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Source: Armstrong Economics
The CDC & Vaccine Companies in Bed with Facebook?
August 8, 2021 by Martin Armstrong
They cleverly used legal jargon to deny the allegation but admitted that they are indeed funded by Johnson & Johnson's parent organization. They said: "The views expressed by factcheck.org do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation."
The fact is that Factcheck.org is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whose current CEO is Richard Besser, who just so happens to be the former head of the CDC. The foundation holds almost $2 billion in shares for Johnson & Johnson, one of the very pharmaceutical companies manufacturing COVID vaccines.
This is outright consumer fraud that anyone else would be thrown in prison for doing. Zuckerberg is beyond walking on water, he can float in the air above it. I believe the Deep State worked against Trump at every stage of the election to ensure he would not just lose the election, but he would never exercise power. Therefore, he should not have had to go after BigTech and even the un-American propaganda machine — CNN — which has done more to undermine the United States than anyone, as its broadcasts are watched around the world.
Now the Epoch Times reports that Facebook is covertly working with the CDC. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, the CDC was forced to release documents that shocked many and prove that Facebook's claims to censor people pretending they are not the government is a lie. They have lost ALL IMMUNITY and can now be outright sued for violating everyone's civil rights.
Has Zuckerberg proven that he is not really qualified to run a company of this size? The rise in the share value had nothing to do with his management skills. But the pending decline has everything to do with his unqualified decision-making. He may think he is a demigod and all-powerful, but sometimes the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Facebook may not exist after 2035.
Source: Armstrong Economics
The CDC & Vaccine Companies in Bed with Facebook?
August 8, 2021 by Martin Armstrong
Zuckerberg is a very dangerous adolescent who has clearly not grown up. Personally, I would never own a single share of Facebook when its management is just so questionable. US Congressman Thomas Massie has come out stating in a series of tweets to say that Facebook's independent fact-checkers are removing what they call "vaccine misinformation." These people are funded by Johnson & Johnson, manufacturers of one of the vaccines. Massie said:
"Who pays the paycheques of the fact checkers? The vaccine fact-checkers at factcheck.org, who claim to be independent, are funded by an organisation that holds over $1.8 Billion of stocks in a vaccine company, and is run by a former director of the CDC."Fact-checkers responded claiming that "As you know, we disclose our funding sources here: www.factcheck.org"
They cleverly used legal jargon to deny the allegation but admitted that they are indeed funded by Johnson & Johnson's parent organization. They said: "The views expressed by factcheck.org do not necessarily reflect the views of the foundation."
The fact is that Factcheck.org is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, whose current CEO is Richard Besser, who just so happens to be the former head of the CDC. The foundation holds almost $2 billion in shares for Johnson & Johnson, one of the very pharmaceutical companies manufacturing COVID vaccines.
This is outright consumer fraud that anyone else would be thrown in prison for doing. Zuckerberg is beyond walking on water, he can float in the air above it. I believe the Deep State worked against Trump at every stage of the election to ensure he would not just lose the election, but he would never exercise power. Therefore, he should not have had to go after BigTech and even the un-American propaganda machine — CNN — which has done more to undermine the United States than anyone, as its broadcasts are watched around the world.
Has Zuckerberg proven that he is not really qualified to run a company of this size? The rise in the share value had nothing to do with his management skills. But the pending decline has everything to do with his unqualified decision-making. He may think he is a demigod and all-powerful, but sometimes the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Facebook may not exist after 2035.
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What does that even mean?
By Kyle Chayka | August 05, 2021
By Kyle Chayka | August 05, 2021
Photograph by David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty
A shift toward the digital space of the metaverse is already beginning to take place, though not yet under Mark Zuckerberg's domain.
In a Facebook earnings call last week, Mark Zuckerberg outlined the future of his company. The vision he put forth wasn't based on advertising, which provides the bulk of Facebook's current profits, or on an increase in the over-all size of the social network, which already has nearly three billion monthly active users. Instead, Zuckerberg said that his goal is for Facebook to help build the "metaverse," a Silicon Valley buzzword that has become an obsession for anyone trying to predict, and thus profit from, the next decade of technology. "I expect people will transition from seeing us primarily as a social-media company to seeing us as a metaverse company," Zuckerberg said. It was a remarkable pivot in messaging for the social-media giant, especially given the fact that the exact meaning of the metaverse, and what it portends for digital life, is far from clear. In the earnings call, Zuckerberg offered his own definition. The metaverse is "a virtual environment where you can be present with people in digital spaces," he said. It's "an embodied Internet that you're inside of rather than just looking at. We believe that this is going to be the successor to the mobile Internet."
