Glibertarianism

Late Night Spooks Open Thread: Hall of Crazed Mirrors

by Anne Laurie| October 20, 20232:44 am| 21 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Information Warfare, Open Threads

Peter Thiel is an FBI informant, lol. (Also whoever at the FBI code named Chuck Johnson "Genius" was surely being sarcastic.) https://t.co/MAGswfsi5o

— Elizabeth Spiers (@espiers) October 19, 2023

I hadn’t thought about Chuck ‘Rage Furby’ Johnson since around the time Trump staged that famous escalator ride, and I wouldn’t trust him if he walked in soaking wet and said it was raining. But if more informed individuals are willing to accept those accusations, however provisionally, there’s certainly no reason to doubt that Peter ‘Palantir’ Thiel would be willing to take Big Gubmint Surveillance’s shilling.

So, since I’ve been a Democrat for the last sixty years, the question for me is: Why does the FBI want their sponsorship to be known now?

… In the summer of 2021, Insider has learned, Thiel began providing information as a “confidential human source,” or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who specializes in investigating political corruption and foreign-influence campaigns.

Charles Johnson, a longtime associate of Thiel’s and a notorious figure in the far-right movement that Thiel has subsidized for a decade, told Insider in a statement that he helped recruit the billionaire as an informant by introducing him to Buma.

A source with knowledge of Thiel’s relationship to the FBI, whose identity is known to Insider but who insisted on anonymity, corroborated Johnson’s account, telling Insider that Johnson brokered a relationship between Thiel and Buma. Insider was able to confirm through an additional source that the FBI added Thiel to its formal roster of registered informants…

The FBI maintains a vast network of informants to keep tabs on organized crime, terrorist threats, extremist groups, and other criminal and intelligence targets. These sources, according to the bureau’s Confidential Human Source Policy Guide, are more than casual tipsters.

Confidential human sources enter “into a relationship with the FBI, and that relationship will forever affect the life of that individual,” the guide says. “[They] will be either an ‘FBI source’ or a ‘former FBI source’ and, in turn, his or her conduct or misconduct will reflect upon the FBI.” As such, the process for recruiting and maintaining such sources is highly regulated, requiring multiple layers of approval. Only people who are able to provide “valuable information … on a recurring basis” are granted CHS status, according to the policy…

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Thiel is a citizen of Germany, the United States, and New Zealand; as of last year, he was reportedly in the process of acquiring yet another passport, from Malta. In 2016, he donated $1.25 million to Trump’s campaign and endorsed him from the stage at the Republican National Convention. After Trump won, Thiel served on his transition team…

Some of Thiel’s business interests rely on the FBI and other government agencies as potential revenue sources. He retains a 10% stake in Palantir, a data company that has sold more than a billion dollars of software and related services to the federal government, including the Pentagon, the CIA, the National Security Agency, and the FBI. A $250 million contract with the US Army in September adds to the evidence that Palantir is essentially “a government service provider,” a financial analyst said.

Thiel also backed Boldend, a spyware company marketing itself as an American competitor to the Israeli NSO Group, Forbes reported last year. NSO’s products have been bought and tested by the FBI…

Johnson, who revealed Thiel’s FBI ties, is a tech investor and far-right agitator with long-standing ties to both Thiel and to the network of MAGA political operators surrounding Trump. He claims to have had a hand in founding Clearview, a facial-recognition startup, and Traitwell, a genomics company. According to Forbes, he worked with Thiel to help vet and select senior staffers for the Trump transition in 2017…

Johnson’s ties to Trump and Thiel are well-documented. But he is also a self-identified “troll” with a history of spreading false information and smearing his rivals. In this instance, his claims are corroborated by two additional sources, as well as supported in part by a third who says Thiel and Buma spoke occasionally…

Buma came forward in August as a whistleblower, alleging that the FBI under Trump and Attorney General Bill Barr shut down his efforts to determine whether Rudy Giuliani had been compromised by a Russian asset. Insider was the first news organization to report on his claims.

In a statement prepared for the Senate Judiciary Committee, Buma said that FBI headquarters had closed his most valuable human sources, including one code-named “Genius,” who had reported on far-right figures involved with planning the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. Johnson told Insider that “Genius” was his CHS code name. Insider was able to confirm Johnson’s identity as “Genius” with two additional sources. The statement does not mention Thiel.

…[Johnson] described Thiel’s motivation for working with Buma as a kind of hedge in an environment where extravagant wealth no longer affords the safety it used to. He pointed to ProPublica’s reporting on Thiel’s income-tax avoidance and the death of Jeffrey Epstein, who had reportedly scheduled several meetings with Thiel.

“I told him to join up or get crushed,” Johnson said…

Late Night Spooks Open Thread: Hall of Crazed MirrorsPost + Comments (21)

Late Night Open Thread: SBF, Performing ‘Intelligence’

by Anne Laurie| October 8, 20233:13 am| 77 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads

Imagine giving this man your money. https://t.co/X9Lozq83Ws

— Not up for trouble, please stop asking (@agraybee) October 7, 2023

There’s a temptation for people who do extremely well on IQ tests to turn themselves into performative contrarians, creating ‘logical’ arguments they can use in social settings to demonstrate that they’re just smarter, i.e. better, than the common herd. It’s a special danger for children whose parents prize this brand of intelligence, because it’s easy to fall into a bad habit of training their kid to perform at their grown-up parties, the way other parents demand guests listen to their kid’s latest piano piece or TikTok rap. And that mutual temptation, IMO, is why Sam Bankman Fried’s Stanford-professor ‘ethical specialist’ parents are also going to lose everything that’s important to them.

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Just sloppy? Give me a break. Here’s How FTX Executives Secretly Spent $8 Billion in Customer Money https://t.co/4q2bTgYMDd

— Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) October 8, 2023

Rubbernecking, with the help of the Wall Street Journal:

The crypto exchange FTX went bust last year after executives spent billions in customer funds they had promised to safeguard.

The tab was $7.7 billion, a Wall Street Journal analysis of company disclosures and legal filings shows. FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and senior staff spent customer funds on technology investments, luxury real estate and political contributions, among other things…

Customers say they had $16 billion in funds on the exchange before its collapse. So far, FTX’s new management has found $7.3 billion that could go toward paying them back…

So where did all the money go?

FTX spent big on investments in technology startups. For example, FTX paid $1.15 billion to acquire around 20% of Genesis Digital Assets, a crypto miner that ran a number of mining facilities in Kazakhstan.

The firm spent $243 million on real estate in the Bahamas…

There’s still around $1 billion of missing customer money that isn’t accounted for, and which could have been used by FTX to fund bad trades at its affiliate hedge fund, Alameda…

… Bankman-Fried took around $10 million from an Alameda account and directed it to an account owned by his father, Joseph Bankman. FTX lawyers said in court papers that Bankman has “been using this gift to finance Bankman-Fried’s criminal defense.” …

Puck‘s Theodore Schleifer, who’s been performing his own slightly-more-detached version of Michael Lewis for the last several months, on “S.B.F.’s Expected Value Calculation”:

… