“We know what you’re thinking. Is this even legal?”
In a pitch deck to prospective customers, one of Facebook’s alleged marketing partners explained how it listens to users’ smartphone microphones and advertises to them accordingly.
As 404 Media reports based on documents leaked to its reporters, the TV and radio news giant Cox Media Group (CMG) claims that its so-called “Active Listening” software uses artificial intelligence (AI) to “capture real-time intent data by listening to our conversations.”
“Advertisers can pair this voice-data with behavioral data to target in-market consumers,” the deck continues.
In the same slideshow, CMG counted Facebook, Google, and Amazon as clients of its “Active Listening” service. After 404 reached out to Google about its partnership, the tech giant removed the media group from the site for its “Partners Program,” which prompted Meta, the owner of Facebook, to admit that it is reviewing CMG to see if it violates any of its terms of service.
An Amazon spokesperson, meanwhile, told 404 that its Ads arm “has never worked with CMG on this program and has no plans to do so. The spox added, confusingly, that if one of its marketing partners violates its rules, the company will take action.
Professor Bruno David (L) and Uncle Russell Mullett (R) pictured in the cave. courtesy of Jess Shapiro for GLaWAC
Buried deep in an Australian cave, archaeologists have uncovered evidence that an Aboriginal ritual may have been passed down 500 generations and survived 12,000 years, making it the oldest known continuous cultural practice in the world, according to a new study.
The rise of artificial intelligence is requiring faster and bigger computations for even simple tasks compared to, say, a Google search. It’s adding to the demand for more internet data centers, but these facilities come at a big environmental cost, especially for the communities that host them. Science journalist Sachi Kitajima Mulkey joins Ali Rogin to discuss.
This Is Not a Game is the extraordinary untold story of the internet’s first conspiracy theory, the legend of Ong’s Hat.
Marc Fennell will dive deep into a previously unexplored world of tech hippies, eccentric web subcultures, and simmering paranoia, uncovering how this tongue-in-cheek artistic experiment backfired on its creator and went on to influence much of what’s wrong with the internet today.
Sometimes it is almost impossible not to feel hopeless and broken,” says the climate scientist Ruth Cerezo-Mota. “After all the flooding, fires, and droughts of the last three years worldwide, all related to climate change, and after the fury of Hurricane Otis in Mexico, my country, I really thought governments were ready to listen to the science, to act in the people’s best interest.”
A view of a pamphlet dropped by Azzarello before he set himself ablaze.
My name is Max Azzarello, and I am an investigative researcher who has set himself on fire outside of the Trump trial in Manhattan.
This extreme act of protest is to draw attention to an urgent and important discovery:
We are victims of a totalitarian con, and our own government (along with many of their allies) is about to hit us with an apocalyptic fascist world coup.
Azzarello’s family had been unaware that he had traveled out of state.
These claims sound like fantastical conspiracy theory, but they are not. They are proof of conspiracy. If you investigate this mountain of research, you will prove them too. If you learn a great deal about Ponzi schemes, you will discover that our life is a lie. If you follow this story and the links below, you will discover the rotten truth of ‘post-truth America’. You will learn the scariest and stupidest story in world history. And you will realize that we are all in a desperate state of emergency that requires your action.
To my friends and family, witnesses and first responders, I deeply apologize for inflicting this pain upon you. But I assure you it is a drop in the bucket compared to what our government intends to inflict.
Because these words are true, this is an act of revolution.
Last March, a billionaire named Peter Thiel started a bank run on Silicon Valley Bank. I knew enough about Thiel that I found this incredibly suspicious: My hunch was that this was intentional, though I couldn’t fathom why.
I began investigating online, and quickly found cryptocurrency’s fingerprints all over it. The bank run occurred just days after Silvergate Bank – which catered almost exclusively to crypto companies – collapsed. Meanwhile, several crypto cheerleaders were all over financial media warning of a regional banking crisis, and nobody in media was addressing the clear crypto connections.
