Hard left TV host and well-known all-around dick Cenk Uyger said Texas had the ice storm coming because…Joe Rogan moved here from California:
Only upside of Texas power outages is people like @joerogan, who were so proud to leave CA and move to TX, freezing their asses off. They said they wanted less government. Congrats, mission accomplished! I hope you're not asking the government to come help you. #Freedom
Today the Texas grid is back up and running normally and it’s getting up into the 50s today as the once-a-century Texas winter storm recedes. But I bet that come summer, California has to close down parts of its grid yet again because high winds took out another power line.
All that’s a handy hook to hang this amusing “Californian moves to Texas” video on:
And yes, it mentions Joe Rogan…
(Though if Calidude had moved to Austin rather than Houston, the homeless people would have been much easier to find…)
Regular readers know that Austin has been climbing out of a once in a century winter storm that froze our roads and wrecked our power grid. Right now it’s still 19°F, but it’s supposed to warm up to a balmy 39°F this afternoon…
Could be worse: ERCOT says that their quick thinking to impose rotating blackouts prevented the physical destruction of the Texas Interconnect Grid. That may even be true, but it’s sort of like a teenager saying “Thanks to my quick thinking, I only managed to burn down the garage and not the entire house!”
Passage of this bill this year would lead to job losses and higher use of labor-reducing equipment and technology,” said Sean Kennedy, executive vice president for public affairs for the National Restaurant Association. “Nearly all restaurant operators say they will increase menu prices. But what is clear is that raising prices for consumers will not be enough for restaurants to absorb higher labor costs.”
But for the fact that he’s president — given his track record of having been wrong on every defense and foreign policy issue for almost five decades — it would be easy to ignore his assessment of China. This is a man who said in 2019, “China is going to eat our lunch? Come on, man.” He added, “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” Despite the difficulty of being wrong on both occasions Biden managed it.
Focus for a moment on what he said about the conversation with Xi. It is natural that China would be spending billions on transportation given the size of the country and the billions who inhabit it. Whether it is true that China is spending billions on climate change is another matter. It has, for decades, been spending billions on coal-fired electricity generation plants and has only recently made noises about reducing pollution.
But “climate change” is probably the last priority for China while it is spending far greater sums on its military and cyberwar capabilities. Xi was clearly trying to gull Biden into some sort of race to reduce greenhouse gas emissions so that we could strangle our economy while China doesn’t do the same to its own. China may well be trying to reduce pollution — Beijing is infamous for its barely breathable brown air — but how much it is really doing remains to be seen.
Biden apparently wants to be known as the “climate change president.” If Xi can increase Biden’s desire to make climate change his top priority for legislation and regulation (which seems altogether likely in any event) China will be greatly advantaged by Biden’s concomitant reductions in spending on the U.S. military and intelligence communities.
To say that Biden is soft on China only proves the speaker’s command of the obvious.
What Tenev did not say, or explain, is why his company – which is merely a client-facing front of Citadel, which buys the bulk of Robinhood’s orderflow to use it perfectly legally in any way it sees fit – was so massively undercapitalized that the DTCC required several billion more in collateral to protect Robinhood’s own investors against the company’s predatory ways of seeking to capitalize on the gamification of investing making it nothing more (or less) than a trivial pursuit to millions of GenZ and millennial investors, a point which Michael Burry made so vividly.
The #mainstreetrevolution is a myth. Zero commissions and gamified apps were designed to feed flows to the two most influential WS trading houses. A few HFs got hurt, but if retail is moving toward more trading and away from fundamentals, WS owns that game. #Stonks by design. https://t.co/Y4raF0jiM3
— Cassandra (@michaeljburry) February 9, 2021
Incidentally we know why Tenev did not mention it: it’s because Robinhood’s back office is a shambles of a shoestring operation, one which never anticipated either such a surge in trading not a multi-billion collateral requirement; had Robinhood been a true brokerage instead of pretending to be one, and run merely to open as many retail accounts as it could in the shortest amount of time, thus generating the most profit in the quickest amount of time to allow its sponsors a quick and profitable exit, it would actually have been on top of this.
SpaceX wants to bring fast satellite broadband internet to the world — and in particular, to internet users in far-flung, rural locations, where download speeds are low and prices are high.
One of the first places in America to get SpaceX Starlink service was Alaska, the state with the lowest population density in the country — just one person per square mile. The company next extended service into Canada (population density: three people per square mile), followed last month by service in the UK — a big jump in concentration, with 650 people per square mile. (Even in the UK, there are plenty of isolated locations where internet service is expensive, slow — or both).
SpaceX’s globe-spanning satellite constellation should be capable of providing 100 megabit-per-second internet service to anywhere by the end of this year. You can expect that a lot of countries, no matter how urbanized they are (or not), will be lining up to sign up for Starlink service. And the more countries Starlink signs up as customers, the better the prospects for the SpaceX subsidiary’s promised IPO.
One country that most definitely does not want Starlink, however, is Russia.
Snip.
As Ars points out, “Russia is planning its own satellite Internet constellation, known as ‘Sphere.'” And in contrast to SpaceX’s Starlink, which is a privately funded and privately built communications system, the 600-satellite Sphere constellation will be a project built and run by the Russian state under the aegis of its Roscosmos space agency. And that could be a problem.
Sphere, you see, is rumored to cost $20 billion to build, may not begin launching until 2024, and won’t be completed before 2030.
Those numbers alone tell you Sphere will never be built, Starlink or no Starlink. Russia is a profoundly broke and profoundly broken country. Sphere is just the sort of prestige project Putin loves to announce to much fanfare, national greatness vaporware that either never gets built or else creeps out into the real world years (or even decades) late and in much-reduced form, like only ordering 100 T-14 Armata tanks.
