During World War II, the Wehrmacht developed the remote-controlled Goliath tracked mine to take out tanks, fortifications, and other targets. Despite some models packing a whopping 220 pounds of explosive, they sort of looked like a toy a child could ride on, and would almost be adorable if it weren’t for the fact that they were Nazi death bombs.
Who’s an adorable little Nazi death bomb? You are! You are!
As in so many things, Ukrainians have rediscovered and deployed (kinda) another lost weapon/tactic from World War II. Namely, they’re using remote control vehicles as suicide antitank bombs.
I’ve long thought you could use even smaller, slightly modified off-the-shelf RC cars in mass to take out softer targets like trucks. Or drive into a enemy barracks with just a couple of pounds of plastique studded with roofing nails.
The Russo-Ukrainian War continues to expand the possibilities of drone warfare, and I trust the Pentagon (and every other military in the world) is taking notes.
Here’s Joe Rogan shooting a Pit Viper, which is evidently the 2011 model Wick shoots in the film:
“That is the smoothest gun of all time. It doesn’t move. Like it literally doesn’t move, there’s no recoil.”
It does indeed look pretty cool and easy to shoot, but before you rush out to buy one, keep in mind that: A.) It’s not going to be available for sale until May, and B.) It’s going to set you back about seven grand.
Here Colion Noir interviews a rep for Staccato about the differences between the 1911 and the 2011.
Staccato is in Texas, and their 2011 models start at a somewhat more reasonable $2,499.
(Aside: I like Noir, but he does the “yeah,” “uh-hu” noise thing that tells the person he’s talking to “Yes, I’m following you,” which he needs to learn not to do for filmed interviews.)
Is there significant enough difference between a 1911 and a 2011 to justify the nomenclature change? I’m slightly skeptical, but I’ve never fired a 2011. Maybe the difference is night and day.
Would I buy a 2011? Not right now, mainly because I just picked up a Sig Sauer P365 Micro Compact 9mm as a carry gun last year, and even $2,500 is considerably more than I want to spend on a gun right now. But if the prices drift down to around $1,000 over the next few years, I’d definitely give them a more serious look.
I meant to mention something about the Credit Suisse situation in Friday’s LinkSwarm but ran out of time. I’m not an expert on European banking in general or Swiss banking in specific. (As opposed to being a squinty, one-eyed, myopic man in the land of the blind sort of expert on American banking, which is not very.) But it’s a big story, so I suppose I should post something about Credit Suisse.
So here’s something.
First, as of this writing, it appears that fellow Swiss bank UBS is about to take over Credit Suisse, probably with the financial backing of the Swiss National Bank (SNB)
Late on Thursday, just hours after the SNB had launched the first (of many) bailout attempts of Swiss banking giant Credit Suisse, Bloomberg blasted the following headline:
*UBS, CREDIT SUISSE SAID TO OPPOSE IDEA OF A FORCED COMBINATION
This lack of enthusiasm by UBS to acquire its struggling rival of course forced the Swiss National Bank to front CS a CHF50 billion credit line to hold it over for the next four days amid a furious bank run, one which we said would be woefully insufficient to restore confidence in the collapsing lender, and which we probably used up in just a few hours.
Then, late on Friday, both banks “unexpectedly” changed their minds and we got the following 180 degree U-Turn report from the FT:
*UBS IN TALKS TO ACQUIRE ALL OR PART OF CREDIT SUISSE: FT
So a deal is inevitable after all… but as always, there is a footnote one which we predicted yesterday when we said that a deal would only happen if the acquiring bank – in this case UBS – got a full central bank backstop.
That now appears to be the case with Bloomberg, Reuters and the WSJ all reporting that UBS is asking the Swiss government for a backstop to cover future risks if it were to buy Credit Suisse Group AG, after the Swiss National Bank and regulator Finma have told international counterparts that they regard a deal with UBS as the only option to arrest a collapse in confidence in Credit Suisse. The FT reported that deposit outflows from the bank topped CHF10bn ($10.8bn) a day late last week as fears for its health mounted.
Here’s Patrick Boyle on how Credit Suisse brought itself low:
One big take-away: It wasn’t bad investments per se that wrecked confidence in the bank, it was involvement in a series of scandals, as they have “a strong, liquid balance sheet.” “Credit Suisse has instead been plagued by repeated scandals. From spying on a former employee, a criminal conviction for allowing drug dealers to launder money, a massive leak of client data to the media, Archegos, Greensill, Mozambique ‘tuna bonds,’ the list is too long.”
