Things You Won't Get From Wikipedia

Responding to a comment from a reader in an earlier article about the latest Bond mis-adventure, caused me once again to just shake my head at today's sad condition of the media and the misleading and often subtly deceptive information resources we all have and regularly turn to - I suppose, particularly, Wikipedia.

I understand that a fundamental protocol of what allows certain things to make it to a Wiki page and certain other things to 'not,' is this academia, campus-based 'peer review' and fact-checking volunteer scheme they have. Granted the Wiki began with a huge global co-operation of librarians and especially campus-based librarians, then no doubt they desire to preserve some kind of intellectual territoriality but so much of what they allow up onto the main pages is just so much nonsense really.

Lord Nicholas Windsor - his dad is the head of UK freemasonry (I think).
He went to Oxford, not Cambridge, unlike Charteris.

Nobody these days seems to have the common sense capacity to think through ideas logically and adjust things that appear through constant repetition but simply cannot be true realistically-speaking.

I mean, my own uncle went to school with Charles Yin (Leslie Charteris) and my father was just a year younger than Yin - and they not only thus lived in the same eras, but either in the same physical locations in the world and certainly in the exact same social circles.

If you go by Wiki, Charles Yin was footloose, moved around a lot, appearing to struggle from one job to another... ...and what I think you're meant to draw from this is that by travelling as much as he did at a young age, and experiencing so many jobs he gained a lot of experience for his eventual career as a writer.

Dr Peter Duncan, Cambridge expert on Russia -
the individual most singly responsible for current MI6 Russian policy. 

Wiki very casually explains that Charles Yin went to King's College Cambridge and Rossall School. I don't even want to go into what that means to knowledgeable people but if you look up even the silly Wiki entries and read through them at some point you are going to trip over certain er, 'associations' and 'clubs' let's say, that will give you cause to stop and think.

On Charteris himself (Bowyer-Yin), the Wikipedia entry again very casually says firstly that his father was 'a physician,' and that (and I find the phrasing quite rude, frankly) he - ' claimed to be able to trace his lineage back to the emperors of the Shang Dynasty.'

Well okay, let me tell you something about his father - he was the A-Number One Chinese physician across the whole of South East Asia, having surgeries all over the place from Siam (as it was then) to Ceylon (as it was also known then). He had a partner who was a compounding chemist as well as a medical GP - Doctor Lim - and in 1954, Doctor Suat Yin was the first and only person in South East Asia to own and drive a 'gull-wing' Mercedes 300 SL. And that was because he had the monopoly rights to manufacture medicinal morphine from the US Military (because it was a militarily controlled substance) into South East Asia. His partner Doctor Lim was highly versed in the chemistry and entire process of manufacturing medical morphine including the so-called Indian latex method of extraction and had been since long before WWII - and the US Army recognized this doubly so because Lim was an industrial chemist of sorts who also consulted to the wartime rubber (rubber latex, not poppy latex) plantations and first stage process works in Ceylon and India and Malaysia.

Wiki absurdly tells that Charteris worked on a rubber plantation. Doing what, exactly, did he 'work' on a rubber plantation - as a Tamil cutting rubber, or maybe a Chinese rubber tapper...? Rubber plantations were owned by literally the most wealthy people more or less in the world, due to the exorbitant prices on rubber caused by the wars.

Leslie Charteris - I hate to tell you all this - was a writer by no accident; he is related to the Mitford Sisters through his mother's family and their link to the Redesdale and Denham Baronetcy. Yeah he 'drove a bus' as Wiki rightly says - he tested out vehicles for my father's aunt and her then husband, who started the Green Line Busing Company of Thailand and Singapore. Probably worth - the bus company - today's equivalent of thirty to fifty million dollars or more.

Sometimes, I give up, honestly. 

