Yesterday, after finishing trading, I cycled over to my fathers' to discover that he had collapsed and died after a long illness.
He was my best mate, my pal...
One of the most remarkable people that I have ever met described my father as "the most remarkable man" that he had ever met.
Without my dad, I'd be nothing.
Without my dad...
RJB - RIP.
NB. Please allow me some time to recover. There will be very limited blog postings over the next few weeks.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Monday, 23 March 2009
Friday, 20 March 2009
Burying Crystals, Burying Bodies, Burying Scudamore #
Somchai Neelapaichit was a Human Rights Activist in Thailand when His Excellency The Good Doctor Thaksin Shinawatra was in power.
On March 12th 2004, Somchai was grabbed by Thai police and has never been seen since.
One of the policemen had telephoned Thaksin's office on the day of the abduction but, when the police were introduced to the role of being defendants on trial, the mobile phone records were not produced in court.
A quick rewind to June 10th 2003 and His Excellency is on the eve of a visit to the Strange Idiot Child From Texas in order to offer support for the US/UK Global War Of Terror. To show that he meant business, His Excellency had three Muslim leaders in the South of Thailand arrested on suspicion of plotting with Jemaah Islamiah. All were tortured (simulated strangling, electrocution etc) and all were later acquitted.
Throughout the US/UK Global War Of Terror, Thailand has been used for illegal Third World Torture Centres under the US/UK Extraordinary Rendition programme. The Economist states: "The CIA has admitted that it destroyed 92 tapes held in Thailand of such interrogations [questioning foreigners in Thai military jails] - leading to accusations that it did so because of the abuses that took place."
Fast forward now to August 10th 2007 and Amnesty International (AI) sent an open letter to the Thai government and the media detailing extensive human-rights abuses in Thailand, particularly in the Muslim south where enlightened forms of killing like mass suffocation were practiced. Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a parallel report at the same time.
Concurrently, Thaksin had just taken over at Manchester City to the background of the Manc Manicness that generally accompanies every surreal neoreality that lands on the Eastlands outfit.
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Shinawatra brought money, or rather debt and the rumours of money, into Man City.
When the human-rights abuses came to light, the PL in the person of Our Great Leader, Richard Scudamore, rushed to the PR-rescue.
At City's first home match of the 2008/09 season immediately following the AI and HRW allegations, Our Great Leader sat next to His Excellency surrounded by the sort of private security people that one needs nowadays at the top of the 'game' in England, in a resounding show of support accompanied by pandering press releases from the PL itself.
The message was loud and clear - Thaksin is clean.
The remainder of this post details the murky relationships between Our Great Leader and some inappropriate people in inappropriate places, and is, consequently, for subscribers only.
Register at footballisfixed@googlemail.com to receive all posts via email without ######### and without truncations.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
On March 12th 2004, Somchai was grabbed by Thai police and has never been seen since.
One of the policemen had telephoned Thaksin's office on the day of the abduction but, when the police were introduced to the role of being defendants on trial, the mobile phone records were not produced in court.
A quick rewind to June 10th 2003 and His Excellency is on the eve of a visit to the Strange Idiot Child From Texas in order to offer support for the US/UK Global War Of Terror. To show that he meant business, His Excellency had three Muslim leaders in the South of Thailand arrested on suspicion of plotting with Jemaah Islamiah. All were tortured (simulated strangling, electrocution etc) and all were later acquitted.
Throughout the US/UK Global War Of Terror, Thailand has been used for illegal Third World Torture Centres under the US/UK Extraordinary Rendition programme. The Economist states: "The CIA has admitted that it destroyed 92 tapes held in Thailand of such interrogations [questioning foreigners in Thai military jails] - leading to accusations that it did so because of the abuses that took place."
Fast forward now to August 10th 2007 and Amnesty International (AI) sent an open letter to the Thai government and the media detailing extensive human-rights abuses in Thailand, particularly in the Muslim south where enlightened forms of killing like mass suffocation were practiced. Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a parallel report at the same time.
Concurrently, Thaksin had just taken over at Manchester City to the background of the Manc Manicness that generally accompanies every surreal neoreality that lands on the Eastlands outfit.
########################################################################
######################################################################
#########################################################################
######################################################
Shinawatra brought money, or rather debt and the rumours of money, into Man City.
When the human-rights abuses came to light, the PL in the person of Our Great Leader, Richard Scudamore, rushed to the PR-rescue.
At City's first home match of the 2008/09 season immediately following the AI and HRW allegations, Our Great Leader sat next to His Excellency surrounded by the sort of private security people that one needs nowadays at the top of the 'game' in England, in a resounding show of support accompanied by pandering press releases from the PL itself.
The message was loud and clear - Thaksin is clean.
The remainder of this post details the murky relationships between Our Great Leader and some inappropriate people in inappropriate places, and is, consequently, for subscribers only.
Register at footballisfixed@googlemail.com to receive all posts via email without ######### and without truncations.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Friday, 13 March 2009
TwitterSoapRealTime - A Corruption Feed #
Evolution...
We started with a couple of brief Twitters, before extending a collection of such Twitters into a TwitterSoap, and now we bring you TwitterSoapRealTime - A Corruption Feed.
The post below will be added to in Real-Time over the next few days, as and when we feel like it.
You might expect observations, market advices, rants, overviews, holistics, mockery and legal provocations in the directions of the perpetrators of the corruptions that define your existences.
Obviously, this is just a flagrant, yet fragrant, ploy to further boost our hits.
But, as regular readers will understand, we always provide you with a little something in return.
Scousers Taking The PESs? 15/03/09
Generally, the utilisation of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) may be determined via inside information, market analysis or, over a period of time, the fundamentals.
Institutional bias also publicises its hyperreality in a similar range of manners.
Now that ScudamoreWorld have done that which we desired and reignited a moribund title race, it is worth just taking a glance at a few highlight figures relating to Liverpool FC.
In 7 matches (three at home, four away) against Real Madrid (2), Chelsea (2), Manchester United (2) and Arsenal (1), Liverpool have won 6 and drawn 1.
In these matches, they have scored 9 goals late in the half (a fundamental measurement of fitness differential) while their august opponents have managed exactly 0.
Fair enough, Liverpool FC might just be a phenomenal team.
So let us compare this grouping of seven matches with the remainder of Liverpool's Premiership matches this season.
Liverpool have played 24 other matches, only winning 13 of them - this is against the likes of Stoke, West Brom, Fulham, Wigan etc - and, more revealingly, against these lesser sides, Liverpool have scored 20 late goals and let in 10.
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Additionally, in their five matches against the other members of the Big 4, Liverpool have received 4 sendings off in their favour.
So let us all celebrate ScudamoreWorld and the Fake Climax - Fix The Big Matches And Allow Them The Use Of ###################### And Liverpool Are In The Title Race.
Who Needs Reality??!!
Consortium Hitting The Premiership 14/03/09
One consortium is impacting on numerous Premiership matches in the early market phases.
############## of the Saturday matches are affected.
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As per usual with this particular clan, the market access has been peppered with positions, sometimes disinformational, sometimes in reaction to market Realities, sometimes spurious, but always broadly distributed across the global markets to attempt to disguise the criminalities at play.
The Real McCoy - Irish Moss 13/03/09
The Real McCoy is proper comedy, or a proper album by genius, McCoy Tyner.
The Real McCoy has also been the Cheltenham Hyperreality 2009.
We were telling anybody who was willing to listen pre-Cheltenham to SELL Tony McCoy winners over the first three days of the Fake Festival.
This QED was hardly superstring theoretic.
Both Ladbrokes and William Hill bookmakers had their shop-fronts festooned with victorious images of 'the best national hunt jockey in the world', there were widespread media references to the expectations of McCoy riding numerous winners - after all, the man had recently achieved his 3,000th career winner and had been a serial over-performer, on occasion, at previous Fake Festivals.
So, where do we stand after Day 3?
Tony McCoy has just one winner.
Tony McCoy has been riding a lot of horses for Nicky Henderson.
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Meanwhile, Ruby Walsh, with 5 winners at the FF, rides Kauto Star, the favourite in the Gold Cup for another 'interesting' trainer, Paul Nicholls.
Oh! The money that I have historically made opposing well-backed favourites from the Henderson and Nicholls yards!!
UEFA Referee Appointments 13/03/09
There is no evidence that western European referees are superior to those from the eastern half of the continent.
Indeed, my Trading Team would all probably agree that, if anything, the western officials are the more problematic, particularly #########################
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#######################################################################
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In this case, why have UEFA provided exactly zero officials from eastern Europe for the Champions League and UEFA Cup 1/8th Final matches?
24 games and the most exotic UEFA can come up with is Hungary and Croatia...
