The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

The CEO Was a Tumblrina? How Did Somebody Overlook This Gigantic Red Flag in the FTX Catastrophe?

Posted on | November 17, 2022 | Comments Off on The CEO Was a Tumblrina? How Did Somebody Overlook This Gigantic Red Flag in the FTX Catastrophe?

Caroline Ellison, CEO of Alameda Research

“This is worse than Theranos, this is worse than Madoff, if what I’m reading is true.”
— John Reed Stark, former SEC official

Suppose that you’re a major Silicon Valley venture capitalist, someone entrusted to invest vast sums of other people’s money in new enterprises. Don’t you have an obligation, as due diligence, to research the people running the companies you’re funding? Because now I’m imagining a courtroom trial in a lawsuit brought by people who entrusted their savings to whatever VC funders decided that investing money in a company run by Sam Bankman-Fried‘s girlfriend was a good idea.

*** (Spoiler alert: It was not a good idea.) ***

The story of how Caroline Ellison ended up as CEO of Alameda Research, the company from which Bankman-Fried (known as “SBF”) spun off the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, is eventually going to be a major motion picture, the “happy ending” of which is going to be these people going to prison (if they don’t conveniently commit suicide, as sometimes happens to people who become “problematic” to the Democratic Party). Meanwhile, investors around the world — including many who had no idea their money had been invested in this blatant Ponzi scheme run by a clique of Gen Z geeks — are certain to become plaintiffs in a class-action suit against investment firms like Sequoia Capital, who ignored so many red flags about SBF’s operation. Just two months ago, Sequoia “published a long, meandering profile of Sam Bankman-Fried, a.k.a. SBF, the now-disgraced founder of the bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX. The article, ‘Sam Bankman-Fried Has a Savior Complex — And Maybe You Should Too,’ ran to an eye-glazing 14,000 words and featured flowery prose that looked especially ridiculous after FTX’s spectacular collapse.”

Sequoia deleted that article from their website, but not before somebody archived it, so you can get the full taste of enthusiastic gushing over SBF’s “epiphany” about pursuing “effective altruism,” which inspired him to quit his job as a trader at Jane Street Capital and eventually launch Alameda Research in 2017, before creating FTX in 2019. This is where Caroline Ellison enters the story. Whereas SBF is the son of two Stanford Law professors and attended MIT, Ellison is the daughter of an MIT professor and attended Stanford. (See “Assortative Mating” in The Bell Curve, pp. 110-113. Certainly Charles Murray would have something interesting to say about this.) Ellison worked at Jane Street Capital with Bankman-Fried and, like her boyfriend, Ellison became a devotee of “effective altruism.” From the 14,000-word article:

Caroline Ellison, a friend and colleague who was trading on the equities desk at Jane Street during that time, remembers the moment well. “It was unusual,” she says, “because he decided to quit — not to do anything in particular, but just under the premise that there were a lot of other options out there.” . . .
Ellison is a freckle-faced redhead with a personality that splits the difference between bubbly and nerd-ball. She’s partial to a pair of designer frames that make her look a bit like Edna Mode, the superhero stylist in The Incredibles.
About six months after SBF dropped out, Jane Street sent Ellison on a recruiting trip to California, so she decided to call on her old friend. They’d been office buddies at Jane, but they’d also occasionally socialized outside of work, too, being fellow EA acolytes.

(And by “occasionally socialized outside of work,” of course they mean, MAKING THE BEAST WITH TWO BACKS, but continue . . .)

Ellison wanted to catch up, but from the get-go, SBF was acting uncharacteristically shifty. There were several canceled coffee dates, and when the two finally did get together — at Jumpin’ Java, an old-school Berkeley coffeehouse with hand-painted murals on the wall and whimsical art in the windows—SBF evaded even the most innocuous of questions.
“So,” Ellison asked after joining SBF at a table, “what have you been up to in the last few months?” Ellison, it should be noted, was dressed as a sultry wood nymph — she was on her way to a LARP (Live Action Role Play) party. . . .

(Permit me to interrupt: She was “DRESSED AS A SULTRY WOOD NYMPH”? The future CEO of a multi-billion-dollar company was LARPing? As a WOOD NYMPH? Words fail . . .)

