THERE ARE SIDE EFFECTS: Supply can’t meet demand as diabetes drugs’ use surges for weight loss.
YE DID THE IMPOSSIBLE: make Alex Jones sound sane.
No, Ye, there really aren’t good things about Hitler. Not a one. He was even a crappy artist. Not one good thing. I guess he liked dogs. So there is that. One good thing.
Right up to the point where he tested a cyanide capsule’s efficacy on his German Shepherd while in the bunker in April of 1945.
More here: Masked Ye goes on antisemitic tirade on Infowars: ‘I like Hitler.’
“You’re not Hitler, you’re not a Nazi, you don’t deserve to be called that and demonized,” Jones told Ye, who was appearing on his program along with white nationalist Nick Fuentes, who made headlines when he accompanied Ye to a dinner at Mar-a-Lago with former President Trump last week.
“Well, I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone,” Ye said in response while wearing a fully hooded mask on the set of Jones’s show. “And Jewish people are not going to tell me you can love us, and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography” while also condemning Hitler, he added, saying “you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I’m done with that.”
“Every human being has something of value that they brought to the table, especially Hitler,” Ye continued. “Also Hitler was born Christian.”
As the show headed to a commercial break, Jones told Ye he had a “Hitler fetish,” to which Ye responded, “I like Hitler.”
Ye has seen public backlash for weeks with his repeated comments criticizing Jewish people and falsely claiming a cabal of elite Jewish power brokers control the media, Hollywood and politics.
His comments have caused major brands long associated with his music, fashion line and businesses to cut ties with him, moves he has said cost him hundreds of millions of dollars.
Related: O Ye of Little Faith: The Anti-Semitism of Kanye West. “In other words, Kanye West has lost his mind. But that doesn’t explain enough. If West had blamed the Iroquois for his woes, that would be unhinged. But he didn’t. He blamed the Jews, and that’s no accident of mental illness. West found a powerful political explanation for his experience, one that already has a pedigree in the black community—anti-Semitism.”
OUT ON A LIMB: FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident. Sam Bankman-Fried is a con man and fraudster of historic proportions. But you might not learn that from the New York Times, CoinDesk’s Chief Insights Columnist David Z. Morris writes.
These are complex and in many cases nuanced forms of fraud – largely echoing, it must be said, well-established models in the traditional finance world. That obscurity is one reason Bankman-Fried was able to masquerade as an honest player, and has likely helped keep coverage softer even after the collapse.
Bankman-Fried had also crafted a scruffy, nerdy image hard to square with malevolent thievery – not unlike other 21st century luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Neumann. In interviews, he talked a stream of nonsense tailored to snowjob outsiders about an industry that’s already full of jargon and complicated tech. He cultivated political and social influence through a web of strategic donations and insincere ideological statements.
Since his con collapsed, Bankman-Fried has continued to muddy the waters with carefully disingenuous letters, statements, interviews and tweets. He has attempted to portray himself as a well-intentioned but naïve kid who got in over his head and made a few miscalculations. This is a softer but more pernicious version of the crisis management approach Donald Trump learned from the black-hat mob lawyer Roy Cohn: Instead of “deny, deny, deny,” Bankman-Fried has decided to “confuse, evade, distort.”
And it has, to a significant degree, worked. Mainstream voices still parroting Bankman-Fried’s counterfactual talking points include Kevin O’Leary, who portrays an investor on the reality show “Shark Tank.” In a Nov. 27 interview with Business Insider, O’Leary described Bankman-Fried as a “savant” and “probably one of the most accomplished traders of crypto in the world” – despite recent data implying immense trading losses even when times were good.
O’Leary’s status as an investor in, and formerly paid spokesperson for, FTX (we sure hope those checks clear, Kevin!) explain his continued affection for Bankman-Fried in the face of mounting contradictory evidence. But he is far from alone in burnishing Bankman-Fried’s image. The disgraced failed son of two Stanford University law professors will be handed the opportunity to defend himself onstage at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit Wednesday.
The scale and complexity of Bankman-Fried’s fraud and theft appear to rival those of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and Malaysian embezzler Jho Low. Whether consciously or through malign ineptitude, the fraud also echoes much larger corporate scandals such as Worldcom and, particularly, Enron.
The principals in all of those scandals wound up either sentenced to prison or on the run from the law. Sam Bankman-Fried clearly deserves to share their fate.