Original Mercedes 300 SL

So, the comment pointed out that Charteris had never worked as a writer on a Bond movie. And that is certainly a conclusion one can draw from the Wiki entry on his work. He was contracted to Paramount, in any case, not Columbia. A little point about 'movies' generally... In the old days, movies were made by photographing on special film stock made by petrochemical companies exclusively. Shell made most of the film stock. It cost HUGE sums to even buy the unexposed canisters of film stock, never mind the movie cameras. Bell and Howell, Hughes Tool Corporation, and MGM either made the main parts or owned all the actual fully-made cameras - and the first two of these were deeply linked to the petroleum exploration and drilling industry. Now there are things that I can tell you about the movie 'Thunderball' that very few others alive today can - for one thing it was not all filmed in the Bahamas, although the story is set there and the movie intends you to believe it is all Bahamian scenery. 

John Hopkins has the screen credit as co-screenplay writer on 'Thunderball' - a story which was devised by Kevin McClory and produced by him. McClory was first cousin to the then Managing Director of Shell Far East, who provided the film stock at the expense of Shell.

Hopkins was also from Cambridge University - and hit his head and drowned in his pool in California in 1998, and, according to Wikipedia, that was 'following an accident in which he slipped.' 

Whatever.


Any-hew... Thanks to the Singapore government decently retaining some real history about itself, here is the official entry in its own records about Dr Yin Suat Chuan:

http://www.nas.gov.sg/archivesonline/photographs/record-details/b0701eba-1162-11e3-83d5-0050568939ad 

Dog-In-The-Hunt News

Honestly, really TRULY ROOOLY - I was trying all this whole entire week to develop a couple of ideas for a new Bond villain... Some characterization besides the ugly guy or the guy with one eye or a scar or some other disfigurement intended to provoke an underlying empathy; because as you know there are theories around the place in creative writing schools to the effect that horror is a kind of mix of tragedy in which we can find some empathetic feelings, tied up with the extreme viciousness and malice of the dark subject that was explained by the personal tragedy involved.

Now I could say that the ordinary news itself provided sufficient material for sourcing some new James Bond movie villain ideas but the fact is, the news is not actually covering certain important matters that are up at that 'global domination(!)' level of story.

Henry Poole, I think... Pretty conservative.

We have seen remarkably little of the reporting regarding the scandals to do with Barclays Bank. 

Surprisingly, you might think, I am personally not one of those who thinks the then top dog at the Investment Banking arm of Barclays, Roger Jenkins, ever did anything illegal or even morally wrong in injecting a GBP322 million advisory services line into the Qatari government's bailing-out of Barclays following the Global Financial Crisis of 2008. His thinking was that although he was being asked by the bank's Chief Executive and Board to find the required multi-billion dollar funding package, it was clear that they were happy to close up his Investment Banking side (which Jenkins was CEO of) by accepting enough to keep their own sides intact and funded and forgetting about everyone else. In the current court case brought by the UK's Serious Fraud Office against Jenkins and two others, it is inevitable that Jenkins will counter that the Qataris themselves would not want to invest so much in a bank WITHOUT an Investment Banking arm.

Jenkins will win the case on an objective view of the facts. That is to say, he will if the UK courts are honest, although it is clear they are not and have not been for a long time. 

Jenkins secured over 7 billion US Dollars for the bail-out funding of Barclays. In the process, there are taped phone calls between others at senior levels of the bank agreeing to unwritten conditions set by key people in the Singapore government's sovereign funds area, for 'pro bono advisory services' in exchange for the Singapore government's recommending the deal to the ruling family of Qatar. So much for the honesty and incorruptibility of the leaders in Singapore. ...As I have been saying for decades.

Just pretty standard Bond stuff.

Again, a lot of people will jump onto the Qataris but in this case I hardly think that is fair. In the whole saga, lost in the media-controlled narratives, we never see why Barclays was in trouble in the first place. The Qataris are super wealthy, we know that. And they are entitled to invest in stuff they think is worth buying. The problem is not what Qatar has done or still does -, but the problems come in because they are super ultra wealthy, that those going to them greedily seek to skim because of the sheer temptation of such large sums. 

