The First Rule Of The Big Club: Insiders Don't Criticize Other Insiders...,

persuasion |  Censorship is about who has the power to censor, and what checks are placed upon that power. Right now, tech companies have all the power, and they exercise it as a like-minded cartel. When we see Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ted Cruz voice similar concerns over what happened to WallStreetBets last week, we should realize that the politics of this issue in the post-Trump era will no longer divide along an axis of Left and Right, but of insider and outsider. 

Elizabeth Warren, when she started landing blows against Wall Street after the 2008 financial crisis, met with President Obama’s economics adviser, the former treasury secretary and Harvard president Larry Summers. He presented her with a choice: “I could be an insider or I could be an outsider,” she recalled in her 2014 memoir, A Fighting Chance. “Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. People—powerful people—listen to what they have to say. But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.”  

.@AOC bringing back her social media crash course for members of Congress. Here's what lawmakers took away from it at the 2019 session: https://t.co/daHysbxKIc

“The room was packed. Every seat was filled." https://t.co/GRb0PblPAH

— Cristiano Lima (@viaCristiano) February 3, 2021

Occasional Cortex Fans tell themselves that AOC is positioning herself as an insider: “I will show you how to develop a base and raise money without going through Pelosi or the DNC.” They delude themselves into believing that she is the most interesting politician around right now.

It’s precisely this insider-protection scheme that the internet and social media have most disrupted. Insiders are massively powerful but few in number. Outsiders have always been numerous but unorganized. Social networking and online organizing have given the outsiders real power to effect change, and finally register their disgust at the way incompetent elites protect each other. The elites of Big Business, Big Media, Wall Street, and Washington are terrified of this, and will leverage any censorship power to keep the outsiders at bay. 

The Real “Big Lie”

After the storming of the Capitol building on Jan. 6, we heard a lot about the “Big Lie” perpetrated by Trump and his allies that the election was “stolen.” In reality, this narrative never got far. It was rejected by the media (including Fox News), thrown out by the courts, labeled by social networks as “disputed,” and dismissed by politicians, including Trump’s own vice president. Yes, some far-right groups like the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers came to Washington to commit acts of violence, but they were roundly denounced. For a Big Lie to be successful, it has to have buy-in from the people in power, moneyed interests, the narrative-framers in the media generally, all of whom have to benefit from the lie and therefore repeat it. 

But what issue could possibly unite all of these constituencies? For several years, elites in the media, government, and now finance have denounced social media as a tool for propaganda, disinformation and hate. Social media was to blame for the Russian disinformation that supposedly elected Trump in 2016. Social media was fingered as the main culprit in an “insurrection” that attempted to overthrow an election. And now, WallStreetBets is accused without evidence of spreading hate and misinformation. We’ve even been told that social media is worse than cigarettes. 

What all of our elites have in common is a reason to fear social media. Legacy media hates social media for disrupting their business models and competing with them for influence. Wall Street has just learned that organized social networks can threaten their control of the Monopoly board. The party in power benefits from increased censorship and repression of political dissent by labeling it “hate speech” and “disinformation.” Ironically, the tech oligarchs benefit the least from the censorship they impose, but the threat of break-up keeps them in line. 

If there is a Big Lie in American politics right now, it is the idea that censorship of social media is necessary to save democracy. In his book The Square and the Tower, the historian Niall Ferguson describes the age-old tension between hierarchies and networks—between the rulers in the Tower and the people in the Square. The last thing that the rulers want to see when they look down is a teeming throng in the Square. And nobody benefits more than the rulers from malleable censorship rules that are easily weaponized to restrict, disrupt, or disband the Square. What the insiders fear is not the end of democracy, but the end of their control over it, and the loss of the benefits they extract from it. Ultimately, the battle over speech is just one aspect of a broader war for power amid a growing political realignment that is not Left versus Right, but rather insider versus outsider. Thanks to social media, the outsiders are threatening to replace who’s in the Tower, and the insiders have never been more scared.

Is The Elite Overreaction To Trump An Overtly Feminized Expression Of Fear?

TAC |  Let's not attribute to malice that which can be explained by an insecure elite stumbling back into a tenuous grasp on power.

There is a real question worth asking here, and it lies at the heart of our current political dysfunction: why do the people in power, in government and beyond, consistently act in a way that makes them look like part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Why are tectonic policy shifts at the state level being arranged around the transfer of power at the federal? Why did the media and big business suddenly change their tune on the miracle date of January 20?

I think the answer is fairly simple, and a lot less nefarious than some of the alternatives.

We hear a lot of talk these days about “the politics of fear,” and it’s almost exclusively directed at the right (and almost exclusively in ridiculous ways): the only reason anyone possibly could have voted for Donald Trump is that they’re conditioned to fear Xi Jinping, or Jack Dorsey, or black people; the only reason to oppose progressive social policies is a fear of homosexuals, or of women, or of men who think they’re women; the only reason to reject the candidates of Wall Street—whose names are always tagged with a big, dark capital “D”—is fear that our backwards way of life will be ravaged by Kamala Harris’ lizard-people overlords; et cetera, et cetera, until it becomes apparent that the only possible explanation for any of the left’s electoral failures is some deep terror ingrained in the minds of half the voting public.

But it’s worth talking too about the fear that drives the left. There’s the obvious example of the pandemic—the hysteria that left most of Blue America hunkered down like it was a nuclear apocalypse, only to bravely emerge from their bunkers in droves on November 3. That’s the same kind of fear that underlies the really fanatical climate stuff. But there’s another kind too, and it essentially boils down to a fear of opposition, a fear of not being in power.

It’s a function of our adversarial politics: when you see no way of working with someone, when you can find no common ground, when the stated goals of that person go against everything you believe, you’re probably going to be terrified of any situation in which that person has power and you don’t. And it’s not fear of the extremes, either—call me an optimist, but I don’t think there are many people stupid enough to sincerely believe that Donald Trump is a fascist. We live in a world where four years of sometimes-successful administration by a scattershot, moderate conservative puts the fear of God in about 80 million people.

So why does everything change the second 45 gives way to 46? It doesn’t require Don Jr.’s hypothetical nefarious plot. All it requires is that people in positions of power—the people who are terrified of losing those positions—act exactly as we would expect them to act under the influence of that terror. That doesn’t just mean Democratic governors who overplayed their hands, and then rethought their moves the second they stepped into a post-Trump world. It means the huge companies that, for the first time (and likely the last time) in a long time, didn’t have a buddy in the White House and now are ready to dive back into the game. It means the legacy media that went through a well-earned hell over the past five years, and now get a little breathing room to lob softball questions at a friendly politician. It means every American who subscribes to the progressive culture and narrative that dominate our institutions, who worried just for a moment that maybe they wouldn’t always be in control.

