DOJ to Rudy Giuliani: ‘Oops!’

Posted on | November 15, 2022 | Comments Off on DOJ to Rudy Giuliani: ‘Oops!’

Mentioned this in the earlier post, but gosh, isn’t it just a timely coincidence that we’re just now learning this?

Federal prosecutors in New York said Monday they have declined to file criminal charges against former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, more than a year after his apartment and office were searched by the FBI.
The grand jury investigation has concluded “and that based on information currently available to the Government, criminal charges are not forthcoming,” prosecutors said in a letter to the court.
Prosecutors asked the court to end the appointment of Barbara S. Jones, the retired federal judge who had been appointed special master in the case.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan had been deciding whether Giuliani, one of Trump’s lawyers and a close adviser, violated lobbying laws when he campaigned for the ouster of then-U.S. Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch from Ukraine.
The FBI seized more than a dozen devices from Giuliani’s home and office during a search in April 2021. Jones had been reviewing the contents.
Giuliani “was very pleased” when he learned Monday he would face no foreign lobbying charges, his attorney told ABC News.
The attorney, Bob Costello, said he informed Giuliani shortly after the U.S. attorney’s office issued its letter.
“We are very pleased that they did this,” Costello said. “I’m not surprised that they did this because I saw the evidence, or lack thereof, and knew Rudy Giuliani didn’t do anything wrong.”
“They deviated from office policy by issuing a statement like this, which is very nice, because there’s a memorialization now that Rudy Giuliani didn’t do anything wrong in Ukraine.” Costello added he wished prosecutors had done it sooner.
“The mayor has been completely and totally vindicated,” Giuliani spokesperson Ted Goodman told ABC News in a statement. “The grand jury failed to find even probable cause that a crime was committed, which is the basis for a search warrant.”
A spokesman for the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York declined to comment beyond the letter that was filed on the public docket.
Costello had denied any wrongdoing by his client speaking to ABC News at the time Giuliani’s home and office were raided last year.
“They’re trying to make Rudy Giuliani look like a criminal. He has done nothing wrong,” Costello said in April 2021.
On April 28, 2021, Giuliani was awoken by federal agents at 6 a.m. at his home on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Costello told ABC News. Agents took electronic devices, including Giuliani’s cellphone, while at his office they seized devices, including a computer belonging to longtime Giuliani assistant Jo Ann Zafonte, Costello said.
Giuliani, though he is now off the hook in the Southern District of New York, he remains a target of criminal investigators in Georgia over his role in seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

The Georgia case will, of course, come to an ignominious end just as soon as it ceases to serve the partisan purposes of Democrats, which is why this federal “investigation” ended when it did. The whole point was to keep Giuliani quiet — to prevent him from defending Trump — while the persecution of Trump supporters and Nancy Pelosi’s J6 witch hunt continued through Election Day. Once the midterm campaign ended, so did the DOJ “investigation” of Giuliani. In related news . . .

Christopher Wray Refuses to Answer
Whether Or Not His Paid Informants Were
Inside the Capitol Building on January 6th

It has been reported that the FBI had at least eight informants inside the Proud Boys, and a dozen more who were part of the J6 riot crowd, and it’s hard to avoid the suspicion that these fed assets acted the role of agents provocateurs, inciting the “insurrection” at the Capitol.

Rep. Higgins: “Did the FBI have confidential human sources on J6?”

Wray: “The suggestion that the FBI's confidential human sources or FBI employees in someway instigated or orchestrated Jan 6th, that's categorically false.”

Higgins: “It should be a no!”
pic.twitter.com/KViFcPcWDT

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) November 15, 2022

Even if we could take Wray’s word for this — which we can’t, because he’s notoriously dishonest — one does not have to believe that the FBI’s sources “instigated or orchestrated” the riot in order to question what, exactly, was going on here. If, as has been alleged, the riot was a “conspiracy,” plotted in advance, why didn’t the FBI’s sources warn somebody to beef up security so that the riot could be prevented?

That’s a rhetorical question. Because we all know the answer.

