Yes, really. It’s all a LIE. SBF is a liar. MacAskill is a liar. It’s shocking how blatantly they all lie.

As a “filthy rich” public figure, SBF continued to follow the EA handbook — or so it seemed — which encourages its followers to be self-sacrificing, frugal and modest. This is based in marketing and public relations no less than a genuine commitment to the idea that, as privileged members of a rich nation, it’s their moral duty to forego unnecessary comforts for the sake of “doing good better.” But whatever the motive, it pays dividends. When MacAskill appeared on “The Daily Show” last September to promote his recent book, “What We Owe the Future,” his announcement that he gives away 50% of his income drew heavy applause. SBF, too, benefitted from media accounts that overlooked clear red flags at FTX to focus on his story as the humble crypto tycoon, practically a monk, who slept on bean bags in his office, shared an apartment with nine roommates, and drove a beat-up Carola.

A series of revelations since last summer, and especially since the FTX debacle, suggest that this was all, for lack of a better word, a massive grift. In reality, SBF owned a $40 million penthouse in the Bahamas, which he called home, and accrued a “local property portfolio worth an estimated three hundred million dollars.” Many of these “were luxury beachfront homes, including seven condominiums in an expensive resort community called Albany, costing almost $72 million.” SBF flew in private jets and purchased a $16.4 million mansion in the Bahamas under his parent’s name as a “vacation home.” FTX employees received free meals and had access to an “in-house Uber-like” transportation service. This is a far cry from the humble lifestyle that EAs, including MacAskill, consistently presented to the public.

MacAskill, meanwhile, has more money at his fingertips than most of us make in a lifetime. Left unmentioned during his “Daily Show” appearance: he hired several PR firms to promote his book, one of which was paid $12,000 per month, according to someone with direct knowledge of the matter. MacAskill’s team, this person tells me, even floated a total promotional budget ceiling of $10 million — a staggering number — thanks partly to financial support from the tech multibillionaire Dustin Moskovitz, cofounder of Facebook and a major funder of EA.

It’s easy to give away part of your income — and sound saintly announcing this on TV — when you have, say, a mansion in the Bahamas or multimillion-dollar budgets to promote your projects and your brand.

It’s almost as if having a bunch of wealthy, privileged people getting together to tout a story that makes them look saintly ought not to be trusted, automatically.

And yeah, SBF was living the monastic life — nay, like an anchorite on a pillar in the desert — if you’re willing to grant him hundreds of millions of dollars for his Bahama properties, and a private jet, and catered meals, and the attention of ex-presidents and tycoons. The beat-up Toyota Corolla probably has its own gold-plated garage.

I’m finding it hard to keep track of who is up and who is down anymore. Elon Musk allowed Kanye West back on Twitter, and then West made a bunch of anti-semitic remarks and got booted again. So he announced what he really thinks.

West hired Milo Yiannopoulos as campaign manager (yep, Ye is running for president), and then fired him.

Mike Lindell was suing election boards all over the country, and his latest efforts got smacked down hard, including a demand that he pay all court costs. He has flushed millions down the crapper.

The only person whose star is rising is Andrew Anglin, rabid neo-Nazi, publisher of the Daily Stormer, who has been allowed back on Twitter, where he promptly endorsed Kanye West.

The ball is back in your court, Elon. I’m sure you’ll make some perspicacious Solomonic judgement here.

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Here’s a fine summary of what a bumbling incompetent Elon Musk is.

Many of us have been saying for years that Donald Trump is a dangerous fool, and that the Republican party has become the party of treason. Do you agree with us now?

So, with the revelation of MASSIVE & WIDESPREAD FRAUD & DECEPTION in working closely with Big Tech Companies, the DNC, & the Democrat Party, do you throw the Presidential Election Results of 2020 OUT and declare the RIGHTFUL WINNER, or do you have a NEW ELECTION?
A Massive Fraud of this type and magnitude allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution. Our great ‘Founder’ did not want, and would not condone, False & Fraudulent Elections.

That’s an outright admission that he wants to overthrow the government and install a dictatorship ruled by his whims. So what are we doing about it? NOTHING.

