do deals. He is also trying to foster a revolution against ######################
############################################ but that is neither here nor there...
When Shinawatra was prime minister of Thailand, he was ######### responsible for what Amnesty International called the "systematic" murder of Muslims in the restive south of the country.
Why is this man still allowed to own ANY of Manchester City?
Why is he still an honorary president, alongside truly honourable characters like Tony Book?
And why are so many City journalists, David Conn springs to mind, undergoing selective journalistic revisionism regarding their euphoria and adulation of Shinawatra after the rigged Munich 50 year anniversary match?
And still their silence will not do.
Where is the call by City fans for Shinawatra to be stripped of all links, financial or otherwise, with the club?
Where is the incentive from ScudamoreWorld for this to come to pass?
Or do Shinawatra's continuing arms-length sponsorship arrangement with the PGMOB match officials via the AirAsia entity and his value in other aspects of the Premier League's expansion into Asia mean that he can order ######## so long as his cash is ofshorky and his tee-shots are straight and true.
Aside from issues relating to the Depression, the football world has other issues that will limit the future growth of the industry.
When Victor Chandler International relaunched their spread betting operation last week, Chandler stated: "The reason why the Premier League and all the big [football] leagues are so popular in Asia is there is no question about football's integrity. Any reports of irregular betting patterns are just 'blips'".
Where to start?
Firstly, the Premiership is so popular in Asia EXACTLY because of how fixed the games are.
Secondly, ScudamoreWorld wishes to market itself to British customers as an operation based on integrity.
Thirdly, we would ask Mr Chandler whether the £12 million in bets placed with his company in Gibraltar #########################################################
################################################### was just a 'blip'?
When the full effect of the corruption underpinning football is in the shared consciousness of the football fan, the game will be lost.
When betting money takes over a sport, you get horseracing or greyhound racing.
The markets are dominant, the sport is hyperreal.
Football is not a sport.
It is a corrupted product - a product existing outside the bounds of its original purpose.
When the current wave of hyperowners retreat to their offshore financial centres, football will be left totally in the clutches of the gambling industry.
Perhaps then ScudamoreWorld might be good enough to campaign for a levy on the bookmaking organisations who leech their profits off our sports without providing anything in return.
Michel Foucault: "The last crime cannot but remain unpunished."
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Tuesday, 20 January 2009
Gaza - A Panopticon For The Palestinians
Noam Chomsky: "On Saturday December 27, the latest US-Israeli attack on helpless Palestinians was launched. The attack had been meticulously planned, for over 6 months according to the Israeli press. The planning had two components: military and propaganda. It was based on the lessons of Israel's 2006 invasion of Lebanon, which was considered to be poorly planned and badly advertised. We may, therefore, be fairly confident that most of what has been done and said was pre-planned and intended.
That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee."
Why are we not able to watch, on the telly, Kettering and their Palestinian charity shirt sponsors against Egyptian-owned Fulham in the FA Cup next weekend?
Noam Chomsky: "The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes."
Why are FIFA taking action against Frédéric Kanouté for displaying the slogan "Palestina" in a recent Copa Del Rey match?
Noam Chomsky: "Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath. To honour the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters."
Why on earth would Kaká have left Milan for Abu Dhabi United?
Noam Chomsky: "The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote. They are too familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defence" Forces). The bombing hit the local hospital - the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support. That included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to halt the criminal aggression that was undertaken, as scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from the threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense rocketing, a fantasy of apologists."
Why did the roof collapse, killing nine people, at Kaká's church, the Reborn in Christ Church, during his negotiations with Abu Dhabi United? Was it a Sign?
Noam Chomsky: "All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials. Thirty years ago Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities." As Israel's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his remarks, "the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets." The reasons were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labour government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name." Eban did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for stating them publicly. Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his advocacy of massive state terror is also reminiscent of regimes he would not dare to mention by name."
Why are the mainstream media pretending that we have a January Transfer Market when, in Reality, we have an Abu Dhabi United Transfer Window?
Noam Chomsky: "Eban's justification for state terror is regarded as persuasive by respected authorities. As the current US-Israel assault raged, Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel's tactics both in the current attack and in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 are based on the sound principle of "trying to 'educate' Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." That makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon, where "the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians -- the families and employers of the militants -- to restrain Hezbollah in the future." And by similar logic, bin Laden's effort to "educate" Americans on 9/11 was highly praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin's destruction of Grozny, and other notable attempts at 'education'."
Why is Rafa so "disturbed" and full of "venom" over his historical revisionism?
Noam Chomsky: "Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society."
Why, even Fernando Torres does not agree with his manager...
Noam Chomsky: "Hamas is regularly described as "Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel." One will be hard put to find something like "democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus" -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable."
Why is Rafa cracking up?
Noam Chomsky: "Such details as those mentioned earlier, though minor, nevertheless teach us something about ourselves and our clients. So do others. To mention another one, as the latest US-Israeli assault on Gaza began, a small boat, the Dignity, was on its way from Cyprus to Gaza. The doctors and human rights activists aboard intended to violate Israel's criminal blockade and to bring medical supplies to the trapped population. The ship was intercepted in international waters by Israeli naval vessels, which rammed it severely, almost sinking it, though it managed to limp to Lebanon. Israel issued the routine lies, refuted by the journalists and passengers aboard, including CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul and former US representative and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. That is a serious crime -- much worse, for example, than hijacking boats off the coast of Somalia. It passed with little notice. The tacit acceptance of such crimes reflects the understanding that Gaza is occupied territory, and that Israel is entitled to maintain its siege, even authorized by the guardians of international order to carry out crimes on the high seas to implement its programs of punishing the civilian population for disobedience to its commands - under pretexts to which we return, almost universally accepted but clearly untenable."
Why the satanic beard, Rafa?
Noam Chomsky: "Who cares, for example, if the editors of Lebanon's Daily Star, generally pro-Western, write that "Some 1.5 million people in Gaza are being subjected to the murderous ministrations of one of the world's most technologically advanced but morally regressive military machines. It is often suggested that the Palestinians have become to the Arab world what the Jews were to pre-World War II Europe, and there is some truth to this interpretation. How sickeningly appropriate, then, that just as Europeans and North Americans looked the other way when the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust, the Arabs are finding a way to do nothing as the Israelis slaughter Palestinian children." Perhaps the most shameful of the Arab regimes is the brutal Egyptian dictatorship, the beneficiary of most US military aid, apart from Israel."
Why does PGMOB official Stuart Attwell always cover his mouth when talking to senior referees?
Noam Chomsky: "The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category - except for the category of familiarity; I've just given several examples, and will return to others. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of "terrorism," but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called "aggression," because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes. In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Lords of the Land, Idit Zertal and Akiva Eldar point out that after Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day... Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might" - exercised with extreme savagery, thanks to firm US support and participation."
Why has Steve Bennett officiated at five out of the last 28 Premiership matches?
Noam Chomsky: "The US-Israeli assault on Gaza escalated in January 2006, a few months after the formal withdrawal, when Palestinians committed a truly heinous crime: they voted "the wrong way" in a free election. Like others, Palestinians learned that one does not disobey with impunity the commands of the Master, who continues to prate of his "yearning for democracy," without eliciting ridicule from the educated classes, another impressive achievement."
Why were there three changes of referee in the Premiership last weekend when most leading European leagues see one such instance every five years or so?
Noam Chomsky: "Since the terms "aggression" and "terrorism" are inadequate, some new term is needed for the sadistic and cowardly torture of people caged with no possibility of escape, while they are being pounded to dust by the most sophisticated products of US military technology - used in violation of international and even US law, but for self-declared outlaw states that is just another minor technicality. Also a minor technicality is the fact that on December 31, while terrorized Gazans were desperately seeking shelter from the ruthless assault, Washington hired a German merchant ship to transport from Greece to Israel a huge shipment, 3000 tons, of unidentified "ammunition." The new shipment "follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip," Reuters reported. All of this is separate from the more than $21 billion in U.S. military aid provided by the Bush administration to Israel, almost all grants. "Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," said a briefing by the New America Foundation, which monitors the arms trade. The new shipment was hampered by the decision of the Greek government to bar the use of any port in Greece "for the supplying of the Israeli army."
Greece's response to US-backed Israeli crimes is rather different from the craven performance of the leaders of most of Europe. The distinction reveals that Washington may have been quite realistic in regarding Greece as part of the Near East, not Europe, until the overthrow of its US-backed fascist dictatorship in 1974. Perhaps Greece is just too civilized to be part of Europe."
Why does Howard Webb get every major match and isn't this just a little too much power in one policeman's hands?
Noam Chomsky: "There are good reasons why the voting record is consistently unreported and dispatched deep into the memory hole by the media and conformist intellectuals. It would not be wise to reveal to the public what the record implies about their elected representatives. In the present case it would plainly be unhelpful to let the public know that US-Israeli rejectionism, barring the peaceful settlement long advocated by the world, reaches such an extreme as to deny Palestinians even the abstract right to self-determination."
Why has Keith Harris finally admitted that there is no possibility of any club being sold in the current global financial climate that was absolutely not caused, in any way whatsoever, by free market capitalist ideologues?
Noam Chomsky: "The figures for killed and wounded are surely an underestimate. And it is unlikely that there will be any inquiry into these atrocities. Crimes of official enemies are subjected to rigorous investigation, but our own are systematically ignored. General practice, again, and understandable on the part of the masters.
The Security Council Resolution called for stopping the flow of arms into Gaza. The US and Israel (Rice-Livni) soon reached an agreement on measures to ensure this result, concentrating on Iranian arms. There is no need to stop smuggling of US arms into Israel, because there is no smuggling: the huge flow of arms is quite public, even when not reported, as in the case of the arms shipment announced as the slaughter in Gaza was proceeding."
Why is Richard Scudamore keeping very very quiet at the moment? It surely would have nothing to do with the new televisions deals, would it?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel abandoned Gaza in September 2005. Rational Israeli hardliners, like Ariel Sharon, the patron saint of the settlers movement, understood that it was senseless to subsidize a few thousand illegal Israeli settlers in the ruins of Gaza, protected by the IDF while they used much of the land and scarce resources. It made more sense to turn Gaza into the world's largest prison and to transfer settlers to the West Bank, much more valuable territory, where Israel is quite explicit about its intentions, in word and more importantly in deed. One goal is to annex the arable land, water supplies, and pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that lie within the separation wall, irrelevantly declared illegal by the World Court. That includes a vastly expanded Jerusalem, in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years, also irrelevant. Israel has also been taking over the Jordan Valley, about one-third of the West Bank. What remains is therefore imprisoned, and, furthermore, broken into fragments by salients of Jewish settlement that trisect the territory: one to the east of Greater Jerusalem through the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, developed through the Clinton years to split the West Bank; and two to the north, through the towns of Ariel and Kedumim. What remains to Palestinians is segregated by hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints."
Why will the Premiership title race go to the very last game again this season?
Noam Chomsky: "The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel, and if some are intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled. In reality, their major goal is harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control," designed to make life unbearable for the "two-legged beasts" who will be like "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" if they seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are "like grasshoppers compared to us" so that their heads can be "smashed against the boulders and walls." The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered "princes." And the attitudes shape policies."
Why is the Premiership now a handicapped event?
Noam Chomsky: "The plans that Olmert sketched in 2006 have since been abandoned as not sufficiently extreme. But what replaces the convergence programme, and the actions that proceed daily to implement it, are approximately the same in general conception. They trace back to the earliest days of the occupation, when Defence Minister Moshe Dayan explained poetically that "the situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against her will...You Palestinians, as a nation, don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you." You will "live like dogs, and whoever will leave, will leave," while we take what we want."
Why? Is it true that the Dalai Lama wishes an audience with Harry Redknapp?
Noam Chomsky: "As the crimes passed beyond what the carefully honed Israeli propaganda campaign was able to suppress, even confirmed Israeli hawks became concerned that the carnage is "Destroying [Israel's] soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America" (Ari Shavit). Shavit was particularly concerned about Israel's "shelling a United Nations facility...on the day when the UN secretary general is visiting Jerusalem," an act that is "beyond lunacy," he felt."
Why does Stevie G take such an interest in matters of the underworld variety?
Noam Chomsky: "Before, Israel had sensibly barred all journalists, even Israeli, while its crimes were proceeding in full fury. Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians is "clear and undeniable," Amnesty International (AI) reported. Its repeated use in densely populated civilian areas "is a war crime," AI concluded. They found white phosphorus edges scattered around residential buildings, still burning, "further endangering the residents and their property," particularly children "drawn to the detritus of war and often unaware of the danger." Primary targets, they report, were the UNRWA compound, where the Israeli "white phosphorus landed next to some fuel trucks and caused a large fire which destroyed tons of humanitarian aid" after Israeli authorities "had given assurance that no further strikes would be launched on the compound." On the same day, "a white phosphorus shell landed in the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City also causing a fire which forced hospital staff to evacuate the patients... White phosphorus landing on skin can burn deep through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn unless deprived of oxygen." Purposely intended or beyond depraved indifference, such crimes are inevitable when this weapon is used in attacks on civilians."
Why is Thaksin Shinawatra still allowed to own 25% of Abu Dhabi United when the latest Amnesty International report accuses his government of "systematic" genocide against Muslims in the south of the country?
Noam Chomsky: "Aggression always has a pretext: in this case, that Israel's patience had "run out" in the face of Hamas rocket attacks, as Barak put it. The mantra that is endlessly repeated is that Israel has the right to use force to defend itself. The thesis is partially defensible. The rocketing is criminal, and it is true that a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks. But it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. That goes far beyond any principle that we would or should accept. Nazi Germany had no right to use force to defend itself against the terrorism of the partisans. Kristallnacht is not justified by Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris. The British were not justified in using force to defend themselves against the (very real) terror of the American colonists seeking independence, or to terrorize Irish Catholics in response to IRA terror - and when they finally turned to the sensible policy of addressing legitimate grievances, the terror ended. It is not a matter of "proportionality," but of choice of action in the first place: Is there an alternative to violence?"
Why have Victor Chandler International decided to enter the spread betting sector at the onset of the Depression? Did they not learn when they last dipped their toes in the waters?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words."
Why are Victor Chandler International so concerned at the integrity of football?
