SBF Goes Simple Jack

“I’ve Had A Bad Month” – Bankman-Fried Claims “Didn’t Knowingly Commingle Funds”, Blames Girlfriend’s Fund & “Accounting Mistakes”

BY TYLER DURDEN

THURSDAY, DEC 01, 2022 – 06:44 AM

It appears Sam Bankman-Fried is using the ‘Simple Jack’ defense…

Bankman-Fried started the interview by saying he’s deeply sorry about what happened.

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” Bankman-Fried (SBF) said.

He claims he was shocked by what happened this month.

“I have limited access to data,” Bankman-Fried said about his attempt to reconstruct what happened over the past month.

Which makes us wonder – if he didn’t have the data, who did? 

When pressed by Sorkin, Bankman-Fried said “I didn’t knowingly commingle funds”.

Which we note is not a denial, and as NYT notes, on the commingling of funds, there appears to be ample evidence suggests that Alameda and FTX shared an account at their U.S. banking partner Silvergate. Not sure how that could square with SBF’s claim that that didn’t occur, or wasn’t aware it was occurring.

Over and over again, SBF calls it an “accounting mistake” claiming that there was a difference between FTX’s audited financials vs FTX’s internal dashboards showing Alameda’s positions.

SBF tries to distance himself from the trading firm, claiming he did not have the bandwidth to run two companies (FTX and Alameda).

“I wasn’t running Alameda,” he says.

“I was nervous because of the conflict of interest of being too involved.”

Clearly SBF is attempting to throw Caroline Ellison, the former CEO of Alameda under the bus as responsible for the downfall.

Asked when he knew there was a problem, he responded “Nov 6th”, which just happens to be the day that Changpeng Zhao, also known as CZ, publicly tweeted he’d be liquidating Binance’s holdings of FTT.

When they looked at the data, they realized “there was a potential, serious problem there,” he says. Alameda’s position was huge on FTX, and it had just taken a huge hit.

When asked by Sorkin if his lawyers support him speaking publicly about this, SBF says “no they are very much not.”

“I have a duty to talk and to explain what happened.”

“I’m looking to be helpful anywhere I can with any of the global entities,” he says.

SBF framed the whole debacle as a risk management problem that got out of hand in what he calls a “run on the bank,” and that he was unaware of any actions taken by Alameda.

The former White Knight notably squirmed uncomfortably when asked if he is concerned about criminal liability, stuttering the comment that “there’s a time and a place for me to think about  myself and my own future.  I don’t think this is it.”

“I don’t personally think that I have” criminal liability.

Asked whether FTX’s charitable endeavors were part of a PR campaign. Some were real, he said.  

But “there are things I felt like we needed to do for the business.”

With regard to his massive donations to Democrats and cozy relationships with regulators, he said he participated in these types of things, and he wishes that this wasn’t how the world worked, blasting the ‘greenwashing’ that many firms have to do.

“I spent probably thousands of hours in DC trying to get to the point where I could actually have meetings with some of the regulators,” Bankman-Fried said. He said it wasn’t an issue of donations or money — it was a matter of repeatedly asking for meetings and submitting documents.

Sorkin asks SBF about the adderal use and group sleepovers. SBF responds, “We messed up big.”

“Look, I screwed up,” adding that we “completely failed” on risk management, and conflict of interest risk. 

On reports of drug use at FTX, SBF says “there were no wild parties. At our parties we play board games. Twenty percent of people would have a quarter of a beer each and the rest of us would not drink anything.”

He says he has been prescribed various things to help him concentrate. “I think they help me focus a little bit,” he says.

Finally, when asked if he was truthful, SBF said:

“I was as truthful as I’m knowledgeable to be,” SBF said.

“I don’t know of times when I lied.”

Bankman-Fried ended the interview by admitting:

“I obviously wish that I spent more time dwelling on the downsides and less time thinking about the upsides.”

Perhaps the most memorable line of the whole thing was this: “Look, I’ve had a bad month,” claiming that he has just one working credit card left, and admitting “I don;t know what the future holds.”

Sadly, we have a feeling justice will never be done here for the 1000s of FTX clients who have lost millions…

As we discussed last week, Sam Bankman-Fried has now demonstrated that he is both a pathological liar and a sociopath, the kind who in “explaining” to his employees how he stole billions (over $4 billion according to new FTX CEO John J. Ray) from the now bankrupt FTX, an act which left it insolvent and without liquidity, called it “loans” which were “generally” not used for “large amounts of personal consumption” (just “small amounts” used for such trivial items as $40 million penthouses and private jets).

And the only reason we don’t officially call him a criminal just yet, is because he has not yet confirmed he used client money from his exchange to fund his personal hedge fund, an act which would cost any other individual decades in jail… but not prominent democrats like SBF or Jon Corzine, of course. Plus it’s the US legal system’s job to do that, not ours. Although we are growing increasingly skeptical this prominent Democratic donor will ever see the inside of a courtroom.

It’s not just us: with much of the entire world demanding to know how this corpulent 30-year-old still has not been thrown in prison, or at least charged with a variety of crimes, the NYT has now confirmed to the entire world what a farce the one-time paper of record has become, and how it is willing to whore itself out for clicks – not to mention prominent Democrat donors – because following such luminaries as Janet Yellen, Larry Fink, Mark Zuckerberg, and Volodymyr Zelensky, none other than SBF will be speaking with Andrew Ross-Sorkin at the NYT Dealbook “summit” this evening…

The shocked, stunned, and simply disgusted reactions to this grifter’s appearance have continued..

While the FTX founder hasn’t gone completely silent since the collapse of his crypto empire, this marks one of the first times he’ll speak in front of a live audience.

And while we are certain that the NYT – which we assume is done writing puff pieces on behalf of SBF after it became a laughing stock last week – would be quick to mercilessly cancel and expel from its “prestigious” conference anyone who had misgendered some post-op transsexual, it is willing to give this thieving pathological liar and sociopath a forum in which to profess his innocence to the entire world, and by association with other Democrat “celebrities” such as this one…

The NYTimes points out that no questions will be off limits, and topics may include the collapse of the company, allegations of fraud and mismanagement and how Mr. Bankman-Fried intends to pay back customers, investors and creditors. Will Sorkin ask about the massive amounts of money given to Democrats?

Here’s some questions from Bloomberg’s Olga Kharif that we’d like answered:

  • Usually, when companies file for bankruptcy, their executives don’t talk to the press, tweet or participate in summits. Why are you doing the opposite? Why are you here?
  • How exactly did FTX find itself with an $8 billion shortfall? Did FTX use customer funds inappropriately? How, and when did that start?
  • The bank run on FTX started when Binance said it would dump its holdings of FTT — the FTX token you gave to Binance in 2021 when it exited its equity investment in FTX. Why did you give Binance the FTT token back then? Weren’t you worried that it gave Binance some power over you? Why did your relationship with Binance sour?
  • You have mentioned recently that you regret filing for bankruptcy because you could have raised the money necessary to plug the shortfall. Who was willing to give you funds?
  • What do you think the ramifications of FTX’s collapse will be for you personally? And the ramifications will be for crypto in general?

Ironically, just a few hours earlier on the same stage, BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said, about FTX, “We have to see how all this plays out,” adding that “right now we can make all the judgment calls that it looks like there was some misbehavior of major consequence.”

Andrew Ross Sorkin did note that he believes Bankman-Fried will be coming to us live from the Bahamas (so did not feel the need to set foot on US territory).

The NY Times has already warned that they’re monitoring reports of protests occurring at the conference today, which is being held at a venue in New York’s Columbus Circle. Here’s what they said in an email to attendees this week:

The New York Times and our employees defend freedom of speech everyday through our journalism, and we respect the right to peacefully assemble. At the same time, we want to ensure summit guests have an enjoyable, safe and productive experience. We do not expect these protests to impact the summit in a meaningful way, but we ask you allot extra time for travel and check-in.

The acknowledgement comes after social media users have urged one another to protest the event for giving Bankman-Fried a platform to share his side of what’s transpired this month.

As a reminder, at a bankruptcy hearing last week, FTX lawyers said that a “substantial amount” of the company’s assets were missing or stolen and that the exchange had been run like Mr. Bankman-Fried’s “personal fiefdom.”

