Pissants Must Eat Bugs: But For Us - The Blood Is The Life

medicalbag  |  Some say that Countess Elizabeth Báthory, considered by many to be the world’s worst female serial killer, was the true inspiration for Bram Stoker’s Dracula. After all, legend has it that she bathed in the blood of at least 650 servant girls she had tortured and killed. She was said to be so evil that villagers kept their daughters in hiding for fear that Elizabeth would take them. Her gruesome activities even earned her such names as “the Infamous Lady” and “the Blood Countess.” This is her story.

Erzsébet Báthory, more commonly known in the Western world as Elizabeth, was born in 1560 to one of the most powerful Protestant families in Hungary at the time. She was the daughter of Baron George Báthory and Baroness Anna Báthory, who were both Báthorys by birth. Possibly stemming from inbreeding within her family, it is said that from an early age Elizabeth suffered from seizures, loss of control, and fits of rage. As a child, she witnessed the brutal punishments handed out by her family’s officers on their estates; one anecdote describes a gypsy accused of theft who was sewn up in the belly of a dying horse and left to die. Her family tree certainly included some disturbed kin as well. One of her uncles taught her Satanism, and she learned about sadomasochism from her aunt.

Elizabeth was married by the time she was 15 years old to Count Ferenc Nádasdy, a soldier who would go on to lead the armies of Hungary against Ottoman forces threatening Central Europe. After her marriage, the countess became the mistress of the Nádasdy estate, where the couple earned a reputation as harsh masters. Building upon her own cruelty, it is believed that Ferenc showed her some of his own ways of punishing his servants. After 10 years, Elizabeth gave birth to 3 daughters and a son. 

Although the count participated in his wife’s torture activities, it wasn’t until the death of her husband in the early 1600s that Elizabeth’s true evil came to fruition. She eventually moved to one of her castles at Čachtice in northwest Hungary (now Slovakia) and began surrounding herself with a cohort of servants to help her with her torture practices. Legend has it that one day an attendant girl was brushing Elizabeth’s hair when she accidentally pulled too hard and it tugged on a snag in her hair. The countess erupted in anger, jumping up and striking the girl with the back of her hand. The strike was so hard that it made the girl bleed and some of that blood was left on Elizabeth’s hand. Later that night, Elizabeth noticed that the skin on her hand where the blood had been looked more youthful than she had seen it in many years. This gave her the idea that if such a small amount of blood could make her hand look so young, then more could restore youthfulness to her whole body. It’s said that this is when the madness began and Elizabeth started to bathe in the blood of virgin girls.  

Young women began to disappear from villages near and far, as well as children. Unhappy girls were lured to the castle with the prospect that they would find work there but were never seen again. When they arrived, they were locked up in a cellar as they awaited torture. Elizabeth carried out much of the torture herself, often beating the girls to death. Sometimes she would sew a girl’s mouth shut, force her to eat her own flesh, or burn her genitals. When she was too sick to get out of bed to beat them, Elizabeth would order her servants to bring up a girl to her quarters where she would bite their faces and shoulders. In other instances, she would stick needles underneath the girl’s fingertips before cutting off the fingers of those who tried to take them out. Soon Elizabeth began to run out of young women, because she had either already taken them, or the villagers had started to hide their daughters out of fear that she would take them. This is when the countess began to resort to noble girls, a decision that would ultimately lead to her demise.

Tissue Rejuvenation Via Plasma Dilution

lifespan  |  Back in 2005, Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy showed that joining the circulatory systems of young and old mice together in a procedure called parabiosis could rejuvenate aged tissues and reverse some aspects of aging in old mice.

Following this discovery, many researchers concluded that there must be something special in young blood that was able to spur rejuvenation in aged animals, and various companies have been trying to find out what. Indeed, we recently reported that researchers were apparently successful in halving the epigenetic age of old rats by treating them with Elixir, a proprietary mix of pro-youthful factors normally found in young blood.

However, a question still remains: was the rejuvenation the result of there being something beneficial in the young blood, or is it more a case of dilution of the harmful factors present in old blood?

Today, we want to spotlight a new study by Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy, which again lends more weight to the idea that the rejuvenation is most likely due to a dilution of pro-aging factors in old blood rather than there being any special sauce in young blood [1].

During the study, the research team discovered that by replacing half of the blood plasma in old mice with a saline and albumin mixture, the albumin replacing the lost protein that was removed when the original old blood plasma was taken, they could achieve a similar or even greater rejuvenation effect in brain, liver, and muscle tissues as joining two mice together through parabiosis or giving old mice young blood.

We had the opportunity to interview Drs. Irina and Michael Conboy about this new discovery and to see if we could get to the bottom of the mystery surrounding aged blood rejuvenation.

Steve: This recent paper builds on the 2015 paper of TGF beta, but it goes even further back to the days when you guys had a lab next door to Amy Wagers and Tony Wyss-Coray and you all shared the techniques, including the parabiosis technique.

Irina: Yes. Actually, I would like also to thank you, Elena, and the whole organization for highlighting our work and giving us an opportunity to speak in interviews.

Steve: You are very welcome. So, is this dilution? Is it what you put in that’s more important, is it what you take out, or is it both? I personally think that the evidence strongly suggests that it’s more what you take out, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there isn’t good stuff in young blood.

Irina: Since our 2005 heterochronic parabiosis paper, many people jumped into this boat of young blood, thinking that the reason for rejuvenation is that there are less young factors in an old animal and we provided them. Meanwhile, all our work even leading to that paper suggested the opposite outcome: that there are excessive factors in old blood that are actually good proteins; for example, TGF beta. You cannot live without TGF beta. But, when people age, the levels of this protein become elevated, and they start doing counterproductive things for tissue repair, induce inflammation, increase fibrosis, and prevent proliferation of tissue stem cells. That was our point of view for the past 15 years, and every single paper that we published since was putting forward the general idea that it is not the young blood, it is the old blood that needs thought and attention.

Have Elites Acquired The Technology To Rule Without The Gentry?

michaelochurch  |   In a society like ours, the upper and lower classes have more in common with each other than either has with the middle class. The upper and lower classes “live like animals”, but for very different reasons. The upper classes are empowered to engage their primal, base urges; the lower classes are pummeled with fear on a daily basis and regress to animalism not out of moral paucity but in order to survive. People in the lower class live lives that are consumed entirely by money, because they lack the means of a dignified life. Those in the upper class, likewise, experience a life dominated by money, because maintaining injustices favorable to oneself is hard work. So, even though the motivations are different (fear at the bottom, greed at the top) the lower and upper classes are united in what the middle class perceives as “crass materialism” and, therefore, have strikingly similar cultures. Their lives are run by that thing called “money” toward which the middle classes pretend– and it is very much pretend– to be ambivalent about. The middle classes are sheltered, until the cultural protection, on which their semi-privileged status depends, runs out.

