This is definitely not funny. So whatever you do, don't laugh. https://t.co/fbGla5mFwT

— Catturd ™ (@catturd2) March 11, 2023

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

RIP "a day in my life as a tech company employee" Tik Tok videos https://t.co/y45ihM2Y50

— David Burge (@iowahawkblog) November 6, 2022

Catch the reply thread!

For too long Twitter free speech has been policed by authoritarian leftists. Now that Elon Musk has taken over we will hopefully be allowed to comment freely. The circled sulking woman, Vijaya Gadde (of banning Trump fame) was fired just after this photo was taken. 👍 pic.twitter.com/FNPBuNKZV0

— Major Harry Clark (@WinstonsButler) October 28, 2022

It’s like what the folks in Savannah said, when they heard that Sherman burned Atlanta: “It just shows there’s good in everyone.”

Ars Technica:

Russia is reportedly blocking Twitter, Facebook, various news sites, and major app stores, according to a German journalist.

The move comes after the Russian government announced last week that it was partially restricting access to Facebook in retaliation for the company applying fact-checking labels to posts from state-controlled media outlets.

RTWT

Emerald Robinson is unsympathetic, looking on as CNN craters.

here have been so many scandals recently at America’s least favorite cable news network CNN that it’s hard to remember them all — they’ve multiplied like the ex-husbands of the Kardashian clan. Who can keep up with all the jokes now? Just take the most recent one: the forced resignation of CNN’s president Jeff Zucker. The first scandal is that not one, but two women were interested in being romantically involved with Jeff Zucker — who could be described, generously, as the least attractive man in the Eastern Seaboard. (I’ve been unable to confirm whether both women were legally blind when they met Zucker.)

The second scandal is that the woman who was romantically linked with Jeff Zucker, Allison Gollust, was not only romantically involved with Zucker for a decade but that the pair were personally involved in PR crisis management for New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. This included “calling him to do news segments with his brother Chris Cuomo and even coaching him on what to say during his infamous COVID briefings” according to the New York Post.

Why was the top executive of a cable news network coaching an elected official? Perhaps because his girlfriend had previously been the communications director for Governor Cuomo? Perhaps because Governor Cuomo’s brother hosted a nightly news program for CNN? Perhaps because CNN has always operated as the cable news wing of the Democrat Party under Zucker’s direction? In terms of ethical violations at CNN, we are spoiled for choice.

Let’s not forget the scale of the scandal that Zucker and Gollust were aiding and abetting Andrew Cuomo to escape: he had ordered that COVID patients should be placed into New York nursing homes. (There’s absolutely no reason to do that unless you want to spread the disease to the elderly.) Then Cuomo and his team intentionally withheld nursing home death data during the Trump Administration. In other words, Zucker and Gollust helped Governor Cuomo’s cover-up of COVID-19 nursing home deaths while ostensibly employed by CNN to inform the public of such cover-ups. It’s hard to imagine a more serious ethical breach at a media outlet.

What was the reaction, you ask, of CNN’s staff to Jeff Zucker’s resignation and the serious ethical breaches behind it? They all got together for a staff meeting and defended Zucker of course. (We know this because most of them leaked details to other media outlets like the New York Times.) This might be surprising to anyone who thought people like Brian Stelter and Jake Tapper and Don Lemon were actually journalists and not just a motley crew of misfits that were hired by Zucker over the years. Did anyone really trust these people to give them information anymore? Since CNN has lost 90% of its audience, the answer to that question is a resounding no.

RTWT

Kurt Schlichter is reveling in Schadenfreude as the Biden Administration keeps racking up the points in the Worst-Ever-Presidential-Administration Olympics and the microscopic-majority democrat Congress keeps trying for revolutionary change and falling flat on its face.

There’s no sense in pretending that we don’t take pleasure in the total failure of our Marxist-curious party of the left. Through a combination of outright fraud, procedural irregularities, plus the total support of the garbage establishment and its failed institutions, the Democrats took power by the thinnest of margins and have proceeded to fail on a level comparable to Heaven’s Gate, New Coke, and the Weekly Standard. There’s no shame in enjoying their total rejection by all decent Americans. In fact, you should enjoy it without hesitation or mercy, especially since it means more than just us cons getting our jollies.

The Democrats’ “Biden is FDR and not just a desiccated, pervy old weirdo” dreams have died. Their dreams of five trillion in handouts to bums and donors have died. Their dreams of enshrining their ability to cheat in elections have died. The Democrats can’t even shatter norms, like the filibuster, competently.

So much fail in so little time. The Latinx community – which the Dems put all their faith in as part of an unstoppable future majority, is rejecting them, in large part because Democrats are the kind of people who use the word “Latinx” unironically. Some foreigners, seeing the Democrats’ weakness and stupidity – it’s not just Commander-in-Chief Crusty who is the problem – are chomping at the bit to chomp off pieces of other countries because they know that the Dems put the “feck” in “feckless.” The rest are invading our country through what used to be a border. Inflation is up, the market is down, and November 2022 is approaching just over the horizon like a Tongan tsunami.

Noted dead white guy Samuel Johnson, who believed that there are only two genders, once observed, “Depend upon it, Sir, when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” It’s an apt analogy here, both because it evokes the fact that the Democrats have gone all-in on the side of the criminals as the crime rate rockets up, and also because it demonstrates just how intractably stupid the Democrats are. They ride in the little cart heading toward their November 8th date with the electoral noose, but their minds are not concentrated on that. Instead they are concentrated on fake insurrections and telling us how CRT is not taught in schools yet must absolutely continue to be taught in schools.

RTWT

Wikipedia model article.

The boys from Top Gear get away with taking hypercars through little tiny streets in Italian cities for laughs, but I suspect they measure first. This guy did not.

A surprisingly large percentage of these mishaps seem to take place in locations where people speak Spanish…

HT: Vanderleun.

(title from Vanderleun) It would take a heart of stone not to laugh at Kathy Griffin complaining.