Wretchard.com

Climate actions planned for first day. They include a raft of environmental policies to be enacted on the first day of his presidency, including re-joining the Paris climate accord.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/biden-keystone-xl-1.5877038

When the Lives of Others is a movie about you.

New at the Belmont Club

The Great Digital Escape

Your soul is for sale

Did you know you can back up your social media data?

datatransferproject.dev

The Data Transfer Project was launched in 2018 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.

The Data Transfer Project was launched in 2018 to create an open-source, service-to-service data portability platform so that all individuals across the web could easily move their data between online service providers whenever they want.

The contributors to the Data Transfer Project believe portability and interoperability are central to innovation. Making it easier for individuals to choose among services facilitates competition, empowers individuals to try new services and enables them to choose the offering that best suits their needs.

1. Here’s a use case link for Facebook.
2. The equivalent link for Twitter.

Data To Go: An FTC Workshop on Data Portability

The official website of the Federal Trade Commission, protecting America’s consumers for over 100 years.

Data portability refers to the ability of consumers to move data – such as, emails, contacts, calendars, financial information, health information, favorites, friends or content posted on social media – from one service to another or to themselves. In addition to providing benefits to consumers, data portability may benefit competition by allowing new entrants to access data they otherwise would not have so that they can grow competing platforms and services. At the same time, there may be challenges to implementing or requiring data portability. For example, data that consumers want to port may include information about others, such as friends’ photos and comments. How should this data be treated? How can the data be transferred securely? Who has responsibility for ensuring that data portability is technically feasible? Does mandatory data access or data sharing affect companies’ incentives to invest in data-driven products and services?

Of course the question becomes: where do I move my data and what for? Enter the emerging world of personal data services which allow you to store your data under encryption and let you control access and potentially sell your data to who you choose.

Moving your data to yourself is a whole level more radical than moving it to another platform belonging to someone else.

He Created the Web. Now He’s Out to Remake the Digital World.

Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data. He has technology and a start-up pursuing that goal. Can he succeed?

George Spix and I had roughly the same idea in the book “Open Curtains”. Data ownership is a potentially a big political issue. The fact that Berners-Lee and startups have taken it up means it’s finally gotten traction.

Books:  Open Curtains by George Spix and Richard Fernandez

Back in 1988 Bill Moyers was recalling Lyndon Johnson explaining how to keep whites poor by encouraging them to look down on “colored men”.

During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs. Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. “I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it,” he said. “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

Today, as Rana Dasgupta argues in Harper’s, the Western middle class including those with gender studies and critical theory degrees — especially them — are the new unemployables, made redundant by cheap Chinese and robotic labor. The only way to make the destitute Woke feel good about themselves is to let them look down on the Deplorables.

[Essay] The Silenced Majority, By Rana Dasgupta | Harper’s Magazine

Can America still afford democracy?

the system can no longer afford Western production, and even America’s poor are dependent on the subsidy of cheap Asian labor to maintain their precarious consumer status. Along with debt, of course. U.S. consumers have incurred nearly $1 trillion in credit card debt, $1.5 trillion in student loans, another $1.3 trillion in auto debt, and almost $10 trillion in mortgages.

All this, however, is nothing but turbulent preface. Current efforts to disentangle wealth from the American population are even more radical. Triumphant robotic capitalism employs new technologies to automate and commodify work so that the political defeat of the bottom 50 percent can be extended to the bottom 90 percent.

Many mid-level jobs have already been rendered obsolete in sectors such as architecture, law, accountancy, teaching, and medicine (and many more salaries, therefore, have been absorbed as corporate wealth). This is a stunning volte-face for the middle classes, who are still inclined to believe that the system exists to serve them, and so entertain the hope that it will create the same number of high-paying jobs as were destroyed. But there is no basis for such hope. The prospect of large corporations run by owner-strategists without human management is not far off and, as state subsidies are simultaneously withdrawn, the middle classes will be unable to pass their savings, property, and status on to their children. Their erstwhile social and political standing will follow that of the West’s steelworkers, shipbuilders, and coal miners. The coming evacuation may cause American capitalism to collapse. But that will not discourage the catastrophe elite, which is fascinated by its own death drive (working out how to survive death is a notorious Silicon Valley hobby).

The process has been expedited by the coronavirus lockdowns, which have migrated social and economic processes to digital platforms more quickly than anyone could have anticipated—and supplied useful legitimation along the way.

It’s a good thing Washington is immune to Chinese influence.

China Using ‘Cognitive Warfare’ Against Taiwan, Observers Say

A Taipei think tank and observers in Taiwan say China is trying to influence residents with “cognitive warfare,” hoping to reverse opposition to Beijing’s desired takeover of Taiwan so it can be accomplished without having to go to war. Taiwanese attitudes have been drifting away from the mainland,…

“Its ultimate goal is to control what’s between the ears. That is, your brain or how you think, which [Beijing] hopes leads to a change of behavior,” Tzeng Yi-suo, director of the cybersecurity division at the government-funded Institute of National Defense and Security Research in Taipei, told VOA.

