Robert Mercer Money Launderer for Vladimir Putin?

medium |  Renaissance Technologies (RENTEC) is the second largest hedge fund in the US, managing $45 billion in assets. It has a reputation for being the most successful hedge fund in history, for using quantitative trading strategies designed by top scientists, and for being extremely secretive.

Publicly available information on RENTEC implies that the firm is a massive money laundering tool disguised as a hedge fund, operating on behalf of Vladimir PUTIN.

BACKGROUND
Money laundering involves a transaction where illicit money is spent by one party, producing a seemingly legitimate profit for another party. Ostensibly the two parties are unrelated, but in reality, both parties are closely connected.

The money laundering process can be summarized in three steps:
• SOURCE Secure illegally sourced funds.
• TRANSACT Illegal money is used in a transaction, resulting in profits for another party.
• COVER UP The true nature of the transaction is visible only to insiders.

Evidence suggests money laundering via financial markets works like this:

• SOURCE Criminal organization invests in a hedge fund (Fund A) operating in a market with a high degree of corruption (for example Russia).
• TRANSACT On behalf of Fund A, an international bank purchases a security in the corrupted market. The bank then sells(i.e. shorts) the same security in a second developed market (for example the UK), and forwards the proceeds to Fund B. Both funds are owned by the same criminal organization.
• COVER UP The nature of the transactions are obfuscated with advanced financial techniques and the inner workings of the fund are kept secret.

A significant degree of sophistication is required to launder money in plain sight via financial markets. Due to this sophistication, it’s unlikely direct evidence will come to light without access to internal records. However, by using other cases as a guide, the following mosaic of indirect evidence will likely be found:

• SOURCE Key people are connected to criminal organizations via one or more intermediaries.
• TRANSACT An abnormally high rate of return that allows significant amounts of money to be laundered in a short amount of time. Evidence of buying and selling the same securities in different markets.
• COVER UP History of using financial engineering to hide the nature of transactions and a reputation for extreme secrecy.

US strategy to ‘dethrone’ Putin for oil pipelines?

medium |  A US Army document concedes the real interests driving US military strategy toward Russia: dominating oil pipeline routes, accessing the vast natural resources of Central Asia, and enforcing the expansion of American capitalism worldwide.

The Russians are coming. They hacked our elections. They are lurking behind numerous alternative political movements and news outlets. Such is the overwhelming chorus from traditional reporting on Russia, which sees the United States as being under threat from fanatical Russian expansionism — expansionism which has gone so far as to interfere dramatically in the 2016 Presidential elections.

Russia is certainly an authoritarian regime with its own regional imperial ambitions. President Vladimir Putin and his cronies are responsible for massive deaths and human rights violations against populations at home and abroad (the latter in war theaters like Syria and elsewhere). Putin has strengthened a system of oligarchical state-dominated predatory capitalism which has widened extreme inequality and concentrated elite wealth. And we will no doubt learn more about what shenanigans Russia did, or did not, get up to in relation to US elections. 

For the most part, these are not especially dangerous things to report on from the comfort of the West. Somewhat lacking from conventional reporting, on the other hand, is serious reflection on whether US policies toward Russia have contributed directly to the deterioration of US-Russia relations.

While the bulk of the Western pundit class are busy bravely obsessing over the innumerable evils of Putin, it turns out that the upper echelons of the US military are asking some uncomfortable questions about how we got to where we are.

A study by the US Army’s Command and General Staff College Press of the Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth reveals that US strategy toward Russia has been heavily motivated by the goal of dominating Central Asian oil and gas resources, and associated pipeline routes.

The remarkable document, prepared by the US Army’s Culture, Regional Expertise and Language Management Office (CRELMO), concedes that expansionist NATO policies played a key role in provoking Russian militarism. It also contemplates how current US and Russian antagonisms could spark a global nuclear conflict between the two superpowers.

Bone-in-the-Nose Medicine "Discovers" System That Taoist Chi-Kung Develops...,

universal-tao | An introduction to the ancient Kung Fu practice designed to unify physical, mental, and spiritual health:

• Describes the unique Iron Shirt air-packing techniques that protect vital organs from injuries
• Explains the rooting practice exercises necessary to stabilize and center oneself
• Includes guidelines for building an Iron Shirt Chi Kung daily practice

Long before the advent of firearms, Iron Shirt Chi Kung, a form of Kung Fu, built powerful bodies able to withstand hand-to-hand combat. Even then, however, martial use was only one aspect of Iron Shirt Chi Kung, and today its other aspects remain vitally significant for anyone seeking better health, a sound mind, and spiritual growth.

In Iron Shirt Chi Kung Master Mantak Chia introduces this ancient practice that strengthens the internal organs, establishes roots to the earth’s energy, and unifies physical, mental, and spiritual health. Through a unique system of breathing exercises, he demonstrates how to permanently pack concentrated air into the connective tissues (the fasciae) surrounding vital organs, making them nearly impervious to injuries--a great benefit to athletes and other performers. He shows readers how once they root themselves in the earth they can direct its gravitational and healing power throughout their bone structure. Additionally, Master Chia presents postural forms, muscle-tendon meridians, and guidelines for developing a daily practice routine. After becoming rooted and responsive, practitioners of Iron Shirt Chi Kung can then focus on higher spiritual work.  Full Text. 