One last thought:

John Helmer Sketches What Happens Next

John Helmer: http://johnhelmer.net/ukraine-armistice-how-the-udz-of-2023-will-separate-the-armies-like-the-korean-dmz-of-1953/

UKRAINE ARMISTICE – HOW THE UDZ OF 2023 WILL SEPARATE THE ARMIES LIKE THE KOREAN DMZ OF 1953

–  By John Helmer, Moscow
  @bears_with

For the buffer zone to achieve the demilitarization of the Ukraine, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned in July that military factors, not politics, will decide. “I see no reason to question what President Vladimir Putin announced on February 24, 2022, and reaffirmed a few days ago,” Lavrov said. “Our goals remain the same. And they will be met. There is a solution to this problem. The military know this.”  

In case the distinction Lavrov was making between political negotiations and military operations, between soldiers and civilians, wasn’t clear enough, Maria Zakharova, the Foreign Ministry spokesman, made it the target of her irony last Thursday.  In her regular briefing  for reporters, Zakharova was asked to comment on US weapons supplies to the Ukraine.  “Something is wrong with this world if two women are discussing Stingers, MANPADS, SAMS, and HARM anti-radar missiles,” she answered the journalist. “As a reminder, scaling up its military supplies to Kiev and directly controlling Ukrainian forces, including the provision of real-time recon data, Washington has, in fact, become a party to the conflict in Ukraine…As far as their internal dealings regarding how much money they give to whom, what particular supplies are underway, or what items they are running out of or have more of, this is not our concern. Let them decide what kind of games they want to play among themselves.”

The Kherson manoeuvre, announced  by Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Sergei Surovikin on November 9; the electric war campaign  which has followed*; and the cutoff of troops, arms and supplies by train from Kiev to the eastern front, first announced by the Russian Defense Ministry on November 24,  foreshadow how the military are preparing to establish the Ukrainian Demilitarized Zone (UDZ), its depth to the west of the Dnieper River, and the cities to be included in Russian-controlled territory.

This is a future to be established by the Russian General Staff, negotiated and signed by military officers of the NATO-controlled commands in Kiev and Lvov. The outcome is an end to  hostilities with an armistice that is not a peace treaty.

The model is the armistice of Panmunjom of July 27, 1953, which ended the Korean War. The terms of the armistice took two years to negotiate by US, Korean and Chinese officers. The Korean demilitarized zone (DMZ) which was the outcome was four kilometres in depth. The Ukrainian demilitarized zone (UDZ) will be up to one hundred kilometres in depth, depending on the range of the US and NATO missile and artillery weapons deployed on the Kiev side of the Dnieper.  On the ground inside the UDZ there may be no electricity, no people, nothing except for the means to monitor and enforce the terms of the armistice.

For avoidance of doubt, red on the map means Russia.

In what follows, Russian and other military sources have reviewed the official Russian policy statements, published operational bulletins, and social media and website commentaries in Russian. The maps with their overlays of the UDZ have been drawn by the sources to illustrate some of the constants, some of the variables in the present situation — the tactical options and the operational scenarios.

They are presented to warn that Russian politico-military thinking should not be interpreted as if it’s similar to US military doctrine.

The sources also caution that the recent evidence of Polish government decision-making, leaked last week by Moscow, rules out the foreseeable prospect that, whoever wins next year’s Polish elections, any regime in Warsaw will be capable of more independence of Washington’s control than the regime in Kiev.   Consequently, the Galician region will remain nominally Ukrainian, de facto North American. De-nazification of the Americans and Canadians entrenched between Lvov and Cracow is not a Russian objective.

By contrast, the future for Hungarian Transcarpathia is beyond Washington’s control.  Either way, Russian thinking is to “let the disaster zone that is rump Ukraine, west of the Dnieper, remain someone else’s problem.”

There are well-known advocates in Moscow for “the Ukrainian demilitarized zone to be all of the Ukraine”. In their words, “there is no sense in leaving western Ukraine to remain in bed with the US and deploy NATO weapons. Nothing will be offered to the Hungarians and Poles — they will have to earn it for themselves. It follows that demilitarization is not four or one hundred kilometres deep, comparable to the terms imposed on Germany in 1945 or on Korea in 1953. For Russia’s long-term security, look where we are in Germany and on the Korean peninsula right now. So eventually, for the long term the solution is the December terms.  But the Americans won’t discuss this. Short of that — the Banderite state and its army must be defeated. That’s what demilitarization and de-nazification mean. There must not be a UDZ  but a buffer that will be all of the Ukraine.”

Other sources believe that the official statements from Moscow, the operational evidence, and General Winter are all now indicating six months of formation and testing of the lines of a new UDZ and of the new Russia to the east of these lines.

For the demarcation of the eastern line of the UDZ,  according to one source, “look at Kherson – I think she’s the prototype. Look at Krasny Liman as well. The electric war raids have been extended for the first time in November to the rail tracks moving west to east with Ukrainian military reinforcements of men and resupply of arms and ammunition. This signals the start of the campaign to disrupt Ukrainian logistics. This is coordinated with the situation of what is left of the civilian population in the cities along this line. We are seeing the large population centres emptied.”

Social media reports of new Russian ground force movements also indicate that a winter offensive of ground operations is being readied in parallel.  How much is calculated feint and battlefield deception will be clear soon enough.

A Russian videoclip of Russian tanks repainted in winter white camouflage was recorded from a civilian car and posted this weekend on the internet; no location was identified.  The car is travelling at about 40 kph; the clip lasts for one minute and when it stops, the line of tanks in the opposite lane is continuing to stretch to the horizon.  

One Moscow source: “I cannot see Russians risking massive armoured movements or repeating their March manoeuvres. I believe the General Staff will wage the electricity war and put pressure on Kiev and on Europe while continuing a slow, inch-by-inch movement in Donbass. General Patience is more important than General Winter. Those two are on a par with General Iskander taking out electric substations and transport corridors. Putin will only come under pressure if he puts himself under pressure to take territory and takes thousands of casualties in the process. He does not want this. The General Staff does not want this. They have made this explicitly clear. So they have come up with new forms of warfare. Just how new these are hasn’t dawned yet in Kiev or Washington or Brussels.”

This is not positional warfare by Russian forces, all sources agree. But the outcome of highly mobile deployments (known as РЕЙД – “reyd” – in Russian military terminology) will be geographical.

MAP OF THE UKRAINE WITH OVERLAY OF UDZ FORMED BY NEW RUSSIAN LINES

Legend: Black lines=UDZ; red arrows=Russian РЕЙД  movements; blue arrows=withdrawal and re-deployment; red stars=attack targets; blue crosses=Russian fortifications.

MAP OF UKRAINIAN RAIL LINES AND TRAIN STATIONS WITH UDZ OVERLAY

Legend: broken line=state border; black points=near-border train stations; red points=western train stations; red circles=western train stations included in international passenger tariff.

Military source: “The maps speak for themselves. The РЕЙД will consist of several heavy armoured spearheads with the objective of occupying and destroying enemy logistical hubs and transportation routes as well as any infrastructure. This will include whatever remains of the Ukrainian electrical grid in the target zone. Once the destruction of these targets has been completed, the remnants of the infrastructure will be mined, and the area planted with sensing devices. The armies will then begin a rapid, staged withdrawal behind Russian lines where the process of fortification and entrenchment has already begun.”

“Civilians and disarmed Ukrainian troops – except for the Ukro-Nazi units — will be allotted one or two corridors through which they will be permitted to leave the zone. They’d better not dawdle.”

MINING THE UDZ WITH THE REMOTE-LAUNCHED ZEMLEDELIYE SYSTEM

First detected in operation in March, Zemledeliye (literally “agriculture”) is a remotely fired rocket system for planting mines across a landscape. The mines “can be used in defence and offence. In defence to block the enemy’s advance and in offence to block retreat and channel the enemy into the desired killing zone. The mines launched by this system are programmable -- they can be deactivated or they can self-destruct in the future with the cessation of hostilities.” Source: https://militaryleak.com/

The sources agree that the city of Odessa is not a target for direct military attack. There are several reasons. One is that up to half the city population is already pro-Russian and willing to wait for the opportunity to open the city gates; for the evidence, read this.  