And still a significant proportion of the Republican party don’t comprehend the magnitude of his betrayal of the country.

…Donald Trump is viewed unfavorably by almost one in three (29%) voters who backed Republicans in the midterms, including 33% of “Reagan Republicans,” 34% of “Traditional Republicans,” 34% of Fox News viewers, and even one in five (21%) voters who backed him in 2020.

One third regard Trump unfavorably…which means two thirds still think he’s peachy. He’s admitted he’s willing to stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot the Constitution, and all these people who in other circumstances fervently announce their support of the Founding Fathers, and are outraged that anyone would teach their kids any criticisms of 18th century America, are just fine with it. Do you want to be a banana republic? Because this is how you get a banana republic.

How can they let this admission of treachery slide? Because the Republican party is also the stupid party. Case in point: Herschel Walker.

You know what still stings? Fifteen years ago, I was at an organization meeting for the local Democrats, and they were looking for volunteers to run for office, and I volunteered to run for the school board. Everyone looked at me like I was a crazed madman, and quietly suggested I put my hand down and that we get someone who was electable. Ouch. It sill burns.

But somewhere, a group of Georgia Republicans met, looked over the available field of conservatives willing to run for high office, and they picked Herschel Walker, a man who every day demonstrates that he has a turnip in his skull instead of a brain. Someone with the mind of a slow child, who didn’t get past his fourth grade grammar lessons.

He doesn’t understand reason, either. His recent babbling gaffe about werewolves and vampires got the attention of Obama, and he’s not happy about it.

The whole story is that he used a fictional horror story as evidence of the importance of faith. Obama neglected to tell everyone that Walker was a godly man who interpreted cheesy movies as evidence for Jesus.

Walker discussed his internal would-you-rather werewolf vs. vampire debate in the context of recalling a movie he said he had watched about a vampire. He concluded his story by talking about the importance of faith because in the movie, he said, a person who did not believe in God tried to kill a vampire with a cross and failed because they didn’t have faith. On Fox, Walker said, The whole story is the story involved people having faith, having faith and continuing to go out and do your job, having faith to get things done. So they don’t tell you the whole story.

Shut up, Herschel. Shut up. In that Democratic meeting, I was willing to put my hand down and let someone else electable run, and you can’t even stop running off at the mouth about a story that was an embarrassment for you.

That’s the Republicans for you, the party of stupid criminals.

The right wing has flared up in another desperate attempt to crank up the hysteria over Hunter Biden. It’s a non-starter. All I get from it is a sense of how obsessed these loons are.

The source is Elon Musk, of course. He has dug up some boring internal documents from Twitter, then fed them to Matt Taibbi, who then shat them out onto Twitter again, claiming that they reveal First Amendment violations and that Twitter, before Musk, was in bed with the liberal Left. I already don’t care.

Musk is an ass.

Taibbi…my contempt for Matt Taibbi knows no bounds. I can never trust anything he ever writes.

As for Hunter Biden, I DON’T CARE. He’s the son of our current president, and that’s about it, and Joe Biden seems to love his son, which is only to be expected. Hunter seems to be a bumbling opportunist, but his profile in government is limited and he’s been given no power. Contrast him with Ivanka, Donald Trump’s daughter, who was brought along to all kinds of confidential meetings, and who, with her husband Jared, has profited mightily. Talk to me again when Hunter Biden scoops up $2 billion from the Saudis.

I might believe that Hunter Biden has done wicked things, but that doesn’t affect me or the US government. If there is evidence that he’s a bad guy, lock him up…but that’s where it ends. These wingnuts are only seeing a way to torment a president they don’t like. All the evidence they have consists of wild conspiracy theories about a laptop dropped off for repair that they claim contains all kinds of revealing information, but none of the stories are backed up with a solid connection to Hunter Biden.

There’s nothing there, but Musk & Taibbi blew it up into an absurd dark tale that falls apart on even casual inspection.

