GameStopped

 From Zero Hedge:

The Urban Dictionary gets a new definition.

We Get Mail

Last month, we got an email from a subscriber who noticed some overlap between the stocks that he saw on r/WallStreetBets and our top names list. He noted that our site and WSB had both been bullish on AMD and Penn National Gaming (PENN), and predicted GameStop (GME) would soon end up our list: 

I’m seeing a direct correlation from some of the names on your list and the r/wallstreetbets

Subreddit: r/wallstreetbets

Names that pop up in there usually seem to appear on your list a day or two later.

Could you write a piece about why you think that is and why your top names might be affected by “meme stock” buying frenzy that happens in there?

For example. I predict GME will appear on your list by today’s close or possibly this week. They have been pumping GME hard and now that Ryan Cohen has upped his stake in the company it’s beginning to pay off for those that got in on it. I sadly did not.

Sadly, it didn't make our top names list either. We got that email on December 23rd; between then and Tuesday's close, GameStop was up another 619%. 

 

Let's talk about what's going on with GameStop, your clever idea to buy puts on it, and why it never made our top names. We'll close with possible consolation prize: a small cap with a parabolic chart that did make our top names. 

Striking Back At The Establishment

In a post earlier this month (The Establishment Strikes Back), we wrote about how the capital wing of establishment cracked down on Trump and his supporters. One motivation behind WallStreetBets' short squeeze/gamma squeeze is of course to make money. But another apparently is to strike back at the establishment. One cynical tweeter tied the two points neatly together: 

The Cohen he refers to there is Stephen A. Cohen, whose Point72 Asset Management, along with Citadel, had to pour additional billions into Melvin Capital as Melvin got GameStopped. 

WSB poster "Consygiere" expressed similar sentiments in a popular post on the board early Wednesday: 

This is not about $GME anymore, this is about setting terms straight:

Retail does not want to be manipulated anymore.

For decades Wall Street was manipulating securities, getting away with it, and blaming it on others. Through the media, bullshit target prices, naked short selling, or other forms of manipulation mentioned here (Kenneth, this one's for you). Citadel and many other MMs - don't misinterpret with Market Makers, we're talking about Market Manipulators here - got away with their dirty tactics to make shitload of money and screw people over. They finally got caught in their own game and tried everything to turn it around, but Shitron didn't work, the media didn't work, more aggressive selling didn't work. Now they're calling through some random crooks for regulations.

BULLSHIT. Regulation for what? Exchange of ideas? Our own Due Diligence? Winning against you in your own game? Yeah, in most cases your buddies at the SEC would gladly do so if you tell them anyway. This time though? People finally came to the realisation what the fuck you guys are doing over there. It was known by many since 2008 but people forgot quickly, and now is the time to remind them that you are no one else's friend but your crooked buddies.

What's Next For GameStop?

As I type this, it's already up another 100% in the pre-market. In the immortal words of WSB poster "SDBcop", "We can remain retards longer than they can stay solvent". 

So You're Thinking Of Buying Puts On It

That seems like a clever idea, right? The bubble's got to pop at some point, and by buying puts instead of just shorting GME like the morons at Melvin did, your downside risk will be limited to the cost of the puts. True, but have you checked the cost of puts on GameStop? On Tuesday, if you scanned for the optimal, or least expensive puts to hedge against a decline of up to 63% on GME over the next six months, you got this error message: 

This and the subsequent screen capture are via the Portfolio Armor iPhone app.

You got that error because the cost of hedging against a greater-than-63% decline in GME over that time frame was itself greater than 63% of position value. The smallest decline you could hedge against this way was a decline of >64%. 

And as you can see there, the cost of that hedge as a percentage of position value was a whopping 61.46%. 

Why GameStop Didn't Make Our Top Names

In a nutshell, the cost of the puts has been too high for us, throughout this parabolic move. Our system looks at the costs of out-of-the-market puts and calls on securities in part to gauge options market sentiment on them, and in part to make sure they can be cost-effectively hedged. All else equal, Redditors bidding up the price of OTM call options on GME was bullish with respect to our gauges of options market sentiment, but the rising cost of GME's OTM put options outweighed that for us. 

A Possible Consolation Prize: Bionano

 

Bionano's Saphyr optimal genome mapping system.