I dug deep into the financials of Thiel’s venture capital firm Founders Fund and eventually uncovered the following, all proven many times over.
Cryptocurrency is our first planetary multi-trillion-dollar Ponzi scheme. It was expressly created for this purpose by a laundry list of rich and powerful people out of Stanford/Silicon Valley and Harvard/Facebook.
The March 2023 bank failures were all intentional: the banks were used to move out stolen Ponzi money. This signals that they’re no longer dumping cash in to keep the cryptocurrency Ponzi afloat, and that it will soon go insolvent, as all Ponzis must.
When the Ponzi scheme goes insolvent, it will take down half the stock market with it: The perpetrators used their major companies to pipe into the blockchain so they could funnel money out from the crypto exchanges. This includes Google, Tesla, Apple, PayPal, Facebook, Disney, Walmart, Target, InBev, Zoom, and countless others.
It is a Ponzi scheme so large that it created global inflation, which is why the price of Bitcoin has been a remarkable leading indicator for inflation rates. Victims who bought crypto don’t realize their money has already been stolen, so the money gets double-counted by the victims and the criminals who stole it.
As it turns out, our elites are awash in Ponzi schemes. Stanford’s StartX.com investment fund and Jeffrey Epstein’s ‘Program for Evolutionary Dynamics’ he ran at Harvard are both fake-science Ponzi factories that these schools have invested billions in: They are filled with fraudulent companies that use smoke and mirrors to promise miraculous new technology, but always collapse while the perpetrators only get richer.
Funneling trillions of dollars in stolen cash through the stock market created the largest stock-market anomaly in history. The stock chart signature of a Ponzi scheme is a massive increase (while they stack up cash) and then a massive fall (as they funnel out the stolen cash). This chart shape appeared in all the companies listed above. In order to explain the massive anomaly, our criminal government unleashed COVID on the world and told us these were the “stay at home stocks.”
—
Ponzi schemes are vicious beasts, and cryptocurrency is history’s largest Ponzi by orders of magnitude. It could best be described as an economic doomsday device, intentionally made to shatter the world economy.
The U.S. government is fully involved in this totalitarian con: To illustrate its bipartisan support, I’ll note that nearly every participant of the Clinton Global Initiative has ties to cryptocurrency, while two of the biggest tech VCs who participated are Trump associates Josh Kushner and Anthony Scaramucci.
To better understand our form of government, I will point you to one of the most astonishing pieces of stand-alone evidence I’ve found: Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton’s 1988 DNC speech where he nominated Mike Dukakis for president against George H.W. Bush. The speech is a vile, mean-spirited roast of Dukakis that makes no sense whatsoever: For Clinton to ruthlessly attack a member of his own party should have been political suicide, and he repeatedly mocks Dukakis’ noble and earnest qualities.
Notably, actor Rob Lowe, who was supporting Dukakis, was victim of a teen sex blackmail operation at the DNC that year. Since we know Clinton is a close associate with teen sex blackmail artist Jeffrey Epstein, we can suddenly make perfect sense of the nonsensical speech by applying this lens: Bill Clinton is a cocky mob boss who blackmailed Mike Dukakis because Dukakis thought his job was to help the public. He teases out the future public revelation that Kitty Dukakis drank rubbing alcohol, and offers a strange anecdote about the crack epidemic that reveals he is an exceedingly proud drug runner.
What does this revelation tell us? That our government is conning us completely. That Bill Clinton was secretly on (former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush’s side, and that the Democrat vs. Republican division has been entirely manufactured ever since: Clinton is with Bush; Gore is with Bush; Trump is with Hillary, and so on. When they present themselves in public, they are acting as characters that are against one another, practicing kayfabe as wrestlers do.
As it turns out, we have a secret kleptocracy: Both parties are run by financial criminals whose only goals are to divide, deceive, and bleed us dry. They divide the public against itself and blame the other party while everything gets worse and more expensive and handful of people take all the money.