Elon Musk released the anticlimatic “Twitter Files” about “free speech suppression” by the social-media platform on Friday evening. On Monday, he teased the release, writing, “The public deserves to know what really happened …”

What followed after was a series of tweeted snippets detailing what the public has known—and what Twitter executives themselves have detailed over the past two years—about the company’s deliberation surrounding the New York Post’s publication of files from Hunter Biden shortly before the 2020 election.

“What you’re about to read is the first installment in a series, based upon thousands of internal documents obtained by sources at Twitter,” Matt Taibbi, Substack writer and former longtime Rolling Stone writer, darkly intoned Friday evening. But contrary to the melodramatic billing, the files mostly show what’s already been documented: that Twitter removed links to the Post’s story and files from Hunter Biden’s laptop and struggled with how to react to the surprise revelation of the leak of files from a presidential candidate’s son.

Right. The New York Post story, which claimed that a laptop abandoned at a repair shop was full of secrets, was not credible, and Twitter dithered over whether they should allow such nonsense to be promoted. The story was comparable to that Pizzagate crap, which claimed that a child porn & murder ring was operating the basement of a pizza parlor which did not have a basement. Unless you’re some faux free speech absolutist, that’s the kind of thing that should definitely be quashed on the grounds that it is a lie.

Furthermore, much of what Twitter censored out seem to have been photoshopped dick pics of Hunter Biden.

In examples of what Taibbi characterized as wrongly removed content, the Substack blogger cited a number of tweets containing non-consensually posted intimate imagery of the former Vice President’s son, commonly referred to as “revenge porn.”

That says nothing but that there was some surprisingly obsessive behavior by the MAGA nitwits.

Also, as far as the claim that Joe Biden and the state were intentionally compromising free speech to suppress ‘information’ about the President’s son — take note that all the terrible tinkering with Twitter stories occurred prior to 2020. I know, we’d all like to forget who was president then, but it wasn’t Joe Biden. It was Trump.

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More details: this was a revelation that Musk made a pinned tweet and claimed was a violation of the Constitution’s first amendment. It was a series of blocked tweets that contained:

The offending material that Taibbi revealed was removed by Twitter at the Biden campaign’s request turns out to have been a bunch of links to Hunter Biden in the buff.

There was a tweet from a Chinese account featuring a naked woman on top of Hunter Biden, as well as a family photo. Two pictures of Hunter Biden’s penis, one with another woman in the background. Taibbi’s next list of material was removed by Twitter after being flagged by the Democratic National Committee. They include a picture of Hunter Biden smoking crack and getting his feet rubbed and a link to a Hunter Biden sex tape.

And that’s the big hubbub. Social media company removes unwanted dick pics: News at 11.

Constitutional crisis!

Here in Minnesota, the most reliable supporters of Republicans are gun owners, hunters, and fishing fanatics. Even our Democratic governor made appeasing that demographic a key part of his electoral success, and I don’t mind — it’s a bridge to environmental action, you know. I also have roots in the Western US, where a major issue is individual liberty to use local resources.

Here’s an interesting case of private interference in individual liberty.

OnX is an app that’s intended to help hunters find public land so they can go after deer, elk, or whatever they happen to be hunting. At first glance, that may not seem like news, but users of that app get an invaluable view of just who owns the property around them, which is critical when trying to reach public lands where hunting is legal. They have also gotten a very clear view of something that is otherwise hidden from the public: how corporations, millionaires, and billionaires have blocked out huge chunks of public property so that they alone can access it—without paying a dime.

They do this by creating public land “islands,” areas that are surrounded by privately held property. The public lands in these islands become de facto parts of the surrounding property. In most states, there is absolutely no rule that says the property owners have to do anything to allow access to that island of land.

One of their tactics is to divide the land into a checkerboard — squares of private ownership around public land that are in contact at only their corners. The rich want to make it illegal to step across any of those corners!

Well aware of how prickly many land owners are about hunters crossing their property, Cape located an area of “checkerboard” control. That is, the land is divided into one mile-by-one mile sections, half of which are public property, half of which are privately owned, like the black and white squares on a checkboard.