Earlier: Sam Bankman-Fried’s media outlets must come clean. “SBF-funded publications have an obligation to their readers to clear up the exact nature of their financial relationship with him, if they ever want their stories on this beat to be trusted again. Questions remain around what kind of influence came with accepting Bankman-Fried’s money — which, as it turns out, wasn’t actually his and is now gone. Otherwise, I foresee a future where reporters at these outlets are left jobless, wishing they’d learned to code.”
SENICIDE: Many nursing homes are poorly staffed. How do they get away with it?
Related: “In modern day western-culture, senicide often takes the form of placing senior citizens in overcrowded conditions where preventable diseases can easily spread. More often than not, these spaces are separate from other generations of people so problems such as quality of life, hygiene and isolation are less detectable to the wider population.”
IT’S LIKE THEY’RE ON STRIKE OR SOMETHING: Men need to be working — and fewer and fewer of them are.
READER FAVORITE: Apple AirPods Pro (2nd Generation) Wireless Earbuds. #CommissionEarned
ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Is that light the end of the tunnel or a railroad union freight train?
CHRISTIAN TOTO: Disney Blinks, DeSantis Snags First Huge Win of 2024 Campaign. “Days after rejoining the company, Iger declared a ceasefire in the Culture Wars he helped inflame.”
VICTORIA TAFT: Why Is the Left So Obsessed With Harming Children?
LUMMIS’ FOOLISH CAVE-IN WON’T WIN HER TOLERANCE FROM LEFT: The Washington Stand’s Suzanne Bowdey looks at the sad defense delivered during a Senate floor speech Tuesday evening just before the final vote on the Respect for Marriage Act.
A GOP WITH A BACKBONE WOULD DO A LOT OF THINGS: A GOP With Backbone Would Support Elon Musk, Punish Apple, And Fight For Free Speech On Twitter.
BETTER DEAD THAN RUDE: Diversity Up, Public Safety Down.
With the number of voluntary resignations from England and Wales police forces up 72 percent since last year, these efforts to attract new officers are sorely needed. Yet Rowley appeared more concerned with virtue signaling than with promoting the police force.
“I am really pleased that we have achieved our highest ever female representation as part of the Met reaching its greatest ever total number of officers,” he said.
The number of female police officers in London has indeed reached a record high, according to Met figures. As of September, the force was 30.4 percent female, and it aims to increase its share of women officers to 33 percent by the next fiscal year, intending for 50 percent of all new recruits to be women. Of the 1,678 officers recruited since April, 44.5 percent (746 officers) have been female.
Rowley is devoted to diversity and inclusion. “The evidence across the world is that the best companies and organisations benefit from diverse teams,” he has said. “It is not only about fairness, it is about being the most effective in a complex world.”
The world is indeed complex, but London’s violent crime has risen steadily in recent years. Police in London recorded a quarter of a million violent crime offenses in 2021-22, a 10 percent increase from the previous year. A major driver of violence in the capital has been gang warfare. According to a Sky News investigation, roughly 200 gangs operate in London.
As David Frum wrote in his 2000 book How We Got Here: The 70’s: The Decade that Brought You Modern Life (For Better or Worse), about police on the other side of the big pond:
Americans over a certain age are often surprised to see diminutive women patrolling their city’s meanest streets. The policemen of their childhood were tall, commanding figures. Have the cops shrunk? Well, yes. In March 1973, the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration issued an order forbidding any local police department that received federal funds (that is, all of them) to maintain minimum height requirements—the rules disqualified too many women. In 1977, the Supreme Court seconded LEAA by striking down Alabama’s minimum height requirement as a violation of the 1964 act. The federal government lived up to its own principles. In 1971 it waived size and strength requirements for its own police forces. In 1977, New York City acceded to a judicial order and permitted women to apply for fire-fighting jobs. None of the applicants passed the department’s strength test so the judge ordered the strength test made easier until sufficient numbers of women could pass.
Well, better dead than rude, right?
FTX’S BANKMAN-FRIED: I’ll be broke at the end of this, you know.
Let me correct the quote reference just a skosh: “I expect I’m gonna have nothing at the end of this,” said the man hunkering down in the Bahamas with $100,000 in the bank and $121 million in recently purchased real estate there as well.
Not in any sense does Bankman-Fried suggest that he feels any sympathy for the victims of the FTX collapse, nor any real responsibility for it. He repeatedly dodges the latter, especially in his breathtaking claim that he didn’t bother to manage risk for FTX, and only admits to being “vaguely aware” of customers’ deposited assets getting transferred to Alameda, which crosses “a bright red line,” as Stephanopoulos points out. SBF’s response was that he was asleep at the switch:
“There is something maybe even deeply wrong there, which was I wasn’t even trying. Like, I wasn’t spending any time or effort trying to manage risk on FTX and that that was obviously a mistake,” he said. “If I had been spending an hour a day thinking about risk management on FTX, I don’t think that would have happened. And I don’t feel good about that.”