The “middle-est” of the middle class is the Gentry. Here we’re talking about people who dislike pawnbrokers and stock traders alike, who appear to lead a society from the front while its real owners lead it from the shadows. This said, I have my doubts on the matter of there being one, singular Gentry. I would argue that corporate middle management, the clergy, the political establishments of both major U.S. political parties, TED-talk onanist “thought leaders” and media personalities, and even Instagram “influencers” could all be called Gentries; in no obvious or formal way do these groups have much to do with one another. Only in one thing are they united: by the middle 2010s it became clear that both the Elite (bourgeoisie) and Labor (self-aaware proletariat) were fed up with all these Gentries. Starting around 2013, an anti-Gentry hategasm consumed the United States, and as a member of said (former) Gentry I can’t say we didn’t deserve it.

Technology, I believe, is a major cause of this. Silicon Valley began as a 1970s Gentry paradise; by 2010, it had become a monument to Elite excess, arrogance, and malefaction. Modern technology has given today’s employers an oppressive power the Stasi and KGB only dreamt of. The American Gentry was a PR wing for capitalism when it needed to win hearts and minds; but with today’s technological weaponry, the rich no longer see a need to be well-liked by those they rule.

For a concrete example, compare the “old style” bureaucratic, paperwork corporation of the midcentury and the “new style” technological one, in which workers are tracked, often unawares, down to minutes. The old-style companies were hierarchical and feudalistic but, by giving middle managers the ability to protect their underlings, ran on a certain sense of reciprocated loyalty– a social contract, if you will– that no longer exists. The worker agreed not to undermine, humiliate, or sabotage his manager; the manager, in turn, agreed to represent the worker as an asset to the company even when said worker had a below-average year. All you had to do in the old-style company was be liked (or, at least, not be despised) by your boss. If your boss liked you, you got promoted. If your boss hated you, you got fired. If you were anywhere from about 3.00 to 6.99 on his emotional spectrum, you moved diagonally or laterally, your boss repping you as a 6.75/10 “in search of a better fit” so you moved along quickly and peaceably. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked better than what came afterward.

I’ve worked in the software industry long enough to know that software engineers are the most socially clueless people on earth. I’ve often heard them debate “the right” metrics to use to track software productivity. My advice to them is: Always fight metrics. Sabotage the readings, or blackmail a higher-up by catfishing as a 15-year-old girl, or call in a union that’ll drop a pipe on that shit. Always, always, always fight a metric that management wishes to impose on you, because while a metric can hurt you (by flagging you as a low performer) it will never help you. In the old-style company, automated surveillance was impossible and performance was largely inscrutable and only loyalty mattered– your career was based on your boss’s opinion of you. It only took one thing to get a promotion: be liked by your boss. In the new-style company, devised by management consultants and software peddlers with evil intentions, getting a promotion requires you to pass the metrics and be liked by your boss. In the old-style company, you could get fired if your boss really, really hated you. (As I said, if he merely disliked you, he’d rep you as a solid performer “in search of a better fit” so you could transfer peacefully, and you’d get to try again with a new boss.) In the new-style company, you can get fired because your boss hates you or because you fail the metrics. The “user story points” that product managers insist are not an individual performance measure (and absolutely are, by the way) are evidence that only the prosecution may use. This is terrible for workers. There are new ways to fail and get fired; the route to success is constricted by an increase in the number of targets that must be hit. The old-style hierarchical company, at least, had simple rules: be loyal to your boss. Having been a middle manager, I can also say that the new-style company is humiliating for us– we can’t protect our reports. You have to “demand accountability from” people, but you can’t really do anything to help them.

This, I think, gives us a metaphor for the American Gentry’s failure. Middle managers who cannot protect their subordinates from the company’s more evil instincts (such as the instinct to fire everyone and hire replacements 5 percent cheaper) have no reason to expect true loyalty. They become superfluous performance cops and taskmasters, and even if they are personally liked, their roles are justifiably hated (including by those who have to perform them.)

Vic Used To "Wear The Blue Vest" But Now He's Just Big Mad And Utterly Helpless...,

trust |  I drove for Amazon from December 2019 until March of 2021, and I want to shed light on the work environment and the way the world's largest online retailer treats its employees. I want to show support for all the people I worked with and drove with, and with those who wear the blue vest across the nation. I support the driver walk-out on Easter Sunday. It's time to show Amazon that drivers are people who deserve better, and not machines who don't need a bathroom break!

When Vic started delivering packages for Amazon in 2019, he enjoyed it - the work was physical, he liked the autonomy, and it let him explore new neighborhoods in Denver, Colorado.

But Vic, who asked to be referred to by his first name for fear of retaliation, did not like the sensation that he was constantly under surveillance. 

At first, it was Amazon’s “Mentor” app that constantly monitored his driving, phone use and location, generating a score for bosses to evaluate his performance on the road.

“If we went over a bump, the phone would rattle, the Mentor app would log that I used the phone while driving, and boom, I’d get docked,” he said.

Then, Amazon started asking him to post “selfies” before each shift on Amazon Flex, another app he had to install. 

“I had already logged in with my keycard at the beginning of the shift, and now they want a photo? It was too much," he said.

The final indignity, he said, was Amazon's decision to install a four-lens, AI-powered camera in delivery vehicles that would record and analyse his face and body the entire shift. 

This month, Vic put in his two-week notice and quit, ahead of a March 23 deadline for all workers at his Denver dispatch location to sign release forms authorising Amazon to film them and collect and store their biometric information.

“It was both a privacy violation, and a breach of trust,” he said. “And I was not going to stand for it.”

The camera systems, made by U.S.-based firm Netradyne, are part of a nationwide effort by Amazon to address concerns over accidents involving its increasingly ubiquitous delivery vans.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment, but has previously told the Thomson Reuters Foundation that access to the footage was limited, and video would only be uploaded after an unsafe driving incident was detected.

Albert Fox Cahn, who runs the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project - a privacy organisation - said the Amazon cameras were part of a worrying, new trend.

"As cameras get cheaper and artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, these invasive tracking systems are increasingly the norm," he said.

 

Time Grows Short Sleepyheads...,

charleshughsmith |  Even as the chirpy happy-talk of a return to normal floods the airwaves, what nobody dares acknowledge is that "normal" for a rising number of Americans is the social depression of downward mobility and social defeat.

Downward mobility is not a new trend--it's simply accelerating. As this RAND Corporation report documents, ( Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018) $50 trillion in earnings has been transferred to the Financial Aristocracy from the bottom 90% of American households over the past 45 years.

Time magazine's article on the report is remarkably direct: The Top 1% of Americans Have Taken $50 Trillion From the Bottom 90% -- And That's Made the U.S. Less Secure.

"The $50 trillion transfer of wealth the RAND report documents has occurred entirely within the American economy, not between it and its trading partners. No, this upward redistribution of income, wealth, and power wasn't inevitable; it was a choice--a direct result of the trickle-down policies we chose to implement since 1975.

We chose to cut taxes on billionaires and to deregulate the financial industry. We chose to allow CEOs to manipulate share prices through stock buybacks, and to lavishly reward themselves with the proceeds. We chose to permit giant corporations, through mergers and acquisitions, to accumulate the vast monopoly power necessary to dictate both prices charged and wages paid. We chose to erode the minimum wage and the overtime threshold and the bargaining power of labor. For four decades, we chose to elect political leaders who put the material interests of the rich and powerful above those of the American people."

