CURLY, LARRY AND MOE APPROVE THIS MESSAGE: Dana White launches ‘Power Slap,’ competitive open-handed striking sport.

UFC President Dana White on Friday announced the launch of “Power Slap,” a combat sport focused on competitive open-handed striking.

According to a news release, “Power Slap” is both sanctioned and regulated.

The release says Pilgrim Media Group will produce “Power Slap,” which “will feature competitors from across the globe competing on the ultimate stage to showcase their power, technique and resolve.”

According to the release, airing on TBS in early 2023, “Power Slap” will launch with an eight episode series in which “athletes will compete to earn a spot in the cast house, the first Power Slap rankings, in future Power Slap matches and world recognition.”

Preview of the pilot episode of Power Slap, which helped to sell the series to TBS:

MARTIN SCORSESE AT 80: FRANCIS FORD COPPOLA, STEVE MCQUEEN, TIM BURTON AND WOODY ALLEN ON THE ‘GREATEST DIRECTOR ALIVE.’

Steven Spielberg might want a word here, but Scorsese’s best works have been brilliant. Still not sure about The Irishman’s excruciating 287-hour running time, though.

BE PREPARED: Carhartt Men’s Washed Duck Double Front Dungaree. #CommissionEarned

FINALLY: Twitter verifies account for Jesus Christ.

MAKE THEM PAY: Amid lawsuit, judge voices criticism of Virginia Tech policies that limit student speech.

HOW IT STARTED: The Rise of the Latte Town.

I’m holding up traffic. I’m walking down the street in Burlington, Vermont, and I come to a corner and see a car approaching so I stop. The car stops. Meanwhile, I’ve been distracted by some hippies playing Frisbee in the park, and I stand there daydreaming for what must be 15 or 20 seconds. The car waits.

In a normal city, cars roll through these situations; if they see an opening, they take it. But this is Burlington, one of the most socially enlightened cities in America, and drivers here are aware that America has degenerated into a car-obsessed culture, where developers pave over paradise to put up parking lots; where driving threatens to crush the natural rhythms of foot traffic and face-to-face community with superhighways and arid suburbia; where fossil-fuel-burning machines choke the air and displace the renewable energy sources of human locomotion. This driver knows that while sitting behind the wheel, he is ethically inferior to a pedestrian like me. And to demonstrate his civic ideals, he is going to make damn sure that I get the right of way. No matter how long it takes.

Finally, he honks politely, and I wake up from my reverie and belatedly cross the street. But by the time I reach the next corner, I’m lost in my thoughts again and, seeing a car coming, I stop. This car stops too. And waits. I have to go through this ritual about a dozen times before I finally adapt to local mores and trudge straight into the intersections. In Burlington, pedestrians have inherited the earth. Social enlightenment rules.

Burlington is a Latte Town.

Latte Towns — the term is Alan Ehrenhalt’s — are upscale liberal communities, often in magnificent natural settings, often university-based, that have become the gestation centers for America’s new upscale culture. They are the birthplaces of the coffee shops, gourmet bread stores, micro- breweries, organic grocery stores, and the rest of the sensibility-drenched enterprises that marry natural goodness, high craftsmanship, cosmopolitan taste, social concern, and inflated prices to create a 1990s version of genteel culture. Boulder, Colorado, is a Latte Town, as are Madison, Wisconsin; Napa, California; Northampton, Massachusetts; Missoula, Montana; Wilmington, North Carolina; Ithaca, New York; and on and on. You know you’re in a Latte Town when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name that must have the word “Grounds” in it, before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop.

The ideal Latte Town has a Swedish-style government, German-style pedestrian malls, Victorian houses, Native American crafts, Berkeley human- rights groups, and Beverly Hills income levels. There should be some abandoned industrial mills that can be converted into lofts, software startups, and organic-brownie factories. The Latte Town in Utopia would have Rocky Mountain views to the west, Redwood forests downtown, a New England lake along the waterfront, and a major city with a really good alternative weekly within a few hours’ drive.

—David Brooks, the Weekly Standard, September 15th, 1997.

How it’s going: Defund the police comes to Burlington, Vermont.

Defund police departments and crime goes up. Does that surprise anyone? No. But the real problem isn’t the lack of police but of the tolerance of drug addled transients. They know full well if they get arrested they’ll just be out the next day. They’ll never pay a fine and never do more time. There are no consequences whatsoever. That’s the real problem.

