Saturday 29 February 2020

The 2019/20 Premier League Season Did Not Take Place

"The Gulf War did not take place" (La Guerre du Golfe n'a pas en lieu) was a collection of three essays published by philosopher and cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard in 1991.

The title is a reference to the play by Jean Giraudoux "The Trojan War Will Not Take Place" in which the characters attempt to prevent what the audience knows to be inevitable...
... a little like the Football is Fixed Network.

In this essay, a posthumous Jean Baudrillard argues that the 2019/20 Premier League season is not really a football competition but rather corruption masquerading as football.

Using a systemic match manipulation template, ownership of a cartel of EPL teams, a perverted Professional Game Match Officials Board (PGMOB) refereeing body, the 'hacking' of Manchester City, plus extensive doping and fixture list biases, Liverpool have been presented with the title by mafia entities.

All the spectators have known about this season has been in the form of propaganda imagery.
The closely watched media presentations makes it impossible for the fan to distinguish between the experience of what is truly happening, and its stylised, selective misrepresentation through simulacra by the content providers.
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From the beginning, we knew that this season wouldn't happen. After sport as sport and sport as terror, here is sport in the morgue - which leaves us to grapple with football's corpse and the necessity of dealing with this decomposing body which nobody from the Premier League has managed to revive.
Liverpool have secured victory over the corpse of English football.

Football has entered into a definitive crisis.
Sport exists through opening up competition but not in the EPL. In the past, competition functioned as a grading between different teams but now competitive edge is a virtual advantage created by illicit means - matchfixing, insider trading, corruption of referees and doping all on a systemic template.

This is why the season has not taken place. In this sense, the gravity of the non-event in the Premier League is greater than the event itself: it corresponds to a highly toxic window which affects a rotting corpse and which can cause nausea and powerless stupor. Here again, our symbolic defences are weak: the mastery of the end of football escapes us and we experience all this in the uniform shameful indifference of the Sky and BT Sport duopoly.

Non-football is characterised by that degenerate form of football which includes mafia (e.g. John Colquhoun), mafia states (e.g. Malta or Gibraltar), the manipulation of outcome in correlation with insider trading in the betting markets, coercion and blackmail. The corrupted match has taken the place of the legitimate game. It has become the principal focus, the simulacral reality, or rather, in its pure non-competiveness, the reality of non-football. The players bury themselves in their agents' offshore embrace leaving corruption alone on the stage, and including all of us as corruption hostages on the football media stage dominated by 4th Estate fake and hidden agendas (e.g. The Guardian, Der Spiegel). The hostage fan is the phantom actor, the extra who observes football powerlessly. The fan only exists commercially for value and liquidity - pay your subscriptions, buy our merchandise, watch the corruption and shut the fuck up - fantastic degradation of that which was the very core of the beauty of football. With the Premier League, the value of football has plummeted. The EPL has made itself the capitalist master of fan hostage value - the vulgar merchant of the fan hostage market. Taking the place of sport, fan hostage has become synonymous with the debility of football. We are all hostages of media intoxification, induced to believe in football just as we were once led to believe in 'Football Leaks' and the blackmailing operative Rui Pinto - a foot-soldier of the mafia juggernaut destroying football across Europe for the financial benefit of certain mafia (states). We are already strategic hostages in situ; our site is the screen on which we are virtually bombarded day by day. In this sense, the grotesque vaudeville played by the Premier League is a diversion, at once a diversion of both football and terror. Its systemic corruption has at least put an end to the particular corruption and spotfixing of the past, thereby showing the EPL to be in this as in many other respects the perfect accomplice of state terrorism. The systemic corruption in UK football features Malta as a catalyst with regard to matchfixing and transfer market abuses while the assassination of Daphne Caruana Galizia by the mafia state is equivalent to the murderous attempts perpetrated against whistleblowers by mafia entities in the UK, while such bodies all the time promote the fake coerced patsy Rui Pinto and the passwords allegedly hidden in his head (and, as it happens, on one of John Colquhoun's hard-drives).