I've been digging into downward mobility and social depression for years: Are You Really Middle Class? The reality is that the middle class has been reduced to the sliver just below the top 5%--if we use the standards of the prosperous 1960s as a baseline.

The downward mobility isn't just financial--it's a decline in political power, control of one's work and ownership of income-producing assets. This article reminds us of what the middle class once represented: What Middle Class? How bourgeois America is getting recast as a proletariat.

This reappraisal of the American Dream is also triggering a reappraisal of the middle class in the decades of widespread prosperity: The Myth of the Middle Class: Have Most Americans Always Been Poor?

Downward mobility excels in creating and distributing what I term social defeat: In my lexicon, social defeat is the spectrum of anxiety, insecurity, chronic stress, fear and powerlessness that accompanies declining financial security and social status.

Does The Great Reset Expect Wokeness To Get You To Relinquish Property?

mises |   What exactly is wokeness? As I write in Beyond Woke,

According to the social justice creed, being “woke” is the political awakening that stems from the emergence of consciousness and conscientiousness regarding social and political injustice. Wokeness is the indelible inscription of the awareness of social injustice on the conscious mind, eliciting the sting of conscience, which compels the newly woke to change their be­liefs and behaviors.4

This is as close to a definition of wokeness as I can manage, gleaning it as I have from the assertions of those who embrace it. Of course, the etymology of the word “woke,” and how it became an adjective describing those who are thus awakened into consciousness of social and political injustice, is another matter. I discuss the etymology in Google Archipelago:

“Woke” began in English as a past tense and past participle of “wake.” It suggested “having become awake.” But, by the 1960s, woke began to function as an adjective as well, gaining the figurative meaning in the African American community of “well-informed” or “up-to-date.” By 1972, the once modest verbal past tense began to describe an elevated political consciousness. In 2017, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) recognized the social-conscious awareness of woke and added the definition: “alert to racial or social discrimination and injustice.”5

Yet there are as many definitions of wokeness as people who’ve heard of it, as is the case with most anything the least bit controversial. I’m sure that others can and will add to the definition or suggest that wokeness should be defined altogether differently. But the above definition and historical-semantical renderings are sufficient for our purposes. According to adherents, then, wokeness is enhanced awareness of social and political injustice and the determination to eradicate it.

But what could wokeness have to do with the Great Reset? As a corrective, wokeness is not aimed at the sufferers whose complaints, or imagined complaints, it means to redress. Wokeness works on the majority, the supposed beneficiaries of injustice. It does so by making the majority understand that it has benefited from “privilege” and preference—based on skin color (whiteness), gender (patriarchy), sexual proclivity (heteronormativity), birthplace (colonialism, imperialism, and first worldism), gender identity (cis gender privilege), and the domination of nature (speciesism)—to name some of the major culprits. The list could go on and is emended, seemingly by the day. This majority must be rehabilitated, as it were. The masses must understand that they have gained whatever advantages they have hitherto enjoyed on the basis of the unfair treatment of others, either directly or indirectly, and this unfair treatment is predicated on the circumstances of birth. The “privilege” of the majority has come at the expense of those minorities designated as the beneficiaries of wokeness, and wokeness is the means for rectifying these many injustices.

And what are the effects of being repeatedly reprimanded as such, of being told that one has been the beneficiary of unmerited “privilege,” that one’s relative wealth and well-being have come at the expense of oppressed, marginalized, and misused Others? Shame, guilt, remorse, unworthiness. And what are the expected attitudinal and behavioral adjustments to be taken by the majority? They are to expect less. Under woke ideology, one will be expected to forfeit one’s rights, because even these rights, nay, especially these rights, have come at the expense of others.

Thus, wokeness works by habituating the majority to the reduced expectations that I introduced in my first installment on the Great Reset. It does this by instilling a belief in the unworthiness of the majority to thrive, prosper, and enjoy their lives. Wokeness indoctrinates the majority into the propertyless future (for them, at least) of the Great Reset, while gratifying the Left, its main ideological propagators, with a sense of moral superiority, even as they too are scheduled to become bereft of prospects.

One question remains. Why is wokeness more suited to the objectives of the Great Reset than socialist-communist ideology?

This Explains Why PennyAnte Local Politicians Have Felt So Lockdown Emboldened

gpenewsdocs  |  Corporations have stepped beyond lobbying governments. They are integrating in policy making at the national and international levels. From agriculture to technology, decisions historically made by governments are increasingly made by secretive unaccountable bodies run by corporations says Nick Buxton.

LYNN FRIES: Hello and welcome. I’m Lynn Fries, producer of Global Political Economy or GPEnewsdocs. Today I’m joined by Nick Buxton. He’s going to be giving us some big picture of context on The Great Reset, a World Economic Forum initiative to reset the world system of global governance.

A worldwide movement crossing not only borders but all walks of life from peasant farmers to techies is fighting against this initiative on the grounds that it represents a major threat to democracy. Key voices from the health, food, education, indigenous peoples and high tech movements explained why in The Great Take Over: How we fight the Davos capture of global governance, a recent webinar hosted by the Transnational Institute.

Today’s guest, Nick Buxton is a publications editor and future labs coordinator at the Transnational Institute. He is the founder and chief editor of TNI’s flagship State of Power report. Welcome. Nick.

NICK BUXTON: Thank you very much, Lynn.

FRIES: The Transnational Institute was co-organizer of The Great Takeover webinar. So what is it that you’re mobilizing against by opposing this Great Reset Initiative.

BUXTON: What we’re really concerned about is really that this initiative by the World Economic Forum actually looks to entrench the power of those most responsible for the crises we’re facing. In many ways, it’s a trick. It’s a sleight of hand to make sure that things continue as they are; to continue the same.

 That will create more of these crises, more of these pandemics, will deepen the climate crisis, which will deepen inequality. It’s not a Great Reset at all. It’s a Great Corporate Takeover. And that’s what we were trying to draw attention to.

What we’ve been finding in recent years is that really there is something I would call it a kind of a global, silent coup d’état going on in terms of global governance. Most people don’t see it.

And people have become familiar with the way that corporations have far more influence and are being integrated into policymaking at a national level. They see that more in front of them. People see their services being privatized. They see the influence of the oil companies or the banking sector that has stopped actions such as regulation of banks or of dealing with a climate crisis.

What people don’t realize is a global level there has been something much more silent going on. Which is that their governance, which used to be by nations, is now increasingly being done by unaccountable bodies dominated by corporations. And part of the problem is that that has been happening in lots of different sectors but people haven’t been connecting the dots.

So what we’ve been trying to do in the last year is to talk with people in the health movement, for example; people involved in public education; people involved in the food sector; to say what is happening in your sector?

And what we found is that in each of these sectors, global decisions that used to be discussed by bodies such as the WHO or such as the Food and Agriculture Organization were increasingly done by these unaccountable bodies.

