Via my Amazon-/Microsoft-/VC-praised AI-preneurship (mAIP), information the Biden administration is seeking re: "root causes of malicious cyber activities"; my work that builds on mAIP is... (cont.)
…a/the key to preventing/subduing (PSing) a particular root-cause of said kind (PRC); a key to said PSing ASAP is my finders’-fee offer that: 1) is designed to make the Biden administration aware of PRC, 2) you(r company) can PROFIT from
Links to said praise
below (in part 2), along with excerpts; search keywords (KWs): praise for my AI-preneurship
Re: “information . . . Biden . . . seeking”
From the August 25, 2021 article on PBS.org titled “Biden tackles cybersecurity with tech, finance leaders” (my emphases):
Though ransomware was intended as one focus of Wednesday’s gathering, a senior administration official who briefed reporters in advance said the purpose was much broader, centered on identifying the “root causes of malicious cyber activities.”
Re: PSing PRC would be VALUABLE to top technology companies and their customers
From an August 25, 2021 “fact sheet” from the Biden administration:
Apple announced it will establish a new program to drive continuous security improvements throughout the technology supply chain.
Google announced it will invest $10 billion over the next five years to expand zero-trust programs, help secure the software supply chain, and enhance open-source security.
Microsoft announced it will invest $20 billion over the next 5 years to accelerate efforts to integrate cyber security by design and deliver advanced security solutions.
More below re: “would be VALUABLE.”
Re: (PRC-info via) mAIP
Details below; KWs: Amazon of customized-education and artificial intelligence; partly via my disruptive innovations; CE-for-AI will be to the AI economy what oil has been to the industrial economy.
PRC summary (some details follow; 100+ pages of details are linked-to below)
From a University of Pennsylvania criminologist’s 2013 book: ~78 million psychopaths (Ps) are IMPERILED (PsIMP) by advances in molecular-genetics research (e.g., “indefinite detention” by the year 2034).
From a 2020 article in Nature: “In the past decade, studies of psychopathological genetics have become large enough to draw robust conclusions.”
(Very) likely:
a growing number of Ps are aware that PsIMP, and are resisting
Ps’ war chest is large and enlarging rapidly (e.g., via ransomware, de facto legalization of huge fraud (e.g., de facto via kleptocracy))
There are indicators that Ps are leveraging life science (LS) to:
develop “personalized bioweapons”
weaponize viruses (e.g., for use after Ps have developed a vaccine, per Pulitzer winner Lawrence Wright’s finding that “the experts all share the concerns I’ve presented—that something like this [i.e., weaponize after vaccine] could happen”)
Re: said likelihoods/indicators:
Worldwide, kleptocracy is BOOMING.
Necessity for kleptocrats (Ks): hiring contract killers often.
Contract killers are Ps in “virtually all” cases (source: 2019 article in The Atlantic).
So Ks (e.g., non-Ps) need to RESIST PsIMP (e.g., by FUNDING (other) Ps after making them aware that PsIMP).
Indicator that the alliance of Ks and Ps has reached an advanced stage (e.g., re: weaponizing LS): parallels/similarities between Deutsche Bank and the defunct, wildly violent, politically influential/coercive, worldwide criminal enterprise of the 1980s known as Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). From a 1992 U.S. Senate report on BCCI:
[L]argest case of organized crime in history, spanning over . . . 72 nations . . . finance terrorism . . . assist the builders of a Pakistani nuclear bomb . . .
[From November 2021 book American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World’s Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History . . . :
BCCI had created a blueprint that numerous kleptocrats and international criminals would soon follow. It was one of the earliest case studies in what would grow into the modern kleptocracy playbook . . .]
Title of the 2020 book by the finance editor of The New York Times:
Dark Towers: Deutsche Bank, Donald Trump and an Epic Trail of Destruction
From a 2011 article in U.K. newspaper The Independent:
My companion, a senior UK investment banker and I, are discussing the most successful banking types we know and what makes them tick. I argue that they often conform to the characteristics displayed by social psychopaths. To my surprise, my friend agrees.
He then makes an astonishing confession: “At one major investment bank for which I worked, we used psychometric testing to recruit social psychopaths because their characteristics exactly suited them to senior corporate finance roles.”
Re: personalized bioweapons (PBs)
From the chapter in 2015 book Tomorrowland: Our Journey from Science Fiction to Science Fact titled “Hacking the President’s DNA,” co-authored by a former Resident Futurist of the FBI (my emphases):
Our next commander-in-chief will be our first commander-in-chief to have to deal with genetically based, made-to-order [e.g., personalized] biothreats.
. . . Within a few years, politicians, celebrities, leaders of industry [e.g., me] . . . will be vulnerable to murder[, extortion, etc.] by genetically engineered bioweapon. Many such killings could go undetected, confused with death by natural causes; many others would be difficult to pin on a defendant, especially given disease latency. Both of these factors are likely to make personalized bioweapons extremely attractive to anyone bearing ill will.
From a 2012 article in The Atlantic:
According to Ronald Kessler, the author of the 2009 book In the President’s Secret Service, Navy stewards gather bedsheets, drinking glasses, and other objects the president has touched—they are later sanitized or destroyed—in an effort to keep would‑be malefactors from obtaining his genetic material. . . . [A]ccording to a 2010 release of secret cables by WikiLeaks, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton directed our embassies to surreptitiously collect DNA samples from foreign heads of state and senior United Nations officials.
Indicators that said alliance is developing PBs
— Summary (details below) —
Psychopathy correlates strongly with hypersexuality.
Jeffrey Epstein (JE):
was hypersexual
was banked by Deutsche Bank (DB)
owned a company (JCo) that mined DNA databases and financial databases en route to: 1) reporting profits of ~$300M, 2) not reporting the names of any clients
Linking financial data and DNA data is a prerequisite for PBs that yield “profits”-via-extortion.
There are indicators (e.g., seen above) that:
JE extorted
JCo was banked by DB
DB employs many Ps (e.g., possible ex-suppliers of data to JCo)
DB banks many Ps (e.g., possible ex-clients of JCo)
Key indicator of #4: DB banks many WEALTHY criminals (e.g., Ks who are possible ex-clients of JCo).
Re: weaponizing viruses
From the April 2020 article in The New Yorker titled “What Lawrence Wright Learned From His Pandemic Novel” (my emphases):
By the time Wright and I met for lunch and discussed his novel—“The End of October,” which is out this month—he had already done the coast-to-coast reporting. He had met with epidemiologists, immunologists, microbiologists, security experts, vaccine experts, and public-health officials. He had read all the books, all the journal articles. . . . The experts, Wright notes in a letter to the reader in the galleys of his book, “all share the concerns I’ve presented—that something like this could happen.”
From The End of October:
“Really, Henry,” Bartlett asked, “you think this [virus] was man-made?”
[Henry:] “Biowarfare has always been . . . the ultimate weapon of war, one that can destroy the enemy without fingerprints.”
“It only makes sense if they have also developed a vaccine [my emphasis],” said Bartlett.
[September 27 update:
From a September 23, 2021 article on TheIntercept.com:
The [2018] proposal . . . describes the insertion of human-specific cleavage sites into SARS-related bat coronaviruses.
. . . The . . . proposal, which also described a plan to mass vaccinate [my emphasis] . . .
“Let’s look at the big picture: A novel SARS coronavirus emerges in Wuhan with a novel cleavage site in it. We now have evidence that, in early 2018, they had pitched inserting novel cleavage sites into novel SARS-related viruses in their lab,” said Chan. “This definitely tips the scales for me. And I think it should do that for many other scientists too.”
Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who has espoused the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 may have originated in a lab, agreed. “The relevance of this is that SARS Cov-2, the pandemic virus, is the only virus in its entire genus of SARS-related coronaviruses that contains a fully functional cleavage site at the S1, S2 junction,” said Ebright, referring to the place where two subunits of the spike protein meet. “And here is a proposal from the beginning of 2018, proposing explicitly to engineer that sequence at that position in chimeric lab-generated coronaviruses.”
— End of update —]
Indicators that said alliance is weaponizing viruses
JE met with top virologist George Church several/many times (e.g., in 2014).
From George Church’s web page on the site for Harvard’s PhD Program in Virology:
Virology Faculty Member . . .
From a 2019 article on NBCnews.com (my emphases):
Harvard science professors kept meeting with donor Jeffrey Epstein . . .
[A]ccording to the online personal calendar [for 2014] of Dr. George Church, a renowned geneticist who holds professorships at Harvard, Harvard Medical School and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology[:]
. . . On April 22, Epstein met with Church at the Harvard Medical School’s Genetics Department building . . . The two had a phone call the next day. He had lunch with Church on June 21, according to the calendar. . . . On Sept. 12, Epstein and Church had another phone call, which was followed by a teleconference call Oct. 21 between Epstein and Church . . . On Nov. 30, the calendar lists a dinner with multiple attendees: “Dinner w/ Jeff Epstein . . .
From Church’s web page (my emphases):
Our lab works on AAV therapeutic vectors, including evasion of innate immunity, capsid design via machine learning with large synthetic libraries for multiplex testing of tissue tropism and evasion of cell/humoral immunity. We study variation in human populations to various viruses including rare neutralizing antibodies for HIV. We are interested in near-extinction-scale Elephant and Swine Viruses (EEHV and ASFV). We harness viral and anti-viral mechanisms (e.g. recombinases, CRISPR, deaminases) to develop new editing technologies.
JE’s meetings with Church might’ve come after JE et al. reviewed the “step-by-step manual” referenced in the following book excerpt.
From 2017 book Warnings: How to Find Cassandras and Stop Catastrophes, co-authored by a former U.S. National Coordinator for Security and Counter-Terrorism (my emphases):
In 2011, Ron Fouchier, from the Erasmus Medical Center in downtown Rotterdam, crafted a series of experiments to mutate highly lethal H5N1 into a form contagious by air. Just five single mutations allowed H5N1 to bind with cells in the human respiratory tract (thereby making it contagious by air, sneezes, and dirty doorknobs, etc.). Using ferrets as incubators, and their noses as makeshift Petri dishes, Fouchier rapidly moved infected sputum from ferret to ferret. In a period of weeks, he created a bug as transmissible as the Spanish flu but potentially up to twenty times more lethal.
. . . Fouchier was roundly criticized for launching such a dangerous study in a working hospital, in a crowded city, with arguably less than perfect protections. He did it without complicated tools, available in nearly any laboratory and to consumers. And he decided to publish his results to give the world a step-by-step manual, steps that could be taken in nearly any lab to make his superbug.
So JE’s meetings with Church might’ve coincided with Ps’ efforts to create a vaccine . . .
Re: JE’s trafficking* of underage girls (UGs) might’ve HELPED Ps weaponize LS
From 2021 book This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race, by a cybersecurity reporter for The New York Times (my emphases):
“[H]ackers seized on the coronavirus to take aim at our hospitals, our vaccine labs, and the federal agencies leading the Covid-19 response.”
“The pandemic is global, but the response has been anything but. Allies and adversaries alike are resorting to cyberespionage to glean whatever they can about each country’s containment, treatments, and response.”
“[H]ackers were . . . pilfering intellectual property from every major company in the Fortune 500, American research laboratories . . .”
Many top technologists are high-functioning autistics (e.g., have Asperger’s Syndrome).
~30% of male Aspies have “pedophilic sexual fantasies of female children” (source: 2017 article on the website of the U.S. government’s National Center for Biotechnology Information).
So JE’s trafficking might’ve enabled Ps to coerce TOP hackers . . .
* From a 2019 article on TheDailyBeast.com:
Police say Epstein was sexually abusing girls as young as 13, many of them from poor families and broken homes. And, according to lawsuits filed by victims, Epstein loaned them out to his famous friends.
Re: JE-coerced-TOP-hackers is consistent with DB functioning as a next-gen variant of BCCI
See below; KWs: BCCI trafficked UGs, en route to blackmailing.
Another indicator re: said alliance weaponizing LS
From July 2021 book Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story (my emphases):
In December 2011, Jeffrey Epstein brought together some of the most brilliant scientific minds in the nation on his remote island . . .
It was, essentially, a Global Doomsday conference.
The attendees were instructed to identify some of the greatest threats to the earth, contemplating such phenomena as bioterrorism . . .
Re: psychopathy is ~70% heritable
From 2011 book The Science of Evil, by a University of Cambridge professor of developmental psychopathology:
If a trait or behavior is even partly genetic, we should see its signature showing up in twins.
. . . Regarding twin studies of Type P [i.e., psychopaths], none of these show 100 percent heritability, but the genetic component is nevertheless substantial (the largest estimate being about 70 percent).
Re: many/most/all genetic identifiers of said ~70% will be identified soon
From 2013 book The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime, by said University of Pennsylvania professor of Criminology (and Psychiatry and Psychology):
“Behavioral genetics is a shadowy black box because, while it tells us what proportion of a given behavior is genetically influenced, it does not identify the specific genes lurking in there that predispose one to violence. Molecular genetics is poised to pry open that black box . . .”
“Twenty years ago, molecular genetics was a fledgling field of research. Now it is a major enterprise providing us with a detailed look at the structure and function of genes.”
“The essence of the molecular genetic research we have been touching on above—identifying specific genes that predispose individuals to crime—is that genes code for neurotransmitter functioning. Neurotransmitters are brain chemicals essential to brain functioning. There are more than a hundred of them and they help to transmit signals from one brain cell to another to communicate information. Change the level of these neurotransmitters, and you change cognition, emotion, and behavior.
. . . It’s 2034 . . . [A]ll males in society aged eighteen and over have to register at their local hospital for a quick brain scan and DNA testing. One simple finger prick for one drop of blood that takes ten seconds. Then a five-minute brain scan for the “Fundamental Five Functions”: First, a structural scan provides the brain’s anatomy. Second, a functional scan shows resting brain activity. Third, enhanced diffusion-tensor imaging is taken to assess the integrity of the white-fiber system in the brain, assessing intricate brain connectivity. Fourth is a reading of the brain’s neurochemistry that has been developed from magnetic resonance spectroscopy. Fifth and finally, the cellular functional scan assesses expression of 23,000 different genes at the cellular level. The computerization of all medical, school, psychological, census, and neighborhood data makes it easy to combine these traditional risk variables alongside the vast amount of DNA and brain data to form an all-encompassing biosocial data set.
. . . Fourth-generation machine-learning techniques looked for complex patterns of linear and nonlinear relationships . . . ”
Re: “indefinite detention” of Ps could/should ensue
From The Anatomy of Violence (my emphases):
It’s 2034 . . . The economic cost of crime is now astronomical. Back in 2010, the cost of homicide in the United States was estimated at over $300 billion—more than the combined budgets of the Departments of Education, Justice, Housing and Urban Development, Health and Human Services, Labor, and Homeland Security. Way back in 1999, it was estimated to consume 11.9 percent of GDP, but in 2034 it is gobbling up 21.8 percent.