A related reason, according to this source: “The Ukronazis have put their maximum effort into de-Russification using terror, and they are dug in for a fight, while the locals appear content to let anyone or everyone else to do the fighting.  It looks like [General] Surovikin has arrived at the conclusion that there is no point in trying to slog across unfavourable ground with dodgy logistics in order  to ‘liberate’ a headache — at least not until depopulation due to de-electrification occurs. I take Surovikin at his word.”

For Surovikin’s October 18 statement, read this.  

The sources agree there will be a new military demarcation line before the thaw next spring; they differ on how it is being drawn now, and how it will look next April. “For now the line will be on the Dnieper with the zone extending from the west bank into the rump Ukraine – my guess is at a depth of not less than 100km. This will put Russian territory out of the range of most Ukrainian artillery. A 100km-deep zone will also give the Russian forces time to detect and intercept anything in flight. In the central sector, Kherson City will remain without population for an as yet undecided period. For as long as this lasts, the city is likely to be part of the zone rather than part of Russian territory. Time and armistice negotiations may change that.”

“In the northern sector – that’s from Kramatorsk and Slovyansk to Kharkov, then northwestward to Sumy and Chernigov – these are garrisons and staging areas of hate on or near to Russia’s borders; they will not be spared. It’s lights out for them. They made their decision in February-March and during the pull-back last spring. The shelling, sabotage, and other attacks on Bryansk, Belgorod and Kursk have qualified them for de-electrification, de-population, and de-nazification.”

“The point to emphasize, especially in the Russian operations in the north, is that they will be РЕЙД operations – they will not seize and hold territory. The penetrations will be deep, but not as deep as last February-March. This time they will include a massive security element,  including drones and infantry support. The idea won’t be to occupy the territory, let alone administer it, for any length of time. The goal will be to destroy enemies who raise their heads and the infrastructure they rely on; lay mines and sensors; and then withdraw.”

“Once the assigned transportation and logistics nodes have been taken, the job of destroying them by engineer units will begin. Bridges, roads, railroads, marshalling yards, rolling stock, airfields, fuel storage and dispensaries, electrical substations, transmission and communications towers, central offices, warehouses, laydown areas,  agricultural equipment – anything that could possibly be used to support the Ukrainian-NATO effort east of the zone’s western border will be destroyed. That will be also be the ground forces’ job – more comprehensive and thorough than missile and drone strikes can achieve.”

“Civilians and disarmed fighters, without their motorized equipment, will be permitted to walk out of the zone to specially prepared buses (as Surovikin supervised in Syria) with whatever they can carry on their backs. The United Nations Secretary-General, so enthusiastic about saving Ukronazis at Mariupol,    will be told to have them ready at prescribed pick-up points. The elderly will be encouraged to come to prepared aid stations for care and processing.  Anyone who chooses to stay inside the zone will be informed explicitly via radio, flyers, and loudspeaker that they are considered enemy combatants and will be targeted accordingly. After a prescribed amount of time, the ‘golden bridges’ for the exiting population will be destroyed. For those remaining they will have had no power, sanitation, or communications before the Russians arrive, and even fewer means to restore these utilities after they leave.”

Inside the UDZ, take Poltava, for example — the source has indicated by the red arrows the western and eastern lines of approach by the Russian forces:

Above:  Poltava with the highway approaches marked by red arrows. Below: satellite picture, just south of Poltava, of electrical substation and transmission towers destroyed by Russian military engineers before they withdraw.

“If the Russians are able to skirt the large population centres, reach the outskirts of Poltava, and bring the large railway marshalling yards, junctions and highways under fire, this will be the death knell for the NATO-Ukrainian forces to the east. After a set interval allowing those who wish to escape, the infrastructure can be destroyed. As Russian forces move back along the E40 and north along the routes that got them there. they will be able to destroy everything including fuel stations, radio/microwave towers, sub-stations, and bridges along the way.”

Another source: “I see a continuation of strikes to hit commanders in Ukraine, though it would seem that now all strategy meetings and even tactical command meetings happen overseas. Russians will try to push as many civilians as possible toward Europe. Darkness over the country gives a clear view of small units spread out in the country in defensive positions if they are not using civilian cover. They will be picked out and hit with drones or artillery right across the eastern front.”

[*]There was plagiarism on this topic by Pepe Escobar in a recent piece he entitled “Electric War” in which concepts, terms and references were cribbed from Dances with Bears. Following republication of Escobar by Andrei Raevsky of The Saker, they have refused to acknowledge the evidence of the plagiarism.

Ed: Having read Escobar’s piece, there is substantial overlap.

Ukraine on the Edge

Mark Wauck: https://meaninginhistory.substack.com/p/ukraine-update-111821

Ukraine Update 11/18/21

Mark Wauck

This post will address several topics, but they all revolve around the conflict in Ukraine. Let’s start with the aftermath of the “Russian missile lands in Poland” hoax. Antiwar.com has an interesting article that asks a very relevant question, related to our post yesterday about the divisions within the US regime:

Why Is AP Still Protecting the Source Behind its False Russia-Bombed-Poland Story?

Yesterday I wrote, regarding the initial narrative of a Russian missile landing in Poland:

The US initially was on board—AP quickly cited “sources” to the same effect, that the missile was Russian.

That all changed, virtually spinning on a dime. Zhou himself took time out from the G20 festivities to very quickly announce that “US tracking” had shown that the missile was not launched by Russia. The rest of the West pretty quickly fell into line, having gotten the word from the top.

I argued that the “source” in question was certainly not a source within the US military, and that the US military reacted in a state of alarm to defuse this hoax narrative that Ukraine and the UK, in particular, were propagating. The Saker points out a similar dynamic, this morning. The post is virulently anti-Polish, and thus focuses on the Polish reaction, which tracks what I wrote—Poland quickly backtracked. More quickly than some other nations:

Initially, it appears that some Polish politicians wanted to immediately use this incident to create even more tensions, but the rather tepid reaction of the US sent them a clear message: the US is not interested in participating in what would be a truly ridiculous (and potentially very dangerous) PSYOP or false flag.

The Poles got the message and soon they also agreed that the missile was Ukrainian.

In fact, of course, the characterization of the US reaction as “tepid” misses the real point. The US presented two diametrically opposed reactions. The initial reaction, quoted in the AP and credited to a “senior U.S. intelligence official”—one presumes that means CIA—claimed that the missile was Russian. That reaction was quickly followed by a complete repudiation of that hoax—coming from Zhou personally. That second—a repudiation of the hoax—was the message that the Poles got. They responded accordingly, once their master had spoken.

This is the point at which Antiwar.com follows up. Antiwar first points out that the hoax was clearly intended to gin up war hysteria:

AP’s source claimed Russian missiles hit Poland. This seemed calculated to set off a frenzy and trigger NATO articles to create a wider war. Why won’t the AP tell us who the falsifying source is?

More specifically: WW3 hysteria:

World War III was trending on Twitter.

Antiwar provides documentation for the way the hysteria was fanned by the usual suspects, even as the US military was scrambling to defuse it all. Antiwar focuses on a key issue:

AP rules say reporters can only grant anonymity to a source if “the source is reliable”. But if they prove themselves to not be reliable, shouldn’t the anonymity be rescinded?

So, who is this “senior US intelligence official” who propagated a false narrative? Antiwar contacted AP, but all they got was an affirmation that the narrative was, in fact, false:

WARSAW, Poland (AP) — In earlier versions of a story published November 15, 2022, The Associated Press reported erroneously, based on information from a senior American intelligence official who spoke on condition of anonymity, that Russian missiles had crossed into Poland and killed two people. Subsequent reporting showed that the missiles were Russian-made and most likely fired by Ukraine in defense against a Russian attack.

If you try to pull up the original AP hoax narratives, you’ll be redirected to the “correction.” The question remains:

Why is the AP still protecting a source it now says fed it false information?

In my piece “Should Media Expose Sources Who Lied to Them?” from 2017, I argued that not exposing falsifying sources is “like having a loaded gun lying around.” When a crisis happens, “a government source wanting to smear a foreign government, or even help provoke war, has the mechanisms to do so without fear of consequence or accountability.” The source can hide behind anonymous quotes, and their media contact hides behind anonymous sources. Both are effectively off the hook.