DopamineHegemony |  The team behind the discovery suggest the compartments may act as “shock absorbers” that protect body tissues from damage.

Mount Sinai Beth Israel Medical Center medics Dr David Carr-Locke and Dr Petros Benias came across the interstitium while investigating a patient’s bile duct, searching for signs of cancer.

They noticed cavities that did not match any previously known human anatomy, and approached New York University pathologist Dr Neil Theise to ask for his expertise.

The researchers realised traditional methods for examining body tissues had missed the interstitium because the “fixing” method for assembling medical microscope slides involves draining away fluid – therefore destroying the organ’s structure.  

Instead of their true identity as bodywide, fluid-filled shock absorbers, the squashed cells had been overlooked and considered a simple layer of connective tissue.

Having arrived at this conclusion, the scientists realised this structure was found not only in the bile duct, but surrounding many crucial internal organs.

“This fixation artefact of collapse has made a fluid-filled tissue type throughout the body appear solid in biopsy slides for decades, and our results correct for this to expand the anatomy of most tissues,” said Dr Theise.

Have 99.999% Missed The Real Revolutionary Possibilities of Crypto?

hackernoon |  Money is power.

Nobody knew this better than the kings of the ancient world. That’s why they gave themselves an absolute monopoly on minting moolah.

They turned shiny metal into coins, paid their soldiers and their soldiers bought things at local stores. 

The king then sent their soldiers to the merchants with a simple message:

“Pay your taxes in this coin or we’ll kill you.”

That’s almost the entire history of money in one paragraph. Coercion and control of the supply with violence, aka the “violence hack.” The one hack to rule them all.

When power passed from monarchs to nation-states, distributing power from one strongman to a small group of strongmen, the power to print money passed to the state. Anyone who tried to create their own money got crushed.

The reason is simple:

Centralized enemies are easy to destroy with a “decapitation attack.” Cut off the head of the snake and that’s the end of anyone who would dare challenge the power of the state and its divine right to create coins.

Kings and nation states know the real golden rule: Control the money and you control the world.

And so it’s gone for thousands and thousands of years. The very first emperor of China, Qin Shi Huang (260–210 BC), abolished all other forms of local currency and introduced a uniform copper coin. That’s been the blueprint ever since. Eradicate alternative coins, create one coin to rule them all and use brutality and blood to keep that power at all costs.

In the end, every system is vulnerable to violence.

Well, almost every one.

Governance Threat Is Not Russians, Cambridge Analytica, Etc, But Surveillance Capitalism Itself...,

newstatesman |  It’s been said in some more breathless quarters of the internet that this is the “data breach” that could have “caused Brexit”. Given it was a US-focused bit of harvesting, that would be the most astonishing piece of political advertising success in history – especially as among the big players in the political and broader online advertising world, Cambridge Analytica are not well regarded: some of the people who are best at this regard them as little more than “snake oil salesmen”. 

One of the key things this kind of data would be useful for – and what the original academic study it came from looked into – is finding what Facebook Likes correlate with personality traits, or other Facebook likes. 

The dream scenario for this would be to find that every woman in your sample who liked “The Republican Party” also liked “Chick-Fil-A”, “Taylor Swift” and “Nascar racing”. That way, you could target ads at people who liked the latter three – but not the former – knowing you had a good chance of reaching people likely to appreciate the message you’ve got. This is a pretty widely used, but crude, bit of Facebook advertising. 

When people talk about it being possible Cambridge Analytica used this information to build algorithms which could still be useful after all the original data was deleted, this is what they’re talking about – and that’s possible, but missing a much, much bigger bit of the picture.

So, everything’s OK then?

No. Look at it this way: the data we’re all getting excited about here is a sample of public profile information from 50 million users, harvested from 270,000 people. 

Facebook itself, daily, has access to all of that public information, and much more, from a sample of two billion people – a sample around 7,000 times larger than the Cambridge Analytica one, and one much deeper and richer thanks to its real-time updating status. 

If Facebook wants to offer sales based on correlations – for advertisers looking for an audience open to their message, its data would be infinitely more powerful and useful than a small (in big data terms) four-year-out-of-date bit of Cambridge Analytica data. 

Facebook aren’t anywhere near alone in this world: every day your personal information is bought and sold, bundled and retraded. You won’t know the name of the brands, but the actual giants in this company don’t deal in the tens of millions with data, they deal with hundreds of millions, or even billions of records – one advert I saw today referred to a company which claimed real-world identification of 340 million people. 