This impossibility of proceeding to the act, this utter absence of legitimacy, implies the triumph of blackmail as strategy (in the case of the Premier League, there is still a challenge; with Rui Pinto & John Colquhoun there is only blackmail). The Premier League's abjection lies in it having vulgarised everything: club competition has become a fake entertainment spectacle, the fan a commercial hostage, the violent corruption of the league a scam based on a religious support for one's team and football an impossible comedy featuring a VAR orchestrated by mafia, for mafia, combined with an ignorance of the rules of the game and any interest in the integrity of the sport. Although the media points out VAR as the culprit, the grouping of PGMOB match officials working with the Liverpool cartel of teams should really be in the dock. But the state has helped the EPL become this monstrosity. By allowing the league to monetise small criminalities, the government drove the Premier League towards the mirage of sustainable systemic corruption (like the arms trade or aspects of the City of London).
This evolution of this mercenary league is indeed the only ironic and pleasing trait of this whole story.

We are in neither a sport of war nor a gamble of poker but in a reality of betting markets controlling match events which has wound its way inexorably through 28 years of the Premier League to a denouement in our current events; a sport of fake matches, to which belong those in the Champions League as well as the EPL (the Champions League under Ceferin has been taken over by the same mafia operators behind 'Football Leaks' and the criminalisation of the Premier League). Peripeteias of an anorexic history or an anorexic sport which can no longer be taken as real because it is incapable of conceiving sporting integrity - and God knows the EPL has no integrity - and thus devours itself. It is corrupted football, that of the right to corruption under the green light of the Premier League and UEFA with no precautionary regulation - free market matchfixing must not have obstacles to performativity. On the Richter scale, the 2019/20 Premier League season would not even reach two or three. The history and pre-season were unreal, as though the fiction of an earthquake were created by a manipulation of the match officials, of mainstream media, of the masses. The EPL is neither the strong form nor the degree zero of football, but the weak or phthisical degree, the asymptotic form which allows a pretence of competitive football but no real encounter, the transparent degree which prevents football being seen from the depths of the darkroom where the fan resides.

We should have been suspicious about the insider trading from BT Sport operatives pre-season as they actively contorted the betting markets to their corruption matrix in the same manner as they perpetrated the systemic corruption behind the mafia entity Leicester City stealing the 2015/16 version of the EPL title from Arsenal. The 2019/20 season never began. It had ended prior to its onset. It had already been won and the headlines and war strategies had already been written. As there is no competition, there are no matches. Just markets and a distinction between the prescribed winners and losers.

But these systemic corruptions do not occur in a vacuum.
We expose Liverpool's links with PGMOB match officials, we expose doping at the club, we expose the manner in which proprietary information was stolen from Manchester City, we expose Liverpool FC's links to bookmakers and how such associations energise insider trading and matchfixing, we expose the fixture list manipulations and all other marginal gains supportive of this project.
In the end, the distinction between the winners (Liverpool and their cartel of teams) and losers (Manchester City and other Gestifute-linked clubs) becomes indecipherable as the winners readily become the hostage of the losers; a Stockholm Syndrome that quantums into existence as the 'winners' evolve as hostages of the mafia themselves.
Since this season never began, this season is therefore interminable.
Indeed, Covid-19 might make it literally so.

By dint of dreaming of pure corruption, of an orbital corruption purged of all local and political infusions, the matchfixers have fallen into the arms of the mafia, into the virtual impossibility of football which translates into the paltry fantasia where adversaries compete in matches of agreed outcome, as though the irruption of the event of football had become obscene and insupportable, no longer sustainable, like every real event moreover. Everything is therefore transposed into the virtual, and we are confronted with a virtual apocalypse, a hegemony ultimately much more dangerous than real apocalypse.

The most widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual. However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own. Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual (in the manner of a doped up Jamie Vardy) and we must be content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian, deters any passage to real action. We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual.