Noam Chomsky: "After Israel broke the June 2008 ceasefire (such as it was) in November, the siege was tightened further, with even more disastrous consequences for the population. According to Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza, "On Nov. 5, Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza, vastly reducing and at times denying food supplies, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, and parts for water and sanitation systems..." During November, an average of 4.6 trucks of food per day entered Gaza from Israel compared with an average of 123 trucks per day in October. Spare parts for the repair and maintenance of water-related equipment have been denied entry for over a year. The World Health Organization just reported that half of Gaza's ambulances are now out of order" - and the rest soon became targets for Israeli attack. Gaza's only power station was forced to suspend operation for lack of fuel, and could not be started up again because they needed spare parts, which had been sitting in the Israeli port of Ashdod for 8 months. Shortage of electricity led to a 300% increase in burn cases at Shifaa' hospital in the Gaza Strip, resulting from efforts to light wood fires. Israel barred shipment of Chlorine, so that by mid-December in Gaza City and the north access to water was limited to six hours every three days. The human consequences are not counted among Palestinian victims of Israeli terror."
Why did Alan Shearer rewrite Reality in his assessment of Mike Dean's comedic performance in allegedly refereeing the game between Sunderland and Aston Villa?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel's senior diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar reports that shortly before Israel launched its full-scale invasion on Saturday Dec. 27, "Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal announced on the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a 'cessation of aggression' - he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crossing as of 2005, before Hamas won the elections and later took over the region. That arrangement was for the crossing to be managed jointly by Egypt, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas," and as noted earlier, called for opening of the crossings to desperately needed supplies."
Why did Dave Whelan put all his ill-gotten gains into dodgy Icelandic banks?
Noam Chomsky: "Today, Israel could have security, normalization of relations, and integration into the region. But it very clearly prefers illegal expansion, conflict, and repeated exercise of violence, actions that are not only criminal, murderous and destructive but are also eroding its own long-term security. US military and Middle East specialist Andrew Cordesman writes that while Israel military force can surely crush defenseless Gaza, "neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces [a bitter] reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that `The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza'.""
Why does Dave Whelan object to other's tilting markets for proprietary advantage when he employs such tactics himself?
Noam Chomsky: "One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.""
Why is the collapse of the BSkyB linkage with pubs going to be so key to the next tv deal, to the Premier League's financial detriment?
Noam Chomsky: "There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel" are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible."
Why was it so funny seeing psychopath Dick Cheney arriving for the inauguration of ObamaWorld - not "Renewing America" so much as "Rebranding America" - in his wheelchair? Why was this just so funny...?
Noam Chomsky: "Meanwhile we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called "politicide," the murder of a nation -- at our hands."
We are all Palestinians...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
That surely includes the timing of the assault: shortly before noon, when children were returning from school and crowds were milling in the streets of densely populated Gaza City. It took only a few minutes to kill over 225 people and wound 700, an auspicious opening to the mass slaughter of defenceless civilians trapped in a tiny cage with nowhere to flee."
Why are we not able to watch, on the telly, Kettering and their Palestinian charity shirt sponsors against Egyptian-owned Fulham in the FA Cup next weekend?
Noam Chomsky: "The meticulous planning also presumably included the termination of the assault, carefully timed to be just before the inauguration, so as to minimize the (remote) threat that Obama might have to say some words critical of these vicious US-supported crimes."
Why are FIFA taking action against Frédéric Kanouté for displaying the slogan "Palestina" in a recent Copa Del Rey match?
Noam Chomsky: "Two weeks after the Sabbath opening of the assault, with much of Gaza already pounded to rubble and the death toll approaching 1000, the UN Agency UNRWA, on which most Gazans depend for survival, announced that the Israeli military refused to allow aid shipments to Gaza, saying that the crossings were closed for the Sabbath. To honour the holy day, Palestinians at the edge of survival must be denied food and medicine, while hundreds can be slaughtered by US jet bombers and helicopters."
Why on earth would Kaká have left Milan for Abu Dhabi United?
Noam Chomsky: "The rigorous observance of the Sabbath in this dual fashion attracted little if any notice. That makes sense. In the annals of US-Israeli criminality, such cruelty and cynicism scarcely merit more than a footnote. They are too familiar. To cite one relevant parallel, in June 1982 the US-backed Israeli invasion of Lebanon opened with the bombing of the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila, later to become famous as the site of terrible massacres supervised by the IDF (Israeli "Defence" Forces). The bombing hit the local hospital - the Gaza hospital -- and killed over 200 people, according to the eyewitness account of an American Middle East academic specialist. The massacre was the opening act in an invasion that slaughtered some 15-20,000 people and destroyed much of southern Lebanon and Beirut, proceeding with crucial US military and diplomatic support. That included vetoes of Security Council resolutions seeking to halt the criminal aggression that was undertaken, as scarcely concealed, to defend Israel from the threat of peaceful political settlement, contrary to many convenient fabrications about Israelis suffering under intense rocketing, a fantasy of apologists."
Why did the roof collapse, killing nine people, at Kaká's church, the Reborn in Christ Church, during his negotiations with Abu Dhabi United? Was it a Sign?
Noam Chomsky: "All of this is normal, and quite openly discussed by high Israeli officials. Thirty years ago Chief of Staff Mordechai Gur observed that since 1948, "we have been fighting against a population that lives in villages and cities." As Israel's most prominent military analyst, Zeev Schiff, summarized his remarks, "the Israeli Army has always struck civilian populations, purposely and consciously...the Army, he said, has never distinguished civilian [from military] targets...[but] purposely attacked civilian targets." The reasons were explained by the distinguished statesman Abba Eban: "there was a rational prospect, ultimately fulfilled, that affected populations would exert pressure for the cessation of hostilities." The effect, as Eban well understood, would be to allow Israel to implement, undisturbed, its programs of illegal expansion and harsh repression. Eban was commenting on a review of Labour government attacks against civilians by Prime Minister Begin, presenting a picture, Eban said, "of an Israel wantonly inflicting every possible measure of death and anguish on civilian populations in a mood reminiscent of regimes which neither Mr.Begin nor I would dare to mention by name." Eban did not contest the facts that Begin reviewed, but criticized him for stating them publicly. Nor did it concern Eban, or his admirers, that his advocacy of massive state terror is also reminiscent of regimes he would not dare to mention by name."
Why are the mainstream media pretending that we have a January Transfer Market when, in Reality, we have an Abu Dhabi United Transfer Window?
Noam Chomsky: "Eban's justification for state terror is regarded as persuasive by respected authorities. As the current US-Israel assault raged, Times columnist Thomas Friedman explained that Israel's tactics both in the current attack and in its invasion of Lebanon in 2006 are based on the sound principle of "trying to 'educate' Hamas, by inflicting a heavy death toll on Hamas militants and heavy pain on the Gaza population." That makes sense on pragmatic grounds, as it did in Lebanon, where "the only long-term source of deterrence was to exact enough pain on the civilians -- the families and employers of the militants -- to restrain Hezbollah in the future." And by similar logic, bin Laden's effort to "educate" Americans on 9/11 was highly praiseworthy, as were the Nazi attacks on Lidice and Oradour, Putin's destruction of Grozny, and other notable attempts at 'education'."
Why is Rafa so "disturbed" and full of "venom" over his historical revisionism?
Noam Chomsky: "Like others familiar with the region, Middle East specialist Fawwaz Gerges observes that "What Israeli officials and their American allies do not appreciate is that Hamas is not merely an armed militia but a social movement with a large popular base that is deeply entrenched in society." Hence when they carry out their plans to destroy Hamas's "social wing," they are aiming to destroy Palestinian society."
Why, even Fernando Torres does not agree with his manager...
Noam Chomsky: "Hamas is regularly described as "Iranian-backed Hamas, which is dedicated to the destruction of Israel." One will be hard put to find something like "democratically elected Hamas, which has long been calling for a two-state settlement in accord with the international consensus" -- blocked for over 30 years by the US and Israel, which flatly and explicitly reject the right of Palestinians to self-determination. All true, but not a useful contribution to the Party Line, hence dispensable."
Why is Rafa cracking up?
Noam Chomsky: "Such details as those mentioned earlier, though minor, nevertheless teach us something about ourselves and our clients. So do others. To mention another one, as the latest US-Israeli assault on Gaza began, a small boat, the Dignity, was on its way from Cyprus to Gaza. The doctors and human rights activists aboard intended to violate Israel's criminal blockade and to bring medical supplies to the trapped population. The ship was intercepted in international waters by Israeli naval vessels, which rammed it severely, almost sinking it, though it managed to limp to Lebanon. Israel issued the routine lies, refuted by the journalists and passengers aboard, including CNN correspondent Karl Penhaul and former US representative and Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney. That is a serious crime -- much worse, for example, than hijacking boats off the coast of Somalia. It passed with little notice. The tacit acceptance of such crimes reflects the understanding that Gaza is occupied territory, and that Israel is entitled to maintain its siege, even authorized by the guardians of international order to carry out crimes on the high seas to implement its programs of punishing the civilian population for disobedience to its commands - under pretexts to which we return, almost universally accepted but clearly untenable."
Why the satanic beard, Rafa?
Noam Chomsky: "Who cares, for example, if the editors of Lebanon's Daily Star, generally pro-Western, write that "Some 1.5 million people in Gaza are being subjected to the murderous ministrations of one of the world's most technologically advanced but morally regressive military machines. It is often suggested that the Palestinians have become to the Arab world what the Jews were to pre-World War II Europe, and there is some truth to this interpretation. How sickeningly appropriate, then, that just as Europeans and North Americans looked the other way when the Nazis were perpetrating the Holocaust, the Arabs are finding a way to do nothing as the Israelis slaughter Palestinian children." Perhaps the most shameful of the Arab regimes is the brutal Egyptian dictatorship, the beneficiary of most US military aid, apart from Israel."
Why does PGMOB official Stuart Attwell always cover his mouth when talking to senior referees?
Noam Chomsky: "The new crimes that the US and Israel have been committing in Gaza in the past weeks do not fit easily into any standard category - except for the category of familiarity; I've just given several examples, and will return to others. Literally, the crimes fall under the official US government definition of "terrorism," but that designation does not capture their enormity. They cannot be called "aggression," because they are being conducted in occupied territory, as the US tacitly concedes. In their comprehensive scholarly history of Israeli settlement in the occupied territories, Lords of the Land, Idit Zertal and Akiva Eldar point out that after Israel withdrew its forces from Gaza in August 2005, the ruined territory was not released "for even a single day from Israel's military grip or from the price of the occupation that the inhabitants pay every day... Israel left behind scorched earth, devastated services, and people with neither a present nor a future. The settlements were destroyed in an ungenerous move by an unenlightened occupier, which in fact continues to control the territory and kill and harass its inhabitants by means of its formidable military might" - exercised with extreme savagery, thanks to firm US support and participation."
Why has Steve Bennett officiated at five out of the last 28 Premiership matches?
Noam Chomsky: "The US-Israeli assault on Gaza escalated in January 2006, a few months after the formal withdrawal, when Palestinians committed a truly heinous crime: they voted "the wrong way" in a free election. Like others, Palestinians learned that one does not disobey with impunity the commands of the Master, who continues to prate of his "yearning for democracy," without eliciting ridicule from the educated classes, another impressive achievement."
Why were there three changes of referee in the Premiership last weekend when most leading European leagues see one such instance every five years or so?
Noam Chomsky: "Since the terms "aggression" and "terrorism" are inadequate, some new term is needed for the sadistic and cowardly torture of people caged with no possibility of escape, while they are being pounded to dust by the most sophisticated products of US military technology - used in violation of international and even US law, but for self-declared outlaw states that is just another minor technicality. Also a minor technicality is the fact that on December 31, while terrorized Gazans were desperately seeking shelter from the ruthless assault, Washington hired a German merchant ship to transport from Greece to Israel a huge shipment, 3000 tons, of unidentified "ammunition." The new shipment "follows the hiring of a commercial ship to carry a much larger consignment of ordnance in December from the United States to Israel ahead of air strikes in the Gaza Strip," Reuters reported. All of this is separate from the more than $21 billion in U.S. military aid provided by the Bush administration to Israel, almost all grants. "Israel's intervention in the Gaza Strip has been fueled largely by U.S. supplied weapons paid for with U.S. tax dollars," said a briefing by the New America Foundation, which monitors the arms trade. The new shipment was hampered by the decision of the Greek government to bar the use of any port in Greece "for the supplying of the Israeli army."
Greece's response to US-backed Israeli crimes is rather different from the craven performance of the leaders of most of Europe. The distinction reveals that Washington may have been quite realistic in regarding Greece as part of the Near East, not Europe, until the overthrow of its US-backed fascist dictatorship in 1974. Perhaps Greece is just too civilized to be part of Europe."
Why does Howard Webb get every major match and isn't this just a little too much power in one policeman's hands?
Noam Chomsky: "There are good reasons why the voting record is consistently unreported and dispatched deep into the memory hole by the media and conformist intellectuals. It would not be wise to reveal to the public what the record implies about their elected representatives. In the present case it would plainly be unhelpful to let the public know that US-Israeli rejectionism, barring the peaceful settlement long advocated by the world, reaches such an extreme as to deny Palestinians even the abstract right to self-determination."
Why has Keith Harris finally admitted that there is no possibility of any club being sold in the current global financial climate that was absolutely not caused, in any way whatsoever, by free market capitalist ideologues?
Noam Chomsky: "The figures for killed and wounded are surely an underestimate. And it is unlikely that there will be any inquiry into these atrocities. Crimes of official enemies are subjected to rigorous investigation, but our own are systematically ignored. General practice, again, and understandable on the part of the masters.
The Security Council Resolution called for stopping the flow of arms into Gaza. The US and Israel (Rice-Livni) soon reached an agreement on measures to ensure this result, concentrating on Iranian arms. There is no need to stop smuggling of US arms into Israel, because there is no smuggling: the huge flow of arms is quite public, even when not reported, as in the case of the arms shipment announced as the slaughter in Gaza was proceeding."
Why is Richard Scudamore keeping very very quiet at the moment? It surely would have nothing to do with the new televisions deals, would it?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel abandoned Gaza in September 2005. Rational Israeli hardliners, like Ariel Sharon, the patron saint of the settlers movement, understood that it was senseless to subsidize a few thousand illegal Israeli settlers in the ruins of Gaza, protected by the IDF while they used much of the land and scarce resources. It made more sense to turn Gaza into the world's largest prison and to transfer settlers to the West Bank, much more valuable territory, where Israel is quite explicit about its intentions, in word and more importantly in deed. One goal is to annex the arable land, water supplies, and pleasant suburbs of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that lie within the separation wall, irrelevantly declared illegal by the World Court. That includes a vastly expanded Jerusalem, in violation of Security Council orders that go back 40 years, also irrelevant. Israel has also been taking over the Jordan Valley, about one-third of the West Bank. What remains is therefore imprisoned, and, furthermore, broken into fragments by salients of Jewish settlement that trisect the territory: one to the east of Greater Jerusalem through the town of Ma'aleh Adumim, developed through the Clinton years to split the West Bank; and two to the north, through the towns of Ariel and Kedumim. What remains to Palestinians is segregated by hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints."