A reader from Vermont:

An important factor to understand is how police departments are staffed. Originally at roughly 95 in 2018, that was made up of 50 patrol officers and then 45 supervisors, detectives, domestic violence officers, etc. All most all of the police leaving have come from patrol officers. Now at about 60 total, only 15 are patrol officers, so it’s actually a 70% drop from 50 to 15.
This is fairly typical across the country – when you hear of departments being down such and such, the impact is actually far far greater than immediately apparent.

Lots more reactions like these but this reader just says what the Times only insinuates.

Read this article carefully and the take away is the citizens are effectively resorting to vigilantism to solve the bike theft problem. Sure, they are not physically harming anyone now, but it is clear if the police will not or cannot protect lives and property — in this case property — people will take matters into their own hands. If you think this is better than effective law enforcement, think again.

As Glenn warned in August of 2020, when “defund the police” fever was in full bloom in latte towns across America, “the breakdown of law and order won’t go as [leftists] hope. Ultimately, the police are there to protect criminals from the populace, not the other way around. Get rid of the police, and armed vigilantism is what you’ll get. And what you’ll deserve.”

HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: Student barred from class for claiming there are two genders.

PATRICK HYNES: Help us Ron DeSantis, you’re our only hope.

HOW IT STARTED: “Defund the Police.”

How it’s going: California sheriff’s office stops all daytime patrols due to ‘catastrophic staffing shortage.’

A California county sheriff’s office announced that it will stop its daytime police patrol due to a “catastrophic staffing shortage throughout the agency.”

Tehama County, which is located north of Sacramento and has a population of 65,000, will suspend daytime patrol services starting November 20.

Ending the patrols could prove dangerous considering that Red Bluff, the county’s most populated city, has a violent crime rate higher than 97% of other U.S. cities, according to Neighborhood Scout.

The Tehama County Sheriff’s Office released a statement announcing the decision and noted, “Over the past several years, the Sheriff’s Office has had difficulties with recruitment and retention of employees, which has been directly linked to pay disparities. A drastic rise in attrition, coupled with the inability to present enticing recruitment efforts have resulted in an unprecedented staffing shortage.”

According to KRCR-TV, the Tehama County Jail is currently around 60% of its staffing capacity. Over the past year, the sheriff’s office has lost 20 employees.

Gooder and harder, California.

IN OUR SYSTEM, YOU GOTTA GET THE VOTES WHERE YOU NEED THEM:

People didn’t show up where people needed to show up to flip races. Oh, they showed up elsewhere. You’ll hear about the “national popular vote,” the total number of votes cast for each party. Republicans received almost 52 million votes, Democrats only around 47 million. It’s an interesting stat that means absolutely nothing.

For the past few cycles, Democrats were roundly mocked by conservatives for citing how they’d won the NPV, as they should have been, so it can’t be a source of comfort now. Everyone knows where the votes are needed. If the candidates, campaigns, and party can’t work within that reality they deserve to lose.

Well. Plus: “That being said, the real problem for Republicans was Lindsey Graham. The senior Senator from South Carolina, for reasons known only to him, decided to introduce a nationwide 15-week abortion ban in September. Think what you will of the concept, it was a stupid strategic move.”

I said that at the time.

WHICH IS WHY THE DEMOCRATS UNCEASINGLY PROMOTE IT: White House Report Card: National division is a win for Biden.

I LOVE THE RESPONSES CALLING HER A “CHRISTOFASCIST” WHEN SHE’S ACTUALLY A HINDU:

HMM: Police find no powder in ‘suspicious’ envelopes reported by Kari Lake’s campaign office.

THE BATTLE FOR CONTROL OF THE HOUSE: Where Things Stand. “So where do things stand now? Currently, at the time of this writing, Democrats have won 198 House seats compared to the GOP’s 210 seats. That leaves 27 seats that have yet to be called, and the Republican Party only needs to win eight of them to reach the 218 seats needed for the majority.”

“CLIMATE:” Boris and Rishi Buy the Pyramids.

SETH BARRETT TILLMAN: The Arrest of James Hodges.

THIRD WORLD COUNTRIES CAN DO THIS BETTER, AND DO: The battle over a 100% hand count in Arizona pulls back the mask.

EARLY BLACK FRIDAY DEAL: TurboTax Premier 2022 Tax Software. #CommissionEarned

TWO WORLD WAR II AIRPLANES COLLIDE AND CRASH DURING WINGS OVER DALLAS AIR SHOW:

Two World War II-era airplanes collided and crashed while performing a flyover at a commemorative event in Texas on Saturday, the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. Six people were onboard the two planes at the time of the crash, the Commemorative Air Force said.

A Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra were participating in the Air Force’s Wings Over Dallas air show when they collided mid-air near the Dallas Executive Airport just before 1:30 p.m. local time, the FAA said.

According to the event’s website, several planes were scheduled to do a flyover demonstration Saturday afternoon. Social media posts showed hundreds of people gathered to watch the flyover. The 3-day event is in honor of Veterans Day, which was Friday.

Anthony Montoya saw the two planes collide.

“I just stood there. I was in complete shock and disbelief,” said Montoya, 27, who attended the air show with a friend. “Everybody around was gasping. Everybody was bursting into tears. Everybody was in shock.”

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson called it a “terrible tragedy.”

Here’s video of the crash, which was caught by multiple people on their phone cameras:

⚠️ GRAPHIC VIDEO: A mid-air collision involving two planes near the Dallas Executive Airport, today. The accident took place during the Wings Over Dallas WWII Airshow at 1:25 p.m., according to Dallas Fire-Rescue. A @FOX4 viewer took this video. @FOX4 is working for more details. pic.twitter.com/jdA6Cpb9Ot

— David Sentendrey (@DavidSFOX4) November 12, 2022

THE FALL GUY: Biden border chief Chris Magnus resigns amid pressure from Homeland Security.

He said he believed he was doing the job Mr. Biden asked of him in the direction he was taking CBP.

That direction has been the worst border numbers on record, with more illegal immigrants encountered and more fentanyl and terrorism suspects detected than ever before.

Mr. Magnus, who had been chief of police in Tucson, Arizona, took over at CBP when numbers were already bad. They started deteriorating at the beginning of the Biden administration.

But during 11 months on the job, Mr. Magnus made little headway in bringing the numbers down.

Border Patrol agents and Republicans on Capitol Hill blame Mr. Mayorkas — indeed, if the GOP takes control of the House there will likely be an effort to impeach the secretary.

Mr. Mayorkas, though, seemed to finger Mr. Magnus as the hurdle to better border security.

Mr. Mayorkas is slated to appear on Capitol Hill for testimony next week, and the border situation is likely to come up.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said Mr. Biden had accepted Mr. Magnus’s resignation and ”appreciates” his lengthy law enforcement career.

As Ed Morrissey wrote on Friday, before Magnus resigned, “This also raises another question of whether Biden and Mayorkas want to push out Magnus as a way to blame him for everything that’s gone wrong, to discredit Magnus in case he goes to Congress with what he knows about the border crisis, or both…At some point, the silly impotence of trying to push Magnus out will end as it should have last month, before the nasty leaks and innuendo. Biden will formally fire Magnus, and Magnus will then start chatting up House Republicans about his future testimony. If Biden and Mayorkas don’t like that, then they should adopt better border-control policies and keep Magnus inside the tent. If they did that, perhaps Magnus won’t be inclined to burn it all down.”

HOPES OF GOP SENATE MAJORITY DIE IN NEVADA AS CORTEZ MASTO DECLARED WINNER.

FTX: The fall of Sam Bankman-Fried is crypto’s Enron moment.

In recent weeks, the world’s richest man and his flailing attempts to figure out what to do with Twitter have dominated the news cycle. However, his unhinged management-by-tweets reality show are nothing compared to an almighty tussle between two crypto-bros.

Internet magic money (aka crypto) billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried, better known as SBF, is the man behind FTX, a crypto exchange. He seems to have angered fellow magic money billionaire and fremeny, Changpeng Zhao, better known as CZ and CEO of the rival exchange Binance. It might have to do with FTX cozying up to regulators to get the regulations beneficial to the FTX but not its rivals.

Last week, the FTX balance sheet was leaked to crypto news site Coindesk, which effectively caused a run on the exchange by exposing the financial ties between FTX and Alameda Research, a crypto trading firm also owned by SBF. The balance sheet showed that FTX’s finances were a paper tiger and ripe for plundering.

There followed a jujitsu move by which the Binance chief created a market run on FTX. His firm dumped the FTX tokens they were holding, essentially telling the market they had no faith in them. “CZ outsmarted SBF, plain and simple,” a friend who is deeply involved in this industry told me of the clashing egos. “CZ helped SBF create FTX, let him grow it, and then when it got too big, he destroyed it.”

CZ, in an ironic Robinhood act that SBF himself pioneered with other failing crypto firms, announced that he was buying SBF’s empire in a move to “save” FTX. A day later he declared, “no deal” as FTX is a big hairball and not worth the hassle. Now that’s a proper decimation of a competitor. The whole thing is quite messy – much like the whole crypto ecosystem, which is supposed to be open and transparent but is more opaque than a dog with glaucoma.

