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.

Book Review of The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

 

Book Review of The Cat Who Saved Books by Sosuke Natsukawa

Translated by Louise Heal Kawai

* * * * *

A teenage adventure and the power of truth.

If this novel was intended only for teenagers, then they probably don’t know when they are being spoiled.

A thrice-bereaved High School boy, Rintaro, comes to terms with the death of his grandfather who has looked after him since the death of his parents, by going on alarming adventures with a strange talking cat. The cat is, by Japanese standards, really quite rude and blunt, but that’s just what Rintaro needs. Each adventure is a fable giving a different perspective on the meaning and nature of books. The adventures take place in “labyrinths”, created either by the personality or the will of the character whom Rintaro is going to confront, but all are sustained by the power of truth. The way, the only way, for Rintaro to resolve issues is to find a way in which the character in that labyrinth is lying (perhaps to themselves) or under a misapprehension. If he can get his “adversary” to recognise and correct the lie, then the process immediately becomes non adversarial: things resolve themselves and books are freed. The last labyrinth, though, is created by someone far older and far more powerful than the others. And there is much more at stake than Rintaro’s own existence or happiness. He has to show how books give hope even if their power is waning in the modern world. And he needs all the insight and understanding he has gained from his adventures to answer that one.

Truth is the key, not just for the successful execution of Rintaro’s missions but also for his love-life, because Sayo, whom he doesn’t even see as his friend to begin with, sees through everything and is completely unimpressed by the High School’s star pupil and sportsman, whom even Rintaro loves a bit.

This novel was translated by Louise Heal Kawai.

The Cat Who Saved Books is published in the UK by Picador on the 16^th of September 2021.

Book Review of Thorneycroft to SA80 by Jonathan S. Ferguson

 Book Review of Thorneycroft to SA80 (British Bullpup Firearms 1901-2020) by Jonathan S. Ferguson.

* * * * *

The Author is Keeper of Firearms and Artillery at the Royal Armouries. 

The original photography for this book was by N.R. Jenzen-Jones.

It is published by Headstamp Publishing (Nashville) 2020 and copies are available for commercial sale internationally. This review is based on a Backer’s Kit Edition, which does not differ in editorial content from the commercial edition.

This book sets out to be an authoritative history of bullpup firearms in Britain, and starts by defining what “bullpup” means (effectively a firearm where the barrel begins behind the trigger) and exploring the American origins of the term, which seems to have been coined two decades after the first British rifles meeting the definition. The production values of the book, normally a superficial matter, are excellent and this makes a genuine difference in a history of this kind, because the original photographs are crisp and clear and show exactly the things the text is seeking to convey, whilst archive drawings and diagrams are reproduced well-enough to be clearly readable and understandable. The author and his photographer enjoyed access to relevant firearms in the Royal Armouries collection and to various archive material and seem to have been mindful that not everyone would have such access. They have made the most of it so their readers can benefit.

The author shows some museum-curator’s bias in letting the guns speak for themselves rather than by paying too much attention to the oral tradition about them, but where opinions of actual people come from material with a provenance, they are included. The story is told largely in chronological order, and as far as British bullpup firearms are concerned that story starts with late Victorian inventors seeking to create a .303” service rifle to take the place of a cavalry carbine, which would also be capable of delivering accurate fire at longer ranges. With the propellant technology of the time, this demanded a longer barrel in a weapon which was not much longer than a carbine. This is where the 20^th century concept of the military bullpup rifle came from, even if the weapons concerned never saw service. The bullpup was the only way to have a rifle-length barrel in a carbine-length weapon. The definition of rifle-length barrels lost about eight inches around that time, (the “propellant technology of the time” having already changed without the bullpup inventors apparently noticing) and so the Short Magazine Lee Enfield rifle was sufficient to meet the needs of both infantry and cavalry for two world wars.

Towards the end of the second world war the British Army knew it needed at least a self-loading rifle, but there was no enthusiasm for adopting (as some wanted) the American M1 Garand rifle, not least because it already looked old-fashioned compared to some captured German weapons, such as the FG42, the design of which suggested a bullpup without actually being one. This cued a succession of Anglo-Polish attempts to develop the working concepts of the FG42 into something shorter and perhaps even lighter. As Britain began to emerge from postwar austerity and it became obvious that the end of the Second World War had not ushered in an era of global peace and security, the idea of adopting some kind of bullpup multi-purpose weapon for the British Army took hold and has never really gone away.