Since it is fully parasitic, a secret kleptocracy is an incredibly unstable form of government – left to its own devices, it can only lead to fascism or failed state.
—
One of the key findings of this research is that Harvard University is one of the largest organized crime fronts in history, which is how they churn out billionaires – it’s a major hub of this sprawling criminal network.
As it turns out, dozens of the writers of The Simpsons went to Harvard. So I asked myself the question: If The Simpsons served the interests of organized crime, how would it do so?
Well, it offers a dysfunctional family suffering from moral decay, a community incapable of solving its problems, a worker drone who slaves away for an evil billionaire, and cathartic laughs for our poor collective circumstances.
There are some notable specifics as it relates to this research, too: In Marge vs. The Monorail, the townsfolk are too oafish and divided to invest in the town’s needs (fix Main Street) and fall for the charms of a dazzling showman with a bogus monorail Ponzi scheme. When we know that the show is closely linked to an organization that invests billions of dollars in Ponzi factories, this becomes quite damning.
In Lisa the Iconoclast, Lisa discovers that town founder Jebediah Springfield was a secret criminal con artist, and that the townsfolk’s lives are a lie. Realizing this is an important discovery, she desperately tries to get the townsfolk to listen to her. But they meet her with hostility, apathy, disbelief, and partisanship and she fails to get through to them. Ultimately, she realizes the town is so far gone that perhaps it’s better for them to be lied to by con artists, and she keeps the secret to herself.
And here I’ve been, like Lisa Simpson, desperately trying to get friends, family, and the public to believe the proof of a totalitarian con I’m trying to show them, and they’ve turned away with hostility, apathy, disbelief, and partisanship.
And so, we realize the criminal truth of The Simpsons: Our elites are telling us that our eroding collective circumstances are our own fault, and we can’t do anything about it, while they steal the American Dream from us. It is, for lack of a more elegant word, brainwashing.
—
Lastly, we string these major discoveries together: Cryptocurrency is an economic doomsday device; our government is a secret kleptocracy; The Simpsons exists to brainwash us. From there, the only research we need is critical thinking and we’re able to piece together the true story of our circumstances.
Consider America since 1988: Institutions like healthcare and universities have become parasitic in their skyrocketing prices. News media tells us to be angry and tribalized. Daytime television warns us of moral decay. Local news tell us to fear our neighbors. The Simpsons tells us we’re too oafish and divided to save the American Dream. Seinfeld tells us to celebrate the assholes and be irritated by all the normal people around us. “Reality” TV tells us that real life is filled with hedonism and strife.
Social media, owned by crypto criminals like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, is flooded with nonsense conspiracy theories and memes reminding us that we are hopeless, helpless, anxious, depressed, ironic, scared, apathetic, escapist, lonely, misguided, and jaded, telling us we can’t do anything but have a laugh at our circumstances.
Liberals mock the hypocrisy of conservatives; conservatives mock the hypocrisy of liberals, and our collective circumstances erode. The left shouts “All Cops Are Bastards,” which ensures they’ll be hated by the police and the public (and flies in the face of leftist theory). The public’s distrust of the government is at an all-time high, but so is the belief that we are helpless to do anything about it.
And with all this, a sharp rise in apocalyptic messaging: Climate change will kill us all; COVID will kill us all; vaccines will kill us all; AI will kill us all – no matter the bubbles we ascribe to, we’re bombarded with existential crises with no solutions. We’ve seen a surge in apocalyptic film, literature, and video games that tell us there is no way out of our poor circumstances but total societal breakdown. Zombies tell us that the public is our enemy. If you go to your nearest convenience store, you can buy a can of water called “Liquid Death.”
This is our rotten farce: For our entire lives, we have been flooded with media designed to slowly steer us into a world where the American Dream was dead, where the public was fully divided against itself, where everybody believed we were powerless to do anything about our worsening circumstances. It is all so they can organize an unprecedented, apocalyptic rug pull on the entire populace as they pivot to fascism, which is perhaps best understood as kleptocracy at the barrel of a gun.
