Never trust a ticket-taker

An insider explains why Robinhood is selling out its users:

I work for Robinhood. Don’t kill me.

Low-level, technical shit, comp sciences major, not finance side. Guess what we overhead today?

Vladimir, yes founder Vladimir, and the C-Suite, received calls from Sequoia Capital and the White House that pressured into closing trading on GME etc. I guarantee you the same took place at E-Trade and the others who closed trading.

File reports on the SEC page. If I wasn’t scared to be out of work in a pandemic I’d quit. I’m disgusted. We all need to rise up, this is as bad as it gets when we talk about how the rich get one set of rules, and the rest of us get screwed over, and over, and over again left to bail them out and pick up the tab for their trillion dollar tax breaks. We need to pile pressure on every government and financial institution involved in this travesty of justice.

I’m taking a massive career risk even posting here but fuck these motherfuckers.

So much for the “rule of law”. It’s not communistic in the slightest to observe that the corporations are now obviously a significant part of the problem.

The tiger approaches

The elections are fake. The stock markets are fake. The money is fake. The courts are fake. The police are frauds. The military is gay, trans, and fabulous. It appears that Tiger Time is rapidly approaching the once-great United States empire.

The Great American Middle Class has stood meekly by while the New Nobility stripmined $50 trillion from the middle and working classes. As this RAND report documents, $50 trillion has been siphoned from labor and the lower 90{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the workforce to the New Nobility and their technocrat lackeys who own the vast majority of the capital: Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018.

Why has the Great American Middle Class meekly accepted their new role as debt-serfs and powerless peasants in a Neofeudal Economy ruled by the New Nobility of Big Tech / monopolies / cartels / financiers? The basic answer is the New Nobility’s PR has been so persuasive and ubiquitous: soaring inequality and Neofeudalism has nothing to do with us, it’s just the natural result of technology and globalization–forces nobody can resist. Sorry about your debt-serfdom, but hey, your student loan payment is overdue, so it’s the rack for you.

The recent Foreign Affairs article referenced here last week Monopoly Versus Democracy describes the net result of the economic propaganda that the stripmining of the working and middle classes was ordained and irresistible: Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. That’s how far we’ve fallen:

“As the journalist Barry Lynn points out in his book Liberty from All Masters: The New American Autocracy vs. the Will of the People, the robber barons shared with today’s high-tech monopolists a strategy of encouraging people to see immense inequality as a tragic but unavoidable consequence of capitalism and technological change. But as Lynn shows, one of the main differences between then and now is that, compared to today, fewer Americans accepted such rationalizations during the Gilded Age. Today, Americans tend to see grotesque accumulations of wealth and power as normal. Back then, a critical mass of Americans refused to do so, and they waged a decades-long fight for a fair and democratic society.”

The bottom 90{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} of the U.S. economy has been decapitalized: debt has been substituted for capital. Capital only flows into the increasingly centralized top tier, which owns and profits from the rising tide of debt that’s been keeping the bottom 90{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} afloat for the past 20 years.

Not only that, but the robber barons were, for the most part, Americans themselves. They felt some sense of obligation to their fellow Americans, and knew that an amount of restraint and noblesse oblige was required. The lawless and mostly foreign elite that presently rules the USA feels no sense of obligation to the American people and therefore knows no restraints. The situation somehow calls to mind a little Chinese poem written by Zhang Xianzhong, who lived in similarly evil times. Consider the history of the man known as the Yellow Tiger.

Towards the end the Ming dynasty, drought, famines and epidemics broke out in various part of China. In the late 1620s, peasants revolted in Shaanxi, resisting attempts by the Ming government to collect grains and taxes. They coalesced into rebel armies called “roving bandits” (liúkòu 流寇) because of their highly mobile nature, and spread into other parts of China. Chang escaped from the army, joined the rebel forces in Mizhi County in 1630, and established himself as a rebel leader, styling himself Bada Wang (八大王, Eighth Great King). His mobile forces would conduct raids along the western edge of Shaanxi, plundering swiftly and hiding out in the hills. Later he moved into other provinces, moving from place to place raiding towns and cities. He was defeated at various times by the Ming forces; Chang would also surrender when it was expedient for him to do so, for example in 1631 and 1638, but would then later regroup and resume rebellion.