UK courts are at the heart of a spate of litigation arising out of the Mozambique “Tuna bond” or “hidden debt” scandal. The scandal involved $2 billion of bank loans and bond issues from Swiss bank Credit Suisse and Russian bank VTB. The bank loans were taken out in secret by Mozambican state-owned companies, without the legally required approval of the Mozambique Parliament and backed with hidden government guarantees.
The loans were intended to finance contracts between the state companies and a Lebanese-UAE based ship builder, Privinvest, between 2013-2016 for three maritime projects. These projects were intended to boost maritime security and develop the country’s fishing industry. However, a 2017 audit by Kroll found that $500 million of loans could not be accounted for and that Privinvest may have over-inflated prices by $713 million. The audit also found that $200 million of the loans were spent on bank fees and commissions.
So it turns out that Mozambique’s political and business elites are at least as corrupt as our own political and business elites.
Good to know.
Ironically, according to Boyle, the reason European banks may be in better shape than our own is because they had to deal with the fallout of the Euro crisis. “This is not because European banks are very good — it is precisely because they have historically been quite bad.”
Practically every banking regulation in existence commemorates a time when things went badly wrong, and Europe spent a decade toughening up banking regulation because it went through a rolling multiyear euro crisis. The European regulators have a detailed set of standards for testing interest rate risk, with the idea that they will be applied to every significant bank in Europe. Unrealized losses are not ignored under this regime and the global Basel standards on stable funding are applied across the entire banking sector. This is quite different to the regulations applied to community banks in the United States who lobbied the government for regulatory exemptions over the years.
“The economist Matthew Klein argued in a blog post that banks today can be seen as speculative investment funds grafted on top of critical infrastructure, and that this structure is designed to extract subsidies from the rest of society by threatening civilians with crises if the banks’ bets are ever allowed to fail.”
Was Credit Suisse infected with the radical transexual social justice warrior madness as the rest of our elites? Of course they were:
Fear not! The banks that are failing are not woke! OK, they’re woke, but they’re not broke! OK, they’re broke, but they are not without allies who realize that they must support this house of cards freak show. OK, the contagion will take the little people down, but so what? https://t.co/D76Y8svHTL
I wasn’t planning on writing more about the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, but too much info has been coming down the pike to ignore. Plus, I found the video below, and felt I had to share it.
A newly published database from the Claremont Institute has revealed that the since-collapsed Silicon Valley Bank donated or pledged to donate nearly $74 million to the Black Lives Matter movement and related causes.
In an August 2020 Diversity, Equity & Inclusion report, SVB declared “we are on a journey committed to increasing diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in our workplace, with our partners and across the innovation economy.”
The bank revealed that they had donated $1.6 million to “causes supporting gender parity in innovation,” as well as $1.2 million to support “opportunities for diverse, emerging talent in innovation.”
In SVB’s 2021 Proxy Statement, the bank wrote in relation to racial and social equity that “the calls to end systemic racial and social inequities following the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 had a profound global impact.”
“We responded by expanding opportunities for dialogue, including hosting over 40 small group ‘Conversation Circles’ in which over two thirds of our employees participated in discussions about racial equity issues.”
The statement continued to say that the bank’s “DEI-focused ‘town hall’ meetings for employees were in response to our recognition of the need for greater transparency and dialogue around the racial representation of our workforce and the innovation ecosystem.”
In addition, the bank, provided “opportunities for action, mobilizing our employees and clients to join in community service through Tech Gives Back, a week of volunteer events focused in part on racial equity, social justice and access to the innovation economy,” and partnered with “Act One Ventures to launch The Diversity Term Sheet Rider for Representation at the Cap Table initiative, which advocates for venture capital firms to include in all of their term sheets a pledge to bring members of underrepresented groups into deals as co-investors.”
A 2020 letter from CEO Greg Becker stated, “In recent months, we’ve expanded our philanthropic giving through corporate donations and employee matching programs. These programs focus on pandemic response, social justice, sustainability and supporting women, Black and Latinx emerging talent and other underrepresented groups. You’ll find examples of these programs in this report, ranging from workforce development to affordable housing.”
In 2020, the bank launched its Missions program, “a software platform designed to engage employees to act in support of the causes they care about most such as voter education and racial justice and equity,” which saw employees donate $400,000 for “justice and equity for Black Americans.”
According to the Claremont Institute, an additional $250,000 was allocated by the SVB Foundation to support grants for social justice organizations including the NAACP, ACLU, and National Urban League.