China vs India at the top of the world.

Nepal slips toward anarchy as India and China seek Himalayan edge

Protests erupt over parliament dissolution, raising COVID and economic risks

KATHMANDU — Nepalese Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli’s sudden dissolution of parliament in mid-December has triggered nationwide protests and political chaos, pushing the country to the brink of anarchy while giving India and China potential opportunities to enhance their Himalayan influence.

So argues David Goldman.

Money is information. But if facts are anything you want them to be then you can create money out of nothing. Truth and money goes from being rooted in reality to a deep fake.

So how can Bidenomics go bankrupt? It can happen if reality exists, if God is something you can’t rig.

https://pjmedia.com/spengler/2021/01/16/bidenonmics-will-bankrupt-us-n1389923

What better way to demonstrate virtue than by intimidating the unworthy.

Parler CEO John Matze and family go into hiding after death threats

The CEO of Parler, the conservative social media app, and his family have gone into hiding because of death threats and harassment, according to a new court filing. The documents, obtained by Fox N…

Parler, which is a favorite of Trump supporters, was booted off Apple and Google’s platforms after the Capitol riots and Amazon took it off its cloud hosting service, Amazon Web Services.

In response, Parler filed an antitrust lawsuit against Amazon. Amazon countersued, saying Parler’s suit had no valid legal basis and claiming Amazon employees had been threatened and harassed, Fox News reported.

Following last year’s efforts to ban Trump Administration officials from speaking on campus, Harvard University students are now circulating a petition that calls for revoking degrees from Trump supporters and aides who attended the elite Ivy League institution

The much more accurate term is “to unperson“, to create:

an individual who usually for political or ideological reasons is removed completely from recognition or consideration

What “cancel” does is unperson people. This is the opposite of an invented person or deep fake, an event or individual created entirely for the narrative. One of Winston Smith’s jobs in Orwell’s 1984 was to invent people.

“Suddenly there sprang into his mind, ready-made as it were, the image of a certain Comrade Ogilvy, who had recently died in battle, in heroic circumstances. . . . It was true that there was no such person as Comrade Ogilvy, but a few lines of print and a couple of faked photographs would soon bring him into existence.”

Who’s to say Ogilvy never existed? Or that so and so had such and such a law degree? If you follow the news closely you will notice how it continuously manufactures and deletes people and events from the spotlight. In the end it’s all the same to the Narrators. As Winston Smith noted:

“Within twenty years at most, he reflected, the huge and simple question ‘Was life better before the Revolution than it is now?’ would have ceased once and for all to be answerable.”

There are two forbidden questions in public discourse today.

1. The integrity of the 2020 elections;
2. The origin of the Covid virus.

John Hinderaker writes: “Democrats are making extraordinary efforts to suppress all discussion of whether Joe Biden actually won the 2020 presidential election. In fact, they go even farther: they want to suppress all discussion of the extent to which voter fraud occurred.”

Touching on the origins of the coronavirus is even more highly charged. A US State Department document put it this way:

For more than a year, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has systematically prevented a transparent and thorough investigation of the COVID-19 pandemic’s origin, choosing instead to devote enormous resources to deceit and disinformation. Nearly two million people have died. Their families deserve to know the truth. Only through transparency can we learn what caused this pandemic and how to prevent the next one.

The U.S. government does not know exactly where, when, or how the COVID-19 virus—known as SARS-CoV-2—was transmitted initially to humans. We have not determined whether the outbreak began through contact with infected animals or was the result of an accident at a laboratory in Wuhan, China.

The virus could have emerged naturally from human contact with infected animals, spreading in a pattern consistent with a natural epidemic. Alternatively, a laboratory accident could resemble a natural outbreak if the initial exposure included only a few individuals and was compounded by asymptomatic infection. Scientists in China have researched animal-derived coronaviruses under conditions that increased the risk for accidental and potentially unwitting exposure.

In a sense the stability of the status quo depends on these two questions not being answered. That is not because the truth is known to a certitude but precisely because it is not.

Books:  Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost by Michael Walsh “A philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy — Andy Ngo’s book on the “Idea” that burned cities and perhaps much else.

Reality usually is. But in an ideological world where the good side and the bad must clearly distinguishable and never stray from their categories nobody is interested in the truth. “Journalism” becomes impractical; only polemic is possible. You’re stuck with the narrative you start.

Who Is John Sullivan, Who Was the Woman With Him and Their Appearance on CNN After the Capitol

New video…

This is true of everything. Maybe even lockdown advocates knew this but could not break ranks. Ignorance is an undefined quantity when loyalty is paramount.