In 1635 he joined a larger confederation of bandits that included another rebel leader, Li Zicheng (Li would later capture Beijing and end the Ming rule there). They devastated Henan and pushed into Anhui. After they had burnt the Ming ancestral temple at Zhongdu (Fengyang) in Anhui and ravaged the area, the rebel armies broke up and Chang headed to Hubei. In 1637, joined by other rebels and with an army now reaching a size of 300,000 men, he again pushed into Anhui, then to Jiangsu, and almost down to Nanjing. But he was defeated there and he retreated back to Hubei. In 1638, he surrendered to Ming supreme commander Xiong Wencan (熊文燦) and was allowed to serve as a regional Ming commander. However, he reneged on the agreement in 1639 and rebelled, and later defeated the Ming forces led by the Ming general Zuo Liangyu (左良玉). In 1640, he suffered defeats at the hand of Zuo and had to flee with few followers into the mountains of Eastern Sichuan. In 1641 he emerged from Sichuan and attacked Xiangyang, capturing and executing the imperial prince there.

In 1643, he took Macheng in Hubei, and his army swelled to some 57,000 after incorporating the city’s rebels.[12] He then captured the provincial capital of Wuchang, killed the imperial prince there, and proclaimed himself “Xi Wang” (King of the West).

Zhang was apparently a man of literary gifts as well as martial ones. He left words engraved on a stele that are among the most haunting ever written.

Heaven brings forth innumerable things to nurture Man.

Man has nothing good with which to recompense Heaven.

Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.

Lawyers are stupid

Not all of them, of course. But as a general rule, it’s a good idea to keep in mind that even highly successful lawyers are considerably less intelligent than successful entrepreneurs and even modestly accomplished computer programmers. What compounds their mediocrity is the fact that they are trained to not think, but rather, to do the legal equivalent of “skim until offended”. As one lawyer explained it to me, in law school they are trained to look for “the magic sentence” in the case law upon which the argument depends, then regurgitate it for gold stars and favorable decisions. At no point is any contextual thinking or holistic understanding taught, required, or encouraged.

This is why Patrick Byrne’s account of encountering Rudy Giuliani and his team rings absolutely true, as well as why we were correct to have no faith whatsoever in Team Giuliani’s legal approach to attacking the 2020 election fraud.

 I explained to him carefully the outline of what we understood at that point, an outline such as the reader might have after watching this presentation by the MIT Math PhD Dr. Shiva, or the exposition by Seth Keshel, as well as the cascade of stories of porous security in election software all referenced above. I feared overwhelming him, so I tried to simplify. Given that he sat grunting stoically as I spoke, it was difficult to judge what was sinking in. Yet after only 10 minutes I saw Rudy checking his multiple phones for texts, right in front of me as we sat talking. Conversing with one of his assistants, sending someone on a side errand, or receiving a report back. It felt rather strange to be talking to a man who was paying so little attention to me, but the Commish, sitting on the side, motioned for me to continue. After no more than 30 minutes I was ushered out of the office, but told to hang around.

Eventually I was brought back into a smaller room with Mayor Giuliani, and again asked to explain what I think happened. Realizing I may have overwhelmed him with my earlier explanation, gotten him lost in the forest for the trees, I broke it down simply and slowly, like one would for, well, one’s 76 year old Grandfather. Again within 5-10 minutes he was fidgeting, grunting on occasion, sending people on unrelated side errands, checking his multiple phones for texts and typing some people back…. Meanwhile, I tried to stay on track. Yet there was a moment 15 minutes in when I got a whiff of something in that small office…. Medicine? Booze? Just as I was taking a sniff to decide, someone rushed in with something unrelated issue, and I was escorted from the office.