Why will the Premiership title race go to the very last game again this season?
Noam Chomsky: "The checkpoints have no relation to security of Israel, and if some are intended to safeguard settlers, they are flatly illegal, as the World Court ruled. In reality, their major goal is harass the Palestinian population and to fortify what Israeli peace activist Jeff Halper calls the "matrix of control," designed to make life unbearable for the "two-legged beasts" who will be like "drugged roaches scurrying around in a bottle" if they seek to remain in their homes and land. All of that is fair enough, because they are "like grasshoppers compared to us" so that their heads can be "smashed against the boulders and walls." The terminology is from the highest Israeli political and military leaders, in this case the revered "princes." And the attitudes shape policies."
Why is the Premiership now a handicapped event?
Noam Chomsky: "The plans that Olmert sketched in 2006 have since been abandoned as not sufficiently extreme. But what replaces the convergence programme, and the actions that proceed daily to implement it, are approximately the same in general conception. They trace back to the earliest days of the occupation, when Defence Minister Moshe Dayan explained poetically that "the situation today resembles the complex relationship between a Bedouin man and the girl he kidnaps against her will...You Palestinians, as a nation, don't want us today, but we'll change your attitude by forcing our presence on you." You will "live like dogs, and whoever will leave, will leave," while we take what we want."
Why? Is it true that the Dalai Lama wishes an audience with Harry Redknapp?
Noam Chomsky: "As the crimes passed beyond what the carefully honed Israeli propaganda campaign was able to suppress, even confirmed Israeli hawks became concerned that the carnage is "Destroying [Israel's] soul and its image. Destroying it on world television screens, in the living rooms of the international community and most importantly, in Obama's America" (Ari Shavit). Shavit was particularly concerned about Israel's "shelling a United Nations facility...on the day when the UN secretary general is visiting Jerusalem," an act that is "beyond lunacy," he felt."
Why does Stevie G take such an interest in matters of the underworld variety?
Noam Chomsky: "Before, Israel had sensibly barred all journalists, even Israeli, while its crimes were proceeding in full fury. Israel's use of white phosphorus against Gaza civilians is "clear and undeniable," Amnesty International (AI) reported. Its repeated use in densely populated civilian areas "is a war crime," AI concluded. They found white phosphorus edges scattered around residential buildings, still burning, "further endangering the residents and their property," particularly children "drawn to the detritus of war and often unaware of the danger." Primary targets, they report, were the UNRWA compound, where the Israeli "white phosphorus landed next to some fuel trucks and caused a large fire which destroyed tons of humanitarian aid" after Israeli authorities "had given assurance that no further strikes would be launched on the compound." On the same day, "a white phosphorus shell landed in the al-Quds hospital in Gaza City also causing a fire which forced hospital staff to evacuate the patients... White phosphorus landing on skin can burn deep through muscle and into the bone, continuing to burn unless deprived of oxygen." Purposely intended or beyond depraved indifference, such crimes are inevitable when this weapon is used in attacks on civilians."
Why is Thaksin Shinawatra still allowed to own 25% of Abu Dhabi United when the latest Amnesty International report accuses his government of "systematic" genocide against Muslims in the south of the country?
Noam Chomsky: "Aggression always has a pretext: in this case, that Israel's patience had "run out" in the face of Hamas rocket attacks, as Barak put it. The mantra that is endlessly repeated is that Israel has the right to use force to defend itself. The thesis is partially defensible. The rocketing is criminal, and it is true that a state has the right to defend itself against criminal attacks. But it does not follow that it has a right to defend itself by force. That goes far beyond any principle that we would or should accept. Nazi Germany had no right to use force to defend itself against the terrorism of the partisans. Kristallnacht is not justified by Herschel Grynszpan's assassination of a German Embassy official in Paris. The British were not justified in using force to defend themselves against the (very real) terror of the American colonists seeking independence, or to terrorize Irish Catholics in response to IRA terror - and when they finally turned to the sensible policy of addressing legitimate grievances, the terror ended. It is not a matter of "proportionality," but of choice of action in the first place: Is there an alternative to violence?"
Why have Victor Chandler International decided to enter the spread betting sector at the onset of the Depression? Did they not learn when they last dipped their toes in the waters?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel has a straightforward means to defend itself: put an end to its criminal actions in occupied territories, and accept the long-standing international consensus on a two-state settlement that has been blocked by the US and Israel for over 30 years, since the US first vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a political settlement in these terms in 1976. I will not once again run through the inglorious record, but it is important to be aware that US-Israeli rejectionism today is even more blatant than in the past. The Arab League has gone even beyond the consensus, calling for full normalization of relations with Israel. Hamas has repeatedly called for a two-state settlement in terms of the international consensus. Iran and Hezbollah have made it clear that they will abide by any agreement that Palestinians accept. That leaves the US-Israel in splendid isolation, not only in words."
Why are Victor Chandler International so concerned at the integrity of football?
Noam Chomsky: "After Israel broke the June 2008 ceasefire (such as it was) in November, the siege was tightened further, with even more disastrous consequences for the population. According to Sara Roy, the leading academic specialist on Gaza, "On Nov. 5, Israel sealed all crossing points into Gaza, vastly reducing and at times denying food supplies, medicines, fuel, cooking gas, and parts for water and sanitation systems..." During November, an average of 4.6 trucks of food per day entered Gaza from Israel compared with an average of 123 trucks per day in October. Spare parts for the repair and maintenance of water-related equipment have been denied entry for over a year. The World Health Organization just reported that half of Gaza's ambulances are now out of order" - and the rest soon became targets for Israeli attack. Gaza's only power station was forced to suspend operation for lack of fuel, and could not be started up again because they needed spare parts, which had been sitting in the Israeli port of Ashdod for 8 months. Shortage of electricity led to a 300% increase in burn cases at Shifaa' hospital in the Gaza Strip, resulting from efforts to light wood fires. Israel barred shipment of Chlorine, so that by mid-December in Gaza City and the north access to water was limited to six hours every three days. The human consequences are not counted among Palestinian victims of Israeli terror."
Why did Alan Shearer rewrite Reality in his assessment of Mike Dean's comedic performance in allegedly refereeing the game between Sunderland and Aston Villa?
Noam Chomsky: "Israel's senior diplomatic correspondent Akiva Eldar reports that shortly before Israel launched its full-scale invasion on Saturday Dec. 27, "Hamas politburo chief Khaled Meshal announced on the Iz al-Din al-Qassam Web site that he was prepared not only for a 'cessation of aggression' - he proposed going back to the arrangement at the Rafah crossing as of 2005, before Hamas won the elections and later took over the region. That arrangement was for the crossing to be managed jointly by Egypt, the European Union, the Palestinian Authority presidency and Hamas," and as noted earlier, called for opening of the crossings to desperately needed supplies."
Why did Dave Whelan put all his ill-gotten gains into dodgy Icelandic banks?
Noam Chomsky: "Today, Israel could have security, normalization of relations, and integration into the region. But it very clearly prefers illegal expansion, conflict, and repeated exercise of violence, actions that are not only criminal, murderous and destructive but are also eroding its own long-term security. US military and Middle East specialist Andrew Cordesman writes that while Israel military force can surely crush defenseless Gaza, "neither Israel nor the US can gain from a war that produces [a bitter] reaction from one of the wisest and most moderate voices in the Arab world, Prince Turki al-Faisal of Saudi Arabia, who said on January 6 that `The Bush administration has left [Obama] a disgusting legacy and a reckless position towards the massacres and bloodshed of innocents in Gaza...Enough is enough, today we are all Palestinians and we seek martyrdom for God and for Palestine, following those who died in Gaza'.""
Why does Dave Whelan object to other's tilting markets for proprietary advantage when he employs such tactics himself?
Noam Chomsky: "One of the wisest voices in Israel, Uri Avnery, writes that after an Israeli military victory, "What will be seared into the consciousness of the world will be the image of Israel as a blood-stained monster, ready at any moment to commit war crimes and not prepared to abide by any moral restraints. This will have severe consequences for our long-term future, our standing in the world, our chance of achieving peace and quiet. In the end, this war is a crime against ourselves too, a crime against the State of Israel.""
Why is the collapse of the BSkyB linkage with pubs going to be so key to the next tv deal, to the Premier League's financial detriment?
Noam Chomsky: "There is good reason to believe that he is right. Israel is deliberately turning itself into perhaps the most hated country in the world, and is also losing the allegiance of the population of the West, including younger American Jews, who are unlikely to tolerate its persistent shocking crimes for long. Decades ago, I wrote that those who call themselves "supporters of Israel" are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction. Regrettably, that judgment looks more and more plausible."
Why was it so funny seeing psychopath Dick Cheney arriving for the inauguration of ObamaWorld - not "Renewing America" so much as "Rebranding America" - in his wheelchair? Why was this just so funny...?
Noam Chomsky: "Meanwhile we are quietly observing a rare event in history, what the late Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling called "politicide," the murder of a nation -- at our hands."
We are all Palestinians...
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Friday, 16 January 2009
It's The Quality Of The Statistics Stupid - A Flashback
Once per month when the avalanche of projects simply becomes overwhelming, we resort to chicanery and reproduce an old post rather than undertake anything so time consuming as creativity.
But, we try to make the choice pertinent.
Today we reprint a post that was originally put out on December 30th 2007, just prior to the onset of the January Transfer Window Twilight Zone.
Parts of the post are fucking dire, but there's enough stuff of interest to give it another run out...
The current Twilight Zone is even more twilit.
Manchester City are buying anything that moves via a financially depleted, yet evidently still robust, sovereign wealth-fund operation called Abu Dhabi United.
Nobody else is buying anybody for anything.
The market has collapsed.
Excellent.
This will lead to yet more rigged matches as agents are forced to further focus on corrupting match outcomes rather than similarly corrupting the Twilight Zone.
A Wayne Bridge to Nowhere...
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Today, there are two posts in that broadsheet bastion of the bookmaking fraternity called The Guardian that focus on Sabermetrics. This prompts us to produce an overall assessment of the value of such "science" in modern day football.
To the uninitiated, Sabermetrics is a statistical evaluation of a sportsplayer based on selective and historical match data together with current training ground measurements. These analyses are extensively used in English football by the likes of Sam Allardyce, Aidy Boothroyd and Damien Comolli. As ever when the non-scientist approaches scientific data, there is much tomfoolery around. But, correctly used, Sabermetrics is an extremely valuable tool.
Sabermetrics was originally the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who was among its first proponents and has long been its most prominent advocate known to the general public. In the US, a leading advocate of such analyses is Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's baseball team who repeatedly manage to finish in the higher reaches of the tournaments while having the lowest wage bill in the league.
As Sabermetrics has two core constituencies, the value of a player and the current form of a player, we will take these two areas in turn. Lets start with the transfer market.
"We too often reward the lucky strike and overvalue randomness" states Beane and, indeed, there are a whole load of players who live on one "magic" moment - think Michael Owen's pre-gambling-career goal against Argentina or John Barnes' genius against Brazil. The key issue here is value. Players are effectively commodities in the financial market that is football. As with all market prices, the value is based on historical information. But the value of a football player differs from the value of a stock in one very important manner - nowhere near all the information is in the price. Market efficiency, as this is known, is a vital component of market analysis. If financial markets were strongly efficient, no analyst would be able to make a profit as all the information would be fully incorporated into the market price. Fortunately for my bank balance, financial markets are only weakly efficient allowing skilled operators to detect value and arbitrage opportunities in the marketplace. The football transfer market does not even reach the benchmark of weak efficiency. Players used to be assessed solely by eye or on the word of trusted scouts but the evaluation now utilises the statistics generated by companies like ProZone, Opta and Sports Universal. And herein lies one of the problems. The statistics are simplistic. There is no differentiation within the data. So, Opta measure a Ray Wilkins-style 1.5 metre square ball as equivalent to a Juan Sebastian Veron 50 metre switching quarterback delivery. When coaches, agents and managers make an assessment of a player based solely on pseudo-statistics, they are using the data to create invalid structures. The outcome is contrary to the declared aim - value is destroyed rather than created. For example, Comolli used Sabermetrics in determining that Darren Bent was worth £17 million in the summer - although adequate, Bent's real value is probably around one-third of this price. The highly skilled operations, like Arsenal, utilise proprietary analyses based on Sabermetrics together with the intuitive assessments of the management team. This approach undoubtedly is the preferable route to success and Wenger has spent a nett £5 million in the same window that Abramovich has forked out a quarter of a billion pounds. And which of these two teams has the more sustainable squad? Evidently, not Chelsea...
Sabermetrics has a further problem with regard to the transfer market. We could, if we chose to, name around twenty players in the Premiership who incorporate gambling interests into their playing performances. To correctly evaluate such an individual, one is required to use enhanced statistics, gut feeling and the correlation between performance and betting patterns in the global markets. Once again, the slickest are already scratching the surface of this holistic approach as was demonstrated by the total lack of interest from any of the major Mediterranean teams in ############# when he was being offered around last summer or when all the top English sides decided to pass on ##############'s availability after Real Madrid - a player at the peak of his career rarely makes a move from the biggest club in the world to the biggest club in ############### willingly.
Additionally, Sabermetrics fails to pick up on the solo rogue operator. Whereas the most criminalised players are retained by the leading bookmakers, the loose cannons corrupt to a personal agenda. Step forward ####################################
############################################################################
#############################################################################
################################################################################
################################################################################
#############################################################################
#########################################################################
Just ask yourself, what value are Opta's (or indeed anybody else's) stats on these games? The player evaluation must be holistic otherwise the idiocy of Comolli and his like will continue to be the norm away from the very top outfits. An additional benefit of the correct utilisation of Sabermetrics is created by arbitrage over a time window. This is Wenger's core competency - buy cheap, sell rich as he has repeatedly shown with the likes of Henry, Petit, Overmars, Vieira, Anelka etc.
The second area where Sabermetrics are widely abused is in team selection. Although there is value in measuring a players training performance cycles, it should merely form one tool in the box. Morale, motivation, private life, grudge, interpersonal issues etc etc are also relevant but the core problem with such naive assessment is that it individualises a team game. The core competency in a team sport is producing a scenario where the complete team performs at a greater level than the basic sum of its parts - team spirit cannot be measured nor created by measuring a cycling machine. Furthermore, when players realise that their place in the starting eleven is dependent on running around like a blue-arsed-fly in training, they effectively undermine the team effort by putting in too much effort in training in midweek with the result that the side selected for the weekend game is physically more tired than the players who took it easier in training. This impacts negatively on results. Such methods also require a hierarchy sympathetic to the use of Sabermetrics. Allardyce undoubtedly had such an environment at Bolton but the ego's, gamblers, cliques and general dysfunctionality at Newcastle is an altogether different beast. If I were Big Sam, I'd sell ############################################################ and ############## in the January transfer window and use Sabermetrics to bring in young committed and non-corrupt players at a fraction of the cost (both in transfer and wages). I have no doubt that results would improve.