Iranian fuel tanker convoy to Afghanistan goes boom.
The media want you to know that it’s Trump’s fault they couldn’t investigate such trivial scandals as Lincoln Project pedophiles, because how would they have time when Orange Man Bad?
Speaking of the Lincoln Project, founder Rick Wilson managed to pay off his mortgage early just as the John Weaver pedophilia scandal was breaking. How fortuitous!
Back in The Before Time, The Long Long Ago, newspapers actually defended free speech.
Back in 1977, the New York Times maintained that as long as Nazis did not engage in any illegality, they were “entitled” to the protection of the law, and then put the onus of maintaining peace on the Skokie residents:
The argument that they will provoke violence simply by appearing on the streets of Skokie only emphasizes the obligation of the police to keep the peace—and gives an opportunity the people of Skokie to demonstrate their respect for the law.
These days, the Times board will chase you out of the building for allowing anyone to voice an opinion that chafes against the brittle sensitivities of its writers. The paper employs full-time speech monitors to vet wrongthink.
The cancel mob comes for Baen Books. Book editors and writers kindly tell them to get stuffed.
Special for Black History Month:
Here are the names of the 200+ slaves owned by Kamala Harris’ ancestor Hamilton Brown in Jamaica in 1817. One of the largest planters in Jamaica, Brown now has a town named after him, Brown’s Town pic.twitter.com/6QnBpEQyez
Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg told employees they need to “inflict pain” on Apple because Apple won’t let Facebook steal every single bit of personal data from Apple devices.
“Bill Gates Bankrolling Educational Organization That Says Math is Racist.” “A conglomerate of 25 educational organizations called A Pathway to Equitable Math Instruction asserts that asking students to find the correct answer is an ‘inherently racist practice.’ The organization’s website lists the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation as its only donor.” How many fingers, Winston?
A helicopter running on fossil fuel spraying a chemical made from fossil fuels onto a wind turbine made with fossils fuels during an ice storm is awesome. pic.twitter.com/3HInc2qKb9
“Man Asks That You Respect His Preferred Adjectives.” “‘Here are the adjectives I identify with,’ Becker put on social media. ‘Cool, witty, handsome, innovative, fun.’ Please use one of these adjectives when describing me. It distresses me when people use adjectives I don’t identify as,’ Becker later explained. ‘Like “creepy,” “weird,” or “off-putting.” That’s basically denying my existence and trying to genocide me.'”
Rush Limbaugh died Wednesday after a year-long battle with cancer.
Limbaugh’s death at age 70 was announced Wednesday on his influential conservative radio program, by his wife, Kathryn.
Limbaugh announced last February that he was diagnosed with Stage 4 lung cancer.
Although the cancer was expected to quickly kill Limbaugh, he received treatment and continued to host his radio program over the year.
Shortly after his diagnosis, then-President Donald Trump surprised Limbaugh at last year’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress by awarding him the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Then-first lady Melania Trump put the medal around Limbaugh’s neck.
“The Rush Limbaugh Show” premiered in 1988, airing for 33 years.
Limbaugh’s program went on the air at a time when conservative media outlets were few and far between. Liberal opinion dominated all the broadcast networks, Time, Newsweek, NPR and most newspapers. He was a breath of fresh air, and became notably more conservative after Desert Storm. Straight from the git-go, liberals hated him for daring to bust up their media monopoly, and liberal Twitter is reacting to his death with exactly the sort of grace and tact you’d expect.
There isn’t one good quality about Rush Limbaugh. Not one. Fuck him. Wherever he is.
Rush Limbaugh was a coward and white supremacist. He aggressively and cynically exploited divisions in our country by weaponizing hatred and bigotry for his own personal gain. He was in service to his own greed, prejudice, and hypocrisy, and that is how history will remember him.
(With a side helping of wishing Henry Kissinger dead as well.)
Limbaugh always opened his show with the quote “…with talent on loan from God,” and now he gets to give it back.
A few tributes:
No words … I just got news the Rush Limbaugh has passed away. thanks Rush for all you taught, gave and were. A hero to many. An icon. A patriot. A revolutionary that saved radio. Heavens gain, our loss.
Like millions of conservatives across the country, I grew up listening to Rush Limbaugh, his ability to explain any given topic was unmatched, his intellect was legendary, over the years I have watched him do so much good helping out struggling Americans.
If you know a conservative under the age of 35, Limbaugh influenced them. Whatever you think of his career trajectory, and I have my frustrations in the Trump era, he was a profoundly important check on Democratic narratives in the press. A true legend. Rest in peace.
Farewell to Rush Limbaugh. A giant of American broadcasting, a man who inspired millions, and infuriated millions (and then inspired some of those, too). He saw through the media lies to bring out the greatness of this country. He fought to the end like the American that he was.
Don’t worry about all the negative stuff the communists are saying about Rush. Read all of them. Then go live the kind of life that ensures they’ll say the same thing about YOU when you die.
Make the right enemies. And make sure they hate you like they hated him.
I kept meaning to put up this 2020 Presidential election fraud documentary by Mike Lindell (the MyPillow CEO), but YouTube keeps taking it down, so here’s a BitChute version:
I haven’t watched all of it it yet, but it’s more proof that there’s a lot of evidence out that there the 2002 Presidential election was rigged, and that very powerful people in the Democratic Media Complex want to keep you from examining the evidence for yourself. And I wanted to put up a copy that I don’t think is going to disappear…
At one point, it was estimated that the losses accumulated by GameStop short-sellers approached $5 billion. Melvin Capital, the now-notorious hedge fund with the huge GameStop short position, eventually required an infusion of $2.75 billion in cash from an even larger hedge fund to cover its possession and remain solvent.
