MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: Gov. Ron DeSantis Asks Grand Jury to Probe Wrongdoing Over COVID Vax.
Author Archive: Ed Driscoll
December 14, 2022
TYLER O’NEIL: Conservatives, Christians Systematically Excluded From Benefits of Christmas Shopping on Amazon. “Amazon systematically excludes many conservative Christians from the kind of Christmas cheer that comes with knowing that every purchase helps a good cause of their choice. Thanks to Amazon’s decision to exclude organizations that the SPLC brands ‘hate groups,’ those who support religious liberty can’t help ADF with their doll or other purchases.”
ALL IN THE FAMILY: Sam Bankman-Fried’s esteemed Stanford parents face their own reckoning.
As Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried sat in a Bahamian courtroom Tuesday, the popular Stanford law professors had to be worried about more than whether their FTX founder son, Sam Bankman-Fried, will go to prison for orchestrating what a federal prosecutor described as “one of the biggest financial frauds in American history.”
The couple also have to be concerned about their own legal jeopardy, a criminal law expert said, given reports that they were involved, at some level, in their son’s efforts to build his allegedly fraudulent cryptocurrency exchange into a $32 billion business. They face scrutiny on multiple fronts over whether they were complicit in the alleged crimes that led to the company’s spectacular collapse.
“I can’t imagine a world where Bankman-Fried’s parents were not his financial and legal advisors,” said Matthew Barhoma, a criminal defense and appellate attorney who is based in Los Angeles.
It could get especially ugly for the couple, who are accustomed to a privileged life in high-minded academia. If prosecutors and the FBI want to play hardball, they could try to force Bankman and Fried to cooperate with the investigation and to testify against their beloved son.
“Beloved?” How much money did SBF funnel to the San Jose Mercury?
Meanwhile: Caroline Ellison likely working with feds against Sam Bankman-Fried.
Sam Bankman-Fried’s reported ex-girlfriend was likely among the first people to turn on him and help prosecutors build their fast-moving fraud case in the epic, $8 billion-plus collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange, a former US government lawyer said Wednesday,
Caroline Ellison, 28, is a key figure in the case as she was at one time CEO of the Alameda Research hedge fund — which authorities claim received billions of dollars that Bankman-Fried, 30, diverted from FTX.
“She would have among the greatest incentives to cooperate, as it was seeming likely that in his effort to exculpate himself, Bankman-Fried would try to finger her,” former Securities and Exchange Commission lawyer Howard Fischer told The Post.
Fischer said “the speed of the indictment and the breadth of the charges” against Bankman-Fried meant “someone relatively senior is cooperating with the federal authorities in exchange for leniency for their own potential misconduct.”
“It is possible Bankman-Fried’s publicity tour, in which he repeatedly disclaimed either knowledge of — or responsibility for — mishandling or theft of customer assets, spurred senior officers to fear that he would specifically blame them,” he said.
Finally, America’s Newspaper of Record is now just doing straight-up reportage: DOJ Arrests Sam Bankman-Fried For Running Out Of Bribery Money.
HOW IT STARTED:
During a rally yesterday, Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden spoke to a crowd in Derry, N.H., a town that many miners call home. He acknowledged the economic setbacks and job insecurity that coal miners face these days, and gave them some advice: 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.
—“Biden tells coal miners to ‘learn to code,'” The Hill, December 31st, 2019.
How it’s going: Expect coding class enrollment surge following WaPo publisher’s announcement that layoffs are coming.
None of these people give a single shit that their preferred policies result in countless jobs lost in the oil and coal industries. https://t.co/Gb4RCjNWTr
— Sunny (@sunnyright) December 14, 2022
—Twitchy, today.
THE DESIRE NAMED STREETCAR: Everything is a scam: COVID/Light rail edition.
The latest light rail boondoggle is called the Southwest LRT project. It connects downtown Minneapolis with the western suburbs, and has never been a favorite of the tonier sort of people. They love light rail, except when it comes to or through their neighborhood.
The project has spiraled out of control, vastly outstripping its already bloated budget. As usual. Light rail is hideously expensive, and especially so when going through expensive neighborhoods. The line is only 14 miles long and will cost $2.7 billion.