 

 

Hunter Biden's Memoir "Like A Pink Horse Riding Down Nightmare Alley"

AP |   Hunter Biden, son of President Joe Biden and an ongoing target for conservatives, has a memoir coming out April 6.

The book is called “Beautiful Things” and will center on the younger Biden’s well publicized struggles with substance abuse, according to Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Acquired in the fall of 2019, “Beautiful Things” was kept under wraps even as Biden’s business dealings became a fixation of then-President Donald Trump and others during the election and his finances a matter of investigation by the Justice Department.

“Beautiful Things” was circulated among several authors and includes advance praise from Stephen King, Dave Eggers and Anne Lamott.

“In his harrowing and compulsively readable memoir, Hunter Biden proves again that anybody — even the son of a United States President — can take a ride on the pink horse down nightmare alley,” King writes in his blurb. “Biden remembers it all and tells it all with a bravery that is both heartbreaking and quite gorgeous. He starts with a question: Where’s Hunter? The answer is he’s in this book, the good, the bad, and the beautiful.”

In a snippet released by Gallery, Biden writes in his book, “I come from a family forged by tragedies and bound by a remarkable, unbreakable love.”

The president and first lady released a statement Thursday saying, “We admire our son Hunter’s strength and courage to talk openly about his addiction so that others might see themselves in his journey and find hope.”

During one of last fall’s presidential debates, Joe Biden defended his son from attacks by Trump.

“My son, like a lot of people, like a lot of people you know at home, had a drug problem,” the Democratic candidate said. “He’s overtaken it. He’s fixed it. He’s worked on it, and I’m proud of him. I’m proud of my son.”

Huntergate: My Dad Is Important, Here's What You'll Need To Blackmail Me To Get To Him

TAC |  I  read the files on Hunter Biden’s laptop. They paint a sleazy picture of multi-million dollar wire transfers, potential money laundering, and possible tax evasion. They raise serious questions about the judgment and propriety of Jim Biden, the president-elect’s brother, and Joe himself. Call it smoke not fire, but smoke that should not be ignored. The files were supplied to TAC by a known source previously established to have access.

Joe Biden is lucky a coordinated media effort kept Hunter out of the campaign. The FBI has had the laptop since 2019, when they subpoenaed the files in connection with a money laundering investigation. Federal investigators also served a round of subpoenas on December 8, a month after the election, including one for Hunter Biden himself. While the legal thrust of the investigation by the federal prosecutor in Delaware is taxes, the real focus seems to be on Hunter’s Chinese connections. This all comes after the FBI has had over a year to examine some of the same files TAC looked at.

In the final weeks before the election, Hunter’s laptop fell into Republican hands. The story went public in the New York Post, revealing that Hunter Biden introduced his father, then vice president, to a top executive at Ukrainian energy firm Burisma less than a year before the elder Biden pressured government officials in Ukraine into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company. The meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, an adviser to the board of Burisma, sent Hunter Biden about a year after Hunter himself joined the Burisma board at a salary of $83,000 a month with no obvious work duties past making such introductions.

Nice work if you can get it, and to get it your dad better be vice president. If all that alone does not meet the test of impropriety, we need a new test. Hunter Biden’s value to clients was his perceived access to the White House. His father Joe was at least a passive participant in the scheme, maybe more than that.

The problem was many Americans never heard this story. Twitter led a social media charge to not allow the information online. After years of salivating over every bit of Trump family gossip, the mainstream media claimed the Biden story did not matter, or was Russian disinfo. Surveys suggest the information could have swung the election if voters had known about it. One survey showed that enough people in battleground states would have changed their votes to give Trump 311 electoral votes and reelection.

No mind, really. As soon as it became clear Joe Biden was going to win, the media on all sides lost interest in the laptop. The story became about the story. It devolved into think pieces about the Orwellian role of social media and some online giggling about the sex tapes on the laptop. But our short attention spans have consequences. The laptop still has a lot to tell us.

Hunter’s laptop was chock-a-block with video that appears to show Hunter smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with a woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images. There’s evidence there that Hunter spent money on escorts, some $21,000 on cam sites, big plays on all sorts of depravities. There is also Joe’s car insurance information, Hunter’s SSN, pages of call logs, and lots of email addresses, bank account numbers, and personal information of prominent people. None of the material is encrypted, just dumped on a standard MacBook Pro using the password “Hunter02.” The machine was regularly connected to the internet and might as well have had an electronic sign on it saying “My dad is important, here’s what you’ll need to blackmail me and others to get to him.”

The Lesson Of The BLM Protests

caitlinjohnstone |  Remember when Americans shook the earth with massive protests demanding an end to the police state and the entire liberal establishment just kept saying “I hear you, I agree with you” and then did absolutely nothing to even reduce police brutality? It’s important to remember such lessons.

People would ask me “Why are you supporting Black Lives Matter Caitlin?? Don’t you see all the corporations and corporate Dems support it? Why would they do that if it didn’t serve them?” This is why they did it. Empty words of support can defuse a situation far easier than open opposition.

Imagine if all the plutocrats, pundits and politicians had just yelled at the BLM protesters and admonished them to stop? It would have only turned people against them with far more aggression, and it would have exposed the fact that they are the enemy. It’s much more effective to say “I hear you, I agree with you” with no intention of taking any real action.

And really this is all institutions like the Democratic Party exist to do: defuse left populism and crush grassroots activism not with opposition, but with empty words of agreement that have no intention of action behind them. They’re just a bottomless pit that tricks people into pouring their energy into it, thereby stopping all leftward movement.

A kid who doesn’t want to clean their room will tell their parents “No! I don’t wanna!” A very clever kid who doesn’t want to clean their room will say “Yes! I’ll get on that right away” and then enjoy hours of peace and relaxation without parental nagging, and without cleaning. It’s the exact same way with the powerful. It’s much more efficacious for them to pretend to be on your side than expose the fact that they’re not. In the end the result is the same: the kid doesn’t clean their room. But they don’t get the kind of pushback they’d get if they said no.

Manipulators are good at manipulation. The people who make their way to the top in a corrupt system are manipulators. You can’t take their words at face value, mustn’t mistake vapid placation for victory. They’ll happily give you a mountain of words in exchange for your real treasure.

