The Lord of Billionaires' Row

(Now also available on smashwords.com in multiple E-book formats!)

The Lord of Billionaires' Row is a novel by the blog author, which grew out of his further research into his blog article "Buy to Rot" published in February 2014. The article was on the effects and implications of very large amounts of money from overseas, not always legally come by, being "invested" in the UK property market in general and the London market in particular. Briefly, masses of houses and flats are bought and even built to lie empty, while ordinary wage-earners cannot afford to buy properties at inflated prices and they often struggle to find a place that is for rent at any price.

It became clear that, perhaps due to foreign  influence on British media proprietors, politicians and global "influence on the influencers", it was quite impossible to have a factual public discussion of those important issues, let alone other ones which the blog author discovered were interconnected. So, instead of trying to smuggle intelligent debate past The Guardian's online moderators, he wrote an exciting and enjoyable crime/espionage adventure novel in which money from communist China is laundered through the UK property market (where British organised crime was already active and constantly gaining power over law-enforcement and even politicians) and where British commercial secrets are stolen by various means, including physical burglaries by Chinese agents at key industrial sites from Scotland to East Anglia.

The novel also shows how much the policies of the Chinese Communist Party are determined by the personalities of the party's General Secretary and his rivals within the CCP leadership. When the leadership is not only corrupt but institutionally psychotic, there can be no change of direction (ie: away from disaster) without a profound reform of that institution as well as a change of leader. Just swapping leaders for another operating within the same corrupt framework will not suffice! 

The implications for Britain of the power over public life that organised crime has obtained by stashing most of its ill-gotten gains in the housing market for generations are just as chilling as the implications for China's future of unending and increasingly corrupt communist dictatorship.

Where to get the novel from:

Amazon.com

Link to Kindle/E-book and Paperback editions

Amazon.co.uk

Link to Kindle/E-book and Paperback editions

Other Amazon marketplaces:

See list of links to Amazon marketplaces on this blog article.
They all offer the Kindle E-book and with the exception of the Netherlands they offer the Paperback as well.

Author's Page on Amazon

Amazon.co.uk:

Follow this link for more stuff on the author.

Amazon.com:
Follow this link for a little bit more stuff on the author, as Amazon.com author's pages have more features!

Smashwords edition

Link to page where the book can be obtained in multiple E-book formats.

Note. This includes a mobi format version. This is formatted a bit differently from the "Kindle" Amazon mobi edition, because the formatting guidelines for the two platforms differ. Mostly, this is a matter of the platform's preferred style, which the author has respected in each case. The Smashwords edition, being available in several formats from the same source document, has in-text navigation features needed for a couple of the non-mobi formats, which are not strictly necessary on devices with Kindle-like navigation facilities and so are not present in the Amazon edition.

In-text navigation in this context amounts to a clickable "Back to Top" link at the end of each chapter or front/back matter section, which takes the reader to the table of contents, from where they can click a link to the chapter or section of their choice. In the Amazon Kindle edition, just press the menu button and go to table of contents for the same result. Hyperlinks are not implemented in the paperback edition, yet, but we may live to see (and probably, regret) this in our lifetimes.

Pricing:

The author has set the base price of the Amazon Paperback to £12.25 plus P&P. Due to the weighty nature of the book the paperback price cannot be much cheaper.  There is no VAT on books (not even E-books!) in the United Kingdom. The base price of the Amazon Kindle Edition is £1.70 There may be a tiny "delivery" charge to distort this figure.

The base price of the Smashwords edition is $2.10.

There is now an Australian-printed Amazon paperback available.

Book Review of Chasing Alexander by Christopher Martin

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A good book to read, but very tricky to honestly review without annoying anybody. I was invited to review this book, so here goes:

The only commissioned officer to get a good press in this memoir of the author’s service in the USMC in both Iraq and Afghanistan is... Alexander the Great. And even then the author is not uncritical of Alexander’s later excursions into social engineering. Even senior NCOs (“Senior Enlisted” in USMC parlance) come across as a sort of alien species. Whereas Spike Milligan wrote of British Army Sergeant-Majors (in a letter to The Guardian): “just one of them could win you a war” Christopher Martin finds their 21^st Century USMC equivalents to be obsessed with trivia when vital issues, such as food and ammunition supply, or fire support from an armoured convoy ideally placed to provide this, which chooses not to give it, are being willfully neglected.

