Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” (1927) inspired a really fantastic array of Golden Age of Art Deco posters. <link>

John Wolfstahl agrees with Secretary of Defense Austin that defending Ukraine against Russian Nuclear Intimidation is not only a local strategic goal, but desirable in deterring in advance nuclear blackmail world-wide.

]t was with some interest that I heard Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin speculate i]this weekend that a Russian victory over Ukraine could lead to greater proliferation of nuclear weapons.

I have heard defense officials, including prior Secretaries of Defense, make such assertions in the past so I tend to view them with skepticism. In this case, however, Secretary Austin is on to something. …

Russia has not just invaded a sovereign country. It did not just annex territory of a state whose borders it had pledged to respect. And it did not just annex land from a state that agreed to free itself of legacy Soviet nuclear weapons left on its territory in 1991 and return them to Russia as the USSR’s designated successor state.

No, Russia has done all of this while threatening to use its nuclear weapons against states who might come to Ukraine defense and to insulate itself against counter-attacks. Moscow under Putin has done more than weaponize risk. Russia in this campaign has undermined the hard-earned norm against threatening to use nuclear weapons for territorial aggression and sought to use its nuclear arsenal as a shield behind which it could pursue an invasion, commit war crimes, and destabilize a continent for its own benefit. Protestations that any reference to nuclear weapons have been misunderstood aside, Russia under Putin has become the kind of state we have worried might develop in North Korea or Iran. Many analysts have expressed concern for years that North Korea in particular was a threat because it was an anti-status quo state that might try to use its nuclear weapons to carry out sub-strategic attacks against South Korea, and that it might miscalculate that their nuclear deterrent might protect them in the event it attacked the South from an American response.

Instead, Russia is the one who underestimated its own capabilities and now is dragging the world closer to the nuclear brink. And thus Austin was right to note one of the very tangible reasons why the United States should remain so committed to both deterring Russia nuclear use and ensuring Ukraine prevails. If Russia can hide behind its nuclear shield and prevent America and NATO from bringing many of their conventional advantages into the conflict, than others may see a similar path to victory against a stronger, more capable military adversary. If Russia – the second-best army in Ukraine[1] – can hold America and NATO at arm’s length while gobbling up a neighbor, then maybe other states will follow suit. It is likely this would influence nuclear decision making among US friends and allies. I think this is a lesser danger for US allies and treaty partners, however, since Putin has attacked many states but none of them US allies proper because he knows the risk. And there is a good argument that the depth and strength of NATO’s response to the invasion of Ukraine has likely done wonders for the credibility of the alliance, as evidenced by Finland and Sweden’s desire to join NATO as rapidly as possible.

But for the potential aggressors out there, states whose leaders are unaccountable and who may have territorial or strategic ambitions, the lure of nuclear weapons has always been balanced by the costs of going nuclear, both economically and politically. But if Russia can invade a state in the face of a much stronger set of conventional adversaries and get away with it because it has nuclear weapons, then the prospects that other states might up their interest in nuclear weapons should be a concern. And Secretary Austin put this in a way that was not overstated and did not suggest this was an on-off switch kind of decision.

This gets to the follow-on point that Austin did not make but that he might have/should have. If Ukraine can defeat Putin (defined as expelling him from all Ukrainian territory taken, at least since February) and avoid Putin escalating with nuclear weapons, then the United States will have done something both unlikely and important – demonstrate that nuclear weapons are much less useful as a tool for conventional military conquest than some might have believed, perhaps even unusable. Avoiding nuclear escalation by Russia is a key U.S. objective not only because of the horrors a nuclear strike would cause, or because it would likely draw the U.S. and NATO in the conflict with uncertain consequences. It matters because perhaps the only way Putin can avoid defeat is through nuclear escalation – nuclear use by Moscow is perhaps the easiest way for him to end a losing campaign and force a stalemate by going over the heads of the Ukrainians and raising the stakes for the west as high as he has raised them for himself. Put another way . . . keeping the Ukraine war conventional is the best way to beat Putin.

RTWT

I agree, and I think he is correct in noting that Russia’s attack on Ukraine must be opposed for being an absolutely outrageous violation of the post-WWII understanding that there should be no alteration of European borders by force.

On top of which, Russia’s perfidy in breaking its 1994 pledge to not only respect, but to defend, Ukraine’s territorial integrity, and its flagrant resort to shameless lying represents exactly the same kind of gangsterish behavior characteristic of Nazi Germany, and both offenses against decency and the international Order absolutely require opposition.