Of course, the media plays a role in this misuse of pseudo-statistics. As does aesthetics...
We are all persuaded by a credible source rather than a credible argument and, so, when journalists wax lyrical about the sublime touch of Dimitar Berbatov, sending his value ever upwards in the process, they choose to ignore the fact that the man often selects to be a liability (as Martin Jol discovered to his cost). Additionally, the media promotes those who it is in the interests of The Game to be promoted - the number of column inches associated with the 20 Premiership players who we know to be working alongside bookmakers is far out of kilter with the performances of these players on the pitch. And, as we have stated before, the Guti and The Beast Syndrome results in a homoerotic element to the evaluation - we simply do not believe that being square-jawed, or having symmetrical features or flowing locks has any influence on match performance. Of course, the beautiful are known statistically to succeed more than the aesthetically challenged but, when making the assessment of a player's true value, such factors should be sidelined. Who would you rather have in your team, Paul Scholes or Guti, Franck Ribéry or David Beckham, Carlos Tevez or Berbatov? And, although a true great, Paolo Maldini was never quite as good as the length of his eyelashes would suggest. There is, indeed, considerable evidence that Black and red-haired players are grossly undervalued when compared to the standard anglo-saxon features...
Around 50% of the teams in the top two English leagues utilise Sabermetrics. As with all analyses, it is the inputs which produce value. Give a neural network to a monkey and you'll get Watford; give it to Wenger and you'll get Arsenal. If Arsenal were to incorporate the machinations against their interests by the English institutional powers into their holistic Sabermetrics, they would actually have had a chance of the title this year - as we showed in our last post, Arsenal would have been eight points clear at the seasonal midway stage without the effect of corrupt match officials. But, in the criminalised world of the Premiership, there are many necessary skills that have too little to do with football and too much to do with the global gambling markets.
There is one other prime problem with Sabermetrics. By applying an analysis that aims to effectively play the percentages, the coaches who develop simplistic Sabermetrics are unable to adapt to the tactical requirements necessary to win the really big games. And it is these matches that determine trophies. Although he is past his sell-buy date now, a couple of years ago, Barcelona would rather select Ronaldinho, even though he had spent the night samba-ing around the Ramblas, than any other individual who had happened to have had a particularly good training session on the rowing machine. Barça won the Champions League and it is interesting that Beane's baseball team always falls short of ultimate success as Sabermetrics, while perhaps improving the chances of avoiding massive underachievement, similarly fails to engender overachievement.
Dietrological intend to launch a new business next summer. Provisionally entitled Holistic Sabermetrics, we will be offering a thorough and complete statistical assessment of both individual and team realities based on our proprietary data. We are confident of our success in this venture - there is nobody else out there with our databases.
Someday soon, somebody is going to be persuaded by the pseudo-scientific data to pay £30 million for Berbatov. They should probably chat with us first...
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
But, we try to make the choice pertinent.
Today we reprint a post that was originally put out on December 30th 2007, just prior to the onset of the January Transfer Window Twilight Zone.
Parts of the post are fucking dire, but there's enough stuff of interest to give it another run out...
The current Twilight Zone is even more twilit.
Manchester City are buying anything that moves via a financially depleted, yet evidently still robust, sovereign wealth-fund operation called Abu Dhabi United.
Nobody else is buying anybody for anything.
The market has collapsed.
Excellent.
This will lead to yet more rigged matches as agents are forced to further focus on corrupting match outcomes rather than similarly corrupting the Twilight Zone.
A Wayne Bridge to Nowhere...
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Today, there are two posts in that broadsheet bastion of the bookmaking fraternity called The Guardian that focus on Sabermetrics. This prompts us to produce an overall assessment of the value of such "science" in modern day football.
To the uninitiated, Sabermetrics is a statistical evaluation of a sportsplayer based on selective and historical match data together with current training ground measurements. These analyses are extensively used in English football by the likes of Sam Allardyce, Aidy Boothroyd and Damien Comolli. As ever when the non-scientist approaches scientific data, there is much tomfoolery around. But, correctly used, Sabermetrics is an extremely valuable tool.
Sabermetrics was originally the analysis of baseball through objective evidence, especially baseball statistics. The term is derived from the acronym SABR, which stands for the Society for American Baseball Research. It was coined by Bill James, who was among its first proponents and has long been its most prominent advocate known to the general public. In the US, a leading advocate of such analyses is Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's baseball team who repeatedly manage to finish in the higher reaches of the tournaments while having the lowest wage bill in the league.
As Sabermetrics has two core constituencies, the value of a player and the current form of a player, we will take these two areas in turn. Lets start with the transfer market.
"We too often reward the lucky strike and overvalue randomness" states Beane and, indeed, there are a whole load of players who live on one "magic" moment - think Michael Owen's pre-gambling-career goal against Argentina or John Barnes' genius against Brazil. The key issue here is value. Players are effectively commodities in the financial market that is football. As with all market prices, the value is based on historical information. But the value of a football player differs from the value of a stock in one very important manner - nowhere near all the information is in the price. Market efficiency, as this is known, is a vital component of market analysis. If financial markets were strongly efficient, no analyst would be able to make a profit as all the information would be fully incorporated into the market price. Fortunately for my bank balance, financial markets are only weakly efficient allowing skilled operators to detect value and arbitrage opportunities in the marketplace. The football transfer market does not even reach the benchmark of weak efficiency. Players used to be assessed solely by eye or on the word of trusted scouts but the evaluation now utilises the statistics generated by companies like ProZone, Opta and Sports Universal. And herein lies one of the problems. The statistics are simplistic. There is no differentiation within the data. So, Opta measure a Ray Wilkins-style 1.5 metre square ball as equivalent to a Juan Sebastian Veron 50 metre switching quarterback delivery. When coaches, agents and managers make an assessment of a player based solely on pseudo-statistics, they are using the data to create invalid structures. The outcome is contrary to the declared aim - value is destroyed rather than created. For example, Comolli used Sabermetrics in determining that Darren Bent was worth £17 million in the summer - although adequate, Bent's real value is probably around one-third of this price. The highly skilled operations, like Arsenal, utilise proprietary analyses based on Sabermetrics together with the intuitive assessments of the management team. This approach undoubtedly is the preferable route to success and Wenger has spent a nett £5 million in the same window that Abramovich has forked out a quarter of a billion pounds. And which of these two teams has the more sustainable squad? Evidently, not Chelsea...
Sabermetrics has a further problem with regard to the transfer market. We could, if we chose to, name around twenty players in the Premiership who incorporate gambling interests into their playing performances. To correctly evaluate such an individual, one is required to use enhanced statistics, gut feeling and the correlation between performance and betting patterns in the global markets. Once again, the slickest are already scratching the surface of this holistic approach as was demonstrated by the total lack of interest from any of the major Mediterranean teams in ############# when he was being offered around last summer or when all the top English sides decided to pass on ##############'s availability after Real Madrid - a player at the peak of his career rarely makes a move from the biggest club in the world to the biggest club in ############### willingly.
Additionally, Sabermetrics fails to pick up on the solo rogue operator. Whereas the most criminalised players are retained by the leading bookmakers, the loose cannons corrupt to a personal agenda. Step forward ####################################
############################################################################
#############################################################################
################################################################################
################################################################################
#############################################################################
#########################################################################
Just ask yourself, what value are Opta's (or indeed anybody else's) stats on these games? The player evaluation must be holistic otherwise the idiocy of Comolli and his like will continue to be the norm away from the very top outfits. An additional benefit of the correct utilisation of Sabermetrics is created by arbitrage over a time window. This is Wenger's core competency - buy cheap, sell rich as he has repeatedly shown with the likes of Henry, Petit, Overmars, Vieira, Anelka etc.
The second area where Sabermetrics are widely abused is in team selection. Although there is value in measuring a players training performance cycles, it should merely form one tool in the box. Morale, motivation, private life, grudge, interpersonal issues etc etc are also relevant but the core problem with such naive assessment is that it individualises a team game. The core competency in a team sport is producing a scenario where the complete team performs at a greater level than the basic sum of its parts - team spirit cannot be measured nor created by measuring a cycling machine. Furthermore, when players realise that their place in the starting eleven is dependent on running around like a blue-arsed-fly in training, they effectively undermine the team effort by putting in too much effort in training in midweek with the result that the side selected for the weekend game is physically more tired than the players who took it easier in training. This impacts negatively on results. Such methods also require a hierarchy sympathetic to the use of Sabermetrics. Allardyce undoubtedly had such an environment at Bolton but the ego's, gamblers, cliques and general dysfunctionality at Newcastle is an altogether different beast. If I were Big Sam, I'd sell ############################################################ and ############## in the January transfer window and use Sabermetrics to bring in young committed and non-corrupt players at a fraction of the cost (both in transfer and wages). I have no doubt that results would improve.
Of course, the media plays a role in this misuse of pseudo-statistics. As does aesthetics...
We are all persuaded by a credible source rather than a credible argument and, so, when journalists wax lyrical about the sublime touch of Dimitar Berbatov, sending his value ever upwards in the process, they choose to ignore the fact that the man often selects to be a liability (as Martin Jol discovered to his cost). Additionally, the media promotes those who it is in the interests of The Game to be promoted - the number of column inches associated with the 20 Premiership players who we know to be working alongside bookmakers is far out of kilter with the performances of these players on the pitch. And, as we have stated before, the Guti and The Beast Syndrome results in a homoerotic element to the evaluation - we simply do not believe that being square-jawed, or having symmetrical features or flowing locks has any influence on match performance. Of course, the beautiful are known statistically to succeed more than the aesthetically challenged but, when making the assessment of a player's true value, such factors should be sidelined. Who would you rather have in your team, Paul Scholes or Guti, Franck Ribéry or David Beckham, Carlos Tevez or Berbatov? And, although a true great, Paolo Maldini was never quite as good as the length of his eyelashes would suggest. There is, indeed, considerable evidence that Black and red-haired players are grossly undervalued when compared to the standard anglo-saxon features...
Around 50% of the teams in the top two English leagues utilise Sabermetrics. As with all analyses, it is the inputs which produce value. Give a neural network to a monkey and you'll get Watford; give it to Wenger and you'll get Arsenal. If Arsenal were to incorporate the machinations against their interests by the English institutional powers into their holistic Sabermetrics, they would actually have had a chance of the title this year - as we showed in our last post, Arsenal would have been eight points clear at the seasonal midway stage without the effect of corrupt match officials. But, in the criminalised world of the Premiership, there are many necessary skills that have too little to do with football and too much to do with the global gambling markets.
There is one other prime problem with Sabermetrics. By applying an analysis that aims to effectively play the percentages, the coaches who develop simplistic Sabermetrics are unable to adapt to the tactical requirements necessary to win the really big games. And it is these matches that determine trophies. Although he is past his sell-buy date now, a couple of years ago, Barcelona would rather select Ronaldinho, even though he had spent the night samba-ing around the Ramblas, than any other individual who had happened to have had a particularly good training session on the rowing machine. Barça won the Champions League and it is interesting that Beane's baseball team always falls short of ultimate success as Sabermetrics, while perhaps improving the chances of avoiding massive underachievement, similarly fails to engender overachievement.
Dietrological intend to launch a new business next summer. Provisionally entitled Holistic Sabermetrics, we will be offering a thorough and complete statistical assessment of both individual and team realities based on our proprietary data. We are confident of our success in this venture - there is nobody else out there with our databases.
Someday soon, somebody is going to be persuaded by the pseudo-scientific data to pay £30 million for Berbatov. They should probably chat with us first...
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Monday, 12 January 2009
Murk Murk Murk #
Last evening at the Savoy in London, Henry James Redknapp was honoured by the Football Writers Association for his twenty five years in management.
We would like to take this opportunity to question what Mr Redknapp is being 'honoured' for?
His betting activities?
The ownership of over ####################### houses in London and the south coast - that is a purchasing rate of one per #### throughout his managerial career?
His ongoing police case involving money laundering and bungs?
The fake FA Cup triumph courtesy of ############################?
The utilisation of ############################################# by teams under his management?
Or all of these things, perhaps...?
Please tell us.
We deserve to know.
The 'honour' was bestowed on a day when, in a live Sky event, certain Tottenham insiders short-sold their team in the match against Wigan Athletic.
There is something quite apt about these two neohyperrealities occurring on the same date.
In this post, large amounts of which are for subscribers only, we address the corruptions in yesterday's match at the JJB Stadium, we provide an overview of the very real inadequacies in Redknapp's management skills and we examine the behaviours of the man in the transfer market.
Instead of being crowned as some type of superheroic overachiever, Redknapp should rather be regarded as a bog standard boss who employs ###########################
#############################################################################
##############################################################################
############################################################################
############################################################################
Wigan v Tottenham
This match, being programmed on the day of the title decider, was always likely to be a very hot market.
Indeed, two of the largest insider gambling consortia targeted the match from market opening in Asia. Large amounts of fake money went on Spurs in the hours after the markets opened in the Far East. This is a standard trading tactic to provide disinformation to the market, and the perpetrators were taking advantage of the beginning of the Chinese New Year window to, hopefully, catch the Asian market makers off balance.
On the morning of the match, the market changed and a one-way gamble of some magnitude was placed on the hosts. The gamble was global and featured support of Wigan at both Draw No Bet and -0.0.0.5 on the Asian Handicaps in the Far East, and on the Fixed Odds markets in Europe.
The immediate pre-match period was interesting.
Mr Redknapp stripped Jermaine Jenas of the club vice-captaincy and suggested to the player that he would soon be on his way out of the club.
Having really helped morale with this little cluster bombshell, Redknapp followed this up with implanting a 3-5-2 formation on the team, hence creating tactical uncertainty into the mix as well.
And so to the match itself.
The match had nil-nil written all over it as two poor teams struggled to provide entertainment. Then, after 57 minutes, everything changed.
Heurelho Gomes rushed from his area and cleared a rare Wigan attacking foray. In doing so, he developed a calf-strain. He clearly wanted to come off and signalled this concern to the bench. Yet, despite Gomes being unable to dive, or to move at speed, or his inability to kick the ball, Redknapp elected to keep him on the pitch despite having two further substitutions available and a quality reserve keeper on the bench - Sanchez Cesar was previously at Real Madrid and Real Zaragoza.
Now why would Mr Redknapp make such a self-destructive decision?