Again I wandered around among the staff, most of whom were professing to know nothing about what was going on, and many others of whom were packing up desks in bankers’ boxes.  I was perplexed, and found myself drifting around the convoluted office space. 30 minutes later I was strolling outside some other conference room down the hall, when I heard Rudy’s familiar voice saying, “…don’t understand a fucking thing this guy’s telling me…” drifting out of a doorway. Startled, I looked around the corner, and there was Rudy talking to whatever group of staffers happened to be sitting worshipfully in that conference room to which he had moved.

Several staffers pulled me aside in a hallway. What Mayor Giuliani  is going to need, one told me, is a one page summary. Very simplified.

Another added, but with graphs and data.  

Another piped up, And bulletpoints. The Mayor likes bulletpoints!

But no more than one page! Repeated the first.

Insulted at Mediocrity and the 20-something staffers who were telling me how to write, and giving such asinine advice in the process, I promised I would get them something by the end of the weekend. 48 hours. I asked them for one favor: any requests that came from them should be orchestrated through one of their people, who would call one person whom I would designate among my cyber-team, and that way we would have some structure, and keep track of deliverables as we sought to accommodate their needs, so that it would not all turn into a shit-show.

Then I left and drove back to DC. By late that evening, I had learned that there were three different open requests from three people on Rudy’s team to various of my colleagues within the Bad News Bears. One was only going to handle passing requests of this type, one only wanted to handle passing on requests of that type… And the shit-show began.

I do not want to claim that everybody in that large but melting office space was incompetent. As I said, there were three competent, skillful lawyers (a fourth if one counted a Constitutional law scholar who was in and out).  But the atmosphere was one of despair, there was zero leadership shown, staffers were wondering around in the dark, and the meetings seemed like sophomore bull sessions rather than anything organized and disciplined.

From occasional contacts with several of those solid staffers over the weeks that followed, I learned what had had happened that day just before I arrived. Rudy had declaimed that, “You can never prove election fraud in a courtroom!” and had declared it was not going to be the strategy. The strategy was going to be to challenge things on procedural grounds: “This county in this state had one set of rules, this other county in that same state used a different set of rules, that violates due process and Equal Protection of the 14 Amendment.” So I was correct: just before I arrived there had been a huge blow-up between Rudy and Sidney in front of everyone, with Rudy ending by shouting at Sidney Powell and sending her away, in front of an office of dozens of people. Declaring that none of this was going to be about election fraud, and putting his lawyers to work on their procedural filings.

I don’t think Giuliani was taking a dive. I don’t think he ever had the ability to do any better. My impression is that his legal campaign was little more than a feint to keep the media distracted. Only time will tell. 

Based Deutschland

From SB on SocialGalactic: A German company stands firmly against the poison shots:

The management of a German construction company sent out a message to employees as follows:

“If an employee of our company is vaccinated, then his dismissal will be announced immediately! Whoever introduces unreliable vaccines, condemned by many experts around the world, jeopardizes the stability of our work processes at the enterprise! We are responsible for all employees, as well as reliable sales, timely wages and so on! We refuse to experiment with the effectiveness of our company in favor of the pharmaceutical industry! Our employees will be instructed and warned about it!

We are one team!

We have a task, the task of our company is to sustainably support the family, including our employees, and lead them through the economic crisis! Anyone who does not understand this should look for work elsewhere!

Thanks for attention!

As with the GameStop uprising, economic pressure is finally beginning to work against the Fake Elite. People are finally beginning to see that all that “free speech” and “open borders” and “free trade” and “equal opportunity” and “financial capitalism” nonsense was nothing but a Promethean attack on the foundations of the Christian West.

The secret of the elites

“The secret of the elites is that they’re not all that smart so they need the deck stacked to continue the illusion that they are elite at all.”

– Rob Peffer

He’s absolutely right. That’s why the fake elite devotes 100 percent of their collective effort to trying to maintain the illusion and keep the deck stacked. It’s also why nationalism and populism terrify them. They know their power and influence could be broken literally overnight by a sufficiently angry populace.

This is no longer about ideology. All the idearrhea about “liberal” and “conservative” and “communism” and “objectivism” is a veil to obscure the realities of the stacked deck. It’s about lawless rule by a small, mostly foreign and self-appointed fake elite. They all have imposter syndrome because they are all imposters.

Arrested for illegal tweets

Ricky Vaughan is arrested for four-year-old tweets… which “amounted to nothing short of vote theft”:

A Florida man was arrested this morning on charges of conspiring with others in advance of the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election to use various social media platforms to disseminate misinformation designed to deprive individuals of their constitutional right to vote.

Douglass Mackey, aka Ricky Vaughn, 31, of West Palm Beach, was charged by criminal complaint in the Eastern District of New York. He was taken into custody this morning in West Palm Beach and made his initial appearance before U.S. Magistrate Judge Bruce E. Reinhart of the Southern District of Florida.

“According to the allegations in the complaint, the defendant exploited a social media platform to infringe one the of most basic and sacred rights guaranteed by the Constitution: the right to vote,” said Nicholas L. McQuaid, Acting Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. “This complaint underscores the department’s commitment to investigating and prosecuting those who would undermine citizens’ voting rights.”

“There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote,” said Seth D. DuCharme, Acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York. “With Mackey’s arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes. They will be investigated, caught and prosecuted to the full extent of the law.”

“Protecting every American citizen’s right to cast a legitimate vote is a key to the success of our republic,” said William F. Sweeney Jr., Assistant Director in Charge of the FBI’s New York Field Office. “What Mackey allegedly did to interfere with this process – by soliciting voters to cast their ballots via text – amounted to nothing short of vote theft. It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public’s trust in our electoral processes. He may have been a powerful social media influencer at the time, but a quick Internet search of his name today will reveal an entirely different story.”

The complaint alleges that in 2016, Mackey established an audience on Twitter with approximately 58,000 followers. A February 2016 analysis by the MIT Media Lab ranked Mackey as the 107th most important influencer of the then-upcoming Election, ranking his account above outlets and individuals such as NBC News (#114), Stephen Colbert (#119) and Newt Gingrich (#141).

As alleged in the complaint, between September 2016 and November 2016, in the lead up to the Nov. 8, 2016, U.S. Presidential Election, Mackey conspired with others to use social media platforms, including Twitter, to disseminate fraudulent messages designed to encourage supporters of one of the presidential candidates (the “Candidate”) to “vote” via text message or social media, a legally invalid method of voting.

Now they’re just trolling us. 

It’s afraid!

 NASDAQ does not enjoy playing by #GamerGate rules.

NASDAQ PRESIDENT ADENA FRIEDMAN SAYS WE MONITOR SOCIAL MEDIA CHATTER AND WILL HALT STOCK IF WE MATCH CHATTER WITH UNUSUAL ACTIVITY IN STOCKS – CNBC

$GME

$AMC

$BB

$NOK

So they’re going to try to out-Smart Boy the autists. Yeah, good luck with that. Spacebunny once observed that she’d never seen me back down the way I downright hastened to make things right with a world-class individual a few years ago.

Even dark lords know their limits….

Running from defamation

The legal team of The New York Times sounds a little… panicked.

The New York Times filed a “Motion to Dismiss” request in an attempt to toss out the lawsuit and evade their wrongdoing.

Maggie Astor, The New York Times reporter who wrote the defamatory article, affirmed in her piece that the Veritas videos have “solely” unnamed sources. 

“The video then claims that Democratic operatives connected to Ms. [Ilhan] Omar’s campaign paid voters to hand over blank mail-in ballots and filled them out. This would be illegal, but the allegations come solely from unnamed people who speak with Project Veritas operatives in the video and whose faces are not shown,” she said.

In an affidavit, Astor said that the videos have “many” unnamed sources.

“Many of the individuals featured in the Video were unnamed, and there was no way for me to verify the claims that the unnamed sources purport to make in the Video,” she said.

Astor said she relied on Project Veritas’ “reputation” when making her unfounded claims.

“I know of Project Veritas and, before writing my articles about the Video, I knew that it had a reputation for publishing deceptively-edited videos and had been publicly criticized many times for doing so,” she said.

While arguing to dismiss the case, The New York Times’ legal team cited Wikipedia.