Of course, the Champions League simply bars east European teams from the latter stages due to ##############################################################
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#################################################################################
####################################################################
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But the UEFA Cup had 6 eastern clubs in the last sixteen and yet still had to put up with #############################################################################
#################################################################################
Next year, the UEFA Cup is being rebranded as The Europa - "A Premium On Mediocrity For The Disenfranchised East" is much closer fidelity to Reality.
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
We started with a couple of brief Twitters, before extending a collection of such Twitters into a TwitterSoap, and now we bring you TwitterSoapRealTime - A Corruption Feed.
The post below will be added to in Real-Time over the next few days, as and when we feel like it.
You might expect observations, market advices, rants, overviews, holistics, mockery and legal provocations in the directions of the perpetrators of the corruptions that define your existences.
Obviously, this is just a flagrant, yet fragrant, ploy to further boost our hits.
But, as regular readers will understand, we always provide you with a little something in return.
Scousers Taking The PESs? 15/03/09
Generally, the utilisation of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) may be determined via inside information, market analysis or, over a period of time, the fundamentals.
Institutional bias also publicises its hyperreality in a similar range of manners.
Now that ScudamoreWorld have done that which we desired and reignited a moribund title race, it is worth just taking a glance at a few highlight figures relating to Liverpool FC.
In 7 matches (three at home, four away) against Real Madrid (2), Chelsea (2), Manchester United (2) and Arsenal (1), Liverpool have won 6 and drawn 1.
In these matches, they have scored 9 goals late in the half (a fundamental measurement of fitness differential) while their august opponents have managed exactly 0.
Fair enough, Liverpool FC might just be a phenomenal team.
So let us compare this grouping of seven matches with the remainder of Liverpool's Premiership matches this season.
Liverpool have played 24 other matches, only winning 13 of them - this is against the likes of Stoke, West Brom, Fulham, Wigan etc - and, more revealingly, against these lesser sides, Liverpool have scored 20 late goals and let in 10.
##############################################################################
###########################################################################
##############################################################################
#############################################################################
############################################################################
#########################################################################
############################################################################
#######################################################################
Additionally, in their five matches against the other members of the Big 4, Liverpool have received 4 sendings off in their favour.
So let us all celebrate ScudamoreWorld and the Fake Climax - Fix The Big Matches And Allow Them The Use Of ###################### And Liverpool Are In The Title Race.
Who Needs Reality??!!
Consortium Hitting The Premiership 14/03/09
One consortium is impacting on numerous Premiership matches in the early market phases.
############## of the Saturday matches are affected.
############################################################################
#########################################################################
############################################################################
######################################################################
###########################################################################
##################################################################
##################################################################
###############################################################################
############################################################################
############################################################################
#######################################################################
################################################################
As per usual with this particular clan, the market access has been peppered with positions, sometimes disinformational, sometimes in reaction to market Realities, sometimes spurious, but always broadly distributed across the global markets to attempt to disguise the criminalities at play.
The Real McCoy - Irish Moss 13/03/09
The Real McCoy is proper comedy, or a proper album by genius, McCoy Tyner.
The Real McCoy has also been the Cheltenham Hyperreality 2009.
We were telling anybody who was willing to listen pre-Cheltenham to SELL Tony McCoy winners over the first three days of the Fake Festival.
This QED was hardly superstring theoretic.
Both Ladbrokes and William Hill bookmakers had their shop-fronts festooned with victorious images of 'the best national hunt jockey in the world', there were widespread media references to the expectations of McCoy riding numerous winners - after all, the man had recently achieved his 3,000th career winner and had been a serial over-performer, on occasion, at previous Fake Festivals.
So, where do we stand after Day 3?
Tony McCoy has just one winner.
Tony McCoy has been riding a lot of horses for Nicky Henderson.
#############################################################################
######################################################################
#######################################################################
########################################################################
####################################################################
Meanwhile, Ruby Walsh, with 5 winners at the FF, rides Kauto Star, the favourite in the Gold Cup for another 'interesting' trainer, Paul Nicholls.
Oh! The money that I have historically made opposing well-backed favourites from the Henderson and Nicholls yards!!
UEFA Referee Appointments 13/03/09
There is no evidence that western European referees are superior to those from the eastern half of the continent.
Indeed, my Trading Team would all probably agree that, if anything, the western officials are the more problematic, particularly #########################
#############################################################################
#######################################################################
################################################################
In this case, why have UEFA provided exactly zero officials from eastern Europe for the Champions League and UEFA Cup 1/8th Final matches?
24 games and the most exotic UEFA can come up with is Hungary and Croatia...
Of course, the Champions League simply bars east European teams from the latter stages due to ##############################################################
###########################################################################
#################################################################################
####################################################################
############################################################################
But the UEFA Cup had 6 eastern clubs in the last sixteen and yet still had to put up with #############################################################################
#################################################################################
Next year, the UEFA Cup is being rebranded as The Europa - "A Premium On Mediocrity For The Disenfranchised East" is much closer fidelity to Reality.
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Wednesday, 11 March 2009
TwitterSoap - A Coda #
Dabble In Dabbawala
As the Permanent Depression thrives, based on the algorithmic inadequacies of the computer-based global financial market risk management systems that have failed us all, it is worthy of note that, in Mumbai, 6 million meals are delivered daily by the Dabbawala vendors utilising only a colour coded manual system of identification.
Out of those six million meals, only one is mistakenly delivered - that is a Six Sigma rating!
Don't let the machine take over from the brain.
Wishing Unwell
A very personal message to Max Clifford - hurry up and die...
WADA Dey Do?
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) performs a similar systemic input to all those bodies that look for suspicious patterns in the betting markets.
There is no doping and there is no illegal insider trading.
Nothing at all.
As we have reached the critical stages of the Champions League, the issue of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) becomes a major parameter in any match evaluation.
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###########################################################################
#########################################################################
#########################################################################
###############################################################
So, a question for these pseudo-quangos...
If professional market analysts are able to determine the use of PESs pre-match AND experienced fans are able to detect the utilisation of PESs in-running, what is it that the good people of WADA are actually being paid for?
PESs v non-PESs = victory = rigged event = loss of integrity.
Who cares?
Media Deceleration Of The Depression #24
The BBC, still claiming, on occasion, that we still reside in a downturn, extensively doctors its output regarding the economic catastrophe of the free market ideology.
A simple example...
On the day when the Bank of England reduced interest rates to a hyperlow 0.5%, the BBC sent one of its nepotistic-fortunates to Devizes to interview Real people.
An android from the Chamber of Commerce, a businessman selling murdered fish and an extremely angry old woman who complained emotionally and bitterly about the impact on her savings. She survives on a mixture of her savings and the interest gained and she aggressively questioned the nepotistic one about whether it was fair that people who had lived within their means and saved, were being repeatedly punished for the risk and greed exhibited by their more psychopathic brethren.
By the next news report, only the android and the fish-murderer remained.
London Mafia? You're Having A Laugh!
The Fat People who have destroyed Newcastle United have been hyperlabelled 'the London Mafia' when, in Reality, they are ####################################
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As season ticket holders continue to drift from the Geordie club, Llambias has sent them a threatening letter. Anybody who invested long term in the club by purchasing a 3-year season ticket at a reduced price was told, in no uncertain terms: "All we are asking for is that supporters pay back the money they saved on this seasons' ticket when they signed up for the 3 years and we will terminate the contract."
All we are demanding is that you fuck off back to London, pal.
Oh, that would be after you've returned the cost of the season ticket for THIS season due to you and your cohorts extensive mismanagement of the team.
And take all your chins with you...
There's a Depression on, for goodness sake!
Pitching The Thresholds
All of the marketed responses to the Permanent Depression seek to establish a foundation, a base, a limit, a threshold - the point at which the markets must be quantitatively eased, the degree to which regulation must be accommodated, the level at which blame must be humbly accepted.
Damage limitation is the key battleground for the psycho-protagonists, as wherever these various thresholds are eventually set, our very futures depend on them.
Extensive printing of money yields hyperinflation if deflation is not accepted as the pain (see later TwitterSoap).
Limited regulation with suitably primed loopholes will allow a return to boom-and-bust asap, whereas a Global New Deal would rather delay such an inevitability. Only delay, mind...
The current fake argument over executive bonuses is where the battle for blame is being fought.
Should some paunch-vested ennobled/benighted upper class freak be able to keep his bonus/pension?
Wouldn't a more Realistic territory be to ask why these paunch-vested ones shouldn't be returning all their bonuses of the last 25 years since this neo-conservative nightmare began?
Their system has been founded on Racism, Corruption, Nepotism, Racketeering, Terror, Incompetence and Injustice.
And they believe they deserve a bonus?
Slavoj Žižek: "The ruling ideologies are trying to shift the blame for the global capitalist system as such onto its accidental deviations - such as overly lax regulation or the corruption of the financial institutions."