At one place on this checkboard map, Eshelman controlled two squares that met at a corner. The other two squares were public property. Using OnX, Cape mapped out the exact location and led three friends in stepping across the corner from one public square to the other. They not only didn’t step on Eshelman’s land, the area of his property they crossed was infinitely small. Not one state has laws against this “corner crossing,” which is common in areas where grants of public land were once given to railroad companies in an effort to “open up” the West.

The rich guy who has bought up these parcels of land, drug company executive Fredric Eshelman, is upset at this simple privilege. He’s an extraordinarily greedy person.

Eshelman owns 23,277 acres near Elk Mountain, but in prosecuting this case against corner-crossing, he attempted to block access to 1.6 million acres of public land.

So he’s suing four hunters who stepped across the mathematically infinitesimal corner boundary for $7 million. He lost a criminal trial against them — it would have been difficult to show that they’d deprived him of anything — so he’s making a civil case of it, and since he’s rich, he can harass the hunters with lawsuits until he wins. Sadly, people in Wyoming (Wyoming! Deeply Republican Wyoming!) think the hunters will eventually lose.

No matter how ridiculous this may all seem, and no matter the quick outcome of the jury trial, Wyoming officials are convinced that the landowners will win in the end. According to a Republican attorney who formerly worked for the state attorney general’s office, if the hunters win, “it would not surprise me at all that the Legislature would come back and pass a law saying corner crossing is illegal. It’s sort of if you win, you lose, and if you lose, you lose.”

This is the kind of case that ought to unite everyone, Republican rednecks, environmentalists, Democrats, people who want to look for spiders, just everyone, in opposing this scheme. I don’t like the idea that filthy rich assholes can wall off huge chunks of public land to create private game hunting parks for themselves. Unfortunately, there are also lots of ranchers who exploit the Wyoming checkerboard for their personal gain.

By the way, Eshelman is a hard right Republican donor.

Yet more good news? Be still my heart.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and a top deputy of seditious conspiracy for leading a months-long plot to unleash political violence to prevent the inauguration of President Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The panel of seven men and five women deliberated for three days before finding Rhodes and lead Florida Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs guilty of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transition of presidential power. But three other associates were not convicted of the historically rare and politically freighted sedition count. All five were convicted of obstructing Congress as it met to confirm the results of the 2020 election. Both offenses are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Lock him up!

Although, I’m sad to say, it looks we can anticipate a little less happy news from these court cases in the future.

Rhodes and his co-defendants were the first accused of seditious conspiracy and the first to face trial and be convicted on any conspiracy charge to date in the massive Jan. 6 investigation. He is the highest-profile figure to face trial in connection with rioting by angry Trump supporters who injured scores of officers, ransacked offices and forced lawmakers to evacuate the U.S. Capitol.

What? That angry dork is the “highest-profile figure” arrested in the insurrection plot? That doesn’t seem right. I can think of a few members of congress and one ex-president who ought to be on the docket.

In case you’re wondering about the fierce pirate fashion statement, Rhodes did not lose an eye in gallant action. He dropped a loaded gun, it went off, and put out his eye. Yeah, he’s one of those bumbling gun-fondling dumb-asses.

The war in Ukraine is draining American stockpiles of things that blow up, so the defense industry has come up with a clever scheme: take a bomb we have in plentiful supply, strap a rocket motor to it (also plentiful) and send those off to a war to blow more stuff up.

The Pentagon is considering a Boeing proposal to supply Ukraine with cheap, small precision bombs fitted onto abundantly available rockets, allowing Kyiv to strike far behind Russian lines as the West struggles to meet demand for more arms.

U.S. and allied military inventories are shrinking, and Ukraine faces an increasing need for more sophisticated weapons as the war drags on. Boeing’s proposed system, dubbed Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), is one of about a half-dozen plans for getting new munitions into production for Ukraine and America’s Eastern European allies, industry sources said.

Although the United States has rebuffed requests for the 185-mile (297km) range ATACMS missile, the GLSDB’s 94-mile (150km) range would allow Ukraine to hit valuable military targets that have been out of reach and help it continue pressing its counterattacks by disrupting Russian rear areas.