And that’s when the Wall Street empire struck back. Suddenly, the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, which purports to be a Wall Street regulator but instead operates as little more than a Wall and Broad soothsayer to a public skeptical of Wall Street’s power, weighed in and intimated that it might investigate or even shut down the trading of GameStop stock to prevent the price from getting even higher.
Then the Wall Street-backed trading apps and the Wall Street brokerages joined in, announcing they would no longer allow their users and retail investors to buy GameStop stock. The result? When you can no longer buy a stock, its price can only go in one direction: down.
The whole saga has spawned a mini-industry of commentary on trading, markets, Wall Street, hedge funds, regulation, efficient markets theory, and who knows what else. Hedge funds are bad! No, hedge funds are good! Markets are efficient vehicles for asset price discovery! No, we need strict regulation to prevent mob-incited runs on banks!
They all miss the point. What’s happening right now has nothing to do with hedge funds or free markets or pricing theory or any of that. What’s happening right now is another front in the major war taking place in institutions and countries across the world: It’s the elite versus the populists.
Wall Street has a long, storied history of viciously crushing short-sellers. It’s something of a local pastime. Just ask David Einhorn, who wrote an entire book on the industry’s efforts to destroy him for the crime of shorting the stock of a bank that was covering up the fact that a huge chunk of its loans were garbage and would never be paid back. The GameStop saga isn’t about the benefits, or evils, of short-sellers.
The real story is how “retail investors” — the industry term for regular people who day trade now and then or have a small brokerage account for retirement or to buy stocks every now and again for fun — figured out how to take down a financial leviathan. It’s not that Wall Street dislikes retail investors, it’s that Wall Street views them as little more than commission factories for the big brokerage houses.
Those rubes don’t know anything. They’re not sophisticated. They don’t have the credentials or pedigrees of the geniuses who simultaneously destroyed the housing market and economy in 2008. And they certainly don’t have the power to move markets.
It’s Wall Street’s job to move markets. It’s Wall Street’s job to tell people which stocks and bonds to buy, which conveniently just happen to be the same assets that the mega-banks are desperate to get off their balance sheets.
A bunch of trash, mortgage-backed securities based on mortgages that will clearly never get paid back? Just put them all in the same garbage bag, claim they couldn’t all possibly start to rot at once, and then demand that the ratings agencies whose salaries you pay stamp them not as trash, but as pure gold. Then, when magically all those bags of garbage start to stink to high heaven, why, then it’s time to demand that the federal government — funded by those retail investor rubes who will probably lose their jobs and homes and savings because of those bags of Wall Street’s garbage — bail every last one of them out.
See, retail investors don’t move markets. Until they do. Which, in the case of the Redditors bidding up GameStop stock, they did. And that cannot be tolerated. The whole GameStop saga isn’t about finance or politics. It’s David vs. Goliath, the have-nots vs. the haves, the underdog vs. the heavy favorite with the best talent and training and equipment money can buy. It is a perfect microcosm of the war between the populists and the elites, the individuals vs. the institutions, the people vs. the powerful.
A bunch of internet randos found a way to take financial advantage of a company that had backed itself into a corner. They banded together, executed the strategy, and made bank. They used the exact same rules and systems that Wall Street has used for decades to screw individual investors out of their money.
That was the Redditors’ real crime. Because that’s not allowed. You are not allowed to use the same set of rules for your own advantage.
The rules here are simple: Heads Wall Street wins, tails you lose. The institutions set the rules, not you. The elite, not the populace, will determine what is allowed and what isn’t.
Former President Donald Trump is not interested in forming a third party and pledges to remain involved in Republican politics. Suck it, Lincoln Project. (And by “it” I mean “your complete irrelevance” and not “the genitalia of teenage boys”…)
The great theme of the Trump years, the one historians will note a century from now, was the failure of America’s expert class. The people who were supposed to know what they were talking about, didn’t.
The failure began with the country’s top consultants and pollsters. Candidate Trump did almost everything lavishly paid political consultants would have told him, and did tell him, not to do — and he won. The most respected pollsters, meanwhile, predicted a landslide for Hillary Clinton. America’s best and brightest political adepts turned out to know very little about the elections they claim to understand.
Also during the 2016 campaign, an assemblage of top-tier academics, intellectuals and journalists warned that Mr. Trump’s candidacy signified a fascist threat. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Nazism at Yale, was among the most strident of these prophets. “Be calm when the unthinkable arrives,” he warned in a Facebook post shortly after the election. “When the terrorist attack comes, remember that all authorities at all times either await or plan such events in order to consolidate power. Think of the Reichstag fire.” Many experts stuck with the fascism theme after Mr. Trump’s election and throughout his presidency. That these cultured authorities couldn’t tell the difference between a populist protest against elite contempt and a coup carried out by powerful ideologues will go down as one of the great fiascoes of American intellectual history.
The fascism charge was only the most acute form of the claim that Mr. Trump was carrying out an “assault on democracy.” Some semantic clarification is in order here. When intellectuals and journalists of the left use the word “democracy,” they typically are not referring to elections and decision-making by popularly elected officials. For the left, “democracy” is another word for progressive policy aims, especially the widening of special political rights and welfare-state provisions to new constituencies. By that definition any Republican president is carrying out an “assault on democracy.”
Mr. Trump assaulted democracy in the ordinary sense of the word, but he did so only after the 2020 election. That effort was discreditable and disruptive, but it was also delusional and ineffective. It was not the assault the president’s expert-class critics had foreseen.