The solution is for falsifying sources to be unmasked so we get accountable speech.

Part of the bargain of anonymity is truthfulness. Why should a serious media outlet protect the anonymity of a source who just fed it false information? So they can do it again?

This is the state of affairs with regard to the MSM. It is, to a significant degree, an agent of State information control. However, one thing is probably true—the AP characterization of its source as a “senior US intelligence official” is probably entirely accurate. If the source had been a low level official we might well know already who was responsible. Fortunately, in the internal war between State/CIA and DoD, cooler heads at DoD won this round. The dynamics of it all remain concerning.

Moon of Alabama explains what’s going on in Ukraine, graphically:

Quoting first from the Russian MoD:

One depot of artillery armament, delivered by western countries and prepared for being sent to troops, has been destroyed.

The redeployment of the reserve forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU), and the delivery of foreign armament to operations areas have been frustrated.

The last sentence describes the real purpose of the attacks on the energy systems.

The lack of energy is degrading the railway network that brings weapons from the west to the eastern front. It makes redeployment of units from one front section to another very difficult and time consuming. It will give the Russian forces the advantage when they change the Schwerpunkt of their attacks from one corner of the frontline to another.

Another effect of the strikes on the electricity systems and the blackouts in the big cities that follow them is a renewed stream of refugees that will want reach western Europe. It will over time change the public opinion and the political priorities of those countries. If they fail to end the war they will have to carry the burden.

Yesterday Mark Milley kept repeating the Zhou regime’s mantra: We’re all in in support of Ukraine for “as long as it takes.” Does Europe share that view? And to the extent they do share that view for now, how long will that resolve last?

Expanding on Moon’s snapshot of the current situation, Will Schryver offers this thread:

Ukraine War Thoughts – 2022_11_17

There are increasing signs the narrative field is being sown to condition the public mind for Zelensky’s predestined fall from grace.

Ukrainian leadership is exuding desperation.

They know the true score.

They know time is running out.

They know their autumn “conquests” were Pyrrhic in the extreme – many thousands of casualties and severe losses of equipment without ever inflicting a meaningful defeat on Russian forces, who are content to fall back to prepared lines to await the next wave of cannon fodder.

They know and are humiliated by how the Russians effected, with impressive speed and negligible cost, the withdrawal of over 20,000 troops and their equipment from Kherson, over what were (allegedly) acutely vulnerable and tenuous lines of communication across the Dnieper.

They evacuated all their armor and vehicles, leaving only 18 unsalvageables.

Meanwhile, the Ukrainians were so psychologically marred by the mauling they’d been taking for weeks that they remained convinced for a couple days that the Russian retreat was a ruse and a trap.

Tracked vehicles were able to cross the (allegedly) impassable Antonovsky bridge, which had been the favorite target of the AFU’s little HIMARS toys, even as the interception rate regularly exceeded 80%.

GMLRS rockets pack a mere 23 kg of high explosive in their warheads.

Once the withdrawal was completed, Russian demolition experts brought down the venerable old Soviet bridge good and proper.

Indeed, the Russians have now greatly accelerated their systematic “decommunization” of Ukraine’s legacy Soviet infrastructure – their very lifeblood.

Because of the well-designed, well-built, and redundant Soviet energy generation and distribution grid, Ukraine enjoyed a surfeit of energy since 1991 – which they put to little productive use, and exported the abundant surplus for cash.

Much of it is now a smoldering heap.

As the US did ostentatiously in Iraq – comprehensively degrading all Iraqi infrastructure assets – the Russians are finally giving Ukraine similar treatment here in late 2022.

One might say they are “Saddamizing Ukraine” in advance of something big soon to follow.

Despite the irrepressible faith of Ukraine supporters, the AFU has suffered massive irreplaceable losses, even as Russian strength is peaking.

There have been numerous thinly veiled recent admissions of this by official voices stretching from Warsaw to Berlin to Washington.

In a final futile attempt to prove themselves worthy of direct NATO intervention, Ukraine has sacrificed almost all its offensive potential for a militarily meaningless few square kilometers of Kharkov and Kherson oblasts.

And, in this weakened state, winter is upon them.

The ubiquitous deceptions of the #EmpirePropagandists notwithstanding, Russia is not on its last legs. Quite to the contrary, they appear to have finally gotten deadly serious about prosecuting this war. How that manifests itself on the battlefield remains to be seen.

I predict Surovikin will remain content to savage Ukrainian offensive moves as long as Zaluzhny is willing to keep launching them.

But the moment that waning offensive impulse manifests exhaustion, THAT is when General Armageddon is most likely to strike.

And the biggest question that now remains is: what will the empire do in response?

Will they resign themselves to the humiliation of a Russian triumph over imperial designs?

Or will the #EmpireAtAllCosts cult attempt something rash?

Let us pray it is the former …

To finish off, here’s another video interview of Doug Macgregor. This time the interviewer is Polish so, while Macgregor repeats much of what you’ve already heard in previous videos, he tailors his remarks for a Polish audience—and that lends some interest. I’d like to point out one segment that may be of particular interest. Beginning at about 15:00 Macgregor discusses his conversations with both German and US military officials at the time of the NATO expansion eastward—1997.

Macgregor recounts that both the Germans and the Americans were totally out of touch with Polish and Hungarian irredentism, which in his experience in Europe he says is very real. The German view, as expressed to him by high level German officers, was that, since Germany had reconciled itself to the loss of its eastern regions (to Poland), they expected that Poland would likewise be reconciled to the loss of its own eastern former territories (to Belarus and Ukraine). The Americans, on the other hand, exhibited the typically American disinterest in the histories and cultures of foreign lands—including Poland and Hungary. The view of senior American officers was that America was leading a great expansion of Democracy eastward, which would eventually reach Moscow. The result would be universal happiness. Macgregor says he was dumbfounded at the ignorance and lack of self awareness exhibited by these Americans.

I can’t speak to the views of the average Pole or Hungarian on these matters. I can say that officials of the current Polish and Hungarian governments have certainly expressed irredentist sentiments in unmistakable terms. In the case of Hungary, two points should be made. 1) Hungarian irredentism is, for historical reasons, of little concern for Russia. As you’ll from the map, only a tiny sliver of the Transcarpathian Oblast of Ukraine has a Hungarian population (green). For historical reasons, Russia probably couldn’t care less about any Hungarian ambitions in this area, especially since Hungarian – Russian relations are currently excellent:

  1. On the other hand, Slovakian and Romania have significant Hungarian populations—certainly in relation to the population of Hungary proper. Close to half a million Hungarians reside in Slovakia, bordering Hungary. The situation in Romania is complicated by the fact that the nearly one million Hungarians in Romania reside smack in the middle of Romania. The Székely Land is of considerable cultural and historical significance for Hungarians—and the history between Hungary and Romania in that regard has been fraught with mutual hostility. Take a look:

Once again, this situation is of little to no concern to Russia. Historically, Hungary has relied on outside powers to settle its score with Romania, which has nearly twice the population as Hungary.

The situation with regard to Poland is far different. Poles are historically and culturally much attached to Lwów/Lviv, which is considered something like the capital of Western Ukraine. Only a very tiny remnant of Poles still live there, probably less than 1%, but many Poles have family roots in that region, as they were deported after WW2 from there to what is now Poland. As I said, I can’t speak to the view of the average Pole about reincorporating Lwów into Poland. However, I have good reason to believe that the average Ukrainian would be, quite literally, violently opposed to that idea. Nevertheless, the current Polish government very likely would jump at the chance of the US going to bat on behalf of Polish irredentist interests in Lwów—foolish as that would be. More to the point, again for historical and cultural reasons (cf. the virulently anti-Polish article from The Saker linked above), no Russian (or Ukrainian) government could lightly surrender that territory to Poland—even though quite a few Russians feel that it would serve the Poles right. Lwów would likely prove undigestible for Poland. The rest of the world would soon discover just how deep Polish – Ukrainian hatred really is.

So, now, Doug Macgregor:

Contango

ZeroHedge: https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/oil-prices-are-plunging-curve-crashes-contango

Oil Prices Are Plunging, Curve Crashes Into Contango

Oil prices are plunging this morning as futures contracts roll with the Jan 23 WTI contract price trading with a $77 handle.