That’s $190 million a mile. You can build a lot of roads with that kind of money. A typical lane of highway costs $1-2 million a mile. And would carry a lot more people*.
OK, so it’s expensive and over budget. Over budget as in $1.1 billion over budget. That’s quite an error. $1.6 billion to $2.7 billion. And despite a lot of effort looking under couch cushions and in the pockets of jackets, lots of money still needs to be found to fill that budget hole.
So guess where a bunch of the money is going to come from?
A plan to close the yawning budget gap for the $2.7 billion Southwest light-rail line was put in motion Monday, but the proposed infusion of $211 million still would not be enough to see the troubled project to completion.
The Metropolitan Council’s Transportation Committee on Monday unanimously recommended moving $111 million to the Southwest project, most of it taken from federal COVID-19 relief funds. That plan will require approval by the full council, which will build and maintain the line, in a vote expected next week.
Meanwhile, the Hennepin County Board is slated to vote Thursday on a measure to transfer an additional $100 million to the Southwest project, an extension of the Green Line that will link downtown Minneapolis to Eden Prairie.
But with project funding currently falling short by $450 million to $550 million, the Met Council would still need to find an additional $240 million to $340 million to finish the job. And it’s unclear at this time where the extra money will come from.
COVID. Is there anything it can’t do?
Honestly, this is just the icing on the cake. The project is government in a nutshell. Plan something totally ridiculous. Grossly mislead people on how much it will cost. Get started before the deception is too obvious to ignore. Screw things up. Plead “sunk cost.” Use “emergency” to steal more money.
* Yes, but building roads provides insufficient opportunities for graft: “A transit agency that expands its bus fleet gets the support of the transit operators union. But an agency that builds a rail line gets the support of construction companies, construction unions, banks and bond dealers, railcar manufacturers, electric power companies (if the railcars are electric powered), downtown property owners, and other real estate interests. Rail may be a negative-sum game for the region as a whole, but those concentrated interests stand to gain a lot at a relatively small expense to everyone else.”
AOC’S NEW CLIMATE FILM HITS ICEBERG, SINKS INTO THE ABYSS:
“To The End” made an average of $80 per screening. AOC has her fans but, apparently, all of them have seen her act and the rest of America isn’t interested. Even if she had a point, releasing a film at the start of a cold winter while you claim the earth is burning up seems, well, ill-timed.
I spent two minutes of my time, bringing you this “review.” It’s two minutes I won’t get back.
Obviously, AOC’s most die-hard fans won’t increase their carbon footprint by driving to movie theaters. But why was the film made in the first place? Major Budget Feature Films Have a Carbon Footprint of Over 3,000 Metric Tons, New Report Finds.
Environmentally speaking, the most sustainable option AOC could have taken was to make no film at all. Why does she hate Gaia so?
QUESTION ASKED: LGBTQ activist exposed by Rep. Nancy Mace: ‘Do you believe your rhetoric is a threat to democracy?’
At the @OversightDems hearing on white supremacy, Rep. @NancyMace asked witnesses if extremist rhetoric on social media is a threat to democracy. Trans activist Alejandra Caraballo @Esqueer_ said, "Yes." The congresswoman then presented Caraballo's tweets. https://t.co/z5VG89Kf0w pic.twitter.com/OnAEsAOIgb
— Andy Ngô 🏳️🌈 (@MrAndyNgo) December 13, 2022
TO BE HONEST, PROBABLY NOT: ‘You Think I Don’t Know How F*cking Old I Am?’ Biden Reportedly Fed-Up With Media Fixation on His Age.
Related: How to Respond to Anger and Aggression in Dementia. Understanding the Causes and Finding Ways to Cope.
Fallen FTX mogul Sam Bankman-Fried brought up his vegan diet and apparent ADD diagnosis as he begged a Bahamas judge to let him out of jail on Tuesday — with his attorney proposing a $250,000 cash bail to no avail, according to reports.
A magistrate judge in the Bahamas denied bail for the 30-year-old accused crypto crook, who lowered his head and hugged his parents, both Stanford professors, following the decision.
It came after a lengthy hearing — Bankman-Fried’s first in-person public appearance since his arrest in the Bahamas on Monday and the stunning collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange.