“Project Veritas bills itself as a ‘prominent independent journalistic organization,’ but it is described on its Wikipedia page (and just about everywhere else) as ‘an American far-right activist group founded by James O’Keefe’ that ‘uses undercover techniques to reveal supposed liberal bias and corruption and is known for producing deceptively edited videos about media organizations, left-leaning groups, and debunked conspiracy theories,’” they said.

Wikipedia themselves admit that their website is not a reliable source of information.

New York Times’ legal team also labelled Astor’s article an opinion piece to avoid Project Veritas’ charges of defamation.

Now, I’m no legal expert, but even a humble consumer advocate knows that if your defense against a charge of defamation involves relying upon Wikipedia, you’re probably in trouble. 

Gamers 1, Bankers 0

Not unlike certain lawyers, bankers are beginning to discover that gamers are really freaking good at playing games once they figure out what the rules are. No matter what the game is.

Investors on Reddit have launched an attack that’s both trolling and serious on Wall Street firms by purchasing shares in GameStop, pushing the stock price up over 480{3549d4179a0cbfd35266a886b325f66920645bb4445f165578a9e086cbc22d08} in a week, costing hedge funds millions of dollars, and skyrocketing young investors’ portfolios and egos.

Popular subreddit r/WallStreetBets (WSB), whose tagline is “Like 4chan found a Bloomberg Terminal,” has over 2 million members reading and posting “stonks” tips and news. Its biggest obsession in recent weeks has been raising the stock price of GameStop, the old-school video game mall retailer.

“They’re digitally doing it in a coordinated attack,” Howard Lindzon at Social Leverage, an early stage seed investment fund, told BuzzFeed News.

Lindzon thinks the investors chatting across Reddit — who tend to be millennial and Gen Z men — are just having a fun time causing trouble for hedge funds who’d bet on shares in the gaming retailer dropping. “They’re just playing a game,” he said. “And they’re having a blast.”

But Wall Street hedge funds, including Citron Research and Melvin Capital, had shorted the stock, meaning they had bet against it and needed it to drop in price in order for their investments to be successful.

Even the cries about “it’s unfair, it’s coordinated” are the same. It’s perhaps worth noting that historically, dating back to the days of Rome, once the people get sufficiently irritated, they have no trouble at all slaughtering the elite whose power is based on the very authority they have been abusing and in which the people no longer believe. 

SJWs destroy baseball Hall of Fame

Convergence has struck at baseball history, as SJW sportswriters vote to keep Curt Schilling out of the Hall of Fame:

Schilling is responsible for one of the great and iconic moments in baseball history. He was one of the all-time great postseason pitchers and had more than 3,000 regular-season strikeouts in his career.

Yet tonight, we’re going to find out if he has been passed over for the ninth time for a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. It’s going to be close. About 46 percent of the ballots have been made public and of those, Schilling is getting 75 percent of the vote. That number, 75 percent, is the minimum needed. But in the past, players on the borderline lose a percent or two when the ballots that weren’t made public are added in. 

In other words: Schilling probably won’t make it. And why is that? Because he likes Donald Trump. And because his support of things like what happened at the Capitol on Jan. 6 turns off baseball writers.

(UPDATE: Schilling did not make it. He received 71.1 percent.)

Cancel culture? Yes, if Schilling is canceled. He should definitely be in the Hall of Fame. But the baseball writers who vote on this want to be thought police, too.

This is a big moment for the Hall of Fame, and maybe for the whole idea of cancel culture. The Hall ballot says: “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.’’

Voters — longtime baseball writers — have been struggling over the “integrity, sportsmanship, character” part for years. That’s why Pete Rose isn’t in. He bet on the game, which directly affected the integrity of the sport. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, accused in the steroid scandal, will likely not be voted in tonight either. They cheated the game.

But Schilling? He’s being kept out because the writers don’t like how he votes, how he thinks and how he talks. I’m not just guessing either. In the days before the Hall vote the past few years, this year included, writers have explained why they didn’t vote for Schilling.

As small and petty as this may be, if you haven’t grasped that the society in which you grew up in is now over, this should be another wake-up moment for you. This is not our culture, it is Zero History culture. We cannot live with the converged and they certainly don’t want to live with us.