In this process, the football clubs are once again revealing. Extracted like molecules in an experimental process, then distilled one by one in the exchange of mafia fake, it is their virtual death that is at issue, not their real death. Moreover, they never die: at best they disappear to reappear as gambling outfits, at worst they enter receivership only to be reformed and renamed in a new virtual unreality. There will never be monuments to current footballers in the manner in which Best or Greaves or Brady or Charles or McNeill are commemorated as everybody will be too ashamed of the modern player, kissing the badge of their agents offshore financial centres while perfecting the persona of a post-career in media disinformation: the collective shame which attaches to the club reflects the absolute degradation of football into fixed fan-boy fake-fun.

The passage to systemic corruption suffers widespread infamy: it supposedly corresponds to a criminally creative elevation of sporting prowess, thus to a psychotic process. It seems that this obsession with the passage to corruption today governs all of our behaviour: obsession with every real, with every real event, with every real corruption, with every associated pleasure which is too real. In fact, so real that it is unreal. Against this obsession with the real we have created a gigantic apparatus of simulation which allows to pass the act "in vitro". We prefer the exile of the virtual, of which television is the universal mirror, to the catastrophe of the real.

So the media chooses to applaud the array of unbeaten records and stellar performances by Liverpool while ignoring the rancid underbelly of underground mafia corruption that is the very definition of this supposed real.

The holistic of football has not escaped this virtualisation which is like a surgical operation, the aim of which is to present a face-lifted sport, the cosmetically treated spectre of its death, and its even more deceptive televisual subterfuge (as we see in the corrupted players of yesteryear obfuscating current corruptions on Sky, BT Sport and Match of the Day). Even players have lost the privilege of use value, the privilege of real football. Corruption has passed by that way and it spares nobody.

No more than the politicians, footballers do not know what to make of their real function, their function of corruption and matchfixing. They are pledged to the decoy of football as others are to the decoy of power.

Football has become pure (in the fascist sense) and speculative (in an insider trading sense) to the extent that we do not see the real event that it could be or that it would signify.

Since the 2019/20 (and 2015/16) Premier League titles were won in advance, we will never know what it would have been like if the league title races had actually existed. We will never know what Manchester City taking part with a chance of winning would have been like. We will never know what Liverpool taking part with a probability of being beaten would have been like. We have seen what a state-based systemic corruption is like, a process of paralysis or lobotomy of a fake sport away from the field of play with no possibility of reaction. But this is not football, any more than $100 million bets on a game is sufficient to make it football. Any more than the direct transmission by BBC/BT Sport/Sky of real time information is sufficient to authenticate the sport. One is reminded of Capricorn One in which the flight of a manned rocket to Mars, which only took place in a desert studio, was relayed live to all the television stations in the world.

While one fraction of the media and political class, specialists in the substitute bench of mental contortions, are whole-heartedly in favour of the systemic corruption (the corruption earns more for UK PLC than legitimacy), and another fraction are against it from the bottom of their hearts - but for reasons no less disturbing, all are agreed on one point: this systemic corruption exists, we have seen it. There is no interrogation into the sport itself or its reality; or into the fraudulence of this corruption, the programmed and always delayed illusion of competitive sport; or into the machination of this matchfixing and its amplification by disinformation, not to mention the improbable orgy of fake media, the systematic manipulation of data, the artificial dramatisation ("surely the most amazing comeback ever!")...

If you do not have practical intelligence, hacks and insider knowledge about the systemic corruption in the Premier League (and few among us do), at least develop a sceptical intelligence towards it, without renouncing the pathetic experience of its absurdity.

But there is more than one kind of absurdity: that of the assassination and that of being caught up in the illusion of assassination. It is just as in La Fontaine's fable: the day there is a real football match in the Premier League you will not even be able to tell the difference.

The mafia of John Colquhoun has become football.

The real victory of the simulators of corruption in football is to have drawn everyone into this rotten simulation of the real.