So yes, I have been looking at the real world to find a Bond-style super villain but the crooks we see in the real world, are all so banal. I don't see Jenkins as a super villain - he is problematic and likely quite complex and difficult to deal with - but his ultimate boss at the bank, Bob Diamond seems far more sinister to me, yet at the same time he is so utterly banal and venal and in the end, just plain stupid.

Jenkins is glitzy enough and lurid enough in his lifestyle to be a movie figure, but he is just not completely sinister enough. 

...So I am still working on it.

Roger Jenkins - very very wealthy guy.
What if he ended up in a jail with Assange?! LOL
Won't happen, of course.

But once again, the back-story to the Jenkins issue (which begun to be heard in the UK courts this week), is the secret wire-tapping of phone conversations from a long time ago, by the UK Intelligence people - who ultimately were the ones pushing the narrative that Jenkins should be charged. The evidence in the court case however is only able to be heard sourced from the trading floor phone calls that were always taped as part of normal protocol, and from which the UK prosecutors are trying this American 'parallel construction' stunt to create the impression of wrong-doing. But what is really going on is naked jealousy on full display. Jenkins was very visible of a figure in his heydays at Barclays.   

I have business with Qatari sources. They're rich, you see. I have 'a dog in the hunt,' as they say.

Warning - (Pls) Don't Read This Incautiously

The essential difference between myself and say, some public figure like Julian Assange, is that Julian Assange's main capability - and the real reason he was used by various major interest groups (whoever they may be let's just leave that to one side for this immediate discussion) - is a global reach in transmission of information and journalism.

This blogspot here, this one you are reading, is not 'monetized' and I never want it to be. Consequently, fundamentally, it is shadow-obstructed if not exactly blocked as such. And that means that not too many people will ever read what is written down here.

'Old school' 

When I say 'don't read this incautiously' I mean don't jump to the conclusion that this blog needs to present the kinds of hard facts that we all presume ever came from Wikileaks or from Julian Assange - in order to say certain 'conclusion'-style things.

However don't think I don't personally have certain hard facts, and in many many instances, far more detailed and explosive than anything Assange ever had; he had what everyone thinks, and to some extent rightly so, 'the motherlode' namely Hillary Clinton's private emails to John Podesta who was representing the DNC organization. 

The reason I am placing a heavy caveat on what you are about to see, is that I am not jumping to the sorts of typical conclusions about what you will see, that say, some people on Fox would, or some Right Wing commentators will jump to immediately.

No comment...

The only thing I would like you to take away from this is the absolute and guaranteed realization that it is via banks in Qatar, whose headquarters are in fact in London, that certain public figures who are supposedly employed by voting citizens and the public, have and are still funneling simply enormous sums of money that you really wouldn't believe unless you take into consideration amounts such as the hundreds of millions said to have been sent 'back' to Iran, or the sums of cash that went missing in Iraq off US military transport planes - and maybe half of all the heroin and cocaine business in the world.

You see, Qatar is the world's number 1 secret banking destination today, and not Switzerland. It is a tax-free country and is run by highly non-transparent autocratic rulers within a single family who appear to have a lot of friends in Western governments all around the place. I could show you photographs of those rulers with David Cameron, The Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen of England, Hillary Clinton, Theresa May, Angela Merkle, Barack Obama and the real biggie Tony Blair - and on and on. 

But I will just show you this one:

This is New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez with Bob Corker on the side there.
Bob (M.) got a going over with in a recent
criminal corruption indictment which he won in court,
following which though, you will find he doesn't prolly hang out with the same characters anymore.

If you ever ask yourself, well what in the hell is all this animus against Donald Trump and today's FBI under Wray and the DOJ under Bill Barr, really all about and how come people like Kamala Harris are so aggressive questioning Bill Barr about Mueller's report - it's all about money. 

This Is The Basic Problem:

Look you can't blame producer Barbara Broccoli too much. For one thing she is not British, she is American. And in the second place she originally contracted the screenwriters Neal Purvis and Robert Wade because she has seen an earlier work of theirs which she described as being 'dark, witty, sexy and inventive...' ...indeed all the things you would want in a Bond movie.