Quoting Tim Rich in The Guardian: "It seemed strange that Redknapp did not bring off his goalkeeper, Heurelho Gomes, who appeared to be suffering from a hamstring injury. Judging from his facial expressions, Gomes does not hide pain well, although Redknapp commented that he "had his own reasons" for not removing him."
We are sure that he did!
As Paul Doyle added in the same rag: "What must Tottenham's back up keeper Cesar be thinking? He can't get a game even when the first-choice is grievously wounded."
For the 35 minutes remaining in the match, Redknapp was repeatedly seen on his mobile, hand covering his mouth, taking a real interest in events on the field of play as he demonstrated that managerial professionalism so worthy of honouring.
###############################################################################
############################################################################
#####################################################################################################
The gamble was landed.
##########################################################################
###############################################################################
#############################################################################
############################################################################
As for the Tottenham fans who had travelled to Wigan expecting that their team might be playing a competitive game, who cares?
After the match, Redknapp blamed everything on the players - "its the players that have got us into this mess" - and followed on with a variety of snide comments about the squad that he had inherited from Juande Ramos, a vastly superior manager to Redknapp.
Transfer Strategy
Don't get me wrong, Redknapp is a good judge of player.
Unfortunately, the quality of the player is not the only variable taken into account when a purchase is to be made by one of his clubs.
He prefers working with certain agents eg Willie McKay, the bookmaker, agent and racehorse trainer who has even named one of his racehorses after Redknapp.
He also has an inability to perceive the larger financial picture when undertaking any of his proprietary transfers.
Lets look at his full impact on Portsmouth FC.
In that they are owned illegally by Arkadi Gaydamak and that Peter Storrie, one of Redknapp's co-defendants in the City of London police case, is the Director/Executive Chairman of the club, it is difficult to feel any compassion for such an outfit.
But Portsmouth FC have been abused by Redknapp...
... and then some.
When Redknapp left for Spurs, he returned almost immediately to receive his freedom of the city in honour of his alleged triumph in winning the FA Cup for Pompey last season.
This was a fake triumph as we have posted before.
He also left Portsmouth in a financial hotch-potch of considerable proportions.
90% of turnover was going to cover the wages of the players that Redknapp had purchased, the club were one of the least fit in the Premiership, they were already out of the League Cup, were on the verge of exiting the UEFA Cup and were severely underperforming in the league.
Moreover, there was the case of Benjani who had been illegally sold onto Manchester City by Willie McKay.
When footballers move between clubs, they are cup-tied if they have been involved in any of the cup competitions earlier in the season.
Why does this not apply to managers?
For Redknapp is now benefitting from the quality of the squad assembled by Juande Ramos and Spurs are both in the League Cup Final and in the UEFA Cup second phase.
And the man has the barefaced cheek to claim that he has been hard done by.
Juande Ramos is one of the best managers in European football - check out his considerable achievements at Sevilla and the fact that he is now the manager of the biggest club in the world, Real Madrid.
This is all a slightly higher threshold of achievement than winning one fake trophy in a quarter of a century with Bournemouth, Southampton, West Ham and Portsmouth.
Having ripped off his former club in a variety of manners, last week Redknapp returned to steal Jermain Defoe for a knockdown price taking advantage of the poorly constructed contract put together by himself and his advisers when he was Pompey manager.
And even this transfer stank.
############################################################################
########################################################################
###########################################################################
########################################################################
#######################################################################
As a fitting finale to a fake financial deal, Defoe claimed a £700,000 loyalty bonus from Portsmouth for not requesting the transfer himself.
########################################################
#####################################################
############################################################################
Redknapp is also interested in buying Pascal Chimbonda (agent: Willie McKay) and David James (agent: John Colquhoun). ###########################################
##############################################################################
###############################################################################
#############################################################################
############################################################################
Much of our analysis of corruption in both football and financial markets comes across a similar structure - nepotism.
Individuals who have grown up in a familial setting already within the inner football sanctums are significantly more prone to make criminalised choices when faced with life choices. The old adage that one generation makes the money, the next spends it, while the third becomes Alexandre Gaydamak holds true.
Many of the extended ################ networks in English football have this familial component.
So we have Harry Redknapp and Jamie, Frank Lampard Senior and Junior, John and Kevin Bond (Redknapp's assistant at Spurs and the only individual to be sacked in light of the exposures in the BBC Panorama bungs programme), #######################
#######################################################################
################################################################### etc etc.
This is no different than the behaviours of, for example, the Murdochracy or Kerry Packer, the Oxbridge/public school network, Tony and Hillary Benn, Karamanlis and Papandreou in Greece, the leading country in the world very nearly managing to achieve a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton succession in a manner more attuned to the Mubarak's in Egypt, the al-Assad's in Syria or, for that matter, Kim Jung Il in North Korea.
Nepotism and cronyism is non-meritocratic and creates corruptions, criminalities and inefficiencies in the boardrooms of power.
Keeping it in the family is a non-competitive monopolistic practice.
But Redknapp just keeps laughing all the way to the bank (and the estate agents). His extended familial linkages become stronger by the month. Harry is manager at Tottenham, his son Jamie is on the coaching staff at Chelsea where he operates closely with his relative Frank Lampard. Meanwhile, Frank's father is involved in the takeover of Watford by Chelsea, and Redknapp himself still enjoys input to events on the south coast through Storrie and James.
Next weekend, the main Sky televised offering is Tottenham versus Portsmouth.
Turn on.
Tune in.
Drop out.
Whatever market hyperreality determines the outcome of the match, one thing is for certain - the match will be a market driven extravaganza and ###############
##################################################################################
##############################################################################
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
We would like to take this opportunity to question what Mr Redknapp is being 'honoured' for?
His betting activities?
The ownership of over ####################### houses in London and the south coast - that is a purchasing rate of one per #### throughout his managerial career?
His ongoing police case involving money laundering and bungs?
The fake FA Cup triumph courtesy of ############################?
The utilisation of ############################################# by teams under his management?
Or all of these things, perhaps...?
Please tell us.
We deserve to know.
The 'honour' was bestowed on a day when, in a live Sky event, certain Tottenham insiders short-sold their team in the match against Wigan Athletic.
There is something quite apt about these two neohyperrealities occurring on the same date.
In this post, large amounts of which are for subscribers only, we address the corruptions in yesterday's match at the JJB Stadium, we provide an overview of the very real inadequacies in Redknapp's management skills and we examine the behaviours of the man in the transfer market.
Instead of being crowned as some type of superheroic overachiever, Redknapp should rather be regarded as a bog standard boss who employs ###########################
#############################################################################
##############################################################################
############################################################################
############################################################################
Wigan v Tottenham
This match, being programmed on the day of the title decider, was always likely to be a very hot market.
Indeed, two of the largest insider gambling consortia targeted the match from market opening in Asia. Large amounts of fake money went on Spurs in the hours after the markets opened in the Far East. This is a standard trading tactic to provide disinformation to the market, and the perpetrators were taking advantage of the beginning of the Chinese New Year window to, hopefully, catch the Asian market makers off balance.
On the morning of the match, the market changed and a one-way gamble of some magnitude was placed on the hosts. The gamble was global and featured support of Wigan at both Draw No Bet and -0.0.0.5 on the Asian Handicaps in the Far East, and on the Fixed Odds markets in Europe.
The immediate pre-match period was interesting.
Mr Redknapp stripped Jermaine Jenas of the club vice-captaincy and suggested to the player that he would soon be on his way out of the club.
Having really helped morale with this little cluster bombshell, Redknapp followed this up with implanting a 3-5-2 formation on the team, hence creating tactical uncertainty into the mix as well.
And so to the match itself.
The match had nil-nil written all over it as two poor teams struggled to provide entertainment. Then, after 57 minutes, everything changed.
Heurelho Gomes rushed from his area and cleared a rare Wigan attacking foray. In doing so, he developed a calf-strain. He clearly wanted to come off and signalled this concern to the bench. Yet, despite Gomes being unable to dive, or to move at speed, or his inability to kick the ball, Redknapp elected to keep him on the pitch despite having two further substitutions available and a quality reserve keeper on the bench - Sanchez Cesar was previously at Real Madrid and Real Zaragoza.
Now why would Mr Redknapp make such a self-destructive decision?
Quoting Tim Rich in The Guardian: "It seemed strange that Redknapp did not bring off his goalkeeper, Heurelho Gomes, who appeared to be suffering from a hamstring injury. Judging from his facial expressions, Gomes does not hide pain well, although Redknapp commented that he "had his own reasons" for not removing him."
We are sure that he did!
As Paul Doyle added in the same rag: "What must Tottenham's back up keeper Cesar be thinking? He can't get a game even when the first-choice is grievously wounded."
For the 35 minutes remaining in the match, Redknapp was repeatedly seen on his mobile, hand covering his mouth, taking a real interest in events on the field of play as he demonstrated that managerial professionalism so worthy of honouring.
###############################################################################
############################################################################
#####################################################################################################
The gamble was landed.
##########################################################################
###############################################################################
#############################################################################
############################################################################
As for the Tottenham fans who had travelled to Wigan expecting that their team might be playing a competitive game, who cares?
After the match, Redknapp blamed everything on the players - "its the players that have got us into this mess" - and followed on with a variety of snide comments about the squad that he had inherited from Juande Ramos, a vastly superior manager to Redknapp.
Transfer Strategy
Don't get me wrong, Redknapp is a good judge of player.
Unfortunately, the quality of the player is not the only variable taken into account when a purchase is to be made by one of his clubs.
He prefers working with certain agents eg Willie McKay, the bookmaker, agent and racehorse trainer who has even named one of his racehorses after Redknapp.
He also has an inability to perceive the larger financial picture when undertaking any of his proprietary transfers.
Lets look at his full impact on Portsmouth FC.
In that they are owned illegally by Arkadi Gaydamak and that Peter Storrie, one of Redknapp's co-defendants in the City of London police case, is the Director/Executive Chairman of the club, it is difficult to feel any compassion for such an outfit.
But Portsmouth FC have been abused by Redknapp...
... and then some.
When Redknapp left for Spurs, he returned almost immediately to receive his freedom of the city in honour of his alleged triumph in winning the FA Cup for Pompey last season.
This was a fake triumph as we have posted before.
He also left Portsmouth in a financial hotch-potch of considerable proportions.
90% of turnover was going to cover the wages of the players that Redknapp had purchased, the club were one of the least fit in the Premiership, they were already out of the League Cup, were on the verge of exiting the UEFA Cup and were severely underperforming in the league.
Moreover, there was the case of Benjani who had been illegally sold onto Manchester City by Willie McKay.
When footballers move between clubs, they are cup-tied if they have been involved in any of the cup competitions earlier in the season.
Why does this not apply to managers?
For Redknapp is now benefitting from the quality of the squad assembled by Juande Ramos and Spurs are both in the League Cup Final and in the UEFA Cup second phase.
And the man has the barefaced cheek to claim that he has been hard done by.
Juande Ramos is one of the best managers in European football - check out his considerable achievements at Sevilla and the fact that he is now the manager of the biggest club in the world, Real Madrid.
This is all a slightly higher threshold of achievement than winning one fake trophy in a quarter of a century with Bournemouth, Southampton, West Ham and Portsmouth.
Having ripped off his former club in a variety of manners, last week Redknapp returned to steal Jermain Defoe for a knockdown price taking advantage of the poorly constructed contract put together by himself and his advisers when he was Pompey manager.
And even this transfer stank.
############################################################################
########################################################################
###########################################################################
########################################################################
#######################################################################
As a fitting finale to a fake financial deal, Defoe claimed a £700,000 loyalty bonus from Portsmouth for not requesting the transfer himself.
########################################################
#####################################################
############################################################################
Redknapp is also interested in buying Pascal Chimbonda (agent: Willie McKay) and David James (agent: John Colquhoun). ###########################################
##############################################################################
###############################################################################
#############################################################################
############################################################################
Much of our analysis of corruption in both football and financial markets comes across a similar structure - nepotism.
Individuals who have grown up in a familial setting already within the inner football sanctums are significantly more prone to make criminalised choices when faced with life choices. The old adage that one generation makes the money, the next spends it, while the third becomes Alexandre Gaydamak holds true.
Many of the extended ################ networks in English football have this familial component.
So we have Harry Redknapp and Jamie, Frank Lampard Senior and Junior, John and Kevin Bond (Redknapp's assistant at Spurs and the only individual to be sacked in light of the exposures in the BBC Panorama bungs programme), #######################
#######################################################################
################################################################### etc etc.
This is no different than the behaviours of, for example, the Murdochracy or Kerry Packer, the Oxbridge/public school network, Tony and Hillary Benn, Karamanlis and Papandreou in Greece, the leading country in the world very nearly managing to achieve a Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton succession in a manner more attuned to the Mubarak's in Egypt, the al-Assad's in Syria or, for that matter, Kim Jung Il in North Korea.
Nepotism and cronyism is non-meritocratic and creates corruptions, criminalities and inefficiencies in the boardrooms of power.
Keeping it in the family is a non-competitive monopolistic practice.
But Redknapp just keeps laughing all the way to the bank (and the estate agents). His extended familial linkages become stronger by the month. Harry is manager at Tottenham, his son Jamie is on the coaching staff at Chelsea where he operates closely with his relative Frank Lampard. Meanwhile, Frank's father is involved in the takeover of Watford by Chelsea, and Redknapp himself still enjoys input to events on the south coast through Storrie and James.
Next weekend, the main Sky televised offering is Tottenham versus Portsmouth.
Turn on.
Tune in.
Drop out.
Whatever market hyperreality determines the outcome of the match, one thing is for certain - the match will be a market driven extravaganza and ###############
##################################################################################
##############################################################################
Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Saturday, 10 January 2009
Is The Fixture List Fixed? #
So, who is correct?
Rafa Benítez or Arsène Wenger, Sir Ferguson, and virtually every market analyst on planet Earth?
Does the Premier League (PL) allow for the Fixture List to be manipulated in favour of certain entities?
You might as well ask whether the pope is a catholic?
Football is Fixed say the Fixture List is Fixed!
Football DataCo are the faceless ScudamoreWorld quango that controls the template fondly known as the Premiership Fixture List. This secretive organisation are on a bit of an earner. Through enforcing a licensing arrangement on all media, Football DataCo earn a tidy sum when any newspaper, television channel, pools company or website wishes to print the Premiership Fixture List.
For a newspaper to print the full Premiership schedule currently costs £3931 (prior to VAT), for example.
Woe betide any transgressors!! The legal threats are immediate and heavy-handed - you should expect a lawsuit to be filed as Organismos Prognostikon Agonon Pododfairou found out in Greece.
Football DataCo are wholly owned by the PL and the Football League, although they provide services to the Scottish Premier League and the Scottish League also.