Just to give an example, we have now the global pandemic and one of the key bodies that is now making the decisions is a facility called COVAX [COVID-19 Vaccines Global Alliance]. You’d have thought global health should be run by the World Health Organization. It is accountable to the United Nations. It has a system of accountability.

Well, what’s actually happening is that the World Health Organization is just one of a few partners but really [COVAX] it’s being controlled by corporations and corporate interests. In this case it is GAVI [The Vaccine Alliance formerly known as the Global Alliance for Vaccines & Immunization] and CEPI [The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations].

And they are both bodies, which don’t have a system of accountability. Where it’s not clear who chose them; who they’re accountable to; or how they can be held to account. And what we do see is that there’s a lot of corporate influence in each of these bodies.

Facism Is Capitalism That Really Means It

counterpunch |   American prisons are warehouses for inconvenient populations. This makes them (definitionally) Concentration Camps.

The alliance of the American left with right-wing nationalist national security and surveillance state officials since 2016 in fighting ‘fascists’ seems inexplicable in ideological terms. The reason? The national security and surveillance states are corporate-state amalgams that exist to enforce an imperial world order. The attempted U.S. coup in Bolivia was to control lithium for liberal, green EVs (Electric Vehicles). The U.S. coup in Venezuela that is still under way is to control oil. The build-out of the surveillance state domestically is to secure control of domestic politics by and for capital. This is fascism.

Nevada bill would allow tech companies to create governments https://t.co/BfkVsCZQUC pic.twitter.com/28wdXGbHyp

— Jerry Brito (@jerrybrito) February 5, 2021

One of the many good arguments against George W. Bush’s 2003 war against Iraq was that combat forces turn into reactionary armies when they return home. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, was a veteran of the first Gulf War. The militia movement of the early 1990s was made up of veterans of U.S. dirty wars in Central America and the first Gulf War. Veterans returning from W. Bush’s Iraq fiasco were unable to find meaningful employment during the Great Recession. What this meant practically is a choice between becoming a cop or stocking shelves at Target for minimum wage.

Those most capable of inflicting harm amongst the Capitol invaders appear to be those who had military training combined with an alleged willingness to use it. That a lot of cops appeared sympathetic to the invaders more likely than not ties to real or imagined shared experience in the military. The militarization of the police includes the psychology of seeing others as enemy combatants, as well as a duty to commit violence for imagined right. This is manifested in varying solidarities including class and the residual detritus of American history, including race. What is missing from assertions of what people ‘are,’ fascist, racist, etc., is any notion of relative power.

Consider: do liberals really believe that the U.S. is trying to restore democracy in Bolivia or Venezuela by ousting democratically elected leaders and replacing them with hard-right pawns of the U.S.? Why then would the CIA care about democracy in the U.S.? The CIA brought Saddam Hussein to power in Iraq. The CIA helped install Pinochet in Chile. The CIA ousted Mosaddeq in Iran and Arbenz in Guatemala. While it is a large and complex organization, some fair proportion of everything dark and evil that has taken place since 1948 can be laid at its feet.

The point: between the alliance of corporate and state interests reflected in the Iraq War and the Wall Street bailouts, and the CIA’s long history of destroying functioning democracies for the benefit of American business interests, lies the approximate locus of American power. Few of the players involved in these machinations are motivated by ideology. One of Howard Zinn’s contributions in A People’s History is his explication of the economic motives that powerful people and organizations hide with ideological explanations of their actions. In other words, what people are, e.g. racist, fascist, does little to explain history.

Now that Donald Trump is out of power, what do the liberal opponents of fascism intend to do to disentangle the corporate from political power that defines it? One of the early answers is to redefine it as exclusively the province of authoritarian leaders. In fact, the Nazis based much of their political economy on the American model. The Americans provided eugenics, slavery, genocide, the legal framework for Nazi race laws, and an industrial model that motivated some fair portion of German militarism. In the present, the Americans have mass incarceration, a militarized police force, a large and intrusive surveillance apparatus, political police (FBI) and a public-private domestic spying operation.

Nevada Governor Sisolak And The 21st Century Company Town/Store...,

reviewjournal |   If you’ve got enough money, acres upon acres of undeveloped land and an “innovative technology,” you soon could form a new local government in Nevada.

When Gov. Steve Sisolak last month announced his plan to launch Innovation Zones in Nevada to jump-start the state’s economy by attracting new tech companies, the details of how those zones would operate proved scarce.

According to a draft of the proposed legislation, obtained by the Review-Journal but not yet introduced in the Legislature, Innovation Zones would allow tech companies like Blockchains, LLC to effectively form separate local governments in Nevada, governments that would carry the same authority as a county, including the ability to impose taxes, form school districts and justice courts and provide government services, to name a few duties.

Sisolak pitched the concept in his State of the State address as his plan to bring in new companies that are at the forefront of “groundbreaking technologies,” all without the use of tax abatements or other publicly funded incentive packages that had previously helped Nevada bring companies like Tesla to the state.

During his speech last month, Sisolak specifically named Blockchains, LLC as a company that had committed to developing a “smart city” in the area east of Reno that would run entirely on blockchain technology, once the legislation passes.

The draft, which could change before it’s unveiled as a formal bill, provides the first look into the details behind the concept.

The draft language of the proposal says that the traditional local government model is “inadequate alone to provide the flexibility and resources conducive to making the State a leader in attracting and retaining new forms and types of businesses and fostering economic development in emerging technologies and innovative industries.”

It adds that this “alternative form of local government” is needed to aid economic development within the state.

 

Then Scoops The Liminal Perspective On The Current Political Moment

CTH |  Everything from within the DC system is designed to lie to you.  Accept that and you begin to realize how events are NEVER what they appear on the surface.

The owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is Jeffrey Sprecher.  Remember the position of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in regards to Senator Loeffler?  Well, Mr. Sprecher is the husband of former Senator Kelly Loeffler.

Kelly Loeffler’s seat was purchased by their elite status and position.  Why would a billionaire run for an elected office paying a few hundred thousand?

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell positioned Loeffler with committee assignments based on that status of influence and affluence.

Jeffrey Sprecher and Kelly Loeffler entered politics for their elite interests.

The ruse of the DecptiCons is always that a motive to the benefit of the republic lies behind their candidacy. This is the same ruse that lay behind Mitt Romney, another DeceptiCon.  There are no purely altruistic motives behind these politicians, particularly in the Senate.

Their motives are all about status, power and greed.  They are not representatives of the people; they are representative of their own elite fellowship and interests, and this crosses both parties.  Everything else is chaff and countermeasures to ensure their position.

That is the brutal and uncomfortable reality to accept.  The entire system is corrupt.

The swamp is deep and filled with DeceptiCons who will strike at any given moment once they attain a useful position. President Trump went to Georgia to campaign for Senator Kelly Loeffler. Simultaneous to President Trump’s visible support, Loeffler’s husband Jeffrey Sprecher, owner of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), announced the NYSE will not blacklist Chinese telecommunications firms outlined in Trump’s executive order.