Perhaps those critics failed to understand Mr. Trump’s assault on democracy because they had carried out a similar sort of assault in 2016-18, with the support of the federal bureaucracy and the nation’s political and cultural elite. I’m referring to the Russia scare: the belief that Mr. Trump won only because his campaign “colluded” with agents of Moscow, and that his election in 2016 was therefore illegitimate. The theory made sense only if you couldn’t grasp the obvious reasons for Mr. Trump’s victory, namely that Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate and that Obama-era progressivism had become sufficiently unpopular in the Midwest to throw the election to the nationalist candidate. Somehow it was easier for smart and accomplished people to believe that a TV celebrity and political neophyte with attention-deficit issues had entered into a diabolically ingenious pact with a foreign dictator in which the dictator helped him pick up just enough votes in the states he needed to win.
It took a 22-month investigation by a special counsel to establish an absence of evidence that Mr. Trump’s campaign had conspired with the Russians. America’s best minds and most influential leaders had spent more than two years obsessing over an idiotic conspiracy theory.
This spectacular failure of the expert class would have been impossible without the willing support of a credulous news media. That Mr. Trump won the presidency largely by denouncing the media should have suggested to leading journalists and media executives that something in their industry had gone badly wrong. Instead most of them took his rise as license to indulge their worst instincts.
Reporters treated every turn of events as evidence of Mr. Trump’s unique evil. They regarded every preposterous accusation put forward by his political foes as reasonable and likely true. The repeal of “net neutrality,” an Obama-era regulation on internet service providers, heralded the end of the open internet (it didn’t). The administration built “cages” in which to cram children of illegal border crossers (it didn’t). The president praised neo-Nazis as “very fine people” (he didn’t). His postmaster general was removing mailboxes to steal the election (an obvious lie). In retrospect, it was hardly surprising that so many Americans believed Mr. Trump’s fictitious claims about the election. Reports of his defeat, accurate though they were, meant little coming from news organizations that cared so much about discrediting him and so little about factual truth.
America’s foreign-policy elite didn’t perform appreciably better. For decades, they had insisted that peace between Israel and the Arab world was impossible without a long-term solution to the Israel-Palestinian problem. It was an axiom, no longer up for debate. Mr. Trump followed through on a promise long made but not kept by the U.S. government to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. Foreign-policy experts the world over predicted hellish payback from the Arab world, but the recognition went forward, the U.S. Embassy moved, and the payback consisted of a day’s worth of inconsequential protests.
Meanwhile the administration pressed ahead with a diplomatic push to strike commercial and diplomatic deals between Israel and Arab states. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco announced they would establish formal relations with Israel, and Saudi Arabia may do the same. The foreign-policy clerisy, having been wrong about the central question of global diplomacy for the past four decades, predictably ignored these achievements.
In the few short days following the collapse of President Donald Trump’s attempts to bring evidence of electoral fraud to the attention of the state legislatures and the courts—not to mention the calamitous events of Jan. 6—the ascendant left has moved swiftly to capitalize on what has proved a stunning propaganda victory for them and neutralize their enemies on the right.
Forget the looting, burning, and general civil unrest at the hands of BLM and Antifa in cities across America last summer—for which next to no one has yet been punished, and which was widely cheered by both the mainstream media and Democrat politicians up to and including Vice President-elect Kamala Harris. That’s all ancient history now, replaced by the “insurrection,” the “armed riot” at the Capitol, the “worst attack on Washington” since the War of 1812, when the British burned the capital and the White House.
Of course, it was not. Unrecalled by the born-yesterday media, for example, is the 1954 attack by four Puerto Rican separatists on the House of Representatives, during which some 30 shots were fired and five congressmen were wounded; the terrorists were later pardoned by Jimmy Carter in 1979. Also forgotten: the bombings of the Capitol building and the Pentagon in the 1970s by the radical leftists of the Weather Underground, led by Barack Obama’s buddy William Ayers.
George, where you make a mistake is that people coming from the liberal side like you, you immediately say everything’s a lie instead of saying there are two sides to everything. Historically what would happen is if said that I thought that there was fraud, you would interview someone else who said there wasn’t. But now you insert yourself in the middle and say that the absolute… fact is that everything that I’m saying is a lie…. Let’s talk about the specifics of it. In Wisconsin, tens of thousands of absentee votes had only the name on them and no address. Historically those were thrown out, this time they weren’t. They made special accommodations because they said, oh, it’s a pandemic and people forgot what their address was. So they changed the law after the fact. That is wrong, that’s unconstitutional. And I plan on spending the next two years going around state to state and fixing these problems and I won’t be cowed by liberals in the media who say, there’s no evidence here and you’re a liar if you talk about election fraud. No, let’s have an open debate. It’s a free country.
The global semiconductor shortage is still slamming the auto industry. Tempted to do a separate “explainer” post about how the cyclical nature of the semiconductor industry and how hard it is to add capacity.
The order, which is the first the governor has signed since October and the first non-coronavirus related order since the pandemic began last year, directs agencies “to use all lawful powers and tools to challenge any federal action that threatens the continued strength, vitality, and independence of the energy industry.”
“Each state agency should work to identify potential litigation, notice-and-comment opportunities, and any other means of preventing federal overreach within the law,” it states.
“And when they do that,” added Abbott during the press conference, “that will arm Texas to be prepared to fight back.”
The governor called the order “a homework assignment for every state agency in Texas.”
It will be swell to see democrats squander tens of millions of dollars on a race they can’t win yet again…
“State Rep. Bryan Slaton filed an amendment saying that the Legislature should bring a vote to the floor to abolish abortion before it votes to ceremonially change the names of highways or bridges.”
Netflix goes full social justice warrior, inks deal with Ibram X. Kendi. If you didn’t cancel your subscription over Cuties, now would be a good time to do so. (Hat tip: Blog reader David Rainwater.)