Joseph Stiglitz: "But the toxic thing is... our bankers are... ethically challenged."
Piotr Kropotkin: "It is by spoliation that they hold these riches."
Fabrication Of Realities
This week, Bernard Madoff will appear in court and it appears likely that he is going to plead guilty to 11 charges. A life sentence is in the offing as it has been accepted that the masses must be given their kilogram of flesh.
Since being rumbled, Madoff has been under house arrest.
Criminals at most levels of society are kept apart from their accomplices in order to prevent the Fabrication of Realities.
And exactly where is Sir Allen Stanford at the moment? Is Botham going to be questioned? He is knighted so he must be guilty of something.
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UEFA Versus ScudamoreWorld
UEFA are, once again, after the rogue and opaque entity that is ScudamoreWorld.
UEFA have called for "a single national body" to regulate the game in England, as this land is virtually unique among European nations in failing to supply a "proper legislative framework" for sports bodies.
ScudamoreWorld is totally unique in many other ways too...
The twinning of Premiership clubs with Asian Champions League clubs.
The 39th Game.
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###################
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That sort of thing...
The response from the ubiquitous Premier League spokesperson: "Football is best governed at a national level and any debate about how to do that should take place within that framework."
Translated from ScudamoreSpeak, this reveals: "Football is best misgoverned by ################## and any debate about how to do that should take place in shady non-regulated environments away from the public gaze."
One Dead Yank
Mark Twain: "I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable."
How true.
But, did he never go to Leeds?
And anyway, at least its a grin dying in Manchester...
Incognito Ergo Sum
John Colquhoun does not like having his photograph taken.
That is part of the trip.
His journey to becoming a super-agent is secreted in anonymity.
Colquhoun was responsible for the Fulham transfer policy that saw them waste £31 million last summer at the peak of the market. Roy Hodgson is already at the point of asking for further funds to repair the damage.
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Colquhoun is part of Key Sports who were involved in all that unpleasantness at Luton Town.
And that particular murk continues unabated.
Mike Berry, of Luton infamy, has found himself on the wrong side of the law yet again.
In an example of the problem of having two alleged regulatory bodies, English football frequently ends up fighting itself.
And so it is with this story.
The FA was fighting ScudamoreWorld.
Mike Berry represented both Kelvin Jack and Dundee in the transfer of the Trinidadian goalkeeper to the Scottish club. He kept this hyperreality away from the player that he was representing.
Lord Justice Mummery: "In our age it is more important than ever for courts to hold the firm line drawn between payments openly, and therefore, honestly, received by agents, and undeclared payments received by agents secretly."
Colquhoun represents several clubs on a consultative level.
His agency also represents players at those clubs.
We are in a Non-Regulated Chinese Walls territory here but we would be bound to ask whether these players are aware of the potential duplicitous options available in such a structure?
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Strewth! It is a good job that we do not bear grudges :)
The Tightrope - Financial Funambulism
Stretched between the two great edifices of Friedmanism and its, as yet, unnamed offspring is The Tightrope.
Our Global Financial System (OGFS) is walking across The Tightrope at this very moment.
On the left of our intrepid anti-hero is the Abyss of Deflation.
On the right, the Hyperreality of Hyperinflation.
OGFS is desperate to avoid the Abyss of Deflation and is printing money to prevent any risk of Stagflation as the populace cannot be repeatedly fleeced within a stagflated environment.
Unfortunately, each spin of the printing press adds weight to the balancing rod held by OGFS, making the likelihood of the Hyperreality of Hyperinflation more Real.
Oh, and just to make the whole process more entertaining in a Gladiators-stylee, The Tightrope gradually narrows as OGFS approaches the goal AND the Monster from the Deep occasionally violently twists The Tightrope itself in an attempt to send OGFS into the Hyperreality of Hyperinflation.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times: "Liberalisation contained the seeds of its own downfall."
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
As the Permanent Depression thrives, based on the algorithmic inadequacies of the computer-based global financial market risk management systems that have failed us all, it is worthy of note that, in Mumbai, 6 million meals are delivered daily by the Dabbawala vendors utilising only a colour coded manual system of identification.
Out of those six million meals, only one is mistakenly delivered - that is a Six Sigma rating!
Don't let the machine take over from the brain.
Wishing Unwell
A very personal message to Max Clifford - hurry up and die...
WADA Dey Do?
The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) performs a similar systemic input to all those bodies that look for suspicious patterns in the betting markets.
There is no doping and there is no illegal insider trading.
Nothing at all.
As we have reached the critical stages of the Champions League, the issue of Performance Enhancing Substances (PESs) becomes a major parameter in any match evaluation.
#############################################################################
#####################################################################
###########################################################################
#########################################################################
#########################################################################
###############################################################
So, a question for these pseudo-quangos...
If professional market analysts are able to determine the use of PESs pre-match AND experienced fans are able to detect the utilisation of PESs in-running, what is it that the good people of WADA are actually being paid for?
PESs v non-PESs = victory = rigged event = loss of integrity.
Who cares?
Media Deceleration Of The Depression #24
The BBC, still claiming, on occasion, that we still reside in a downturn, extensively doctors its output regarding the economic catastrophe of the free market ideology.
A simple example...
On the day when the Bank of England reduced interest rates to a hyperlow 0.5%, the BBC sent one of its nepotistic-fortunates to Devizes to interview Real people.
An android from the Chamber of Commerce, a businessman selling murdered fish and an extremely angry old woman who complained emotionally and bitterly about the impact on her savings. She survives on a mixture of her savings and the interest gained and she aggressively questioned the nepotistic one about whether it was fair that people who had lived within their means and saved, were being repeatedly punished for the risk and greed exhibited by their more psychopathic brethren.
By the next news report, only the android and the fish-murderer remained.
London Mafia? You're Having A Laugh!
The Fat People who have destroyed Newcastle United have been hyperlabelled 'the London Mafia' when, in Reality, they are ####################################
########################################################################
################################################################
####################################################################
######################################################################
##################################
As season ticket holders continue to drift from the Geordie club, Llambias has sent them a threatening letter. Anybody who invested long term in the club by purchasing a 3-year season ticket at a reduced price was told, in no uncertain terms: "All we are asking for is that supporters pay back the money they saved on this seasons' ticket when they signed up for the 3 years and we will terminate the contract."
All we are demanding is that you fuck off back to London, pal.
Oh, that would be after you've returned the cost of the season ticket for THIS season due to you and your cohorts extensive mismanagement of the team.
And take all your chins with you...
There's a Depression on, for goodness sake!
Pitching The Thresholds
All of the marketed responses to the Permanent Depression seek to establish a foundation, a base, a limit, a threshold - the point at which the markets must be quantitatively eased, the degree to which regulation must be accommodated, the level at which blame must be humbly accepted.
Damage limitation is the key battleground for the psycho-protagonists, as wherever these various thresholds are eventually set, our very futures depend on them.
Extensive printing of money yields hyperinflation if deflation is not accepted as the pain (see later TwitterSoap).
Limited regulation with suitably primed loopholes will allow a return to boom-and-bust asap, whereas a Global New Deal would rather delay such an inevitability. Only delay, mind...
The current fake argument over executive bonuses is where the battle for blame is being fought.
Should some paunch-vested ennobled/benighted upper class freak be able to keep his bonus/pension?
Wouldn't a more Realistic territory be to ask why these paunch-vested ones shouldn't be returning all their bonuses of the last 25 years since this neo-conservative nightmare began?
Their system has been founded on Racism, Corruption, Nepotism, Racketeering, Terror, Incompetence and Injustice.
And they believe they deserve a bonus?
Slavoj Žižek: "The ruling ideologies are trying to shift the blame for the global capitalist system as such onto its accidental deviations - such as overly lax regulation or the corruption of the financial institutions."
Joseph Stiglitz: "But the toxic thing is... our bankers are... ethically challenged."
Piotr Kropotkin: "It is by spoliation that they hold these riches."
Fabrication Of Realities
This week, Bernard Madoff will appear in court and it appears likely that he is going to plead guilty to 11 charges. A life sentence is in the offing as it has been accepted that the masses must be given their kilogram of flesh.
Since being rumbled, Madoff has been under house arrest.
Criminals at most levels of society are kept apart from their accomplices in order to prevent the Fabrication of Realities.
And exactly where is Sir Allen Stanford at the moment? Is Botham going to be questioned? He is knighted so he must be guilty of something.
###########################################################################
######################################################################
###############################################################################
#######################################################################
UEFA Versus ScudamoreWorld
UEFA are, once again, after the rogue and opaque entity that is ScudamoreWorld.
UEFA have called for "a single national body" to regulate the game in England, as this land is virtually unique among European nations in failing to supply a "proper legislative framework" for sports bodies.
