KATHERINE BOYLE: It’s Time to Get Serious. “Prevailing wisdom insists that your twenties are for extreme exploration—collecting memories, friends, partners, identities. It’s BS.”

Just months before Sam Bankman-Fried’s unraveling, Fortune Magazine referred to the billionaire as a “trading wunderkind” a latter-day Warren Buffett only with a “goofy facade” and a penchant for fidget spinners. Even after his downfall and subsequent arrest in the Bahamas, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times and Axios all referred to Bankman-Fried, or SBF, as a disgraced “crypto wunderkind.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times illustrated his boyishness best when interviewing him at the Times’ DealBook Summit last November. “When you read the stories,” Sorkin said, “it sounds like a bunch of kids who were all on Adderall having a sleepover party.”

SBF’s fate will now be decided by the Southern District of New York, but his media charade of aw-shucks interviews and congressional testimony laced with brogrammer idioms built a public persona that we’ve largely come to accept: SBF is just a kid. Indeed, he’s so young that his law school professor parents were involved in his business and political dealings. (In this, they embody the helicopter style of child-rearing favored by nearly the entire Boomer elite.)

The reality, of course, is that SBF is a grown-ass, 30-year-old man.
…
Perhaps you’ve given little thought to SBF or FTX beyond: WTF!? In which case I applaud your rich social life and sense of restraint.

But the reason this iteration of the time-tested financial fraud plotline matters so much is not because SBF is an exception to the rule of how our culture infantilizes millennials. It’s that he is the rule.

Infantilizing young adults is a convenient way for the aged to hold onto power longer than their sell-by date.

21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: Prostitutes gather in Davos for annual meeting of global elite — where demand for sexual services rockets during economic summit.

THEY HAD PEOPLE FROM FULTON COUNTY COUNTING THE DEATHS: WHO presses China for more data after COVID death tally leaps from 37 to 60K.

TO BE FAIR, HE KNOWS QUITE A LOT ABOUT THE SUBJECT: Brian Stelter, formerly of CNN, hosts panel on “the clear and present danger of disinformation” at Davos.

NOTHING TO SEE HERE: Joe Biden Quietly Removed Tax Returns From His Website, and We Have Questions.

WELL, GOOD: Ten-minute scan enables detection and cure of the most common cause of high blood pressure. “For the study, 128 people were scanned after doctors found that their hypertension (high blood pressure) was caused by the steroid hormone aldosterone. The scan found that in two thirds of patients with elevated aldosterone secretion, the hormone originated from a benign nodule in just one of the adrenal glands, which could be safely removed.”

JOE ROGEN: Howard Stern Went ‘Woke.’ “‘He has to be [woke] because the skeletons that guy [has in the closet],’ [Matt] McCusker said, alluding to reams of comedy sketches that would get him canceled today. Stern acknowledged that two years ago after some of his racially-charged sketches ‘resurfaced’ following the BLM protests of 2020. It may explain why other rambunctious comics, like Sarah Silverman and Chelsea Handler, similarly embraced woke ideology.”

THE HEADLINE DOESN’T REFER TO THE PRESS: Prostitutes Join the World Elites at Davos.

TRILLIONS:  Hans Bader on the San Francisco Reparations Proposal.

GOOD: New drug combination may effectively treat often fatal childhood brain tumor.

HMM: Artists launch copyright lawsuit against AI art generators Stable Diffusion and Midjourney. “Midjourney and Stable Diffusion are trained on billions of images. In the case of the latter, it uses selected datasets from the LAION-5B project, a collection of 5 billion images and associated descriptive captions created by a German-based research non-profit. The scraping is usually done without the artists’ consent and can be used to imitate their art style. Now, three artists—Sarah Andersen, Kelly McKernan and Karla Ortiz—say this is a violation of several copyright laws.”

OUT ON A LIMB: Sorry, media, the great reset is real.

K-12 IMPLOSION UPDATE: Youngkin goes ballistic on equity and what schools do to achieve it vice excellence.