Proof that letting biological men compete in women’s sports is a bad idea. Top male high school athletes routinely beat female Olympians.
The Lamb and Flag, once frequented by the likes of Lord of the Rings author J.R.R. Tolkien and his friend C.S. Lewis, who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, has suffered a disastrous loss of revenues since the start of the pandemic.
It first opened in 1566 and moved to its present location on St Giles, a broad thoroughfare in the city centre, in 1613. It is owned by St John’s College, one of 45 colleges and private halls that make up the University of Oxford.
“Until the San Francisco Unified School District board stripped Dianne Feinstein’s name from one of its public schools, we were unaware of the Senator’s service to the Confederacy.”
On one side of the fight are the hedge fund managers. These guys are good-hearted regular folks living out the American dream by manipulating markets so that companies will fail and they can buy another desperately needed yacht.
On the other side are a bunch of Cheeto-stained Redditors who are dangerously manipulating markets to try to make money. These guys obviously weren’t informed that the stock market was only for rich people to make money. They’re probably Nazis and alt-righters too.
“Biden All-Female Communications Team Won’t Tell Nation What’s Wrong, Nation Should Already Know.” “It’s fine. Everything’s fine. Nothing’s wrong, OK!?” said Jen Psaki in her first press conference as a part of Biden’s team. “Why would you think I’m not fine? Ugh… if you have to ask, I’m not going to tell you.”
Here’s a Wall Street story that has everything to do with the current political moment.
GameStop is the video game retailer that almost went out of business last year. This year, a whole bunch of powerful hedge funds bet on GameStop stock going by selling the stock short.
For those unfamiliar, a short squeeze happens when a rising stock price forces short-sellers out of their position. When panic strikes and those sellers buy back stock, they send shares even higher. Here, you have what InvestorPlace Markets Analyst Tom Yeung calls a powerful feedback loop.
Yeung also sees GME stock as being a particularly relevant candidate for a short squeeze. Right now, 71.2 million of its shares are being sold short. That is even more than its total outstanding share count!
Enter Wallstreetbets- A trading/investing subreddit. Someone noted that these hedgefunds shorted 140% of all shares available.
These hedgefunds were so damn greedy, they borrowed more shares than actually existed. That's how arrogant and dumb they were. pic.twitter.com/MpsFwMdqdM
And so we reach our main story of how the hedgefund's greed ruined them.
Realizing that these hedgefunds shorted GME by a ridiculous amount, these Redditors (normal people like you and me), bought every share they could get their hands on. Driving the price up like crazy. pic.twitter.com/ojvdEZhNXb
So eventually, the due date for when these hedgefunds need to return the borrowed shares comes closer.
And what do they do?
They double down.
They short MORE. Because they're sure that they can manipulate the stock enough to get it to crash, thereby saving themselves. pic.twitter.com/xIi5iwpV4h
So the short selling bear hedge funds are totally screwed. The result? Carnage:
Across most of America, GameStop is just a place to buy a video game. On Wall Street, though, it’s become a battleground where swarms of smaller investors see themselves making an epic stand against the 1%.
The funds serving the financial elite are starting to walk away in defeat. Big bets they made that GameStop’s stock would fall went wrong, leaving them facing billions of dollars in collective losses. All the wild action pushed GameStop’s stock as high as $380 on Wednesday, up from $18 just a few weeks ago.
The stunning seizure of power gives some validation to smaller-pocketed investors, many of whom are encouraging each other on Reddit and are trading stocks for the first time thanks to brokerages offering free-trading apps. It’s also left more investors on Wall Street asking if the stock market is in a dangerous bubble about to pop, as AMC Entertainment, Bed Bath & Beyond and other downtrodden stocks suddenly soar as well. The S&P 500 set a record high earlier this week, though it fell Wednesday.
Two investment firms that had placed bets for money-losing GameStop’s stock to fall have essentially thrown in the towel. One, Citron Research, acknowledged Wednesday in a YouTube video that it unwound the majority of its bet and took “a loss, 100%” to do so.
Snip.
Melvin Capital is also exiting GameStop, with manager Gabe Plotkin telling CNBC that the hedge fund was taking a significant loss. He denied rumors that the hedge fund will fail. The size of the losses taken by Citron and Melvin are unknown.
Before its recent explosion, GameStop’s stock had been struggling for a long time. The company has been losing money for years as sales of video games increasingly go online, and its stock fell for six straight years before rebounding in 2020.
That pushed many professional investors to make bets that GameStop’s stock will decline even further. In such bets, called “short sales,” investors borrow a share and sell it in hopes of buying it back later at a lower price and pocketing the difference. GameStop is one of the most shorted stocks on Wall Street.
But its stock began rising sharply earlier this month after a co-founder of Chewy, the online seller of pet supplies, joined the company’s board. The thought is that he could help in the company’s transformation as it focuses more on digital sales and closes brick-and-mortar stores. Its shares jumped to $19.94 from less than $18 on Jan. 11. At the time, it seemed like a huge move for the stock.
Smaller investors were meanwhile exhorting each other online to keep GameStop’s stock rolling higher.
The raucous discussions are full of sarcasm, self deprecation and emojis of rocket ships signifying belief that GameStop’s stock will fly to the moon.
Snip.
There is no overriding reason why GameStop has attracted this cavalcade of smaller and first-time investors, but there is a distinct component of revenge against Wall Street in communications online.
“The same rich people that caused the market crash in 2007/08 are still in power and continue to manipulate the market to get even richer, we are just taking back our fair share,” one user wrote on Reddit.
“hey mom i can’t come up for dinner,” another user wrote. “i’m bankrupting a 10 figure hedge fund with the boys.”
Beyond personal attacks, the battle has also created big financial losses for Wall Street players who shorted GameStop’s stock.