Each trading day, our system selects the ten names it estimates will perform best over the next six months. Usually, these include large cap stocks, but last month we picked up a couple of small caps, Nano Dimension (NNDM) on December 11th, and Ampio Pharmaceuticals (AMPE) on December 17th. By late December, both were up big, as we wrote at the time ("Big Gains From Small Names"). As of Tuesday's close, AMPE was down about 4.5% since it hit our top ten, but NNDM was up about 154%.

Our top names from December 11th (image via Portfolio Armor).

Last Thursday, another small cap name hit our top ten: Bionano Genomics (BNGO). Since then, it's up more than 47%.

 

 

Bionano popped up on our top ten again on Tuesday, suggesting the stock has more room to run. Unlike GME it can be cost-effectively hedged, so if you decide to buy it, consider hedging in case we end up being wrong about it. 

Private equity could face a reckoning as power shifts in Congress

 From Pitchbook:

After years of operating with minimal government intervention, the US private equity industry could face new regulatory scrutiny in 2021 and beyond.

Democrats now control both chambers of Congress and the White House, giving progressive lawmakers who have long criticized the PE industry their best chance yet to enact significant change.

Chief among those lawmakers is Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), the primary force behind the Stop Wall Street Looting Act, a comprehensive bill first introduced in 2019. The proposed legislation never left committee in a Senate controlled by Republicans. But Warren is now set to reintroduce her effort to regulate an industry she has derided for debt-heavy deals that can lead to layoffs, bankruptcies and other woes while exposing firms to few risks.

If passed, the bill would tax capital gains as regular income, ban dividends in the first two years a private equity firm owns a portfolio company, and hold firms responsible for debt and legal obligations incurred at portfolio companies under their ownership, among other outcomes.

"Senator Warren will continue her push to rein in the private equity industry this year," a Warren spokesperson told PitchBook. "And that includes holding these predatory companies accountable for lining the pockets of wealthy firms at the expense of struggling workers during the COVID-19 crisis, and wreaking havoc on low-income Americans at risk of losing their homes."

In terms of the pandemic's effect on private equity, the industry's top lobbying group takes the opposite view of Warren.

"Our nation is experiencing a serious economic downturn," said a spokesperson for the American Investment Council. "And now would be the worst time to pass legislation that will discourage investment in businesses and destroy jobs."

Indeed, any efforts to seriously reassess the role of private equity may have to wait. The newly blue Congress has several other high priorities, including efforts to pass another economic stimulus package and an infrastructure plan as well as holding a second impeachment trial for former President Donald Trump.

"I think the Biden administration has many catastrophes to contend with to move on PE in year one," said Eileen Appelbaum, a frequent private equity critic who has testified before Congress in support of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act. "Hopefully, there will be Congressional hearings to tee up financial reform in year two."

Not every member of Warren's party will be on board with her latest push. When the House held hearings in late 2019 to look at private equity's role in a string of retail bankruptcies, including Toys R Us, several Democrats voiced support for the industry's role in creating jobs in their districts.

One newly empowered lawmaker who could set his sights on private equity is Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who was recently named chairman of the Senate Banking Committee. Politico reported this week that Brown, a co-sponsor for Warren's bill, plans to hold public hearings to examine private equity's influence.

Appointees joining the Biden administration could also play a role in determining how private equity is regulated.

Last week, President Biden nominated Gary Gensler to lead the SEC. A former partner at Goldman Sachs and the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in the Obama administration, Gensler has since become known for clashes with big banks over their role in the global financial crisis. The expectation is Gensler, if confirmed, would be an aggressive advocate for Wall Street regulation.

Biden also tapped Rohit Chopra, a Warren disciple and commissioner of the FTC, to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Last year, Chopra lobbied Congress to require private equity firms to notify the FTC of smaller add-on deals, describing such firms as "vulture investors" and expressing concern about potential monopolies in the healthcare industry.

One shift that could have more immediate impact would be increased congressional funding for the IRS, which was gutted under the Trump administration. A renewed push by the agency to investigate investment funds and monitor fees could increase transparency about whether those dividends were used to either enrich executives or actually pay their LPs.

