In The Shadow Of Mt Hollywood

Whittaker Chambers made the point in Witness , almost in passing, that up to the 1920s, German was the language of international socialism. But once the Bolsheviks consolidated power in Russia, that position passed almost immediately to Russian. Chambers's sympathies strike me as having remained with a more German brand of socialism throughout his career as a spy, which may explain his eventual defection. But I think this also reflects a basic conflict on the Left, which might be characterized as the idealists vs the Tankies. According to this site , A Tankie is an apologist for the violence and crimes against humanity perpetrated by twentieth-century Marxist-Leninist regimes, particularly the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin (1924 - 1953). More broadly, the term may refer to any leftist who is perceived to support or defend authoritarian regimes on the basis that they are enemies of the United States. This can include regimes that are not and do not claim to be communist suc...

PLEASE CONFIRM: A user claims that they spotted Caroline Ellison at Ground Support Coffee on West Broad in SoHo Manhattan at 8:15 AM. This would mean she is not in Hong Kong and is in NY not in custody. pic.twitter.com/QUduYO9GfZ — Autism Capital 🧩 (@AutismCapital) December 4, 2022 According to this story, The citizen journalist also shared pictures of messages sent that also said a source was “99%” sure “it’s her.” The message also says there’s an “Alameda person” with her. In addition to the confirmations from the barista behind the counter, there’s also the sighting of a Golden Doodle puppy pictured at the bottom of the ostensible Ellison’s feet. FTX and Alameda executives shared a Golden Doodle pup called “Gopher.” SBF recently tweeted about Gopher before FTX collapsed. . . . People also shared street maps showing that the coffee and sandwich shop was really close to the New York Attorney’s Office and the FBI. “After a close analysis, she’s snitching on Sam,” one person...

I continue to be amazed that writers on the right-wing blogs are actually paid for their output. Some guy who goes by "Bonchie" at Red State and apparently has a full time job there posed this question about Sam Bankman-Fried yesterday. My only answer has to be that google is your friend. Let's look at equivalent cases. Kenneth Lay's company, Enron, went bankrupt in 2001. It wasn't until 2004 that he was indicted by a grand jury for his role in the company's failure. The decline of Elizabeth Holmes's company, Theranos, began with adverse reporting in 2015 . It wasn't until 2018 that a federal grand jury indicted Holmes on fraud charges. The closest parallel case is Bernard Madoff. On December 10, 2008, Madoff's sons Mark and Andrew told authorities that their father had confessed to them that his firm was a massive Ponzi scheme. According to the Wikipedia entry, "The following day, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation a...

Now and then I see a piece that reflects on Trump's actual legacy, or perhaps what things might have been like had he won reelection. Last month I covered some revisionist opinio n that reexamined his disastrous mistakes on COVID: He imposed lockdowns and extended them when they didn't work; he elevated Dr Fauci, who promptly undermined him in the name of "science"; he sent the hospital ships to New York and LA, which proved laughably unnecessary. In contrast, Gov DeSantis's reputation is rising as a more level-headed leader. This is especially worth noting as we move into 2023 and are still recovering from lockdowns, the inflationary stimulus payments they generated, and supply chain disruptions from the same source. Although court decisions limited the worst of the the lockdown overreach, it is now accepted in at least some quarters that public health authorities can continue to impose masking, mandate vaccinations, close parks and beaches, and shut down bus...

In a remarkable unintentional exposé of our educational system, Forbes yesterday seems to think it broke the story of the year: Exclusive: Sam Bankman-Fried Knew Plenty About His Alameda Research Hedge Fund–And Sent Details To Forbes Just Months Ago . Bankman-Fried, in a series of high-profile media appearances this week, has begun offering his own working theory: Alameda took on far too much leverage to make risky investments on the FTX platform, and FTX failed to recognize and prevent it. A key claim: that Bankman-Fried himself didn’t really know what Alameda was up to. “I was frankly surprised by how big Alameda’s position was,” Bankman-Fried said at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit on Wednesday. “Alameda is not, like, a company that I monitor day-to-day,” he claimed to New York magazine in an article published Thursday. “It’s not a company I run. It’s not a company I have run for the last couple years. And Alameda’s finances I was not deeply aware of. I was only surface...

Here's more of the conventional FTX narrative that just doesn't fit. Remember that new CEO Ray's big complaint about FTX was that not only did they not keep payroll records, they basically didn't have an organization chart. It was just a bunch of millennials with ADHD playing video games in a luxury condo. Right? Here's FTX skeptic Marc Cohodes's take, as quoted by Alex Berenson : They were glorified interns, they had no experience, they had no exchange experience, they had no capital markets experience. . . which led me to believe this is a giant fraud. . . This is the basic media narrative and the received explanation, it was all Sam and Caroline and the others makin' whoopie in a yellow submarine. No org charts. No wonder! But wait a moment. The demise of cryptocurrency exchange FTX has brought an end to FTX Arena in Miami, or at least its name. Naming-rights deals, in which companies spend up to $500 million to put their names on sports facil...

Media accounts continue to be generous to Sam Bankman-Fried on the FTX scandal. This piece, I think, gives the overall current dimensions of the Overton window: In the weeks since Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire was revealed to be a house of lies, mainstream news organizations and commentators have often failed to give their readers a straightforward assessment of exactly what happened. August institutions including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered many key facts about the scandal, but they have also repeatedly seemed to downplay the facts in ways that soft-pedaled Bankman-Fried’s intent and culpability. The writer in the piece comes down on Sam Bankman-Fried as the architect of a fraud: At the heart of Bankman-Fried’s fraud are the deep and (literally) intimate ties between FTX, the exchange that enticed retail speculators, and Alameda Research, a hedge fund that Bankman-Fried co-founded. While an exchange ultimately makes money from transactio...