SVB additionally partnered with 44 organizations focused on furthering DEI in innovation and invested in relationships with historically black colleges and universities, and hosted internships and provided tuition assistance for students from “underserved communities.”
In a Corporate Responsibility Report from 2021, SVB pledged to donate $50M in its diversity and inclusion programs and partnerships, “with a focus on women, Black and Latinx individuals.”
In May of 2021, SVB announced a proposed five-year, $11.2 billion community benefits plan in collaboration with The Greenlining Institute, an M4BL, or Movement For Black Lives, member. The Claremont Institute wrote that “that plan includes $75M in unspecified charitable contributions (also not included in our total).”
Social Justice is bad enough by itself, but it’s also a marker for those incapable of thinking clearly enough to focus clearly on their main jobs.
And now this video, which slams “Stupid Valley Bank” for its egregious stupidity and slams It’s Pat, which is these days is almost like a Hispster move (“It’s a pretty obscure bad movie, you’ve probably never heard of it”).
Don’t attempt to steal a helicopter unless you can actually, you know, fly a helicopter.
Multiple helicopters were broken into and one was operated before crashing on Wednesday morning at the Sacramento Executive Airport, according to the Sacramento Police Department.
Police say that they received several reports of multiple helicopters being broken into early Wednesday morning.
Officers that responded found a helicopter with major damage that “appeared to have been operated,” police said in a statement.
The damaged helicopter was left on its side and is a Bell 429 model, according to the Federal Aviation Administration.
A further investigation showed that when the helicopter crashed it also damaged several other helicopters.
Yeah, I’d say there was some serious damage.
I have so many questions about this. Like: What did they think they were going to do with the helicopter after they stole it? Take it for a joy ride and return it? Try to sell it? Just how do you go about selling a stolen helicopter? Did they think regional air traffic control was just going to ignore it? (“Hey, stray helicopter! No biggee!”) Did he not realize Sacramento Police have helicopters to chase you with? (Oh yeah: There was an alert.)
No suspect in custody, so police are looking for a doubly lucky dumbass…
I was involved in the occasional fight in middle and high school, but it never involved more than one other person. When a fight broke out, a circle would gather to watch it, but it never occurred any of us to wade in and join the melee. Widespread brawls with multiple combatants just never happened.
Well, that was then, and this was now. Every year, people post videos of large brawls to social media, and not all of them of them happen at Waffle House. On March 8, a huge brawl broke out at EBR Readiness Alternative School in Baton Rouge, which happens to be a middle school.
How huge? 200 people (including parents) were involved, and multiple cars of policemen had to break up the fight:
I can honestly say that I never considered “brawling with police” to be a viable life strategy in middle school. (Or any time.)
I know very little about “Alternative” schools in Louisiana, but this one appears to be majority black.
Here’s hedge fudge manager/university professor Patrick Boyle goes into detail of just how it went down.
“Silvergate’s importance in the recent crypto boom is possibly best described by a now-deleted testimonial from the bank’s website: ‘Life as a crypto firm can be divided up into before Silvergate and after Silvergate.It’s hard to overstate how much it revolutionized banking for blockchain companies.’ The testimonial was written by a millennial who still lives in his parents’ basement playing video games and has had some recent run-ins with the law. His name is Sam Bankman Fried.”
“If we go back ten years, Silvergate was a small San Diego based real estate lender that transformed itself into the go-to bank for the crypto industry.”
“Silvergate invited in crypto entrepreneurs and asked them what problems they were trying to solve and how the bank could be helpful. After this, the bank transformed itself and grew rapidly. It went public in late 2019 at a share price of $13, and a year later the stock price had risen by 1,580% as it became a key interchange point between dollars and cryptocurrencies.”
“Major Silverlake clients included Paxos, bitFlyer, Kraken and also innovators in atonal rock music – Mars Junction…” [This is an inside joke. Mars Junction is the band of Cameron & Tyler Winklevoss, AKA the WInklevoss Twins of Facebook investing controversy] “…who also had some involvement in the Crypto industry. FTX and Alameda were also big customers.”
“The bank’s growth mirrored the growth of the crypto industry, and it declined alongside that industry too, announcing in a regulatory disclosure earlier this week that it plans to wind down operations in the face of ‘turmoil in digital currency markets.'”
Last week Silvergate had announced that they would be unable to file an annual report with the SEC on time due to a weakening in their capital position. They announced that they might be forced to close at that time, blaming growing problems, in part on pending investigations into their operations. The filing confirmed that Silvergate is being investigated by the US Department of Justice.”