"That would achieve one of the important ends of the Stop Wall Street Looting Act," Appelbaum said.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who has long railed against private equity, plans to renew her efforts to bring major changes to the industry. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Samsung Eyes New $10 Billion Texas Semiconductor Plant

From Zero Hedge:

It isn't just Silicon Valley CEOs and New York financial firms that are making the move to Texas.

Now, even Samsung is considering a $10 billion investment in the state to build an advanced chipmaking plant, according to Bloomberg. The company hopes that such a move could win it more U.S.-based clients and help it catch up with Taiwan Semiconductor.

Samsung is currently in discussions to potentially put a plant in Austin that would be "capable of fabricating chips as advanced as 3 nanometers in the future," the report says. Plans are still in preliminary stages. 

Such a plant would be expected to begin operations as early as 2023. 

The company is hoping to play on the U.S. government's continued hawkishness with China, which could encourage domestic production. The plant, if manufactured, would be the "first in the U.S. to use extreme ultraviolet lithography, the standard for next-generation silicon," Bloomberg wrote. Samsung would almost certainly have to negotiate incentives with President Joe Biden's administration to make the deal happen. 

Greg Roh, senior vice president at HMC Securities. commented: “If Samsung really wants to realize its goal to become the top chipmaker by 2030, it needs massive investment in the U.S. to catch up with TSMC. TSMC is likely to keep making progress in process nodes to 3nm at its Arizona plant and Samsung may do the same. One challenging task is to secure EUV equipment now, when Hynix and Micron are also seeking to purchase the machines".

The move could put Samsung "head-to-head" against rival Taiwan Semiconductor, which has its own plans to build a $12 billion plant in Arizona by 2024. Samsung has said it aims to be the biggest player in the semiconductor industry, with aims of investing $116 billion into its foundry and chip design over the next 10 years. 

Samsung purchased land in October next to its existing fab in Austin. The city's council held a meeting in December to discuss Samsung's request to rezone the land for industrial development. 

Samsung's chip division spent $26 billion on capex in 2020, but that largely supported the company's memory business, where Samsung has long dominated. 

Why is Bill Gates buying up farmland across America?

 From Natural News

(Natural News) The fourth richest person in the world and the top financier of the World Health Organization, Bill Gates, has silently become the biggest farmland owner in the United States. The man himself is the farthest thing from a farmer, however. He couldn’t even lift a bale of hay, let alone grip the two strands of bailing twine together with his bare hands.

Nevertheless, Gates now owns tens of thousands of acres of farmland across eighteen states. He owns the most farmland in Louisiana – a stunning 69,071-acre portfolio. As if this wasn’t enough, he owns another 47,927 acres in Arkansas, and 20,588 acres in Nebraska, and has a stake in a 25,750-acre swath of land on the west side of Phoenix, Arizona. So why is Bill Gates buying up farmland across America?

Bill Gates and the UN’s agricultural experiments

Bill Gate’s investment vehicle, Cascade Investments, has gone to great lengths to conceal his large farmland purchases, and have tried to cover their tracks with each monstrous deal. One of the deals was a $171 million acquisition concealed by an LLC with two employees in a metal-sided building down a dirt road off the Bayou Teche.

Bill Gates prides himself in philanthropy, so why would he be directing his personal investment vehicle to invest in farmland across the country and keep it a secret? In 2008, his personal foundation invested $306 million to direct the farming operations of small holder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation used the grant money to support high-yield, “sustainable” agriculture.

Ten years later, Bill launched Gates Ag One to advance these efforts. Now, Cascade Investments coordinates with a subsidiary, Cottonwood Ag Management, which is part of the Leading Harvest network, a nonprofit that promotes sustainable agriculture. The Harvest network now represents 2 million acres in 22 states and another 2 million acres across seven other countries. The Sustainable Agriculture Working Group is behind this transformation of agriculture and Bill Gates is one of the main investors. This 13-member group includes foreign investors looking to change food and crop production in the US, including: Ceres Partners, Hancock Natural Resources Group, The Rohaytn Group, and UBS Farmland Investors.

Is Gates preparing to control US farmers and dictate the direction of US farming in accordance with the United Nations? Is he preparing to launch experimental GMOs across hundreds of thousands of acres of US farmland, dictating the type of seeds and animal breeds that farmers use? It’s unclear whether his farmland is being used for conservation purposes or whether he intends to invite foreign influence and experimental genetic-altering technologies into the US agriculture space.