How am I supposed to feel about this? I am entirely sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause and opposed to the militaristic imperialism of Russia, but our solutions to the conflict all seem to involve more, bigger, longer-ranged bombs…which leaves defense contractors chortling in glee, and may be necessary to throw invaders out of a foreign land, but I am repulsed by the idea of more effective killing machines.

It doesn’t help that everyone is so blithe about the cost. It’s cheap, they say.

The M26 rocket motor is relatively abundant, and the GBU-39 costs about $40,000 each, making the completed GLSDB inexpensive and its main components readily available. Although arms manufacturers are struggling with demand, those factors make it possible to yield weapons by early 2023, albeit at a low rate of production.

They don’t say how much the M26 costs, but I’d guess that the total cost of a single GBU-38 + M26 is going to exceed the yearly salary of a college professor, so sure, I’ll just visualize it as every shot is a teacher’s or scientist’s career being lobbed at a couple of soldiers to explode into fragments, and the money instead finding its way into a lobbyist/contractor’s pockets.

It’s fine. Everything is fine.

We have a little tradition here at Chez Myers for Black Friday: we stay home, refuse to do any shopping, and god forbid we would be caught dead in a shopping mall. We have never seen the point of going into a frenzy of spending money just because it’s a day off, and because corporations have spent the past week dunning us with ads for “sales” that are really just them flogging the same old merchandise with greater intensity.

However, we’ve lacked a patron saint for this day. We haven’t had anything like a Santa Claus to represent the true spirit of Black Friday. We needed an icon of failed, lying, greedy capitalism run amuck, and what do you know, one has dropped into our lap.

Samuel Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried had become a legend by pushing an image of monkish aloofness, vowing to forsake the allures of his extraordinary wealth — sleeping on beanbag chairs, driving a Toyota Corolla — and to give away his fortune for the greater good.

Yet in April, when Avedisian was hired as a master of ceremonies for a conference in the Bahamas sponsored by FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, she saw how the 30-year-old billionaire really lived: in a guarded island compound, every need closely catered to, the world’s elite at his beck and call.

That’s our boy. What better avatar of the spirit of the corporate world than a frumpy, disheveled, arrogant man-child who presents himself as a benevolent wise master, pretending to live a life of denial of the material world, while simultaneously indulging in the grossest excesses of greed and extravagant luxury?

Best of all, this month his lifestyle has undergone a magnificent pratfall, seeing billions of dollars evaporate, and reversing his image from wunderkind to poster child for incompetence.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information,” said Ray, who once oversaw the liquidation of Enron, one of America’s most infamous corporate frauds.

Poof, all gone. His Bahamian penthouse is on the chopping block, his island refuge is exposed as a shallow scam, his philosophical pretensions revealed to be a lie.

The odd behavior did not stop Bankman-Fried from building a brand as the volatile industry’s voice of reason. He’d been celebrated for pushing for crypto regulation on Capitol Hill, donating generously to pandemic-prevention efforts and Democratic politicians, and preaching a dogma known as “effective altruism” that used math and logic to determine where their donations could accomplish the most global good.

We can only hope his downfall cripples that “effective altruism” bullshit, too.

It’s also the case that SBF exposes the incompetence of investment bankers and venture capitalist. What brought him down was stupidity and greed and a lack of skill in running a big company — he was a cocky child handed a whole bunch of money by luck and persuasion, and he lost it all with the usual tawdry criminal failings. And he still has people fooled!

Pack said his firm declined to invest in Alameda after learning that Bankman-Fried had hidden $10 million in losses and planned to use their money to fund FTX, not Alameda, without telling them. The episode, he said, had many of the same issues that ultimately led to FTX’s bankruptcy: Bankman-Fried’s secrecy and deception about how money was spent; his cryptic messages and shoddy record-keeping; his excuses for losing clients’ funds.

“They were very brilliant traders. They made a lot of money … but they also lost it almost as fast as it came in,” he said. They had a “cold, emotionless, calculated approach to playing with other people’s money.”