The two most famous examples of this are the EM2 rifle of the 1950s and the SA80 rifle in British service today. The stories of these are told in detail, but also in the context of what went before and what was going on elsewhere during their development. John Garand, for example, designed a bullpup rifle to replace his own M1 design as the US army’s service rifle, but retired before it could be developed for trials, and this was not the only American bullpup design being put forward. Other, notably successful bullpup rifles have served in other countries -and, in Australia, they still do.

The book deals with the problems encountered by British small arms development programmes in some detail, but if one reads between the lines many of these come down to the discipline of materials science being largely ignored by those taking the decisions. This problem is actually endemic to British defence projects in general and a cynic might say that it’s the one way of sabotaging projects that senior officials know they can get away with (they certainly succeeded in sabotaging the Valiant bomber). It’s certainly not that Britain as a country lacks materials scientists or that learning about materials science is unpopular with the general population: J.E Gordon’s eminently accessible materials science book “The New Science of Strong Materials” (Or Why we Don’t Fall Through the Floor), first published in 1968, went through several new editions throughout the seventies. Mr Ferguson’s book details how an attempt by Cranfield University to lighten the design of the SA80 by adopting wonder materials such as carbon fibre and titanium saved a total of four ounces: this may have disappointed the University of Cranfield but it will have surprised no-one who has read Professor Gordon’s book, which teaches the distinction between strength and stiffness. In any case, many mechanical firearms components come with a minimum weight, below which they will not work. This is one of several concepts which decision-makers seem not to grasp.

This is a well-researched book, exploiting a rich supply of factual material and actual weapons to the full. It will, therefore, be disappointing to those seeking to use it to promote one strongly-held opinion or another. But as a way of understanding what actually went on, it is perfectly fit for purpose.

Review Copyright (c) Matthew K. Spencer 2021, all rights reserved.

Book Review of Traitors by Alex Shaw

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This review is based on a free review .pdf from the publisher via NetGalley.co.uk

A fast-paced spy thriller with a charismatic (French) heroine.

This novel is set in places and involves the sort of (Ukrainian) people and politics which the author knows about and this makes it a palpable improvement on his earlier works. Those tended to be set mainly in American settings, perhaps to appeal to an American readership, and also featured highly-technological super-weapons, which are a trap for an author who does not fully comprehend the fruits of his own research. The author, wisely, approached this novel with the premise that a grenade in a modest apartment is dramatic enough.

Although this is an action thriller and the pace rarely slackens, there are layers and twists to the plot and it is a battle of minds as well as muscle. The international politics are more convincing than before (especially as this review was written the day after what the press are already calling “the Black Sea Incident”) and Russian intelligence officers are portrayed as sufficiently intelligent to hatch plots which pay off even if the heroine does her best to thwart them. And that brings us to Sophie Racine, the best thing about this book. The late, great Leslie Thomas once introduced one of his female characters with the line “you should have seen her throw a grenade” and the ability to use a grenade wisely is what sets a truly charismatic female action heroine apart from the AR-toting also-rans.

The supporting cast is mainly a British SIS officer and former SAS trooper who supplies the heroine, not with muscle (which would be superfluous) but restraint and the occasional less-violent solution, such as asking nicely. This, too, represents an improvement on the author’s previous work. At the time of the Yugoslav Civil War, when Western peacekeepers went in, it was pointed out that the hallmark of the SAS was actually subtlety and if what you wanted was an enemy base utterly pulverised, you sent in any line infantry regiment of the British Army.

Traitors by Alex Shaw is published by HQ on the 23^rd of July 2021

Institutional Incomprehension: How Modern Education Fails at the Margins

 Relevant Quotes:

Education, Education, Education! 

(Tony Blair)

 

Educational achievement is THE route to better jobs. 

(Practically everyone who tries to sell modern education to the marginalised.)

Now brothers are kindred but hard times betray,

and so we stumbled on the old changing way.