And then, she hired Martin Campbell the director to try and revive the franchise - which he managed to do especially in Casino Royale, which was a commercial success and really unearthed the English-speaking mainstream public to Eva Green who went onto substantial successes in more movies.

'I just know you guys are going to f* it up!'

But then - and for me you can see the signs already beginning to creep in in Casino Royale when someone is placing various policy pressures onto the director - the whole enterprise goes badly downhill in a very tragic way when the entire Bond 'canon,' let's say, the authentic book-based narrative about what this thing is all about, turns into some kind of political propaganda pantomime horse. 

And that is because there is a difference between 'writer,' and 'screenwriter.' The two things are not the same at all - and neither Purvis nor Wade are acknowledged writers with any real body of print work published beforehand.

A screenwriter is a visual logistics manager or documenting clerk. A writer deals with all kinds of ideas communicated in the first instance through words and language. And there are some ideas that have no visual image analogs to render the real sense of them. In films they require to be implied by scenes, images, and perhaps sound - and even then, they will rely on the audience having an ability to make the impressionistic leaps needed.

'Petrichor' has no direct visual analog. 'Aldehyde' hasn't either. Nor does 'louche;' at least not in the modern world.

Once you have the screenwriters also bringing their own personal private life biases into the stories which are not part of the real originator's 'canon,' you massively run the risk of losing the audience that made you rich in the first place who liked what was there when they were attracted to the product. 

Len Deighton and Leslie Charteris were significant writers long before they worked on Bond films as screenwriters, even though they were both good screenwriters, especially so Charteris. They understood what today's Bond developers appear to have no clue about, which is that the Fleming stories do not revolve around the following:

Weird Characters
Location
Politics
Crazy Objective (of inverted 'protagonist' character; namely, the villain)
Anti-Protagonist (Bond)
Conflict caused by Bond blocking the objective
Car-chase
Violence and pain
Dangerous edges
Explosions
Bigger Explosions
Huge vast explosions
Credits and music

...What they revolve around I do know - but it would cost you a damn lot of money to get it from me!

You're on your own coughing up twenty bucks plus coke and popcorn money for the rubbish you will get from Eon and the two gay guys inclusive one heroin addict. Good luck.

Music is - Arnej 'People Come People Go' (Maor Levi Remix)

Scientist Goes Missing...??!

Like, yeah, so what?

Rami Malek is announced as coming onto the cast of the new Bond scam. And a comedy writer(!) is also announced as THE MAIN SCREENPLAY WRITER(?)

Okay so what has been going on with the Bond franchise for years now is that they hold off on production until they get what they reckon are adequate placement and support contracts before they make the next movie or even commission a script and screenplay. Variety Magazine reported the producers have secured a hundred million dollars from a list of brands like Belvedere vodka, Heineken, Gillette, Omega watches...

So now you know (ought to be able to guess) how the French actress from the Schlumberger family got her part.

Yep. Sony was kicked off the distribution account and substituted with Universal Pictures, who clearly take a far lesser cut now.

The next Bond, whilst it will sink like a stone at the Box Office, will still be a 'success' for the producers, who don't give a f* about talent or being a faithful custodian of the true Bond 'brand,' or thrilling or entertaining the audience or paying real screenwriters or meaningful writers generally.

It seems that the mode for all the big movie franchises now - because people don't spend money going to movie theaters anymore and are getting everything they want from the internet - is product-placement and other angles to make money other than real ticket sales. Marvel creates one disaster after another and still goes on. 

Apparently the main plot line of 'Bond 25' is that a scientist goes missing where Bond is vacationing or maybe more or less in retirement.

Yawn...

And with Malek turning up the continuing undercurrent will be that everything about Bond will be gay-themed and there is not a damned thing real fans of the real books and original films will be able to do about it. 

Scientist missing - no doubt a 'climate change expert' or even better still, could be a vaccination biochemist...

...And Rami Malek. Doing bad impressions of Montserrat Caballé. Why not.

Wonder how much Malek had to tip in to 'get' a spot. He's just come off a 'great success' from er, er, er, global marketing contracts.