The story was pretty remarkable. After SBF quit Jane Street, he moved back home to the Bay Area, where Will MacAskill had offered him a job as director of business development at the Centre for Effective Altruism. He rented a modest apartment near CEA HQ in Berkeley, he still had a couple of weeks to just explore before his job started. This was his first vacation in, well, ever. In the years working at Jane, SBF had never taken any significant time off.
He spent his vacation just soaking everything in: It was his first time in the Bay Area as an adult, and he found his home turf unexpectedly thrilling. It was where all the new technology was. It was where all the startups were. It was where the bulk of the EA community was starting to congregate. SBF ended up hanging out a lot with his younger brother Gabe, who was living in an EA commune on nearby Stuart Street.
At that time, everyone in the tech world was talking about crypto. In the Bay Area, you couldn’t escape the chatter. . . .

To cut a long story short, SBF discovered that Asian markets were selling crypto at significantly higher prices than in the U.S., figured out how to take advantage of that spread, invested $50,000 of his own money into this project, quickly increased that, then secured $50 million in funding to start Alameda Research:

With a goosed-up capital account, the money started piling up so fast that SBF placed what he refers to as “a market order for employees” to tend to the Rube Goldberg operation that kept the capital spinning. There were constant blowups with banks, which are wary of anything crypto. Crypto was so new that regulators in South Korea and elsewhere were constantly changing their mind about regulations—then making those changes retroactive. It was a swirling mess. Pulled into the vortex was Nishad Singh, a friend of SBF’s brother Gabe, and a fellow EA member. Singh is a bespectacled and baby-faced young man with an earnest mien. He often wears a T-shirt with the words “compassionate to the core” printed, in a diminutive all-lowercase font, over his heart. After just one conversation with SBF, Singh decided to leave Facebook to take on the more meaningful work of building FTX. Caroline Ellison came, too, quitting Jane Street and moving to California only weeks after SBF described the operation to her over tea. The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. The kitchen was given over to stand-up desks, the closet was reserved for sleeping, and the entire space overrun with half-eaten take-out containers. It was a royal mess. But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities. . . .

Or so we are expected to believe. Turns out that there are people in the “effective altrusm” community who have heard tales of abusive behavior by Bankman-Fried during the 2017-2019 early years of Alameda Research, which led several employees to quit. So the assertion that SBF was donating 50% of his profits to “EA-approved charities” is something for which I’ll have to see the receipts before I’ll believe it.

Sam Bankman-Fried Promised
Millions To Nonprofits. Some Say
They Didn’t Get The Money.

Going from obscure nerd to Fortune magazine cover boy in just five years was, it must be admitted, a remarkable feat. His “effective altruism” shtick was a major factor in SBF’s celebrity, as was the fact that he became the second-largest contributor of campaign cash to the Democratic Party. Nobody seems to have thought this was suspicious and, similarly, the connection between the currency exchange FTX and the trading firm Alameda Research also failed to raise concerns. Is putting your girlfriend in charge of a multibillion enterprise really a good idea? What ultimately crashed SBF’s empire was the fact — which both Bankman-Fried and Ellison have admitted — that SBF “loaned” funds from FTX customers to Alameda, to the tune of $10 billion. But if Alameda was successful, why would it need such a “loan”?

When asked about the blurred lines between his companies in August, Bankman-Fried denied any conflict of interest and said FTX was a “neutral piece of market infrastructure.”
“I put a lot of work over the last few years into trying to eliminate conflicts of interest there,” 30-year-old Bankman-Fried told CNBC in an interview. “I don’t run Alameda anymore. I don’t work for it, none of FTX does. We have separate staffs — we don’t want to have preferential treatment. We want as best as we can, to treat everyone fairly.” . . .
Three sources familiar with the company told CNBC that [employees] were blindsided by the company’s actions and that, to their knowledge, only a small cohort knew that customer deposits were being misused. Employees said in some cases, their life savings are tied up on FTX.
“We’re just shocked and devastated,” a current FTX employee said. “I feel like I’m in a movie that’s playing out in real time. No one saw this coming.”
As a result of the public backlash FTX has faced over these missing funds, employees who say they were just as devastated as customers are now facing financial hardship, harassment surrounding their involvement with the company, and tarnished future employment prospects.
“We could not believe how we were being betrayed,” a former employee said.
— CNBC, Nov. 13

Did I mention that FTX had an in-house psychotherapist and employees were reportedly doing a lot of prescription stimulants?

