Month: December 2022

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Musk makes a mistake. Freedom of speech means protecting ugly, hateful speech. The answer is more speech, not censorship.

Kanye West Suspended by Elon Musk’s Twitter for ‘Incitement of Violence’

“…Elon Musk’s Twitter has suspended rapper Kanye West after he used the platform Thursday to share an image of a swastika merged with the Star of David…”

Obviously, I don’t agree with the crazy utterings of a disturbed mind. The crazy utterings are not violence, they are protected speech in accordance with American law and tradition. That applies to almost all speech no matter how ugly, how hateful, how disgusting.

Woke has affected everything, even anti-woke billionaires. 

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Similar statements could be made for many science, medicine, and engineering schools…

An American Law School, Then and Now: Five decades of change at an elite institution

“…Is the law school better than it was 50 years ago? If more resources per student and more student choices are indicators of quality, then it is vastly better. But I see no indications that the quality of intellectual training has improved. Nationwide, there is no evidence that first-year associates in law firms require less on-the-job training, and the legal professoriate is more detached from the concerns of practicing lawyers and judges than it was 50 years ago. Are today’s young lawyers more ethical and larger-minded than their predecessors? Are the additional resources per student worth the enormous increase in cost? It seems doubtful that that proposition would stand up to a rigorous cost-benefit analysis. And neither Texas nor any other highly-ranked law school is interested in conducting such an analysis…”

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Gavin Newsom’s reparations committee will recommend handing out $223,200 per person to all descendants of slaves in California for ‘housing discrimination’ at a cost of $559BN – in nation’s biggest restitution effort ever

California Reparations… $223,000 checks for every slave descendant

    • A task force was set up in California to make proposals for slavery reparations
    • Descendants of slaves in California could receive $223,200 each, it speculated
    • That would total $569billion – more than the entire state expenditure in 2021 
    • Nearly 6.5% of California residents – 2.5M – identify as Black or African American 
    • A focus of the task force has involved reimbursing for ‘housing discrimination’
    • The task force was formed due to a bill signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020

Life among Democrats in wacky California. You can’t make it up.

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Just another con-artist who cynically used woke stupidity to trick a new group of liberals out of billions of dollars.

FTX’s Collapse Was a Crime, Not an Accident

“…These are complex and in many cases nuanced forms of fraud – largely echoing, it must be said, well-established models in the traditional finance world. That obscurity is one reason Bankman-Fried was able to masquerade as an honest player, and has likely helped keep coverage softer even after the collapse.

Bankman-Fried had also crafted a scruffy, nerdy image hard to square with malevolent thievery – not unlike other 21st century luminaries like Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Neumann. In interviews, he talked a stream of nonsense tailored to snowjob outsiders about an industry that’s already full of jargon and complicated tech. He cultivated political and social influence through a web of strategic donations and insincere ideological statements.

Since his con collapsed, Bankman-Fried has continued to muddy the waters with carefully disingenuous letters, statements, interviews and tweets. He has attempted to portray himself as a well-intentioned but naïve kid who got in over his head and made a few miscalculations. This is a softer but more pernicious version of the crisis management approach Donald Trump learned from the black-hat mob lawyer Roy Cohn: Instead of “deny, deny, deny,” Bankman-Fried has decided to “confuse, evade, distort.”

And it has, to a significant degree, worked. Mainstream voices still parroting Bankman-Fried’s counterfactual talking points include Kevin O’Leary, who portrays an investor on the reality show “Shark Tank.” In a Nov. 27 interview with Business Insider, O’Leary described Bankman-Fried as a “savant” and “probably one of the most accomplished traders of crypto in the world” – despite recent data implying immense trading losses even when times were good.

O’Leary’s status as an investor in, and formerly paid spokesperson for, FTX (we sure hope those checks clear, Kevin!) explain his continued affection for Bankman-Fried in the face of mounting contradictory evidence. But he is far from alone in burnishing Bankman-Fried’s image. The disgraced failed son of two Stanford University law professors will be handed the opportunity to defend himself onstage at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit Wednesday.

The scale and complexity of Bankman-Fried’s fraud and theft appear to rival those of Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff and Malaysian embezzler Jho Low. Whether consciously or through malign ineptitude, the fraud also echoes much larger corporate scandals such as Worldcom and, particularly, Enron.

The principals in all of those scandals wound up either sentenced to prison or on the run from the law. Sam Bankman-Fried clearly deserves to share their fate…”

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Voter fraud is real and the magnitude of the fraud is near the volume where it can make a difference, locally and sometimes nationally.

LaFayette Man Must Serve 15 Years In Prison For Trying To Vote Twice In Same Election

“…The evidence presented at trial showed that a Walker County resident’s absentee ballot for the January 2021 runoff election was sent by mistake to an old address, a PO box in LaFayette, Ga. When the resident’s ballot never arrived but her husband’s did, the resident called the Elections Office in Walker County to inquire about her ballot. The Elections Office discovered that they had already accepted, but had not yet counted, an absentee ballot for the resident, and the ballot appeared to have the resident’s signature on the Oath of Elector section. The resident went to the Election Office to view the ballot with the signature on it and immediately noticed it was not her signature. The Elections Office immediately cancelled the forged ballot and had a new ballot sent to the resident’s current address.”

The big story, as a friend writes, is that this would never have been detected if the actual voter hadn’t complained. He comments:

The real story here is that this ballot wouldn’t have been rejected without the intended ballot recipient complaining about it. Otherwise, the absentee ballot would have been counted like any other, despite not having her signature.

Which is weird, because all the best people have assured me that “signature verification” prevents this sort of thing from happening.

Now imagine 10,000 voters willing to give/sell their blank ballot to a third party/activist/harvester and never complain about it. No one would notice. That’s how elections are bought with absentee voting…”

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds

Doug Santo