Also at the same hearing: Bankman-Fried’s parents were at his hearing in the Bahamas, and his mother laughed during the proceedings, report says. “During the proceedings, Bankman-Fried’s mother Barbara Fried laughed when her son was called a ‘fugitive,’ according to CoinDesk’s report, which described his parents as showing both ‘dejection and defiance.’ She also ‘clenched her jaw and chewed on the frames of her glasses,’ per the Times. His father, Joseph Bankman, ‘occasionally put his fingers in his ears as if to drown out the sound of the proceedings,’ per CoinDesk.”
Interesting courtroom behavior from a pair of Stanford law professors.
December 13, 2022
AIRBRUSH ALERT: Washington Post caught stealth-editing report that initially labeled Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss ‘conservative.’
To be fair, this is the same paper that thought Jennifer Rubin and Dave Weigel were conservatives as well.
UPDATE: Washington Post: everything we dislike is conservative.
December 12, 2022
CHANGE: Philadelphia forced to remove box that hid Columbus statue since BLM protests.
The statue in Marconi Plaza has been covered since June 2020, when progressive Mayor Jim Kenney announced plans to completely remove it as protesters took to the streets after George Floyd’s murder.
But on Friday, a judge ordered the city to finally free the statue and remove the plywood box.
Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt said “the City accepted the donation of the Columbus statue in 1876” and was not able to just ditch it.
“It has a fiduciary duty to preserve that statue, which it designated an historic object in 2017. The Columbus statue is not City property,” the judge ruled.
Local outlet WPVI-TV filmed city workers removing the box late Sunday.
A handful of onlookers cheered as the controversial statue finally emerged from underneath its covering, which since October had been painted the green, white and red of the Italian flag.
Attorney George Bochetto, who represents the statue’s supporters, told the local station that he is “delighted” that “the rule of law still matters.”
“That we are not a society ruled by cancel culture mobs. That all ethnic groups can proudly protect and honor their diverse heritages,” Bochetto said in a statement, referring to the 2020 protests.
He also told the Philadelphia Inquirer that the court’s decision was “not just significant for the Columbus statue and Italian Americans, it’s significant for every ethnic group in this country.”
The mayor’s spokesman, Kevin Lessard, said the city is “very disappointed” in the court’s ruling.
Of course he is: “In all of his political writings, [the late Roger] Scruton takes on the Left for scorning existing norms and customs, and for promoting a ‘culture of repudiation.’ The Left is ‘negative.’ It dismisses ‘every aspect of our cultural capital’ with the language of brutal invective: accusing every defender of human nature and sound tradition of ‘racism,’ ‘xenophobia,’ ‘homophobia,’ and ‘sexism.’ Like 1984’s ‘two minutes of hate,’ this language tears down, intimidates, and can never build anything humane or constructive—it is nihilistic to the core. At the same time, Scruton wants to reach out to reasonable liberals who eschew ideology and who still believe in civility and the promise of national belonging. His conservatism can discern the truth in liberalism (another Aristotelian trait) while the partisans of repudiation see half the human race as enemies.”
ORANGE MAN BANNED: Here’s How Twitter Execs Reinterpreted Trump Tweets To Justify Banning Him.
Twitter executives, including former head of legal, policy and trust Vijaya Gadde, reinterpreted then-President Donald Trump’s final Jan. 8, 2021, tweets to overrule the initial finding of the site’s safety team that they were not in violation of the rules, according to internal messages published by journalist Bari Weiss Monday.
Trump first tweeted that the “75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me … will have a Giant Voice long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” before tweeting a follow-up roughly an hour later saying he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration on Jan. 20, 2021. Members of Twitter’s safety team initially rejected increasingly agitated calls from Twitter staff to ban Trump, saying that neither message was in clear violation of the rules, as they contained no overt or coded incitement to violence. (RELATED: Twitter’s Safety Team Found Trump’s Final Tweets Did Not Violate Policy, But He Was Banned Anyway)
Less than 90 minutes after this initial assessment by the Twitter safety team, Gadde messaged another higher-ranking staffer that the safety team, suggesting that the team may have been incorrect to interpret the term “American Patriots” as being in reference Trump voters as opposed to the rioters present on Jan. 6., Weiss reported.