This is how lots of real advertising targeting works: people can buy up databases of thousands or millions of users, from all sorts of sources, and turn them into the ultimate custom audience – match the IDs of these people and show them this advert. Or they can do the tricks Cambridge Analytica did, but refined and with much more data behind them (there’s never been much evidence Cambridge Analytica’s model worked very well, despite their sales pitch boasts). 

The media has a model when reporting on “hacks” or on “breaches” – and on reporting on when companies in the spotlight have given evidence to public authorities, and most places have been following those well-trod routes. 

But doing so is like doing forensics on the burning of a twig, in the middle of a raging forest fire. You might get some answers – but they’ll do you no good. We need to think bigger. 

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.

With "Platform" Capitalism - Value Creation Depends on Privacy Invasion

opendemocracy |  The current social mobilization against Facebook resembles the actions of activists who, in opposition to neoliberal globalization, smash a McDonald’s window during a demonstration. 

On March 17, The Observer of London and The New York Times announced that Cambridge Analytica, the London-based political and corporate consulting group, had harvested private data from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their consent. The data was collected through a Facebook-based quiz app called thisisyourdigitallife, created by Aleksandr Kogan, a University of Cambridge psychologist who had requested and gained access to information from 270,000 Facebook members after they had agreed to use the app to undergo a personality test, for which they were paid through Kogan’s company, Global Science Research.

But as Christopher Wylie, a twenty-eight-year-old Canadian coder and data scientist and a former employee of Cambridge Analytica, stated in a video interview, the app could also collect all kinds of personal data from users, such as the content that they consulted, the information that they liked, and even the messages that they posted.

In addition, the app provided access to information on the profiles of the friends of each of those users who agreed to take the test, which enabled the collection of data from more than 50 million.

All this data was then shared by Kogan with Cambridge Analytica, which was working with Donald Trump’s election team and which allegedly used this data to target US voters with personalised political messages during the presidential campaign. As Wylie, told The Observer, “we built models to exploit what we knew about them and target their inner demons.”

These platforms differ significantly in terms of the services that they offer: some, like eBay or Taobao simply allow exchange of products between buyers and sellers; others, like Uber or TaskRabbit, allow independent service providers to find customers; yet others, like Apple or Google allow developers to create and market apps.

However, what is common to all these platforms is the central role played by data, and not just continuous data collection, but its ever more refined analysis in order to create detailed user profiles and rankings in order to better match customers and suppliers or increase efficiency.

All this is done in order to use data to create value in some way another (to monetize it by selling to advertisers or other firms, to increase sales, or to increase productivity). Data has become ‘the new oil’ of global economy, a new commodity to be bought and sold at a massive scale, and with this development, as a former Harvard Business School professor Shoshana Zuboff has argued, global capitalism has become ‘surveillance capitalism’.

What this means is that platform economy is a model of value creation which is completely dependant on continuous privacy invasions and, what is alarming is that we are gradually becoming used to this.

American News Media Is a Propaganda Organ For Imperial Dictatorship

strategic-culture |  America’s ‘news’-media possess the mentality that characterizes a dictatorship, not a democracy. This will be documented in the linked-to empirical data which will be subsequently discussed. But, first, here is what will be documented by those data, and which will make sense of these data:

In a democracy, the public perceive their country to be improving, in accord with that nation’s values and priorities. Consequently, they trust their government, and especially they approve of the job-performance of their nation’s leader. In a dictatorship, they don’t. In a dictatorship, the government doesn’t really represent them, at all. It represents the rulers, typically a national oligarchy, an aristocracy of the richest 0.1% or even of only the richest 0.01%. No matter how much the government ‘represents’ the public in law (or “on paper”), it’s not representing them in reality; and, so, the public don’t trust their government, and the public’s job-rating of their national leader, the head-of-state, is poor, perhaps even more disapproval than approval. So, whereas in a democracy, the public widely approve of both the government and the head-of-state; in a dictatorship, they don’t.

In a dictatorship, the ‘news’-media hide reality from the public, in order to serve the government — not the public. But the quality of government that the regime delivers to its public cannot be hidden as the lies continually pile up, and as the promises remain unfulfilled, and as the public find that despite all of the rosy promises, things are no better than before, or are even becoming worse. Trust in such a government falls, no matter how much the government lies and its media hide the fact that it has been lying. Though a ‘democratic’ election might not retain in power the same leaders, it retains in power the same regime (be it the richest 0.1%, or the richest 0.01%, or The Party, or whatever the dictatorship happens to be). That’s because it’s a dictatorship: it represents the same elite of power-holding insiders, no matter what. It does not represent the public. That elite — whatever it is — is referred to as the “Deep State,” and  which nominally is headed by the head-of-state of its leading country (this used to be called an “Emperor”), but which actually consists of an alliance between the aristocracies within all these countries; and, sometimes, the nominal leading country is actually being led, in its foreign policies, by wealthier aristocrats in the supposedly vassal nations. But no empire can be a democracy, because the residents in no country want to be governed by any foreign power: the public, in every land, want their nation to be free — they want democracy, no dictatorship at all, especially no dictatorship from abroad.