There’s little fresh news, but analysts say the rise in COVID-19 cases in China has renewed worries about energy demand.

China’s State Council warned cities to avoid “irresponsible loosening” of COVID-19 measures, according to the South China Morning Post.

“Commodity markets have been under pressure as China’s zero-COVID strategy has strangled economic growth. Without any signs of softening, commodity markets had factored-in that status quo for the foreseeable future. Looser quarantine rules suggest an end to the restrictions are closer than we thought,” ANZ Bank said in a note.

Additionally, recession concerns have dominated recent oil market trading even with the European Union’s ban on Russian crude approaching and OPEC’s efforts to tighten supply.

Traders expecting a looming European ban on Russian oil to juice prices have been surprised: physical crudes are weakening in the latest twist in a volatile global market.

From Houston to Singapore, demand for barrels has slipped even with European Union’s Dec. 5 ban in prospect.

“There’s a lot of confusion in this market right now,” Amrita Sen, chief oil analyst at consultant Energy Aspects said in a Bloomberg TV interview.

“Yes, demand in China is weak and this is something we’ve been saying for some time.

“The thing is, the rest of the world demand is actually pretty decent,” she added.

WTI puked back below $80 (trading with a $77 handle at its intraday lows) to its lowest since September…

Additionally, the nearest position of the US crude futures curve is now flashing oversupply for the first time in a year.

The front-month spread between futures for delivery in December and January, which reflects short-term supply-demand balances, traded in shallow contango – the industry term for the bearish market structure – on Friday ahead of the December contract’s expiry.

The Jan-Feb spread is also in contango…

“Bottom line here is that demand for oil out of Asia isn’t good and while it may be decent in the US, it’s struggling with the pipe outage that slows exports and generates weakness that may last for a few weeks,” said Scott Shelton, an energy specialist at TP ICAP Group Plc.

“The market positioning was the exact opposite, which has forced liquidation and made this even worse.”

However, several traders have noted that last week we had another 4 million barrel release from the SPR, which means the price is completely distorted. Biden’s SPR drain scheme is due to end in a few days, which means to a greater extent, oil price may once again be determined by actual supply and demand, which traders suggest means prices are likely to soar.

Finally, we can’t help but note the coincidence of this sudden dump in crude prices on the day that the Biden administration suggests immunity for Saudi’s MbS?

Is the market pricing in the imminent ‘quid pro quo’ of a possible Saudi/OPEC crude production increase?

This would seem odd given the price drop is vindication for OPEC+’s decision to cut production as their fears about oil demand appear justified.

Ponzi Predator?

Tom Luongo: https://tomluongo.me/2022/11/17/cryptofanfic-thoughts-on-ftx/

Date: November 17, 2022Author: Dexter K. White5 Comments

(Usage herein unless otherwise noted:  bitcoin = bitcoin; crypto = everything else)

A lot of people think crypto is worth something.
A lot of people think bitcoin is worth something.
Most people in each community think fiat currency has major problems.
And they all believe in the cross fungibility of cryptocurrency and fiat.

Which is why they are missing a huge point about FTX.

The broad crypto community can’t even imagine the perspective of someone who thinks all of crypto (and BTC) is a bunch of bullshit.

And it is from that perspective where our story is told.  First, a little background.

Dramatis Personae

For lots of reasons, the concept of cryptocurrency always pissed off the old white collar on a blue striped shirt finance guys. 

Those guys cut their teeth in the go-go 80s and dot-com 90s and now zoomer & millennial crypto “traders” want to tell them how markets work.

The old guys know what a mania looks like.  They know what people investing in bullshit looks like.  They traded pets.com, for God’s sake.

So when the rapscallions of crypto refused to come get their entry analyst jobs and instead wanted to build an alternative financial system, the old guard took notice.

The wrong people started getting rich.  And even if most of their “wealth” was still locked in the land of magic beans (crypto tokens), they were still pulling out enough dollars to make a splash.

“They are buying all the Lambos, Mortimer!  This shit is getting out of hand.  Time to kill the baby.”

Market Caps and Traps

Market capitalization isn’t real.  It’s a notional value representing the maximum value of all the existing units of an instrument if you could sell them at the current bid.  But you never can.  When the entirety of an issue goes up for sale, there is, for a single moment, not a single buyer.  And then the price drops by a lot.

This is all glaringly obvious but still bears repeating.  Because we live in a world where we’re constantly told market caps equal net worth.  A world where idiots like Elizabeth Warren want to tax “big wampum number” every time someone multiplies a share count times a price.  

In the 1990s people thought Bill Gates was worth $35B.  But he couldn’t sell $35B of MSFT back then even if he wanted too.  Gates is rich, Elon is rich, Bezos is rich, but not as rich as dumb reporters say they are.

They can only fully convert their wealth into dollars when they retire, when they are allowed to sell all their converted founder’s shares without restriction.

The View from Above

The old guys look at crypto as a closed system.  Just a black box with a bunch of token ledgers that people are buying with dollars.  And those dollars are ultimately debited and credited between accounts in the traditional finance world.  

If all the tokens inside the black box disappeared, the same amount of dollars would exist in the real world.  No net wealth has been created.

In accounting terms, you can’t actually do a debit to cash and a credit to crypto.

No matter how many passionate speeches are given about DeFi, the systems are independent.  Dollars are dollars and crypto is crypto.  

All of the value inside the crypto system is imaginary and all the money that has been traded in crypto markets are just dollar credits and debits inside the old guys’ financial system.

There is no inherent value in crypto, only the net value on exit.

You don’t have to agree with this take, just acknowledge that some might see it this way.

And if you control the dollar/fiat system, you face a choice whether to allow a blending of the two systems or to keep crypto in a box and kill it by blocking the exits.

Most importantly, if you can set up a toll booth and milk the muppets of their real world dollars, you do it.  The old guys know how this game is played.  It doesn’t matter if the muppets are buying FTT or shares of eToys.com.

And so, decisions were made.

Liquidity Inside & Out

You don’t get liquidity for nothing in crypto.  You can’t just print a billion tokens, sell one for a dollar and call yourself a billionaire.  That only works for Theranos.  You need a backer.

This has usually meant working with some huge sketchy bitcoin whales to liquify the trade in your token and create the illusion of demand.

Especially in the first rally of 2017, liquidity in crypto was mostly endogenous.  That is to say it came from bitcoin (BTC).  The exogenous (dollar) liquidity came later.  And it is that dollar liquidity that drove a lot of the second boom of 2020-21.

But the relationship between endogenous (mostly BTC) and exogenous (your 19 year old nephew buying DOGE) is incredibly weighted towards the “value” already inside the system.

It’s a large pile of useless tokens leveraged by people with unlimited borrow.  And whatever new money is coming in to bid them up even more.

Crypto people think real wealth creation has happened.

Trade finance guys think the crypto people bid up a bunch of magic beans inside a closed system and when they run for the exits, finance needs to slam the door in their face.

There is no spoon.  When a market goes bidless, there is no market.

And at a time when dollar liquidity is being drained worldwide, if you think crypto is going to moon, you may be a tad disappointed.

Ponzi Lifecycles

All Ponzi schemes die of the same cause:  a liquidity shortage.

But they bilk a lot of people and collect a lot of cash before that happens.  And the people who run Ponzis are not looking to share the top of the pyramid.

But what if you could offer to increase the vig and extend the lifecycle of a Ponzi scheme?  What if you systematized that?

Inside crypto, there has been no shortage of projects in urgent need of liquidity.  Crypto liquidity needs can be satisfied by worthless tokens leveraged to infinity.

In the real world, the powers that be have decided the contagion effect from crypto is too much to bear.

All the exogenous liquidity is preserved in the real financial world.  It’s a zero sum game.  The crypto table can be knocked over with very little long term risk to the traditional system, as long as that happens before any real fusion occurs.

SBF could even be a patsy, while still possibly being a criminal fraudster in this story.  A patsy who believed in crypto being controlled by those who believe in fiat.

After considering all of the above, imagine those powerful and connected handlers and how they would achieve their goals.

How would that look?

