[American Greatness] Sam Bankman-Fried is the ultimate dangerous and ridiculous expression of the most toxic and creepy culture in America.
If he did not exist, he would have to be invented.
“Ya. Hehe. I had to be. It’s what reputations are made of, to some extent. I feel bad for those guys who get f—ed by it, by this dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us." —Sam Bankman-Fried
The FTX Bitcoin empire of 30-year-old CEO Sam Bankman-Fried is in shambles. Or more specifically, his "dumb game" cryptocurrency exchange has destroyed thousands of lives. Electronically, he may have robbed perhaps a million investors, and along with them hundreds of large institutional investors.
Mysteriously, only after the conclusion of the midterm elections, did we suddenly learn that this left-wing "philanthropist" and benefactor of Democratic politics, this megadonor to the quid pro quo puff-piece media, this con artist protected from federal securities regulators, had drained off, lost, hidden, or spent billions of dollars of other people’s money.
As a result, the Bahamas-basking, tax-avoiding, polyamorous sybarite, and heartthrob of progressive moralists, now claims he has no wherewithal to honor his financial commitments to his own investors. Preliminary postmortem auditors sigh that they have never encountered a greater financial mess than what Bankman-Fried has left in his wake.
How does the most sophisticated financial system in the history of civilization allow a virtue-signaling nerd to nearly wreck it? Where were the Federal Trade Commission, the Department of Justice, the IRS, and all the other alphabet soup agencies that supposedly exist so that someone like Bankman-Fried does not? Where is Merrick Garland and his special prosecutors, the FBI with its televised SWAT swoops and leg irons?
For all the performance-art boasts of simply doing good for others by doing far better for himself, Bankman-Fried may soon be revealed to be one of the great, dissolute con artists in American history. Like the infamous Charles Ponzi, "Bankman" may become our eponymous word in the 21st century for electronically driven, pyramid-scheme theft.
His Stanford-Silicon Valley moral veneer was shiny but otherwise razor thin. Yet Bankman-Fried told at least one truth when he explained to obsequious media what his ilk easily does to fool purported suckers who send him cash, while he avoided federal and media oversight: "This dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us."
Well, not everyone. Instead, he might qualify his "everyone" as the like-minded, cynical, left-wing politicos, the kindred media hacks at the Washington Post and New York Times, and brethren investor toadies who helped him render Bernie Madoff a small-potato sinner in comparison.
Bankman-Fried had showered Joe Biden in 2020 with millions of dollars in campaign donations and did so again with larger sums to congressional candidates in 2022. His public relations arm of FTX exuded the usual virtue speak—including promised impending multibillion-dollar gifting—for utopian, Democratic, and progressive causes. And the media on spec gushed about their pet grunger as he sought to buy protection from Democratic fixers.
[Daily Skeptic] I wrote recently about the origins of the pandemic and who knew what and when, noting that both the U.S. and China clearly knew about the virus earlier than they have admitted and both are still engaged in a cover-up of what really happened and what they knew.
Here, after a brief recap, I want to look more closely at who isn’t involved in the cover-up, or not entirely, and what that tells us.
It’s clear that China is covering up both the lab origin of the virus and early spread prior to December 2019. As a new report from independent research group DRASTIC, summarised in the Washington Post, reminds us, within hours of the first public announcement of "pneumonia of unknown origin" by the Wuhan Municipal Health Commission on December 30th 2019, a second notice appeared warning "not to disclose information to the public without authorisation". This lack of transparency continued, with the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) issuing gag orders, punishing ’whistleblowers’, hiding key Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) virus data, not cooperating with investigations and failing to acknowledge early cases which undermine the wet market origin story. While some such cases from November 2019 were leaked to the South China Morning Post, the CCP has never officially acknowledged them.
It’s also clear that U.S. scientists are covering up the lab leak and not cooperating with the investigation — which was the reason Jeffrey Sachs disbanded the Covid origins taskforce which formed part of the Lancet Covid commission he was chairing, perceiving severe conflicts of interest and a basic lack of cooperation. As recently as July 2022, two NIH-funded studies involving Kristian Andersen and others claimed to find conclusive evidence for the wet market theory, despite there now being reams of evidence for international spread of the virus before December 2019, which the studies failed even to acknowledge.
The U.S. CDC likewise is covering up the early spread of the virus as part of its lab leak cover-up, and has refused to acknowledge or investigate the presence of the virus in the U.S. before Jan 18th 2020 despite all the evidence that now shows this to be a fact.
So who isn’t involved in the cover-up? The World Health Organisation (WHO) does not appear to be. Back in June 2020, the WHO encouraged countries to look properly into early spread. As the Guardian reported: "The WHO has urged countries to investigate any other early suspicious cases, so that the circulation of the virus can be better understood, encouraging doctors to check records for pneumonia cases of unspecified origin in late 2019."
#2
SARCASM SWITCH ON
But, CCP only reported each and every week, the Statistically & Logically impossible, deaths from Covid-19+ were 4634 to/or 4636 for each week for 88 weeks from April 20th, 2020 to Dec. 31st, 2021, for their population of 1,448,471,400+/-.
