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Replay of this week's webinar

"I am a game designer with experience in a very small niche. I create and research games designed to be played in reality. I’ve worked in Alternate Reality Games (ARGs), LARPs, experience fiction, interactive theater, and “serious games”. Stories and games that can start on a computer, and finish in the real world. Fictions designed to feel as real as possible. Games that teach you. Puzzles that come to life all around the players. Games where the deeper you dig, the more you find. Games with rabbit holes that invite you into wonderland and entice you through the looking glass."

We're going to go back to the future! After taking an evolutionary step backwards for four years, it's time to get America back on track and moving forward again in the 21st Century and, hopefully, we still have time to make this decade the Roaring 20s and not the prelude to the second Great Depression.

This is a chart developed over several months of investigation. It shows the individuals, functions and relationships of the top leadership of QAnon as currently understood.This is not a historical review—it is only concerned with the people running QAnon now.

After the initial excitement following the authorization of the first COVID-19 vaccines, a harsh reality set in. People who want a vaccine can’t get it, some counties have more than others and older people are camping out for it the way they once might have for tickets to a Bruce Springsteen concert.

Joe Biden will inherit among the most challenging political and economic environments of any US president. With America reeling from the storming of the Capitol by pro-Trump insurrectionists, not to mention a raging pandemic, President Biden must heal partisan wounds and put the world’s largest economy back on track.

The Brexit deal has failed to have any major effect on the exchange rate of the pound since January 1. The pound has held steady against the US dollar at US$1.36 and has strengthened slightly against the euro to €1.12. This was very much consistent with the modest expectations of the markets. But what about the longer term?

January 19th already, too. This new year is flying by and maybe that's because 2020 seemed to take forever. Even though we are still locked down, there is, hopefully, light at the end of the tunnel but before we start to take off the masks and party like it's 2019 (remember the good old days), let's keep in mind that there's still a lot of work ahead of us and, according to the CEO of vaccine-maker, Moderna, this Covid virus is in it for the long haul.

It's Martin Luther King day so the markets are closed.It's a good day to read his "I Have a Dream" speech – really is amazing when you think of the great social change in this nation that was set in motion by one man with a vision. Here's a great video of the actual event.

The urgency of vaccinating nursing home residents is evident in the numbers. The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed the lives of more than 136,000 residents and employees of long-term care facilities in the U.S. alone, accounting for nearly 40% of all U.S. deaths linked to the disease. Echoing that urgency, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar declared in mid-December, “We can have every nursing home patient vaccinated in the United States by Christmas.” Yet, by Christmas, most states had barely begun.

Americans witnessed an alarming and deadly failure in planning and policing at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. The FBI failed to sound intelligence alarms, including about dozens of targets on the terrorist watch list traveling to Washington, D.C.U.S. Park Police, D.C. police and the National Guard, who collectively policed the “Save America” rally that preceded the riot, deviated from common crowd-control techniques by allowing rallygoers to bring flagpoles and other items that were later used as weapons. Capitol Police also failed to take seriously threats from white supremacists and other Trump supporters. They lacked contingency planning, proper staffing and adequate equipment.

Some Republican congressional leaders, including U.S. Reps. Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks and Paul Gosar, along with Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, joined President Trump in trying to pin the violent siege of the U.S. Capitol building on antifa, a loose movement of left-wing, anti-racist and anti-fascist activists.

Does deplatforming work from a technical perspective?

Volkswagen’s chairman, Herbert Deiss, has been struggling to bring the company’s stock price back to its previous heights since he took over the reins of the German car maker six years ago. The business has been embroiled in infighting, scandals and board tussles. Diess was appointed in 2015 at the peak of the diesel emissions scandal, when VW was caught using software settings to under-report emissions. He was surprisingly mellow in a recent LinkedIn post in which he acknowledged that there has been significant resistance within the company that he has yet to resolve. He went on to detail his plans to turn around the fortunes of an increasingly disrupted VW.

New Administration, same policy. Joe Biden pledged yesterday to give all of us another $1,400 in direct payments and, in a shocking change of policy from the previous administration, pledged real money to pay for vaccines and TESTING to start getting the virus under control. As crazy as that sounds – we need it very badly with 2M Global Deaths and 91M Global Cases and over 20% of each coming from America, which is already on fire.