So, Blueballs Combined With Hopelessness And Angst....,

Commenter at Naked Capitalism called Amfortas the Hippie dropped this today, I'm copying it here apropos of nothing in particular....,

Anecdote on the vibe in north houston 2-3-2021…feels very germane to this part of the zeitgeist: cousin calls, and says he’s coming up…same worry in his voice as a year ago, when he came out here to hide from the pandemic and correlated uncertainty. (he stayed til late april).

This time, his worry is civil unrest, violence, insurrection.

He’s a self-described “manwhore”…never nailed down…having numerous women all over texas that he breezes though and stays with for a while when work brings him near(he’s a roofer and tree expert and heavy equipment operator…with ample talent in all of them). The women in question are all divorcees, and seem happy with the arrangement: playing happy married to a hot guy who leaves before he becomes a chore.

Anyway…lately, he’s been hanging around north houston…where we’re both from.
Woodlands, magnolia, tomball, etc.

He lives in his truck on a spread of pineywoods he inherited…and gets a hotel room off and on, for a week at a time.
He spends a lot of time in bars, beer joints, dancehalls and clubs. It is this part of his life where we find the Doom:
he says the clubs, etc are at best ¼ populated…and that the ratio of men to women is, at best, 3 to 1.
of course this is the pandemic, and all…we both understand that…although he chafes at the mandates more than I do.

The scary part is the sentiments of the remaining men in these stag halls: “f&&k it…i ain’t doing this any more…they’ve screwed us all…” etc.

the way he puts it:”they’re tired of everything…the pandemic, the half-assed attempts at mitigating the pandemic, the economic results of those half-assed attempts, the lack of material support to mitigate the half-assed mitigations…and on and on in that vein…”

I interject: “so…blue balls, combined with hopelessness and angst”

him:”exactly!”

so I ask what he thinks will become of this mood/vibe…

Everything About The Corporate Fascist OBidenBama Administration Is Fake

caitlinjohnstone |  A new exclusive from The Daily Beast titled “White House Reporters: Biden Team Wanted Our Questions in Advance” reports that the White House press corps is being pressured to provide briefing questions ahead of time in a way that makes even mainstream media journalists uncomfortable.

“While it’s a relief to see briefings return, particularly with a commitment to factual information, the press can’t really do its job in the briefing room if the White House is picking and choosing the questions they want,” one White House correspondent told The Daily Beast. “That’s not really a free press at all.”

“It pissed off enough reporters for people to flag it for the [White House Correspondents Association] for them to deal with it,” another source reportedly said.

While Obama’s deputy press secretary Eric Schultz calls the move “textbook communications work” designed to ensure that Biden’s press secretary has answers ready instead of having to “repeatedly punt questions”, clearly the reporters on the job feel differently.

“The requests prompted concerns among the White House press corps, whose members, like many reporters, are sensitive to the perception that they are coordinating with political communications staffers,” writes the Beast.

Having questions in advance would indeed be a good way to help insulate press secretary Jen Psaki (for whom liberals are already developing an unwholesome celebrity crush) from hard questions. This would avoid sticky situations like when Psaki deflected inquiries about treasury secretary Janet Yellen’s conflict of interest with the Citadel controversy by babbling about Yellen being the first woman in her position and claiming that receiving $800,000 in speaking fees from that company is no reason for her to recuse herself.

So this is just one more item on the steadily growing pile of fake things about this administration. Everything about it is phony. This is the Astroturf Administration.

 

Respect Science Respect Expertise Respect Hierarchy KNOW YOUR PLACE!!!

mondediplo |  Worrying about the crisis of authority is what liberals do these days in the United States. Older concerns, like the economic problems of blue-collar whites, have become a subject for liberal sneering, but restoring the rightful hierarchy of credentialed expertise has become a matter of real moral urgency. ‘Respect Science’ say the signs and stickers you see in liberal neighbourhoods. Respect expertise. Respect hierarchy. Know your place.

Foreign policy, it is said, must be reclaimed by the foreign policy ‘community’. Central bank policy must be protected from the influence of farmers. From the consensus views of the relevant professions there can be no dissent, at least not in public. ‘Doubt,’ I read recently in the Washington Post, ‘is a cardinal virtue in the sciences ... But it can be disastrous in public health, where lives depend on people’s willingness to trust those same experts.’ Therefore it has to be kept quiet, if not removed from view altogether — a thought-suppressing logic that can be extended into any field of knowledge you care to mention.

This essay is not a brief for free speech absolutism or an effort to rationalise conspiracy theory or an attack on higher learning. It is about the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the left, and here is the suggestion I mean to make: the form of liberalism I have described here is inherently despicable. A democratic society is naturally going to gag when it is told again and again in countless ways, both subtle and gross, that our great national problem is our failure to heed the authority of traditional elites.

Worse, when those traditional elites come together with unprecedented unanimity to insist their high rank proves their correctness and justifies their privilege ... when they say we are in a new cold war against falsehood ... when the news media dumps its neutrality and likens itself to superheroes and declares it is mystically attuned to truth and legitimacy ... when they do those things and then get the biggest news story of the decade fabulously wrong, a society like ours is going to spot the hypocrisy. And we are going to resent it.

Which is to say that the effect of all this moral judgmentalism has been the opposite of what was intended. To spend four years scolding people in the shrillest notes of moral hysteria was perhaps the perfect recipe for convincing Trump supporters to redouble their dedication to this deluded and prejudiced man. It is well known that shaming people for failing to live up to your personal high standards of Covid hygiene is not a good strategy for changing their behaviour. Multiply that dynamic by 300 million and you’ve got America in the age of Trump. Ten per cent of a nation energetically scolding the other 90%.

If historians still exist in 30 years, they will look back upon these last four years with disgust and bewilderment. Disgust when they contemplate the loud, vain ignoramus who sat in the White House scarfing hamburgers and spinning conspiracy theories on Twitter while Covid burned through the nation.

But when they look at liberals, they will shake their heads with disbelief. How could they have thought it was wise to try to enlist the great economic and cultural powers of our time — the masters of Silicon Valley — to try to censor our opponents? Ira Glasser, the old ACLU chief, relates how liberal academics embraced speech codes because they ‘imagined themselves as controlling who the codes would be used against’. What these well-meaning liberals didn’t understand, he continued, was that ‘speech restrictions are like poison gas. It seems like it’s a great weapon to have when you’ve got the poison gas in your hands and a target in sight, but the wind has a way of shifting — especially politically — and suddenly that poison gas is being blown back on you.’