This operation had more red flags than a May Day parade in Beijing, but nobody seemed to notice any problems with FTX/Alameda when Bankman-Fried’s empire was the hottest firm in the hottest “emerging” sector of the economy. What we can now call The Crypto Bubble never really made sense from an economic perspective. It was mainly popular because it was unregulated, a sort of anarchist pirate kingdom based on a theory of implied value that appealed to the kind of people who talk a lot about “fiat currency” and “Jekyll Island” (nudge, nudge). I mean, I get it — in an ideal world, I’d be a goldbug fanatic, but we’re not living in an ideal world, and I am skeptical of the promise that cryptocurrency is the road to Utopia. Meanwhile, in the real world, the crypto king SBF was living in a $40-million penthouse in the Bahamas with 10 of his dorky minions in some kind of polyamorous cult situation.

Of all the revelations in the wake of the FTX meltdown, none is more shocking than this: Caroline Ellison had a Tumblr blog.

The handle of her blog was “worldoptimization” — a reference to her goal as a devotee of “effective altruism” — and someone has archived the whole thing back to 2014, when Ellison was still a college student, and interested in a lot of right-wing ideas, including “human biodiversity” (abbreviated HBD, popularized by Steve Sailer). Ellison had been raised Catholic, but turned atheist as a teenager, and considered herself part of the “trad” (traditionalist) movement of women who rejected feminist promises of “sexual liberation.” There has been a lot of ignorant and biased commentary about Ellison’s blog, accusing her of endorsing pseudoscientific “race science,” etc., but after skimming over it pretty heavily, I think these critiques are missing the main point: What kind of adult has a Tumblr blog? Answer: Not the healthy kind.

As crazy as Twitter can be, at least there are verifiably sane people who use Twitter, which cannot be said for Tumblr, the Internet’s Quasi-Official Lunatic Asylum. And when you read what Ellison was posting there, you discover that she was, for example, a fan of The Bachelor series. Do you really want someone like that running a multibillion-dollar trading company? No, you don’t. Her Tumblr blog reveals Caroline Ellison to be a fundamentally silly person, obsessed with trivial nonsense.

Some regular readers may be saying, “Wait a minute, Stacy. Aren’t you kind of ‘fundamentally silly’ yourself?” Yes, of course, but I am a mere journalist. I’m not running a gigantic financial company — and thank God for that, because I’d probably botch it at least as badly as Caroline Ellison has botched it. However, I’d botch it in a more traditional way — a scandal involving strippers, cocaine, Lamborghinis, etc. — not wasting my time blabbing about The Bachelor on a Tumblr blog.

In a sane world, the venture capitalists who gave investors’ money to Sam Bankman-Fried and Caroline Ellison would be ritually humiliated — lashed and pilloried — if not indeed hanged in the public square. But we don’t live in a sane world, so they’ll escape the brutal justice they deserve.




 

Category: Crime

In The Mailbox: 11.16.22

Posted on | November 16, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.16.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.
OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Armed Citizen Stops Kidnapping
Ninety Miles From Tyranny: The 90 Miles Mystery Box, Episode #1903
EBL: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Opps! Ukraine shot those missiles into Poland, also, Francisco Pizzaro Captures Inca Emperor Atahualpa at the Battle of Cajamarca
Twitchy: Woman goes viral for berating her “racist, Trump-loving, cis white” father at “funeral”, also, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) didn’t appreciate Elon Musk’s japery
Louder With Crowder: ‘Joe Biden is the face of left-wing failure’, also, Elon Musk, man enough to admit when he’s wrong, ‘rehires’ Ligma and Johnson back to Twitter
Vox Popoli: Calling Rome to Repentance, Meme of the Week 006, “British”, and She’s Going To Blow