“Customers rushed over the last few months to pull money out of Silvergate. In January they reported that customers had withdrawn more than $8 billion, forcing them to sell held-to-maturity assets to fund the run, accruing losses on the sale of those securities of $718 million dollars.”
Why was Silvergate so important in the world of crypto? Well, people who trade cryptocurrencies often want to use dollars to buy crypto, or they want to sell crypto and receive dollars and the dollar side of those transactions is where things get bogged down. If you are transferring large sums of money to buy crypto, you need to deal with the US banking system, who might ask you a lot of questions relating to anti money laundering regulations. Crypto people hate questions like this. Similarly, if you just sold some crypto and want to deposit the dollars you received, most banks will have a long list of questions about the source of your funds, and there is a really good chance that they will simply refuse to do the transaction. It is going to be a struggle for a US regulated financial institution to show their regulator that they have done enough due diligence to be sure that your funds are not the proceeds of crime. And the last thing a bank needs is to be accused of money laundering; they would rather just simply not deal with suspicious transactions.
“For this reason, stablecoins like Tether and Terra exist – or existed.” If you weren’t paying attention, the value of theoretically stable Terra crashed hard last year.
“If you can convert your dollars into crypto once, you can then buy stablecoins that are supposed to always be worth a dollar, and then instead of buying and selling crypto, with actual dollars you buy and sell crypto with dollar-denominated stablecoins, your money can stay ‘on chain.’ The problem with that, is that you have to trust the stablecoin issuers, and they, for some reason, don’t always seem trustworthy. They won’t really tell you where the money is.”
“They’ll sometimes announce that they are going to be audited by a top 12 auditor (I’m not really sure what a top 12 auditor is – but when you hear that – you know you are getting number 12 on the list), and you start to wonder if Friehling & Horowitz made that list.” Friehling & Horowitz were Bernie Madoff’s auditors.
“If you have deposited your dollars with a crypto exchange or a stablecoin provider, they still need to deposit them somewhere. They need a bank too. Now (of course), another way of dealing with this banking issue, might be to lie to your bank about what your account is being used for (SBF and the team at FTX did that), but the technical term for ‘lying to your bank’ is Bank Fraud (as Sam Bankman-Fried just found out) – and you can get in trouble for that.”
“There was significant demand for a “crypto friendly bank” and Silvergate was willing to fill that role, when no other bank was willing to take that risk. Silvergate weren’t just crypto friendly either, they built their own payments network called the Silvergate Exchange Network to (according to their marketing documents) enable the efficient movement of U.S. dollars between participants 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.”
“As you might imagine, Silvergate (being the only bank that would deal with them) attracted a lot of big crypto customers, as these customers were able to open up accounts without lying too much.”
“Silvergate dealt with most of the big players in the industry and they were an actual US regulated bank with excruciatingly detailed audited financial statements and capital regulation. This meant that your money was safe at Silvergate, unlike at the other venues we just went over.”
“The beauty of dealing with these crypto customers, crypto exchanges, [was] that because you don’t have any real competition in this space, you don’t really have to pay them any interest on their deposits. You could take the billions of dollars they deposit with you, put it all in treasuries, and you get to keep all of the interest. You’ll probably have to spend some of the profits on lawyers to keep the regulators at bay, but overall you might have a profitable business. But that’s boring right? And no one gets involved in crypto for a boring life…”
“They had a product called SEN Leverage direct lending, where they would lend people money collateralized with bitcoin. Exchanges could also borrow dollars collateralized with bitcoin for corporate treasury and other business purposes. In January, they announced that total SEN Leverage commitments were $1.1 billion dollars and that all of their SEN Leverage loans ‘continued to perform as expected, with no losses or forced liquidations.’ So, as crazy as that business might sound, it was not really the source of their problems.”
“As of September, 2022 their balance sheet showed about $11.4 billion of ‘securities,’ meaning bonds: Treasury securities, mortgage-backed securities, agency bonds and so on and $1.4 billion of ‘loans,’ meaning the Bitcoin loans and some other real-estate lending. They had $13.2 billion worth of deposits at the end of September, most of them being from crypto companies – so non-interest paying deposits, the best kind.”
“The problem for Silvergate was that when FTX was exposed as being insolvent, crypto investors were considerably less willing to leave their cash on exchanges.”
“They asked for their money back from the exchanges, meaning that the crypto companies had to ask for their money back from Silvergate, so Silvergate was faced with a good old fashioned bank run – driven not by a loss of faith in Silvergate, but by a loss of faith in crypto exchanges. By the end of December, noninterest bearing deposits at Silvergate fell from $13.2 billion dollars to just $3.9 billion dollars.” Yowzers! It’s hard to expect any bank to survive an outflow of 2/3rds of their deposits in such a short period of time.”