Like the term "cyberspace," a coinage of the fiction writer William Gibson, the term "metaverse" has literary origins. In Neal Stephenson’s novel "Snow Crash," from 1992, the protagonist, Hiro, a sometime programmer and pizza-delivery driver in a dystopian Los Angeles, immerses himself in the metaverse, "a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones." It's an established part of the book's fictional world, a familiar aspect of the characters' lives, which move fluidly between physical and virtual realms. On a black ground, below a black sky, like eternal night in Las Vegas, Stephenson's metaverse is made up of "the Street," a sprawling avenue where the buildings and signs represent “different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations." The corporations all pay an entity called the Global Multimedia Protocol Group for their slice of digital real estate. Users also pay for access; those who can only afford cheaper public terminals appear in the metaverse in grainy black-and-white.
Stephenson’s fictional metaverse may not be that far off from what today's tech companies are now developing. Imagine, like Hiro, donning goggles (perhaps those produced by Oculus, which Facebook owns), controlling a three-dimensional virtual avatar, and browsing a series of virtual storefronts, the metaverse equivalents of different platforms like Instagram (which Facebook also owns), Netflix, or the video game Minecraft. You might gather with friends in the virtual landscape and all watch a movie in the same virtual theatre. "You're basically going to be able to do everything that you can on the Internet today as well as some things that don't make sense on the Internet today, like dancing," Zuckerberg said. In the future we might walk through Facebook, wear clothes on Facebook, host virtual parties on Facebook, or own property in the digital territory of Facebook. Each activity in what we once thought of as the real world will develop a metaverse equivalent, with attendant opportunities to spend money doing that activity online. "Digital goods and creators are just going to be huge," Zuckerberg said.
This shift is already beginning to take place, though not yet under Facebook's domain. The video game Second Life, which was released in 2003 by Linden Lab, created a virtual world where users could wander, building their own structures; land can be bought there for either U.S. dollars or the in-game currency, Linden Dollars. Roblox, a children's video game launched in 2006, has lately evolved into an immersive world in which players can design and sell their own creations, from avatar costumes to their own interactive experiences. Rather than a single game, Roblox became a platform for games. Fortnite, released in 2017, evolved from an online multiplayer free-for-all shoot-'em-up into a more diffuse space in which players can collaboratively build structures or attend concerts and other live in-game events. (Ariana Grande just announced an upcoming virtual show there.) Players of Fortnite buy customized avatar “skins” and motions or gestures that the avatars can perform—perhaps that's where Zuckerberg got his reference to dancing. If any company is primed to profit from the metaverse it’s the maker of Fortnite, Epic Games, which owns a game marketplace and also sells Unreal Engine, the three-dimensional design software that is used in every corner of the gaming industry and in streaming blockbusters such as the "Star Wars" TV series "The Mandalorian." In April, the company announced a billion-dollar funding round to support its “vision for the metaverse."
No single company is meant to own or run the metaverse, however; it requires coöperation to create consistency. Assets that one acquires in the metaverse will hypothetically be portable, moving even between platforms owned by different corporations. This synchronization might be enabled by blockchain technology like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, which are defined by their immutable record keeping. If you bought an N.F.T. avatar from the online society Bored Ape Yacht Club, Fortnite could theoretically verify your ownership on the blockchain and then allow you to use the avatar within its game world. The same avatar might show up on Roblox, too. The various realms are supposed to maintain "interoperability," as Zuckerberg said in the earnings call, linking together to form the wider hypothetical metaverse, the way every Web site exists non-hierarchically on the open protocol of the Internet.
The metaverse represents a techno-optimist vision for a future in which culture can exist in all forms at once. Intellectual property—a phrase increasingly applied to creative output of any kind—can move seamlessly among movies, video games, and virtual-reality environments. It’s a tantalizing possibility for the corporate producers of culture, who will profit from their I.P. wherever it goes. Disney’s Marvel pantheon of superhero narratives already amounts to a "cinematic universe"; why not unleash it into every possible platform simultaneously? In Fortnite, as the pro-metaverse investor Matthew Ball wrote in an influential essay last year, "You can literally wear a Marvel character's costume inside Gotham City, while interacting with those wearing legally licensed N.F.L. uniforms." (How appealing you find this may depend on how addicted you are to logos.) In the future, users’ own creations may attain the same kind of portability and profitability, letting fan concepts compete with Marvel just as self-published blogs once disrupted newspapers.
Please go to The New Yorker to read the entire article.