We never agreed to divide our tin,

and when you're out of love with your brother, 

your hard times begin.

(Richard Thompson, "The Old Changing Way" (song lyric))

What this is all about:

This morning, the UK Parliament's Education Select Committee published a report blaming the term "white privilege" for the undeniable fact that poorer white pupils do relatively badly in British schools. It is also apparent from their figures that Afro-Caribbean pupils also do quite badly compared to British Asian pupils or British African pupils. The committee is basically saying that poor educational achievement is not really a colour issue, but perhaps something less superficial. Most of the reaction to this report has, of course, been entirely woke superficial Tory-bashing. But that's not to say that the committee have really thought long enough or deeply enough to have the real answers.

The Harsh Truth:

The BBC report on the Parliamentary report makes it painfully obvious that low educational achievement by poor white (and almost certainly also Afro-Caribbean) pupils and students is caused by an instinctive rejection of the sales message of modern education encapsulated by the first two quotes, above. Even the BBC is unable to comprehend exactly why this is so, but in comprehending at least that it is so, they are somewhat ahead of the politicians.

Modern Education is being sold to us on an entirely materialistic basis, aimed solely at our self-interest and our self-gratification. Even if people aspire to be educated so as to join some caring or public-spirited profession, the necessary qualifications are sold to us on the basis that the will "allow you to fulfill your dream." You are not even allowed to do good to others without a broad streak of self-interest. And the reason Modern Education is sold to us on this basis is quite simply that it has nothing else to offer. Nothing is allowed to be objectively good or bad, so Modern Education cannot be sold on the basis that it is good in and of itself. Classical Education could be and was sold on the basis that it was good in and of itself, but whether it really was is perhaps a matter for debate and it's not the point which needs to be grasped here: the materialistic self-interest sales-pitch for Modern Education is not selling to the marginalised and we need to understand why it is being rejected. And this bring us to the third quote, above.

If you have grown up in serious disadvantage or oppression, and even more so if your family has had to live with disadvantage and oppression for generations, that third quote is a statement of your deepest knowledge: your primary survival instinct. "If you're out of love with your brother, your hard times begin." Some people in disadvantaged communities may reject this ethic and join criminal gangs in consequence. These are not the survivors: they are the ones that kill others; the ones who get killed. You survive oppression by sticking with those close to you and those like you, you survive by brotherly love. And if you are doing that, then a Blairite sales pitch for higher education that seems to be telling you to break free of those around you and leave them behind, sounds unwise if not wholly evil. (And so does the Marxist message that you can break free of oppression by turning the tables and becoming the oppressor. A boot on the other foot is still a boot in someone's face.)

The marginalised are not rejecting education because they are misinformed, deranged, deluded, dull, ignorant or stupid, but because the fact that they have virtually nothing of material value enables them to make non-materialistic judgements. "I'll stick with my mates." or "my Dad or Uncle will get me a job" or even "I don't really want to be quite like that Tony Blair." 

Learning used to be something of intangible and almost unlimited worth and during and after the Reformation it was highly prized by the poor: it was often literally true that a ploughboy would know more about the Bible than a Bishop. Education should be something of unlimited worth! But in the past few generations the intelligentsia, whose crass stupidity made George Orwell despair of them, have reduced education to nothing more than a tool for climbing the greasy pole.

Education needs to get back to being the kind of learning that has value irrespective of any self-interest or immediate material outcome.

Like rooks and ravens, human beings are born to learn, all their days. We do not learn solely to get a better job and have a career, but to make a better job of our whole lives and not just at our place of employment. By learning we enjoy what's around us more because we understand what's happening: if it is good we can take quiet pleasure in that and if it is not good, we can change it. We learn to make better decisions, we learn to take better care of others. We even learn just for the sake of learning. We learn to recognise when we are being helped and when we are being bullied and manipulated. We learn to do justice as well as to seek justice for ourselves. And all of this learning is inconvenient to those who would manipulate us. But if we can achieve an education system that genuinely prizes learning for its own sake, there is hope for us. We can exchange manipulation for free and steady progress towards what is objectively good. And if we persist for long enough, fewer and fewer people will be marginalised: learning will be accepted because it will be seen to be good.