Interesting Items 11/28

Howdy All, a few Interesting Items for your information.  Enjoy –

In this issue –

1.  FTX
2.  Prosecutor
3.  Ivermectin
4.  Respect
5.  Twitter
6.  Dragon
7.  Artemis
8.  Tracking
9.  HHS

1.  FTX.  Futures Exchange (FTX) was founded in 2019 a couple years after Sam Bankman – Fried (SBF) noticed that Bitcoin was bought and sold at significantly different prices in different countries’ markets.  Sometimes the difference was 60%.  He figured out that if you can set up an international crypto exchange, you can get a lot of traffic and make a lot of money by attracting traders.  He quickly a hedge fund company, Alameda Research in 2017, FTX in 2019, and spent three years as the new Golden Boy of trendy investing.  By Sept 2022, FTX was worth upwards of $32 billion.  The bankruptcy filing happened a couple months later, and a lot of very famous people lost a lot of money.  So, what happened?  Fraud, mostly.  Few of the assets were secured.  SBF used FTX as a piggy bank, “lending” somewhere between $1 – 4 billion to Alameda Research, who in turn made political donations with the money.  SBF ended up being the second largest funding source for democrats this election cycle, nearly $30 million, with Soros being the largest.  That money and his incessant virtue signaling was enough to make the Biden administration look the other direction at what he was doing and how he was doing it.  Like Google under O’Bama, SBF also visited the WH from time to time.  Now that they have the 2022 results, expect democrats to make an example out of SBF and his girlfriend while they manufacture another source for their dirty campaign money. 

2.  Prosecutor.  Only took Merrick Garland a few days to respond to President Trump’s announcement that he was going to run a third time for President.  The response was to appoint Jack Smith to oversee a pair of special prosecutor investigations into Trump.  One will look into Jan 6, the other will be the documents seized from Mar a Lago.  Interestingly, a week before Garland ran his mouth in public, the Washington Post ran a piece (likely based on leaks from Do(in)J) stating that the classified held by Trump were for his own use rather than for giving to other nations.  The Wash Post piece carefully did continue the false flag operation that there was actually classified at Trump’s home and that he neither bothered to declassify them (like he has claimed was done) or couldn’t.  And who decides?  The feds, now to be led by one Jack Smith.  My prediction is that Smith will get an indictment, a conviction before a rabidly anti-Trump jury in DC, and a harsh sentence.  I further predict that the entire mess will be appealed to an unwilling SCOTUS for action.  All this will take far longer than any political campaign built around the 2024 election.  In picking Smith, Garland managed to find one of the most partisan anti-Trump prosecutors out there.  Smith’s first claim to fame came in 2010, as head of Eric Holder’s Do(In)J Public Integrity Section, criminal division looking at ways to target conservative non-profits for supposedly funding campaigns.  This quickly morphed into him working with the IRS’ Lois Lerner to obstruct non-profit filings during the O’Bama administration.  Smith demonstrates quite nicely that he can and will say and do anything humanly possible to get Republicans.  Smith was the prosecutor who scored public corruption convictions against former VA Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife in 2015.  The SCOTUS vacated the conviction on an 8-0 unanimous vote.  He regularly targeted Republicans and apparently has a great reputation among democrats as a no holds barred prosecutor.  Corruption, thy name is democrat, a criminal enterprise masquerading as a political party.

3.  Ivermectin.  Ivermectin is the story that will not go away for the public health apparat.  Three doctors hauled the FDA into court complaining that the FDA illegally interfered with their ability to prescribe medicine to their patients when it issued statements on ivermectin.  While ivermectin is approved by the FDA, it is not approved for use to treat COVID.  Of course, there is a huge number of various meds and supplements approved for one purpose that work very well for others.  The FDA anti-ivermectin webpage can be found here.  The FDA claimed their anti-ivermectin actions were not directives.  Rather they claimed they were only recommendations, the argument made in federal court.  Recommendations do not explain their active obstruction of all things ivermectin and active pressure on hospitals, doctors, pharmacies, and other parts of the health care community to block and obstruct prescribing and the use of ivermectin.  The FDA went so far as using the horse paste epithet.  They managed to get ivermectin’s manufacturer to publicly trash the drug in what appeared to be a quid pro quo for them to fast-track approval of ivermectin-based new drug to treat COVID.  The government has moved to dismiss the complaint, because they plaintiffs lack standing, because their injuries can’t be traced back to the FDA.  What a bunch of weasels. 

4.  Respect.  What better way to celebrate the lame duck session of congress than to hold a cloture vote on the latest DC assault on Christians, the so-called Respect for Marriage Act.  This little gem was held in Chuck Schumer’s back pocket until after the election where he thought he could get support from outgoing Republicans to pass it.  First test happened the week before Thanksgiving where 12 Republicans including both of Alaska’s US Senators voted for cloture on the legislation.  The legislation nationalizes the ongoing assault on Christian small business owners who refuse to do business with gay marriage fans or those in the trans world.  It also codifies state level assaults on Christian based adoption businesses.  Worse, it empowers the goons in Merrick Garland’s Department of (In)Justice to do what states have been doing.  For some reason, we didn’t hear Lisa Murkowski say a single word about this during her recent and very expensive reelection campaign (/sarc).  Expect the left to use this to target Catholic colleges and universities.  It can also be used to deny grants, licenses and contracts by those who disagree, essentially denying employment.  If you want to see where this is going, ask Jack Phillips how things have gone for him after he won a SCOTUS case in 2018 that did not require him to bake a wedding cake. 