BREAKING: footage was just leaked from Twitter HQ in San Francisco showing current working conditions of the software engineers

Before @elonmusk bought Twitter they were drinking lattes and playing foosball, but now he’s making them do this. WTF

Pray for them #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/nZdGAGzGKT

— ELIJAH SCHAFFER (@ElijahSchaffer) November 18, 2022

BREAKING: footage was just leaked from Twitter HQ in San Francisco showing current working conditions of the software engineers

Before @elonmusk bought Twitter they were drinking lattes and playing foosball, but now he’s making them do this. WTF

Pray for them #RIPTwitter pic.twitter.com/nZdGAGzGKT

— ELIJAH SCHAFFER (@ElijahSchaffer) November 18, 2022

Yuri Bezmonov points out that elite cronyism revolving around Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) virtue-signaling investing resides at the root of the FTX/Alameda Investing debacle.

Most articles I’ve read about FTX are analyzing the mechanics of how it imploded, but they are not going deep on the characters involved because that would be politically incorrect. Have no fear, Yuri is here! It is the perfect story to dissect that includes pattern recognition, crony elitism, and physiognomy. The diligence below will grow more savage as you keep reading.

FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is the quintessential soy bugman. Rule of thumb – never trust a vegan who wears cargo shorts with white socks. His parents were Stanford professors and his mother is a Democrat NGO bundler. SBF funneled $50 million to Democrats in this midterm cycle, second only to the perennial heavyweight George Soros. “Effective altruism” + “democracy” = stealing from people to give to Democrats. He also fraudulently transferred FTX customer money into his own hedge fund Alameda, run by soy bugwoman ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison.

The most underreported part of this tale is on the other side of the table – the investors. Sequoia is regarded as the one of the greatest venture capital firms of all time with a storied history of grand slams including household names like Apple, Cisco, Google, Instagram, LinkedIn, PayPal, Reddit, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and Zoom. It has $85 billion in assets under management. Roloef Boetha is its well-respected leader, who was part of the legendary Paypal Mafia that included Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, David Sacks, and Keith Rabois.

At the peak of the bubble in Summer 2021, Sequoia plowed $214 million into FTX. As is custom with smug VCs, they announced their investment with a 13,000 word epic of self-congratulatory masturbatory propaganda fellating the brilliance of SBF. They have deleted the piece from their website to hide their embarrassment, but the internet never forgets and archived it in full here. The worst moment came when the partners were simping over SBF’s pitch, while he was simultaneously playing a video game.

RTWT

Peter van Buren notes some of the pathologies.

As with the suspension of Trump (and on a much, much lesser scale, me) progressives cheered the deplatformings the way public lynchings used to attract a picnicking crowd. The left controls social media (as well as most mainstream media) and so day by day their unreal world becomes ethically more cleansed, more free of things they do not like, and with all the bad news (Hunter Biden) made to go away. The world online is the way they want it to be, with the real world held at bay behind the screen. Like living in The Villages in Florida, or maybe in the Matrix.

It is very much the same for what we’ll call social media 3D, things like renaming high schools and tearing down statues. Those acts are the equivalent of tweets. Nothing changes because of them, but everyone feels more righteous. Might as well send the 45 cents a day to one of those TV charities and think you are solving hunger in Africa. Or posting on Facebook that everyone should get vaccinated. Or, at least when gays were still performing as victims, changing your photo to a rainbow flag.

You see it also in the blurred lines between fiction and reality. A touchpoint for understanding Trump was the dismal novel The Handmaid’s Tale. Black empowerment? Wakanda. Economic equality is fictionalized by replacing every white person in a TV commercial with a black actor, and every other Hallmark romance with a same-sex couple. Same thing when our society over-celebrates the first transgender Jeopardy! winner or another children’s book where the cuddly caterpillar who does good deeds is nonbinary. NYC’s Shakespeare in the Park this year featured Richard III with the lead played by a black woman, no doubt as some imagine the Bard secretly intended.

But this detachment from reality, the appearance of action instead of action, is why progressives continue to have to “raise awareness” for the same old things over and over. In the end, nothing that happens online matters. Online is just propaganda of unknown real-world effectiveness. The left celebrates the deplatforming of Marjorie Taylor Greene, forgetting she is still a sitting congresswoman. Votes count, “likes” do not. Joe Rogan talks to 11 million people a week; Neil Young, his one-time media nemesis, not so many.

The danger of all this, as every purple-haired undergrad eventually realizes, is it creates learned helplessness. …

RTWT

An epic video of the interception of two Russian cruise missiles in a row by Ukrainian air defense systems. Kyiv region, November 15 pic.twitter.com/2In4KWCzAG

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) November 17, 2022

Factory Engraved! You can’t get that today.

0xfbifemboy does a thorough job of explaining “how Sam Bankman-Fried, Sam Trabucco, and Caroline Ellison incinerated over $20 billion dollars of fund profits and FTX user deposits.”