A real where match outcomes are in the underground betting markets before the game even starts.
A real where matches are corrupted months ahead.
A real where the utilisation of doping is accepted as a competitive advantage.
A real where players pay managers to play and agents pay national managers for client selection.
A real where a significant percentage of players represented by certain agents are involved in matchfixing.
A real where the UK sports media is entirely captured and performative to the corruption.
A real where only the American-owned Manchester United and Liverpool have a veto on the choice of Premier League chief executive.
A real where some EPL clubs are merely gambling stables e.g. Tony Bloom at Brighton & Hove Albion who sacks employees if their legitimate professionalism interferes with his proprietary matchfixing and market plays - Bloom is paying money out left, right and centre in a desperate attempt to bury his historical crimes.
A real where Match of the Day commentary is added post-game under corrupted editorial inputs.
A real where Manchester United should be 4th from bottom of the league and Crystal Palace bottom sees United instead challenging for a Champions League place and Hodgson being given a legacy based on doping and matchfixing.
And a real where Liverpool FC are champions, were champions before a ball was kicked and will be champions again so long as that is the preferred strategy of state and mafia.

The Premier League no longer takes place.
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If you have any information to contribute to Football is Fixed, please contact Ojo del Toro in complete confidence via Direct Message @footballisfixed. You can do so anonymously, but if you use your real name you can rest assured that this website operates a blanket policy of non-disclosure and does not cooperate with requests for details from the authorities or individuals.



Football is Fixed operate as a cellular network. We use the Iceberg Effect. We release 5% of our analytics and any hacks made available to us. We retain 95% for strategic defence, constructive negotiation, court. In extremis, we recuse ourselves and operatives will ensure full publication of the relevant information in numerous territories.

We Open Betting Markets. Whistleblowing, Corruption Hacking, Fraud Forensics. 
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© Football is Fixed 2006-2020

Wednesday 26 February 2020

The Wikileaks' Thread - The Futures Of Julian Assange & Investigative Journalism Are Inextricably Linked


A Timeline Of The End Of Journalism - Things You Won't Learn In The Orwellian (Otherwise Known As The Guardian)

Martin Luther King: "In the end we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends."

George Orwell (1984): "The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."
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Friedrich Nietzsche in 'Beyond Good And Evil': "Ultimately 'love of one's neighbour' is always something secondary, in part conventional and arbitrarily illusory, when compared with fear of one's neighbour. Once the structure of society seems to have been in general fixed and made safe from external dangers, it is this fear of one's neighbour which again creates new perspectives of moral valuation. There are certain strong and dangerous drives, such as enterprisingness, foolhardiness, revengefulness, craft, rapacity, ambition, which hitherto had not only to be honoured from the point of view of their social utility - under different names, naturally, from those chosen here - but also mightily developed and cultivated (because they were constantly needed to protect the community as a whole against the enemies of the community as a whole); these drives are noe felt to be doubly dangerous - now that the diversionary outlets for them are lacking - and are gradually branded as immoral and given over to calumny. The antithetical drives and inclinations now come into moral honour; step by step the herd instinct draws its conclusions. How much or how little that is dangerous to the community, dangerous to equality, resides in an opinion, in a condition or emotion, in a will, in a talent, that is now the moral perspective: here again fear is the mother of morality. When the highest and strongest drives, breaking passionately out, carry the individual far above and beyond the average and lowlands of the herd conscience, the self-confidence of the community goes to pieces, its faith in itself, its spine as it were, is broken: consequently it is precisely these drives which are most branded and calumniated. Lofty spiritual independence, the will to stand alone, great intelligence even, are felt to be dangerous; everything that raises the individual above the herd and makes his neighbour quail is henceforth called evil; the fair, modest, obedient, self-effacing disposition, the mean and average in desires, acquires moral names and honours. Eventually, under very peaceful conditions, there is less and less occasion or need to educate one's feelings in severity and sternness; and now every kind of severity, even severity in justice, begins to trouble the conscience; a stern and lofty nobility and self-responsibility is received almost as an offence and awakens mistrust... 'we wish that there will one day no longer be anything to fear!'"
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The Guardian’s Direct Collusion With Media Censorship By Secret Services Exposed by Thomas Scripps