As GameStop’s gains grew and short sellers scrambled to get out of their bets, they had to buy shares to do so. That accelerated the momentum even more, creating a feedback loop. As of Tuesday, short sellers of GameStop were already down more than $5 billion in 2021, according to S3 Partners.
Much of professional Wall Street remains pessimistic that GameStop’s stock can hold onto its immense gains. The company is unlikely to start making big enough profits to justify its $22.2 billion market valuation anytime soon, analysts say. The stock closed Wednesday at $347.51. Analysts at BofA Global Research raised their price target Wednesday — to $10.
All the mania is raising some concern that investors are taking excessive risks, and reporters asked Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell on Wednesday whether the Fed’s moves to support markets through the pandemic is helping to push stock prices too high.
In short, the hedge funds suffered a serious bloodletting:
NBC NEWS: Short-sellers lost $14.3 billion today alone on GameStop stock, according to S3 Partners
Did the Wall Street titans laid low by retail investors shrug their shoulders over the loss and slink off quietly into the night to lick their wounds? They did not. Instead, our elites staged a fullbore freakout over being beaten at their own game(stop).
were the ones manipulating the stock, but they got caught, and are now trying to take their ball and go home.
While these hedgefunds are on every news channel screaming about Reddit and Wallstreetbets, they inevitably draw attention to themselves, and what's going on.
Perhaps the most flagrant example was where noted CNN tool Chris Cillizza declared the GameStop short squeeze an example of Trumpism. Because how dare ordinary people think they can beat the elite at their own games?
Hate speech, White Supremacy, Racism, etc. These are the new catch-all for the government violating your rights. https://t.co/JMGS9e6YJW
— Article V Convention of States please (@philthatremains) January 27, 2021
(Babylon Bee: “Merriam-Webster Changes Definition Of ‘White Supremacist’ To ‘Anyone Who Wins In The Stock Market When They’re Not Supposed To’.)
There’s even the “Russia! Russia! Russia!” cliche:
Now they are blaming Russia for the move in GameStop.
Why? Because what they are not saying is the squeeze, along with Biden's destruction of the US economy in the name of climate change, has the potential to trigger a 2008 style financial collapse.pic.twitter.com/crF03bo0jz
And finally, a Berkeley professor wants you know they’re investing in GameStop because they’re not having sex:
Arm young men, in a basement, not at work, not having sex, not forming connection, with an RH account, a phone and stimulus and you have the perfect storm of volatility as they wage war against established players while squeezing the dopa bag,,,harder and harder
Secretary of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts William Galvin wants a 30-day trading suspension of GameStop, because retail investors can’t be allowed to make money off the mistakes of their betters.
There are valid reasons for hedge funds and short sellers to exist. But no one, least of all our corrupt political establishment, should let them get away with the classic “I keep my profits private but force the government to underwrite my losses” con game.
Reddit shuts down #wallstreetbets and I honestly think today is a defining day. This is no longer just a war of Big Tech against conservatives. Its just so delicious that @TheDemocrats have officially aligned themselves w Wall Street culture now. #GameOn
lmao some hedge fund might go bankrupt from redditors raising gamestop's stock as a joke.
Newsflash: if you can go bankrupt from one stock going up too much, you are running the same scam as the redditors, the only difference is you wear a suit and tie while you do it.
This may all seem extremely irrational. But thanks to the Federal Reserve’s endless money pump, the market has been irrational for a long time. And the biggest irrationality was short-sellers shorting more stock than actually existed.
I should point out that I have no money in GameStop, AMC, or Nokia stock (unless there’s some tucked away in one of my various 401K funds, which I rather doubt). Though honestly, as weird as this year is already going, I’m tempted to put a few hundred dollars in Dogecoin…
In the “stop panicking” category: “Statehouse wins position GOP to dominate redistricting“:
An abysmal showing by Democrats in state legislative races on Tuesday not only denied them victories in Sun Belt and Rust Belt states that would have positioned them to advance their policy agenda — it also put the party at a disadvantage ahead of the redistricting that will determine the balance of power for the next decade.
The results could domino through politics in America, helping the GOP draw favorable congressional and state legislative maps by ensuring Democrats remain the minority party in key state legislatures. Ultimately, it could mean more Republicans in Washington — and in state capitals.
By Wednesday night, Democrats had not flipped a single statehouse chamber in its favor. And it remained completely blocked from the map-making process in several key states — including Texas, North Carolina and Florida, which could have a combined 82 congressional seats by 2022 — where the GOP retained control of the state legislatures.
After months of record-breaking fundraising by their candidates and a constellation of outside groups, Democrats fell far short of their goals and failed to build upon their 2018 successes to capture state chambers they had been targeting for years. And they may have President Donald Trump to blame.
“It’s clear that Trump isn’t an anchor for the Republican legislative candidates. He’s a buoy,” said Christina Polizzi, a spokesperson for the Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee, on Wednesday. “He overperformed media expectations, Democratic and Republican expectations, and lifted legislative candidates with him.”
Snip.
The biggest disappointment came in the seat-rich state of Texas, Democrats needed nine seats to reclaim the majority after flipping a dozen in the midterms. Though some races remain uncalled, so far Democrats were able to unseat one incumbent and Republicans offset that with another pickup.
Now Texas Republicans, retaining control of the Senate and the governor’s mansion, will have total authority over the drawing of as many as 39 congressional districts in the state. Democrats fear Republicans will pack and crack the rapidly diversifying suburbs to dilute unfriendly voters. Despite targeting 10 districts, Democrats failed to flip a single targeted seat in 2020 on the current map, which was drawn by the GOP roughly a decade ago.