As Glasser’s metaphor suggests, this cannot end well. The mob attack on the Capitol frightened us all. But for Democrats to choose censorship (via the monopolists of Silicon Valley) as the solution to the problem is a shocking breach of faith. There are many words one might use to describe a party that, over the last 30 years, has shown itself contemptuous of working-class grievances while protective of the authority of the respected... but ‘liberal’ isn’t one of them.

 

Damn Skippy Libertarians Are Domestic Terrorists!!!

antiwar |  The Department of Homeland Security issued on Wednesday a nationwide terror alert lasting until April 30. The alert warns of potential terrorist attacks from Americans who are “ideologically motivated” and have “objections to the exercise of government authority and the presidential transition, as well as other perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

The language used in this alert suggests that millions of Americans are potential terrorists. Second Amendment supporting, antiwar, anti-tax, anti-politics, anti-militarization, pro-life, and anti-Federal Reserve activists certainly have “objections to the exercise of government authority.” They are certainly viewed by the political class and its handmaidens in big tech and the mainstream media as ideological extremists. Anyone who gets his news from sources other than mainstream media or big tech, or who uses certain “unapproved” social media platforms, is considered to have had his grievances “fueled by false narratives.” For something to be considered a false narrative, it need only contradict the “official” narrative.

The "domestic terrorist” alert is the latest sign that activities on January 6 on Capitol Hill, like the attacks of September 11, 2001, are being used to advance a long-standing anti-liberty agenda. Legislation expanding the federal government’s authority to use its surveillance and other unconstitutional powers against “domestic terrorists” is likely to soon be considered by Congress. Just as the PATRIOT Act was written years before 2001, this legislation was written long before January 6. The bill’s proponents are simply taking advantage of the hysteria following the so-called insurrection to push the bill onto the congressional agenda.

Former CIA Director John Brennan recently singled out libertarians as among the people the government should go after.

This is not the first time libertarians have been smeared. In 2009, a federally-funded fusion center identified people who supported my presidential campaign, my Campaign for Liberty, or certain Libertarian and Constitution parties candidates as potentially violent extremists.

The idea that libertarianism creates terrorists is absurd. Libertarians support the non-aggression principle, so they reject using force to advance their political goals. They rely instead on peaceful persuasion.

Libertarianism is being attacked because it does not support just reforming a few government policies. Instead, it presents a formidable intellectual challenge to the entire welfare-warfare state.

(B x C x D = AHH) Biological Knowledge X Computing Power X Data = Ability To Hack Humans

Reuters |  BGI Group, the world’s largest genomics company, has worked with China’s military on research that ranges from mass testing for respiratory pathogens to brain science, a Reuters review of research, patent filings and other documents has found.

The review, of more than 40 publicly available documents and research papers in Chinese and English, shows BGI’s links to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) include research with China’s top military supercomputing experts. The extent of those links has not previously been reported.

BGI has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside China since the outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, including to Europe, Australia and the United States. Shares of BGI Genomics Co, the company’s subsidiary listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, have doubled in price over the past 12 months, giving it a market value of about $9 billion.

But top U.S. security officials have warned American labs against using Chinese tests because of concern China was seeking to gather foreign genetic data for its own research. BGI has denied that.

The documents reviewed by Reuters neither contradict nor support that U.S. suspicion. Still, the material shows that the links between the Chinese military and BGI run deeper than previously understood, illustrating how China has moved to integrate private technology companies into military-related research under President Xi Jinping.

The U.S. government has recently been warned by an expert panel that adversary countries and non-state actors might find and target genetic weaknesses in the U.S. population and a competitor such as China could use genetics to augment the strength of its own military personnel.

BGI has worked on PLA projects seeking to make members of the ethnic Han Chinese majority less susceptible to altitude sickness, Reuters found, genetic research that would benefit soldiers in some border areas.

Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security think tank, who has provided testimony to U.S. Congressional committees, told Reuters that China’s military has pushed research on brain science, gene editing and the creation of artificial genomes that could have an application in future bioweapons. She added that such weapons are not currently technically feasible.

BGI’s pattern of collaboration with the Chinese military was a “reasonable concern to raise” for U.S. officials, said Kania.

 

The Existential Crisis Of The Global Useless Class

weforum |  In Davos we hear so much about the enormous promises of technology – and these promises are certainly real. But technology might also disrupt human society and the very meaning of human life in numerous ways, ranging from the creation of a global useless class to the rise of data colonialism and of digital dictatorships.

Automation will soon eliminate millions upon millions of jobs, and while new jobs will certainly be created, it is unclear whether people will be able to learn the necessary new skills fast enough. Suppose you are a fifty-years-old truck driver, and you just lost your job to a self-driving vehicle. Now there are new jobs in designing software or in teaching yoga to engineers – but how does a fifty-years-old truck driver reinvent himself or herself as a software engineer or as a yoga teacher? And people will have to do it not just once but again and again throughout their lives, because the automation revolution will not be a single watershed event following which the job market will settle down, into a new equilibrium. Rather, it will be a cascade of ever bigger disruptions, because AI is nowhere near its full potential.

Old jobs will disappear, new jobs will emerge, but then the new jobs will rapidly change and vanish. Whereas in the past human had to struggle against exploitation, in the twenty-first century the really big struggle will be against irrelevance. And it is much worse to be irrelevant than exploited.

Those who fail in the struggle against irrelevance would constitute a new “useless class” – people who are useless not from the viewpoint of their friends and family, but useless from the viewpoint of the economic and political system. And this useless class will be separated by an ever-growing gap from the ever more powerful elite.

This danger can be stated in the form of a simple equation, which I think might be the defining equation of life in the twenty-first century:

B x C x D = AHH!

Which means? Biological knowledge multiplied by computing power multiplied by data equals the ability to hack humans, ahh.

If you know enough biology and have enough computing power and data, you can hack my body and my brain and my life, and you can understand me better than I understand myself. You can know my personality type, my political views, my sexual preferences, my mental weaknesses, my deepest fears and hopes. You know more about me than I know about myself. And you can do that not just to me, but to everyone.

 

 

 

Short Seller Hedge Funds Were The Good Guys In Gamestop Pissant Insurrection...,

WaPo  |  The particular targets of the GameStop crowd are hedge funds and short sellers. Here, a couple of definitions may be useful. Generally speaking, a hedge fund is a small-to-medium-size company that makes money by choosing smart investments. There is nothing nefarious about this. To the contrary, if you don’t like too-big-to-fail banks that get backstopped by taxpayers, small-enough-to-fail hedge funds ought to be celebrated. If you worry about complex financial conglomerates with corrupting conflicts of interest, single-purpose investment boutiques are simpler and healthier. On the online forums where the GameStoppers congregate, you read complaints about hedge funds being bailed out during the crisis of 2008. Actually, banks, brokers, insurers, mortgage providers, money market funds and even car companies got rescues. Hedge funds got nothing.