Category: Crime

Our Long National Nightmare Is Over: Republicans Win House Majority

Posted on | November 15, 2022 | Comments Off on Our Long National Nightmare Is Over: Republicans Win House Majority

It shouldn’t take an entire week to count the votes — Florida, notably, counted all theirs in about four hours — but at last it’s done:

It is now official. Republicans have won the House of Representatives. According to Decision Desk HQ, the GOP will hold at least 218 seats following yet another race called in their favor.
Nancy Pelosi has been dethroned. The seat that pushed Republicans over the finish line was in California’s 3rd district, won by Kevin Kiley, who has been an outspoken fighter against Gavin Newsom in the state.
Looking at the outstanding races left, it is probable that the GOP will reach at least 220 seats and may end up with as many as 222. Lauren Boebert in CO-3 is currently leading and is simply waiting on the “curing” period to end. Other races in California that seem probable to go Republican include Mike Garcia’s seat.
This isn’t the outcome Republicans expected, but it is something. Winning is better than losing, and with winning comes the ability to dictate committee assignments, floor votes, and investigations. There are going to be a lot of entertaining things happening over the next two years. Buckle up and enjoy the show.

BTW, Decision Desk HQ was started by an Ace of Spades co-blogger who got tired of liberal media organizations (e.g., Associated Press) acting as de facto “official” arbiters of who had won various elections. In an era when every state’s election results are publicly available on the Internet, there’s no need to let the media exercise this authority, so now bloggers do it. Note that there are still 14 races “too close to call,” and never mind whether the vote counts were accurate in Arizona, Nevada and other states where the counting went on forever.

The biggest immediate consequence of the Republican victory is that Nancy Pelosi’s J6 witch-hunt committee is now finished, done, over, kaput. It served its partisan purpose — to smear Republicans as treasonous “insurectionists” and threaten them with contempt charges — while ginning up propaganda about the alleged “threat to democracy” posed by “election deniers,” but all that is over now.

Now we stumble onward, like zombies in a Wes Craven flick . . .

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

So, immediately *after* Election Day …
A. The second-largest crypto exchange goes bankrupt.
B. DOJ to Giuliani: "Never mind."
C. Russian missiles hit Poland.

Just a series of random coincidences, you see.

— The Patriarch Tree (@PatriarchTree) November 15, 2022

Category: Election

In The Mailbox: 11.14.22

Posted on | November 15, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.14.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Director Blue: Enviro-Globalists Are The New Mayans
EBL: The System Is The Steal
Twitchy: Media Calls AZ Race For Hobbs, also, FBI Had Eight Informants Inside The Proud Boys Around January 6
Louder With Crowder: ‘Just doing what I always do’, Did Elon Musk fire a yappy insubordinate employee LIVE on Twitter?,[YES HE DID!] and Dave Chappelle explains Trump’s appeal slow enough for liberals to understand
Vox Popoli: The Global Moral Compass, Never Forget, What Makes Boomers Special, and Unleash the Memes
Stoic Observations: Wakanda Weeps
Gab News: Dangers Of Democracy