#3
This is by far the most important observation from the entire fiasco. Not a single institution worked. Not the courts, medical community, industry, media, government, etc., etc., etc. In the entire world. Every. Single. One. Was / Is compromised.
[American Greatness] A good deal of scathing commentary has been heaped on Emily Oster’s terrible piece in the far-Left Atlantic on COVID amnesty, so I won’t spend more time on the fundamental lunacy and—as our own Ned Ryun aptly puts it—the chutzpah of this old-new leftist idea: That you have to let everyone off the hook for the terrible things they did because they had no way of knowing at the time that it was terrible. ("I’m sorry I bashed your head in! I thought it was in the best interests of society!")
Instead, I want to ask the Osters of the world a question of perspective: Why do you suppose it is, if there were "mistakes" on all sides, that 100 percent of the pandemic "errors in judgment" went against individual freedom and liberty? If this were an honest back-and-forth situation, where everyone was getting it wrong some of the time, you’d expect to see some big mistakes in the other direction—in the direction of not enough precaution, not enough restraint. Instead, Oster would like us to believe, we flipped a hundred coins, and every single one came up tails.
I grant you that Oster may be hysterical and totally lacking in common sense—most tenure committees consider that a prerequisite. But "mistakes" like this don’t just happen, one after the other and all tending in the same direction, unless the people guiding society have a fundamental conviction under everything else that people cannot be trusted and that the biggest threat to good order and "progress" is the people themselves.
Keep a weather-eye on the Republican Party as soon as the elections are over. Don’t expect them to rush head over heels to represent your views or actually do what you wanted them to. Trump did what the voters wanted and look what they did to him—and by "they" I mean the Republicans as much as the Democrats: You can serve the people or you can serve the government, but you can’t do both. Guess which side the GOP leadership is on?
If a new Republican caucus were serious about its duties to the voters, it would fire Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy today. No more nonsense about how good they are at maneuvering through the minutiae of procedure in Washington. It’s not that these men are incompetent; in fact they’re very good at what they do. It’s just that they’re playing for the wrong team. They’ve been the leaders of a party we didn’t vote for, elected under false pretenses by paying us lip-service every two years. They get elected by pretending to offer us an alternative to Democrats. Gotta keep that old illusion alive—it keeps everyone paying their taxes.
Mitch McConnell must not become majority leader in the Senate. Kevin McCarthy must not become majority leader in the House.
[ShabelleMedia] Remember the construction of a 700-kilometre concrete wall along the Kenya-Somalia border aimed at restoring peace in the region and keeping at bay the al-Shabaab ...... the Islamic version of the old Somali warlord... militia group?
Now the new Defence Cabinet Secretary, Aden Bare Duale, describes the move as archaic and plots to roll out a modern, sophisticated and comprehensive security system.
Continued on Page 49
#1
I have no idea if this man is telling the truth or not. I suspect not. However, has anyone else noticed that African leaders increasingly sound more reasonable and thoughtful than our own?
[Telegraph] Cryptocurrency regulation is needed to stop the next FTX-style implosion spilling over into a wider financial crash, the deputy governor of the Bank of England has said.
Sir Jon Cunliffe said Britain should "continue to bring these activities and entities within regulation", including "most obviously, the need to protect consumers".
Offshore digital coin exchange FTX, which just weeks ago had been valued at $32bn (£27bn), collapsed earlier this month leaving one million creditors out of pocket amid allegations it had mishandled customer deposits.
The Bahamas-based cryptocurrency exchange, run by 30-year-old Democrat donor Sam Bankman-Fried, had an $8bn black hole in its budget when it filed for bankruptcy two weeks ago.
The failure of FTX has spread panic through global cryptocurrency markets, wiping roughly $100bn from the value of all digital assets in the past 10 days according to data from Coinmarketcap, as a web of 130 companies linked to the bust exchange were placed into bankruptcy.
Dozens of cryptocurrency companies and investors have found their assets caught up in FTX’s collapse.
On Monday, shares in publicly listed Grayscale, the world's largest cryptocurrency fund designed to track the price of bitcoin, were trading at a 45pc discount to the digital currency, falling a further 5pc in New York. Grayscale owns $10.5bn in bitcoin, but its value has plunged to $5.5bn.
Grayscale on Friday refused to share proof of its cryptocurrency reserves, blaming "security concerns". Cryptocurrency companies have been rushing to publish audits of their reserves in an effort to quell investor fears they are exposed to FTX.
[YouTube] The story of how the #Russian #government evolved also explains why it cannot become a #democratic state in its current territorial configuration.
#2
^ Way back when if you wanted money you got a job in Manhattan, and if you wanted political power you got a job in DC. Now it's one-stop shopping. The Founding Fathers were on to something with that whole separation of powers thingy.
Posted by: Matt ||
11/22/2022 16:39 Comments ||
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#3
CaspianReport is an excellent YouTube channel. Shirvan doesn't tell you anything about geopolitics you couldn't figure out on your own; but you don't have to, because you can watch his channel. Highly recommended.