“The biggest question is whether a tweet like the one this morning from Trump, which isn’t a rule violation on its face, is being used as coded incitement to further violence,” Gadde messaged the other staffer, whose name was redacted. “Eg use of term ‘American Patriots’ and ‘They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!’”
Read the whole thing.
Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but this latest look into Twitter’s previous management’s misdeeds will likely have zero traction in the DNC-MSM: Nets Bury Heads in the Stand, Shut Out Mention of Fourth Twitter Files Batch.
On Saturday night, journalist Michael Shellenberger dropped the fourth batch of what’s become known as the Twitter Files and detailed the depths in which Twitter executives in January 2021 sought to concoct a rationale to ban former President Trump from the platform following the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
But like we saw with the previous three tranches from Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss (and an addendum from Taibbi), the major broadcast networks of ABC and NBC continued to ignore the bombshell files showing a pattern of deception, lies, and excuses from Twitter employees to censor conservatives and opposing views to the far-left Twitter workforce. CBS remained out to lunch with their total stuck at 26 seconds they gave to the first release.
Just think of the media as Democratic Party operatives with bylines, and their lack of coverage makes perfect sense.
Evergreen:
DEVELOPING: FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas after U.S. files criminal charges.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities this evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and U.S. trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse.
Damian Williams, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said on Twitter that the federal government anticipated moving to “unseal the indictment in the morning.”
Bahamas Attorney General Ryan Pinder said that the United States had filed unspecified criminal charges against Bankman-Fried and was “likely to request his extradition.”
In a statement, Bahamian Prime Minister Philip Davis said, “The Bahamas and the United States have a shared interest in holding accountable all individuals associated with FTX who may have betrayed the public trust and broken the law.”
“While the United States is pursuing criminal charges against SBF individually, The Bahamas will continue its own regulatory and criminal investigations into the collapse of FTX, with the continued cooperation of its law enforcement and regulatory partners in the United States and elsewhere,” continued the statement.
Subsequent reports have only reinforced this rumor, and the latest is that Ellison is being represented by DC law firm, WilmerHale…
… best known for its Government Affairs Department Chair, Jamie Gorelick, who was the former No. 2 ranking member in the Clinton Justice Department, and in a recent interview, she referred to Garland as her “wingman.”
If indeed Ellison is working the Feds while currying favor with SBF’s former closest friends, the days of Bankman-Fried — who may or may not soon commit Epsteincide — outside of a prison cell are numbered.
On the other hand though, Jamie Gorelick? What could go wrong?
NO. NEXT QUESTION? Is it bigotry to focus on Sam Brinton’s thefts?
Brinton is not just some random non-binary dude who happened to get caught up in a scandal and would otherwise have been anonymous. He was hired specifically to push gender ideology on the American public, and in the most in-your-face manner. So in-your-face that some LGBTQ+ activists actually worried that Brinton was something of a potential time bomb, given his sketchy history.
Brinton was trotted out as part of the LGBTQ++/565=screw you crowd. Along with Adm. Rachel Levine, Karine Jean-Pierre, and Biden’s embrace of the Dylan Mulvaney crowd hiring Brinton was explicitly a cultural and political statement. A symbol. And as a symbol, not merely a public employee of no note, it is totally fair to examine his conduct.
It is the Biden crowd, not we, who made Brinton this symbol of competence and diversity. On Bastille Day the Biden Administration sent Brinton and Levine to the French Embassy as the United States’ representatives to their celebration. That is extremely high profile, and was done to make a point.
So Brinton is a high profile symbol chosen specifically for his gender fluidity. That makes his behavior significant. Conservatives didn’t latch on to him to make a point, the Left did.
And, unsurprisingly, his behavior tracked exactly with the expectations of people who believe that Brinton’s gender confusion is a result of a mental illness of some kind. The guy parades around in female clothing, does bondage seminars, describes his bizarre sexual practices and teaches them to others, and steals women’s luggage to wear their clothes.
This all fits together. It’s not like the last item, stealing women’s clothes, is shockingly different that everything else. It shocks nobody, and demonstrates that normalizing his behavior was always stupid. It’s all of a piece–his crimes are connected to his other perversities, not some shocking exception. How many of those outfits he proudly parades around in were stolen? I would bet it would be more than one.
