AND THE HITS JUST KEEP ON COMING: CNN Initiates Mass Layoffs.

 On Thursday, CNN initiated the layoffs that CEO Chris Licht foreshadowed the day prior in an email sent to staff.

Chris Cillizza, a political reporter and editor-at-large, Martin Savidge, Alex Field, Mary Anne Fox, and Alison Kosik were among the most recognizable names let go by the network. HLN, the subsidiary network formerly known as CNN Headline News, is expected to be scaled back significantly and will no longer feature live programming as a result of the cuts, according to Variety.

* * * * * * * *

Cilizza’s exit is perhaps the most surprising of the reported cuts to this point, given his prominent role at the outlet, where he was given his own vertical, The Point, and hosted its Downside Up podcast.

Related: CNN boss Chris Licht guts HLN amid cost-cutting bloodbath. “CNN boss Chris Licht has gutted sister network HLN, terminating all live programming as part of ongoing layoffs and budget cuts. Licht slashed HLN’s ‘Morning Express with Robin Meade,’ as well as ‘Weekend Express,’ he announced in a memo to CNN’s remaining staff on Thursday.”

Exit quote:

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.”

UPDATE:

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.”

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.’

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.”

TIM BLAIR: Today’s noticeboard is brought to you by the emerging sport of Plonkerdump, currently sweeping Europe and the UK.

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.

DON’T WORRY, IT’S PROBABLY NOTHING: ‘Wild ride:’ Morgan Stanley’s Mike Wilson predicts double-digit percentage drop will hit stocks in early 2023.

RIP: Gaylord Perry, Hall of Fame pitcher who won 2 Cy Young awards, dead at 84.

DISPATCHES FROM THE REHAB TOUR: FTX’s Sam Bankman-Fried denies ‘improper use’ of customer funds amid scrutiny of crypto giant.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the embattled former CEO of cryptocurrency giant FTX and trading firm Alameda Research, told ABC News he was ultimately responsible for the downfall of both companies, but denied that he knew “that there was any improper use of customer funds.”

“I really, deeply wish that I had taken a lot more responsibility for understanding what the details were of what was going on,” Bankman-Fried said. “I should have been on top of this, and I feel really, really bad and regretful that I wasn’t. A lot of people got hurt. And that’s on me.”

Bankman-Fried spoke to George Stephanopoulos and ABC News for his first network interview since both companies in his cryptocurrency empire filed for bankruptcy this month. He addressed rumors that have swirled since the collapse and discussed his uncertain path forward. The interview took place in the Bahamas island of Nassau where FTX was headquartered.

George Stephanopoulos, eh?

DISPATCHES FROM THE “IT’S DIFFERENT WHEN WE DO IT” PARTY: Hypocrisy alert: Democrats just chose an election denier as Pelosi’s successor.

FTX’S COLLAPSE WAS A CRIME, NOT AN ACCIDENT:

Executives at FTX reportedly received a total of $4.1 billion in loans from Alameda Research, including massive personal loans that were likely unsecured. As revealed by bankruptcy proceedings, Bankman-Fried received an incredible $1 billion in personal loans, as well as a $2.3 billion loan to an entity called Paper Bird in which he had 75% control. Director of Engineering Nishad Singh was given a loan of $543 million, while FTX Digital Markets co-CEO Ryan Salame received a $55 million personal loan.

The FTX situation has more smoking guns than a shooting range in Texas, but you might call this one the smoking bazooka – a glaringly obvious sign of criminal intent. It’s still unclear how the bulk of those personal loans were used, but clawing the expenditures back will likely be a major task for liquidators.

The loans to Paper Bird were arguably even more worrying because they appear to have fueled more structural fraud by creating yet another related third party to shuffle assets between. Forbes has posited that some of the Paper Bird funds may have gone to buy part of Binance’s stake in FTX, and Paper Bird also committed hundreds of millions of dollars to various outside investments.