Not brilliant at all. Give me $10 billion dollars and an indifference to the suffering of others, and I could throw it all away just as quickly by buying over-priced real estate and being stupid.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect symbol of Black Friday: a dumpy, dead-eyed schlub wandering about in a vast, sterile penthouse, staring at a cell phone, going nowhere. The anti-Black Friday is sitting down in a home with your grandchild drawing and playing games and not spending a penny for the happiness of your existence. Maybe we’ll go outside later so she can ride her scooter around the block.

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Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are also runners-up for this distinguished symbolism. We have an embarrassment of idiots!

Meet the Club Q murderer’s father. You’ll immediately regret it.

The Colorado shooter’s dad on finding out his son murdered people: “They started telling me about the incident, a shooting… And then I go on to find out it’s a gay bar. I got scared, ‘Shit, is he gay?’ And he’s not gay, so I said, phew… I am a conservative Republican.” (@CBS8) pic.twitter.com/7Zw4vpLtjE

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) November 23, 2022

He goes on to say, “I praised him for violent behavior really early. I told him it works… You’ll get immediate results.” He’s definitely among the Republican base, emphasis on “base.”

Here are the immediate results his son got.

Peter Thiel funded it. Candace Owens promoted it. I had never heard of this GloriFi bank until it collapsed.

It’s whole deal was that it was “anti-woke,” whatever that means. Since it was run by a gang of rabid capitalists who didn’t know what “woke” means, that doesn’t matter. What it really was was an ideologically driven attempt to prove that conservative principles were profitable and practical. They weren’t.

As The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on GloriFi’s shuttering, puts it, the business was “anti-woke.” While GloriFi itself never publicly described itself as anti-woke, the company had no qualms about marketing itself as a service provider for right-wing America. In a July press release, the company described itself as “a pro-freedom, pro-America, pro-capitalism technology company . . . empowering members to put their money where their values are and preserve the Country they believe in.”

In other words, its foundation was built on far-right paranoia and their bizarre obsessions.

Pitching itself as a financial institution that allowed one to be “free to celebrate your love of God and country without fear of cancellation,” GloriFi’s marketing read more like a campaign ad than an enticing APR offer on a new credit card. Highlights from the “about us” page include: “OUR BILL OF RIGHTS IS NON-NEGOTIABLE” and “WE ARE ONE NATION UNDER GOD.”

In its short tenure GloriFi, managed to launch checking and savings accounts as well as credit cards, with plans to offer mortgages and insurance in a future that will no longer take place. Founder and CEO Toby Neugebauer pitched plans to offer gun owners discounts on home insurance, credit cards made of shell casing material, and assistance paying legal bills if customers shot someone in self-defense. Over the summer, GloriFi secured conservative commentator Candace Owens as a co-founder and spokesperson for the brand.

Guys. Guys. GUYS. I know this is news to you, but regular banks won’t cancel your account if you announce that you love god and America. That’s not a sound basis for differentiating yourself from the competition. In fact, it makes you look weird, and especially stuff like the special privileges for gun-owners and people who shoot other people was probably counter to profitability. Having a controversial freak like Candace Owens (what? Laura Loomer was unavailable?) as the face of your company didn’t project seriousness, either.

Predictably, it imploded.

But GloriFi was unable to translate ideological grandstanding into functional corporate management. Even before its public launch, the startup was plagued by reports of chaos amongst staff and financiers. GloriFi missed its planned launch date several times, at one point due to clashes with Texas financial regulators. Reports emerged of unpaid invoices and erratic behavior from Neugebauer, who had converted his home Dallas mansion into the company’s main office.

According to the Journal, the company was eventually forced to hire a law firm to investigate workplace issues, particularly around Neugebauer. In one memo reviewed by the Journal, GloriFi’s former Head of Human Resources Britt Amos described several employees at Neugebaur’s mansion telling him to “make sure I leave around six,” and explaining that “after 5 p.m. Toby starts drinking and things at the house deteriorate quickly.” Amos also described a meeting where a visibly drunk Neugebauer was “drinking Red Bull and putting alcohol in it.”

You know, being “woke” just means you’re aware of the social shortcomings of the existing system, and are concerned about fairness and equality. Declaring yourself “anti-woke” implies that you’re ignorant of reality and want a system that will screw people over, things I do not want in a financial institution.