What about short sellers? These are specialists who research stocks that might go down, sometimes because bosses are illegally covering up bad news about their companies. When short sellers identify a case of fraud or similar, they borrow and sell the stock, hoping to buy it back at a lower price later. Again, there is nothing evil about this. To the contrary, it’s a way of keeping prices honest. A market without short sellers is like a political system without investigative journalists.

This, however, is not how GameStoppers see things. They have gone after a short seller named Andrew Left, hacking into his social media accounts, sharing his personal information online, ordering dozens of pizzas to be delivered to his home in the middle of the night, and texting his children with threatening and profane language, according to the Wall Street Journal. Perhaps not surprisingly, Left has announced he will stop playing the game. Irrational stock prices will be that much likelier.

The worry is that the GameStoppers will now target others. Short sellers operate in the open: You can check short-selling volumes for any given stock on Yahoo. By whipping up frenzied buying of a heavily shorted company, speculators can cost the shorts billions and maybe put them out of business. Already, GameStoppers are buying other beaten-down companies, such as cinema giant AMC. A Goldman Sachs index of heavily shorted stocks is up sharply this month because the shorts have been routed.

Hedge funders and short sellers are out to get rich: They are certainly not angels. But there is a difference between trading based on evidence and research and trading based on conspiracy theories and mob tactics. Over the past week, it’s been tempting to celebrate the colorful rebels — they represent the democratization of finance, the revenge against the fat cats. Now it is time to remember that truth matters.

At Its Heart The Gamestop Story IS FICTION - And You Pissants Have Once Again Been Deceived...,

wired |  At its heart, the GameStop story is about small-time traders—many, according to press accounts, young and inexperienced—going up against established players and winning, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars a person (so far, at least). The WallStreetBets subreddit describes itself as “a gathering place of millions of unique individuals who are tired of being run over by the big guys and are each fighting back in their own way.” Its investors, who use the page to discuss strategy and timing, were exploiting the rigidity in “short” positions of hedge funds, who bet that GameStop’s stock would decline in value. Such “short” funds represent a commitment to provide a share of GameStop at a specific time, no matter the price, magnifying the profit potential if the redditors could push the stock in the other direction and send the hedge funds scrambling to meet their obligations.

This week, the GameStop story became a national talking point, particularly on Twitter, where users of all stripes and political persuasions cheered on the financial chaos. The billionaire entrepreneurs Elon Musk and Mark Cuban defended WallStreetBets, as did the left-wing representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, each pleased to see hedge funds undone by their own greedy ways. An arcane finance story became a class-warfare parable for the general public, with regular folks acting just as clinically as the hedge fund executives they were vanquishing—that is, being upfront about treating investments as mere manipulations, as opposed to some complex matter meant to assess the genuine value of a company. As Ocasio-Cortez wrote on Twitter: “Gotta admit it’s really something to see Wall Streeters with a long history of treating our economy as a casino complain about a message board of posters also treating the market as a casino.”

On Thursday, Robinhood blocked the kind of speculative trades of GameStop stock that were used by the redditors to drive up its share price. Though the brokerage reportedly did this to protect its own finances, the move nonetheless seemed destined to backfire in ways similar to Egypt’s drastic internet shutdown, which ultimately helped the protests spread. Suddenly, the GameStop controversy changed from a revenge fantasy against hedge funds to a matter of economic fairness: Are the same tools available to all investors, no matter their wealth? (The comparison is obviously imperfect—unless you really see the Reddit day traders as freedom fighters. More to the point, by blocking speculative trades of GameStop, Robinhood could be seen as protecting new investors who seem destined to lose money when GameStop’s share price comes back to earth.)

Next up in this cycle, one imagines, is the recognition that this revolution, whether tolerated or quashed, won’t change much at all. And like the authoritarians who found their way back to power, the hedge fund managers are likely to rein in the trading apps and their mischievous fans, ensuring their hold on the markets.

That’s the thing about the internet—time and again, it has proven better for the top dogs. At the very least, it certainly won’t threaten them. If we are foolish enough, and heartless enough, to allow a financial system that so thoroughly separates wealth creation from work and genuine improvement to society, well then the internet will make this skewed system even more lucrative for those who play. The richest will reap the wealth and the poorest, least experienced traders will end up holding the bag. An empty bag, at that.

Is Marjorie Taylor Greene A Congressional Craziness Outlier?

caitlinjohnstone |   I really hope Americans get rid of that dangerous right wing lunatic in congress, by which I mean all of the people in congress.

Marjorie Taylor Greene is not more crazy than all the DC politicians who agree the US should maintain planetary hegemony using bombs, regime change ops, starvation sanctions and nuclear threats. She’s just a less popular genre of crazy.

There is an ideological struggle to determine whether the Republican Party will be the kind of bat shit crazy that believes in QAnon and Jewish Space Lasers or just the kind of bat shit crazy that believes in carpet bombing Iran and destroying the ecosystem for money.

Stop normalizing status quo politics.

Stop normalizing ecocide.

Stop normalizing imperialism.

Stop normalizing mass murder.

Stop normalizing nuclear standoffs.

Stop normalizing starvation sanctions.

Stop normalizing exploitation.

Stop normalizing oppression.

Stop normalizing the mainstream so-called “centrists” who promote these extremist evils.

If people could really grasp how horrific our status quo is, wingnut freaks like Marjorie Taylor Greene wouldn’t stand out against the background, because everyone who helps bolster this murderous and depraved status quo is also a wingnut freak. And there would be just as urgent a push to cast out all the other freaks as there is to cast out her.

The ruling class keeps Americans as poor as possible so they can’t use their money to do naughty things like fund leftist political campaigns or sabotage hedge funds.

People are like two clicks away from burning Wall Street to the ground and setting up guillotines and mainstream analysts are still wringing their hands about how gamer trolls might be compromising the integrity of the market somewhat.

What Becomes A Country Drained Of Its Economic LifeBlood?

deagel |  There have been many questions about the countries forecast specially the one focusing on the United States of America (USA). They won't be answered one by one but below you can find some explanation, thoughts and reflections. We are going to keep this as short as possible.