. . . [This] leads the government to launch the LOMBROSO program—Legal Offensive on Murder: Brain Research Operation for the Screening of Offenders.
. . . Under LOMBROSO, those who test positive—the LPs—are held in indefinite detention. . . . It sounds quite cushy, but remember that the LPs have not actually committed a crime. Perhaps the main drawback is who they live with, housed as they are in facilities full of other LPs—time bombs waiting to explode.
Re: it’s (very) likely that a growing number of Ps are aware that PsIMP
From a 2016 article on PsychologyToday.com:
A [meta-analytic] review of [48] studies found that the correlation between psychopathy and intelligence is nearly zero [i.e., ~2.3% of Ps have an IQ ≥ 130; ~16% ≥ 115].
From the 2012 article in FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin titled “The Corporate Psychopath”:
Today’s corporate psychopath may be highly educated—several with Ph.D., M.D., and J.D. degrees have been studied . . .
En route to raising awareness, Ps can use the pretense of screening job applicants to test for psychopathy (i.e., to identify other Ps).
Re: it’s (very) likely that a growing number of Ps are resisting
More below.
Re: it’s (very) likely that Ps’ war chest is large and enlarging rapidly
More below.
Re: hypersexuality
From the 2015 article on Broadly.com titled “When Women Get Addicted to Sexting”:
Sex addiction (officially known as hypersexuality) missed out on being recognized as a brain-changing clinical disorder like drug addiction in 2013, but a 2014 Cambridge University study suggested it does mirror the latter. It found that when sex addicts were shown pornography, the regions of their brains which process anticipation were more active than those of people without compulsive sexual disorders. The same regions kick into action when drug addicts are shown drug stimuli.
Re: psychopathy correlates strongly with hypersexuality
From a 2012 article on HuffingtonPost.co.uk (my emphases):
“In one of the largest studies of its kind ever published, U.S. psychologists have found a particular aspect of personality in men and women predicts what the researchers refer to as ‘hypersexuality.’
. . . This character trait is—psychopathy.”
“Psychologists are beginning to concur that it’s this unique element of character which most powerfully predicts . . . a gamut of risky sexual behaviors.”
“The ‘hypersexual’ have more sexual partners than the rest of the population, fantasize more . . . and tend to favor more sex without love.”
From The Anatomy of Violence:
The striatum is a key brain region that is associated with reward-seeking and impulsive behavior. Studies have shown that it is involved in stimulation-seeking behavior, persistently repeating actions that are related to rewards . . . We found that our psychopathic individuals [i.e., research subjects] showed a 10 percent increase in the volume of the striatum compared with controls.
. . . [T]he difference between us and psychopaths is that we can say no when tempted by the goodies, whereas psychopaths just want their stuff. And they want it here, and they want it now. For them, reward is a drug that they cannot turn their backs on, and this pushes them along a path of depravity and vice.
Re: JE was hypersexual
From a 2019 article in The New York Post:
Jeffrey Epstein had an insatiable sexual appetite that included threesomes with “strap-on” dildos and a required three orgasms a day, according to court documents unsealed Friday.
Re: JE was banked by DB
Title of a 2019 article in Vanity Fair:
Of Course Jeff Epstein Moved His Dirty Money Through Deutsche Bank
Title of a December 2019 article on TruePundit.com:
Jeffrey Epstein’s Private Banker at Deutsche & Citi Found Swinging From a Rope; Executive “Suicide” Before FBI Questioned Him
Re: JCo
From a 2020 article in The New York Times:
In the years after Jeffrey Epstein registered as a sex offender [i.e., after 2008], he . . . started a business to develop algorithms and mine DNA and financial databases.
. . . Southern Trust [i.e., said business] generated about $300 million in profit in six years . . . The source of Southern Trust’s revenue is not clear; the bare-bones corporate filings made by the company in the Virgin Islands do not list any clients.
Indicator that JE extorted
From the 2019 article in The New York Times titled “The Day Jeffrey Epstein Told Me He Had Dirt on Powerful People”:
The overriding impression I took away from our roughly 90-minute conversation was that Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous and powerful people, and had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use.
Indicators that JCo was banked by DB
JE owned a bank (JB) . . .
From said 2020 article in The New York Times:
In the years after Jeffrey Epstein registered as a sex offender, he . . . set up a bank.
. . . JB might’ve banked JCo . . .
From said 2020 article in The New York Times:
[JB] was created under a territorial law [in the Virgin Islands] that lacked many of the oversight requirements banks are usually subject to . . .
. . . These specialized banks have drawn scrutiny because of their potential for abuse, including money laundering.
. . . JB might’ve been banked by DB . . .
From said 2020 article in The New York Times:
The Federal Reserve Bank of New York describes international bank entities in the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico [e.g., EB] as “high-risk” institutions [my emphasis]. Last year, it temporarily suspended applications for them to obtain financial services from the Fed until it can issue stricter rules for them.
From Dark Towers:
Deutsche had been moving money—as much as $80 billion—for thousands of “high-risk entities” [my emphasis] in various countries.
Indicators that DB employs many Ps
See above re: the investment bank that used psychological testing to recruit psychopaths.
From Dark Towers (my emphases):
“[DB] helped funnel money into countries that were under economic sanctions for pursuing nuclear weapons or participating in genocides.”
“The hundreds of millions of dollars that Deutsche [had] wired to Iranian banks [by 2006] provided vital funding for the sanctioned country to pay for its terrorism. Soon Iraq was being ripped apart by violence. Roadside bombs detonated all over the country, targeting the country’s fragile government and the U.S. military forces that were trying to keep the peace. Much of the violence was the work of a terrorist group, Jaysh al-Mahdi, which had been armed and trained by Hezbollah, which had been bankrolled by Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, which had been financed by Deutsche.
. . . The sanctions violations weren’t the work of an isolated crew of rogue Deutsche employees. Managers knew. Their bosses knew. American regulators would later find evidence that at least one member of the bank’s vorstand—in other words, one of Deutsche’s most senior executives—knew about and approved of the scheme.”
“[Deutsche] would soon become enveloped in scandals related to money laundering, tax evasion, manipulating interest rates, manipulating the prices of precious metals, manipulating the currencies markets, bribing foreign officials, accounting fraud, violating international sanctions, ripping off customers, and ripping off the German, British, and United States governments. (The list went on.)”
Indicators that DB banks many Ps (e.g., indirectly, via banking many WEALTHY criminals)
Again: DB moved as much as $80B for thousands of “high-risk entities” in various countries.
From a 2020 article in The New Yorker (my emphases):
“Between 2011 and 2015, ten billion dollars left Russia through Deutsche Bank’s mirror trades.
. . . The recently published FinCEN files . . . add some fascinating detail to the mirror-trades affair.
. . . The FinCEN files cover around two trillion dollars’ worth of suspicious transactions reported at major banks between 1999 and 2017. Of that two trillion, more than half—around $1.3 trillion—passed through Deutsche Bank.”
“As we now know, mirror trades were not just suggestive of financial crime. Major criminal organizations, terrorist groups, and drug cartels used them to launder and transfer money, and benefited more generally from this geyser of dirty money.”
“According to the documents . . . nearly fifty million dollars were also funneled through mirror trades to the Khanani network, whose clients include associates of Hezbollah and the Taliban.”
“The FinCEN documents are based on Suspicious Activity Reports—essentially whistle-blowing reports made by banks themselves—filed to the U.S. government. They were leaked to BuzzFeed News, then shared with the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, which shared them with news outlets around the world.”