 

Conservative Treehouse Does An Exceptionally Fine Job Explaining The Gamestop Situation

CTH |  It started with a bunch of smart ordinary Wall Street market watchers assembling on Reddit and noticing that hedgefunds were making millions destroying the stock value of GameStop (GME) -and others-  by short selling the stock and trading the position.

[Short Lesson to Understand Short-Selling Here]

The hedgefunds were so greedy the short-sellers borrowed more than 140% of the total number of shares of stock of GME (GameStop) in order to destroy it.  The stock value dropped from $20 to $4 as the sharks made millions in the short-sells.  That’s when the Reddit investment community,Wall Street Bets, noticed an opportunity.

One of the issues with short-selling is that short-sellers must always eventually purchase the stocks they borrowed.  That means if the stock value increases you are committed to buying it, you will lose money, and you cannot get away from the loss in your short-sell position so long as the stock value is high.

Knowing the borrowed shares were more than the total number of outstanding shares of the entire GME stock, the rebellious alliance knew the short-sellers (hedgefunds) would have to eventually buy them.  So the independent group, mass numbers of individual investors, started purchasing shares and driving up the GameStop stock value.

When Someone Shows You Who They Are Believe Them The First Time...,

 

What Is the Great Reset? Part I: Reduced Expectations and Bio-techno-feudalism  - “the Great Reset” is but a coordinated propaganda campaign shrouded under a cloak of inevitability. Rather than a mere conspiracy theory, as the New York Times has suggested,9 the Great Reset is an attempt at a conspiracy, or the “wishful thinking”10 of socioeconomic planners to have corporate “stakeholders”11 and governments adopt the desiderata of the WEF.

In order to sell this package, the WEF mobilizes the warmed-over rhetoric of “economic equality,” “fairness,” “inclusion,” and “a shared destiny,” among other euphemisms.12 Together, such phrases represent the collectivist, socialist political and ideological component of the envisioned corporate socialism13 (since economic socialism can never be enacted, it is always only political and ideological).

I’ll examine the prospects for the Great Reset in future installments. But suffice it to say for now that the WEF envisions a bio-techno-feudalist global order, with socioeconomic planners and corporate “stakeholders” at the helm and the greater part of humanity in their thrall.

 

The Great Reset, Part II: Corporate Socialism  - Nevertheless, the aims of the WEF are not to plan every aspect of production and thus to direct all individual activity. Rather, the goal is to limit the possibilities for individual activity, including the activity of consumers—by dint of squeezing out industries and producers within industries from the economy. “Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed.”6

As Hayek noted, “when the medieval guild system was at its height, and when restrictions to commerce were most extensive, they were not used as a means actually to direct individual activity.”7 Likewise, the Great Reset aims not at a strictly collectivist planning of the economy so much as recommends and demands neofeudalistic restrictions that would go further than anything since the medieval period—other than under state socialism itself, that is. In 1935, Hayek noted the extent to which economic restrictions had already led to distortions of the market:

How much further, then, the Great Reset would take us toward the kinds of restrictions imposed under feudalism, including the economic stasis that feudalism entailed!

The Great Reset, Part III: Capitalism with Chinese Characteristics - The Great Reset represents the development of the Chinese system in the West, only in reverse. Whereas the Chinese political elite began with a socialist-communist political system and implemented “capitalism” later, the elite in the West began with “capitalism” and is aiming to implement a socialist-communist political system now. It’s as if the Western oligarchy looked to the “socialism” on display in China, and said, “yes, we want it.”

This explains many otherwise seeming contradictions, not the least of which is the leftist authoritarianism of Big Tech. Big Tech, and in particular Big Digital, is the ideological communications apparatus for the advancement of corporate socialism, or capitalism with Chinese characteristics.

The Chinese characteristics that the Great Reset aims to reproduce in connection with Western capitalism would resemble the totalitarianism of the CCP. It would require a great abridgement of individual rights—including property rights, free expression, freedom of movement, freedom of association, freedom of religion, and the free enterprise system as we understand it.

The Great Reset would implement the political system in much the same way as China has done—with 5G-enabled smart city surveillance, the equivalent of social credit scores, medical passports, political imprisonment, and other means of social and political repression and control.

In the end, socialism with Chinese characteristics and capitalism with Chinese characteristics would amount to the same thing.

Fin D'Siecle American Male Identity?

patrickwyman |  The assumed subject of this culture is a straight, young-ish (18-40) dude who’s kind of into fitness of some kind, whether that’s lifting weights, a little jiu-jitsu, or what have you. He probably played sports and currently enjoys watching them. He’s familiar with but not super dedicated to video games and likes beer and maybe some weed from time to time. He may or may not have a college degree, but either way has a solid but not extremely high-paying job. He probably lives in the suburbs, exurbs, or a rural area, rather than a dense metro. He’s probably but not necessarily white. He’s disproportionately likely to have served in the military, and if he hasn’t, he knows people - family or friends - who do or did.

These various demographic, and therefore cultural and social affiliations, don’t exist in isolation from one another. Put together, they form a relatively stable melange, an ecosystem with its own influencers and heroes, values and principles, and connections to other social, cultural, and political phenomena.

It’s rooted in physicality and the body, self-ownership through activity. While it doesn’t necessarily eschew the life of the mind - Jocko Willink, for example, constantly discusses and advocates the reading of books on his podcast - that’s simply not the main focus for self-actualization or identity. If you want to talk about intellectual pursuits, you can do it while pulling 500 pounds or beating the hell out of a heavy bag.

Some aspects of this are obviously new, like social media and the role of influencers. But others aren’t. Fitness culture, one of Bro Culture’s constituent pieces, has been around in various guises for a long time; weightlifting came to prominence in the 1960s and 70s, Crossfit in the 2000s, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in the last decade, but other manifestations - like respectable men’s Muscular Christianity around the beginning of the 20th century - have been around for much longer. Bare-knuckle boxing was a manifestation of rough-and-tumble, working-class manhood in later 19th century America. That working-class manhood revolved around taverns and drinking, gambling on fights and races, a combination of activities familiar to any self-respecting Bro today whether he participates in them or not.

One parallel that’s particularly striking to me, though I wouldn’t take the comparison too far, is with medieval chivalry.

Hear me out.

The popular conception of chivalry, as a moral code guiding the behavior of honorable knights, is flat-out, laughably wrong. That’s a creation of 19th-century authors like Walter Scott, and the popular fantasy authors (basically up until George R.R. Martin) who built on their worldview in the 20th.

In reality, chivalry was all about one particular version of Guys Being Dudes. Chivalry could refer to a few different things, but the most common meaning was simply battlefield deeds, executed with some style. This, what knights referred to as “prowess,” was at the core of the broader ideology of chivalry: raw, bloody, physical performance, violence done effectively and to an agreed-upon aesthetic standard. The second major concern of chivalry, honor, grew directly out of the first. Honor wasn’t an abstract concept to medieval knights; it was a possession, a recognition of their particular status and place in the social hierarchy, which they were well within their rights to violently defend and assert through their prowess. Piety was the icing on the cake, but no knight really doubted that God approved of their actions.