There are plenty of things to worry about with Democrats control (by the skin of their teeth) the White House, the Senate and the House, but federalism provides strong state power as a counterbalance to the federal government.
A Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and researcher who has received almost $20 million from the Department of Energy was arrested Thursday after he allegedly failed to disclose ties to the People’s Republic of China.
Mechanical engineering professor Gang Chen faces charges of wire fraud, failing to file a foreign bank account report, and making a false statement in a tax return, the U.S. attorney’s office in Boston revealed Thursday.
Prosecutors allege the 56-year-old professor, who is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in China, has held a number of positions on behalf of the PRC with the goal of promoting China’s technological and scientific capabilities.
They claim he shared his expertise directly with Chinese government officials “often in exchange for financial compensation,” including serving as an “overseas expert” at the request of the Chinese consulate in New York and a member of at least two PRC Talent Programs.
The Department of Energy has given Chen $19 million for research since 2013.
The president didn’t mention violence on Wednesday, much less provoke or incite it. He said, “I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
District law defines a riot as “a public disturbance . . . which by tumultuous and violent conduct or the threat thereof creates grave danger of damage or injury to property or persons.” When Mr. Trump spoke, there was no “public disturbance,” only a rally. The “disturbance” came later at the Capitol by a small minority who entered the perimeter and broke the law. They should be prosecuted.
Actually, I think it’s been firmly established that the entry into the capitol occurred even before Trump stopped speaking.
Also not so much in the news: Israel launched its biggest airstrike in years against Iranian positions in Syria.
A senior U.S. intelligence official with knowledge of the attack told The Associated Press that the airstrikes were carried out with intelligence provided by the United States and targeted a series of warehouses in Syria that were being used as a part of the pipeline to store and stage Iranian weapons.
The official said the warehouses also served as a pipeline for components that supports Iran’s nuclear program.
Maybe the Islamic Republic of Iran expects that they can just ask the Biden Administration for highly enriched uranium directly…
Total crude oil imported from Saudi Arabia last week: Zero.
Two companies, Google and Apple, each control about half of the smartphone market. So when the two companies made a move against Parler, the conservative social media alternative, it effectively erased its app from existence. Joining the party was a third member of the FAANG Big Tech consortium, Amazon, which deplatformed Parler from Amazon Web Services.
AWS controls a third of the cloud marketplace. Microsoft and Google are in 2nd and 3rd place.
Blocking an app doesn’t permanently kill a social networking service, though it places it at a structural disadvantage, but Apple and Google can flag sites as unsafe through their browsers.
Originally, the social media giant and former favorite platform of President Trump claimed that it was simply a matter of accounts not verifying their information. Twitter claimed that until those accounts did so, they would simply not show upon follower accounts.
Well, the tune has been changed. As most suspected from the beginning, there is actually a widespread deletion of conservative accounts goings on under the guise of them being QAnon related. This has supposedly hit over 70,000 accounts so far.
Let me explain how this works. Basically any small amount that propagated the idea that the election was stolen is going to be lumped in as QAnon and targeted.
I don’t believe in QAnon conspiracies. I do believe the election was stolen.
“The world’s biggest gun forum was booted off the Internet because they can be.” In other news, Go-Daddy sucks. I hope AR15.com files a very expensive lawsuit against them.
Looks like Twitter didn’t quite erase Trump’s tweet history:
Gab CEO Pulls Off The Impossible For Trump… INCREDIBLE!
“Gab CEO completely backed up Pres. Trump’s Twitter account before it was deleted & recreated him on Gab! What’s even more impressive is he did this while traffic was up 700% & under attack..https://t.co/F3olVzPpYy
— Liberty Times & Politics #FreeSpeech (@dmills3710) January 13, 2021
There is a large segment of American society, maybe 15-20%, that has not had a president who represents their basic worldview for decades. These folks tend to be white, exurban or rural, believe in religious tradition and cultural conservatism without being regular church-goers, very patriotic, very pro-military, hostile to immigration and free trade, skeptical of big business, big government, and establishment experts, and in favor of entitlement programs and the safety net…
Ross Perot and Pat Buchanan appealed to this demographic to a large extent. Beyond that, the only major national figure I can think of in my lifetime who more or less represented them was George Wallace.
So along comes Trump who appeals to this constituency almost perfectly. Sure, he’s a rich New Yorker, but his outer-borough accent and mentality, scorned by the elite, reminds people that their own regional accents are also scorned by the elite.
This constituency used to be divided between Republicans and Democrats, which is one reason they lacked influence on presidential nominees, but they have shifted to be heavily Republican, which gave them a lot of influence on the nominating process in 2020 [I think he means 2016 here. -LP], and they chose Trump.
Trump, to almost everyone’s surprise, wins. So how do big government, big business, elite experts and so on, i.e., the establishment, react, from his fans’ perspective? Without even giving Trump a chance, they decree that he is illegitimate, that he needs to be resisted, and that his voters are beyond redemption; “this is 1932 in Germany” was not a rare reaction.
So, from these voters’ perspective, the one time in their lifetimes and much longer a president comes around who really speaks to their worldview, the establishment tries to destroy him. Rather than the anti-Trump sentiment persuading them, it makes them stronger supporters, people who see Trump as their weapon against an establishment that disparages them.
Intel ousts CEO Bob Swan and replaces him with Intel veteran Pat Gelsinger. Intel has stumbled so badly over the last few years that replacing Swan (who has a finance background) is probably overdue. Gelsinger spent 30 years at Intel, some as CTO, so maybe he has a good chance of ironing out their process problems.
Speaking of semiconductors, there’s a global chip shortage going on, with auto makers among the hardest hit. And it’s not from TSMC’s cutting-edge fabs, it’s from older, larger geometry fabs. And dependence on Chinese chips plays a role as well.