OF COURSE THEY DID. BUT THEY’RE LYING TOOLS. Recant? Intel signatory on Hunter laptop now says they knew much of it was real. “Wise’s explanation now, after the Department of Justice eventually validated the laptop, amounts to nothing more than defensive spin. If Wise and his cohort wanted to make the case for not jumping to conclusions, they failed miserably at it. Their own letter jumped to a conclusion of a Russian plot, was leaked to Politico to further that narrative, and did so on the basis of absolutely no evidence at all.”

To be fair, there was an election and they wanted their guy to win, and their enemy to lose.

READER FAVORITE: GTHUNDER Digital Night Vision Goggles Binoculars for Total Darkness. #CommissionEarned

REMEMBER WHEN: That Time in 2010 When VP Biden Left Classified Documents Lying Around the West Wing.

MEH, THEY’RE ALWAYS FURIOUS ABOUT SOMETHING. Woke Fury as Diocese of Des Moines Bans Preferred Pronouns. We’re told that “some activists complained,” but well, of course. Activists complain. That’s what they do.

JACK DUNPHY: Los Angeles Descends Into Insanity.

With all of this in mind, coupled with the all-out assault on America’s police officers since the death of George Floyd in 2020, it should surprise no one that the LAPD is having trouble replenishing its ranks. The department is about 500 officers short of its authorized strength, and in its desperation to boost staffing it is trying to lure back recently retired officers.

I can predict with confidence the effort will fall short of its aims. Morale in the LAPD has never been lower, and most officers within sight of retirement are counting the days as a prisoner would to his release date. Having once escaped the disaster the department has become, who in his right mind would return to it?

Los Angeles may be run by lunatics, but is any retired cop crazy enough to want to work for them again?

Gooder, and harder, California.

LAUGHINGWOLF’S FOLLOWUP on the Texas diner shooter. “What happens now? I think there is a growing probability (not possibility) that we are going to see ‘justice’ dispensed at the street level. When people are scared, do not feel safe anywhere, and have no faith in the system, they tend to take things into their own hands when they can. After all, if they know the person who just threatened them is going to be out in an hour or two after the prosecutor cuts a sweetheart deal with them, why take the risk?”

Read the whole thing.

VODKAPUNDIT PRESENTS YOUR WEEKLY INSANITY WRAP: The Billionaires at Davos Want to Bore You to Death, Literally. “At Davos, the WEF is building a Boring New World where everybody will just want to curl up and die.”

Plus:

• The Revolution is being led by doughy twentysomethings with blue hair.
• Another dog, another hero.
• Remember when San Diego was the sane part of southern California? Me neither.

So much more at the link, you’d have to be crazy to miss it.

ASKING THE IMPORTANT QUESTIONS: Which Democratic Party Kingmaker(s) Want Biden Out? “With midterms safely past, news about the classified documents (which was known in advance of the midterms) was allowed to leak out, indicating that whoever arranged Slow Joe’s greased-skid path to the White House has lost confidence in his ability not to screw things up so badly that Democrats get slaughtered in 2024. And this despite the decided unpopularity both of VP Kamala Harris and backup catspaw Pete Buttigieg. My working theory is that the same people who installed Biden will try to install Gavin Newsom in 2024.”

SHOCKER: U. Massachusetts poll: Blacks more likely to hold antisemitic views.

LINCOLN BROWN: No More Fun of Any Kind! Don’t Send Your Kids to Syracuse.

WHATEVER HAPPENED TO “SHUT UP AND COMPUTE?” Organization of ‘nonbinary scientists’ influences universities, professional organizations, publications.

JOEL KOTKIN: Soccer Moms are giving way to Single Woke Females – the new “SWFs” – as one of the most potent voting blocs in American politics. “Their power is growing thanks to the demographic winds. The number of never married women has grown from about 20% in 1950 to over 30% in 2022, while the percentage of married women has declined from almost 70% in 1950 to under 50% today. Overall, the percentage of married households with children has declined from 37% in 1976 to 21% today.”