[Hot Air] It is hardly the case that every big money donor to the Democrat Party is a scammer, nor that all scammers are donors to the Democrat Party. Money, power, and corruption go together, so I am certain that plenty of Republicans have taken donations from scammers.
But an awful lot of the big scammers and moral midgets of the past few decades have been huge Democrat donors. Off the charts Democrat donors. The Venn diagram between big Democrat donors and scumbags shows a ton of overlap.
Sam Bankman-Fried, the latest fraudster to (maybe) face the music was the 2nd largest donor to the Democrats for the past two election cycles. His contributions were only exceeded by George Soros. Bankman-Fried had been promising to spend up to a billion dollars in the next election cycle to ensure Democrats win the presidency and all power in Washington.
Probably not going to happen now, I would guess.
Bankman-Fried, though, is hardly unique among the ponzi schemers and frauds to throw in their lot with the Democrats, relying on their power to shield them for years or even decades from the arm of the law. Harvey Weinstein was able to skate by for decades as a rapist and abuser in Hollywood because he made tons of money for people, and even more importantly gave tons of money to the right people.
In just the past few years a parade of prominent Democrat donors have been revealed to be evil and/or frauds; not only were these people donors to Democrats, but they were chummy with the politicians who obsequiously pumped them up as paragons of virtue. In exchange for the cash a stamp of approval was bestowed, along with a respectability that kept the worst people in the world afloat and wealthy.
Jeffrey Epstein, of course, famously palled around with the glitterati and the powerful. Princes and presidents, billionaires and academics all palled around with him in exchange for cash and...favors. Favors that will never be revealed, now that Epstein is conveniently dead of suicide. It’s not that nobody knew—Epstein had been convicted of sexual crimes long before he was abandoned by the best and the brightest. It was known that he was a pedophile, but the money flowed, so no biggie.
Commentary by Russian military journalist Boris Rozhin:
[ColonelCassad] Regarding the Turkish air strike on the American PKK training and education center in Rojava.
The very purpose was obvious, since it was at this base that the Americans trained the terrorist who staged a terrorist attack in the center of Istanbul, killing 6 and injuring several dozen civilians. Erdogan's revenge was inevitable.
It is believed that the Turks informed the United States through closed channels that such a strike would be delivered in any case, and American personnel were evacuated from there before the strike.
According to the same scheme, Iran once bombed the American Ain Assad base in Iraq, informing the United States a few hours before the strike (via Qatar and Iraq) that missile attacks would be launched on the base, which gave the United States time to transfer personnel to underground shelters. However, at that time, even according to official data, the United States had 114 wounded and shell-shocked (according to unofficial data, there were also dead).
But the main thing here is the very situation when American facilities can be bombed. First Iran, now Turkey. The world has changed...
Russia publicly disapproves of Turkish actions, but if you look at the situation in progression, then the public rhetoric and actions of the parties are not much different from standard agreements like Afrinsky. Erdogan publicly denies this, but he has publicly denied it in the past as well.
There is an important point in all these strikes - Russia and Iran are making efforts to correct Erdogan's line towards Assad. And she has already changed. Erdogan said that after the elections in Turkey, there could be progress in relations with Syria. And the other day he announced the beginning of relations from scratch with Egypt.
Accordingly, if the process of normalization in relations between Syria and Turkey moves forward in the medium term, the Kurds will become superfluous in these scenarios and few will be worried about the next strikes against them.
As it is not difficult to see, Turkey's attacks on the Kurds in Syria and Iraq and Iran's attacks on the Kurds in Iraq do not meet any serious opposition.
#3
This is how I understand the situation: the PKK has been part of the Syrian Kurd (plus some Arab tribals) team that did the majority of the work of destroying ISIS, which is what we’ve been supporting since 2015 or so. They have been wrestling with Turkey for decades over the fact that Turkey has been trying to erase its Kurds — who make up about a quarter of Turkey’s population and whom the Turks call “Mountain Turks” to erase even their identity, forbidding their language, culture, and regularly attempting to wipe out their population. Honours are about even on both sides for vicious assaults, though the majority of the dying has been done by Kurdish civilians. And Turkey has taken advantage of the Syrian civil war and the accumulation of Syrian refugees from the ISIS conquest to take Syrian territory, settling what until now were Kurdish cities and towns with those dependent and grateful Syrian Sunnis whom Turkey did not send on to invade Europe.
This is all separate from the stupid American support started by President Obama for actual Muslim Brotherhooder groups, which has not gone well at all. But President Obama was ever looking for “moderate” jihadis to surrender to, of which the Mad Mullahs of Iran were only the largest and most successful.
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Daily Skeptic] I wrote recently about the origins of the pandemic and who knew what and when, noting that both the U.S. and China clearly knew about the virus earlier than they have admitted and both are still engaged in a cover-up of what really happened and what they knew.
...... the Islamic version of the old Somali warlord...