“That’s a pretty stunning admission,” Stephanopoulos interjected partway through that quote. It’s a stunning rationalization, not an admission, however. Later, Stephanopoulos told the panel that managing risk is Job One for someone at the top of a funds exchange of any sort, which begs the question of what SBF was really doing with FTX, Alameda, and customer assets. Bankman-Fried’s attempt to claim that he never bothered with risk management beggars belief.
Related: Sam Bankman-Fried’s Phone Call to His Parents: ‘There Might Be a Liquidity Issue.’
Both of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents are Stanford Law School professors, who Mr. Bankman-Fried has said were influential in shaping his ethical framework. Their vocations also helped lend Mr. Bankman-Fried, 30, a further veneer of credibility with investors and others as he built his cryptocurrency empire.
Mr. Bankman-Fried was asked by Andrew Ross Sorkin at the DealBook Summit what he told his parents when his firm began to collapse this month. FTX was forced to file for bankruptcy after an avalanche of customer withdrawals created an $8 billion hole on the firm’s balance sheet. Mr. Bankman-Fried likened the customer exodus to a run on the bank.
“I think I called them up and said, ‘Hey guys, I think there might be a problem, like, it looks like Alameda’s position might be imploding here — there might be a liquidity issue,’” he said.
When asked about the $300 million worth of real estate that FTX and Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents reportedly bought in the Bahamas, he said he did not “know the details but that it was not intended to be their long-term property.”
“They may have stayed there while working with the company sometime over the last year,” he said of his parents.
His parents were compliance lawyers who worked for FTX? Could disbarment be in their future?
LIVE AT 3PM EASTERN: ‘Five O’Clock Somewhere’ with Kruiser, VodkaPundit, Special Guest Kevin Downey Jr.
REMEMBER WHEN THEY TOLD US BIDEN’S SMOOTH DIPLOMACY WOULD BRING BACK THE ALLIES TRUMP’S HAMHANDEDNESS HAD ALIENATED? Macron, in Washington, says Biden’s agenda could ‘fragment the West.’
THE NEW SPACE RACE: NASA awards contract for 3D-printed construction on moon, Mars.
VIDEO: Arthur Brooks on corporations going woke. “We need to tell CEOs…3% of your employees are activists…blowing up your Slack demanding that you get involved in a culture war and make political statements. Don’t do it. The rest of your employees are feeling bullied as well…”
THE WAPO WISHES ITS STAFFERS MERRY CHRISTMAS: The Washington Post will end its Sunday magazine, eliminate positions.
“We will end the print Sunday Magazine in its current form as we continue to undergo our global and digital transformation,” Buzbee said in a subsequent email to staff early Wednesday afternoon. She noted that “we will be shifting some of the most popular content, and adding more, in a revitalized Style section that will launch in the coming months.”
“We deeply appreciate the contributions this staff has made to our print readers over the years,” she wrote in conclusion.
Related: Biden tells coal miners to “learn to code.” “According to Dave Weigel of the Washington Post, Biden said, ‘Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as hell learn to program as well… Anybody who can throw coal into a furnace can learn how to program, for God’s sake!’ According to Weigel, the comment was met with silence from the audience.”
NOBODY CARES: EU throws gala party for ‘global gateway’ metaverse — and only a handful of people show up. “By ‘handful,’ they mean 6. The EU spent £332,500. So that’s £55,417 per person.”
So new is Plonkerdump that the rules are yet to be codified. By examining a few demonstration events, however, we may begin to develop a simple scoring system.
I propose that points be awarded on a scale of how many vehicles are able to pass relative to how many stupid climate protesters have been removed.
One point may be awarded, for example, if vehicular progress is achieved after four or more protesters are dragged away by understandably hostile motorists or onlookers:
https://twitter.com/benallaoff/status/1597230950521655297?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1597230950521655297%7Ctwgr%5E1e6a6c9b0d5789ed134744f893ec54da283a7a4b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailytelegraph.com.au%2Fblogs%2Ftim-blair%2Ffriday-noticeboard%2Fnews-story%2F6dd5b4780f2b6d0b38a5c0c87335e7c6
More like this, please.
InstaPundit is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.com.