“There is a good chance that if you had an account at a crypto exchange, that exchange banked with Silvergate, and if you closed your account and cashed out, the cash came from a deposit at Silvergate.”
“There were other FTX related problems too. When prosecutors started looking into the collapse of FTX, their attention was drawn to their banker – Silvergate, for hosting accounts connected to Sam Bankman-Fried. Now, a big problem for Silvergate, was that – with their money all tied up in bonds or lent out, Silvergate had to come up with around 9 billion dollars to pay out these withdrawals.”
“Their accounts show that by the end of December they had sold half of their bonds and had controversially borrowed $4.3 billion from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco, a government institution that is in place to give short-term secured loans to banks that have a short-term liquidity problem.” That, and the FTX connection, attracted the attention of Washington D.C.
In September Silvergate had shown 3.1 billion dollars’ worth of bonds as being “held to maturity” and 8.3 billion dollars’ worth of bonds as being available for sale. The difference between these two classifications (from an accounting perspective) is that the available for sale bonds have to be marked to market – or held on the books at their fair market value, while the “held to maturity” bonds could be marked at their cost price. By the end of December there were no “held to maturity” bonds left on the balance sheet, meaning that they had either been sold, or reclassified as available for sale. One way or another, interest rates had gone up a lot in 2022, and these bonds were worth a lot less than they were being carried on the balance sheet at.
So they might have skated by if rising interest rates hadn’t wrecked their mark-to market.
The sale resulted in a loss of $751.4 million during the fourth quarter of 2022 and in addition, the company recorded a $134.5 million dollar impairment charge related to an estimated $1.7 billion dollars of securities it “expects to sell in the first quarter of 2023 to reduce borrowings.” This is because reclassifying some of the bonds to “available for sale” meant that they now had to be marked to market and that the loss had to be recognized under GAAP accounting rules. Silvergate also had to write down a $196 million dollar investment in “certain developed technology assets related to running a block-chain-based payment network” that it had bought in January 2022. So, all in, there was a net loss of over a billion dollars in the fourth quarter of 2022.
“Bank capital requirements are ‘risk-based’ and need to be kept above 4% to be ‘adequately capitalized’ and above 5% to be considered ‘well capitalized.’ Different types of assets have different risk weights, and this is done to keep deposits safe.”
“A bank that makes a lot of mortgage and business loans might have a capital requirement of around 8%, and assets like bitcoin have a 100% capital requirement, meaning that a bank would need to have $100 of capital for every $100 of bitcoin on its books.”
“In September Silvergate was fine, as despite the Bitcoin loans, most of their money was in high quality bonds that had zero risk weights. But when their deposits went out the door and they had to sell assets and realize a billion-dollar net loss, they were left in a situation where an additional $19 million-dollar loss would but their capital below 5% and they would no longer be considered well capitalized.”
“Last week Silvergate announced that they had sold additional debt securities in January and February to repay the company’s outstanding advances from the Federal Home Loan Bank of San Francisco and that they ‘expect to record further losses related to the other-than-temporary impairment on the securities portfolio.’ These additional losses they said would ‘negatively impact the regulatory capital ratios of the company and could result in the bank being less than well-capitalized.” And that’s when Brunhilda strode on stage to give her farewell.
“This announcement caused the stock price to half that day and according to Bloomberg caused Coinbase, Galaxy, Paxos and other crypto firms to announce that they would stop accepting or initiating payments through Silvergate. These customers leaving were the final nail in the coffin, as they reduced deposits even further.”
“A bank run, on a real bank, caused by crypto related losses and crypto volatility.”
“Matt Levine at Bloomberg argues that one way to think about the rise and fall of Silvergate is that the crypto boom was at its heart a low-interest-rate phenomenon. People started speculating in crypto because interest rates were below the rate of inflation, and so Silvergate was hugely exposed to interest-rate risk simply because of its exposure to its crypto customers.”
“Rising interest rates caused the deposits to evaporate at the same time as the assets backing those deposits fell in value. Levine argues that (with hindsight), Silvergate’s risk management – a year ago – should have been laser-focused on the risk of rising interest rates crushing both its assets and its customers, and it should have hedged that risk one way or another.”
I know all this is long and a bit detailed and technical, but I wanted to point it out as an example of how a cascading chain of events (much like the Piper Alpha disaster) caused a failure, mainly how massive fraud on the basis of one crypto space player and rising interest rates ended up bankrupting a real bank in the real world.