 

Hacker Or Slave? CHOOSE!!!

islamtimes  |  The Digital Age was crucially associated with right-wing ideology from the very start. The incubation was provided by the Progress and Freedom Foundation (PFF), active from 1993 to 2010 and conveniently funded, among others, by Microsoft, At&T, Disney, Sony, Oracle, Google and Yahoo.

In 1994, PFF held a ground-breaking conference in Atlanta that eventually led to a seminal Magna Carta: literally, Cyberspace and the American Dream: a Magna Carta for the Knowledge Era, published in 1996, during the first Clinton term.

Not by accident the magazine Wired was founded, just like PFF, in 1993, instantly becoming the house organ of the “Californian ideology”.

Among the authors of the Magna Carta we find futurist Alvin “Future Shock” Toffler and Reagan’s former scientific counselor George Keyworth. Before anyone else, they were already conceptualizing how “cyberspace is a bioelectronic environment which is literally universal”. Their Magna Carta was the privileged road map to explore the new frontier.

Those Randian heroes

Also not by accident the intellectual guru of the new frontier was Ayn Rand and her quite primitive dichotomy between “pioneers” and the mob. Rand declared that egotism is good, altruism is evil, and empathy is irrational.

When it comes to the new property rights of the new Eldorado, all power should be exercised by the Silicon Valley “pioneers”, a Narcissus bunch in love with their mirror image as superior Randian heroes. In the name of innovation they should be allowed to destroy any established rules, in a Schumpeterian “creative destruction” rampage.

 That has led to our current environment, where Google, Facebook, Uber and co. can overstep any legal framework, imposing their innovations like a fait accompli.

Durand goes to the heart of the matter when it comes to the true nature of “digital domination”: US leadership was never achieved because of spontaneous market forces.

On the contrary. The history of Silicon Valley is absolutely dependent on state intervention – especially via the industrial-military complex and the aero-spatial complex. The Ames Research Center, one of NASA’s top labs, is in Mountain View. Stanford was always awarded juicy military research contracts. During WWII, Hewlett Packard, for instance, was flourishing thanks to their electronics being used to manufacture radars. Throughout the 1960s, the US military bought the bulk of the still infant semiconductor production.

The Rise of Data Capital, a 2016 MIT Technological Review report produced “in partnership” with Oracle, showed how digital networks open access to a new, virgin underground brimming with resources: “Those that arrive first and take control obtain the resources they’re seeking” – in the form of data.

So everything from video-surveillance images and electronic banking to DNA samples and supermarket tickets implies some form of territorial appropriation. Here we see in all its glory the extractivist logic inbuilt in the development of Big Data.

Durand gives us the example of Android to illustrate the extractivist logic in action. Google made Android free for all smartphones so it would acquire a strategic market position, beating the Apple ecosystem and thus becoming the default internet entry point for virtually the whole planet. That’s how a de facto, immensely valuable,  online real estate empire is built.

American Neofeudalism The True Source Of Its Discontents

dailyreckoning |  It’s easy to lay America’s visible frustrations at the feet of Covid lockdowns or political polarization, but this conveniently ignores the real driver: systemic unfairness.

The status quo has been increasingly rigged to benefit insiders and elites as the powers of central banks and governments have picked the winners (cronies, insiders, cartels and monopolies) and shifted the losses and risks onto the losers (the rest of us).

We now live in the world the 19th-century French economist Frédéric Bastiat so aptly described:

“When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.”

Ours is a two-tier society and economy with a broken ladder of social mobility for those trying to reach the security of the technocrat class.

As Bastiat observed, those rigging the system to benefit themselves always create a legal system that lets them off scot-free and a PR scheme that glorifies their predation as well-deserved rewards from their enormous appetite for hard work and innovation.

Embezzling a couple billion dollars also earns you a get out of jail free card: none of the perps in Wall Street’s skims, scams and frauds ever gets indicted, much less convicted, and none of Wall Street’s legalized looters ever goes to prison.

And this is a fair and just system? Uh, right.

Meanwhile, the reality is the roulette wheel is rigged, and only chumps believe it’s a fair game. Those who know it’s rigged have essentially zero agency (control/power) or capital to demand an unrigged game or finagle their way into the elite class doing the skimming.

The net result is soaring frustration with a patently unfair system that’s touted as the fairest in the entire world.

The key takeaway, in my view, is that the unfairness isn’t limited to the economy, society or politics —  it’s manifesting in all three realms. It isn’t just frustration with domestic issues — the global economic order is also a source of unfairness and powerlessness.

These are the dynamics that are tearing apart our social cohesion and that will soon start destabilizing the economy — regardless of how much “money” the Federal Reserve prints.

How divided is America?

 

The Governance Paradigm When Human Interaction Is Fundamentally Suspicious And Politically Contagious

strategic-culture |  In Tempetes Microbiennes, Patrick Zylberman, a professor of History of Health in Paris, detailed the complex process through which health security, so far at the margins of political strategies, was sneaking into center stage in the early 2000s. The WHO had already set the precedent in 2005, warning about “50 million deaths” around the world caused by the incoming swine flu. In the worst-case scenario projected for a pandemic, Zylberman predicted that “sanitary terror” would be used as an instrument of governance.

That worst-case scenario has been revamped as we speak. The notion of a generalized obligatory confinement is not warranted by any medical justification, or leading epidemiological research, when it comes to fighting a pandemic. Still, that was enshrined as the hegemonic policy – with the inevitable corollary of countless masses plunged into unemployment. All that based on failed, delirious mathematical models of the Imperial College kind, imposed by powerful pressure groups ranging from the World Economic Forum (WEF) to the Munich Security Conference.

Enter Dr. Richard Hatchett, a former member of the National Security Council during the first Bush Jr. administration, who was already recommending obligatory confinement of the whole population way back in 2001. Hatchett now directs the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations (CEPI), a very powerful entity coordinating global vaccine investment, and very cozy with Big Pharma. CEPI happens to be a brainchild of the WEF in conjunction with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Crucially, Hatchett regards the fight against Covid-19 as a “war”. The terminology – adopted by everyone from President Trump to President Macron – gives away the game. It harks back to – what else – the global war on terror (GWOT), as solemnly announced in September 2001 by Donald “Known Unknowns” Rumsfeld himself.

Rumsfeld, crucially, had been the chairman of biotech giant Gilead. After 9/11, at the Pentagon, he got busy aiming to blur the distinction between civilians and the military when it came to GWOT. That’s when “generalized obligatory confinement” was conceptualized, with Hatchett among the key players.

As much as this was a militarized Big Pharma spin-off concept, it had nothing to do with public health. What mattered was the militarization of American society to be adopted in response to bioterror – at the time automatically attributed to a squalid, tech-deprived al-Qaeda.

The current version of this project – we are at “war” and every civilian must stay at home – takes the form of what Alexander Dugin has defined as a medical-military dictatorship.