That included many of the same venture capital funds that backed FTX. It will take time to sort out whether this financial incest constituted criminal fraud. But it certainly matches the broader pattern by which Bankman-Fried used secretive flows, leverage and funny money to deceptively prop up the value of various assets.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried Zooms into the New York Times‘ DealBook Summit, twitching away and telling the audience, “I’ve had a bad month,” much to their amusement:

Sam Bankman-Fried:

"I've had a bad month" pic.twitter.com/VMIza684uZ

— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) November 30, 2022

On to Good Morning America and fellow Democrat George Stephanopoulos tomorrow!

TOMORROW: Collapse of a crypto empire — @GStephanopoulos sits down with former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried to talk about what went wrong at the company in a one-on-one interview on @GMA. pic.twitter.com/M1svJISIwZ

— Good Morning America (@GMA) November 30, 2022

ROGER SIMON: Trapped by Apple—a Tale of the ‘Great Reset.’

Apparently, they are more upset with Elon Musk for trying to bring a modicum of transparency to Twitter, pulling their ads from his newly purchased platform and, according to Musk, threatening to remove the Twitter app from their app store.

Yet worse, in China, Apple has restricted AirDrop file sharing, the very method the demonstrators have been using to communicate privately out of earshot of their totalitarian masters. Was this on advice from the communist regime or did Apple just figure out for themselves what was in their best interest to do? It wouldn’t have been hard.

Meanwhile, Apple stock has lost some ground because these protests may be interfering with their iPhone production. Poor things. Further, according to Bloomberg, violent protests have erupted at Apple’s main iPhone plant in China. (Wasn’t Apple supposed to be leaving China for production? I guess not.)

Sadly, what’s going on isn’t surprising. Apple is acting in tandem with our administration, which also, not surprisingly, has stayed mostly mum about what’s going on in China and Iran. Freedom is of no interest to them.

Behind the Iran silence is, obviously, the three-letter word oil, for which President Joe Biden has only himself to blame for having seriously restricted our domestic supply for the most dubious of reasons.

As for China, Biden, we recall, is the man who insisted the Chinese—meaning the regime—were our friends, before he recanted that for electoral purposes. The true story of the Biden family and the Chinese communists, some of which must reside on Hunter’s laptop, is yet to be fully exposed.

What all this adds up to is Apple and the rest of Big Tech cooperating with the administration in the big lie that domestic terrorists (Trump, et al.) are the threat to democracy when they themselves are.

True democracy, whether manifest as a democratic republic or otherwise, has become an inconvenience for them in the march to globalism and the “Great Reset.”

When its guru Klaus Schwab said, “You will have nothing and you will be happy,” it’s not hard to imagine that he would exclude the iPhone or its equivalent implanted under our skin—“the better to track you with, my dear,” they might say in a modern version of a Disney classic.

Whatever their disagreements with Musk, “Elon Musk meets Tim Cook, says Apple never considered removing Twitter app,” according to CNBC.

DISPATCHES FROM WEIMAR AMERICA: Biden’s married, non-binary nuclear waste guru who stole woman’s $2,325 bag from airport hosted SPANKING seminar at kink conference just weeks later — under ‘NuclearNerd’ nickname that’s still in use on fetish hookup website.

THE ABOLITION OF BRITAIN: ‘War on Christian Culture:’ UK Prosecutors Won’t Say If They Stand by Attack on Bible.

A Christian street preacher faced charges of violating the Public Order Act by engaging in “threatening,” “abusive,” and “insulting” speech in telling a lesbian couple that homosexuals will not “inherit the kingdom of heaven,” citing the Bible. In defending the case against him, a prosecutor wrote that “there are references in the bible [sic] which are simply no longer appropriate in modern society and which would be offensive if stated in public” (emphasis original).

The court dismissed the case against the preacher, John Dunn, because the lesbian couple declined to testify, but a prosecutor with the Crown Prosecution Service, the office of England’s government prosecutors, claimed before the trial that some Bible passages are “no longer appropriate in modern society.”