Mutiny! Bank runs! Twitter files! It’s a ginormous LinkSwarm full of interesting (and alarming) links!
And I finally get a chance to talk more about the FTX scandal.
The Twitter files revelations continue to roll out. And Democrats aren’t happy that the workings of their thought police apparatus are being unmasked.
As one might expect, the Judiciary hearing on the “weaponization” of federal agencies, featuring Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as witnesses was full of fireworks, facts, and ad hominem friction.
Out of the gate, Ranking Member Democratic Del. Stacey E. Plaskett labeled the two “so-called journalists” as dangerous and a “threat” to former Twitter employees.
She claimed that Republicans brought “two of Elon Musk’s ‘public scribes'” in “to release cherry-picked out-of-context emails and screenshots designed to promote his chosen narrative – Elon Musk’s chosen narrative – that is now being parroted by the Republicans” for political gain.
“I’m not exaggerating when I say you have called two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Plaskett said after the video.
Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Republican Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, had a simple response to her accusations:
“It’s crazy what you were just saying.”
“You don’t want people to see what happened,” Jordan continued.
“The full video, transparency. You don’t want that, and you don’t want two journalists who have been named personally by the Biden administration, the FTC in a letter. They say they’re here to help and tell their story, and frankly, I think they’re brave individuals for being willing to come after being named in a letter from the Biden FTC.”
Taibbi was having none of it.
Matt Taibbi epic comeback:
"Ranking Member Plaskett, I'm not a 'so-called journalist'. I've won the National Magazine Award, the I.F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism, and I've written 10 books including 4 NYT Best Sellers." pic.twitter.com/crXlWjScEr
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) March 9, 2023
As Glenn Greenwald chimed in from Twitter: “To Democrats, “journalist” means: one who mindlessly and loyally endorses DNC talking points. ”
Unshaken, Matt Taibbi continued, when he was allowed to respond, laid out what he and Shellenberger had found in their research of The Twitter Files:
“The original promise of the Internet was that it might democratize the exchange of information globally. A free internet would overwhelm all attempts to control information flow, its very existence a threat to anti-democratic forms of government everywhere,” Taibbi said.
“What we found in the Files was a sweeping effort to reverse that promise, and use machine learning and other tools to turn the internet into an instrument of censorship and social control. Unfortunately, our own government appears to be playing a lead role.”
Taibbi pointedly added that “effectively, news media became an arm of a state-sponsored thought-policing system.”
“It’s not possible to instantly arrive at truth. It is however becoming technologically possible to instantly define and enforce a political consensus online, which I believe is what we’re looking at.”
Democrats only response to Taibbi and Shellenberger’s facts was to get personal…
Snip.
As we detailed earlier, journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger are testifying before the House Judiciary Committee’s Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government today. Both journalists were involved in the ‘Twitter Files’ disclosures, in which we learned that the government was directly involved in censoring disfavorable speech.
“Our findings are shocking,” writes Shellenberger at his blog. “A highly-organized network of U.S. government agencies and government contractors has been creating blacklists and pressuring social media companies to censor Americans, often without them knowing it.”
Ahead of the appearance, Taibbi released his prepared remarks. He also dropped a new and related Twitter Files mega-thread on ‘THE CENSORSHIP-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX’ which will be submitted to the Congressional record which, according to Taibbi, ‘contains some surprises.’
But Twitter was more like a partner to government. With other tech firms it held a regular “industry meeting” with FBI and DHS, and developed a formal system for receiving thousands of content reports from every corner of government: HHS, Treasury, NSA, even local police…
But equally concerning was how those driving The Narrative used NGOs that agreed with them as Arbiters of Truth.
We came to think of this grouping – state agencies like DHS, FBI, or the Global Engagement Center (GEC), along with “NGOs that aren’t academic” and an unexpectedly aggressive partner, commercial news media – as the Censorship-Industrial Complex.
Who’s in the Censorship-Industrial Complex? Twitter in 2020 helpfully compiled a list for a working group set up in 2020. The National Endowment for Democracy, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, and Hamilton 68’s creator, the Alliance for Securing Democracy, are key…
Twitter execs weren’t sure about Clemson’s Media Forensics Lab (“too chummy with HPSCI”), and weren’t keen on the Rand Corporation (“too close to USDOD”), but others were deemed just right.