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Against The N.I.C.E. Conditioners
American Greatness: Democrats Sue to Demand Extra Day of Voting in Georgia Runoff Election, Far-Left Dark Money Group Spent Over $1.5 Billion for Left-Wing Causes in 2021, and Trump Announces 2024 Presidential Run
American Thinker: The Unpopular Cure for Our Electoral Woes, Key Takeaways from the FBI Whistleblowers Report, and Americans Haven’t Suffered Enough 
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Hump Day News
Babalu Blog: MSC Cruises under investigation for using Cuban slave labor on its ships, Photos of the Day: Well-fed Communist Oligarchs vs. daily bread for Cubans, and Cuban dictatorship sends slave doctors to World Cup in Qatar despite health care crisis in Cuba
Behind The Black: NASA’s SLS rocket successfully launches Orion toward the Moon, Red Chinese pseudo-company Galactic Energy launches five satellites into orbit, A hidden baby star, seen in infrared, and Today’s blacklisted American: Half of today’s students support the death penalty for some speech
Cafe Hayek: More on Personal Liability for Lockdowners
CDR Salamander: Chaos is a Ladder: Opportunity in the High North
Chicago Boyz: Thoughts on the Waukesha Christmas Parade Trial
Da Tech Guy: Acceptable Terms
Don Surber: Trump won without you, National Review, also, Trump dances on the graves of the media
First Street Journal: Lots Of Young People Took Long Fossil Fueled Flights To COP27 Or Something
Gates Of Vienna: Ye of Little Faith
The Geller Report: Philadelphia Soros-Backed DA Larry Krasner impeached by Pennsylvania lawmakers in GOP-led effort, Maricopa County Election Judge Says Voting Machines Were Programmed to Reject Ballots on Election Day, and “This Wasn’t an Election”
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, NGC 3293, and Cleaning House at Twitter
Hollywood In Toto:  K-von’s Essential Promises Jokes You Can’t Tell (But He’ll Tell ’em Anyway), also,  She Said Offers Powerful Snapshot of Harvey Weinstein’s Downfall
The Lid: Matt Gaetz Proposes SPICY Rule Changes To Congress, The Establishment Will HATE
Legal Insurrection: Nancy Pelosi Claims Democrats Have “Always Been” Unifying The Country, University of Florida Student Protests Fizzle as Ben Sasse is Named New School President, Yale Allegedly Pressured Suicidal Students to Leave School and Reapply, and Steve Scalise Wins Unanimous Support of House Republicans as New Majority Leader
Nebraska Energy Observer: Country Roads
Outkick: Brittney Griner Faces Horrific Conditions In Russian Prison, UCLA Proposes Terrible Idea To Save Money In The Big Ten, UVA Cancels Football Game After Horrific Killings, Jemele Hill Attacks OutKick In Desperate Attempt To Boost Failing Book Sales, and Joe Rogan Questions Kyrie Irving’s Persecution For Tweeting A Film Amazon Sells
Power Line: Organized Theft Is Big Business, The Daily Chart: The Electric Car Partisan Divide, and Musk admits mistake
Protein Wisdom Reborn:
Shark Tank: Mast Adds His Support To Mayorkas Impeachment
Shot In The Dark: Curious, also, For The Children
This Ain’t Hell: Air Force’s turn in the barrel, Phony Veteran’s Day Story – What’s the Deel?, and Charges dismissed for Marines involved with San Diego Zoo gondola incident
Transterrestrial Musings: Community College
Victory Girls: Missile Hit In Poland Was Likely Ukraine Misfire
Volokh Conspiracy: “Enforcing the First Amendment on Campus Won’t, by Itself, Address the Problem of Academic Freedom”
Watts Up With That: Nationwide Cold Wave Continues with Numerous Low Temperature Records Likely to Be Set…Intense Great Lakes Snow Event on The Way, also, Africa: The Place where Claims Renewables are Cheaper Go to Die
Weasel Zippers: Spanish Government Celebrates Communist Party With Commemorative Postage Stamp, Thanksgiving Dinners Will Be 20% More Expensive This Year, Schumer Now Says Democrats Want Immigration Bill Because Of Population Decline, Calls For Amnesty, and Raphael Warnock: “America Has A Pre-Existing Condition — It’s Called Racism, It’s Called Classism, It’s Called Bigotry, It’s Called Xenophobia”
The Federalist: Court Blocks Biden’s Loan Bailout But It Already Bagged The Votes It Was Designed To Buy, Why Did Gen Z Turn Out To Vote For Democrats And Against Their Own Interests?, ‘National Conservatism’ Is A Dead End, and Corrupt Media Have Created A Hilarious Problem For Themselves In Time For Trump’s 2024 Campaign
Mark Steyn: Lest We Forget (Albanians), Culture Trumps Politics, and The Consolidation of Wealth and Power