The next edition of Peter Hitchens’ book continues to write itself.

OUT ON A LIMB: Musk Confirms: Yes, Twitter Has Interfered in Elections.

Most infamously, Twitter banned any mention of Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” in the lead up to the 2020 presidential election. By default, they also censored Joe Biden’s deep involvement and shady business dealings with foreign adversaries.

At the time platform executives, including then CEO Jack Dorsey, justified the multi-month banning of the account belonging to the New York Post — the nation’s oldest paper — whose reporters broke the laptop story in October 2020. They also banned White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany after she shared the story, along with countless others who did the same.

During testimony on Capitol Hill in 2021, Dorsey admitted the social media platform had no factual basis for censoring the story.

Flashback: The ‘cabal’ that bragged of foisting Joe Biden on us must answer for his failed presidency.

LAYOFFS UNDERWAY AT CNN: ‘a gut punch.’

All of that is true but the NY Times is bit more blunt about the reasons these layoffs are necessary.

“It is incredibly hard to say goodbye to any one member of the CNN team, much less many,” Mr. Licht wrote in the memo, which was seen by The New York Times. “I recently described this process as a gut punch, because I know that is how it feels for all of us.”

The cuts come as CNN lags behind its chief competitors, Fox News and MSNBC, in total viewership this year, according to Nielsen data. It has notched some wins over MSNBC with viewers in the coveted advertiser demographic of 25- to 54-year-olds, but the sagging ratings overall have affected CNN’s profitability this year.

What I haven’t seen anywhere is any indication which contributors are part of this round of layoffs. Maybe that’s the news that will come tomorrow?

I’m not generally a fan of CNN’s approach and think they’ve been involved in some egregious myth-making over the past several years. That said, a month before Christmas is a tough time for anyone to lose a job. That doesn’t mean I won’t dance a little jig if Jim Acosta finally gets kicked to the curb but so far that doesn’t seem to be the case.

Related: Coal miners become computer coders.

—CNN.com, April 22, 2016.

F*CK DAVID MAMET:

RIP: Fleetwood Mac singer Christine McVie dead at the age of 79.

SKYNET SMILES: San Francisco police ‘killer robots’ would have explosives, not guns: SFPD.

Sleep tight, San Fran citizens!

XI’S GOTTA HAVE IT! China is censoring the World Cup in a uniquely stupid way. “China blurred out faces in the World Cup so that their citizens wouldn’t know the world is maskless.”

MARK JUDGE: Hey Hollywood, maybe make a #MeToo film in which the men are innocent? “The new #MeToo movie She Said has bombed. The prestige picture, based on the crimes of disgraced film producer Harvey Weinstein, only made $2 million — ‘one of the worst results of a major studio in history,’ as Variety put it. Here’s an idea, Hollywood: Make a #MeToo movie in which the accused actually turn out to be innocent.”

THE GROWNUPS ARE BACK IN CHARGE AFTER TRUMP! Biden Official Makes History: The First Nonbinary Federal Official To Face Felony Theft Charges.

THE GRAY LADY ON THE BALENCIAGA DEBACLE: REPUBLICANS POUNCE! When High Fashion and QAnon Collide. Two new Balenciaga campaigns ignited a firestorm that traveled from the internet to Fox News, fueled by allegations that the brand condoned child exploitation.

The internet is full of trolls. Why did this controversy take off?

As online criticism of the campaigns spread, the story was picked up across right-leaning media outlets, including The New York Post and the prime time Fox News show “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” The show has helped to publicize and mainstream QAnon, the internet conspiracy theory that “a group of Satan-worshiping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media.”

“Here you have a major international retail brand promoting kiddie porn and sex with children,” Mr. Carlson told viewers on Nov. 22, “and not promoting it subtly but right out in the open.”

He’s not wrong, but as Jim Treacher likes to say:

DISPATCHES FROM THE EDUCATION APOCALYPSE: Bar Association Drops LSAT Requirement to Increase Diversity in Law School.