NGOs ideally serve as a check on corporations and the government. Not long ago, most of these institutions viewed themselves that way. Now, intel officials, “researchers,” and executives at firms like Twitter are effectively one team – or Signal group, as it were:
The Woodstock of the Censorship-Industrial Complex came when the Aspen Institute – which receives millions a year from both the State Department and USAID – held a star-studded confab in Aspen in August 2021 to release its final report on “Information Disorder.”
The report was co-authored by Katie Couric and Chris Krebs, the founder of the DHS’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). Yoel Roth of Twitter and Nathaniel Gleicher of Facebook were technical advisors. Prince Harry joined Couric as a Commissioner.
Why the fuck is Prince Harry on a committee deciding how free American citizens should be censored?
Their taxpayer-backed conclusions: the state should have total access to data to make searching speech easier, speech offenders should be put in a “holding area,” and government should probably restrict disinformation, “even if it means losing some freedom.”
Snip.
The same agencies (FBI, DHS/CISA, GEC) invite the same “experts” (Thomas Rid, Alex Stamos), funded by the same foundations (Newmark, Omidyar, Knight) trailed by the same reporters (Margaret Sullivan, Molly McKew, Brandy Zadrozny) seemingly to every conference, every panel.
The #TwitterFiles show the principals of this incestuous self-appointed truth squad moving from law enforcement/intelligence to the private sector and back, claiming a special right to do what they say is bad practice for everyone else: be fact-checked only by themselves. While Twitter sometimes pushed back on technical analyses from NGOs about who is and isn’t a “bot,” on subject matter questions like vaccines or elections they instantly defer to sites like Politifact, funded by the same names that fund the NGOs: Koch, Newmark, Knight.
#TwitterFiles repeatedly show media acting as proxy for NGOs, with Twitter bracing for bad headlines if they don’t nix accounts. Here, the Financial Times gives Twitter until end of day to provide a “steer” on whether RFK, Jr. and other vax offenders will be zapped.
Well, you say, so what? Why shouldn’t civil society organizations and reporters work together to boycott “misinformation”? Isn’t that not just an exercise of free speech, but a particularly enlightened form of it?
The difference is, these campaigns are taxpayer-funded. Though the state is supposed to stay out domestic propaganda, the Aspen Institute, Graphika, the Atlantic Council’s DFRLab, New America, and other “anti-disinformation” labs are receiving huge public awards.
Meant to cover this back in February, but FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, in additional to all those federal fraud charges, was charged with “12 new counts, including illegally making over 300 political contributions to the tune of tens of millions of dollars through straw donors and using corporate funds.” The overwhelming majority went to Democrats and left-leaning causes. “Bankman-Fried was the second largest individual donor during the 2022 US midterm elections, contributing $39 million to various Democrat causes.” Also: “FTX’s former CEO wanted to give at least $1 million to a pro-LGBTQ political action group, but couldn’t find anyone bisexual or gay at the company whom he trusted, the document said.”
Speaking of Bankman-Fried: “The previously sealed names of two people who co-signed Sam Bankman-Fried’s $250 million bail package have been publicly released. The guarantors were identified in the unredacted bonds as Andreas Paepcke, a Stanford research scientist, and Larry Kramer, former dean of Stanford law school…How the fuck did these Stanford faculty members get so rich as to guarantee that size of a bail?”
Speaking of crypto, Silvergate, a California bank that was a heavy player in the crypto space, is shutting down and liquidating after huge bank runs in the crypto-winter. Want to guess who was a big booster of Silvergate? Would you believe Sam Bankman-Fried?
When China began to require Western corporations to establish Chinese Communist Party (CCP) cells, businesses brushed off the move as benign. For example, when HSBC HBA 0.0% became the first international financial institution at which workers established a Chinese Communist Party cell in its investment banking venture in China in July, the bank stated that the CCP committee does not influence the direction of the firm and has no formal role in its day-to-day activities. But the CCP may have begun to flex its muscle in other ways. This week, the CCP cell inside the Beijing office of Big Four accounting firm EY demanded that party members wear CCP badges at work in the run-up to China’s annual parliamentary meetings.
Silicon Valley Bank, Santa Clara, California, was closed today by the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation, which appointed the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) as receiver. To protect insured depositors, the FDIC created the Deposit Insurance National Bank of Santa Clara (DINB). At the time of closing, the FDIC as receiver immediately transferred to the DINB all insured deposits of Silicon Valley Bank.
All insured depositors will have full access to their insured deposits no later than Monday morning, March 13, 2023. The FDIC will pay uninsured depositors an advance dividend within the next week. Uninsured depositors will receive a receivership certificate for the remaining amount of their uninsured funds. As the FDIC sells the assets of Silicon Valley Bank, future dividend payments may be made to uninsured depositors.