Early Black Friday Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

The Ka-Bar Killer? ‘Edged Weapon’ Used to Kill 4 Idaho Students, Police Say

Posted on | November 16, 2022 | 1 Comment

Sunday afternoon, police got a call about an “unconscious person” at a residence near the University of Idaho campus in Moscow, Idaho. It was soon reported that four people had been killed, but police wouldn’t say how they’d been killed or what the motive might be. Murders are very rare in the town of 26,000 permanent residents, and now here were four murder victims at once — two university seniors, seniors Madison Mogen and Kaylee Goncalves, both 21, junior Xana Kernodle, 20, and freshman Ethan Chapin, 20. Then on Tuesday, the local coroner let slip that the victims had all been stabbed to death, Police then said an “edged weapon” had been used in what they called a “targeted attack.” The owner of a local hardware store said police asked him if his store sold military-style Ka-Bar knives (made famous in the Rambo movies), which suggests they have some idea such a weapon was used in the murders.

Furthermore — and this is what’s freaking people out — police say that while (a) they don’t have a suspect in custody, (b) they don’t believe there is a threat to the community. Right. You’ve got a mass murderer at large, but don’t worry — there’s no “imminent danger.”

It seems obvious to me that police know a lot about the case they’re not saying publicly. Discussing the case with my brother Kirby, who’s pretty good with this kind of stuff, he thinks maybe the cops actually have their eyes on a main suspect, but are trying to get enough evidence or testimony to qualify as probable cause for a search warrant. This would explain why they believe there’s no “immient danger” to anyone else, because if police have a suspect under surveillance, and know why he did this “targeted” killing, then they also have reason to believe that the suspect isn’t just going around killing people at random.

All things considered, I’d expect police to announce an arrest within two or three days because (a) there can’t be many people who could possibly have a motive for such a “targeted” attack, (b) you don’t stab four people to death without leaving behind a lot of evidence, and (c) there’s got to be surveillance video somewhere showing somebody escaping the scene of the crime. Still, at this point, it seems very mysterious.

Stay tuned . . .




 

Category: Crime, Idaho

In The Mailbox: 11.15.22

Posted on | November 16, 2022 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 11.15.22

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.
OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: Climate Hypocrisy In Egypt
EBL: Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?
Twitchy: Gone In Sixty Minutes – Twitter Employee With “Moral Duty” To Resist & Protest Now Former Employee, also, “Trump Or Death” Protest Doesn’t Pass The Smell Test
Louder With Crowder: Elon Musk fires a bunch more people for sassing him in public, then goes on Twitter to laugh about it, also, Brilliant: Dave Chappelle performed fake monologue during SNL dress rehearsals so they didn’t know what he’d say live
Vox Popoli: Wakanda Never, They Never Said He Was Wrong, The Irrelevance of Optics, False Flag #237, and I Just Don’t Care