Re: worldwide, kleptocracy is BOOMING
From the 2020 article on DailyBeast.com titled “The Kleptocrats’ Money-Laundering Middleman Who Did Deals With Trump”:
“[2020 book] Kleptopia: How Dirty Money is Conquering the World[, by a Financial Times reporter,] is the terrifying true story of how kleptocrats—those who rule through corruption—are uniting, clandestinely fusing their business interests, and forming alliances.”
“From Budapest to Beijing, Harare to Riyadh, they have seized power and are busily guzzling their nations’ wealth.”
From a June 2021 article on the website of Foreign Policy magazine:
Biden Jump-Starts Fight Against Kleptocracy
New memorandum puts anti-corruption efforts at the heart of national security strategy.
From Kleptopia:
They formed a new five families, these international kleptocrats: the Nats, the Brits, the Sprooks, the Petros and the Party.
. . . The Party, the Nats, the Brits, the Petros and the Sprooks are like the clans of the Cosa Nostra that came before them. On the surface they are rivals. But ultimately they are engaged in a common endeavour . . .
The Nats, they declare themselves the saviours of besieged nations while overseeing the plunder of those nations. Drain the swamp, they cry, as they luxuriate in it. They have taken hold in central Europe, eastern Europe and Russia, with imitators on every continent: Bolsonaro in Brazil, Duterte in the Philippines, Erdoğan in Turkey, Netanyahu in Israel, Maduro in Venezuela, Trump in Washington.
. . . The Brits, they continue their long fade from imperial power to global network of financial secrecy connected to the City of London and servicing new, private empires. Their new populist rulers take money and inspiration from the Ur of Kleptopia, post-Soviet Moscow.
. . . The Sprooks—spooks and crooks in indistinguishable union—have a Moscow base too. Semyon Mogilevich, the Brainy Don, is said to be a guest of Putin’s security services on the city’s periphery, permitted to manage his criminal endeavours but, like Ramzan Kadyrov down in Chechnya, subordinate to the ex-KGB ruler. They are true globalists, however, the Sprooks. In Washington, in London, in Paris, the spirit of national security has given way to the profit principle. Sometimes intelligence officers don’t even wait for their early retirement before taking on private clients. The Petros, they have a mechanism for setting the price they charge for the oil they steal from the countries they have invaded from within: they call it Opec. The Party, they are insatiable. Money, land, technology, its leaders in Beijing want it all; no resistance will be tolerated, certainly not from Hong Kongers quaintly attached to antiquated notions of freedom.
Re: Ks need to hire contract killers (CKs) often
From Kleptopia (my emphases):
[F]or the kleptocrat, ruling by licensing theft rather than seeking consent, money can achieve most of what needs to be done. For everything else, there is violence.
. . . [V]iolence was still required. It was to dirty money what the law was to clean—a guarantee that agreements would be honoured.
From said 2020 article on DailyBeast.com (my emphases):
There is nothing they [i.e., Ks] will not do to maintain control. Those who dare to cross them are massacred on the Kazakh steppe and brutalized during Zimbabwe’s sham elections; those who threaten to spill their secrets have their mouths permanently closed.
From Kleptopia:
Geremeyev had rented a flat in Moscow for the hit squad, then flew out the day after their work was done, alongside the shooter. Putin’s officials had permitted the investigators to indict the hit squad and the missing driver, but refused to allow any charges against Geremeyev. That would have brought the matter too close to the sacred networks of kleptocratic power that stretched between Moscow, Grozny and beyond.
Re: virtually all CKs are Ps
From 2019 book The New Evil: Understanding the Emergence of Modern Violent Crime:
As we move along the continuum to Category 9 [of 22 categories of violent crime], we traverse an important threshold. The remainder of the scale encompasses persons who commit “evil” acts partly or wholly as the result of varying degrees of psychopathy . . .
TNE co-author Michael H. Stone, MD, is a professor of clinical psychiatry at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.
TNE co-author Gary Brucato, PhD, is: 1) a clinical psychologist and researcher in the areas of violence, psychosis, and other serious psychopathology, 2) the assistant director of the Center of Prevention and Evaluation at the New York State Psychiatric Institute/Columbia University Medical Center.
Precedent for said alliance between Ks and Ps
Murder Incorporated.
From Wikipedia:
Murder, Inc. . . . was an organized crime group, active from 1929 to 1941, that acted as the enforcement arm of the Italian-American Mafia, the Jewish Mob, and other closely connected organized crime groups in New York City and elsewhere.
Indicators that DB is a next-gen variant of BCCI
— Summary (details follow) —
BCCI is an IDEAL template/playbook for Ps’ resistance, not least because BCCI leveraged huge fraud (HF) to become, again: 1) politically influential/coercive worldwide, 2) DANGEROUS more generally.
There are indicators that:
JE knew about BCCI decades ago.
JE’s bank was part of DB.
JE fit the profile of top BCCI execs (e.g., JE committed many of the crimes committed by said execs).
BCCI was protected by the U.S. government (USG) for many years.
There are indicators that:
JE was protected by USG for many years.
DB was protected by USG in recent years.
Key indicator that USG protected JE: Americans would BENEFIT from USG blackmailing TOP hackers who live in undemocratic countries.
— Re: BCCI —
From said 1992 U.S. Senate report on BCCI:
[BCCI founder] Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others . . .
BCCI was shut down in 1991 by regulators/attorneys-general of several nations (e.g., nations complicit in BCCI’s crimes for many years).
— Re: BCCI leveraged HF —
From said 1992 report:
[BCCI’s criminality included:] fraud by BCCI and BCCI customers involving billions of dollars; money laundering in Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas . . .
— Re: BCCI became politically influential worldwide —
From 1993 book The Outlaw Bank: A Wild Ride into the Secret Heart of BCCI, co-authored by two journalists who covered BCCI for Time magazine (my emphases):
Why [BCCI founder] Agha Hasan Abedi and his rogue bank went unprosecuted for so long is the enduring mystery at the heart of the BCCI affair.
The simple answer is that his watch-me-break-all-the-rules act relied upon the near-absolute complicity of many sovereign governments. High government officials and financial regulators around the world knew what the bank was doing, and yet they created the deep silence that cloaked BCCI's global operations.
From said 1992 report:
BCCI systematically bribed world leaders and . . . prominent political figures in most of the 73 countries in which BCCI operated.
— Re: BCCI became coercive/DANGEROUS —
From The Outlaw Bank (my emphases):
From interviews with sources close to BCCI, Time has pieced together a portrait of a clandestine division of the bank called the Black Network, which functions as a global intelligence operation and a mafia-like enforcement squad. . . . [T]he 1,500-employee Black Network has used sophisticated spy equipment and techniques, along with bribery, extortion, kidnapping and even, by some accounts, murder.
— Indicators that JE knew about BCCI decades ago —
From The Outlaw Bank:
BCCI helps Adnan Khashoggi finance the sale of arms to Iran as a part of the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra effort.
From 2020 book The Spider: Inside the Criminal Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell:
[During the mid-1980s] Leese also introduced Epstein to one of his associates: Adnan Khashoggi. Khashoggi, a Saudi arms dealer, was a man of marvel and mystery. He was born in Mecca, and his father was said to have been the personal physician of Saudi king Abdullah bin Abdulaziz Al Saud. Khashoggi was one of the world’s wealthiest arms brokers. He moved around the world surrounded by heavily armed bodyguards—men trained in the art of killing at Fort Bragg in the United States and at Hereford in the United Kingdom. The Saudi soon became another trusted client of Epstein’s.