The Alt-take on FTX

There have been countless post-mortems published on FTX.  A lot of them are very, very good.

All come from the perspective that crypto has inherent value and fungibility.  Which leads to a common thesis that FTX found itself spiraling out of control and then did a lot of trades and acquisitions to postpone the inevitable, leading to a cataclysm.  This view also prevents another way of looking at the situation.

What if FTX did not find itself in this situation by unfortunate circumstance?  

What if it was built for this?

What if FTX was created to eat Ponzi schemes in the wild and deplete them of any actual cash they had?  Because the whole project was actually architected by those who don’t really believe in crypto?

It just had to survive long enough to eat all of the major Ponzis in the space.  Extracting all the cash and paving the way for regulatory pushback.

It would go something like this:
  • Create a crypto exchange 
  • Become a market maker and mover
  • Pretend to be US compliant by having a placeholder US presence (FTX.us)
  • Maybe make a stablecoin (was in progress)
  • Definitely make a market traded token (FTT)
  • Liquify the token with dollars (USDT)
  • Target Ponzicoin projects with proven real world cash reserves
  • Advance them liquidity via FTT
  • Securitize the loans with their cash
  • Extend their runways, allowing them to keep aggregating cash
  • Wait for their collapse
  • Take their cash, book a loss
  • Repeat

Do this until you have wiped out all the major players and have set the stage for a changing of the guard.

This money eating machine was always destined to fail.  But so was the market it played in.  Perhaps the creators of FTX decided to roll up all the Ponzis in a giant mega-Ponzi and extract all the cash for as long as possible.

It might have lasted longer but for the recent bitcoin price drop which injected a black swan into the timeline and likely blew out a lot of positions FTX was counting on to remain solvent.

Where the money was intended to go is open to speculation.

How this started is a more interesting question.  How much dollar liquidity flowed into FTX via USDT to create credibility for the FTT token is a much more interesting question.

This alternate angle is where we invite others to gaze from and see if it helps elucidate the situation any further as more and more information continues to come out.

What Did They Know and When Did They Know It?

Brownstone Institute: https://brownstone.org/articles/was-the-pandemic-orchestrated/

Was the Pandemic Orchestrated as a Trial Run for Responding to a Biological Attack?

BY WILL JONES  NOVEMBER 16, 2022 

The evidence that the coronavirus originated in a lab is now compelling, as is the evidence that the virus was spreading undetected all over the world by autumn 2019, with one blood sample from Lombardy on September 12th 2019 found to be positive for both viral RNA and antibodies.

One crucial outstanding question is who knew what and when. In particular, what did the U.S. know about the virus before January 2020 and what did the Chinese Government know?

Here I will argue that both the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) knew that an engineered virus was circulating from mid-November 2019, and that while the CCP was initially not worried about the virus, the U.S. biodefence network was much more concerned. The pandemic emergency was therefore largely created by the U.S. biodefence network, which used it as an opportunity to put into practice all the emergency protocols it had been preparing for two decades to respond to a biological attack or pandemic. While the virus quickly turned out to be mild, the emergency response continued largely because the train had already started running and the opportunity was too good to miss.

If the U.S. and its allies did know anything covertly before 2020, the most likely people who would know it are members of the intelligence and security networks. What can we surmise about what they knew from what they were saying and doing in autumn and winter 2019-20 and from later reports?

Consider Dr. Michael Callahan, an ex-CIA agent who now runs the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and was the U.S. Government’s only confirmed point of contact in Wuhan in January 2020. Out of the blue, Dr. Callahan contacted mRNA vaccine expert Dr. Robert Malone on January 4th 2020 to tell him that (to quote Dr. Malone): “There was a novel coronavirus circulating in the Wuhan region, it was looking like a significant biothreat, and I should get ‘my team’ engaged in seeking ways to mitigate the risk of this new agent.”

Bear in mind that at this point nobody else was spreading alarm about the new virus, which according to the public record had only been sequenced and confirmed to be a novel SARS-like virus by the private Chinese company Vision Medicals on December 27th. Certainly the CCP was not spreading alarm. Prior to the Wuhan lockdown on January 23rd 2020 it was playing down the threat from the virus, suppressing news of it and not making any concerted response.

The videos supposedly showing people collapsing in the streets with the virus that went round social media at the time were promoted not by the CCP but by organisations opposed to the CCP and aiming to expose its cover-up of the virus. Most people in the West, too, were not treating the virus as a significant threat and it was barely registering on government agendas. Recall that in early January there were officially just a few people in hospital in Wuhan and no recorded deaths, so any notion that this virus was a major threat to global public health was purely hypothetical – or based on information not in the public domain.

However, Dr. Callahan was not alone in his early alarmism. Others from the U.S. biodefence network were conspicuously alarmist and actively trying to raise alarm in those around them right from the start of January.

In the White House, Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger was stoking up the terror from the beginning of January. As Michael Senger notes: “Throughout January 2020, Pottinger unilaterally called White House meetings unbeknownst to those in attendance and breached protocol to ratchet up alarm about the new coronavirus based on information from his own sources in China, despite having no official intelligence to back up his alarmism.”

It was Pottinger who brought in fellow alarmist Deborah Birx as White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator at the end of February 2020; Birx was instrumental in pushing the alarmist agenda and bringing lockdowns to America.

The leaked ‘Red Dawn’ emails among U.S. Government officials and others in early 2020 show long-time lockdown proponent Dr. Carter Mecher of the Department of Veterans Affairs also pushing for strong responses from very early on.

Dr. Mecher is an associate of Dr. Richard Hatchett, formerly of the National Institutes for Health (NIH) and now CEO of the Gates-funded pandemic vaccine organisation CEPI, with whom he wrote a paper in 2007 purporting to use the lessons of the 1918 pandemic to promote social distancing. A sister paper, also funded by the NIH, was produced at the same time by Imperial College’s Professor Neil Ferguson. National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases Director (then and now) Dr. Anthony Fauci commented in 2007 that the two studies underline that “a primary lesson of the 1918 influenza pandemic is that it is critical to intervene early… Nonpharmaceutical interventions may buy valuable time at the beginning of a pandemic while a targeted vaccine is being produced”.

Richard Hatchett was attending the World Economic Forum when China locked down Wuhan on January 23rd. The following day he gave a press conference with Jeremy Farrar, Director of the Wellcome Trust and a board member of CEPI, and Moderna’s CEO Stephane Bancel, backing China’s draconian response and making clear it was straight out of his own playbook.

One thing that is important to understand, is that when you don’t have treatments and you don’t have vaccines, non-pharmaceutical interventions are literally the only thing that you have, and it’s a combination of isolation, containment, infection prevention and control and then these social distancing interventions. 

There is historical precedent for their use. We looked intensively and did an historical analysis of the use of non-pharmaceutical interventions in U.S. cities in 1918 and what we found was that cities that introduced multiple interventions, early in an epidemic, had much better outcomes.

The ‘we’ of course refers to Neil Ferguson and Carter Mecher, as per the above.

Further possible evidence of the involvement of the U.S. intelligence community and biodefence network is that the messages of the ‘whistleblower’ doctor Li Wenliang in Wuhan were initially promoted in English by an organisation funded by the U.S. Government. The flooding of social media with messages promoting lockdown in 2020 was also seen in 2014 with Ebola in Sierra Leone, where it was clearly the work of outside agents. It is also of significance that the same New York Times reporter, Donald McNeil, wrote almost identical articles praising the extreme interventions in both 2014 and 2020. 

Anywhere you look in early 2020, amidst the sea of general calm, any source of alarm will invariably be found connected with someone associated with the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies – people such as Michael Callahan, Matt Pottinger, Deborah Birx, Richard Hatchett, Carter Mecher and Neil Ferguson.

It comes as no surprise then to learn that in the U.S. the virus was treated, not as a matter of public health but of national security. This approach, already evident in the high level of activity from the biodefence network, was made official in March 2020 when the responsibility for policy in the pandemic was given not to the public health bodies but to the National Security Council and its agencies. The policy document that the ensuing policy decisions were based on has never been published.

Why would a virus that has as yet done very little be a national security matter? The most likely explanation is because it was known or suspected to be a non-natural, engineered agent. This likely conclusion is supported by other evidence, in particular, by what intelligence reports suggest both the U.S. and CCP knew about the virus in November 2019.