[W]e still don’t have a perfect understanding of what exactly happened at Alameda Research and FTX. However, at this point, I feel that we have enough information to get a grasp on the broad strokes. Through a combination of Twitter users’ investigations, forum anecdotes, and official news releases, the history of these two intertwined companies becomes progressively less hazy, slowly coalescing into something resembling a consistent narrative.

Of course, without witness testimonies and a full financial investigation, our claims only remain tentative at best. Any given piece of information may be flawed or even fabricated. However, if they are assembled together and put in context, they together lend credence to the following timeline:

SBF, Trabucco, and Caroline were (probably) initially well-intentioned but not especially competent at running a trading firm

Alameda Research made large amounts of book profits via leveraged longs and illiquid equity deals in the 2020-2021 bull market

Although Alameda was likely initially profitable as a market maker, their edge eventually degraded and their systems became unprofitable

Despite success with some discretionary positions, on net, Alameda & FTX jointly continued to lose large amounts of money and liquid cash throughout 2021-2022 as a result of excessive discretionary spending, illiquid venture investments, uncompetitive market-making strategies, risky lending practices, lackluster internal accounting, and general deficiencies in overall organizational ability
When loans were recalled in early 2022, an emergency decision was made to use FTX users’ deposits to repay creditors

This repayment spurred on increasingly erratic behavior and unprofitable gambling, eventually resulting in total insolvency.

RTWT

In retrospect, perhaps $20 billion would've been better invested in lottery tickets than magic beans from two autistic band nerds pic.twitter.com/Mzh8pmEWWv

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 14, 2022

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The NY Post profiles the FTX founder/genius.

Biden’s second-biggest donor, cryptocurrency billionaire wunderkind Sam Bankman-Fried, a k a SBF, saw his business file for bankruptcy days after the election, but not before pumping $40 million into the Democratic Party to spend on “get-out-the-vote” and other shadowy ballot-harvesting mechanics for the midterms.

The shambolic 30-year-old whiz kid, once said to have been worth $16 billion, had spent $10 million helping get Biden elected in 2020.

SBF’s mother, Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, also is co-founder of left-wing political action committee Mind The Gap, which has raised a reported $140 million to help Democrats win elections through the same “get-out-the-vote” grift.

A more unlikely billionaire you could not find — and of course his money was built on thin air. A math genius with poor social skills, SBF reportedly lived in a “polycule” — a polyamorous relationship with multiple people — in a luxury penthouse with about 10 co-workers in the tax haven of the Bahamas, where his collapsed crypto exchange FTX was headquartered.

Otherwise, he was sleeping on beanbags in his office, eating vegan fries and, according to his own Twitter feed, popping amphetamines and sleeping pills to regulate his chaotic sleeping habits.

Now Reuters is reporting that between $1 billion and $2 billion of customer funds have vanished from FTX, conveniently after the Democrats safely spent his money.

At last report, SBF and his mysterious co-founder, Gary Wang, were being held “under supervision” by Bahamian authorities after reportedly planning to flee to Dubai, according to fintech publication Cointelegraph.

It is a stunning fall to earth. The financial media and big investors have feted the young billionaire as a saint who shunned earthly pleasures like Lamborghinis and Rolexes, but lived only to give away all his money and make the world a better place.

He was the most famous millennial adherent of a cult known as “Effective Altruism,” which originated at Oxford University, found fertile ground in Silicon Valley — and now has gone down in flames along with him.

EA is a disguised form of socialism, because all the “good” that is done just happens to match up perfectly with the left’s obsessions, whether climate change, social justice, equity, banning meat or his favorite, “pandemic preparedness.”

In a Nas Daily online video, an awkward Bankman-Fried was featured this year as a role model of altruism for young people: “Sam is not a traditional billionaire because he believes in the concept of ‘earn to give’ … Next decade he will probably give away more than $10 million … He wants to get rich in order to impact the world and change it.”

RTWT

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Caroline Ellison, Ellison, the close business associate and confirmed ex-girlfriend of FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, tweeted last year:

nothing like regular amphetamine use to make you appreciate how dumb a lot of normal, non-medicated human experience is

— Caroline (@carolinecapital) April 5, 2021

Stephen Helgeson shares my total astonishment that even the idiots in the major cities would vote to place in the United States Senate a candidate so grotesque and manifestly unqualified for the office of local dogcatcher as John Ftterman.

Pennsylvania is a very diverse place, and it is a state with a bifurcated political landscape. Most of rural PA is conservative, but hardcore liberals populate its cities. The state is an energy state with abundant resources, and it is home to a prestigious private ivy league research university, the University of Pennsylvania (located in Philadelphia) along with Carnegie Mellon, Swarthmore, and Villanova. It’s proud of its working class and its historical intellectual prowess, but the recent mid-term victory of a bumbling, oafish hipster politician John Fetterman, over a medical doctor of national repute is puzzling and reflects the rampant spread of stupid.