Minutes of Ministry of Defence (MoD) meetings have confirmed the role of Britain’s Guardian newspaper as a mouthpiece for the intelligence agencies.
Last week, independent journalist Matt Kennard revealed that the paper’s deputy editor, Paul Johnson, was personally thanked by the Defence and Security Media Advisory Notice (or D-Notice) committee for integrating the Guardian into the operations of the security services.
Minutes of a meeting in 2018 read: “The Chairman thanked Paul Johnson for his service to the Committee. Paul had joined the Committee in the wake of the Snowden affair and had been instrumental in re-establishing links with the Guardian.”
D-Notices are used by the British state to veto the publication of news damaging to its interests. The slavish collusion of the mainstream media ensures that such notices function as gag orders.
Johnson joined the committee in 2014 and evidently excelled in his performance. A separate set of minutes from the first meeting attended by Johnson records the Guardian’s close collaboration with military officials.
Under a section detailing “advice” given by the intelligence agencies to the media, the document reads “most of the occurrences and requests for advice were related to further publications by The Guardian of extracts from the Snowden documents. The Secretary reported that the engagement of DPBAC [Defence Press and Broadcasting Advisory Committee] Secretariat with The Guardian had continued to strengthen during the last six months, with regular dialogues between the Secretary and Deputy Secretaries and Guardian journalists.”
The secretary and deputy secretaries were Air Vice-Marshal Andrew Vallance CB OBE, Air Commodore David Adams and Brigadier Geoffrey Dodds OBE. The chairman was Peter Watkins CBE, the MoD’s director general of Strategy, Security and Policy Operations.
Under the direction of these military intelligence handlers, the Guardian played a role in bringing other newspapers internationally to heel. The minutes note, “because of an agreement between The Guardianand allied publications overseas to coordinate their respective disclosures of Snowden material, advice given to the Guardian has been passed on to the New York Times and others, helping guide the disclosures of these outlets.”
In September 2014, the Guardian allowed the former head of GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) Sir David Omand to publish an article titled, “Edward Snowden’s leaks are misguided—they risk exposing us to cyber-attacks.”
He declared, “Journalists are not best placed to identify security risks; we have to trust those who oversee the intelligence-gathering.”
In 2016, Paul Johnson used an unprecedented interview with a serving head of MI5, Andrew Parker, to propagandize for the antidemocratic, warmongering interests of British imperialism.
These facts are damning proof of the Guardian’s total integration into the propaganda wing of the MoD following its involvement in the WikiLeaks and Snowden files releases. Indeed, the work of WikiLeaks and its founder Julian Assange has served to expose and confirm the deep ties of the entire mainstream media to the military-intelligence complex.
The Guardian has been viewed historically as the voice of British liberal dissent, critical of the worst excesses of British capitalism at home and abroad. But it has always acted as a political policeman—filtering the news “responsibly” and channelling the resulting anger into impotent moral appeals to the state and other authorities. Its dealings with Assange and Snowden transformed political allegiance into direct subservience. Its liberal, critical pretensions unravelled in a matter of a few months.
When Assange looked to the Guardian and other papers internationally such as the New York Times to publish the Afghan and Iraq war logs and secret US diplomatic cables in 2010, the editors’ main concern was damage control. Within a month of an initial publication of documents, the Guardian had broken off relations with Assange—publishing an infamous December 17 editorial “WikiLeaks: the man and the idea.” It stated that the Guardian had only agreed to publish “a small number of cables” to control the political fall-out from the details of murder, torture, espionage and corruption they revealed and give it the opportunity of “editing, contextualising, explanation and redaction.”
The main purpose of the editorial was to support Assange’s extradition to Sweden on trumped-up allegations of sexual misconduct relating to a trip to that country a few months earlier.
In an op-ed piece published last month by former Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, he assumes to take the moral high ground by claiming that WikiLeaks issued leaks unredacted, and wanted to continue this practise, in contrast with his “responsible” journalism. An editorial published immediately prior to Rusbridger’s article, again supporting Assange’s extradition to Sweden to face “charges” that don’t exist, stated, “The Guardian disapproved of the mass publication of unredacted documents ... and broke with Mr. Assange over the issue.”