If this whole thing looks like a Ponzi scheme involving magic Internet money, then it just might be – as the Substack Dirty Bubble Media outlines in this post. Feel free to follow VC-twitter and read their threads. Whatever you do, beware of those promising endless good times, unicorns and money raining from the skies.

And a fair amount of money aimed at (mostly) Democrat politicians: FTX Founder Spent $40 Million As Democrat Midterm Megadonor.

Leading up to Sam Bankman-Fried’s spectacular implosion – in which his firm FTX evaporated billions in wealth after the now-bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange allegedly commingled client assets with his trading firm into a liquidity crunch – he became the sixth-largest donor in this year’s midterm election cycle, giving some $40 million to mostly Democratic candidates and causes.

According to Forbes, Bankman-Fried was second only to George Soros among billionaire donors to Democratic groups during the 2022 midterm election cycle.

FTX allegedly loaned Alameda Research – a trading firm founded by Bankman-Fried – roughly $10 billion in client assets, which has landed him under federal investigation by the SEC, CTFC, and the Justice Department – the latter of which already had been working on a months-long investigation, according to the Wall Street Journal. The CTFC, meanwhile, is tasked with regulating certain elements of the crypto markets – including digital assets that are as commodities, and crypto exchanges and clearinghouses.

In late September, Bankman-Fried admitted that his political donations were mostly to Democrats, and Republican recipients were ‘targeted’.

The fallout could be enormous: Canadian teachers could have a $95 million hole in their pensions due to the FTX crypto implosion.

The crisis at cryptocurrency exchange FTX is having ramifications far and wide. Now Canada’s third largest pension plan is revealing details about its exposure to the troubled company led by 30-year-old crypto billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried.

On Thursday, the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (OTPP) released a statement saying that in October 2021 it invested $75 million in both FTX International and its U.S. entity FTX.US. Additionally, it said, it made a follow-on investment of $20 million in FTX.US in January this year. The potential losses it could face are still unknown.

The OTTP wasn’t the only one burned by FTX’s collapse. Sequoia Capital, one of the most successful venture capital firms of all time, said it will mark down its investment of $214 million in FTX to zero. “We are in the business of taking risk,” it wrote to investors. “Some investments will surprise to the upside, and some will surprise to the downside.”

Other blue-chip backers of the platform include BlackRock, SoftBank, and Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek.

If only investors had listened to Larry David: Larry David predicted FTX’s implosion.

Larry David made a prediction about this week’s crypto meltdown that was prettaaay prettaaay good.

In a Super Bowl ad for the FTX crypto exchange in February, Larry David sarcastically predicted that FTX wasn’t going to make it. The ad shows David’s character throughout history, naysaying humanity’s greatest inventions, including the wheel, the lightbulb, coffee and democracy.

At the end of the ad, David learns about FTX, “a safe and easy way to get into crypto.” A dismissive David says, “Ehhh, I don’t think so. And I’m never wrong about this stuff — never.”

“Don’t be like Larry,” the FTX ad closes.

The ad resurfaced on social media this week after FTX imploded. David’s character was, it turns out, right to be skeptical.

FTX filed for bankruptcy proceedings in the United States on Friday, marking a stunning downfall for one of the biggest and most powerful players in the crypto industry. CEO Sam Bankman-Fried, the 30-year-old founder of the exchange, resigned.

To be fair, he was bound to be right eventually:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BH5-rSxilxo

Besides bribed politicians and investor losses, there’s more fallout from FDX’s implosion: FTX Owes Miami $16.5M For Arena Sponsorship Cancellation. “Late Friday, the County and the Miami Heat announced that they had terminated the relationship with FTX because of its bankruptcy.”

So what’s next for Sam Bankman-Fried? FTX founder Bankman-Fried denies fleeing to South America amid crypto collapse.

Decline is a choice, America:

GRIFTING IS AN INTERNATIONAL PHENOMENON: British BLM activist charged with fundraising fraud.

WHY PEOPLE DON’T TRUST “EXPERTS” ANYMORE: ‘Masks reduce racism’ study is latest sign US medical establishment is insanely, perilously woke.

Related: The Suicide of Expertise.

DYING IN A B-17 CRASH, in 2022. “The Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress and a Bell P-63 Kingcobra collided and crashed around 1:20 p.m., the Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement. The collision occurred during the Commemorative Air Force Wings Over Dallas show.”