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Don’t Blame Trump, Martin Shaw’s Miraculous Conversion, and Three Worlds Of Evangelicalism & The Gods’ Return
American Greatness: Third World Electorate, This Wasn’t an Election, and Biden’s Bumbling in Asia Draws Ridicule From International Press
American Power: Why Independent Voters Broke for Democrats in the Midterms, How the 2022 Midterms Became a Squeaker, and American Politics Is Being Shaped by the AWFLs (Affluent White Liberal Feminists)
American Thinker: Abolish ‘Voting Season’ and Bring Back Election Day, With This Obstacle in Place, Republicans Can’t Get the White House, and How Wisconsin Streetfighters Disrupted a Democrat Ballot-Gathering System
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Colombia’s new socialist president puts the country’s foreign policy at the service of dictators, Biden’s concessions to the Castro dictatorship fuels exodus & kills Cubans, Cuban sugar declared unsafe due to contamination by ‘objectionable materials’, and Spain’s Communist postage stamp axed by judge, legal battle begins
BattleSwarm: Texas Election Results Roundup for 2022, also, Veterans Day – Celebrating Ralph Puckett
Behind The Black: SpaceX launches two Intelsat communications satellites, Red China launches Tianzhou freighter to Tiangong-3 space station, NASA managers okay SLS launch attempt November 16th, and Time to face some hard truths about America’s political future
Cafe Hayek: What’s Happening to Econ Teaching?
CDR Salamander: Post-Election Natsec Hotwash – on Midrats, also, “Hoist the Flag and Sound the Trumpet”
Chicago Boyz: Quote of the Day – Veterans Day 2022, also, ABC – Anywhere But China
Da Tech Guy: Can the Navy get any older?, A Very Important Piece By Jazz Shaw and three important points, All Pathetic 96+ Loss League Final Report. LeBron Cheers, and At least overconfidence won’t be a problem for the GOP in 2024 as it was after the two Red Wave elections
Don Surber: Lawsuits could end the trans fad, Fix the Republican Party, and Media falls for another fraud
First Street Journal: Sigh. Now Trump Is Going After Virginia Gov Youngkin, Brandon Flies In To COP27, Yammers About Forcing Other People To Make Progress, and NY Times Is Here To Tell You How To Save Money On Your Biden Inflated Power Bills
Gates Of Vienna: In Solidarity With NATO, Giorgia Meloni Affirms Italian Support for Ukraine, ISIS – The Italian Connection, Culture-Enriching Rape of an 11-Year-Old in Vienna-Meidling, and Putting the Wind up the Germans
The Geller Report: Maricopa County Election Judge Is Threatened by Supervisors After Speaking Out About Tabulation Errors, also, FTX CEO Who Stole Billions in Cypto Ponzi Scheme Is DEMOCRATS’ Second Largest Donor After Soros
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, NGC 7038, And Just Like That, and The Carina Nebula
Hollywood In Toto: Rainn Wilson ‘Changes’ His Name, Saves Planet?, God’s Country Captures Woke Overreach to Near Perfection, and Woke-Free Ticket to Paradise Brings Rom-Coms Back from the Abyss
The Lid: Biden’s Best Lies During His 22 Months As POTUS, also, Days After Election, Biden Gives Amnesty To 300,000+ Foreigners
Legal Insurrection: Mark Kelly Wins Arizona Senate Race, California Remains a Blue State Hellscape, Nevada Senate Race Called For Democrat Cortez Masto, Student Activists ‘Demand’ Ohio State University Divest From Fossil Fuels, and Hollowed Out Youth Crisis
Nebraska Energy Observer: Change is good -decompressing from politics!, also, Remembrance Sunday
Outkick: John Calipari Treats Coal Miner To VIP Experience At Kentucky Basketball Game, Dayton’s International Sensation ‘Mongolian Mike’ Sends Fans Into A Frenzy By Balling Out In College Basketball’s Most Beautiful Jerseys, Celtics Star Asks Why Nike, Which Bends The Knee To Communist China, Suddenly Cares About Ethics, 70,000 German NFL Fans Join Together For Goosebump-Inducing Sing-A-Long Of John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’, and Jeff Saturday Defies Expectations & Haters To Win First Game As Colts Interim HC
Power Line: Why Climate Models Don’t Work, Rays of Hope, and A House closely divided
Shark Tank: Who Will Lead The Sunken Florida Democrats?
Shot In The Dark: What The Klink Cabinet Was To Transparency…, Open Letter To Hennepin County Subjects, and What A Difference Two Years Makes
STUMP: Election Post-Mortem: New York Karma
The Political Hat: The Pro-Life Movement – Preparation Is Not Practical Experience
This Ain’t Hell: Election spending – Beto and Stacey’s spending, Soros’ success, Detective Accused of Lying About Military Service, B-17 and P-63 collide in mid-air over Dallas, Military short takes – Russian losses, another LCS down, C130H followup, and Poll pads at voting center add voters as poll is being closed
Transterrestrial Musings: Going Ahead With The Launch, Artemis III, and Starship Progress
Victory Girls: Show Us The Money – $1 Billion Spent In Afghanistan Since 2021, Elon Musk’s Most Epic Troll Yet, and Zeldin As New RNC Head? Why Not?
Volokh Conspiracy: NIMBYism and Economic Ignorance, also, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit Enjoins Biden Student Loan Forgiveness Plan
Watts Up With That: Green Fail: British Consumers Paying £1 billion per year for Wind Energy which Cannot be Used, Four HUNDRED Private Jets Attended the COP27 Climate Conference, and Dissecting a Wind Project: An Introduction to Bad Economics (and political correctness)
Weasel Zippers: More Than 400 Private Jets Flew In For UN Climate Conference, CNN Accuses Lottery Of “Systemic Racism” After Massive Powerball Payout, Pelosi Claims Democrats Have “Always Been” Unifying The Country, Biden Pulls Back Promise To Codify Roe V. Wade, and Biden Department of Education Official Claims School Discipline Is “Racist,” Blames “Whiteness”
The Federalist: Suburban Saint Louis Voters Reject Drag Shows At Libraries And Schools By 40-Point Margin, We Need To Talk About What Didn’t Happen On Election Day, How To Eliminate Democrats’ Massive Single Women Electoral Advantage, and Republican Leaders Have A Choice
Mark Steyn: Slow Boat to China, A Caliph Departs, Where Will You Go? Elia Kazan, Wild River and the TVA, and Lost at Home and Abroad