We live in a world of the permanent narrative. Once you embark on a storyline — about the elections, the Capitol, the pandemic — you’re locked in.

COVID lockdowns have no clear benefit vs other voluntary measures, international study shows

The peer reviewed study, which was conducted by a group of Stanford researchers and published in the Wiley Online Library on January 5, analyzed coronavirus case growth in 10 countries in early 2020.

Millions are switching to encryption because secrecy, whatever its faults is the only way you can hear yourself think.

Millions Flock to Telegram and Signal as Fears Grow Over Big Tech

The encrypted messaging services have become the world’s hottest apps over the last week, driven by growing anxiety over the power of the biggest tech companies and privacy concerns.

He Created the Web. Now He’s Out to Remake the Digital World.

Tim Berners-Lee wants to put people in control of their personal data. He has technology and a start-up pursuing that goal. Can he succeed?

I’ve often predicted that the complexity crisis would bring forth a componentized world to replace the open borders model. Maybe it’s happening.

Google blocks Australian news as part of ‘experiment’

Users this month complained they were no longer able to see articles from national news websites including Daily Mail Australia in the search engine’s results.

• Google has admitted to hiding news stories from the top of its internet searches
• Readers of leading Australian outlets report no longer seeing latest top stories
• Search giant said it changed its algorithm as part of a ‘short-term experiment’
• Move criticised as show of power as Google fights plans to make it pay for news
• Expert said Google was trying to show outlets need them more than vice versa

Google says it has completed $2.1 billion acquisition of Fitbit amid antitrust concerns

Google has completed its $2.1 billion acquisition of fitness-gadget maker Fitbit, a deal that could help the internet company grow even stronger.

Google and big tech are demonstrating their power. From now on when they give a press conference their spoken statements should have full reverb like edicts from Olympus.

Won’t stop government from creating AI because:

• Politicians will be certain they can pay HAL off.
• Politicians will fund the construction of an AI agent to control AI.
• Artificial idiocy always beats artificial intelligence.

Calculations Show It’ll Be Impossible to Control a Super-Intelligent AI

The idea of artificial intelligence overthrowing humankind has been talked about for many decades, and scientists have just delivered their verdict on whether we’d be able to control a high-level computer super-intelligence. The answer? Almost defini

Part of the team’s reasoning comes from the halting problem put forward by Alan Turing in 1936. The problem centres on knowing whether or not a computer program will reach a conclusion and answer (so it halts), or simply loop forever trying to find one.

Facebook robots shut down after they talk to each other in language only they understand

‘you i i i everything else’

Books:  Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost by Michael Walsh “A philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy — Andy Ngo’s book on the “Idea” that burned cities and perhaps much else.

Facial recognition can track one face from a billion yet databases can’t identify the Covid deaths in NY nursing homes. The press can investigate a high school yearbook photo from the ’80s but WHO can’t investigate the origins of the virus in China.

Our magic world leans to one side. Tech doesn’t track what it’s not allowed to. The means exist. It’s the permission that’s missing. In our facial recognition world, like voting, it’s not the faces that count but who does the recognizing.

Cuomo still refuses to disclose total number of COVID-19 nursing home deaths: watchdog

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is again refusing to release the total number of nursing home residents who’ve died from the coronavirus for at least another two months — until…

Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s administration is again refusing to release the total number of nursing home residents who’ve died from the coronavirus for at least another two months — until March 22 at the earliest, a watchdog group charged.

In a letter to the Empire Center for Public Policy on Wednesday, the state Health Department claimed that it needs another nine weeks and five days to comply with the legal request for a full accounting of nursing home deaths “because the records potentially responsive to your request are currently being reviewed for applicable exemptions, legal privileges and responsiveness.”

The Empire Center submitted its FOIL request on Aug. 3 seeking the total number of COVID-19 nursing home fatalities — those who died in nursing homes and those who were ill and died after being transported to hospitals.

Books:  Last Stands: Why Men Fight When All Is Lost by Michael Walsh “A philosophical and spiritual defense of the premodern world, of the tragic view, of physical courage, and of masculinity and self-sacrifice in an age when those ancient virtues are too often caricatured and dismissed.” —Victor Davis Hanson

Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy — Andy Ngo’s book on the “Idea” that burned cities and perhaps much else.

They expect to stay for a month but will start work immediately during their two-week quarantine, according to the WHO.

WHO team arrives in Wuhan to investigate the origins of COVID-19 / Twitter

China has a lot riding on the long-awaited WHO probe — but so does Australia

The diplomatic defensiveness and tight control of research so far in China doesn’t bode well for hopes of a fully transparent investigation into the origins of the coronavirus, writes Bill Birtles.

WHO investigators have arrived in China for a COVID-19 origin probe. But they’re already downplaying expectations …

They will head straight to hotel quarantine for two weeks.