When we piece it all together, we understand the truth: We are in a totalitarian doomsday cult.
Why on earth would our elites do this? There are many reasons, but the simplest is because capitalism is unsustainable, and they knew it: Climate change and resource extraction would catch up eventually. So, they never intended to sustain it. They knew all along that they would gobble up all the wealth they could, and then yank the rug out from under us so they could pivot to a hellish fascist dystopia.
—
Things escalated wildly in 1988 when former CIA Director George H.W. Bush got the White House, but this plan had been in action long prior:
Why is Stanley Kubrick’s comedy about mutually assured destruction called Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb? Because he was a cocky secret fascist who was getting us to stop worrying and love the bomb. Why did he make A Clockwork Orange? So we’d rejoice at ultra-violence designed to desensitize us to the horrors of the world.
Why were the Manson Family murders crawling with cover-ups and intelligence agents? Because our government wanted to make us fear for our lives and believe that hippies are deranged psychopaths.
Why did Walt Disney produce a fraudulent documentary that told us Lemmings follow each other off cliffs? So we would believe it.
Why did The Beatles tell us to fear the taxman, to scoff at revolution, chase nonsense conspiracy theories, and that happiness is a warm gun? So we would believe it.
Why did Easy Rider tell us that the hippie movement was dead? So we would believe it.
Why did Chinatown end with defeatism in the face of massive corruption? So we would believe it.
Why did George Orwell tell us of a hellish future of totalitarian control that we are powerless to stop? So we would believe it.
Why did Wall Street tell us “greed is good”? So we would believe it.
Why did Do The Right Thing tell us we’re all racially tribalized? So we would believe it.
Why did Simpsons creator Matt Groening make a comic strip called Life in Hell? So we would believe it.
And on, and on, and on, and on. When it comes to any popular media, if you ask yourself the question, “Why would secret doomsday cult kleptocrats want the public to consume this?”, you will find your answers.
—
This is obviously very bad news, but the biggest lie we’ve been told is that we are powerless. We’ve got one way out of hellworld, and that’s for the public to realize that we’ve been conned completely so we can build a united movement that shatters every lie they’ve told us, mocks this rotten farce as loudly as it deserves, and aims at nothing short of abolishing our criminal government so we can build one that serves the public.
To understand this story is to see right through the con, to become immune to the endless sea of criminal propaganda, and to feel the great joy and power that comes with freedom.
If a small number of people quickly put on these truth-colored glasses, we are in for an unimaginably bright future. If not, we get an apocalypse.
For more information, I’ve put together this booklet that includes other major findings and a map to a sea of proof, along with all the other essays on this site.
For the true history of America since the end of World War II, see here.
To see this discovery unfold in real-time, along with further explanations, hundreds of pieces of evidence not covered here, advice, inspiration, political theory, and the heart and soul of a man escaping history’s largest doomsday cult, see my Instagram story highlights. I apologize for leaving things so scattered, but this has been an exhausting affair. So long as you understand this (true) ideology, you will be able to learn the whole story.
Here is a federal lawsuit I filed against dozens of perpetrators of the cryptocurrency Ponzi – not for litigation, but just to preserve the information and attach my name to it. I was terrified and hadn’t slept in days and it shows, but it served its purpose of keeping myself alive long enough to keep learning and telling this story.
I no longer have my original research files from the crypto rabbit hole. If you want to see them, you’ll have to get my laptop back from the government. Ask them how they got it – it’s a very fun story.
I hope you know how powerful you are. I wish you a hell of a lot more than luck.
Due to popular demand, I have added a CBR and CBZ format to the free Internet Archive version of Statio Numero.
CBR and CBZ are standard digital comic formats. There are lots of free readers for tablets and desktop/laptop computers. You should read these on a tablet or laptop/desktop computer, not a phone, for legibility reasons. Of course, the links won’t be clickable in this format, but the art and text have good-quality resolution.