ScudamoreWorld is totally unique in many other ways too...
The twinning of Premiership clubs with Asian Champions League clubs.
The 39th Game.
#########################################################################
##################################################################
#######################################################################
###################################################################
######################################################################
###################
#########################
#######################################################
That sort of thing...
The response from the ubiquitous Premier League spokesperson: "Football is best governed at a national level and any debate about how to do that should take place within that framework."
Translated from ScudamoreSpeak, this reveals: "Football is best misgoverned by ################## and any debate about how to do that should take place in shady non-regulated environments away from the public gaze."
One Dead Yank
Mark Twain: "I would like to live in Manchester, England. The transition between Manchester and death would be unnoticeable."
How true.
But, did he never go to Leeds?
And anyway, at least its a grin dying in Manchester...
Incognito Ergo Sum
John Colquhoun does not like having his photograph taken.
That is part of the trip.
His journey to becoming a super-agent is secreted in anonymity.
Colquhoun was responsible for the Fulham transfer policy that saw them waste £31 million last summer at the peak of the market. Roy Hodgson is already at the point of asking for further funds to repair the damage.
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Colquhoun is part of Key Sports who were involved in all that unpleasantness at Luton Town.
And that particular murk continues unabated.
Mike Berry, of Luton infamy, has found himself on the wrong side of the law yet again.
In an example of the problem of having two alleged regulatory bodies, English football frequently ends up fighting itself.
And so it is with this story.
The FA was fighting ScudamoreWorld.
Mike Berry represented both Kelvin Jack and Dundee in the transfer of the Trinidadian goalkeeper to the Scottish club. He kept this hyperreality away from the player that he was representing.
Lord Justice Mummery: "In our age it is more important than ever for courts to hold the firm line drawn between payments openly, and therefore, honestly, received by agents, and undeclared payments received by agents secretly."
Colquhoun represents several clubs on a consultative level.
His agency also represents players at those clubs.
We are in a Non-Regulated Chinese Walls territory here but we would be bound to ask whether these players are aware of the potential duplicitous options available in such a structure?
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Strewth! It is a good job that we do not bear grudges :)
The Tightrope - Financial Funambulism
Stretched between the two great edifices of Friedmanism and its, as yet, unnamed offspring is The Tightrope.
Our Global Financial System (OGFS) is walking across The Tightrope at this very moment.
On the left of our intrepid anti-hero is the Abyss of Deflation.
On the right, the Hyperreality of Hyperinflation.
OGFS is desperate to avoid the Abyss of Deflation and is printing money to prevent any risk of Stagflation as the populace cannot be repeatedly fleeced within a stagflated environment.
Unfortunately, each spin of the printing press adds weight to the balancing rod held by OGFS, making the likelihood of the Hyperreality of Hyperinflation more Real.
Oh, and just to make the whole process more entertaining in a Gladiators-stylee, The Tightrope gradually narrows as OGFS approaches the goal AND the Monster from the Deep occasionally violently twists The Tightrope itself in an attempt to send OGFS into the Hyperreality of Hyperinflation.
Martin Wolf of the Financial Times: "Liberalisation contained the seeds of its own downfall."
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Monday, 9 March 2009
A Particular System Of Objects - A Flashback
Each month in order to disguise either our being so laid back that we are horizontal, or a preference for life aspects more enjoyable than a focus on a panoply of endemic corruptions, we reproduce a Flashback Post from an earlier era when free market capitalism still existed as an allegedly valid antisocial template.
This week, the bewildered will be parting with their cash via the demi-corruptions of the Cheltenham Festival. The most bemused are the leisure punters who inhabit the Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs). These unfortunates are in a web of the market makers specific design.
The purpose of these 'designs' are to maximise the return to the bookmakers at the expense of the punters by any means possible.
The post below was first published on January 10th 2008 and provides a postmodern perspective of the LBO environment. Within this post, there are numerous Critical Theory deficiencies to stand alongside the usual extensive grammatical ones but, I feel, the post still has a few valid things to say.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs) are a post-modernist artifice in which a traditional betting environment has had its modern objects liberated from their original function. This new infrastructure exists within the societal scam that is British bookmaking but the purpose of the modernity of the environment is to optimise the returns to the bookmakers by utilising a range of post-modernist and/or psychological devices.
"Consumption, insofar as it is meaningful, is the systematic act of the manipulation of signs". And, the LBOs offer a perfect environment to test and prove Baudrillard's differential reasoning. Originally, the bookmakers used primitive forms of psychopathic business strategies to maximise their returns from those with a gambling addiction. Proximity to pubs was one such ruse that remains valid to this day; delayed race start times gave the bookies an edge over the "blind" punter; the security door and the frosted glass psychologically defined the bettor as a societal loser, something to be hidden away; the creation of a chaotic environment made any attempt at pseudo-rationality in decision-making virtually impossible.
To my discredit, I once very briefly considered undertaking a consultancy project for one of the leading English bookmakers. The project aim was to maximise the amount of money that the addicts would hand over to the deserving cause of turf accountancy. The scope of the consultancy was pomo-in-extremis - the company wished to create the model interior to most suit their financial targets utilising colour, form, atmosphere, modular components together with excessive control of the informational flow and the preying on the psychological styles and disorders of the gathered group. We will assess these manipulations in turn.
The LBOs offer a major advantage to the bookmakers in comparison with the racecourse, the internet or the telephone. It is a controlled environment. Totally. Nothing has been left to chance. The positioning of the television screens in relation to the seating, the types of material in the seating, the location of standing places, solo locations and group areas, the disinformational matrix of un-data, the colours of the seats and tv backgrounds, the use of glass/daylight and advertising prompts suitably located, the quality of the images, the misuse of clocks and time etc etc. And, once one steps into this environment with its rarefied atmosphere of reality, the CCTV's ensure that the web performs optimally - the modular design style allowing a process of continuous improvement from the perspective of the abusive bookie.
The control of the information flow is a critical aspect of the reality-mix. Taking the un-sport of horseracing as an example, we are able to immediately conclude that the LBOs are the worst location for maximising the potentially valuable information which might be utilised to limit your losses and exposures. In front of an internet screen, you may access scores of firms and achieve preferable prices by referring to one of the numerous betting odds comparison sites. At the racecourse, one may read the tic-tac, monitor the rails and assess the meaning behind the major bookies returning money to the ring - are they offsetting liabilities by hedging or are they taking a proprietary angle? You can pay extra to monitor the body language of the corrupt trainers and jockeys and, in that it matters, assess the fitness of the poor beasts. When the likes of Toby Balding, Barry Hills, Paul Nicholls or Nicky Henderson, to name but a few, had a hot favourite, my staking level would always be augmented by my behavioural assessment of the key protagonists pre-race. The LBOs, in contrast, are a virtual price monopoly. Furthermore, the prices displayed together with their dynamics may not bear any resemblance either to the prices shown at other LBOs owned by the same company or to the prices available in the ring. Value is further reduced by the refusal of the LBOs to accept a decent size of bet together with outrageous overround percentages and, until recently, a highly regressive tax regime. The LBOs also enforce an obligation to buy - they utilise the psychology of need to create optimistic behavioural atmospheres that engender belief rather than disbelief. The LBOs consequently do not allow the option of trading against an occurrence and all professionals understand that contrarian trading is the first step on the road to investment riches. To quote Warren Buffett: "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful". Or Deleuze: "Sense depends on non-sense".
And this neatly brings us on to the behavioural aspects of the LBOs. We have no desire to spend too much time assessing the behavioural traits of irrationality that underpin the investment marketplace that are the LBOs. The psychological styles/disorders mentioned here are merely some of the most prevalent conditions which the bookmakers choose to address for profit maximisation. Punters are disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, cognitive dissonance is a factor as we cherish long-held "beliefs", anchoring leads to us being overly influenced by external suggestion (a core focus for LBOs), status quo bias is not actually a complete lack of musical good taste but the behavioural term for the chasing of losses (another key area for the psycho's), punters conceptualise without assessing the holistic overview of the reality being presented to them, gamblers are persistently over-confident due to representativeness heuristic, magical thinking takes the bettor even further from the loci of true reality, hindsight bias is another omnipresent feature which is closely linked to memory bias etc etc. The micro-control of this captive group psychology is a major area of research at all the large betting organisations. The serial conditioning of the group engenders learned helplessness and irrational group think as the voices one trusts plead with us to lose our cash by following the twisted logic of the disinformational talking head.