— Indicators that JE’s bank was a part of DB —
From said 1992 report:
“BCCI was from its earliest days made up of multiplying layers of entities, related to one another through an impenetrable series of holding companies, affiliates, subsidiaries, banks-within-banks [my emphasis] . . .”
“By fracturing corporate structure, record keeping, regulatory review, and audits . . . [BCCI founder] Abedi developed in BCCI an ideal mechanism for facilitating illicit activity by others . . .”
From Dark Towers:
“A hodgepodge of hundreds of different systems polluted the bank’s ecosystem. One implication was that there was no way for the bank to measure or understand what it was actually doing.”
“Deutsche more than almost any other multinational financial institution deftly managed to exploit rivalries among regulators to shield itself from tougher rules or greater outside scrutiny.”
— Re: JE fit the profile of top BCCI execs (part 1 of 2) —
From The Outlaw Bank (my emphases):
[G]irls as young as twelve (and later, even younger) were dressed in silk harem pants and procured by BCCI officers for their clients. In the middle 1970s the man in charge of inspecting the girls was Zafar Iqbal, who would later become the chief executive officer of BCCI.
. . . [T]he wife of a Pakistani doctor, was in charge of rounding up the girls and bringing them to Karachi to be outfitted in proper clothes before being presented to the princely clients. Often she would shepherd more than fifty girls at a time through a department store, shopping for jewelry and dresses. This practice was so successful—far more effective than giving away microwave ovens or toasters—that the bank would spend as much as $100,000 on such an evening’s entertainment. According to the Senate testimony of Nazir Chinoy, Madame Rahim would also “interview girls, women, and take them . . . to Abu Dhabi for a dancing show or arrange some singing shows." Throughout the Middle East, “dancing girls” and “singing girls” are euphemisms for prostitutes; Chinoy chose to be tactful before the TV cameras.
. . . According to [BCCI employee] Masri, the protocol officers . . . were also responsible . . . for luring businessmen, military officers, and politicians into Abedi’s web of intrigue through a combination of favors, money, blackmail, and intimidation.
— Re: BCCI was protected by USG for many years —
From The Outlaw Bank (my emphases):
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of the BCCI affair in the United States was the failure of U.S. government and federal law enforcement to move against the outlaw bank. Instead of swift retribution, what took place over more than a decade was a cover-up of major, alarming proportions, often orchestrated from the very highest levels of government.
— Indicator that JE was protected by USG for many years —
From a 2019 article on TheDailyBeast.com:
“I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” [said Alex Acosta, re: the non-prosecution plea deal that Acosta—then the U.S. Attorney in Miami, Florida—provided to Epstein in 2007. Epstein had been accused of unlawful sex with minors and prostitution, but ended up pleading guilty to two counts of soliciting prostitution from a minor.]
— Re: JE fit the profile of top BCCI execs (part 2 of 2) —
From The Outlaw Bank:
The strange and still murky ties between BCCI and the intelligence agencies of several countries are so pervasive that even the White House has become entangled. As Time reported . . . the National Security Council has used BCCI to funnel money for the Iran-Contra deals, and the CIA maintained accounts in BCCI for covert operations. Moreover, investigators have told Time that the Defense Intelligence Agency has maintained a slush-fund account with BCCI, apparently to pay for clandestine activities.
— Indicator that DB was protected by USG in recent years —
From Dark Towers:
To any government official paying attention [in 2017], this was a powerful signal: Investigate Deutsche and risk the president’s wrath.
— Re: Americans would BENEFIT from USG blackmailing top hackers who live in undemocratic countries —
From This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends:
“One day in 2008, almost simultaneously, five of the NSA’s most elite hackers turned in their security badges and pulled out of the Fort’s parking lot for the last time. Inside the agency, these men had been revered as ‘the Maryland Five,’ and time and time again, they had proved indispensable. They were each members of a premier TAO access team that hacked into the systems nobody else could.”
“The United States doesn’t forcibly conscript talented hackers at Google and MIT to moonlight as nation-state attackers like the Russians, Iranians, North Koreans, and Chinese do.”
“My source had gotten his hands on an urgent DHS-FBI alert [issued in 2017]. It was meant solely for the utilities, the water suppliers, the nuclear plants. The bureaucrats were trying to bury it on a holiday weekend. And as soon as I got eyes on it, I could see why: the Russians were inside our nuclear plants.”
“‘Cyber is a tailor-made instrument of power for them,’ former NSA deputy director Chris Inglis said after North Korea’s role in the WannaCry attacks became clear. ‘There’s a low cost of entry, it’s largely asymmetrical, there’s some degree of anonymity and stealth in its use. It can hold large swaths of nation-state infrastructure and private-sector infrastructure at risk. It’s a source of income.’ In fact, Inglis said, ‘You could argue that they have one of the most successful cyber programs on the planet, not because it’s technically sophisticated, but because it has achieved all their aims at very low cost.’”
“I came to survey the rubble at ground zero for the most devastating cyberattack the world had ever seen. The world was still reeling from the fallout of a Russian cyberattack on Ukraine that less than two years earlier had shut down government agencies, railways, ATMs, gas stations, the postal service, even the radiation monitors at the old Chernobyl nuclear site, before the code seeped out of Ukraine and haphazardly zigzagged its way around the globe. Having escaped, it paralyzed factories in the far reaches of Tasmania, destroyed vaccines at one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, infiltrated computers at FedEx, and brought the world’s biggest shipping conglomerate to a halt, all in a matter of minutes.
By the time I visited Kyiv in 2019, the tally of damages from that single Russian attack exceeded $10 billion, and estimates were still climbing. Shipping and railway systems had still not regained full capacity. All over Ukraine, people were still trying to find packages that had been lost when the shipment tracking systems went down. They were still owed pension checks that had been held up in the attack. The records of who was owed what had been obliterated.”
From a 2021 article on CBSnews.com:
President Biden inherited a lot of intractable problems, but perhaps none is as disruptive as the cyber war between the United States and Russia simmering largely under the radar. Last March, with the coronavirus spreading uncontrollably across the United States, Russian cyber soldiers released their own contagion by sabotaging a tiny piece of computer code buried in a popular piece of software called “SolarWinds.” The hidden virus spread to 18,000 government and private computer networks by way of one of those software updates we all take for granted. The attack was unprecedented in audacity and scope. Russian spies went rummaging through the digital files of the U.S. departments of Justice, State, Treasury, Energy, and Commerce and for nine months had unfettered access to top-level communications, court documents, even nuclear secrets. And by all accounts, it’s still going on.
From This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends:
“In 2018, terrorist attacks cost the global economy $33 billion, a decrease of thirty-eight percent from the previous year. That same year, a study by RAND Corporation from more than 550 sources—the most comprehensive data analysis of its kind—concluded global losses from cyberattacks were likely on the order of hundreds of billions of dollars. And that was the conservative estimate. Individual data sets predicted annual cyber losses of more than two trillion dollars.”
“Gosler began with two experiments. That year, 1985, he convinced his bosses at Sandia to sponsor a study. They called it Chaperon, and its premise was simple: Could anyone design a truly secure computer application? And could someone subvert that application with a malicious implant that could not be detected, even through a detailed forensic investigation? In other words, a zero-day [i.e., “a software or hardware flaw for which there is no existing patch. They got their name because, as with Patient Zero in an epidemic, when a zero-day flaw is discovered, software and hardware companies have had zero days to come up with a defense”].