A recent report from the U.S. Senate showed that the CCP made a major safety intervention at the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) on November 12th 2019 to address the “complex and grave situation facing [bio]security work”. The Senate report also implied that around the same time the WIV must have begun work on a vaccine for the new coronavirus – deduced from the fact that Yusen Zhou (who mysteriously died shortly afterwards) applied for a vaccine patent on February 24th 2020. These facts indicate that the CCP became aware that a leaked virus was circulating in mid-November, presumably because it noticed people falling ill and, via testing, traced it back to the WIV (while there is no direct evidence of this, U.S. intelligence reports have noted WIV workers falling ill with a Covid-like illness in November). 

The CCP’s response to discovering this appears to have been to address safety issues at the WIV and to begin working on a vaccine, but otherwise to suppress information about the virus and not treat it as a major threat. The CCP does not appear to have alerted its health services during November or December as medics in Wuhan had to discover it for themselves.

This play-it-down and suppress policy continued even once doctors in Wuhan spotted the novel virus in their patients and obtained the near-complete sequence from a private lab on December 27th. The CCP then continued to insist for weeks that the virus wasn’t spreading between humans, aggressively suppressed any suggestion it came from a lab and pushed from the start the scarcely plausible theory that it had jumped from animals in the wet market.

The sharing of the full virus sequence on January 11th only happened because a Chinese scientist breached protocol to do so, and was disciplined for it. Even once the CCP abandoned its play-it-down policy and initiated aggressive non-pharmaceutical interventions on January 23rd it continued to frustrate efforts to investigate the WIV and its virus database. It’s clear then, that up to January 23rd the CCP showed no sign of being worried about the virus, but every sign of worrying its origins would be discovered.

Separately, the U.S. intelligence community has let it be known that it was aware of a new virus circulating in China from mid-November. As an Israeli news website reported: “In the second week of November, U.S. intelligence recognised that a disease with new characteristics was developing in Wuhan, China. They followed its spread, when at that stage this classified information was not known to the media and did not come out of the Chinese regime either.”

This intelligence is said to have come “in the form of communications intercepts and overhead images showing increased activity at health facilities”. The U.S. military “then alerted NATO and the [Israeli] IDF of the outbreak precisely at the end of November”.

So we know the U.S. had intelligence on the virus circulating in mid-November. I think we have to assume this intel was linked to the CCP safety intervention at the WIV via intercepted communications, and thus that like the CCP, U.S. intelligence knew or suspected it was lab-engineered from that point. If so, no one appears to have told Dr. Fauci and his associates, as Fauci’s FOI emails reveal him and his colleagues to be figuring out that it was likely engineered (and that they funded it) at the end of January.

On February 1st, Fauci initiated an urgent cover-up operation, designed to discredit the idea of a lab leak as a baseless conspiracy theory, telling his associates: “You will have tasks today that must be done.” It is not clear whether Fauci orchestrated this cover-up on his own initiative or, more likely, after being instructed or pre-primed to do so by people in the biodefence network. The motive in any case was the same: to point the finger away from the U.S.’s funding of the implicated virus research and to avoid discrediting the field.

It thus appears that from November 2019, both the CCP and the intelligence community of the U.S. and its allies were watching the leaked outbreak to see what would happen and whether, as they hoped, it would fizzle out. Chinese President Xi Jinping and the CCP were keen to ignore it and suppress any alarm, as well as any hint of a lab leak. The biodefence network, on the other hand, appears to have been much more nervous about the new virus. As soon as word began to get out it amplified the news, spread alarm, pressed for strong interventions and activated biosecurity protocols, putting its members in charge wherever possible. 

Despite this alarmist mode, however, members of the biodefence network consistently backed the natural origins and wet market theory and suppressed the lab leak theory. This is very telling, as there is no way they could have known at that point it was not of lab origin, and as we know there was plenty of evidence to suggest it was, not least what we presume they knew about the Chinese intervention at the WIV. If we assume for a moment they did not suspect it was lab-engineered it is very hard to account for their high degree of alarm about the new virus, or their activation of biodefence protocols and treating it as a national security matter, at a time when officially it had not yet killed anyone and there were few hospital patients.

Furthermore, publicly endorsing the lab leak theory or at least keeping it in play would clearly have been helpful to them as it would have added to the cause for alarm, reinforced their narrative of exposing the CCP’s virus cover-up and unambiguously made it a national security matter. The choice instead to back the CCP’s implausible version of events and suppress the lab leak theory thus betrays that it must have been seriously inconvenient for them in another way, namely that it implicated them and risked discrediting their research.

It is also telling in this regard that when some in the U.S. Government did start pushing the lab leak theory, the Chinese responded not by denying it but by trying to blame the U.S. for the leak. This feels like a warning shot: don’t expose us on this or we’ll expose you.

As is well known, the CCP’s play-it-down strategy came to an abrupt end on January 23rd 2020, when it caved in to the alarmist calls for lockdowns and NPIs (which actually have a long history in China). Thereafter the country embraced its new policy with zeal, turning itself into a showcase for the extreme pandemic response measures, joining in the promotion of them around the world and really making them their own.

Thus we find that the pandemic was largely a creation of the U.S. biodefence network, with China joining in after January 23rd. U.S. intelligence officers had been following the virus (which they, like the CCP, knew was lab-engineered) from mid-November, and the biodefence network made sure news of the virus got out once doctors noticed it, spreading alarm before there was anything really to be alarmed about and treating it immediately as a biosecurity threat.

I believe they did this initially, in part, out of genuine concern about the engineered virus, but also partly because they were itching to try out all the biosecurity protocols they’d been preparing for decades – not least the warp speed rollout of an mRNA vaccine. This latter motive also helps explain why it all carried on once it was obvious the virus was not a major threat to human life and the extreme responses were not justified. It was, in other words, a kind of trial run for a biological attack orchestrated by the biodefence network of the U.S. and its allies.

If true, this certainly helps to make sense of it all. But it is hardly a comforting thought, because it reinforces that they’re not done with us yet, but are just getting ready to do it again, and who can stop them?

The FTX “Naked Short” – Follow the Money

Let’s introduce the players.

Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF) is the beloved offsprong of Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried.

Joseph Bankman is an American lawyer, currently the Ralph M. Parsons Professor of Law and Business at Stanford Law School. In 2004, he and his colleagues developed a proposal for a California program called ReadyReturn, whereby citizens’ tax returns were filled out in advance, requiring only that the users make corrections. The program failed to pass the California legislature by one vote, reportedly after lobbying efforts from tax software preparation company Intuit.

Bankman is married to fellow Stanford law professor Barbara Fried, who is a co-founder of the political fundraising organization Mind the Gap (MTG), which advocates for progressive political candidates and funds get-out-the-vote groups.

Both were involved in FTX, including raising funds for the firm before its bankruptcy.

As reported by VOX (https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/1/6/21046631/mind-the-gap-silicon-valley-democratic-donors-stanford), MTG has been the second largest single donor to the DNC to the tune of some $20 million in bundled donations.

Just behind George Soros

Influence Watch (https://www.influencewatch.org/political-party/mind-the-gap/) lists their larger donors.

And, there’s also OpenSecrets: https://www.opensecrets.org/political-action-committees-pacs/mind-the-gap/C00683649/summary/2022

Then, there’s this interesting chain of events.

Which explains why Fortune has this little piece (https://fortune.com/2022/11/10/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-joe-biden-democratic-party-second-biggest-donor/)

Close to the Biden Regime? You bet (sorry for the pun) – see https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/beleaguered-crypto-billionaire-was-hobnobbing-at-white-house-just-six-months-ago/

A cryptocurrency billionaire facing federal investigation for mishandling customer funds had high-level White House meetings just months ago, as Congress was debating how to regulate his company—and just weeks before he pledged to donate up to $1 billion to Democrats ahead of the midterm campaign.