And all of this corruption is dressed up in the illusion of freedom, the creative use of leisure time on the level playing field offered by the toss of a dice. "Free to be yourself" in fact means "...free to project one's desires onto produced goods; "Free to enjoy life" means free to regress and to be irrational and thus to adapt to a certain social organisation of our behaviour with regard to products. As a punter, the only manner to treat the environment offered by the LBOs is to partially invert Baudrillard's overview of "the way the rationality of objects comes to grips with the irrationality of needs" to become a cynical realistic: "the way the irrationality of needs of the gambler comes to grips with rationality of the irrationality of objects of the bookmakers".
The LBOs are a post-modern artifice, a subtle but base deception founded on trickery and greed. In the atmosphere of this artifice, identity, truth, reason and meaning are warped into equilibrium states of behavioural difference producing a herd-like response to the detriment of the gambler's assets.
According to Foucault, we have become our own prison guards and have learned to mould our behaviour in accordance with the needs of modern capitalism. This behaviour of self is augmented, in Lacan's words by "how human subjectivity is formed and shaped by institutions... We live in ideology, blinded by an 'imaginary' consciousness that prevents us from gaining access to objective truth". The object of the gambler's desire is a Baudrillardian "exchange based on nothing other than corruption".
And, what is the response of our guardians to this societal corruption? Gamcare and the Gambling Commission together with the government's free market attitude to gambling legislation/advertising/marketing and a refusal to address the corruption of the markets and our realities. That's the response... Despite the deceleration towards not-so-super-casinos, the public have been persuaded by the general consensus of "it matters more when there's money on it" and "what's yours worth?". And, as Lyotard says: "consensus is the ultimate form of totalitarianism". Those of us who choose to confront corruption as a core competency understand that the corruption generally remorphs itself into a new and equally invalid form, setting off the whole cyclical process of detection and readjustment to the new corrupted realities.
According to Lyotard, it is only the most major narratives that may be made narrative impossibilities - these are stories that can no longer be told as they no longer convince eg Auschwitz. It is a pity that gambling corruption is not yet anywhere near the reality of being a narrative impossibility.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
This week, the bewildered will be parting with their cash via the demi-corruptions of the Cheltenham Festival. The most bemused are the leisure punters who inhabit the Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs). These unfortunates are in a web of the market makers specific design.
The purpose of these 'designs' are to maximise the return to the bookmakers at the expense of the punters by any means possible.
The post below was first published on January 10th 2008 and provides a postmodern perspective of the LBO environment. Within this post, there are numerous Critical Theory deficiencies to stand alongside the usual extensive grammatical ones but, I feel, the post still has a few valid things to say.
_____________________________________________________________________________________
Licensed Betting Offices (LBOs) are a post-modernist artifice in which a traditional betting environment has had its modern objects liberated from their original function. This new infrastructure exists within the societal scam that is British bookmaking but the purpose of the modernity of the environment is to optimise the returns to the bookmakers by utilising a range of post-modernist and/or psychological devices.
"Consumption, insofar as it is meaningful, is the systematic act of the manipulation of signs". And, the LBOs offer a perfect environment to test and prove Baudrillard's differential reasoning. Originally, the bookmakers used primitive forms of psychopathic business strategies to maximise their returns from those with a gambling addiction. Proximity to pubs was one such ruse that remains valid to this day; delayed race start times gave the bookies an edge over the "blind" punter; the security door and the frosted glass psychologically defined the bettor as a societal loser, something to be hidden away; the creation of a chaotic environment made any attempt at pseudo-rationality in decision-making virtually impossible.
To my discredit, I once very briefly considered undertaking a consultancy project for one of the leading English bookmakers. The project aim was to maximise the amount of money that the addicts would hand over to the deserving cause of turf accountancy. The scope of the consultancy was pomo-in-extremis - the company wished to create the model interior to most suit their financial targets utilising colour, form, atmosphere, modular components together with excessive control of the informational flow and the preying on the psychological styles and disorders of the gathered group. We will assess these manipulations in turn.
The LBOs offer a major advantage to the bookmakers in comparison with the racecourse, the internet or the telephone. It is a controlled environment. Totally. Nothing has been left to chance. The positioning of the television screens in relation to the seating, the types of material in the seating, the location of standing places, solo locations and group areas, the disinformational matrix of un-data, the colours of the seats and tv backgrounds, the use of glass/daylight and advertising prompts suitably located, the quality of the images, the misuse of clocks and time etc etc. And, once one steps into this environment with its rarefied atmosphere of reality, the CCTV's ensure that the web performs optimally - the modular design style allowing a process of continuous improvement from the perspective of the abusive bookie.
The control of the information flow is a critical aspect of the reality-mix. Taking the un-sport of horseracing as an example, we are able to immediately conclude that the LBOs are the worst location for maximising the potentially valuable information which might be utilised to limit your losses and exposures. In front of an internet screen, you may access scores of firms and achieve preferable prices by referring to one of the numerous betting odds comparison sites. At the racecourse, one may read the tic-tac, monitor the rails and assess the meaning behind the major bookies returning money to the ring - are they offsetting liabilities by hedging or are they taking a proprietary angle? You can pay extra to monitor the body language of the corrupt trainers and jockeys and, in that it matters, assess the fitness of the poor beasts. When the likes of Toby Balding, Barry Hills, Paul Nicholls or Nicky Henderson, to name but a few, had a hot favourite, my staking level would always be augmented by my behavioural assessment of the key protagonists pre-race. The LBOs, in contrast, are a virtual price monopoly. Furthermore, the prices displayed together with their dynamics may not bear any resemblance either to the prices shown at other LBOs owned by the same company or to the prices available in the ring. Value is further reduced by the refusal of the LBOs to accept a decent size of bet together with outrageous overround percentages and, until recently, a highly regressive tax regime. The LBOs also enforce an obligation to buy - they utilise the psychology of need to create optimistic behavioural atmospheres that engender belief rather than disbelief. The LBOs consequently do not allow the option of trading against an occurrence and all professionals understand that contrarian trading is the first step on the road to investment riches. To quote Warren Buffett: "Be fearful when others are greedy and be greedy when others are fearful". Or Deleuze: "Sense depends on non-sense".
And this neatly brings us on to the behavioural aspects of the LBOs. We have no desire to spend too much time assessing the behavioural traits of irrationality that underpin the investment marketplace that are the LBOs. The psychological styles/disorders mentioned here are merely some of the most prevalent conditions which the bookmakers choose to address for profit maximisation. Punters are disproportionately influenced by the fear of feeling regret, cognitive dissonance is a factor as we cherish long-held "beliefs", anchoring leads to us being overly influenced by external suggestion (a core focus for LBOs), status quo bias is not actually a complete lack of musical good taste but the behavioural term for the chasing of losses (another key area for the psycho's), punters conceptualise without assessing the holistic overview of the reality being presented to them, gamblers are persistently over-confident due to representativeness heuristic, magical thinking takes the bettor even further from the loci of true reality, hindsight bias is another omnipresent feature which is closely linked to memory bias etc etc. The micro-control of this captive group psychology is a major area of research at all the large betting organisations. The serial conditioning of the group engenders learned helplessness and irrational group think as the voices one trusts plead with us to lose our cash by following the twisted logic of the disinformational talking head.
And all of this corruption is dressed up in the illusion of freedom, the creative use of leisure time on the level playing field offered by the toss of a dice. "Free to be yourself" in fact means "...free to project one's desires onto produced goods; "Free to enjoy life" means free to regress and to be irrational and thus to adapt to a certain social organisation of our behaviour with regard to products. As a punter, the only manner to treat the environment offered by the LBOs is to partially invert Baudrillard's overview of "the way the rationality of objects comes to grips with the irrationality of needs" to become a cynical realistic: "the way the irrationality of needs of the gambler comes to grips with rationality of the irrationality of objects of the bookmakers".
The LBOs are a post-modern artifice, a subtle but base deception founded on trickery and greed. In the atmosphere of this artifice, identity, truth, reason and meaning are warped into equilibrium states of behavioural difference producing a herd-like response to the detriment of the gambler's assets.
According to Foucault, we have become our own prison guards and have learned to mould our behaviour in accordance with the needs of modern capitalism. This behaviour of self is augmented, in Lacan's words by "how human subjectivity is formed and shaped by institutions... We live in ideology, blinded by an 'imaginary' consciousness that prevents us from gaining access to objective truth". The object of the gambler's desire is a Baudrillardian "exchange based on nothing other than corruption".
And, what is the response of our guardians to this societal corruption? Gamcare and the Gambling Commission together with the government's free market attitude to gambling legislation/advertising/marketing and a refusal to address the corruption of the markets and our realities. That's the response... Despite the deceleration towards not-so-super-casinos, the public have been persuaded by the general consensus of "it matters more when there's money on it" and "what's yours worth?". And, as Lyotard says: "consensus is the ultimate form of totalitarianism". Those of us who choose to confront corruption as a core competency understand that the corruption generally remorphs itself into a new and equally invalid form, setting off the whole cyclical process of detection and readjustment to the new corrupted realities.