Sandia divided its top technical brass into bad guys and good guys: the subverters and the evaluators. The former would plant vulnerabilities in a computer application. The latter would have to find them.
Gosler still spent most of his evenings away from work breaking hardware and software for the fun of it. But professionally, he had only ever played the role of evaluator. Now, he relished the chance to play subverter. He designed two implants and was sure the Evaluators would discover his first subversion.
‘I was immersed in a fantasy world back then,’ Gosler told me. When he wasn’t breaking software, he was playing the 1980s computer game Zork, popular with some of the techies he worked with.
For his first trick, he inserted a few familiar lines from the Zork game into the security application’s code. The Zork text effectively fooled Sandia’s application into revealing secret variables that could be used by an attacker to take over the application—and any data the application secured. Gosler was sure his colleagues would pick up on it quickly.
For his second subversion, Gosler inserted a vulnerability that he and others would later only describe as a ‘groundbreaking technical achievement.’
The evaluators never did find Gosler’s two implants. Even Gosler’s Zork subversion proved maddeningly difficult to track down. Sandia’s evaluators still describe the study as one of the most frustrating experiments of their career. They spent months looking for his implants before they finally threw up their hands and demanded that he tell them what he had done.
It took Gosler three eight-hour briefings, pacing in front of a whiteboard covered in notation, which he attacked in bursts, to painstakingly explain his implant. His peers nodded along, but clearly they were baffled.
Initially Gosler thought the second implant could be useful as a Sandia training exercise, but seeing employees’ frustration, his bosses rejected the idea outright. They worried that the exercise would only compel new recruits to quit.
Instead, his bosses decided to start over and put together a new study: Chaperon 2. This time, they chose someone other than Gosler to lead the subversion. Some one hundred Sandia engineers spent weeks and months hunting for the implant. While others came close, only one—Gosler—discovered the subversion and presented it in a detailed hours-long briefing.
. . . Rick Proto and Robert Morris Sr., the respective chiefs of research and science at the NSA’s National Computer Security Center, thought Gosler could teach their analysts a thing or two.
At their first meeting [in 1987], Gosler asked Morris Sr. the question that had been troubling him for some time now. ‘How complex can software be for you to have total knowledge of what it could do?’
. . . Morris Sr. told Gosler that, off the top of his head, he would have ‘100 percent confidence’ in an application that contained 10,000 lines of code or less, and zero confidence in an application that contained more than 100,000 lines of code. Gosler took that as his cue to share with Morris Sr. the more complicated of the subversion tactics he had developed for Sandia’s Chaperon 1 study. Turns out it was an application with fewer than 3,000 lines of code.
Morris Sr. invited an elite NSA squad of PhDs, cryptographers, and electrical engineers to take a look. Not one discovered Gosler’s implant, nor could any replicate the subversion once Gosler pointed them to it.”
From 2019 book Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World:
[T]he “10X” coder . . . describes a programmer who is provably better, multiple times so, than the average code monkey.
. . . Bill Gates once said, “ . . . a great writer of software code is worth ten thousand times the price of an average software writer.”
. . . When I ask venture capitalists and founders whether 10Xers really exist, many immediately say: Oh yes. Hell yes.
“I think it’s probably 1000X,” . . . Marc Andreessen . . . cofounder of Netscape . . . tells me.
From a 2014 article:
“One top-notch engineer is worth 300 times or more than the average,” explains Alan Eustace, a Google vice president of engineering.
Re: it’s (very) likely that a growing number of Ps are resisting
From a U.S.-Military-Academy-at-West-Point professor’s 2018 book:
[The] allure of preventive war is rooted in fear . . . [F]ear is most acute when power is shifting among [groups (e.g., shifting against Ps via advances in molecular genetics)] . . . [Hence the] long parade of preventive conflicts we can observe over thousands of years of history.
From the 2018 article titled “Los Extraditables, the Pablo Escobar-Led Gang That Launched a Bloody Campaign [during the 1980s] Against U.S. Extradition”:
The terrorist group . . . claimed “we prefer a grave in Colombia to a prison in the United States . . .”
Escobar was a drug-trafficker whose net worth reached $58 billion (in 2018 dollars). The other leaders of Los Extraditables were wealthy drug-traffickers.
From 2001 book Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World’s Greatest Outlaw (my emphases):
“[Escobar] intended, he said, to use the public’s weariness with [Extraditables-funded] violence to his benefit. He planned to turn up the violence until the public cried out for a solution, a deal.
. . . A communiqué from the Extraditables not long after hammered home the point:
We are declaring total and absolute war on the government, on the individual and political oligarchy, on the journalists who have attacked and insulted us, on the judges that have sold themselves to the government, on the extraditing magistrates . . . on all those who have persecuted and attacked us. We will not respect the families of those who have not respected our families. We will burn and destroy the industries, properties and mansions of the oligarchy.”
“At his [Pablo’s] peak, he would threaten to usurp the Colombian State.”
“Ever since Pablo’s men had blown that Avianca flight out of the sky . . .”
“[A] total of 457 police had been killed since Colonel Martinez had started his hunt. Young gunmen in that city were being paid 5 million pesos for killing a cop.”
Re: an October 2020 indicator that Ps are resisting, via the following excerpt from my 2021 write-up at comedyvstrump2024.substack.com/p/summary-details:
Re: it’s too late to be stealthy/covert about preventing/subduing Ps’ resistance
During October 2020 I abandoned my plan to have MPS [i.e., my planned startup] double as a front company (FC) for gathering (anticipatory) intelligence about people who are: 1) likely to be hypersexual (psychopathy correlates strongly with hypersexuality), 2) (becoming) wealthy (i.e., intel about people who are likeliest to (be) fund(ing)/lead(ing) Ps’ resistance). [IMPORTANT: My work on MPS-as-FC isn’t said “a/the key to preventing/subduing” Ps’ resistance.] Keywords re: “abandoned”: my experiences since 2016 with government agencies in the U.S. (e.g., police departments, before* I learned that PDs employ many Ps); seeming indicators that at least some Ps: 1) were aware of my FC work, 2) wanted to discourage me (e.g., in October 2020 [my emphasis] a parole officer came to my residence and asked to see me; I don’t have a criminal record); the willingness of U.S. intelligence agencies (IAs) to acknowledge/manage risks has been disincentivized via: 1) said legalization of HF, 2) revolving doors between government and industry, 3) IAs are “effectively beyond oversight or control,” unless whistleblowers risk career damage/loss, imprisonment, etc. (i.e., IAs are IDEAL partners for companies seeking windfall$ via HF).
* Details below . . .
— Re: examples of ‘HF-windfall > managing-risk’ that feature U.S. government agencies —
An ALL-TIME FUGLY example—featuring an IA—is detailed in:
2018 book The Watchdogs Didn’t Bark: How the NSA Failed to Protect America from the 9/11 Attacks
2019 book Crisis of Conscience: Whistleblowing in an Age of Fraud, published by Penguin Random House
Crisis of Conscience details other FUGLY examples. Excerpts from the books are below.
— Re: “IAs are IDEAL partners” —
From the 2018 article in U.S. News and World Report titled “The 10 Richest Counties in the U.S.”:
[H]alf of the top 10 fell in northern Virginia, just outside the nation’s capital . . .
— Re: “before I learned” —
From a 2017 write-up of mine:
“[M]ore than 50% of all police officers killed in the line of duty are killed by psychopaths,” according to a study cited in a 2011 article.