The monies raised are returned to the clubs from the participant leagues.
But, the most important point here is that the PL, in effect, arrange the Premiership Fixture List.
This post is to be divided into four sections.
Firstly, we will provide an overview of the Fixture List manipulation in the Premiership.
Secondly, we'll reveal the Real Premiership table as it would stand this morning without inappropriate externalities.
Thirdly, we intend to dissect parts of Rafa's Keeganesque rant.
And, finally, we'll make up some randomised conclusion.
Serie A, La Primera Liga, Bundesliga, Le Championnat etc etc, all of the top European football leagues use a far more balanced and meritocratic template than that employed in ScudamoreWorld.
In the first half of the season, everybody plays everybody else once, and then, for the second half of the season, the Fixture List is simply inverted.
Furthermore, the institutional incentive in these leagues is to guarantee the Champions League participants as many days as possible to prepare for and recover from European adventures. There is never an instance of, say, Milan being in Kyiv on Wednesday evening and expected to travel to Reggio di Calabria for a lunchtime (or afternoon, for the matter) match just three days later.
Despite this more authentic template, shenanigans still occur, particularly in Spain (each team that Real Madrid meet this season has played Barcelona in the previous match, for example), but in no major territory is the situation as outrageous as it is in the Premiership.
In the first half of this season, there have been 6 Champions League breaks and 4 International breaks. In the matches following these breaks, Manchester United have been away from home on 9 occasions, Arsenal on 8, Chelsea 4 and Liverpool 2.
This is worth, on average, ####################################### analytically.
############################################################################
######################################################################
Furthermore, the gap in days is critical too. The magic number is three - when there is only a three day gap between the European match and the following league game, this is a major disadvantage to the Champions League outfit.
This season, Arsenal have had 3 three-day gaps, Manchester United have had two, and, surprise surprise, both Liverpool and Chelsea have had none.
Put together these two data sets are key. They represent two separate tiltings of the Premiership title race IN FAVOUR of Liverpool and Chelsea, and AGAINST Manchester United and Arsenal.
Who makes these decisions?
It is interesting to add our tabulations of the 'biases' of the PGMOB match officials to this knowledge. We employ a grouping of people to monitor all of the top tier matches in the territories where we trade. These juniors assess the impact of the impacts of the PGMOB officials on the match outcomes in the Premiership.
Our traders then create an index based on these figures - 100 = total manipulation in favour of a team and 0 = total manipulation against.
The figures for the Big 4 this season are as follows:
Liverpool 75
Chelsea 47
Manchester United 35
Arsenal 18
What is Rafa moaning about?
His team are being given a serious handicap start in the Premiership title race here via these three unmeritocratic advantages.
So, what do the manipulations by the match officials alone mean for the Premiership table?
This is how the table would appear this morning with the erroneous PGMOB input removed from the match outcomes. We understand that this is an approximation. For example, Liverpool were held 2-2 at home by Hull City, yet both Liverpool's goals were preceded by fouls. We have to make a guesstimation as to the likely impact of the match having been 0-2 at Half-Time etc etc. But, despite these limitations, these tabulations are considerably more authentic than those offered by ScudamoreWorld.
1. Chelsea 20 - 44
2. Man Utd 18 - 39
3. Arsenal 20 - 39
4. Liverpool 20 - 36
5. Everton 20 - 36
Liverpool are 9 points better off in ScudamoreWorld, and could end up 6 points clear in the fake entity by tomorrow evening.
Its not Real, is it?
The manipulations spread further down the table.
All market analysts who have the good fortune to work in horserace markets understand a handicapped market when they see one. And that is what the ScudamoreWorld 2008/09 tournament is, a handicap.
All this stuff and nonsense about how exciting the bottom of the table is, in that only 10 points cover 7th to 20th positions, is just a pack of lies. The Real differential between 7th and 20th position is 20 points.
Additionally, the biases have been too obvious, particularly in favour of the promoted trio - Mr Scudamore should simply resort to applying weights to the top teams, and then we can enjoy the handicap race without PGMOB contortions...
Although the biases have been heavily in favour of Liverpool and, to a lesser extent, Chelsea this season, this is just one fake year. Despite that proviso, the PGMOB favouritism hierarchy in 2007/08 also featured Chelsea and Liverpool as the chosen ones.
So lets have a look at what Mr Benítez had to say yesterday against this backcloth of Reality/hyperreality (you take your choice).
"Two years ago we were playing a lot of early kick-offs away on Saturdays when United were playing on Sundays. And we didn't say anything [not true: Rafa complained bitterly about having to endure tricky matches soon after Champions League games in 2006/07]. Now he [Ferguson] is complaining about everything, that everybody is against United. But the second half of the season will see them playing at home against all the teams at the top of the table. It is a fantastic advantage [just as, presumably, it was a massive advantage for United's challengers that United were away in all three fixtures in the first half of the season - this isn't the Champions League, the second match is not dependent on the first and there is no extra time advantage].
"But at Christmas, United played on the 29th and the rest of the teams played on the 28th. We were away against Newcastle two days after playing Bolton. They were playing about 40 hours later, they were not complaining then [rubbish logic Rafa! Liverpool playing Newcastle when both teams had two days rest is a major advantage to Liverpool due to the size of their squad. Meanwhile, Man Utd had no advantage over Boro who also enjoyed a three day break]."
So there! It almost makes you want to go into the Lounge Bar in Southport and create a disturbance.
Ferguson: "They tell me its not planned. I've got my doubts. I'm not saying what they do down there, but next year we will be sending someone to see how it happens, I can assure you."
ScudamoreWorld spokesperson: "The PL fixtures are put together through as random a process as possible... but the overriding factor is luck of the draw."
This ScudamoreWorld statement is ###############################################
##############################################################################
#########################################################################
###################################################################
We need to look further into this matter because, underneath, this is not only an issue of two teams gaining an unfair competitive advantage over their two primary opponents in the last two seasons.
There is another collective body who desire the performances of favourites to be problematical. This is, of course, the bookmaking fraternity. Favourites are overbet by the mass body of leisure punters. This is superb for the bookies when they are getting Arsenal turned over, for example, but is not so cool when they are having to pay out to mugs on yet another Man Utd victory.
The various matters mentioned above all have the murky influence of bookmaking in their structure somewhere.
It is our belief that bookmakers (and we are not just talking the manipulations of the Murdochracy here) have a major influence on the Premiership Fixture List. Indeed, I remember having conversations with a leading Asian broker on this very matter fully 12 years ago!
For starters, the bookmakers cannot abide either the England international team overachieving or the Champions League participants progressing too far. The markets on these type of events are very imbalanced due to the impact of the patriotic pound, and last season's Champions League was a dire scenario for the layers when assessed holistically.
Check back through recent years and see how many of the matches between the Big 4 in England have occurred adjacent to a Champions League game. This structure has been utilised ad nauseum.
And it works. If Chelsea and Arsenal are meeting at the weekend after significant Champions League matches, a motivational decision has to be made regarding priorities. Of course, this tactic further randomises the integrity of the Premiership but this is of no concern to the bookmakers.
Similarly, the handicapping of the Premiership this season works hugely to the advantage of the Fat Wallets. The bookies got hammered on Derby County's pitifulness last season, and the compressing of this years' title race has the added benefit that the form book is hyperreal - only keen observers who are willing to maintain their own records are able to assess the true natures of the fundamentals.
The Premier League has too much power spread among too few hands.
Football DataCo works with bookmakers when putting together the Fixture List.
Football DataCo, willingly or not, tilts the Fixture List to the advantage of certain teams.
The match decisions of the PGMOB match officials are also tilted and, bizarrely, in a positively correlated manner with respect to the machinations of Football DataCo.
The PGMOB do not report to the FA, only to the Premier League.
As Graham Poll says: "It is the only country in the world where you [the referee] are not working for the national federation... They're not reporting to the right body."
It is rare to agree with Mr Poll.
Manchester United are correct to be sending down their club lawyer, Maurice Watkins, to monitor the allegedly randomised/luck of the draw event for next season.
And these manipulations, deliberate or not, have serious financial implications.
Tom Hicks and George Gillett have been given six months grace to repay their £350.5 million loan to the Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia. If they are forced to rollover the debt again in the summer, they will be charged a huge penalty fee. Winning the Premiership this year would certainly help solve their financial mess.
Obviously not linked in any manner whatsoever to the above, but it is good to report that Luciano Moggi (a sort of Italian ############################) was sentenced to eighteen months in jail for his role in match fixing and the appropriate selection of referees for Italian Serie A games in the calciopoli scandal.
But it is bad to report that the sneaky little shit will not be incarcerated as his sentence fell within one of Italy's amnesty windows, those wonderful legal statute of limitations required to keep the hairplanted one out of the nick.
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Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Rafa Benítez or Arsène Wenger, Sir Ferguson, and virtually every market analyst on planet Earth?
Does the Premier League (PL) allow for the Fixture List to be manipulated in favour of certain entities?
You might as well ask whether the pope is a catholic?
Football is Fixed say the Fixture List is Fixed!
Football DataCo are the faceless ScudamoreWorld quango that controls the template fondly known as the Premiership Fixture List. This secretive organisation are on a bit of an earner. Through enforcing a licensing arrangement on all media, Football DataCo earn a tidy sum when any newspaper, television channel, pools company or website wishes to print the Premiership Fixture List.
For a newspaper to print the full Premiership schedule currently costs £3931 (prior to VAT), for example.
Woe betide any transgressors!! The legal threats are immediate and heavy-handed - you should expect a lawsuit to be filed as Organismos Prognostikon Agonon Pododfairou found out in Greece.
Football DataCo are wholly owned by the PL and the Football League, although they provide services to the Scottish Premier League and the Scottish League also.
The monies raised are returned to the clubs from the participant leagues.
But, the most important point here is that the PL, in effect, arrange the Premiership Fixture List.
This post is to be divided into four sections.
Firstly, we will provide an overview of the Fixture List manipulation in the Premiership.
Secondly, we'll reveal the Real Premiership table as it would stand this morning without inappropriate externalities.
Thirdly, we intend to dissect parts of Rafa's Keeganesque rant.
And, finally, we'll make up some randomised conclusion.
Serie A, La Primera Liga, Bundesliga, Le Championnat etc etc, all of the top European football leagues use a far more balanced and meritocratic template than that employed in ScudamoreWorld.
In the first half of the season, everybody plays everybody else once, and then, for the second half of the season, the Fixture List is simply inverted.
Furthermore, the institutional incentive in these leagues is to guarantee the Champions League participants as many days as possible to prepare for and recover from European adventures. There is never an instance of, say, Milan being in Kyiv on Wednesday evening and expected to travel to Reggio di Calabria for a lunchtime (or afternoon, for the matter) match just three days later.
Despite this more authentic template, shenanigans still occur, particularly in Spain (each team that Real Madrid meet this season has played Barcelona in the previous match, for example), but in no major territory is the situation as outrageous as it is in the Premiership.
In the first half of this season, there have been 6 Champions League breaks and 4 International breaks. In the matches following these breaks, Manchester United have been away from home on 9 occasions, Arsenal on 8, Chelsea 4 and Liverpool 2.
This is worth, on average, ####################################### analytically.
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Furthermore, the gap in days is critical too. The magic number is three - when there is only a three day gap between the European match and the following league game, this is a major disadvantage to the Champions League outfit.
This season, Arsenal have had 3 three-day gaps, Manchester United have had two, and, surprise surprise, both Liverpool and Chelsea have had none.
Put together these two data sets are key. They represent two separate tiltings of the Premiership title race IN FAVOUR of Liverpool and Chelsea, and AGAINST Manchester United and Arsenal.
Who makes these decisions?
It is interesting to add our tabulations of the 'biases' of the PGMOB match officials to this knowledge. We employ a grouping of people to monitor all of the top tier matches in the territories where we trade. These juniors assess the impact of the impacts of the PGMOB officials on the match outcomes in the Premiership.
Our traders then create an index based on these figures - 100 = total manipulation in favour of a team and 0 = total manipulation against.
The figures for the Big 4 this season are as follows:
Liverpool 75
Chelsea 47
Manchester United 35
Arsenal 18
What is Rafa moaning about?
His team are being given a serious handicap start in the Premiership title race here via these three unmeritocratic advantages.
So, what do the manipulations by the match officials alone mean for the Premiership table?
This is how the table would appear this morning with the erroneous PGMOB input removed from the match outcomes. We understand that this is an approximation. For example, Liverpool were held 2-2 at home by Hull City, yet both Liverpool's goals were preceded by fouls. We have to make a guesstimation as to the likely impact of the match having been 0-2 at Half-Time etc etc. But, despite these limitations, these tabulations are considerably more authentic than those offered by ScudamoreWorld.
1. Chelsea 20 - 44
2. Man Utd 18 - 39
3. Arsenal 20 - 39
4. Liverpool 20 - 36
5. Everton 20 - 36
Liverpool are 9 points better off in ScudamoreWorld, and could end up 6 points clear in the fake entity by tomorrow evening.
Its not Real, is it?
The manipulations spread further down the table.
All market analysts who have the good fortune to work in horserace markets understand a handicapped market when they see one. And that is what the ScudamoreWorld 2008/09 tournament is, a handicap.
All this stuff and nonsense about how exciting the bottom of the table is, in that only 10 points cover 7th to 20th positions, is just a pack of lies. The Real differential between 7th and 20th position is 20 points.
Additionally, the biases have been too obvious, particularly in favour of the promoted trio - Mr Scudamore should simply resort to applying weights to the top teams, and then we can enjoy the handicap race without PGMOB contortions...
Although the biases have been heavily in favour of Liverpool and, to a lesser extent, Chelsea this season, this is just one fake year. Despite that proviso, the PGMOB favouritism hierarchy in 2007/08 also featured Chelsea and Liverpool as the chosen ones.
So lets have a look at what Mr Benítez had to say yesterday against this backcloth of Reality/hyperreality (you take your choice).
"Two years ago we were playing a lot of early kick-offs away on Saturdays when United were playing on Sundays. And we didn't say anything [not true: Rafa complained bitterly about having to endure tricky matches soon after Champions League games in 2006/07]. Now he [Ferguson] is complaining about everything, that everybody is against United. But the second half of the season will see them playing at home against all the teams at the top of the table. It is a fantastic advantage [just as, presumably, it was a massive advantage for United's challengers that United were away in all three fixtures in the first half of the season - this isn't the Champions League, the second match is not dependent on the first and there is no extra time advantage].