According to Lyotard, it is only the most major narratives that may be made narrative impossibilities - these are stories that can no longer be told as they no longer convince eg Auschwitz. It is a pity that gambling corruption is not yet anywhere near the reality of being a narrative impossibility.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Tuesday, 3 March 2009
The Valley Of Slievenamon All Over Again #
We are just one week away.
Seven bundles of 24 hours and we will be there.
There will be Tricolors and Guinness and Deaths of Horses.
There will be memories of the Brigades and the Famine.
There will be Rigged Races and Insider Gambles landed.
But, most astonishingly and, consequently, most worthy of comment in this shoddy little place is the primary fact that the Cheltenham Festival is rather different to normal national hunt horseracing.
In what way?
It is fixed.
But it is not that fixed.
In this pontificating posting, we address the full spectrum of corruption that has blighted British horseracing for decades now, we explore how such illicit machinations vary with circumstance and we conclude by demonstrating the very clear conjunctions between Rigged Racing, Fixed Football and Fake Financial.
We will start our nauseous narrative with that bastion of bold Britannia, the BBC.
We listen to our national broadcaster.
We trust them.
Even when they refused to allow a humanitarian appeal to be shown for the victims of the genocide in the Gaza Panopticon, we trusted that there were very British reasons why this must be so.
We acquiesced.
Because we trust them extensively, we base our lives on the BBC output.
The BBC tells us to "do something funny for money on Rednose Day".
So, we go out in fancy dress and trash a bank :)
The BBC tells us that it is going to "drastically reduce" the amount of horseracing shown on its channels from 2010.
So, we explore why this is so.
But, it must be a very serious thing because Victor Chandler has chosen to speak in public #######################################################################
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But Victor is blinkering himself to the Realities here.
Horseracing is no longer a prime time sport for several reasons.
Firstly, it is not a sport. It is animal abuse to the tune of insider trading.
Secondly, the markets are entirely rigged as we demonstrate below.
Thirdly, nobody believes in the integrity of the sport.
Fourthly, the people who attend race meetings are sidelined in some evolutionary shunting yard of neohyperreality. They meet up in Chepstow and Ludlow and Bangor-on-Dee, and they give prizes to each other.
Oh! How the British love their prizes.
As an aside, notice how many of the top bankers under Commons duress are lorded and knighted? I mean, like, if Allen Stanford and Ian Botham are knights of the realm, there has to be posthumous hope for Dr Harold Shipman here...
As regular readers will understand as I have banged on about it before, I studied at the ################################################################### (#####) in the mid-nineties. My unpublished thesis was sold as a high level consultancy document and was entitled "The Impact of Conspicuous Money on Outcome in British Horserace Betting Markets".
In plain English, for the plain people of England - how races are rigged in relation to the betting markets.
And rigged they are...
Horseracing altered with the establishment of the spread betting firms.
Historically, punters had only been able to bet on an animal rather than against it - this latter market neoreality was only available to the bookmakers who short-sold horses as a matter of course.
When analysts were also able to oppose a creature in the market, the psychopathic control in the possession of the bookies was significantly diluted.
It was at this point where we undertook our research.
Our results were shocking.
There was a statistically significant link between the liabilities for certain aspects of the betting industry on a particular horse winning and the probability of such a victory coming to fruition.
The greater the liabilities of the layers...
... the less likely the animal was to win the event.
This infrastructure was applicable for the vast majority of horserace meetings.
As with all economic abuses, think investment bankers, the corruption was based on a hyperreality of skewed incentives.
Imagine it is 1995 and you are at Catterick races awaiting the 3:15 race. The prize money is £3,400 to win the sporting farce.
The betting market is liquid to £1 million nationally and a major firm of market-manipulating bookmakers have marked liabilities on the odds-on favourite coming home first.
The bookmakers endeavour to alter your neorealities a further phase of the image away from the sport's genesis as the hunt. The owner(s), the trainer and other 'connections' are not a problem.
They understand their sport.
The jockeys do as they are told.
Briefly we should explore the obvious benefits to the insiders of the skewed incentive template.
The bookmakers rake in the cash as the favourite gets turned over. They take a market position against the favourite late in the market in order to optimise their returns.
The owners and connections also short-sell the existentially-abused mass of muscle. Additionally, as the horse is still, in Reality, a good thing, the market price will lengthen for the next outing as mug punters follow the formbook (the route, par excellence, to financial ruin). The connections buy into the animal late in the market so as not to tilt the hyperreality. The horse romps home.
It should be noted that the bookies also gain from this follow up event as punters no longer trust the horse after it pulled up lame when ahead at Catterick.
The jockeys have no say in the matter - they focus on deferred gratification and the McMansion.
Of course, there have to be losers in this rigged pyramid scheme of a sport.
And these would be the legions who are addicted to getting fleeced by the market underworld.
It has to be worthy of mention that, just like the fixing of football and finance, the insiders and their immediate contacts are the ones who benefit the most from the inflation of this Ponzi neoreality.
There are, in effect, three strata to British horseracing. Events like the Catterick race faked up for your delectation above are the bread-and-vegan margarine of the betting industry's balance sheets. The BBC/Channel 4 televised races would form a second layer and the major prize money/kudos events would entail the top tier.
Victor Chandler and his ilk are terrified about the impact of the BBC pulling the majority of their racing coverage as it will lead to a massive reduction in turnover on these races.
These middle-tiered races contribute massively to the bookies coffers.
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"This is a terrible thing for horseracing" bleats Chandler in his petition to the BBC.
In that Chandler has been one of the leading rails operators around British racecourses for the last half a century, this is rather selective vision.
Horseracing used to be a mass spectator sport before the bookmakers, including Chandler, took control.
The rails bookmakers alongside the major off-course firms dominate the market infrastructure.
The rails layers will accept bets up to any size from their clients.
Having profited handsomely from this destruction of an alleged sport, Chandler evidently doesn't learn. At least not in the public space, for the man trumpeted the integrity of the Premiership as the primary reason why he was re-establishing the Victor Chandler spread betting operation that failed spectacularly in its last incarnation under the tutelage of a lizard with a twitch in his eye.
Integrity!
Doesn't exist.
Like Truth and Justice, she turned her head and ran years ago.
Out of sight.
Chandler - ######################################################################
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The BBC should completely get rid of racing.
It is no longer even a 'sport'.
It is a betting medium.
And it is rigged.
It is anachronism in capital letters.
We'll finish with a couple of spectacles.
Remember when Frankie Dettori rode seven winners in one afternoon at Ascot?
Well, that was a hyperreality.
In frank and open discussions with ####################################### of the ##### and Rodney Brack, chief executive of the British Horserace Betting Levy Board, I covered the neorealities behind that spectacle of corruption.
Gary Wiltshire was a pain in the neck to the major bookmakers.
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On that fateful day, Wiltshire took on the entire market believing that 7-in-a-day was not a feasible thing.
He lost well over a million on a day he described as "difficult".
A further value to the spectacle was the hit that ##################### took on the festival of fun, as they were out of the loop.
Their year end for accounting purposes was the following Monday, September 30th.
Cheltenham represents the other type of spectacle.
Some of the races are truly competitive and the reason that it is such a popular spectacle is that it represents a virtual flashback to a different era when race results were not determined in the trading rooms of the #########################
############### - a now-defunct lobbying group, like the G14(18).
The great spectacle of Cheltenham is, of course, Erin's Isle versus The Former Occupying Power.
And, being horseracing, it is still rigged.
In a delight of an historical flashback, some races are heavily tilted against the invading Emerald Army.
The best piece of betting advice my Co. Cork grandfather ever gave me: "Back the Irish in the meritocratic events. Back the Crown in the Handicaps. On no account back the Crown under any other circumstance."
This has always been a valuable advice...
Due to my Direct Action background in the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Hunt Saboteurs and Sea Shepherd, I was not exactly welcome in British horseracing circles once they had undertaken their background checks and the like.
We were attacking their 'sport' from the hunt to the course.
And some of us did amazing things...
X was a member of ######### ALF cell.
He was privileged in the private income department and, considering that this cell was in the north west, he spoke posh.
X infiltrated the biggest local hunt and, using his poshness as his poker face, he became a valuable member of their entourage. We fought with him on hunts.
Then, one night, X made a visit to the kennels.
He had a key, understood the alarm and was not alone.
Every single beagle was found a safe home as the ###################### hunt was forced to become a foot hunt until they could train up some more hounds.
All that in-breeding, all that class, gone...
Now there's something to wish for in 2009.
Horseracing and hunting - neither of these are valid narratives.
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
Football Is Fixed - An Instinct For Freedom
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Seven bundles of 24 hours and we will be there.
There will be Tricolors and Guinness and Deaths of Horses.