5.  Twitter.  The firings and resignations at Twitter continued last week with another round of very public resignations.  Other media was apocalyptic, predicting the swift and ugly demise of Twitter.  Half the 7,500 employees were initially fired.  Taking the workforce down to between 3 – 4,000.  The second round took place in response to a call for those who remained to work hard., This call was particularly aimed at programmers, all of whom loved the challenge.  What they love even more is the almost complete elimination of the woke overhead they dealt with on a daily basis.  Oliver Campbell, in a Threadreader string that already rolled off describes what Musk is doing as whaling and culling.  This is a reaction to the notion that 10% of the people do 90% of the work.  In pushing for a very tight deadline, he was testing and finding out who is actually working and who can perform under extreme pressure.  These are the whales.  Those who can’t are culled.  When you continually slice away at bad portions of something, you are left with one of two options.  Either the business is rotten to the core with nothing usable, or there are some substantially good bits you can salvage and build upon.  Looks like Musk thinks Twitter is salvageable which is why the left is trying to get Twitter banned from the Apple and Google app stores.  Another tidbit is that Musk announced that the only people who had been banned from Twitter were all on the political right.  He has reinstated a lot of them, including President Trump.  He did not reinstate Alex Jones.  One of the things he has started banning on Twitter is AntiFa which used it openly to coordinate their special little brand of lawless fascist mayhem.  Keep watching this master class in rebuilding a corporation. 

6.  Dragon.  SpaceX launched its third and perhaps final cargo Dragon to ISS Sunday.  They have three cargo capsules and four crew Dragon capsules in service.  There is a fifth and final crew Dragon yet to fly.  SpaceX believes the stable of 8 capsules is sufficient to meet their currently planned manifest until they get the fully reusable Starship in operation.  The new crew Dragon should be ready for its first flight in 2024.  They are looking at 15 flights per capsule over its operational lifetime.  Of course, the sooner Starship starts flying, the more traffic will move to that vehicle.  Progress. What a concept. 

7.  Artemis.  The Artemis Orion capsule conducted a close lunar flyby last week and injected itself into a retrograde orbit that passes over the south lunar pole.  The south lunar pole is the new target for exploration because it has ice in the bottom of permanently shadowed craters.  If you can figure out how to mine the ice, you can both stay indefinitely, (providing you can figure out what to do about lunar dust) and fuel your spacecraft.  On the face of it, this was progress.  But progress in this sphere does not come easily, as there are problems with cubesats carried aboard Orion and released on its way to the moon.  A cubesat is a small secondary payload, shaped like a cube, designed to do something.  They are cheap enough that large missions like Orion can carry a bunch of them.  Orion carried 10.  All were successfully released on the way to the moon.  Only four have so far made contact with their ground stations.  Three of the 10 were NASA missions designed to perform experiments.  The rest of them were built by partner space agencies, commercial entities, research institutes and universities.  One of the successful four has problems which are currently being worked.  The use of cubesats is an approach that is generally high risk, high reward, though the current 60% failure rate on this mission seems to be a bit high. 

8.  Tracking.  Notice how closely blue states are adopting CCP solutions to COVID.  Debra Birx’ biography spoke glowingly about her attempt to adopt the CCP approach to COVID, particularly lockdowns.  Her book detailed her active obstruction and undermining of Trump WH efforts to reopen the economy.  She was quite proud of her efforts.  This rather sick emulation of CCP control techniques extended to many states, particularly blue states, with governors and their public health apparat adopting a variety of CCP based approaches to dealing with the spread of the respiratory virus.  Latest among them is MA, which is on the receiving end of a class-action lawsuit which accuses its Department of Public Health of working with Google to install a tracking app on millions of android phones without the knowledge or approval of the phone owners.  The lawsuit by the New Civil Liberties Alliance accuses the MA health department of installing spyware that tracks and records movements and personal contacts on over a million mobile devices without owners’ permission or knowledge.  The lawsuit claims that MA violated both the US and MA constitutions.  Note that a government conspiring with a private company is yet another definition of fascism.  The app was installed during the course of a normal update.  If a user found it running in the background and uninstalled it, it was reinstalled at the next update.  The MA health department really likes the CCP approach to contact tracking, something rejected out of hand by the general public.  Goolag is just begging for regulation.  And they will eventually get it, good and hard. 

9.  HHS.  The CCP wannabees at HHS are back pushing masking, demonstrating that like Tallyrand’s observation about the Bourbons, they have neither learned nor forgotten anything over the festivities of the last three years.  Latest excuse for retaining endless masking and public distancing recommendations is addressing the problem of long COVID.  As usual, public health is demanding the general public do something the sufferers are not doing.  The recommendations came out of an “independent” research agency Coforma, published a week ago.  They interviewed 60 people including long COVID sufferers and concluded that relaxing of the various mandates made life difficult for those with long COVID, demonstrating that researchers invariably come up with conclusions purchased by whomever hired them.  The report provides a convenient vehicle for HHS to pretend hands off while pushing for continuing the same group of policies that failed so spectacularly over the last three years.  HHS in general and the public health apparat have become (and continue to be) wholly owned subsidiaries of the very corporations they deign to regulate.  Think of either regulatory capture or fascism, and you will be spot-on.   An aside:  three instances of “fascist / fascism” in the same edition.  Is this a trend?

More later –

– AG

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