Hatchett is very much part of the group, alongside ubiquitous Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), very close to WHO, WEF and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and Robert Redfield, director of the U.S. chapter of the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Further applications inbuilt in the project will include all-around digital surveillance, sold as health monitoring. Already implemented in the current narrative is the non-stop demonization of China, “guilty” of all things Covid-19-related. That is inherited from another tried and tested war game – the Red Dawn scheme.

Precarity - Neofeudal Slave Nouveau

nakedcapitalism |  precarity is the result of the shift in the last couple of generations of business revenues away from workers and towards profits, or capital, if you prefer. And that most people are far too complacent about that because they have deeply internalized prevailing market/neoliberal ideology.

Robert Heilbroner identified this tendency in his 1988 book, Behind the Veil of Economics. A major focus was contrasting the source of discipline under feudalism versus under capitalism. Heilbroner argues it was the bailiff and the lash, that lords would incarcerate and beat serfs who didn’t pull their weight. But the lord had obligations to his serfs too, so this relationship was not as one-sided as it might seem. By contrast, Heilbroner argues that the power structure under capitalism is far less obvious:

This negative form of power contrasts sharply with with that of the privileged elites in precapitalist social formations. In these imperial kingdoms or feudal holdings, disciplinary power is exercised by the direct use or display of coercive power. The social power of capital is of a different kind….The capitalist may deny others access to his resources, but he may not force them to work with him. Clearly, such power requires circumstances that make the withholding of access of critical consequence. These circumstances can only arise if the general populace is unable to secure a living unless it can gain access to privately owned resources or wealth…

The organization of production is generally regarded as a wholly “economic” activity, ignoring the political function served by the wage-labor relationships in lieu of bailiffs and senechals. In a like fashion, the discharge of political authority is regarded as essentially separable from the operation of the economic realm, ignoring the provision of the legal, military, and material contributions without which the private sphere could not function properly or even exist. In this way, the presence of the two realms, each responsible for part of the activities necessary for the maintenance of the social formation, not only gives capitalism a structure entirely different from that of any precapitalist society, but also establishes the basis for a problem that uniquely preoccupies capitalism, namely, the appropriate role of the state vis-a-vis the sphere of production and distribution.

The bygone decade is marked by a radical change in relations between employers and employees. According to recent research by the Bank of England, the labour share of income in the last thirty to forty years significantly fell in the USA and in other advanced economies as well. The decline of influence of labour as well as new technologies adopted by big corporations have led to new forms of employment: mostly flexible, low-payed, unstable jobs that are underregulated by labour legislation.

The state of things in capital-labour relations with constant redistribution of wealth and power to capital owners is without exaggeration class warfare (an expression, with a good reason, constantly used by Bernie Sanders). Ideology is ready as a powerful weapon in this class war. Media, internet, books and experts strive to persuade workers that this state of insecurity is necessary, normal or even desirable. And the defenders of flexible and unstable jobs claim that this is objective logic of economy which has nothing to do with political decision-making.

 

Citizen My Ass - You are an Indebted Tenant of the Sovereign

theamericanconservative |  The REAL ID Act has been intensely controversial since its 2005 enactment in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and fiercely opposed by both conservatives and liberals. Twenty-five  states passed resolutions objecting to the law or signaling that they would not comply. The Electronic Frontier Foundation declared in 2007,  “A federal law that aims to conscript the states into creating a national ID system… is precisely the kind of scheme that the framers expected that federalism would guard against.” 

But the Department of Homeland Security has compelled submission by announcing that the Transportation Security Agency will prohibit Americans from flying unless they have either a REAL ID Act-approved driver’s license or a passport.  The Supreme Court ruled in 1999 that the “‘constitutional right to travel from one State to another’ is firmly embedded in our jurisprudence.” But REAL ID Act policies have routinely scorned both the Bill of Rights and Supreme Court rulings. 

Most Americans do not possess passports, so federally-approved state driver’s licenses are becoming de facto internal passports. Almost a hundred million Americans do not have REAL ID-compliant identification, according to the U.S. Travel Association. In Minnesota, 11 percent of drivers still have licenses that will be rejected at TSA checkpoints starting on October 1. States and individuals are chaotically scrambling to meet the law’s shifting demands. Twitter is echoing with howls of people who spend hours at motor vehicle administration offices only to have their paperwork rejected because of picayune quibbles. 

But the REAL ID law poses perils far beyond the airport entrance. Maryland began issuing REAL ID driver’s licenses in 2009. In 2017, the Department of Homeland Security notified the state that its REAL ID licenses were invalid unless Maryland snared more documents for each driver. More than half a million drivers remain at risk for losing their licenses.  

TheWashington Post reported in August that 8,000 Maryland licenses have been suspended. Three months earlier, MVA announced that 66,300 people were at risk of having their driver’s license or identification cards revoked for failure to comply with MVA demands.  As Maryland ramps up enforcement, the number of suspended licenses is probably far higher now but MVA spokespersons failed to respond to repeated press inquiries seeking the latest number. Maryland police are seizing the license of any driver who they stop whose only offense was failure to hustle to show Maryland bureaucrats their birth certificate, passport, utility bills, Social Security card, or other proof of their identity. 

Since the 2005 enactment of the REAL ID Act, the federal government has helped bankroll the license plate scanner networks  that permit tracking any driver on the roads in many parts of the nation. If Maryland decides to target people who received cancellation notices, there are almost 500 license plate scanners deployed in police cars and elsewhere in the state that compile almost half a billion scans of driver’s per year. If the order is given to use the scanners, a thousand people a day could be stripped of their licenses and potentially arrested. MVA spokespersons failed to respond to inquiries about whether license plate scanners may be used for enforcing REAL ID compliance demands.

Virtue-Signaling Imbeciles Don't Get A WHOLE LOT Of Things...,

kunstler |  You can’t overstate how fortunate this country was after the Second World War. The mid-twentieth century was the apex of American industrial wealth. We produced real goods and lived in extraordinary comfort. Now, of course that has all turned around, the industry is mostly bygone, the magnificent energy supply is getting sketchy, and all that’s left is a false-front financialized economy based on swindling and accounting fraud. Medicine and health care have become unabashed rackets, and good luck finding a place to live for less than half of your monthly income.

Things have changed, as Bob Dylan once noted in song, and the times they are a ‘changing once again. This is probably the worst time in recent history to go full-bore socialist. Look, it’s as simple as this: the 20^th century saw the greatest rise of global GDP ever. The prospect of that is what drove the various socialisms of the period — the belief that there would be evermore material wealth and that a lot of it had to be fairly redistributed to the workers who brought it into being. You can debate the finer socio-ethical points of that — and indeed that’s what much of politics consisted of throughout the industrialized world — but the stunning bonanza of wealth compelled it.

That is the world we are moving out of right now, despite the fantasies of Elon Musk and the many techno pied pipers like him. GDP growth has stalled, the implacable trend is toward contraction, and the wizards of financial hocus-pocus are running out of tricks for pretending that they create anything of value. In short: there’s no there there. All that’s left are IOUs for loans that will never be paid back — and that kind of loan (especially in the form of a bond) doesn’t have any value.