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Puberty Blockers And Medical Lies, also, Blame the Deep State for Carnage in Ukraine
American Greatness: Election Machines Report More Votes than Ballots in Two Virginia Swing Districts, Gov. Greg Abbott Invokes ‘Invasion Clauses’ To Beef Up Border Security, and Biden Skips Gala Dinner With World Leaders at G20 Summit in Bali
American Power: The Normie Center Strikes Back, also, Control of Congress Comes Down to California
American Thinker: Trump/DeSantis 2024, The 2022 Mid-Terms Exposed the Existence of Two Americas and the Overwhelming Importance of the 2024 Election, and There Was No Cheating, Peasant!
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Pothole Vigilante News
Babalu Blog: Cuban-Canadian files official request for Canada to sanction Cuba’s Castro dictatorship, U.S. delegation in Cuba today, ready to kick-start renewal of perfidious Obama-era ‘Thaw’, and How deep Blue Miami turned Red
BattleSwarm: China’s Lockdowns: Even Crazier, also, Ukraine Update for November 15, 2022: Dnipro Crossed?
Behind The Black: Red China launches remote sensing satellite, Watching the first SLS launch tonight, and November 15, 2022 Quick space links
Cafe Hayek: Vernon Smith: “Markets Are Incredible”
CDR Salamander: German Clear Voices are There if You Look
Chicago Boyz: Quote of the Day (Inflation Edition)
Da Tech Guy: Report from Louisiana: All Politics are Local, One Important Reminder, and Homage to Syd
Don Surber: Trump changed diplomacy for the better, Mom sues Pornhub for selling video of her 12-year-old son’s rape, and Trump-supporting congressman challenges Manchin
First Street Journal: Mid-Terms Post Mortem: Did Democrats “Democracy Is On The Ballot” Work?, Climate Cultists Smash Tablets At Top Of Mt. Sinai, and Good News! Diesel Supply Down To 25 Days
Gates Of Vienna: They Worked Their Will on John Barleycorn, Getting Away With Murder, The Corona Shell Game,  and SOS! Armed Forces!
The Geller Report: Texas Gov. Abbott Invokes Constitutional Authority to Declare and ACT On an Invasion at Southern Border, Republicans Take The House of Representatives Despite Widespread Democrat Election Rigging and Fraud, and MORE ARIZONA DATA: Only 17% of Maricopa Election Day Voters Were Democrat, But Democrats Claim To Win 50% of Delayed Election Day Totals
Hogewash: Zooming in on the Cone Nebula, Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, Time Lapse of a Light Echo, and I’m Not Making This Up, You Know
Hollywood In Toto: How Pop Culture Tackled the ‘Kill Baby Hitler’ Question, Morning Show Still the King at Skewering Identity Politics, and Costner Reaches Out to Yellowstone’s Red-State Faithful
The Lid: If Republicans Want To Win In 2024, They Must Reject Trump
Legal Insurrection: Princeton University Offering a Course on ‘Black and Queer’ BDSM, Gettysburg College Delays Event Meant for Those Who are ‘Tired of White Cis Men’, New Free Speech Policy at UC-Hastings College of the Law Eliminates ‘Heckler’s Veto’, Ronna McDaniel Wants to Remain RNC Chair, But Lee Zeldin’s Supporters Want Him to Run, and Journalist Sam Stein Tries to Rescue Sen. Markey After Trying to Fight Musk, Who Didn’t Take the Bait
Nebraska Energy Observer: Post Election, also, Just because…And an update
Outkick: Single Tom Brady Is 2-0 Since Divorce & Made A Major Social Media Change, Everyone HATES Nathaniel Hackett And Josh McDaniels, U.S. Men’s Soccer Team Replaces Red, White, And Blue With LGBTQ Pride Colors, Mistakes By Eagles & Refs Cost Philadelphia Undefeated Season, Taylor Heinicke Crushes Busch Light After Beating The Eagles, and Warner Bros. Discovery Pessimistic About Keeping NBA On TNT
Power Line: Persecution and the art of Dave Chappelle, The Daily Chart: How Are Those Russia Sanctions Working?, and Abbott Calls Out the Guard [Updated] 
Shark Tank: Rick Scott Challenges Murder Turtle For Minority Leader Post
Shot In The Dark: A Plan So Simple John Fetterman Could Carry It Out, Metaphor Alert, and The New Minnesota Flag
STUMP: Movember 2022: Age Trends in Prostate Cancer Mortality
The Political Hat: Public Schools Protecting Furries
This Ain’t Hell: Both Koreas in on the action? Biden wants Xi’s help, Maricopa County election judge provides firsthand account of fraud, Phony SEAL – Custer’s Last Stand II, and Russia Strikes Poland
Transterrestrial Musings: A Fool And His Money, “Stochastic Terrorism”, and Democrat Donor Monsters
Victory Girls: NBC Suspends Reporter Over Retracted Paul Pelosi Story
Volokh Conspiracy: “The Sordid Business of Dividing Us Up”, also, Balkinization Symposium on Andrew Koppelman’s ” Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed”
Watts Up With That: Winter Warning to Biden Administration (New England Energy Shortages Ahead?)
Weasel Zippers: Biden DHS Secretary Insists The Southern Border Is “Secure”, Maryland School District Unveils LGBTQ Book List That Teaches Words “Intersex,” “Drag Queen” To Pre-K Students, Lib Bashes Her Father At His Own Funeral As A Trump-Supporting Racist, and AOC Race Baits: Republicans “Targeted A Black Man” In WI Elections
The Federalist: Catholic Bishops Gave Biden A Pass In 2020 And Now Christians Are Paying For It , Where Was All The Right-Wing Political Violence Democrats Warned Would Plague The Midterms?, Michigan Parents Sue School Board For Allowing Pornographic Books In Schools, and Now Is The Time To Boot Failed GOP Leaders, Not Bicker About Trump Vs. DeSantis
Mark Steyn: Against the Great Reset, The Way You Look Tonight, and Recreating with the King’s Deer


Early Black Friday Deals
Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

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.

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.)




 

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
Amazon Warehouse Deals




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
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