There will be memories of the Brigades and the Famine.
There will be Rigged Races and Insider Gambles landed.
But, most astonishingly and, consequently, most worthy of comment in this shoddy little place is the primary fact that the Cheltenham Festival is rather different to normal national hunt horseracing.
In what way?
It is fixed.
But it is not that fixed.
In this pontificating posting, we address the full spectrum of corruption that has blighted British horseracing for decades now, we explore how such illicit machinations vary with circumstance and we conclude by demonstrating the very clear conjunctions between Rigged Racing, Fixed Football and Fake Financial.
We will start our nauseous narrative with that bastion of bold Britannia, the BBC.
We listen to our national broadcaster.
We trust them.
Even when they refused to allow a humanitarian appeal to be shown for the victims of the genocide in the Gaza Panopticon, we trusted that there were very British reasons why this must be so.
We acquiesced.
Because we trust them extensively, we base our lives on the BBC output.
The BBC tells us to "do something funny for money on Rednose Day".
So, we go out in fancy dress and trash a bank :)
The BBC tells us that it is going to "drastically reduce" the amount of horseracing shown on its channels from 2010.
So, we explore why this is so.
But, it must be a very serious thing because Victor Chandler has chosen to speak in public #######################################################################
############################################################################
#############################################################################
########################################################################
############################################################################
But Victor is blinkering himself to the Realities here.
Horseracing is no longer a prime time sport for several reasons.
Firstly, it is not a sport. It is animal abuse to the tune of insider trading.
Secondly, the markets are entirely rigged as we demonstrate below.
Thirdly, nobody believes in the integrity of the sport.
Fourthly, the people who attend race meetings are sidelined in some evolutionary shunting yard of neohyperreality. They meet up in Chepstow and Ludlow and Bangor-on-Dee, and they give prizes to each other.
Oh! How the British love their prizes.
As an aside, notice how many of the top bankers under Commons duress are lorded and knighted? I mean, like, if Allen Stanford and Ian Botham are knights of the realm, there has to be posthumous hope for Dr Harold Shipman here...
As regular readers will understand as I have banged on about it before, I studied at the ################################################################### (#####) in the mid-nineties. My unpublished thesis was sold as a high level consultancy document and was entitled "The Impact of Conspicuous Money on Outcome in British Horserace Betting Markets".
In plain English, for the plain people of England - how races are rigged in relation to the betting markets.
And rigged they are...
Horseracing altered with the establishment of the spread betting firms.
Historically, punters had only been able to bet on an animal rather than against it - this latter market neoreality was only available to the bookmakers who short-sold horses as a matter of course.
When analysts were also able to oppose a creature in the market, the psychopathic control in the possession of the bookies was significantly diluted.
It was at this point where we undertook our research.
Our results were shocking.
There was a statistically significant link between the liabilities for certain aspects of the betting industry on a particular horse winning and the probability of such a victory coming to fruition.
The greater the liabilities of the layers...
... the less likely the animal was to win the event.
This infrastructure was applicable for the vast majority of horserace meetings.
As with all economic abuses, think investment bankers, the corruption was based on a hyperreality of skewed incentives.
Imagine it is 1995 and you are at Catterick races awaiting the 3:15 race. The prize money is £3,400 to win the sporting farce.
The betting market is liquid to £1 million nationally and a major firm of market-manipulating bookmakers have marked liabilities on the odds-on favourite coming home first.
The bookmakers endeavour to alter your neorealities a further phase of the image away from the sport's genesis as the hunt. The owner(s), the trainer and other 'connections' are not a problem.
They understand their sport.
The jockeys do as they are told.
Briefly we should explore the obvious benefits to the insiders of the skewed incentive template.
The bookmakers rake in the cash as the favourite gets turned over. They take a market position against the favourite late in the market in order to optimise their returns.
The owners and connections also short-sell the existentially-abused mass of muscle. Additionally, as the horse is still, in Reality, a good thing, the market price will lengthen for the next outing as mug punters follow the formbook (the route, par excellence, to financial ruin). The connections buy into the animal late in the market so as not to tilt the hyperreality. The horse romps home.
It should be noted that the bookies also gain from this follow up event as punters no longer trust the horse after it pulled up lame when ahead at Catterick.
The jockeys have no say in the matter - they focus on deferred gratification and the McMansion.
Of course, there have to be losers in this rigged pyramid scheme of a sport.
And these would be the legions who are addicted to getting fleeced by the market underworld.
It has to be worthy of mention that, just like the fixing of football and finance, the insiders and their immediate contacts are the ones who benefit the most from the inflation of this Ponzi neoreality.
There are, in effect, three strata to British horseracing. Events like the Catterick race faked up for your delectation above are the bread-and-vegan margarine of the betting industry's balance sheets. The BBC/Channel 4 televised races would form a second layer and the major prize money/kudos events would entail the top tier.
Victor Chandler and his ilk are terrified about the impact of the BBC pulling the majority of their racing coverage as it will lead to a massive reduction in turnover on these races.
These middle-tiered races contribute massively to the bookies coffers.
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"This is a terrible thing for horseracing" bleats Chandler in his petition to the BBC.
In that Chandler has been one of the leading rails operators around British racecourses for the last half a century, this is rather selective vision.
Horseracing used to be a mass spectator sport before the bookmakers, including Chandler, took control.
The rails bookmakers alongside the major off-course firms dominate the market infrastructure.
The rails layers will accept bets up to any size from their clients.
Having profited handsomely from this destruction of an alleged sport, Chandler evidently doesn't learn. At least not in the public space, for the man trumpeted the integrity of the Premiership as the primary reason why he was re-establishing the Victor Chandler spread betting operation that failed spectacularly in its last incarnation under the tutelage of a lizard with a twitch in his eye.
Integrity!
Doesn't exist.
Like Truth and Justice, she turned her head and ran years ago.
Out of sight.
Chandler - ######################################################################
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The BBC should completely get rid of racing.
It is no longer even a 'sport'.
It is a betting medium.
And it is rigged.
It is anachronism in capital letters.
We'll finish with a couple of spectacles.
Remember when Frankie Dettori rode seven winners in one afternoon at Ascot?
Well, that was a hyperreality.
In frank and open discussions with ####################################### of the ##### and Rodney Brack, chief executive of the British Horserace Betting Levy Board, I covered the neorealities behind that spectacle of corruption.
Gary Wiltshire was a pain in the neck to the major bookmakers.
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On that fateful day, Wiltshire took on the entire market believing that 7-in-a-day was not a feasible thing.
He lost well over a million on a day he described as "difficult".
A further value to the spectacle was the hit that ##################### took on the festival of fun, as they were out of the loop.
Their year end for accounting purposes was the following Monday, September 30th.
Cheltenham represents the other type of spectacle.
Some of the races are truly competitive and the reason that it is such a popular spectacle is that it represents a virtual flashback to a different era when race results were not determined in the trading rooms of the #########################
############### - a now-defunct lobbying group, like the G14(18).
The great spectacle of Cheltenham is, of course, Erin's Isle versus The Former Occupying Power.
And, being horseracing, it is still rigged.
In a delight of an historical flashback, some races are heavily tilted against the invading Emerald Army.
The best piece of betting advice my Co. Cork grandfather ever gave me: "Back the Irish in the meritocratic events. Back the Crown in the Handicaps. On no account back the Crown under any other circumstance."
This has always been a valuable advice...
Due to my Direct Action background in the Animal Liberation Front (ALF), the Hunt Saboteurs and Sea Shepherd, I was not exactly welcome in British horseracing circles once they had undertaken their background checks and the like.
We were attacking their 'sport' from the hunt to the course.
And some of us did amazing things...
X was a member of ######### ALF cell.
He was privileged in the private income department and, considering that this cell was in the north west, he spoke posh.
X infiltrated the biggest local hunt and, using his poshness as his poker face, he became a valuable member of their entourage. We fought with him on hunts.
Then, one night, X made a visit to the kennels.
He had a key, understood the alarm and was not alone.
Every single beagle was found a safe home as the ###################### hunt was forced to become a foot hunt until they could train up some more hounds.
All that in-breeding, all that class, gone...
Now there's something to wish for in 2009.
Horseracing and hunting - neither of these are valid narratives.
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
Football Is Fixed - An Instinct For Freedom
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
Monday, 2 March 2009
Put The Coach On The Couch #
Any behavioural analysis of Rafa Benitez is a fruitful area for research.
He has personally overseen the deconstruction of an institutionally backed campaign to install the Texas Reds in the Premiership title race, via a form of serial self-harming rarely seen in positions of power.
And in the public space too...
Yet, through the power machinations in the Liverpool hierarchy, this Monday morning finds The Crackpot entrenched at the top of the hill, with strong defences and ramparts, protected by shark infested waters.