In Scotland, Bill Gates teamed up with the United Kingdom to develop “super crops” and to breed high-yield cows. The two entities invested $174 million into experimental breeding programs that aim to make cows produce more milk, make chickens lay more eggs, and make genetically modified crops better withstand disease. The experiments are intended to “help” 100 million African farmers so they can produce higher yields from their small-scale farming operations.

Do these international land grabs and globalist’s experiments coincide with the FDA’s efforts to shutdown raw milk farmers and the Bureau of Land Management’s war against independent ranchers?

Bill Gates and the rise of smart cities

Another reason Bill Gates is buying up land is to invest in upcoming smart cities. The land he owns just west of Phoenix is being developed into a new metropolis called Belmont. When it’s complete, it will boast 80,000 homes, 3,800 acres of industrial, office and retail space; 3,400 acres of open space; and 470 acres for public schools. The acreage is strategically located off Interstate 10 and will be accessible to Interstate 11 as well. The 40 square miles is projected to house 200,000 or more residents, who will undoubtedly be subjected to 24/7 surveillance and personal data harvesting in everything they do within the hyper-connected smart city. Bill Gate’s sardonic influence is part of a greater INFLUENCE that seeks to use Americans and their resources for international control and exploitation.

Sources include:

NewsPunch.com

Agriculture.com

Reuters.com

NaturalNews.com

NaturalNews.com

DAVOS: Are Institutional Investors Prepared for THE GREAT RESET?

 From SWFI 

A contingency of policymakers, near-monopolistic tech companies, and large corporate CEOs are pushing for The Great Reset agenda. According to the World Economic Forum’s page on The Great Reset, it says, “There is an urgent need for global stakeholders to cooperate in simultaneously managing the direct consequences of the COVID-19 crisis. To improve the state of the world, the World Economic Forum is starting The Great Reset initiative.”

The highly-anticipated Davos event will be held on January 25-29, 2021. The WEF is an influential conference of business leaders, activists, policymakers, institutional investors, and corporate CEOs.

In many instances, the spread of the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) upended markets, shifted political alliances, crushed small businesses, while expanding the balance sheet of Western central banks. Furthermore, the crisis has financially benefitted large tech companies like Amazon.com, Inc. and larger retailers vs. restaurants, the travel industry, smaller retail operations, and the live entertainment industry.

Will the WEF’s vision of the Great Reset happen or at least parts in the next decade?

Great Reset of Capitalism

In a June 3, 2020 post on COVID Action, Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of WEF, put out a statement saying, “COVID-19 lockdowns may be gradually easing, but anxiety about the world’s social and economic prospects is only intensifying. There is good reason to worry: a sharp economic downturn has already begun, and we could be facing the worst depression since the 1930s. But, while this outcome is likely, it is not unavoidable.

To achieve a better outcome, the world must act jointly and swiftly to revamp all aspects of our societies and economies, from education to social contracts and working conditions. Every country, from the United States to China, must participate, and every industry, from oil and gas to tech, must be transformed. In short, we need a “Great Reset” of capitalism.”

Decarbonization

With the COVID national lockdowns, the price of oil stumbled even further, thus institutional investors heavily allocated to oil companies like Chevron, ExxonMobil, or BP have faced hits in their equity portfolios, while listed large U.S. and select China tech companies witnessed market cap growth during 2020. The Net-Zero Asset Owner Alliance (AOA), a United Nations-convened alliance of large institutional investors, was established in 2019. The Alliance was initiated by Allianz, Caisse des Dépôts, La Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), Folksam Group, PensionDanmark, and SwissRe. Since then, Alecta, AMF, CalPERS, Nordea Life and Pension, Storebrand, and Zurich have joined as founding members. Net-zero carbon emissions will be a major theme being prodded by both policymakers and corporate CEOs. This trend is already happening on the institutional investor front, on investors plowing more capital into renewables such as wind, solar, hydrogen, and battery storage. Furthermore, electric vehicles were a popular sub-industry in 2020, witnessing rising share prices of Tesla, Inc., Nio, and other EV makers. Sovereign funds have already been major backers of EVs. For example, Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is a major financial investor in Lucid Motors, while Mubadala Investment Company invested in Xpeng Motors.