Like the term "cyberspace," a coinage of the fiction writer William Gibson, the term "metaverse" has literary origins. In Neal Stephenson’s novel "Snow Crash," from 1992, the protagonist, Hiro, a sometime programmer and pizza-delivery driver in a dystopian Los Angeles, immerses himself in the metaverse, "a computer-generated universe that his computer is drawing onto his goggles and pumping into his earphones." It's an established part of the book's fictional world, a familiar aspect of the characters' lives, which move fluidly between physical and virtual realms. On a black ground, below a black sky, like eternal night in Las Vegas, Stephenson's metaverse is made up of "the Street," a sprawling avenue where the buildings and signs represent “different pieces of software that have been engineered by major corporations." The corporations all pay an entity called the Global Multimedia Protocol Group for their slice of digital real estate. Users also pay for access; those who can only afford cheaper public terminals appear in the metaverse in grainy black-and-white.
Stephenson’s fictional metaverse may not be that far off from what today's tech companies are now developing. Imagine, like Hiro, donning goggles (perhaps those produced by Oculus, which Facebook owns), controlling a three-dimensional virtual avatar, and browsing a series of virtual storefronts, the metaverse equivalents of different platforms like Instagram (which Facebook also owns), Netflix, or the video game Minecraft. You might gather with friends in the virtual landscape and all watch a movie in the same virtual theatre. "You're basically going to be able to do everything that you can on the Internet today as well as some things that don't make sense on the Internet today, like dancing," Zuckerberg said. In the future we might walk through Facebook, wear clothes on Facebook, host virtual parties on Facebook, or own property in the digital territory of Facebook. Each activity in what we once thought of as the real world will develop a metaverse equivalent, with attendant opportunities to spend money doing that activity online. "Digital goods and creators are just going to be huge," Zuckerberg said.
This shift is already beginning to take place, though not yet under Facebook's domain. The video game Second Life, which was released in 2003 by Linden Lab, created a virtual world where users could wander, building their own structures; land can be bought there for either U.S. dollars or the in-game currency, Linden Dollars. Roblox, a children's video game launched in 2006, has lately evolved into an immersive world in which players can design and sell their own creations, from avatar costumes to their own interactive experiences. Rather than a single game, Roblox became a platform for games. Fortnite, released in 2017, evolved from an online multiplayer free-for-all shoot-'em-up into a more diffuse space in which players can collaboratively build structures or attend concerts and other live in-game events. (Ariana Grande just announced an upcoming virtual show there.) Players of Fortnite buy customized avatar “skins” and motions or gestures that the avatars can perform—perhaps that's where Zuckerberg got his reference to dancing. If any company is primed to profit from the metaverse it’s the maker of Fortnite, Epic Games, which owns a game marketplace and also sells Unreal Engine, the three-dimensional design software that is used in every corner of the gaming industry and in streaming blockbusters such as the "Star Wars" TV series "The Mandalorian." In April, the company announced a billion-dollar funding round to support its “vision for the metaverse."
No single company is meant to own or run the metaverse, however; it requires coöperation to create consistency. Assets that one acquires in the metaverse will hypothetically be portable, moving even between platforms owned by different corporations. This synchronization might be enabled by blockchain technology like cryptocurrencies and non-fungible tokens, which are defined by their immutable record keeping. If you bought an N.F.T. avatar from the online society Bored Ape Yacht Club, Fortnite could theoretically verify your ownership on the blockchain and then allow you to use the avatar within its game world. The same avatar might show up on Roblox, too. The various realms are supposed to maintain "interoperability," as Zuckerberg said in the earnings call, linking together to form the wider hypothetical metaverse, the way every Web site exists non-hierarchically on the open protocol of the Internet.
The metaverse represents a techno-optimist vision for a future in which culture can exist in all forms at once. Intellectual property—a phrase increasingly applied to creative output of any kind—can move seamlessly among movies, video games, and virtual-reality environments. It’s a tantalizing possibility for the corporate producers of culture, who will profit from their I.P. wherever it goes. Disney’s Marvel pantheon of superhero narratives already amounts to a "cinematic universe"; why not unleash it into every possible platform simultaneously? In Fortnite, as the pro-metaverse investor Matthew Ball wrote in an influential essay last year, "You can literally wear a Marvel character's costume inside Gotham City, while interacting with those wearing legally licensed N.F.L. uniforms." (How appealing you find this may depend on how addicted you are to logos.) In the future, users’ own creations may attain the same kind of portability and profitability, letting fan concepts compete with Marvel just as self-published blogs once disrupted newspapers.
Please go to The New Yorker to read the entire article.
________
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