Silicon Valley Bank had 17 branches in California and Massachusetts. The main office and all branches of Silicon Valley Bank will reopen on Monday, March 13, 2023. The DINB will maintain Silicon Valley Bank’s normal business hours. Banking activities will resume no later than Monday, March 13, including on-line banking and other services. Silicon Valley Bank’s official checks will continue to clear. Under the Federal Deposit Insurance Act, the FDIC may create a DINB to ensure that customers have continued access to their insured funds.
As of December 31, 2022, Silicon Valley Bank had approximately $209.0 billion in total assets and about $175.4 billion in total deposits. At the time of closing, the amount of deposits in excess of the insurance limits was undetermined. The amount of uninsured deposits will be determined once the FDIC obtains additional information from the bank and customers.
SVB was a bank that primarily counted venture capital firms and technology startups as clients. It achieved financial stardom during the COVID-19 pandemic because major cash deposits from the booming firms increased its deposits from $60 billion in the first quarter of 2020 to over $200 billion in December 2022, the Wall Street Journal reported. Its securities portfolio rose from roughly $27 billion in 2020’s first quarter to approximately $127 billion at the end of 2021.
The fact that most of SVB’s assets were seemingly secure — they were mainly longer-term government bonds — led many investors to feel the bank was secure. Those feelings would be dashed in just two days. The bank suddenly announced Wednesday that it needed to raise over $2.2 billion, sending its stock plunging by more than 60% in a matter of days.
The government securities bought by SVB pay a fixed rate, so when market interest rates were raised, a gap began to grow between how much the securities were worth on the open market and what they were valued on the bank’s books. The unrealized losses in SVB’s securities portfolio in December had grown to more than $17 billion, a number expected to grow, as the securities could only be sold at a loss.
Crack the whip: unacceptable because of origins in slavery
Waiter or waitress: server should be used instead
Biological gender, biological sex, biological woman, biological female, biological man, or biological male
Illegal immigrant or illegal alien
Cake walk: “originated during slavery” and thus perpetuates “racist motifs”
In reference to illegal migration: onslaught, tidal wave, flood, inundation, surge, invasion, army, march, sneak and stealth
Anchor baby
Chain migration: this is a term used by “immigration hard-liners”
Peanut gallery: “the cheapest seats often occupied by Black people and people with low incomes”
Third-world countries: too “derogatory”
Oh, it does not end there. Politico reporters are also not allowed to say that a transgender person “identifies as” a certain gender, or describe the current situation at the border as a “crisis.” The guide also warned reporters to make sure not to portray migrants as a “negative, harmful influence.”
Want some more? “Pro-choice” is frowned upon in favor of “abortion rights supporter,” and (of course) “pro-life” is outlawed, with “anti-abortion” taking its place. “Late-term abortion” is also a no-no; reporters are told to use “abortion later in pregnancy.”
College student accused of stealing more than half a million dollars via credit card fraud working part-time at a mall jewelry store where most of the items are under $50. She marked up items, then returned them at the original price and somehow pocketed the difference. She made eight fake transactions totally more than $540,000. As though somehow the store wasn’t going to notice something funny going on.
I’m pro-life but this is stupid. “Texas Lawmaker Looks to Restrict Online Access to Materials Assisting or Facilitating Abortion.” You can’t ban access to information you don’t like, that’s prior restraint and illegal under the U.S. Constitution.
Speaking of violating rights, a judge was suspended for not allowing a defendant access to legal council. Again. The dumbass in question was Kenton County District Judge Ann Ruttle in Kentucky.
By now I assume that you’ve seen or read about Tucker Carlson’s piece on video footage that fatally undermines much of the Democratic Party’s “January 6th Insurrection” dogma.
Instead of rehashing that (Tucker has a wee bit more media reach than I do), here’s a video of Joe Rogan and Michael Malice reviewing the footage.
The biggest takeaway for me is that, while Rogan and Malice are not conservatives, they are far from people who unquestionably accept left-leaning media at face value. For them to be shocked at things that anyone who was paying attention knew no later than, oh, say, January 7, 2021, that there was no “insurrection” at the capital, just a half-assed riot, is actually somewhat surprising.
The mainstream media lies about so many things, so much of the time, that it’s easy to believe one of their narratives about a situation you simply weren’t paying attention to at the time.
Eternal vigilance is the price of freedom…and evidently truth as well.