We have social norms to constrain human nature and desire; we are born as monsters of gluttony, utterly self-centered, and as basic barbarians. Parents, schools, churches, and other people shape the character of a child into something civilized, establishing boundaries that enable us to become good people. Tossing away all those boundaries creates Sam Brintons.
America’s newspaper of record “reports” that Brinton is really escalating his alleged crimes: Christmas Canceled After Sam Brinton Steals Santa’s Sack.
JON GABRIEL: Arizona Democrats forced Sinema out of their party.
BETTER LUCK NEXT YEAR, ROGER WATERS! Anti-Semitism Watchdog Names Kanye West ‘Antisemite of the Year.’
A San Francisco resident recorded a group of drug users gathered indiscreetly around an open manhole appearing to collect hidden drugs.
In the video one of the four men was hunched over the manhole, with its cover shifted to the side, as another three stood and watched.
Older images of that same stretch of sidewalk show that in recent years it has become a destination for drug-users in the city, which is experiencing escalating issues with a fentanyl epidemic.
Data organized by the San Francisco Chronicle shows that within just one block of the manhole 24 people died from drug overdoses in 2020 and 2021.
Between January and October of this year, 501 people have died in San Francisco, according to the city’s accidental overdose report.
In 2020 fentanyl was involved in 73 percent of overdose deaths in the city.
San Francisco’s last Republican mayor left office at the beginning of 1964.
DISPATCHES FROM GROUND ZERO OF THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Finally, The Gibson’s Bakery Family Has Been Paid By Oberlin College.
TWO BUTTIGIEGS IN ONE! Sec. Pete Buttigieg: We need to act to reverse the worst effects of climate change.
And this is how we’ll do it: Pete Buttigieg often flies on taxpayer-funded private jets, flight data show. Biden Cabinet member has taken at least 18 flights on taxpayer-funded private jets, despite calls to curb carbon emissions.
I’ll believe global warming is a crisis, when the people who tell me it’s a crisis start to act like it’s a crisis themselves, to coin an Insta-phrase. In the meantime, I don’t want to hear another word about Glenn Reynolds’ carbon footprint.
SOMEBODY SET UP US THE BOMB: Daily Beast: White supremacy is racially diverse.
ANDOR SHOWRUNNER ADMITS SHOW IS “CHASING THE AUDIENCE” AFTER EXPECTING TO HAVE A “GIGANTIC INSTANTANEOUS AUDIENCE:”
Tony Gilroy, the showrunner and creator for the most recent Star Wars series, Andor, recently admitted the show is “chasing the audience.”
Gilroy recently spoke about the show to Variety, where he was asked how he felt the show had been presented to the world.
After getting some brief clarification about the question, he answered, “I’m very pleased with what they did. The materials are great. I think I was surprised. I thought the show would go the other way, that we would have this gigantic, instantaneous audience that would just be everywhere, but that it would take forever for non-“Star Wars” people or critics or my cohort of friends to get involved in the show.”
“The opposite happened. We ended up with all this critical praise, all this deep appreciation and understanding from really surprising number of sources, and we’re chasing the audience,” he admitted.
A couple of years ago, John Nolte explored: 11 Ways Kathleen Kennedy Killed the Star Wars Golden Goose.
Had you told me in 2015 that as a film franchise Star Wars would be dead in five years, that it would survive only as a television show, I would have called you crazy. I would have said, Lucas couldn’t kill Star Wars with those still-born prequels! TeeeVeee? You must be out of your mind!
I also would have said, Do you know who’s in charge of Star Wars now? Disney, you dolt. You know, Marvel’s Disney? Pixar’s Disney? Fifty-percent of the American box office Disney? The same Disney that’s been dry-humping the same 25 movies for the last 35 years into gold Disney? Disney is Disney. Disney bats a thousand. Disney does everything right.
But here we are, it’s 2020, and as a film franchise Star Wars is dead.
And in 2022, after the damp squibs of The Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi, the streaming franchise is looking dead as well. Which is too bad for Andor. As the Critical Drinker recently noted, it’s “The Best Show At The Worst Time:”