The majority of the economic and demographic data used in the making of the forecasts is widely available by institutions such as the CIA, IMF, UN, USG, etc. You can see the most relevant data at every single country's page. There is a tiny part of data coming from a variety of shadow sources such as Internet gurus, unsigned reports and others. But all these sources are from the internet and are of public domain for at least a minority. For example, several years ago Dagong, the Chinese ratings agency, published a report analyzing the physical economy of the States comparing it with those of China, Germany and Japan. The conclusion was that the US GDP was something between $5 to $10 trillion instead of $15 trillion as officially reported by the USG. We assume that the official data, especially economic, released by governments is fake, cooked or distorted in some degree. Historically it is well known that the former Soviet Union was making up fake statistics years before its collapse. Western as well as other countries are making up their numbers today to conceal their real state of affairs. We are sure that many people out there can find government statistics in their own countries that by their own personal experience are hard to believe or are so optimistic that may belong to a different country.

Despite the numeric data "quantity" there is a "quality" model which has not a direct translation into numeric data. The 2014 strain of Ebola has a death rate of 50-60% but try to imagine what would happen if there is a pandemic of Ebola with hundreds of thousands or millions infected with the virus. So far the few cases of Ebola-infected people have "enjoyed" intensive healthcare with anti-viral and breathing assistance but above all with abundant human support by Physicians and nurses. In a pandemic scenario that kind of healthcare won't be available for the overwhelming number of infected leading to a dramatic increase of the death rate due to the lack of proper healthcare. The "quality" factor is that the death rate could increase to 80-90% in a pandemic scenario from the stated 50-60% rate. The figure itself is not important what is relevant is the fact that the scenario can evolve beyond the initial conditions from a 50% death toll to more than 90%. By the way, no pandemic or nuclear war is included in the forecast.

The key element to understand the process that the USA will enter in the upcoming decade is migration. In the past, specially in the 20th century, the key factor that allowed the USA to rise to its colossus status was immigration with the benefits of a demographic expansion supporting the credit expansion and the brain drain from the rest of the world benefiting the States. The collapse of the Western financial system will wipe out the standard of living of its population while ending ponzi schemes such as the stock exchange and the pension funds. The population will be hit so badly by a full array of bubbles and ponzi schemes that the migration engine will start to work in reverse accelerating itself due to ripple effects thus leading to the demise of the States. This unseen situation for the States will develop itself in a cascade pattern with unprecedented and devastating effects for the economy. Jobs offshoring will surely end with many American Corporations relocating overseas thus becoming foreign Corporations!!!! We see a significant part of the American population migrating to Latin America and Asia while migration to Europe - suffering a similar illness - won't be relevant. Nevertheless the death toll will be horrible. Take into account that the Soviet Union's population was poorer than the Americans nowadays or even then. The ex-Soviets suffered during the following struggle in the 1990s with a significant death toll and the loss of national pride. Might we say "Twice the pride, double the fall"? Nope. The American standard of living is one of the highest, far more than double of the Soviets while having added a services economy that will be gone along with the financial system. When pensioners see their retirement disappear in front of their eyes and there are no servicing jobs you can imagine what is going to happen next. At least younger people can migrate. Never in human history were so many elders among the population. In past centuries people were lucky to get to their 30s or 40s. The American downfall is set to be far worse than the Soviet Union's one. A confluence of crisis with a devastating result.

The Demographic crisis in the former Soviet Union countries has extended for over two decades, if we accept that it ended early in this decade (2010s). The demographic crisis will hit the World in the near future and is projected to last between three and eight decades more or less depending on technological breakthrough and environmental issues. The aftermath is more likely a frozen picture with the population numbers staying the same for a very, very long period of time. The countries forecast population numbers do reflect birth/deaths but also migratory movements. Many countries are going to increase their gross population due to immigration while their native population may shrink.

Over the past two thousand years we have witnessed the Western civilization built around the Mediterranean Sea shifting to Northern Europe and then by the mid 20th century shifting to an Atlantic axis to finally get centered into the States in the past 30 years. The next move will see the civilization being centered in Asia with Russia and China on top. Historically a change in the economic paradigm has resulted in a death toll that is rarely highlighted by mainstream historians. When the transition from rural areas to large cities happened in Europe many people unable to accept the new paradigm killed themselves. They killed themselves by a psychological factor. This is not mainstream but it is true. A new crisis joins old, well known patterns with new ones.

Sorry to disappoint many of you with our forecast. It is getting worse and worse every year since the beginning of the pre-crisis in 2007. It is already said that this website is non-profit, built on spare time and we provide our information and services AS IS without further explanations and/or guarantees. We are not linked to any government in any way, shape or form. We are not a death or satanic cult or arms dealers as some BS is floating around the internet on this topic. Take into account that the forecast is nothing more than a model whether flawed or correct. It is not God's word or a magic device that allows to foresee the future.

Sunday, October 26th, 2014

Red And Black Ants Must NEVER SEE The Jar Or The Hand That Shakes It!!!

nakedcapitalism |  Something else is going on beneath the actual events, for sure. I happened across this story and took a gander at the WSB reddit board and was blown away by the amount of energy there — it was lively and real — something so foreign in an age of sleuths, slights and deception. It does not matter that what was being done would have minimal overall impact on HFs or the financial system in the grand scheme of things. All that matters was people came together spontaneously to do something with no regard for the consequences. And something did happen. Some brokerages halted trading of GME and other affected companies, and it drew quite the media attention as well as a flutter in congress. Maybe it is no big deal as Yves seems to think, but I disagree.

Consider for a moment that this was a somewhat random collection of people (and maybe some big money too) uniting for something that is foolish and self-defeating. People who can afford not to lose, and yet still choose to do so.

Consider also that social media, tech companies, and corporate interests are all geared to measure and predict public sentiment, or further, as for public relations, to shape it. This is predicated upon the continual cycle of researching, organizing, and staging an event (ie product release, new policy, crises) that the public is primed to react to, and upon the assumption that people will generally seek their own interest and well being, often irrationally.

What happens when people act spontaneously (without some widely publicized event or first mover), in tandem, against their own interest and well being? Obviously some people will stand to gain and some to lose. That’s not the point. What is, is that a good chunk of people, bought into their own game with no regard for how it ought to be played, and in the process they (for that moment) changed the rules. And for once they moved and everyone else reacted.

FORGET THE ARTICLE - THE REAL VALUE IS IN THE COMMENTS - OF WHICH THIS IS ONE

Here for contrast, is a great and highly detailed article detailing the hand that's shaking the jar.