"But at Christmas, United played on the 29th and the rest of the teams played on the 28th. We were away against Newcastle two days after playing Bolton. They were playing about 40 hours later, they were not complaining then [rubbish logic Rafa! Liverpool playing Newcastle when both teams had two days rest is a major advantage to Liverpool due to the size of their squad. Meanwhile, Man Utd had no advantage over Boro who also enjoyed a three day break]."
So there! It almost makes you want to go into the Lounge Bar in Southport and create a disturbance.
Ferguson: "They tell me its not planned. I've got my doubts. I'm not saying what they do down there, but next year we will be sending someone to see how it happens, I can assure you."
ScudamoreWorld spokesperson: "The PL fixtures are put together through as random a process as possible... but the overriding factor is luck of the draw."
This ScudamoreWorld statement is ###############################################
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We need to look further into this matter because, underneath, this is not only an issue of two teams gaining an unfair competitive advantage over their two primary opponents in the last two seasons.
There is another collective body who desire the performances of favourites to be problematical. This is, of course, the bookmaking fraternity. Favourites are overbet by the mass body of leisure punters. This is superb for the bookies when they are getting Arsenal turned over, for example, but is not so cool when they are having to pay out to mugs on yet another Man Utd victory.
The various matters mentioned above all have the murky influence of bookmaking in their structure somewhere.
It is our belief that bookmakers (and we are not just talking the manipulations of the Murdochracy here) have a major influence on the Premiership Fixture List. Indeed, I remember having conversations with a leading Asian broker on this very matter fully 12 years ago!
For starters, the bookmakers cannot abide either the England international team overachieving or the Champions League participants progressing too far. The markets on these type of events are very imbalanced due to the impact of the patriotic pound, and last season's Champions League was a dire scenario for the layers when assessed holistically.
Check back through recent years and see how many of the matches between the Big 4 in England have occurred adjacent to a Champions League game. This structure has been utilised ad nauseum.
And it works. If Chelsea and Arsenal are meeting at the weekend after significant Champions League matches, a motivational decision has to be made regarding priorities. Of course, this tactic further randomises the integrity of the Premiership but this is of no concern to the bookmakers.
Similarly, the handicapping of the Premiership this season works hugely to the advantage of the Fat Wallets. The bookies got hammered on Derby County's pitifulness last season, and the compressing of this years' title race has the added benefit that the form book is hyperreal - only keen observers who are willing to maintain their own records are able to assess the true natures of the fundamentals.
The Premier League has too much power spread among too few hands.
Football DataCo works with bookmakers when putting together the Fixture List.
Football DataCo, willingly or not, tilts the Fixture List to the advantage of certain teams.
The match decisions of the PGMOB match officials are also tilted and, bizarrely, in a positively correlated manner with respect to the machinations of Football DataCo.
The PGMOB do not report to the FA, only to the Premier League.
As Graham Poll says: "It is the only country in the world where you [the referee] are not working for the national federation... They're not reporting to the right body."
It is rare to agree with Mr Poll.
Manchester United are correct to be sending down their club lawyer, Maurice Watkins, to monitor the allegedly randomised/luck of the draw event for next season.
And these manipulations, deliberate or not, have serious financial implications.
Tom Hicks and George Gillett have been given six months grace to repay their £350.5 million loan to the Royal Bank of Scotland and Wachovia. If they are forced to rollover the debt again in the summer, they will be charged a huge penalty fee. Winning the Premiership this year would certainly help solve their financial mess.
Obviously not linked in any manner whatsoever to the above, but it is good to report that Luciano Moggi (a sort of Italian ############################) was sentenced to eighteen months in jail for his role in match fixing and the appropriate selection of referees for Italian Serie A games in the calciopoli scandal.
But it is bad to report that the sneaky little shit will not be incarcerated as his sentence fell within one of Italy's amnesty windows, those wonderful legal statute of limitations required to keep the hairplanted one out of the nick.
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Unfortunately, the blocked out parts of the posts and all posts labelled # are available in full to Dietrological or Football Is Fixed subscribers only.
But, please enjoy the free snippets that we are posting on this site.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Friday, 9 January 2009
Polychrysos - The Illusory Game Of Exchange
The Illusory Game of Exchange, the Giant Poker Table where our Realities are determined...
In the previous post in our seasonal triptych, by focusing on the gathering Depression from the perspective of hedge-funds, Dark Pools, Behaviouralism, Darwinism and climate change, we outlined some of the reasons why a Deep Depression is our future.
Only time and space prevented us from venturing further into this systemic murkiness, and in the week since the post, there have been numerous further disturbing pieces of news that, under normal circumstances, would be headline-grabbing.
For example, the Bank of England reducing interest rates (and thereby eliminating its monetary options) to 1.5% - the lowest rate since the central bank was established 315 years ago. This is a statement of extreme historical weakness.
Or, the US economy losing more jobs (2.6 million) in 2008 than in any year since the 2nd World War.
Or the relentless conveyor belt of major job losses and fraud exposures on a daily basis (Alcoa, Satyam etc).
To begin this article, we intend looking at some of the other areas of non-sustainability that will guarantee the Deep Depression.
The Hyperreality (continued)
* Price-earnings (p/e) ratios - Bottom feeders are claiming that longer term investors are able to find value in the current market climate by taking advantage of the low p/e ratios in the marketplace. As stock prices have plummeted, earnings have, until recently, not fallen so far, as companies employ various accounting shenanigans to hide the true carnage from the balance sheets.
But earnings are about to go through the floorboards as the feedback loops and economic contagion poison the entire global economy.
Prices will follow.
The whole efficacy of p/e ratios as a potential measure of value in the marketplace is based on historical analyses and data.
Economists always look to the past for solutions, yet no economic hyperreality is replicable, which renders such research as quite pointless.
In a Depression, p/e ratios become an outmoded yardstick - systemic and super-systemic risk sees to that.
For this reason, there is not one global asset that might be thought of as offering sustainable value - any rebound is nothing more than an example of a dead cat bouncing...
Spokesperson for the Bank of England: "The world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn."
* Ratings Agencies - All investors rely on the ratings bodies for a measurement of the level of risk within an organisation or a sector. These ratings are always inflated as any journey through the companies who either went into liquidation or were saved by governmental handouts in 2008 would demonstrate.
This is a systemic enigma built into the fake structure.
As the Economist states: "Although ratings are relied on by investors and regulators as impartial measures, the Rating Agencies are paid by those they rate for their judgments."
Think advertising - no newspaper contains negative editorial against its advertisers.
Think ratings - no Ratings Agency will downgrade an entity that is, in effect, paying the wages.
Some of the AAA/Aaa nonsenses standing proud at Standard and Poors and Moody's today, will seem just a trifle optimistic in less than twelve months time.
Jean Baudrillard: "... all current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing that you cannot get rid of."
* Private Equity - All the focus has been on the plight of the banks and the insurance companies, on the credit crunch and on the toxic assets, on targeting hedge-funds and on the state of the currency markets.
As attention has shifted to the 'real' economy (NB: it is our assessment that the ONLY Real economy is the informal one), the fake finance of private equity operations will come under increased scrutiny.
All firms under the yoke of private equity have been stripped of their assets and saddled with debt. With the current very real concerns about deflation this is very very bad news indeed.
When the Bank of England produced their Inflation Report on November 12th, the future spread of likely inflation rates projected negative values for the first time ever ie deflation.
Under a climate of deflation, indebted businesses (and households) will be more anxious to pay off loans and debts as soon as feasible.
How they are going to be able to achieve this is another problem entirely.
Jean Baudrillard: "The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange."
* Deflation - With the indebted desperately trying to pay off their financial millstones, a deflationary world is trouble as there will not be enough cash-rich entities to offset the activities of the indebted. This produces a deadly mix of falling prices and high leverage, leading to a debt deflation of the type first postulated by Irving Fisher in the 1930s.
And don't even get us started on the fine balance between deflation/stagflation tipping over into hyperinflation...
Jean Baudrillard: "Here and now, the whole edifice of value is exchangeable for Nothing."
* Moral Hazard - Moral hazard got us into this mess, and moral hazard is the template of choice to cement the Depression.
Excessive leverage, fake mathematics and accounting, all neatly wrapped in a regulatory-lite environment with no downside to the taking positions of excessive risk. Plus ça change...
Last week in the Financial Times, the war criminal called Blair admits to mistakes in his stewardship of the economy, but pleads for any reactive regulation to be as feeble as possible so that the innovation might be allowed to continue.
What innovation?
Credit default swaps? Derivatives generally? Ponzi schemes at hedge-funds? All very fucking innovative but of absolutely no value to anybody other than the psychos with their fingers in the till.
If such innovation had been put into Real research in medicine, science, rather than the myopic minutiae of available knowledges that are allowed to be marketed in this shareholder capitalist poker game, we would not be in this situation.
Still, its great to hear that the war criminal called Blair has earned £12 million from after-dinner speeches since he gave up his full-time post in applied genocide.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "One must push what is already collapsing."
* Emerging Economies - The new paradigmists, a particularly stupid breed of capitalist, reckoned that the emerging economies would rescue the US, the EU and Japan once the Recession began to bite. Yet all economies are declining in lock-step.
Furthermore, the shareholder capitalist model that has been foisted onto numerous gullible territories has been shown to be invalid.
So, for example, China needs to undertake some financial restructuring and recapitalisation. As the Economist states: "It would once have been easy to argue that a market-driven system served up by big western banks could do a better job of this than government. When virtually every such institution has been given state support to stay in business, that case is much harder to make."
George Soros: "If you need systemic change, you might as well go for something that is vastly superior."
* Credit Crisis - Although the record amounts of public money that has simply been handed over to the greed architects of this Depression has succeeded in freeing up some of lack of confidence in the financial system, the Real solidity so created is mainly an illusion. The Real economy will continue to suffer (British retailers experienced their worst xmas ever in 2008 and banks are refusing to pass on the interest rate cuts to businesses and customers) and banks will create a cycle of contagion whereby the businesses that they do support will be undermined by the complete collapse of the rest of the economy, with associated bad debts and further risk of toxicity. we should expect more hedge-funds and banks to go under this year.
Mark Twain: "Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
* Governmental, Regulatory and Central Bank Errors - It is now generally accepted that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the ban on the short-selling of financial stocks was a short-sighted mistake.
It is now generally accepted that solely targeting the toxicity in the financial system was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the excessive financial support provided to insurance giant AIG was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the highly leveraged private equity model was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the lack of regulation in the free market was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the targeting of hedge-funds was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that giving the Bank of England control over the setting of interest rates was a mistake.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that interest rates have been slashed to historical lows.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that the financial industry is rushing to create secretive Dark Pools.
There are more mistakes to come from a financial elite (sic) who see the financial world solely through the prism of their own self-interest.
Satyajit Das: "Markets placed great faith in the volume of money available to support asset prices and assist in alleviating shortages of liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated."
Trust, Psychology, Psychopathy, Freemasonry and Freebie Bets
* Trust is one key component in the current crisis - nobody trusts the banks any longer no matter what their government-sponsored advertising campaigns may claim.
All analysts must judge the security of their investments, savings and cash, and correctly apportion their monies accordingly.
Taking sports brokerage as an example, we set a limit on the degree of trust that we place in our routes to market. Once a threshold has been set, we maintain our cash levels with the said institution below these levels AND we build into our financial projections the probabilities of brokers reneging on our agreements.
We are now at the point where we place banks at the same level of risk as our second tier brokers ie below the level of trust that we have in our primary level Asian brokers.
This breakdown in trust will not be easily repaired.
We don't know them and we don't trust them.
And we don't trust their system either.
As the Depression begins to bite in earnest, many more individuals are going to be reaching this same conclusion.
As Sigmund Freud once observed: "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."
* The Trickledown Effect - One of the great fallacies of shareholder capitalism is the trickledown effect, an illusory piece of fake mathematics that is solely dependent on the imaginary hyperreality of purchasing power parity (PPP). There is no trickledown other than in misery and psychopathy.
In a Depression, this Real trickledown effect is a downward spiral in the fake pyramid selling scheme that is our system.
The greed, the psychopathy and the mistakes were made at the top.
Our representatives bailed them out with huge handouts.
Moral hazard determines that the same greed, the same psychopathy and the same mistakes will be made at the top.
Psychopaths are unemotional and irrational - these two factors must go together as research by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has shown.
There is a sufficiency of psychopathy among financial folk.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
* Freemasonry, the World Economic Forum, our Freebie Bets - We are in the middle of a Secular Bear Market which began in 1997 and which will last until around 2017, even ignoring the super-systemic risk of climate change. There are scenarios where the secular Bear Market becomes a Permanent Depression and, in that the same mistakes are repeatedly made until they cannot be made anymore, this scenario has a significant probability of coming to fruition.
Despite this Reality, we are about to experience another hyperreal inflating of asset bubbles. It should be remembered that two of the biggest bubbles of last century occurred in the years immediately following the 1929 slump.
At Davos this year, we should be expecting to hear numerous public statements as to the seeds of recovery and other such nonsenses. Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs has already started the ball rolling. The pyramid scheme is being talked up.
Furthermore, the few disaffected freemasons with whom I collaborate are informing me that there is an agenda for the deep state to buy back into the financial markets in the summer months, after the worst early year bankruptcies have been accommodated into the already illusory market prices.
In yesterday's post, we briefly discussed the lack of meritocracy in nepotism and cronyism, but this is nothing when compared to systemic control through secret societies.
Let's examine (again briefly) three of the inefficiencies brought to the financial system by the activities of the lodges. It is the remainder of society that pays for these inefficiencies.
For Freemasonry is a hyperreal heist.
Example 1 - When the Meadowhall Mall was being constructed in Sheffield, the tiling/ceramics contract was not a competitive tender. The contract was simply given to a masonic company in Rotherham. This is not meritocratic and it is not an example of a free market.
Example 2 - The biggest sixth form college in England required a new headmaster. A shortlist was drawn up. The chairman of governors objected that a catenian (catholic mason) who had applied was not on the shortlist and, even though he accepted that professionally this was the correct decision, he was duty bound to interview the man. The other candidate withdrew and the catenian was appointed. Two years later 90% of the board of governors at the school were composed of catenians from the same Knutsford lodge as that attended by the headmaster. The chair of governors retired and the new chair is the wife of a leading regional freemason. This is also not meritocratic.
Example 3 - Masons are given prior warning of changes in government regulation. So, when the government announced a change in the way that nursing homes could be operated in the Thatcherite free marketplace in the 80s, freemasons received the tip off of the market opportunity fully six months before the matter had even been discussed in parliament. Ah, democracy... This is neither meritocratic nor proof of the existence of free markets. It is more like Russia...
So, by the summer, the concerted efforts of the Davos brigade and the deep state apparatus will be driving market prices higher AGAINST the Real dynamic of the market which should, at best, be stagnant. Remember - markets are priced for a Recession, not a Depression, and most certainly not a Permanent Depression.