Democrats ❤ Communism:
Someone must have pinged @HaroldFordJr during his appearance on @SpecialReport just now and told him that his Mao was showing.
Portland police are taking longer than ever to respond to 911 calls? Just because the ruling democrats hate them and won’t back them up, refuse to charge habitual lawbreakings, and engendered a wave of retirements? Imagine that. (Hat tip: 357 Magnum.)
Burning in Hell watch: Lisa Montgomery, who strangled a pregnant mom to death and cut out her unborn baby to parade around as her own, was executed.
The left has long had a tendency to push propaganda over truth, but the Trump years have seen a dramatic increase in willfully repeated falsehoods to push the Democratic Media Complex’s favored “narratives” over obvious truths everyone can see with their own two eyes.
First there was the Russian collusion hoax, a self-serving fiction democrats concocted both to jam Trump at the line of scrimmage and give them an excuse for explaining how they managed to lose an election everyone said they had in the bag. There followed more lies to support the initial lie, then the impeachment farce that failed to make a dent.
And all the while, underneath the surface, social justice warriors were spinning out falsehood after falsehood to support their favored narratives. “Hands Up Don’t Shot” was a lie from the git-go. The idea that sex is a social construct was and is a lie, as is the idea that someone can change their sex merely by declaring they have. Not to mention the risible #BlackLivesMatter bullshit that “silence is violence” and the ridiculous idea that everyone who voted for Trump was a “white supremacist.”
Then came to 2020 #BlackLivesMatter/Antifa riots the Democratic Media Complex did their very best to ignore or spin as “mostly peaceful” despite burning down hundreds of businesses and looting thousands.
Then they stole the 2020 Presidential election by massive fraud is six urban counties and got very upset when people tried to point this out.
Finally, the events of January 6 drove them to new heights of hyperbole. Want to call it inadvisable? Absolutely. A mob? Fair enough. A riot? Sure. Criminal? Some of it, by definition.
But what it was not was an “insurrection” or “coup.” Trust me, if a significant fraction of president Trump’s 75+ million supporters wanted to stage an armed coup, you’d know it. Or, more to the point, the likes of Nancy Pelosi, George Soros and Jack Dorsey wouldn’t know it, because they’d hang lifeless from the ends of gibbets.
You don’t get high on your own supply because the moment you start deluding yourself, reality has a nasty way of smacking you upside the head.
And if Democrats think that removing Donald “Emmanuel Goldstein” Trump from the White House means they get to immediately return to their old grifts without consequences (and add a bunch of new woke social justice grifts on top of them to boot), they have another think coming. Kurt Schlichter:
Have you noticed that everything is a lie and a scam? Everything.
See, the problem starts when our elite realized that it could break the norms and betray the principles that we all thought we were all abiding by without accountability, at least for a little while. The Establishment realized that it can simply not enforce the norms, and then there will be a lag time while the normals continue on as if the norms were still in effect. It’s inertia – this is why you get these sad sack RINOs lecturing us on how we’re subverting the institutions when what we are really doing is pointing out that the institutions have subverted themselves.
It’s willful blindness to the corruption because the weakhearts don’t want to admit there is corruption because that would then require them to act. It’s easier to live on scraps.
The biggest gap in this country isn’t between enlightened social justice warriors and the backward racist redneck freaks of JesusLand, it’s between those who want to continue sticking their snouts into troughs of taxpayer money, feel their own grifts are sacred birthrights above reproach and have different laws apply to them than the peasants, and those who have been made aware of the scam.
We’re not going back to sleep, no matter how hard you call us deplorables, racists or insurrectionists.
Salem Media’s Kevin McCullough, who posted questions about the votes moving backwards in the Georgia run-offs and posted Trump’s video from his rally.
The Team Trump account was axed too.
Techno Fog who broke court documents on the Russia hoax.
Tracy Beanz who also did yeoman’s work on Russia hoax.
Influencers on the right suddenly over the last couple of days were also finding their Twitter followers dropping off precipitously. Not just a few people but a lot of influencers, even smaller not well-known people.
Lots of people are having followers purged, including myself, though I’ve only lost some 100-odd. Can;t say whether this is a purge of inactive accounts or not.
Facebook also banned the #WalkAway campaign and Brandon Straka:
Today Facebook took down the #WalkAway Campaign, and with it, the hundreds of thousands of videos & written stories of real people leaving the left. They banned me, my employees & volunteers. We are moving to https://t.co/wsGFdNe6ND Plz sign up & join #WalkAway Campaign group pic.twitter.com/quvahfap0z
In case you haven’t been paying attention, the battle over personal data, free speech and the free flow of information between the American people and the tech giants is heating up. As the Googles and Facebooks of the world take an unconstitutional role in deciding what speech and information should be online, it’s becoming clear much more is at stake than first meets the eye.
It’s also becoming apparent that there are some voices on the Right who are either deeply naïve and ignorant about what is at stake or they are in fact paid collaborators of the tech companies.
Also some discussion of the threat of the singularity, which is still more science fiction than actual at this point. (Hat tip: Director Blue.)
I’ve got a bunch of quarter- or half-formed blog posts about The Recent Unpleasantness I haven’t had time to finish, so let’s use this low-calorie blog post substitute to note that I’m on two separate alternative to Twitter:
On Gab I’m @BattleSwarm. Gab was looking moribund for a while, but after this week’s events it seems to be showing some life again.
I’ve also added a Social Media section to the sidebar.
So if you’re on either of those, try to follow me there in addition to my Twitter account, as it seems like only a matter of time until my account gets nuked for #WrongThink. One wonders how profitable Twitter will be once they get around to banning everyone Democrats and Social Justice Warriors think should get banned.