This is a self-serving lie. WikiLeaks has pointed out that the editorial “conveniently leaves out” that it was the Guardian —through a book authored by David Leigh and Luke Harding—that disclosed the password to the digital file Assange had given them in confidence. The book was a hatchet job on WikiLeaks. The rights to it were sold, becoming the basis of a slanderous Hollywood movie.
When NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked files detailing blanket state surveillance of the world’s population in 2013, the Guardian set out to play the same “responsible” role. Asked afterwards if the paper had held back from publishing anything about GCHQ and UK security services because of “worries about national security,” the ever-pliant Mr. Rusbridger replied, “Yes, we’ve held back a great deal, we’ve published a small amount of what we have read.”
This time, however, the Guardian was told by the security services that even rigorously filtering the Snowden’s revelations was not good enough. It must stop publishing immediately.
The country’s top civil servant, Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood, called the Guardian’s offices to pass on the demands of then Prime Minister David Cameron that the Snowden material either be returned to the government or destroyed. Editors were threatened with legal action if they did not comply.
Rusbridger later explained, “The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.” This is a masterpiece of understatement. Emails obtained by the Associated Press in 2014 showed that this was an operation conducted in intimate collusion between the government, the British security services and the US National Security Agency, including then Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
In the end, two GCHQ security officials directly oversaw the Guardians destruction of its own material. Three Guardian staff members, including Paul Johnson himself, destroyed the hard drives in the Guardian’s possession with angle grinders and other equipment provided by GCHQ officials.
The Guardian had been put in a position it never wanted. Its liberal reputation, and previous disclosures, had made it the newspaper of choice for WikiLeaks’ and Snowden’s revelations. But the scale of what had been uncovered threatened the fundamental interests of British and US imperialism. It therefore rolled over when the government told it to cease and desist, before taking its place alongside the rest of the right-wing media on the secret committee responsible for press censorship and propaganda dissemination.
One of Assange’s persecutors-in-chief, Luke Harding, enjoys the most intimate relations with the security services. His notorious November 2018 fabrication, claiming Assange held meetings with US President Donald Trump’s former campaign manager Paul Manafort, was published in the Guardian just two weeks after Johnson was thanked for “re-establishing links” with the MoD. The story was widely cited and formed a keystone of the efforts, spearheaded by the Democrats in the US, to present WikiLeaks and “Russian interference” as the causes of Trump’s 2016 election victory.
Harding played a central role in silencing questions over the UK government’s bogus account of the Skripal affair in mid-2018. These events were the subject of at least one D-notice, issued while Paul Johnson was on the responsible committee.
An unintended but valuable consequence of the WikiLeaks exposures has been to explode the fraud of the Guardian’s claim to any critical independence from the state. The crimes of the major imperialist powers against the world’s population made available by WikiLeaks were so great that they could not be neutralised, even by the Guardian’s professional gatekeepers of the “truth.” Not a word published in this imperialist propaganda sheet can ever be taken at face value.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky in 'Notes From The Underground': "Power, power was what I wanted then, sport was what I wanted, I wanted to wring out your tears, your humiliation, your hysteria - that was what I wanted then."
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"I think everybody should take a sober look at the world about us, remember that practically everything that you're told about other countries is untrue; what we're told about ourselves and our great strength and how much loved we are - forget it. Our strength is there but it's the kind of strength that blows off your hand while you hold up the grenade; it's a suicidal strength as well as a murderous one. So here we are, and let us hope it is not the end of the road, even though there's every sign that it is not the yellow brick road up ahead" - Gore Vidal in "History Of The National Security State".
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