Early Black Friday Deals
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Category: Linkagery

Further Proof the Washington Post Copy Desk Is Staffed by Incompetent Idiots

Posted on | November 14, 2022 | Comments Off on Further Proof the Washington Post Copy Desk Is Staffed by Incompetent Idiots

As if further proof were needed. They quickly changed the headline and re-wrote the lead, but you have to wonder, what kind of hiring process results in one of the nation’s leading newspapers employing an editor who would click the “publish” button on something like that?

“A gunman has killed three people at a university — quick, somebody write an upbeat human interest feature on the killer!”

The re-written version of the story now leads with the fact that the suspect had two previous “incidents” involving weapons:

The 22-year-old University of Virginia student accused of killing three classmates and wounding two others on campus had previously been investigated by the school for claiming he owned a gun and was the subject of a separate incident in 2021 that involved a concealed weapon, police announced Monday morning. . . .
[Christopher Darnell Jones Jr.] had joined about 25 other students Sunday on a school trip to Washington, where the group watched a play and ate together, the university’s chief of police, Timothy Longo Sr., said at a press conference. When the students returned to campus, Longo said, Jones opened fire for reasons that remain unknown.
Jones, now charged with three counts of second-degree murder, had come to the attention of the school’s threat assessment team after they learned in September 2022 that Jones told someone he owned a gun, Longo said.
“The comment about Mr. Jones owning a gun was not made in conjunction with any threats,” said Longo, who told reporters that the office of student affairs “made efforts” to contact Jones and interviewed his roommate. That roommate did not report seeing Jones with a firearm.
Jones was at the center of “a prior criminal incident involving a concealed weapon violation that occurred outside the city of Charlottesville in February 2021,” Longo said, noting that, as a student, Jones was required to report the case to the school but never did.
The university filed administrative charges but the case was still pending when Jones allegedly gunned down his classmates Sunday night.

Heckuva job, “threat assessment team”! Nothing like filing “administrative charges” to deter armed violence. The three fatalities in the shooting were all UVA football players.

Lavel Davis Jr. was a particularly promising player, a 6-foot-7 wide receiver who caught 20 passes for 515 yards and five touchdowns his freshman season, and started six of eight games as a junior after missing his sophomore season due to injury. Now, here’s the “troubled childhood” angle that was the WaPo story’s original lead:

Once, Jones had been celebrated as a model of perseverance, overcoming a difficult childhood to earn his spot on a prestigious university’s football team.
He spent his early years living in Richmond public housing complexes, where it was often too dangerous to play outside, the Richmond-Times Dispatch reported in a 2018 profile. At night, while his mother worked, Jones was sometimes responsible for feeding his three siblings, walking to nearby grocery stores to pick up Ramen noodles or bologna. When he was 5, his parents divorced and his father left, a loss that he called “one of the most traumatic things that happened to me in my life.”
“When I went to school, people didn’t understand me,” said Jones, then 18, telling a reporter that he attacked other children who bullied him for being smart, leading to suspensions and stints in alternative school.
A woman who identified herself as Jones’s mother, Margo, answered a Washington Post reporter’s call Monday morning.
“I can tell you now that Chris was a good kid,” she said, before hanging up.
Brion Logan, his close friend and teammate in both middle and high school, recalled Jones being taunted as a child.
“Chris would wear outdated clothes and outdated shoes that a lot of people did not wear at the time, and they’d make fun of him because of his situation,” said Logan, a 22-year-old Navy enlistee. “He was always a nice person. He grew up in an unfortunate situation with his dad not being in his life too much and his mom not being the best-off financially.”
Despite the chaos in his life, Jones always made good grades.
“I would get upset because my intelligence was being insulted. Kids would pick on me — ‘Why did you do that? Why did you answer that question?’ ” Jones told the Times-Dispatch. “And in that world, disrespect means you should fight.”
When he reached sixth grade, his family moved to Varina, 10 miles outside Richmond. There, he found mentors, especially through football, but his relationship with his mother fell apart.
In search of a “new start” in 2016, he moved to Petersburg to live with his grandmother, Mary Jones. The Times-Dispatch story reported that over the next two years, mentors “helped him let go of his anger.”
“He always had strong goals. He was ambitious, but his anger simply got in the way,” one of those mentors, Xavier Richardson, said back then. “I try to help him understand that he has been able to succeed despite his obstacles, and he can thrive from them.”
Jones appeared to flourish in the years that followed. He played linebacker and running back at Petersburg High, earning honorable mention all-conference honors as a senior, according to a football biography on the University of Virginia website. He belonged to the National Honor Society and National Technical Honor Society and served as president of both the Key Club and Jobs for Virginia Graduates program.

Wonder if his high school yearbook entry mentions that classmates voted Jones “Most Likely to Murder Three People in Cold Blood”?

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.)

Category: Crime, Virginia

Late Night With Rule 5 Sunday: IJN Uranami

Posted on | November 14, 2022 | 1 Comment

— compiled by Wombat-socho

This has been, to put it mildly, a shitty weekend. Today I got the word that a good friend of mine, conservative journalist & SF fan Martin Morse Wooster, was killed by a hit & run driver while attending an ale conference in Williamsburg, Virginia. Also, I spent considerable time trying to talk another friend in the DC area out of becoming an hero, which is probably going to be an ongoing effort.
On a more cheerful note, this week’s shipgirl is IJN Uranami, one of the post-WW1 Fubuki class. Uranami was a busy girl, playing a prominent role in the invasions of Malaya, Borneo, and various islands in the Dutch East Indies as well as the Tokyo Express supply runs to Guadalcanal. She finally met her end in the Battle of Leyte Gulf, when the convoy she was escorting to Manila got jumped by planes from Task Force 77’s escort carriers Manila Bay, Marcus Island, Natoma Bay, & Petrof Bay. Uranami collected two bombs & several rockets, which sent her to the bottom at noon, October 26. Her wreck has not been found.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.

IJN Uranami from Azur Lane.

NINETY MILES FROM TYRANNY: Hot Pick of the Late Night, The 90 Miles Mystery Box Episode #1897, Morning Mistress, and Girls With Guns.

ANIMAL MAGNETISM: Rule Five Shoplifting Friday, and the Saturday Gingermageddon.

EBL: MAGA – DeSantis & Trump, Ben Hur, Veterans Day, Bond Girls – Never Say Never Again, A View To A Kill, Octopussy, For Your Eyes Only, and Moonraker; Marines Birthday Rule 5, Anna Paulina Luna, White Lotus – Season 1 & Season 2; “Lord Lucan Is Missing“, and Varshavyanka.

A VIEW FROM THE BEACH: Katyonok, Thank You for Your Service, Climate and the Environment, Fish Pic Friday, Good News for Striper Fisherpeople?, Thursday Tanlines, The Wednesday Wetness, The Annual Leaf Post, Election 2022 – Don’t Fear the Reaper!, Riahannon, The Final Countdown – DIY, The Monday Morning Stimulus, Palm Sunday and No, Not the Beaches!