Sam Bankman-Fried, the owner of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, met on April 22 and May 12 with top Biden adviser Steve Ricchetti, according to White House visitor logs reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon. At the time, FTX was lobbying Congress and federal agencies to shape regulation of the crypto industry.
…
[Bankman-Fried] gave more than $5 million to Biden’s 2020 presidential campaign, and has given millions more this cycle to the Democratic Party. In early May, between his first two visits to the White House, Bankman-Fried doled out $865,000 to the DNC, according to Federal Election Commission records. Earlier, in March, he cut three checks totaling $66,500 to the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee, and later in June he sent $250,000 to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

He said in June, weeks after his most recent White House meeting, that he might give up to $1 billion to support Democrats in the midterms, though he backed away from that pledge in September.

Amid the political spending, Bankman-Fried has led an aggressive lobbying campaign in Washington related to cryptocurrency regulation. He met with Ricchetti, the White House counselor, on April 22 and May 12, according to visitor logs. He met on May 13 with Charlotte Butash, a policy adviser to the White House deputy chief of staff.

Bankman-Fried was accompanied in some of the meetings by Mark Wetjen, the head of policy and regulatory strategy at FTX, who served as commissioner on the Commodity Futures Trading Commission under former president Barack Obama. Eliora Katz, FTX’s chief lobbyist, also attended the meetings but did not mention lobbying the White House in disclosures filed with Congress.

Bankman-Fried’s meetings came weeks after White House officials met with his brother, who directs the billionaire’s political operations. Gabe Bankman-Fried visited the White House on March 7 along with Jenna Narayanan, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Tom Steyer and the Democracy Alliance, a network of wealthy liberal donors who fund left-wing causes. Gabe also attended the May 13 meeting with his brother and FTX’s lobbyists.
…
Bankman-Fried has lobbied for a bill proposed by Senate Agriculture Committee chair Debbie Stabenow (D., Mich.) that would put the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in charge of crypto regulation. Bankman-Fried donated $5,800 to Stabenow’s campaign in February, and $20,800 to her joint fundraising committee in January. Bankman-Fried contributed to other Democratic members of the committee amid his lobbying campaign. He sent a combined $31,000 to campaigns and joint fundraising committees tied to Sens. Cory Booker (D., N.J.), Tina Smith (D., Minn.), Dick Durbin (D., Ill.), and Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) from October 2021 through June. Bankman-Fried also contributed to top Republicans on the Senate Agriculture Committee. The crypto billionaire gave $5,800 each to ranking member John Boozman (R., Ark.) and Sen. John Hoeven (R., N.D.) in January and June, respectively.

BTW, here’s Tom Brady and his now-ex pitching the scam:

https://youtu.be/frS690KGrlQ

And, some scam background

First the summary:

Here’s the Al from Boston Show (always a favorite)

https://youtu.be/GTvuohJcUqY

If you watch the video, you would see this perp.

Great quote: “We use very little math. … We tend not to have things like stop-losses these tend not to be very good risk management tools.”

LOL

Caroline Ellison, another 28-year-old SBF protégé, Sam’s girlfriend, and already appears to be out of a job besides facing a criminal investigation. 

Reportedly a Harry Potter fan.

Ellison was CEO of Alameda Research, which is being wound down as of this afternoon. Alameda was a crypto market maker with a reputation for aggressive trading strategies.

Here’s a softball interview: https://blog.liquid.com/women-in-crypto-caroline-ellison

She doesn’t seem to have had a huge amount of experience prior to running a firm with an alleged $10bn of money sloshing around.

If the name “Ellison” sounds familiar, maybe you’re thinking of the Glenn Ellison, Gregory K. Palm Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an Elected Fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory and American Academy of Arts & Sciences.

And if that name sounds familiar, you may recall he was the boss of Gary Genslar before he joined the Biden Regime as Chairman of the CFTC.

Who is “allegedly” behind the entire enterprise?

More on that for another time.

To recap the criminal enterprise so far:

With marquee players like that, anyone surprised Ukraine has also been “investing” in FTX?

Don’t be.

Well, don’t take our word for it (https://www.investmentwatchblog.com/ukraine-military-aid-from-usa-was-invested-in-crypto-ftx-by-ukraine/)

Plus pictures like this floating around tell you all you need to know …

… sort of reminds me of pictures like this …

Which, of course, keeps the USA “Number 1”

On the blockchain no one can hear you scream

Evil Speculator: https://evilspeculator.com/on-the-blockchain-no-one-can-hear-you-scream/

This whole thing with FTX disgusts me.

If only there was some sort of government body that regulated Securities and Exchanges.

You know, some kind of commission than could find these problems before us regular folk got billions of dollars pilfered.

I mean what the heck – SEC, seriously?

It turns out Scam Brokeman-Fraud is a weirdo who can’t tie his own shoes and transferred 10 Billion dollars worth of customer money for his hedge fund to gamble on shitcoins.

Plus he ran a literal orgy house living with 10 other people who had all dated each other polyamorously at various times 

Classy….

It gets better. They were ALL ON AMPHETAMINES

(this is from his COO and GF – don’t get me started on that one)

If you think that’s not weird enough – get this – THEY ARE ALL VEGANS!

Red flag after red flag…

Never trust a vegan with money – he’ll end up eating it.

And any vegans reading this – better stop eating my food’s food!

As a result the crypto markets continue to tear themselves apart today.

BlockFi (a big crypto lender) is admitting defeat.

My advice is to not trust this rally… a dead cat bounce followed by a retest of a breakout level is very common behavior and not at all bullish.

Mark my words… there are other shoes to drop. Massive volatility always begets more volatility.

I mean call me old fashioned, but back in my day Central American countries went broke from rampant hyperinflation and going communist…

But there is never just one cockroach, is there?

Keep in mind that market makers are either insolvent or licking their wounds. In any crash they are likely to stop playing the game.

It’s difficult to overstate how dangerous this is. 

A market crashing into already thin liquidity with near bankrupt market makers unwilling to take risks.

Really surprisingly low stink bids are likely to be filled.

So get ready.

I know this may be hard to take in, but always remember Baron Rothschild’s time tested rule:

“The time to buy is when there’s blood in the streets.”

And what we’re looking at here is the crypto market’s equivalent of The Shining’s elevator of blood.

Temple of Doom

CHS: http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-era-of-all-powerful-central-banks.html

The Era of All-Powerful Central Banks Is Over

Central bank gaming of Finance is the source of instability.

The era of all-powerful central banks is over for a simple reason: they failed: they failed their citizens, their nations, and they failed the world. Their policies have pushed wealth and income inequality to extremes that have destabilized the planet’s social, political, economic and environmental spheres.

As I have endeavored to explain for many years, this is the only possible outcome of central bank dominance. Once Finance becomes the primary mover of everything else, then it distorts everything into a skimming machine that benefits the few with access to central bank funding at the expense of everyone else.

Once finance dominates, then both the “market” and government become servants of finance. I say “markets” because once markets have been financialized, they serve the interests of cartels and monopolies and cease to be markets at all.

Government, regardless of the advertised “brand”, becomes an auction where the highest bidder gains control of governance and regulation, which are bent to serve the interests of the few with access to central bank largesse.

As the charts below illustrate, this is the top 0.1%, with a substantial “trickle down” to the top 1% and top 10%. The bottom 90% have lost ground not just economically but also politically and socially.

The way central banks create and distribute credit/money results in the dominance of Finance and this dominance has led to the distortion and ruination of the economy and society. Vast inequality is the norm everywhere, because the central bank system is everywhere.

Central banks are the source of destabilizing inequality; they can’t fix inequality. As long as Finance dominates “markets” and governments, they won’t be able to fix inequality, either.

Central bankers and government authorities are aware that the system is unraveling due to the extremes of inequality they’ve created. They are attempting to to reconcile this contradiction– Finance turns the entire world into a skimming machine that can only exacerbate inequality–with, yes, what else? Finance.

So central banks are preparing to deposit new “money” directly into checking accounts and governments are pondering windfall taxes, wealth taxes, etc. to claw back some of the wealth that accumulated in the top tier to fund social programs designed to keep the masses compliant.

Central bank gaming of Finance is the source of instability. Reining in central banks’ free money for financiers and cronies is the necessary first step to unseating Finance as the dominant force in markets, governance and the planetary skimming machine Finance has created.

Either power is taken from central banks or the vast inequality that is the result of central bank dominance will unravel the entire system. Take your pick, but the distortions are accelerating, and time is running short.

Get it?