Travel and Digital IDs

There is a mad scramble to build apps in regard to vaccine passports. Already governments and tech companies have been using contract-tracing apps and programs. Apple Inc (AAPL) and Google (parent company Alphabet) partnered to create a bluetooth-based system to notify users if they’d been exposed to COVID-19. According to the WEF website, “Denmark is creating a digital COVID-19 ‘vaccine passport’, to be rolled out in the first few months of 2021.” Vaccine documentation could be a requirement for people to enter a country via airplanes. In 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) disclosed it was working on an e-vaccination certificate, a “smart yellow card” or digital version of the yellow vaccine booklets used in many countries. However, there is pushback among privacy advocates on a digital ID system and putting medical records in the hands of governmental authorities and employers.

Source: https://www.weforum.org/great-reset/

Keywords: California Public Employees Retirement System.

Notes: “Davos Man” is a neologism referring to the global elite of wealthy (predominantly) men, whose members view themselves as completely “international”.

People In These Five States Say 'Get Me Outta Here'

 Authored by Mike Shedlock via MishTalk,

It's easy to guess the states people are leaving. Can you guess the top states where people are headed?

Top Outbound States

Top Inbound States 

The above numbers are on a percentage basis of inbound to outbound moves, not absolute numbers. 

The report is from North American Moving Services.

Key Takeaways from the 2020 Migration Report

• People are fleeing California for Texas and Idaho

• Illinois, New York, and New Jersey are the three states with the most outbound moves. 

• The top five inbound states in 2020 are Idaho, Arizona, Tennessee, South Carolina, and North Carolina, with Tennessee overtaking South Carolina from the 2019 results. 

• Florida, Texas, and Colorado round out the top eight states for inbound moves. 

• Despite pandemic, people continued to move at rates comparable to 2019

Top Five Destination Cities

1. Phoenix 

2. Houston 

3. Dallas 

4. Atlanta 

5. Denver 

Top Five Exodus Cities

1. New York 

2. Anaheim, Calif. 

3. San Diego 

4. Chicago 

5. Riverside, Calif.

I am disappointed the report did not have absolute numbers, making the study flawed. 

Nonetheless, Idaho is interesting.

Idaho has made the top 10 each year since 2015, most of the time on the top of the list. 

Congratulations to Idaho and of course Illinois in reverse, a state I have written about many times.

• Escape Illinois: Get The Hell Out Now, We Are

• It Takes 3 Weeks to Escape Illinois

Q: Why does it take 3 weeks to leave Illinois?
A: Everyone is leaving and that is how long it took to schedule a one-way van out. 

"Everyone is leaving. No one is coming," a U-Haul agent told us.

We love it here in Utah. The photo opportunism are endless. There are 7 national parks within 5 hours or so of where we live. 

The Coming New Order

 Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,

For many years, a handful of people have postulated that those who control industry, finance and governments are essentially the same people – a cabal of sorts that have, over generations, solidified their relationships in order to gain greater wealth and power, whilst systematically making things ever more difficult for the free market to exist.

But why should this be? Surely, corporate leaders are more ardently capitalist than anyone else?

Well, on the surface, that might appear to make sense, but once a significant position of power has been achieved, those who have achieved it recognize that, since they’ve already reached the top, the primary concern changes. From then on, the primary concern becomes the assurance that no others are able to climb so high as they have.

At that point, they realise that their foremost effort needs to be a push toward corporatism – the merger of power between government and business.

This is a natural marriage. The political world is a parasitic one. It relies on a continual flow of funding. The world of big business is a study in exclusivity – the ability to make it impossible for pretenders to the throne to arise. So, big business provides the cash; government provides protective legislation that ensures preference for those at the top.

In most cases, this second half of the equation does not mean a monopoly for just one corporation, but a monopoly for a cabal – an elite group of corporations.

This corporatist relationship has deep roots in the US, going back over one hundred years. To this day, those elite families who took control of oil, steel, banking, motor vehicles and other industries a century ago, soon created a takeover of higher learning (universities), health (Big Pharma) and “Defense” (the military-industrial complex).