Psychopaths (Ps) comprise ~1% of humans (i.e., ~77M of 7.7B).
So a P is at least ~50x more likely than a non-P to kill a police officer, all things being otherwise equal.
So I thought the police would be (among) the biggest supporters of my efforts to identify people who are likely to be Ps. This thinking of mine persisted into 2019 . . .
From a 2019 write-up of mine:
There’s been “a rise in calls, particularly in law enforcement, for universal genetic databases, where everyone’s biometric data is put in one place,” according to a 2019 presentation by a professor of “strategic foresight” who’s an adjunct at the New York University Stern School of Business.
Said calls by law enforcement can be expected to continue/increase, not least because:
“[M]ore than 50% of all police officers killed . . .
From an August 2020 article in The New York Times:
“[A]nother problem making the German authorities increasingly anxious: infiltration of the very institutions, like the police, that are supposed to be doing the investigating [of Neo-Nazis].
In July the police chief of the western state of Hesse resigned after police computers had been repeatedly accessed for confidential information that was then used by neo-Nazis in death threats. It was in Hesse that a well-known neo-Nazi assassinated a regional politician last summer . . .”
“Neo-Nazi groups and other extremists call it Day X—a mythical moment when Germany’s social order collapses . . . Today Day X preppers are drawing serious people with serious skills and ambition.
Increasingly, the German authorities consider the scenario a pretext for domestic terrorism by far-right plotters or even for a takeover of the government.”
From the chapter of 2021 book The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War titled “The Enemy Within”:
“The number of publicly reported attacks by uniformed Afghans against their foreign allies rose from two in 2008 to forty-five in 2012, causing the deaths of at least 116 U.S. and NATO personnel during that period.
. . . In 2011, a U.S. Army behavioral scientist based in Kabul conducted an internal study titled ‘A Crisis of Trust and Cultural Incompatibility’ that concluded insider attacks ‘are no longer isolated; they reflect a growing systemic threat.’”
“[U.S. Marine Gen. John] Allen[, commander of U.S. and NATO forces,] expressed fury at the Afghan security forces’ inability to stop the fratricidal killings. ‘I’m mad as hell about them,’ he told the CBS News program 60 Minutes. ‘We’re willing to sacrifice a lot for this campaign, but we’re not willing to be murdered for it.’”
From 2000 book The Perfect War: The War We Couldn’t Lose and How We Did, by a sociologist who received his Ph.D. from Yale and was a professor at Yale:
By 1969 and 1970 [American] soldiers [fighting in Vietnam] had established a two-front war, one against the Vietcong and NVA and another against their commanders. . . . War-managers could not fight a war with troops who killed their commanders; as the revolt spread, the United States had no choice but to withdraw its ground combat forces . . .
From Warnings: How to Find Cassandras and Stop Catastrophes (my emphases):
In many instances, however, it seemed that an expert or expert group, a Cassandra, had accurately predicted what would happen. They were often ignored . . .
. . . Warnings that have this potential to steal resources from less threatening projects tend to encounter institutional reluctance to tackle the issue. Audiences who react by rejecting an issue for these reasons tend to be the kind of decision makers who help to create Cassandra Events.
From 2011 book The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry:
[“]She said, ‘I’ve got a bad personality. I like to hurt people.’ I thought she was winding me up. I said, ‘Okay, fine.’ So we went through the [fMRI] tests [i.e., brain scans]. When she was looking at the photographs of the mutilated bodies, the sensors showed that she was getting a kick off of them. Her sexual reward center—it’s a sexual thing—was fired up by blood and death [my emphasis]. It’s subconscious. It happens in milliseconds. She found those things pleasant.”
From the 2020 op-ed on TheHill.com titled “The coronavirus: Blueprint for bioterrorism,” written by an assistant in the 1970s to a then vice-president of the U.S.:
It represents the perfect asymmetric warfare strategy . . .
From 1998 book Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies, for which the author received a Pulitzer Prize:
When [Spanish conquistador] Pizarro and [Inca emperor] Atahuallpa met [in 1532] at Cajamarca [in Peru], why did Pizarro capture Atahuallpa and kill so many of his followers, instead of Atahuallpa’s vastly more numerous forces capturing and killing Pizarro? After all, Pizarro had only 62 soldiers mounted on horses, along with 106 foot soldiers, while Atahuallpa commanded an army of about 80,000.
. . . Pizarro’s military advantages lay in the Spaniards’ steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses. To those weapons, Atahuallpa’s troops, without animals on which to ride into battle, could oppose only stone, bronze, or wooden clubs, maces, and hand axes, plus slingshots and quilted armor.
From 2008 book The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy, by Columbia University historian Adam Tooze:
Hitler had seen himself as locked in a global confrontation with world Jewry.
. . . For Hitler, a war of conquest was not one policy option amongst others. Either the German race struggled for Lebensraum [i.e., territory] or its racial enemies would condemn it to extinction.
From 2019 book Appeasement: Chamberlain, Hitler, Churchill, and the Road to War:
The failure to perceive the true character of the Nazi regime and Adolf Hitler stands as the single greatest failure of British policy makers during this period, since it was from this that all subsequent failures—the failure to rearm sufficiently, the failure to build alliances (not least with the Soviet Union), the failure to project British power, and the failure to educate public opinion—stemmed.
From Warnings: How to Find Cassandras and Stop Catastrophes (my emphases):
No intelligence agency had ever heard of Aum Shinrikyo when it released the chemical weapon sarin into the Tokyo subway in 1995, killing thirteen and injuring fifty-four more. Their founder, Shoko Asahara, sported a large Cheshire cat grin and a furry beard reminiscent of Jerry Garcia’s; he had previously worked in a yoga studio as a massage and acupuncture therapist. He also built the largest nonstate biological and chemical weapons program ever seen.
From 2019 book The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution, by a Harvard professor of biological anthropology:
The decisive form of social control represented by the killing of aggressive males could clearly have had far-reaching significance in human evolution. With regard to the idea that Homo sapiens self-domesticated, the critical question is whether individuals with a particularly high propensity for reactive aggression tended to be killed. The characteristic fact of egalitarian relationships indicates that the execution of would-be despots was indeed systematic.
. . . In the millennia before groups found a way to control the bullies, reactive aggression would have dominated social life in the same way as it does in most social primates such as chimpanzees, gorillas, and baboons. In those species, alpha males achieve their position at the top of their group’s dominance hierarchy by defeating each rival in turn in physical and often bloody fights. . . . The alpha’s bullying is strongly correlated with having high levels of testosterone, which appear to support his motivation to dominate others. To judge from the ubiquity of such behavior in the social primates, our ancestors once followed the same brute fashion.
Re: it’s (very) likely that Ps’ war chest is large and enlarging rapidly
— Summary (details follow) —
HFs in the U.S. (HFs-US) have been growing increasingly lucrative since the 1990s (i.e., lucrative even if penalties are incurred via lawsuits, government regulators, etc.).
HFs create lucrative opportunities for intelligent Ps (IPs), because IPs can:
design/implement (parts of) HFs
be relied upon to not become whistleblowers (i.e., to not suffer crises of conscience)
KWs re: HFs-US have been creating MANY lucrative opportunities for IPs: high ROI, money-printing by central banks, higher ROI via monopoly(-profits)-via-HF.
Beyond HFs, Ps can “PROFIT” by leveraging ransomware to extort companies, governments, etc.