This week, the citizens of Pennsylvania stole the loving cup of stupid from the citizens of another politically calcified state, New Mexico — one that has consistently voted for Democrats in over nine decades of its political life. The distinction and trophy for ‘Capital of Stupid’ now rests with the citizens of William Penn’s home with the election of Democrat John Fetterman to the U.S. Senate. Why stupid you say? What is wrong with John Fetterman? It’s simple. Fetterman has never held a real private sector job in his life (he is currently lieutenant governor of Pennsylvania). He has enjoyed financial support from his parents most of his adult life. He prefers hooded sweatshirts and arm tattoos to conventional business suits and claims to be for ‘the little guy.’ Prior to becoming the lieutenant governor, his only other job was Mayor of Braddock, PA where he did nothing to improve the town’s condition. (It is thought that the town actually improved after he left office.)

Fetterman suffered a stroke in May of 2022 which left him with an auditory processing disorder which affected how he handled information and how he spoke. His opponent, a well-known television personality and respected medical doctor, Republican Mehmet Oz, was at a distinct disadvantage. He couldn’t point out the obvious about Fetterman’s inability to understand and speak (and how that would disqualify him from being a senator), but had to tread carefully lest he stimulate a ‘sympathy vote’ for the man. To compound Oz’s problems, Fetterman refused to debate the doctor until the eleventh hour on October 25th, only two weeks before the election after thousands of mail-in ballots had already been cast. Had many of those early voters seen the debate they would have viewed a severely, physically-compromised man struggle to string together a coherent sentence and stay on message.

Does that make Pennsylvania voters stupid? In a word, yes. Stupid because they chose political ideology and a deeply flawed candidate over a good one. They chose to perpetuate a status quo that will cost their state hundreds of thousands of jobs, do nothing to stop the millions that are crashing our southern border, ignore the mounting crime rates in Pennsylvania, not to mention the entire country, and insure that America becomes dependent on foreign oil producers.

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David Spicer, MIT Undergraduate Association President.

The Babbling Beaver (MIT’s conservative satire site) published a real news item, linking a student paper editorial vociferously denouncing a recent Administration report supporting Free Expression.

Its author, the current president of the MIT undergraduate student body is a spectacular specimen of avidly ambitious, power-seeking leftism, like a baby rattlesnake, already fully-equipped with potentially lethal levels of poisonous ressentiment.

This kid, unfortunately, will be heard from in larger contexts in years to come.

[T]he Freedom of Expression report fails to properly consider, let alone assign weight to, the many places speech can occur. Should speech look different in an academic versus residential setting, considering the primary purposes of such places differ? Residential settings serve as students’ ultimate retreat. Unlike speech in the classroom or on the campus grounds where students can stay or exit as they see fit, speech in residential settings inherently has a captive audience. I would not expect it to be acceptable to barge into President Reif’s Gray House anytime I wish to voice my speech, nor should students be expected to have their homes violated in the same manner. More work and discussion is imperative to understand the implications of free speech in different scenarios, taking into account the time, place, and manner of the speech.

Second, the Freedom of Expression report fails to safeguard students against the harms of power differentials. The report believes “empowering our students to be confident advocates who refuse to be silenced” is the appropriate response to speech that chills or silences the voices of marginalized minority groups. I will offer one personal example to illustrate my argument. In spring 2022, I took a required Course 17 class where my teaching assistant said hurtful things to my classmates and me. For example, when I spoke about my queer identity, said TA berated me, asking,“What makes you a minority?” Never in my Latinx, immigrant, genderqueer, gay, disabled, low-income life would I imagine having to defend myself against such an invalidating question. I did not feel comfortable with the remarks of this TA, so I reported the behavior to my professor and department chair and filed a report through the Institute Discrimination and Harassment Response Office (IDHR). The result? My department chair never followed up on the matter. My professor leaked the contents of my email to the TA without my consent. IDHR told me they could not take action on the case. As a student, I could not continue with the class. What protections would I, as a student, have in a scenario like this? Is this the new hallmark of a MIT education?

Real or not, I had a sincerely held perception that I was not and could not be treated fairly in this class. I use this example to show that this Freedom of Expression report would allow my TA to say such harmful comments and to create a hostile academic environment and fails to protect a student like me from the harms of power differentials. While I would like to consider myself an okay exemplar of a “confident advocate,” I did not achieve an acceptable outcome to my situation. I can only imagine how students without my level of comfort in advocating for myself would fare in such a situation. A belief that students should simply advocate in the face of such situations negligently fails to wrestle with the unsettling realities behind power differentials. Such a belief fails students.