So, the Democratic Party has embarked on a crusade to redistribute the wealth of the nation at the exact moment when the “wealth” is turning out to be gone. Good luck with that.

What intellectuals don't get about MIGRATION is the ethical notion of SYMMETRY:

OPEN BORDERS work if and only if the number of pple who want to go from EU/US to Africa/LatinAmer equals Africans/Latin Amer who want to move to EU/US

Silver Rule in #SkinInTheGame

Gabish?

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb (@nntaleb) June 30, 2018

 

Facebook "Privacy"...,

What to see what Facebook has on you (at a minimum)?

1. Goto https://t.co/UFPfcZwJw7
2. Click "Download a copy of your Facebook data"
3. Wait for automatic email from Facebook
4. Download the ZIP file link in the email
5. Extract it and open 'html/index.htm'

— Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) March 24, 2018

 

Sent it to the kids... 

Heard back from the 54yo Chemist Son

This was in the email he received:

What info is available?	What is it?	Where can I find it?
About Me	Information you added to the About section of your Timeline like relationships, work, education, where you live and more. It includes any updates or changes you made in the past and what is currently in the About section of your Timeline.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Account Status History	The dates when your account was reactivated, deactivated, disabled or deleted.	Downloaded Info
Active Sessions	All stored active sessions, including date, time, device, IP address, machine cookie and browser information.	Downloaded Info
Ads Clicked	Dates, times and titles of ads clicked (limited retention period).	Downloaded Info
Address	Your current address or any past addresses you had on your account.	Downloaded Info
Ad Topics	A list of topics that you may be targeted against based on your stated likes, interests and other data you put in your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Alternate Name	Any alternate names you have on your account (ex: a maiden name or a nickname).	Downloaded Info
Apps	All of the apps you have added.	Downloaded Info
Birthday Visibility	How your birthday appears on your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Chat	A history of the conversations you’ve had on Facebook Chat (a complete history is available directly from your messages inbox).	Downloaded Info
Check-ins	The places you’ve checked into.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Connections	The people who have liked your Page or Place, RSVPed to your event, installed your app or checked in to your advertised place within 24 hours of viewing or clicking on an ad or Sponsored Story.	Activity Log
Credit Cards	If you make purchases on Facebook (ex: in apps) and have given Facebook your credit card number.	Account Settings
Currency	Your preferred currency on Facebook. If you use Facebook Payments, this will be used to display prices and charge your credit cards.	Downloaded Info
Current City	The city you added to the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Date of Birth	The date you added to Birthday in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Deleted Friends	People you’ve removed as friends.	Downloaded Info
Education	Any information you added to Education field in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Emails	Email addresses added to your account (even those you may have removed).	Downloaded Info
Events	Events you’ve joined or been invited to.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Facial Recognition Data	A unique number based on a comparison of the photos you're tagged in. We use this data to help others tag you in photos.	Downloaded Info
Family	Friends you’ve indicated are family members.	Downloaded Info
Favorite Quotes	Information you’ve added to the Favorite Quotes section of the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Followers	A list of people who follow you.	Downloaded Info
Following	A list of people you follow.	Activity Log
Friend Requests	Pending sent and received friend requests.	Downloaded Info
Friends	A list of your friends.	Downloaded Info
Gender	The gender you added to the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Groups	A list of groups you belong to on Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Hidden from News Feed	Any friends, apps or pages you’ve hidden from your News Feed.	Downloaded Info
Hometown	The place you added to hometown in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
IP Addresses	A list of IP addresses where you’ve logged into your Facebook account (won’t include all historical IP addresses as they are deleted according to a retention schedule).	Downloaded Info
Last Location	The last location associated with an update.	Activity Log
Likes on Others' Posts	Posts, photos or other content you’ve liked.	Activity Log
Likes on Your Posts from others	Likes on your own posts, photos or other content.	Activity Log
Likes on Other Sites	Likes you’ve made on sites off of Facebook.	Activity Log
Linked Accounts	A list of the accounts you've linked to your Facebook account	Account Settings
Locale	The language you've selected to use Facebook in.	Downloaded Info
Logins	IP address, date and time associated with logins to your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Logouts	IP address, date and time associated with logouts from your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Messages	Messages you’ve sent and received on Facebook. Note, if you've deleted a message it won't be included in your download as it has been deleted from your account.	Downloaded Info
Name	The name on your Facebook account.	Downloaded Info
Name Changes	Any changes you’ve made to the original name you used when you signed up for Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Networks	Networks (affiliations with schools or workplaces) that you belong to on Facebook.	Downloaded Info
Notes	Any notes you’ve written and published to your account.	Activity Log
Notification Settings	A list of all your notification preferences and whether you have email and text enabled or disabled for each.	Downloaded Info
Pages You Admin	A list of pages you admin.	Downloaded Info
Pending Friend Requests	Pending sent and received friend requests.	Downloaded Info
Phone Numbers	Mobile phone numbers you’ve added to your account, including verified mobile numbers you've added for security purposes.	Downloaded Info
Photos	Photos you’ve uploaded to your account.	Downloaded Info
Photos Metadata	Any metadata that is transmitted with your uploaded photos.	Downloaded Info
Physical Tokens	Badges you’ve added to your account.	Downloaded Info
Pokes	A list of who’s poked you and who you’ve poked. Poke content from our mobile poke app is not included because it's only available for a brief period of time. After the recipient has viewed the content it's permanently deleted from our systems.	Downloaded Info
Political Views	Any information you added to Political Views in the About section of Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Posts by You	Anything you posted to your own Timeline, like photos, videos and status updates.	Activity Log
Posts by Others	Anything posted to your Timeline by someone else, like wall posts or links shared on your Timeline by friends.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Posts to Others	Anything you posted to someone else’s Timeline, like photos, videos and status updates.	Activity Log
Privacy Settings	Your privacy settings.	Privacy SettingsDownloaded Info
Recent Activities	Actions you’ve taken and interactions you’ve recently had.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Registration Date	The date you joined Facebook.	Activity Log Downloaded Info
Religious Views	The current information you added to Religious Views in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Removed Friends	People you’ve removed as friends.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Screen Names	The screen names you’ve added to your account, and the service they’re associated with. You can also see if they’re hidden or visible on your account.	Downloaded Info
Searches	Searches you’ve made on Facebook.	Activity Log
Shares	Content (ex: a news article) you've shared with others on Facebook using the Share button or link.	Activity Log
Spoken Languages	The languages you added to Spoken Languages in the Aboutsection of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Status Updates	Any status updates you’ve posted.	Activity Log  Downloaded Info
Work	Any current information you’ve added to Work in the About section of your Timeline.	Downloaded Info
Vanity URL	Your Facebook URL (ex: username or vanity for your account).	Visible in your Timeline URL
Videos	Videos you’ve posted to your Timeline.	Activity Log Downloaded Info

After he had read some of the 305mb provided,he responded:

It's fucking horrifying!! I've looked at about 2% of it, and it makes me grateful that I have used discretion out there for the most part. Even the "private messages" are in the files....

Fist tap Big Don.