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Category: Rule 5

Why Vote-By-Mail Is The End Of The Republic

Posted on | November 13, 2022 | Comments Off on Why Vote-By-Mail Is The End Of The Republic

by Smitty

Hypothetically speaking (not purely, I had anecdotal awareness of at least one occurrence a few election cycles ago), one can use ballots sent to addresses in multiple states to vote more than once in an election.

Who would know?

So, what is to prevent some wiseguy from registering in every state that automatically pushes ballots to addresses, unless removal is explicitly requested by the voter? (I supported one such case last Tuesday as an election officer here in the Old Dominion).

As far as I can tell this is Moral Hazard writ large. If there is no substantial means of detecting such fraud, and the Demsheviks can’t be arsed to enforce laws on non-conservative perpetrators anyway, then we can be relatively confident that ballot boxes will be stuffed, stuffed, and stuffed.

But it’s worse than that.

Part of what makes democracy work is the secret ballot. When the voter goes to a polling place, that voter is afforded a private place to mark and cast the ballot without interference. If we need to be all-in for Bernie to maintain domestic tranquility, fine. But when it’s just us and the ballot, we should be at liberty to vote any way that our conscience dictates.

It is quite possible, even likely, that people are marking their vote-by-mail ballots without coercion. Except that we cannot guarantee that. At a polling place, if the voter requests assistance (Virginia, anyway) requires an explicit voter assistance form just to keep everything tidy, so that the appearance of unwanted kibitzing is minimized.

Beside personal security, there is ballot security. It astounds me that getting ballots printed so that they can be physically marked and scanned on the spot is a challenge. In ten years of supporting elections, I have had one time that a rover had to be called in to clean the scanner portion when it got a bit dusty. We had a second scanner, so no one was inconvenienced.

But all of the ballots are packaged and tamper-sealed and there just aren’t any physical security questions. We closed the precinct and reported results in 1:15 (one hour, 15 minutes).

What the WHAT, Arizona?

Having supported elections for a decade, one is sympathetic to the need to minimize the level of effort for everyone, from voters, to the itinerant election staffers like myself, to the regular county election folks. Legal voters are paying customers. Let them participate.

However, “Election Season” is disgusting.

A credible election:

Requires voters to put on their Big People Pants and be registered in the state of primary residence. Only.
Ensures voters cast their ballots securely, in private. Maybe the county visits nursing homes?
Doesn’t spray ballots at random addresses like Ed McMahon getting his Publisher’s Clearing House on. (Did I date myself there? Vulgar Hunter Biden metaphor is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Maintains a credible chain of custody for the ballots. Note that counting them all on Election Day really cuts down on risk.

Same day registration is insane

On the one hand, the Demsheviks have same-day registration in place, and then stand out beyond the exclusion zone limit and pass out sample ballots. Perfectly legal. Smart, too. For them. Before too many more election cycles, all of those homeless encampments in the blue cities will suddenly get all mobile, show up in swing districts long enough to obtain an address, get their same-day registration on, vote a sample ballot, and then migrate.

The same cadre might, with enough early voting opportunity, be able to (optionally) wash, rinse, and repeat the performance a few times per election.

Legally!

Oh no, no, no, Smitty is just a paranoid and bigoted member of the Binary, Intersectional, Tyrannical, Cis-Hetero, Slave-Lord Anti-Woke Patriarchy (BITCHSLAP). Who would do such a thing? That would be like starting a land war in Asia, funneling taxpayer dollars to a foreign government, which, while under attack, somehow has time to collaborate with a crypto currency exchange whose main brain is a huge Democrat Party donor. Just crazy talk.

Bonus denunciation of Ranked Choice Voting (RCV)

As if bulk-mailed ballots and same-day registration were not stupid enough, this RCV idea has really got to go. It may be OK for your HOA, where you actually know everyone and such a device could save time.

But, as Jonah Goldberg noted, “Complexity is a subsidy”. The same people who decry “disparate impact” are keen on inflicting it upon voters. Runoffs have the virtue of slowing down the process and allowing voters a second thought WITHOUT any loss of election integrity. You can judge this idea by a glance at its proponents: insiders.