AWWW SNAP Wall St. Elite - Unlike In 2008 - Ants Done Caught You Shaking The Jar!!!

 thehill |  Online messaging platform Discord on Wednesday banned the r/WallStreetBets (WSB) server, which became the center for discussions among amateur online traders who fueled an unexpected surge in GameStop’s stock this week. 

A Discord spokesperson confirmed in a statement to The Hill that the decision to remove the server was due to users sharing “hateful and discriminatory content after repeated warnings,” adding that it “did not ban this server due to financial fraud related to GameStop or other stocks.”

“The server has been on our Trust & Safety team’s radar for some time due to occasional content that violates our Community Guidelines, including hate speech, glorifying violence, and spreading misinformation,” the spokesperson added. 

The statement went on to say, “Discord welcomes a broad variety of personal finance discussions, from investment clubs and day traders to college students and professional financial advisors. We are monitoring this situation and in the event there are allegations of illegal activities, we will cooperate with authorities as appropriate.”

This comes after Discord in the days after the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol banned a server called “The Donald,” a pro-Trump community linked to banned subreddit r/The_Donald and TheDonald.win. 

theverge |  Google is actively removing negative reviews of the Robinhood app from the Google Play Store, the company confirmed to The Verge. After some disgruntled Robinhood users organized campaigns to give the app a one-star review on Google’s Play Store and Apple’s App Store — and succeeded in review-bombing it all the way down to a one-star rating — the company has now deleted enough reviews to bring it back up to nearly four stars.

Jesus Christ they really are going all in to reveal the extent of the cabal that runs this country and rigs the rules https://t.co/w0tSQypp9Z

— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) January 29, 2021

Robinhood came under intense scrutiny on Thursday, after the stock trading app announced it would block purchases of GameStop, AMC, and other stocks made popular by the r/WallStreetBets subreddit, and some users have already replaced their deleted one-star reviews with new ones to make their anger heard.

RT |  A popular stock trading chat group has been booted off Facebook due to alleged violations of its “sexual exploitation” rules, claims the page’s founder, who accused “major institutions” of trying to avenge the GameStop debacle.

The Robinhood Stock Traders group boasted more than 157,000 members before it was taken offline on Wednesday, its 23-year-old founder, Allen Tran, told Reuters, adding that the social media giant cited its policies surrounding “adult sexual exploitation.” A notification of the ban seen by Reuters included no further reasoning for what prompted the move.

The page has no formal affiliation with the stock trading app of the same name.

Tran, however, maintains that he has never seen explicit or sexual content on the page, arguing instead that the group was targeted by “major institutions” after members racked up thousands of dollars from trades first proposed in Reddit’s r/WallStreetBets community, which has driven a dramatic price surge in certain heavily shorted stocks, namely those of GameStop, AMC, BlackBerry and Nokia.

“The major institutions are attempting to silence our community. We are positively impacting people’s lives and they are attacking our group because we are more powerful than them,” Tran wrote in a Facebook post after the group’s ban, arguing “there is power in masses.”

Uh..., You See Wha'Happened Wuz....,

hedge fund manager is not doing well pic.twitter.com/6RrdEfykil

— kylie brakeman (@deadeyebrakeman) January 28, 2021

americancompass |  Certainly don’t laze about smoking weed, or even worse, mango Juul pods, playing that god-forsaken game machine. That PS fucking 4, or whatever. My generation, we didn’t sit staring at a computer, wasting our days away. We made things. We worked out our bodies. We built things. Come on. Make something of yourself. What are you going to do all your life? Stock shelves during the day, and eat nuggets and play that game at night? What are you, a loser? Be like Jim. You remember Jim. He studied hard, went to Harvard, and now works at a big financial firm. Come on, you lazy loser. Make something of yourself.

It is pretty simple. At the very, very top of our meritocracy is a big game called Wall Street, that the smartest and cleverest get to play, and get paid big bucks for it. They get to choose their character: Trader, Salesperson, Broker, or Lawyer. The traders get to choose their weapon: Stocks, Bonds, Mortgages, Derivatives. Then they are off, navigating different levels, slaying this and that company, currency, or country.

Below that is that vast landscape of losers who spend their days building roads, growing food, flipping hamburgers, teaching kids, building small businesses, landscaping yards, and their nights shooting hoops, or reading books, or caring for kids, or going to church. Or, God forbid, playing XBOX or PS4. Those are the worst.

A lot of those losers, of every variety but especially the people who play video games, also spend a lot of time on Reddit, or Discord, or Twitch, live-streaming, shitposting, and just having fun.

When they were doing this, some of them noticed that Wall Street was also just a game, and a very profitable one. Sure, it was a little different than Zelda, or Grand Theft Auto, or Demon Souls, but it was a game nonetheless. So they started dipping their toes in and learning this pretty cool and serious game. Then they started telling their friends about it, who told their friends and so on and so on.

Some made a little money here and there, others got run over, but hey, it was just another game. Cool. Of course they were the outsiders, the losers, the clowns fucking around for shits and giggles. They understood that. They knew nobody treated them seriously. Hell, they had been called lazy losers all their lives. Might as well embrace that. So they proudly named themselves “Degenerates” and “Autistic Retards.” Own the stigma, because you ain’t gonna ever shake it or lose it no matter how hard you try.

They dabbled here and there, got a little better at it, and soon attracted a few serious players with serious money into their fold. Wall Street players, slumming it, who saw a community of misfits they could lead, teach, or scam, depending on their ethics.

So it went, and their numbers and ability grew, and then this summer some of the cleverest Wall Street players, who specialized in making big bets on companies failing, came after GameStop, something they had personal views on. That perked up their interest. Making it even cooler, some legitimately skilled Wall Street players who had joined their island of misfit toys pointed out that GameStop was a good buy, not a good sell, and convinced some of the degenerates to join them.

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.

The ONLY GIBBERISH More Ridiculous Than Anti-Racist Gibberish - Is Economics...!!!

WaPo | The market gyrations involving GameStop’s 64-fold rise in price since August are certainly eye-opening. How a money-losing company whose stock previously traded less than 10 million shares a day can shoot up to trading 50 million-plus shares in a day — and cause the stock price of a completely unrelated but similarly named Australian company (GME Resources) to rise 50 percent on Thursday — is hard to reconcile with today’s uber-efficient high-frequency markets.