Through legislation, the US was then transformed to ensure that all these interests would be catered to, creating generations of both control and profit.

Of course, “profit” should not be an evil word, but under crony capitalism, it becomes an abomination – a distortion of the free market and the death of laissez faire economics.

Certainly, this sort of collectivism is not what Karl Marx had in mind when he daydreamed about a workers’ paradise in which business leaders retained all the risk and responsibility of creating and building businesses, whilst the workers had the final word as to how the revenue would be distributed to the workers themselves.

Mister Marx failed in being objective enough to understand that if the business creator took all the risk and responsibility but gave up the ability to decide what happened to the revenue, he’d never bother to open a business. Even a shoeshine boy would reject such a notion and elect to go on the dole, rather than work.

Mister Marx sought more to bring down those who were successful than to raise up those who were not, yet he unwittingly created a new idea – corporate collectivism – in which the very people he sought to debase used the appeal of collectivist rhetoric to diminish both the freedoms and wealth of the average worker.

On the surface, this might appear to be a hard sell – to get the hoi polloi into the net – but in fact, it’s quite easy and has perennially been effective.

Hitler’s New Order was such a construct – the promise to return Germany to greatness and the German people to prosperity through increasingly draconian laws, warfare and an economic revolving door between government and industry.

Of course, a major influx of capital was required – billions of dollars – and this was eagerly provided by US industry and banks. Heads of New York banks not only funded Nazi industry; families such as the Fords, Rockefellers, Morgans, etc., sat on the boards of German corporations.

The Nazi effort failed, as they underestimated the Russian will to fight to the death. (Eighty percent of all German Army deaths were due to the Russian campaign.)

But those in New York were able to regroup and be first in the queue for the restructuring of German industry after the war and, ultimately, profited handsomely.

But most significantly, the idea of corporatist collectivism did not die. Even before the war, the same group of families and corporations had drawn up the plan for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Mister Roosevelt was a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Street man and a director of New York banks. In the 1930s and early 1940s, he created, as president, a revolving door that favoured large corporations, whilst the average American was consciously kept at the subsistence level through government entitlements.

The scam worked. Shortsighted Americans not only were grateful; they deified him for it.

Likewise, John Kennedy’s New Frontier sought to revitalize the concept, as did Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society: Give the little people entitlements that keep them little. Tax smaller businesses and create a flow of tax dollars to the elite industries, who, in turn, provide monetary favours to the political class.

The Green New Deal is merely the latest corporate collectivist scheme on the list.

Corporate collectivism can be defined as a system in which the few who hold the legal monopolies of finance and industry gain an overriding control over all others, and in so doing, systematically extract wealth from them.

Today, this system has become so refined that, although the average American has a flat screen TV and an expensive smartphone, he cannot raise $400 to cover an emergency that occurs in his life. He is, for all practical purposes, continually bankrupt, but still functioning in a zombie-like existence of continual dependency.

This, on the surface, may not seem all that dangerous, but those who cannot buy their way out of a small emergency are easily controlled. Just create an emergency such as an uber-virus and that fact will be illuminated quickly.

In order to maximise compliance in a population, maximise their dependence.

As stated above, this effort has been in play for generations. But it is now reaching a crescendo. It’s now up to speed in most of the former Free World and those who hold the strings are ready for a major step forward in corporate collectivism.

In the coming year, we shall see dramatic changes appearing at a dizzying rate. Capital controls, migration controls, internal movement controls, tax increases, confiscation of assets and the removal of “inalienable” rights will all be coming into effect – so quickly that before the populace can even grasp the latest restrictions, new ones will be heaped on.

As this unfolds, we shall witness the erosion of the nation-state. Controls will come from global authorities, such as the UN, the IMF and the WEF. Organisations that have no formal authority over nations will increasingly be calling the shots and people will wonder how this is possible. Elected officials will increasingly become mere bagmen, doing the bidding of an unelected ruling class.

The changes that take place will be not unlike a blanket that is thrown over humanity.

The question then will be whether to, a) give in to this force, b) to fight it and most likely fall victim to it, or c) seek a means to fall outside the perimeter of the blanket.

Putin's palace. History of world's largest bribe

Signal is a government op

 By Yasha Levine:

Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. It is not your friend.