The author joins the USMC to discover and perhaps prove, himself. This is fortunate, because he has to take the initiative throughout his service to make up for what seems to be a void in the leadership he is offered. As a lance corporal the author becomes part of an electronic network which allows him to request, without reference to higher authority, mortar, artillery and air strikes of great destructive power. Yet communication across that network between those giving orders and those who know the realities on the ground and what the most basic needs are, proves to be indirect and almost completely unidirectional. High authority can convey its orders to the lance-corporal, who cannot make any of his needs or observations known to anybody not in his own line of sight.

On his way to his Afghan deployment in Marjah (and I write as one Afghan city after another falls to the Taliban, who are newly blessed by CCP President Xi) the author sees marines at a staging post in Central Asia, who seem dirty, ragged, emaciated and mentally and physically exhausted. He wonders if he will be in the same state in a few months time -and, spoiler alert, he and his surviving comrades do leave Afghanistan in just that kind of state. For almost the whole of their tour, they have nothing to eat except MRE and snacks: not even substantial junk food. In consequence the author more or less stops eating and lives off coffee and cigarettes, which cannot have helped his fragile mental state. (He is unsparing in his portrayal of his own mental state.

MREs are designed to keep a soldier in the fight for two or three weeks in the absence of better food. They are not able to keep a man truly healthy for as long as a month, let alone a tour, and no amount of positive thinking or propaganda will alter this. MREs are the only substantial food available at the author’s duty station during his tour (except for some steaks that arrive on the USMC’s birthday) and it’s quite obvious that this was also the case during preceding tours in the same location by other units. No commissioned officer ever spends more than a hour or so at the location (even as the seasons turn), so that commissioned officers as a class have no eyes on the problems and no knowledge of them, but they alone have the power to change things. That officers have a monopoly on the power of change is the reason why the Royal Marines and British Army expect lieutenants to be omnipresent, but the USMC seems to make no such demand(?!)

It is also the case that the USMC sets great store by the ability of its enlisted men to carry out astonishing feats of endurance and physical exertion. Scientific research conducted on super-athletes engaging in extreme sports has shown that even the best-tuned human body can do this sort of thing for only forty-eight hours. It simply isn’t possible for a man performing at his physical limits to absorb enough nourishment to keep doing it for any longer without collapse. And yet there will be those who hold that any marine who’s driven beyond those limits somehow wasn’t man enough to cope. It’s a superman mentality which is doomed to foster failure when exposed to reality.

You have to recognise that the exceptional is just that, and save it up for when it actually stands a chance of affecting the ultimate outcome of a conflict or indeed any other issue. To stubbornly demand that your men be exceptional the whole time actually guarantees that they will be physically and mentally exhausted at the golden moment when a supreme effort could have bought results. The Chinese believe in the golden moment, which is precisely why they are suddenly openly backing the Taliban, right now!

And yet, I left in awe of the American men who managed to survive, if not always surmount, the piles of difficulties they were presented with, at least half of which might have been avoided by better organisation and more bi-directional communication between the Elite and the Grunts. Someone needs to translate “By Strength and Guile” into Latin, so that America’s Elite might understand. At the moment they apparently believe that strength is a complete answer by itself.

Chasing Alexander by Christopher Martin is published by Notional Books on the 28^th of September, 2021. An anniversary of note.

Book Review of The Cult of We by Eliot Brown and Maureen Farrell

* * * *

A fireworks display of exploded delusions.

Written by two journalists from the Wall Street Journal, this book seeks to research, document and explode the delusions of the We Work founder Adam Neumann, his wife, gurus, senior employees, their numerous investors and fund managers in charge of other people’s money and even his Japanese mentor and backer Masayoshi Son of Softbank. The effect is rather like an ever-swelling firework display of waste and destruction taking folly to ever greater heights, culminating in the man at the centre of a massive multi-billion-dollar sacrifice of other people’s money on the altar of New-Age virtue-signalling, being allowed to walk away with over a billion dollars (at least on paper) as a reward. At one point, Neumann even unwittingly seeks equivalence with Tony Blair by aspiring to become “president of the world!”

But there is one very important delusion which the authors do not explode, nor do they even appear to recognise it! Adam Neumann and Masayoshi Son engage in large-scale real-estate dealings in Communist China, where all property belongs to the CCP no matter how many leases, contracts and title deeds you think you have, and they go on to plot a scheme by which they would not only control all the real-estate finance in the United States and the Free World, but also in the very unfree world of Communist China. Their vaulted ambition is duly mocked by the authors, but at no point do the authors conceive that even modest and ostensibly profitable investments in the Chinese property market or Chinese industry are inherently delusional. Because to do that, would expose the nakedness of an awful lot of readers of the Wall Street Journal. With that important caveat, this book gets a four-star recommendation to readers.

The Cult of We is published in the UK by Mudlark on the 22^nd of July 2021.