Media coverage routinely refers to GameStop’s price surge as a bubble. But what are financial bubbles — and what causes them? As I noted when writing about bubbles in 2008 in the Review of Financial Studies, the phenomenon had been around for centuries — in the 18th century, Scottish economist Adam Smith called it “overtrading.” But that doesn’t explain what starts a bubble in the first place. Plenty of economists, historians and others have tried.

The Swedish economist Knut Wicksell, in an observation that resonates today, argued in 1898 that bubbles are attributable to interest rates that are too low. In 1929 — we know what happened in the markets then — the Dutch economist historian N.W. Posthumus cited the entrance of nonprofessional buyers fueled by credit. In this view, today’s Federal Reserve and the Reddit crowd would seem natural culprits.

What you need to know about GameStop’s stock price chaos

An alternative view in history is that bubbles can emerge if traders are rational but markets are irrational. The economist and historian Charles P. Kindleberger makes this argument in his classic 1978 book, “Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises.” What drives market irrationality, Kindleberger says, is the fallacy of composition: Each trader believes he can sell at a higher price, and if he can in fact do so, then it is rational for him to buy. But not everyone in the market can do that, so the market as a whole behaves irrationally.

A variant on this irrationality of the market theme underlies the “beauty contest” analogy offered in 1936 by the English economist John Maynard Keynes. He argued that individuals do not pick stocks based on what they think a firm is worth, but rather on what they think other people will think it is worth. (Has Keynes’s “beauty contest” morphed into today’s “chat room”?) In that description, each individual is acting rationally, but the market overall is not.

Short sellers in GameStop — mostly hedge funds that had been betting massively on the company’s stock to fall — had reportedly lost $23.6 billion as of Wednesday. They may find little consolation in the dictum often attributed to Keynes: “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

David A. Martin PhD Does Some Helladocious Slick-Talking - As Do His Censors And Critics...,

westonaprice |  Dr. David Martin, founder and chairman of M-CAM Inc, challenges our presuppositions about the new mRNA Covid-19 vaccines. Quoting the pharmaceutical companies themselves, David suggests that these are not vaccines, but, in actuality, gene therapy. He explains what the vaccines may do to us, what they are promising they can do for us, and how to distinguish the difference. Fist tap Dale.

 

factcheck |  If Event 201 is the backbone of the conspiracy theory in “Plandemic,” then David Martin is the central character. He’s featured throughout the video, making claims primarily about patents.

Martin runs a company called M-CAM, which analyzes patents and intellectual property to estimate the investment value of companies.

M-CAM has five investment companies as clients, managing assets of $1.1 million, according to a recent statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

“Not big in investments, seems more like another guy using predictive modeling as a selling tool for many types of information,” Suzanne Lynch told FactCheck.org in an email, after looking through M-CAM’s SEC filings. Lynch has worked on Wall Street and is now a professor of economic crime at Utica College.

Samuel Rosen, an assistant professor of finance at Temple University’s Fox School of Business, similarly described M-CAM, broadly, as an investment research company and noted in an email to FactCheck.org that it appears Martin manages a small hedge fund, too.

But Martin has also peddled conspiracy theories over the years. He published a novel in 2011, which he claimed was based on real events, alleging a rigged 2008 presidential election that was somehow tied to the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.

Since the pandemic began, he has used his YouTube channel to promote COVID-19 conspiracy theories. He repeats many of those claims in “Plandemic: Indoctornation.”

In one video from April, Martin referred to Event 201, saying: “COVID-19 is a branded campaign … that is funded by people in the software, data sciences and social media industry. That’s who built COVID-19.”

The gist of Martin’s video was that wealthy philanthropists like Bill Gates, technology companies, pharmaceutical companies and global health organizations colluded to create a virus that would force governments to fund research and development of vaccines and therapies in order to enrich themselves.

For “Plandemic,” though, Martin shifts his focus away from “the software, data sciences and social media industry.” Instead, he takes aim largely at government entities.

Martin claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention saw “the possibility of a gold strike” when the SARS epidemic arose in 2003.

“They saw that a virus they knew could be easily manipulated was something that was very valuable,” he says, pointing to a patent filed by the CDC that year. The patent covered the isolated virus that causes SARS and ways to detect it.

Skimming across the screen while Martin makes that claim is a headline for a November 2003 news story about the race to patent the virus. However, that story doesn’t support his argument. It actually explains that the CDC wasn’t pursuing the patent for profit. Rather, it was doing so to keep others from monopolizing research.

“The whole purpose of the patent is to prevent folks from controlling the technology,” the story quotes CDC spokesman Llelwyn Grant as saying. “This is being done to give the industry and other researchers reasonable access to the samples.”

Similarly, the director of the CDC at the time, Dr. Julie Gerberding, told reporters that filing for the patent was “a protective measure to make sure that the access to the virus remains open for everyone.”

“The concern that the federal government is looking at right now is that we could be locked out of this opportunity to work with this virus if it’s patented by someone else, and so by initiating steps to secure patent rights, we assure that we will be able to continue to make the virus and the products from the virus available in the public domain, and that we can continue to promote the rapid technological transfer of this biomedical information into tools and products that are useful to patients,” Gerberding said in a May 2003 telebriefing.

So, Martin’s claim is at odds with the CDC’s publicly stated motivation, and he offers no evidence to support his argument.

Next, Martin claims that federal law wouldn’t have allowed for a patent on that isolated virus.

Again, he’s wrong.

Instead of reading from U.S. patent law, as he says he is in the video, Martin reads from a 2013 U.S. Supreme Court decision. That’s an important distinction since the decision, which changed one aspect of patent law that’s relevant here, came 10 years after the CDC filed for a patent related to the virus that causes SARS.

“Nature is prohibited from being patented,” Martin says, claiming that he was quoting from a section of patent law. Building on that, he claims, “either SARS, coronavirus, was manufactured, therefore making a patent on it legal, or it was natural, therefore making a patent on it illegal.”

But that’s a false dichotomy.

While the Supreme Court did find that “[a] naturally occurring DNA segment is a product of nature and not patent eligible merely because it has been isolated,” that decision came a decade after the CDC sought the patent.

“Isolated genes (that is, genes extracted from a longer DNA sequence) used to be patentable in the past because the courts decided that just the act of extracting them and removing the non-coding segments caused enough of a modification to turn them into patent-eligible things,” Mario Biagioli, a professor at UCLA School of Law, told FactCheck.org in an email. “No more.  A few years ago the Supreme Court decided that simply isolating a gene did not change it enough. It remained a ‘product of nature’ and therefore unpatentable.”

So, claiming that the patent is either illegal or the virus was “manufactured” is wrong.