Rafa has managed to concoct a short-term teflon hyperreality for himself.
By siding with Tom Hicks against George Gillett and Rick Parry in the power struggle, Rafa, in his desire to have omnipotence in the area of transfers, has split the club in two.
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The owners no longer speak to one another.
Parry is leaving after 12 years with the club.
Still no sign of the new stadium.
The club are massively indebted to Wachovia/RBS to the tune of some £350 million.
The debt is being rolled over at cost.
The squad is weak compared to the others at the top of the league and Rafa's transfers are frequently ill-judged both in quality and price.
But the primary issue with Benitez is his determined desire to avoid anything so restricting as strategy.
The Big Picture is not for Benitez.
He prefers the minutiae, the peripheral tinkering with irrelevancies, the micro and the incremental rather than the innovative and the revolutionary.
His behaviourly based stubbornness also prevents him from seeing the issues unfolding on the pitch in real-time. Think Skrtel - the bizarre selection and persistence in a man receiving a skinning every time Downing sped past him at the weekend.
At the start of the season, it was decided by the Texas Reds hierarchy that the ScudamoreWorld Premiership should be the primary focus for the new season.
This strategic choice was magnified and made public by the team selections around the early Champions League windows.
And the selection was the correct one in a sporting world dominated by the fake.
For Liverpool have received a marked positive handicap to be added to their Real points totalisation this season.
Below is the top of the table as it should appear this morning, with the negative and erroneous impacts of the PGMOB officials removed. The figure in brackets is the handicap ie. how many points better/worse off a team is in ScudamoreWorld.
1. Chelsea 27-60 (-5)
2. Manchester United 26-59 (+3)
3. Arsenal 27-52 (-6)
4. Everton 27-48 (-4)
5. Liverpool 27-44 (+11)
6. #########################
7. #########################
8. #########################
9. #########################
10. Aston Villa 27-37 (+15)
The astonishing biases towards Liverpool and Aston Villa deserve closer scrutiny.
And explanation, too...
Both clubs are American-owned and, interestingly, the only other positive handicap in the top ten teams is Manchester United, also owned by our imperial cousins across the sea.
The impacts of this handicapping are a major adjustment to your Realities.
We should have a title race between Chelsea and Champions of Everywhere.
We don't.
Liverpool should be battling with Merseyside rivals over the 4th spot while Arsenal could concentrate on the Champions League, knowing that they possessed an eight point cushion on their Champions League place.
Aston Villa should merely be battling for a top ten finish rather than sitting six points ahead of the Gunners in the race for the 4th place threshold.
This whole ScudamoreWorld pretence is a nonsense.
In previous years, there have been biases built into the competitions in England. For example, the systemic support received by Man Utd in the BSkyB early years, ###
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Anyway, back to The Crackpot.
Around the time of his unstable and informationally embellished rant, Rafa was really in need of a couch, a gentle recline and a soothing voice allowing some person-centred counselling to explore the nether regions of the man's psychological disorders.
Liverpool have since imploded.
There was Gerrard and ##################################
Robbie Keane was sold at a loss, leaving the squad threadbare upfront - Rooney, Ronaldo, Berbatov and Tevez versus Torres, Kuyt, El Zhar and Ngog...
Get Real...
In 7 Premiership matches since the bottom fell out of his rationality, Liverpool have picked up two wins (courtesy of external input from Calamity and the Kipper), four draws and a defeat.
United have notched up eight wins in the same window.
Rafa hyperrealised his errors and changed course.
Although his senseless platitudes surreally claimed that the title race was a Reality, the man altered his strategic focus to the Champions League, a more comfortable territory.
Exactly why he believes that a team that has failed, despite possessing a 17 point handicap advantage over Arsenal, 16 over Chelsea and 8 over Manchester United, is going to be able to compete with these same teams plus Barcelona, is a narrative yet to be told.
An observer might be tempted to surmise that Rafa was deliberately involved in undermining his football club.
His tactics have been, at best, haphazard and, at worst, chaotic and self-destructive.
Rafa has become a liability.
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
The annual fee is £15 for 150 posts.
Football Is Fixed - "In the time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" - George Orwell.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
He has personally overseen the deconstruction of an institutionally backed campaign to install the Texas Reds in the Premiership title race, via a form of serial self-harming rarely seen in positions of power.
And in the public space too...
Yet, through the power machinations in the Liverpool hierarchy, this Monday morning finds The Crackpot entrenched at the top of the hill, with strong defences and ramparts, protected by shark infested waters.
Rafa has managed to concoct a short-term teflon hyperreality for himself.
By siding with Tom Hicks against George Gillett and Rick Parry in the power struggle, Rafa, in his desire to have omnipotence in the area of transfers, has split the club in two.
###############################################################################
###########################################################################
##############################################################################
The owners no longer speak to one another.
Parry is leaving after 12 years with the club.
Still no sign of the new stadium.
The club are massively indebted to Wachovia/RBS to the tune of some £350 million.
The debt is being rolled over at cost.
The squad is weak compared to the others at the top of the league and Rafa's transfers are frequently ill-judged both in quality and price.
But the primary issue with Benitez is his determined desire to avoid anything so restricting as strategy.
The Big Picture is not for Benitez.
He prefers the minutiae, the peripheral tinkering with irrelevancies, the micro and the incremental rather than the innovative and the revolutionary.
His behaviourly based stubbornness also prevents him from seeing the issues unfolding on the pitch in real-time. Think Skrtel - the bizarre selection and persistence in a man receiving a skinning every time Downing sped past him at the weekend.
At the start of the season, it was decided by the Texas Reds hierarchy that the ScudamoreWorld Premiership should be the primary focus for the new season.
This strategic choice was magnified and made public by the team selections around the early Champions League windows.
And the selection was the correct one in a sporting world dominated by the fake.
For Liverpool have received a marked positive handicap to be added to their Real points totalisation this season.
Below is the top of the table as it should appear this morning, with the negative and erroneous impacts of the PGMOB officials removed. The figure in brackets is the handicap ie. how many points better/worse off a team is in ScudamoreWorld.
1. Chelsea 27-60 (-5)
2. Manchester United 26-59 (+3)
3. Arsenal 27-52 (-6)
4. Everton 27-48 (-4)
5. Liverpool 27-44 (+11)
6. #########################
7. #########################
8. #########################
9. #########################
10. Aston Villa 27-37 (+15)
The astonishing biases towards Liverpool and Aston Villa deserve closer scrutiny.
And explanation, too...
Both clubs are American-owned and, interestingly, the only other positive handicap in the top ten teams is Manchester United, also owned by our imperial cousins across the sea.
The impacts of this handicapping are a major adjustment to your Realities.
We should have a title race between Chelsea and Champions of Everywhere.
We don't.
Liverpool should be battling with Merseyside rivals over the 4th spot while Arsenal could concentrate on the Champions League, knowing that they possessed an eight point cushion on their Champions League place.
Aston Villa should merely be battling for a top ten finish rather than sitting six points ahead of the Gunners in the race for the 4th place threshold.
This whole ScudamoreWorld pretence is a nonsense.
In previous years, there have been biases built into the competitions in England. For example, the systemic support received by Man Utd in the BSkyB early years, ###
########################################################################
#############################################################################
#########################################################################
#####################################################################
############################################################################
########################################################################
Anyway, back to The Crackpot.
Around the time of his unstable and informationally embellished rant, Rafa was really in need of a couch, a gentle recline and a soothing voice allowing some person-centred counselling to explore the nether regions of the man's psychological disorders.
Liverpool have since imploded.
There was Gerrard and ##################################
Robbie Keane was sold at a loss, leaving the squad threadbare upfront - Rooney, Ronaldo, Berbatov and Tevez versus Torres, Kuyt, El Zhar and Ngog...
Get Real...
In 7 Premiership matches since the bottom fell out of his rationality, Liverpool have picked up two wins (courtesy of external input from Calamity and the Kipper), four draws and a defeat.
United have notched up eight wins in the same window.
Rafa hyperrealised his errors and changed course.
Although his senseless platitudes surreally claimed that the title race was a Reality, the man altered his strategic focus to the Champions League, a more comfortable territory.
Exactly why he believes that a team that has failed, despite possessing a 17 point handicap advantage over Arsenal, 16 over Chelsea and 8 over Manchester United, is going to be able to compete with these same teams plus Barcelona, is a narrative yet to be told.
An observer might be tempted to surmise that Rafa was deliberately involved in undermining his football club.
His tactics have been, at best, haphazard and, at worst, chaotic and self-destructive.
Rafa has become a liability.
* All posts labelled # are only available by subscription.
The annual fee is £15 for 150 posts.
Football Is Fixed - "In the time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act" - George Orwell.
© Football Is Fixed/Dietrological
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