Summary

Our election system needs reform with an eye toward integrity and a side glance at simplicity. Other than deployed military, the use-cases for ballots in the mail are weak. Prioritize participation in the election. Move Veterans Day to Election Day and make it a twofer–they are not unrelated. Americans have not perished supporting this Constitution to have a bunch of godless Commies destroy our elections.

If the GOP is not making election reform a priority, there is probably a reason, and that reason is not a good one.

Category: Election

Sam Bankman-Fried: MIT-Educated Crypto Swindler Scammed Billions, Donated Millions to Democrats

Posted on | November 13, 2022 | Comments Off on Sam Bankman-Fried: MIT-Educated Crypto Swindler Scammed Billions, Donated Millions to Democrats

How could a Ponzi schemer hide in plain sight so long? That’s the real question at the heart of the story of how Sam Bankman-Fried, the son of two Stanford University law professor, became a celebrity in the financial world — rubbing shoulders with Bill Clinton and Tom Brady, among others — even while critics were pointing out that his crypto-currency empire appeared to be a swindle similar to multi-tier marketing schemes.

Universally known by his initials SBF, Bankman-Fried was nothing if not well-connected. His father, Joseph Bankman, is the Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School, while his mother, Barbara Fried, is the William W. and Gertrude H. Saunders Professor of Law at Stanford. SBF attended Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where “he graduated with a degree in physics and a minor in mathematics” in 2014. This is an important data point — whatever else you may say about Samuel Bankman-Fried, he is not stupid.

This is important, I say, because as you examine the rise and fall of SBF’s crypto empire, there are two possible explanations for what happened: (a) incompetence or (b) deliberate fraud. Given his academic pedigree, it’s difficult to believe it was (a) and therefore . . .

Say hello to SBF’s girlfriend/business partner, Caroline Ellison who, like Bankman-Fried, comes from an academic family. Her father, Glenn Ellison, is the Gregory K. Palm Professor of Economics at MIT. Caroline Ellison graduated from Stanford University in 2016 with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics. So the MIT/Stanford nexus is strong here and, if you’re old enough to remember the Vietnam War, you’re probably thinking about The Best and the Brightest — very smart people with degrees from elite schools who bring about catastrophic failure.

The details of what went wrong with SBF’s scheme are only partially known at this point. Until a couple of weeks ago, there was little awareness of any problem at the Alameda Research/FTX operation, and only in the past week has SBF’s world come crashing down. Basically, SBF created Alameda Research, “a quantitative trading firm specializing in cryptocurrencies,” in 2017. Then in 2019, he launched FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange that attracted over a million clients. He then started robbing Peter to pay Paul, making unauthorized use of funds belonging to FTX customers to prop up Alameda — allegedly, I hasten to add, as a responsible journalist. Predictably, there came a time when the money started running out, and SBF sought a new investor to rescue his enterprise; when that would-be investor did their “due diligence” research, they discovered that FTX’s bookkeeping was a toxic dumpster fire and — KABOOM! — the whole thing went bankrupt in a matter of days. The collapse was sudden, but it wasn’t as if people had no warning.

In April, FTX co-hosted the Crypto Bahamas conference at the Grand Hyatt Baha Mar in Nassau. The conference reportedly drew more than 2,000 people who paid $3,000 to attend. FTX’s cohost for the conference was “global thought leadership forum SALT” and the “alternative investments firm SkyBridge,” founded by Anthony Scaramucci. Among the headliners at the conference were NFL quarterback Tom Brady, former President Bill Clinton and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.

Literally every article written at the time about that conference referred to Sam Bankman-Fried as a “30-year-old billionaire,” and he appeared in a T-shirt, shorts and sneakers, which are apparently the only kind of clothes he owns. That was his chosen image — the billionaire slob.

Never trust people like that. Such behavior is disrespectful.

There was something else about SBF’s carefully crafted image, namely his oft-asserted claim to be an “effective altruist.” He wasn’t one of those greedy capitalists — no, Samuel Bankman-Fried was just making money so he could give it away as charity benefiting worthy causes. And, of course, by “worthy causes,” I mean woke liberal bullshit like “climate change” and massive campaign contributions to the Democratic Party.