— Re: HFs-US have been growing increasingly lucrative since the 1990s —
From Crisis of Conscience:
“[H]ow hollow the edifice of American democracy has become, how insubstantial its checks and balances, after decades of self-interested chiseling, reaming, drilling and blasting by various experts and insiders . . .”
“[T]he sweeping redefinition of fraud as clever business that has occurred in our society . . .”
“[B]ig healthcare firms buy their way out of the frauds and crimes they’ve perpetrated . . .”
“Hanford’s culture of impunity remains intact, because the would-be regulators at the DOE and the EPA, but also at the state and local levels, are part of the game, and look silently away as the billions roll into . . . the pockets of corrupt contractor millionaires and their government accomplices.”
“Leaking waste [that’s radioactive and deadly] is Hanford’s ongoing, slow-motion catastrophe, but other cataclysms could happen in seconds. According to a number of third-party expert reports, several decrepit structures holding large caches of radioactivity are susceptible to nuclear accidents which would threaten people across the Pacific Northwest.”
“Wall Street’s knowledge of its own impunity, proven in the aftermath of 2008, has devastated ethics in the finance industry. It explains the banks’ business-as-usual attitude to fraud, and their cost-of-doing-business approach to lawsuits and settlements.”
“[W]histleblowers are essential in national defense, because the factors that facilitate fraud—secrecy, the sense of mission and mystique, the culture of impunity, and the flow of Other People’s Money—are more extreme.”
“[T]he power of whistleblowers is often illusory . . . We are in the midst of a battle over whistleblowing, part of a larger struggle . . . between the rights of individuals to know what their corporations and their government are doing, and the ever greater power of organizations to keep their secrets. How these conflicts are resolved will say much about the future strength of our democracy.”
The author of Crisis of Conscience is a journalist whose writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic and National Geographic.
— Re: high ROI via HF —
Since the ‘90s, companies that excel at HF (HF-Cos) have been attracting investment from institutional investors that deploy the savings of many Americans (i.e., HF-Cos have been delivering higher ROI than non-HF-Cos, all things being otherwise equal).
From Crisis of Conscience:
[T]hough Risperdal [law]suits have cost the company nearly $3 billion, it sold $34 billion of the drug between 1993 and 2011 alone, sometimes at profit margins approaching 97 percent. Viewed like this, $3 billion in fines seems a smart investment. That’s evidently how the company felt. In April 2012, two months after the Texas trial, the board of Johnson & Johnson made Alex Gorsky, the mastermind of Risperdal marketing, the firm’s new chief executive. Wall Street cheered [my emphasis]: the company’s share price held firm throughout the trial and, aside from brief blips, has climbed steadily ever since. (Johnson & Johnson stock now sells for more than twice what it was worth during the trial.)
— Re: money-printing by central bankers —
From a June 2021 article on Reuters.com:
At $8 trillion, the Fed’s stash of assets has roughly doubled since it kicked off large-scale purchases in March 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic erupted . . .
From a write-up of mine that predates COVID-19:
Since the financial crisis of 2008, HF-Cos have been attracting investment from banks that received (much) more than $13.5 trillion “printed” by central bankers (e.g., banks that double as HF-Cos have used printed money to purchase shares of their own stock).
From 2018 book Collusion: How Central Bankers Rigged the World (my emphases):
By mid-2017, the total assets held by the G3 central banks—the US Fed, the European Central Bank (ECB), and the Bank of Japan (BOJ)—through conjured-money QE [i.e., quantitative-easing] programs had hit more than $13.5 trillion. The figure was equivalent to 17 percent of currency-adjusted global GDP.
To garner support for their multi-trillion-dollar QE strategies, the G3 central bank leaders peddled the notion that they were helping the general economy. That couldn’t have been further from the truth. There was no direct channel, no law, no requirement to divert the Fed's cheap money into helping real people. This was because borrowing and subsequent investing in the real economy required funds from private banks, and not from central banks directly. That’s how the monetary system was set up. And private banks were under no obligation to do anything with this cheap money they didn’t want to do.
. . . Wall Street used its easy access to cheap money to . . . buy back their own shares, thus effectively manipulating their own stock—in broad daylight and with explicit approval from the Fed.
The author of Collusion worked as a managing director at Goldman Sachs, ran the international analytics group as a senior managing director at Bear Stearns in London, was a strategist at Lehman Brothers and an analyst at the Chase Manhattan Bank.
— Re: monopoly —
From 2019 book Goliath: The 100-Year War Between Monopoly Power and Democracy:
In the 1970s, we decided as a society that it would be a good idea to allow private financiers and monopolists to organize our world. As a result, what is around us is a matrix of monopolies, controlling our lives and manipulating our communities and our politics.
. . . But we also face a challenge even more significant than the consequences of a four-decade-long Reagan revolution, because layered on top of the political revolution wrought by the Chicago law and economics school and their left-wing allies is a technological revolution that has enabled a far more dangerous concentration of power.
The author of Goliath was a senior policy advisor and budget analyst to the Senate Budget Committee. He also worked in the U.S. House of Representatives on financial-services policy, including Dodd-Frank, the Federal Reserve, and the foreclosure crisis.
— Re: monopoly(-profits)-via-HF —
HF-Cos have been: 1) more likely to become monopolies than non-HF-Cos, all things being otherwise equal, 2) able to out-compete other HF-Cos by “getting big fast” (e.g., by maximizing HF ASAP).
Monopolies are ideally suited to profit from HF (i.e., to deliver high ROI via HF). KWs: too big to fail/jail.
— Re: Ps can “PROFIT” from ransomware —
From This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends:
By 2019, ransomware attacks were generating billions of dollars for Russian cybercriminals and were becoming more lucrative. Even as cybercriminals raised their ransom demands to unlock victims’ data from three figures to six, to millions of dollars, local officials—and their insurers—calculated it was still cheaper to pay their digital extortionists than to rebuild their systems and data from scratch.
From a June 2021 article in The New York Times:
Ransomware attacks are striking every eight minutes, crippling hospitals and American mainstays like gas, meat, television, police departments, NBA basketball and minor league baseball teams, even ferries to Martha’s Vineyard. This past week, the targets were one of the world’s largest meatpacking operators and the hospital that serves the Villages in Florida, America’s largest retirement community. The week before it was the pipeline operator that carries half the gas, jet fuel and diesel to the East Coast, in an attack that forced the pipeline to shut down, triggered panic buying and gas shortages and was just days from bringing mass transit and chemical refineries to their knees.
And those are just the attacks we see. Beneath the surface, American businesses are quietly paying off their digital extortionists and burying breaches in hopes that they never see the light of day.
From the August 2021 article on Wired.com titled “Putin Is Crushing Biden’s Room to Negotiate on Ransomware”:
A new cybercrime treaty Russia presented to the UN signals once again that the regime won't help clamp down on attacks.
From a July 2021 statement from the Biden administration re: “the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) irresponsible and destabilizing behavior in cyberspace”:
Exposing the PRC’s use of criminal contract hackers . . .
[H]ackers with a history of working for the PRC Ministry of State Security (MSS) have engaged in ransomware attacks, cyber-enabled extortion, crypto-jacking, and rank theft from victims around the world, all for [the hackers’ personal] financial gain.
In some cases, we are aware that PRC government-affiliated cyber operators have conducted ransomware operations against private companies that have included ransom demands of millions of dollars. The PRC’s unwillingness to address criminal activity by contract hackers [my emphasis] harms governments, businesses, and critical infrastructure operators through billions of dollars in lost intellectual property, proprietary information, ransom payments, and mitigation efforts.