Selective buying into the markets is our Freebie bet for this year. For now, we restrict ourselves to suggesting a purchase of the systemic indices, but nearer the time we'll be more specific both with regard to the markets and the timing.
This is truly a contrarian Cynical Realist market position.
There is a risk in this position and the primary skill will be knowing when to close out - it is only in a fake hyperreality that one might make money out of opposing the true Reality. For, although an attempt will be made to drive a new collection of illusory bubbles, the state of the planet and the financial and economic systems may well determine that the bubbles will not be able to be inflated to any great extent.
Buttonwood in the Economist: "... low government-bond yields could lose their appeal and equities could rebound. Income-seeking investors seem unlikely to get much of a return from cash this year. An equity rally could occur even if the global economy is in for a prolonged period of weakness."
The other part of our Freebie Bet is for Dietrological Professional clients only and is ##################### to win the Premiership title.
* Conclusion - As the fallacious system runs on in its empty sameness, the illusion must be replaced by truth, otherwise there will not be eco-system in which to continue to peddle the propaganda and lies.
Satyajit Das: "In this current financial crisis, the quantum of available capital, the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds, and the globalization of capital flows may be some of the accepted "facts" that are revealed to be grand illusions."
Michel Foucault: "There is a battle 'for truth'... It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth... The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
In the previous post in our seasonal triptych, by focusing on the gathering Depression from the perspective of hedge-funds, Dark Pools, Behaviouralism, Darwinism and climate change, we outlined some of the reasons why a Deep Depression is our future.
Only time and space prevented us from venturing further into this systemic murkiness, and in the week since the post, there have been numerous further disturbing pieces of news that, under normal circumstances, would be headline-grabbing.
For example, the Bank of England reducing interest rates (and thereby eliminating its monetary options) to 1.5% - the lowest rate since the central bank was established 315 years ago. This is a statement of extreme historical weakness.
Or, the US economy losing more jobs (2.6 million) in 2008 than in any year since the 2nd World War.
Or the relentless conveyor belt of major job losses and fraud exposures on a daily basis (Alcoa, Satyam etc).
To begin this article, we intend looking at some of the other areas of non-sustainability that will guarantee the Deep Depression.
The Hyperreality (continued)
* Price-earnings (p/e) ratios - Bottom feeders are claiming that longer term investors are able to find value in the current market climate by taking advantage of the low p/e ratios in the marketplace. As stock prices have plummeted, earnings have, until recently, not fallen so far, as companies employ various accounting shenanigans to hide the true carnage from the balance sheets.
But earnings are about to go through the floorboards as the feedback loops and economic contagion poison the entire global economy.
Prices will follow.
The whole efficacy of p/e ratios as a potential measure of value in the marketplace is based on historical analyses and data.
Economists always look to the past for solutions, yet no economic hyperreality is replicable, which renders such research as quite pointless.
In a Depression, p/e ratios become an outmoded yardstick - systemic and super-systemic risk sees to that.
For this reason, there is not one global asset that might be thought of as offering sustainable value - any rebound is nothing more than an example of a dead cat bouncing...
Spokesperson for the Bank of England: "The world economy appears to be undergoing an unusually sharp and synchronised downturn."
* Ratings Agencies - All investors rely on the ratings bodies for a measurement of the level of risk within an organisation or a sector. These ratings are always inflated as any journey through the companies who either went into liquidation or were saved by governmental handouts in 2008 would demonstrate.
This is a systemic enigma built into the fake structure.
As the Economist states: "Although ratings are relied on by investors and regulators as impartial measures, the Rating Agencies are paid by those they rate for their judgments."
Think advertising - no newspaper contains negative editorial against its advertisers.
Think ratings - no Ratings Agency will downgrade an entity that is, in effect, paying the wages.
Some of the AAA/Aaa nonsenses standing proud at Standard and Poors and Moody's today, will seem just a trifle optimistic in less than twelve months time.
Jean Baudrillard: "... all current strategies boil down to this: passing around the debt, the credit, the unreal, the unnameable thing that you cannot get rid of."
* Private Equity - All the focus has been on the plight of the banks and the insurance companies, on the credit crunch and on the toxic assets, on targeting hedge-funds and on the state of the currency markets.
As attention has shifted to the 'real' economy (NB: it is our assessment that the ONLY Real economy is the informal one), the fake finance of private equity operations will come under increased scrutiny.
All firms under the yoke of private equity have been stripped of their assets and saddled with debt. With the current very real concerns about deflation this is very very bad news indeed.
When the Bank of England produced their Inflation Report on November 12th, the future spread of likely inflation rates projected negative values for the first time ever ie deflation.
Under a climate of deflation, indebted businesses (and households) will be more anxious to pay off loans and debts as soon as feasible.
How they are going to be able to achieve this is another problem entirely.
Jean Baudrillard: "The illusion of the economic sphere lies in its having aspired to ground the principle of reality and rationality on the forgetting of this ultimate reality of impossible exchange."
* Deflation - With the indebted desperately trying to pay off their financial millstones, a deflationary world is trouble as there will not be enough cash-rich entities to offset the activities of the indebted. This produces a deadly mix of falling prices and high leverage, leading to a debt deflation of the type first postulated by Irving Fisher in the 1930s.
And don't even get us started on the fine balance between deflation/stagflation tipping over into hyperinflation...
Jean Baudrillard: "Here and now, the whole edifice of value is exchangeable for Nothing."
* Moral Hazard - Moral hazard got us into this mess, and moral hazard is the template of choice to cement the Depression.
Excessive leverage, fake mathematics and accounting, all neatly wrapped in a regulatory-lite environment with no downside to the taking positions of excessive risk. Plus ça change...
Last week in the Financial Times, the war criminal called Blair admits to mistakes in his stewardship of the economy, but pleads for any reactive regulation to be as feeble as possible so that the innovation might be allowed to continue.
What innovation?
Credit default swaps? Derivatives generally? Ponzi schemes at hedge-funds? All very fucking innovative but of absolutely no value to anybody other than the psychos with their fingers in the till.
If such innovation had been put into Real research in medicine, science, rather than the myopic minutiae of available knowledges that are allowed to be marketed in this shareholder capitalist poker game, we would not be in this situation.
Still, its great to hear that the war criminal called Blair has earned £12 million from after-dinner speeches since he gave up his full-time post in applied genocide.
Friedrich Nietzsche: "One must push what is already collapsing."
* Emerging Economies - The new paradigmists, a particularly stupid breed of capitalist, reckoned that the emerging economies would rescue the US, the EU and Japan once the Recession began to bite. Yet all economies are declining in lock-step.
Furthermore, the shareholder capitalist model that has been foisted onto numerous gullible territories has been shown to be invalid.
So, for example, China needs to undertake some financial restructuring and recapitalisation. As the Economist states: "It would once have been easy to argue that a market-driven system served up by big western banks could do a better job of this than government. When virtually every such institution has been given state support to stay in business, that case is much harder to make."
George Soros: "If you need systemic change, you might as well go for something that is vastly superior."
* Credit Crisis - Although the record amounts of public money that has simply been handed over to the greed architects of this Depression has succeeded in freeing up some of lack of confidence in the financial system, the Real solidity so created is mainly an illusion. The Real economy will continue to suffer (British retailers experienced their worst xmas ever in 2008 and banks are refusing to pass on the interest rate cuts to businesses and customers) and banks will create a cycle of contagion whereby the businesses that they do support will be undermined by the complete collapse of the rest of the economy, with associated bad debts and further risk of toxicity. we should expect more hedge-funds and banks to go under this year.
Mark Twain: "Don’t part with your illusions. When they are gone, you may still exist, but you have ceased to live."
* Governmental, Regulatory and Central Bank Errors - It is now generally accepted that allowing Lehman Brothers to go bust was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the ban on the short-selling of financial stocks was a short-sighted mistake.
It is now generally accepted that solely targeting the toxicity in the financial system was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the excessive financial support provided to insurance giant AIG was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the highly leveraged private equity model was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the lack of regulation in the free market was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that the targeting of hedge-funds was a mistake.
It is now generally accepted that giving the Bank of England control over the setting of interest rates was a mistake.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that interest rates have been slashed to historical lows.
It is not yet regarded as a mistake that the financial industry is rushing to create secretive Dark Pools.
There are more mistakes to come from a financial elite (sic) who see the financial world solely through the prism of their own self-interest.
Satyajit Das: "Markets placed great faith in the volume of money available to support asset prices and assist in alleviating shortages of liquidity. The perceived abundance of liquidity was, in reality, merely an illusion created by high levels of debt and leverage as well as the structure of global capital flows. As the financial system deleverages, it is becoming clear, unsurprisingly, that available capital is more limited than previously estimated."
Trust, Psychology, Psychopathy, Freemasonry and Freebie Bets
* Trust is one key component in the current crisis - nobody trusts the banks any longer no matter what their government-sponsored advertising campaigns may claim.
All analysts must judge the security of their investments, savings and cash, and correctly apportion their monies accordingly.
Taking sports brokerage as an example, we set a limit on the degree of trust that we place in our routes to market. Once a threshold has been set, we maintain our cash levels with the said institution below these levels AND we build into our financial projections the probabilities of brokers reneging on our agreements.
We are now at the point where we place banks at the same level of risk as our second tier brokers ie below the level of trust that we have in our primary level Asian brokers.
This breakdown in trust will not be easily repaired.
We don't know them and we don't trust them.
And we don't trust their system either.
As the Depression begins to bite in earnest, many more individuals are going to be reaching this same conclusion.
As Sigmund Freud once observed: "Illusions commend themselves to us because they save us pain and allow us to enjoy pleasure instead. We must therefore accept it without complaint when they sometimes collide with a bit of reality against which they are dashed to pieces."
* The Trickledown Effect - One of the great fallacies of shareholder capitalism is the trickledown effect, an illusory piece of fake mathematics that is solely dependent on the imaginary hyperreality of purchasing power parity (PPP). There is no trickledown other than in misery and psychopathy.
In a Depression, this Real trickledown effect is a downward spiral in the fake pyramid selling scheme that is our system.
The greed, the psychopathy and the mistakes were made at the top.
Our representatives bailed them out with huge handouts.
Moral hazard determines that the same greed, the same psychopathy and the same mistakes will be made at the top.
Psychopaths are unemotional and irrational - these two factors must go together as research by Antonio Damasio, professor of neuroscience at the University of Southern California, has shown.
There is a sufficiency of psychopathy among financial folk.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko: "When the truth is replaced by silence, the silence is a lie."
* Freemasonry, the World Economic Forum, our Freebie Bets - We are in the middle of a Secular Bear Market which began in 1997 and which will last until around 2017, even ignoring the super-systemic risk of climate change. There are scenarios where the secular Bear Market becomes a Permanent Depression and, in that the same mistakes are repeatedly made until they cannot be made anymore, this scenario has a significant probability of coming to fruition.
Despite this Reality, we are about to experience another hyperreal inflating of asset bubbles. It should be remembered that two of the biggest bubbles of last century occurred in the years immediately following the 1929 slump.
At Davos this year, we should be expecting to hear numerous public statements as to the seeds of recovery and other such nonsenses. Jim O'Neill of Goldman Sachs has already started the ball rolling. The pyramid scheme is being talked up.
Furthermore, the few disaffected freemasons with whom I collaborate are informing me that there is an agenda for the deep state to buy back into the financial markets in the summer months, after the worst early year bankruptcies have been accommodated into the already illusory market prices.
In yesterday's post, we briefly discussed the lack of meritocracy in nepotism and cronyism, but this is nothing when compared to systemic control through secret societies.
Let's examine (again briefly) three of the inefficiencies brought to the financial system by the activities of the lodges. It is the remainder of society that pays for these inefficiencies.
For Freemasonry is a hyperreal heist.
Example 1 - When the Meadowhall Mall was being constructed in Sheffield, the tiling/ceramics contract was not a competitive tender. The contract was simply given to a masonic company in Rotherham. This is not meritocratic and it is not an example of a free market.
Example 2 - The biggest sixth form college in England required a new headmaster. A shortlist was drawn up. The chairman of governors objected that a catenian (catholic mason) who had applied was not on the shortlist and, even though he accepted that professionally this was the correct decision, he was duty bound to interview the man. The other candidate withdrew and the catenian was appointed. Two years later 90% of the board of governors at the school were composed of catenians from the same Knutsford lodge as that attended by the headmaster. The chair of governors retired and the new chair is the wife of a leading regional freemason. This is also not meritocratic.
Example 3 - Masons are given prior warning of changes in government regulation. So, when the government announced a change in the way that nursing homes could be operated in the Thatcherite free marketplace in the 80s, freemasons received the tip off of the market opportunity fully six months before the matter had even been discussed in parliament. Ah, democracy... This is neither meritocratic nor proof of the existence of free markets. It is more like Russia...
So, by the summer, the concerted efforts of the Davos brigade and the deep state apparatus will be driving market prices higher AGAINST the Real dynamic of the market which should, at best, be stagnant. Remember - markets are priced for a Recession, not a Depression, and most certainly not a Permanent Depression.
Selective buying into the markets is our Freebie bet for this year. For now, we restrict ourselves to suggesting a purchase of the systemic indices, but nearer the time we'll be more specific both with regard to the markets and the timing.
This is truly a contrarian Cynical Realist market position.
There is a risk in this position and the primary skill will be knowing when to close out - it is only in a fake hyperreality that one might make money out of opposing the true Reality. For, although an attempt will be made to drive a new collection of illusory bubbles, the state of the planet and the financial and economic systems may well determine that the bubbles will not be able to be inflated to any great extent.
Buttonwood in the Economist: "... low government-bond yields could lose their appeal and equities could rebound. Income-seeking investors seem unlikely to get much of a return from cash this year. An equity rally could occur even if the global economy is in for a prolonged period of weakness."
The other part of our Freebie Bet is for Dietrological Professional clients only and is ##################### to win the Premiership title.
* Conclusion - As the fallacious system runs on in its empty sameness, the illusion must be replaced by truth, otherwise there will not be eco-system in which to continue to peddle the propaganda and lies.
Satyajit Das: "In this current financial crisis, the quantum of available capital, the munificent resources of central banks and sovereign wealth funds, and the globalization of capital flows may be some of the accepted "facts" that are revealed to be grand illusions."
Michel Foucault: "There is a battle 'for truth'... It is necessary to think of the political problems of intellectuals not in terms of 'science' and 'ideology', but in terms of 'truth' and 'power'... 'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extend it. A 'regime' of truth... The problem is not changing people's consciousnesses - or what's in their heads - but the political, economic, institutional regime of the production of truth."
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
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