“Sam Bankman-Fried . . . donated more than $40 million to Democrat candidates and super-PACs, including providing the initial funding for the Protect Our Future PAC. He was the second largest donor to the 2020 Biden campaign, pouring over $10 million into Biden-related campaign organizations.”
— David Strom, HotAir.com, Nov. 10

Is anyone really surprised by this? Of course, there are shady people in the financial world who are Republicans, but the 30-year-old MIT-educated billionaire slob? The “effective altruist” who cares about climate change and has a girlfriend who’s a Harry Potter fan?

No, he’s a Democrat. It only makes sense. As the tangled web of SBF’s multi-billion-dollar swindle is unraveled, we should keep this in mind: Democrats collected tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions from a scammer who defrauded investors around the world. The damage inflicted by Sam Bankman-Fried is only beginning to become apparent. It’s possible that SBF’s swindle may collapse the entire crypto-currency market and, I repeat, people were warned it was a Ponzi scheme.

Click and watch that video, which was posted to YouTube in April, just about the time SBF was hosting his Crypto Bahamas conference. Stephen Findeisen, a/k/a “Coffeezilla,” is a Texas A&M alumnus who got interested in exposing fraud because of his personal experiences with friends who got involved in a multi-tier marketing scam. As Findeisen points out, there were interviews in which Bankman-Fried more or less admitted he was running a Ponzi scheme. There were numerous clues that SBF’s business wasn’t legit but . . . “30-year-old billionaire”!

Some people want to believe that the economic “system” is rigged, and that successful people are beneficiaries of unearned “privilege.” In such a worldview, the most successful people are the worst people and all the truly good people are impoverished failures. This belief system functions as a balm to soothe the injured pride of people who secretly envy the ultra-wealthy. Such people like to think that the reason they’re not rich is because (a) capitalism is inherently corrupt and (b) they themselves are too ethical to do whatever it takes to get rich. Having no such illusions myself — I’m just too lazy and disorganized, so once my “Become a Famous Rock Star” plan didn’t work out, I basically had no choice but to become a journalist, a notoriously ill-paid occupation — I don’t hate or envy rich people, and would be very happy if my kids became rich, because then I could just sponge off them in my retirement years. Meanwhile, I’m just rattling the tip jar in hopes that readers get enough entertainment value out of this blog they’ll be willing to spare some cash to keep it going, a “business plan” (if you can call it that) which has worked out surprisingly well over the past decade-plus.

If you believe the “system” is rigged, however, the phenomenon of a 30-year-old billionaire tends to confirm your worldview, showing the economy to be a circus in which any sort of clown can win.

When this bushy-headed slob in sneakers was CEO of a company once valued at $32 billion, people could point to him and say, “See? Capitalism is just a gigantic crapshoot. All that ‘work hard and save your money’ stuff is just a lot of moralistic bullshit.” Now that Bankman-Fried is bankrupt (and quite likely to end up in prison), however, what lesson have we learned? We have learned what I’ve been saying for years: If something seems too good to be true, it’s probably neither good nor true.

Sticking the Big Yellow Button in here because this blog has always been in favor of shameless capitalism. There’s no “get rich quick” secret here, no something-for-nothing flimflam, just me writing stuff that I hope you’ll enjoy reading. A simple fee-for-service transaction that I’ve often summarized as The Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

So far, this arrangement has worked out OK. And unlike a certain 30-year-old crypto billionaire, I’m not heading to federal prison. Life is good.

UPDATE: As might be expected, while I was writing this, Ed Driscoll (who unlike me is neither disorganized nor lazy) published a succinct roundup of news about the FTX meltdown.

Category: Crime

FMJRA 2.0: Ludwig II Von Bayern

Posted on | November 13, 2022 | Comments Off on FMJRA 2.0: Ludwig II Von Bayern

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Another week of .400 baseball – Marichal got us a win at San Francisco, and Joe Coleman held the A’s to two runs while we scored six, so we wound up with two wins out of five games. Could have been worse.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.