'Richard Martin's Wake Up Call'

Very occasionally I get the chance to recommend something - another site or news service or as in this case, an esteemed analyst who has a podcast service.

http://www.richardmartinswakeupcall.podbean.com/

The thing about pooled analysis of the kind that goes on in what are effectively social media control rooms belonging to GCHQ or the GRU or even the FSB, is that all those who end up with decent Intel-driven conclusion reports, started with a group of people around a large table, all of whom can easily have quite individualistic perspectives.

The point being, of course, that they all also have an adequately advanced mindset fully-equipped with good intellectual tools at their disposal.

It's 'old school' but it's not really old school...

I can say without hesitation the podcast I am recommending here comes with all those credentials, having been able to demonstrate them over decades in one form or another. 

Factually speaking, and I would say that it is a fact - today, none of the big agencies I mentioned above are only 'head-quartered' and centralized; they have distributed nodes of analysis experts 'out in the field' be it in the corporate city blocks of major financial centers, or inside research facilities of many different kinds - IE., Fabrica in Italy, other European design centers and especially also, in general academia. Almost all major masthead newspapers have editors who regularly sit on (government) Intel Committee panels.

And these basic government institutions now have a lot of 'competition' from big organized internet communications companies, to say nothing of how the Chinese government operates in the on-line and digital data collecting space.

Japan always had 'JETRO' and this was well-recognized as a benign and even a useful universal corporate intelligence dissemination agency - but of course, they definitely had internal analysis and policy directorates driving a Japanese government policy stance on things. And that's very fair enough, I would say. 

My school...

'Independent,' I would say - if you mean highest level, educated, independent analysis - probably fits neatly into the simple nomenclature of stock standard ethical old school, um, Alphabet stuff... ...that is, absent of sophisticated and surreptitious infiltration by political and/or particular moneyed interests, then your stock standard Harvard or Cornell or MIT and especially Brookings along with their panoply of orbital relationships - ISO and Amacom publishing - academic team-people, is what we would serve with the same set of defined characteristics and also report to at some point, that is, to the same democratically-elected policy leaders. Albeit, for all scrutiny that could be shone, independently.

Hey! Who's that? Now that's 'old school!'

I don't have a problem with that. I would tell the explicit and complete truth to the CIA if they ever asked (not that they will) and I probably would as well to quite a number of others not restricted only to US-led Western government authorities; unless I was told to shut up which I have been from time to time (LOL). And I would recommend the same stance to others to take; these guys are not nearly as bad as pop media and conspiracy thinkers make out. 

Boris Johnson is going to have a lot of trouble pulling the UK government and bureaucracy octopus into line though... I don't have much time for those guys unless I see enough evidence that the right people are back in charge there. The Five Eyes has been a big mistake. But... ...well, not my call there. We'll see what happens. 

We are heard in the courts of kings and princes, so let's
all be respectful about what we do and say and the way we do things around here, not that any of us
ever have been anything other than that... 

You see, how many of you know that the infamous Alexander Downer, was on on the board of Huawei...?

See what I mean?