During that time, they’ll be continuing their work, holding more of the video calls with Chinese counterparts that they’ve already been doing from abroad.

The team then has roughly two weeks in Wuhan to visit hospitals, labs, wet markets and other relevant places before the trip is expected to wrap up ahead of Chinese New Year.

Two Members of W.H.O. Team on Trail of Virus Are Denied Entry to China

Beijing has repeatedly impeded the global inquiry into the emergence of the coronavirus. Two scientists on the team remained in Singapore after testing positive for antibodies.

The limits on WHO make “not proven” almost foregone.

“We have over three billion photos that we indexed from the public internet, like Google for faces,” Hoan Ton-That, CEO of facial recognition start-up Clearview AI told Spectrum.

Every move you make, every pic you take I’ll be watching you. Oh can’t you see you belong to me.

You do it to yourself.

What is the face recognition setting on Facebook and how does it work? | Facebook Help Center

The face recognition setting is a part of your settings on Facebook.

The technology to police the world, down to the smallest village in Africa, is being invented in China and America. What the soundtrack of our lives? “Eye in the Sky” or “Eye of the Tiger”? Or is it …

Impossible? Stalin did it. How he did it is why history matters. Stalinism was a rigorous attempt to implement Marxism. It wasn’t the Revolution Betrayed but the Revolution implemented with unshakeable will.

The social engineering impulse makes it possible to exercise limitless, self-righteous power.

Joseph Stalin: Waiting For Hitler (Part 2)

Did you miss part one? Listen to part one of the episode here
https://www.hoover.org/research/why-d… Recorded on January 25, 2018. “If you’re interested in power, [if] you’re interested in how power is accumulated and exercised, and what the consequences are, the subject of Stalin is just unbeli…

Stefan Thomas, a German-born programmer living in San Francisco, has two guesses left to figure out a password that is worth, as of this week, about $220 million.

The password will let him unlock a small hard drive, known as an IronKey, which contains the private keys to a digital wallet that holds 7,002 Bitcoin. While the price of Bitcoin dropped sharply on Monday, it is still up more than 50 percent from just a month ago, when it passed its previous all-time high of around $20,000.

The problem is that Mr. Thomas years ago lost the paper where he wrote down the password for his IronKey, which gives users 10 guesses before it seizes up and encrypts its contents forever.

Somehow they always guess the password to deactive the nuclear bomb in the movies. Now if only voting would be so secure. Why not? In principle votes could be anonymously ledgered on a blockchain immutably but the voter could always know how it was recorded — and prove it.

The technology for secure voting exists. The politicians just don’t want it.

Lost Passwords Lock Millionaires Out of Their Bitcoin Fortunes

Bitcoin owners are getting rich because the cryptocurrency has soared. But what happens when you can’t tap that wealth because you forgot the password to your digital wallet?

Bari Weiss, formerly of the New York Times, realizes the devil actually exists, and rules a kingdom of lies, which sooner or later becomes a realm on earth. There was nothing so destructive as lying in a good cause.

Miracle, mystery and authority are the three temptations of evil. They can only give you the world. The only way to heaven is the unshakeable faith it has already been given you, if only you choose it. But this is the scary path, as Dostoevsky pointed out; until we are desperate enough to take it.

The Great Unraveling

The old order is dead. What comes next?

Gab is restoring a backup of Trump’s Twitter posts. Yes, but how about you? Is YOUR information backed up: the search history, social media submissions etc mined by big silicon?

Epic! Twitter Competitor Gab Backed Up Trump’s Twitter Account and Recreated It on Their Platform

Andrew Torba, the CEO of Gab, a free-speech alternative to Twitter, backed up President Trump’s entire account before it was deleted, and recreated it on Gab….

This vaccine platform, called a mosaic nanoparticle, was developed initially by collaborators at the University of Oxford. The nanoparticle is shaped like a cage made up of 60 identical proteins, each of which has a small protein tag that functions like a piece of Velcro. Cohen and his team took fragments of the spike proteins of different coronaviruses (spike proteins play the biggest role in infection) and engineered each to have a protein tag that would bind to those on the cage—the other half of the piece of Velcro. When these viral pieces were mixed together with the nanoparticle cage structure, each virus tag stuck to a tag on the cage, resulting in a nanoparticle presenting spikes representing different coronavirus strains on its surface.

Vaccine platforms are the holy grail of the CDC who aspire to go from “bug to drug” in 24 hours. The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are pioneering examples of these nontraditional approaches many of which are yet to come.

The power of big bio will dwarf big tech.

Nanoparticle immunization technology could protect against many strains of coronaviruses

The SARS-CoV-2 virus that is causing the COVID-19 pandemic is just one of many different viruses in the coronavirus family. Many of these are circulating in populations of animals like bats and have the potential to “jump” into the human population, just as SARS-CoV-2 did. Researchers in the laborat…