Yasha Levine

Jan 15

26

Signal — the privacy chat app favored by the world’s leading crypto experts — is trending again. In the wake of Twitter and Facebook’s MAGA Maidan Internet purge (which was followed by Facebook’s announcement that it was gonna start siphoning data off its WhatsApp property), Signal shot up to being the top downloaded messenger app on the planet.

The New York Times is writing about it. Edward Snowden is tweeting about it, telling his fans that Signal is the only reason he’s able to stay alive (and not the fact that he’s being protected round-the-clock by Russia’s security apparatus.) Hell, Even Elon Musk is out there telling people to go Signal. So many people are flooding the app that it’s been crashing.

Elon Musk @elonmusk

Use Signal

January 7th 2021

48,655 Retweets363,262 Likes

Given that the app is blowing up, I figure it’s a good time to roll out my periodic public service announcement: Signal was created and funded by a CIA spinoff. Yes, a CIA spinoff. Signal is not your friend.

Here are the cold hard facts.

Signal was developed by Open Whisper Systems, a for-profit corporation run by “Moxie Marlinspike,” a tall, lanky cryptographer who has a head full of dreadlocks and likes to surf and sail his boat. Moxie was an old friend of Tor’s now-banished chief radical promotor Jacob Appelbaum, and he’s played a similar fake-radical game — although he’s never been able to match Jake’s raw talent and dedication to the art of the con. Still, Moxie wraps himself in air of danger and mystery and hassles reporters about not divulging any personal information, not even his age. He constantly talks up his fear of Big Brother and tells stories about his FBI file.

So how big a threat is Moxie to the federal government?

This big: After selling his encryption start-up to Twitter in 2011, Moxie began partnering with America’s soft-power regime change apparatus — including the State Department and the Broadcasting Board of Governors (now called the U.S. Agency for Global Media) — on developing tech to fight Internet censorship abroad. That relationship led to his next venture: a suite of government-funded encrypted chat and voice mobile apps. Say hello to Signal.

If you look at Signal’s website today, you’ll find all sorts of celebrity endorsements —  Edward Snowden, Laura Poitras, and even Jack Dorsey. You’ll also find a “donate” button — which, by the way, you shouldn’t press because Signal has plenty of tech oligarch cash on hand these days. What you won’t find is an “about” section that explains Signal’s origin story — a story that involves several million dollars in seed and development capital from Radio Free Asia, a CIA spinoff whose history goes back to 1951 and involves all sorts of weird shit, including its association in the 1970s with the Moonies, the hardcore anti-communist Korean cult.

Exactly how much cash Signal got from the U.S. government is hard to gauge, as Moxie and Open Whisper System have been opaque about the sources of Signal’s funding. But if you tally up the information that’s been publicly released by the Open Technology Fund, the Radio Free Asia conduit that funded Signal, we know that Moxie’s outfit received at least $3 million over the span of four years — from 2013 through 2016. That’s the minimum Signal got from the feds.

Three mil might not seem like much these days, especially because Signal recently got a huge infusion of WhatsApp oligarch cash to keep its operation going. But it’s important to know that without this early U.S. government seed money, there would be no Signal today. And that makes you think: If Signal’s super crypto tech truly posed a threat to the feds and to our oligarchy’s power, why would the feds bankroll its creation? And why would Facebook and Google rush to adopt its super-secure protocols? H’mmmmm…

As you can see from the way Parler was shutdown last week — when our imperial oligarchy wants to cancel an app, it can do so instantly and with a vengeance. But Signal lives on and thrives, despite it being a supposed threat to the almighty surveillance powers of the United States of America.

Signal was seeded by this Radio Free Asia?

What is Radio Free Asia and the Open Technology Fund? And why would the U.S government fund crypto tech like Signal? On top of that, why would Silicon Valley — built as it is on for-profit surveillance — embrace Signal’s supposedly unbreakable privacy tech?

I’ve written at length about the deeper history of Signal’s government backers and the way in which crypto fits into America’s imperial machine. In fact, I dedicated two whole chapters of my book to the subject. I won’t reprint it here. But if you want to know the whole story, you can pick up Surveillance Valley at your local bookstore. Or you can check out some of the articles I’ve…

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—Yasha Levine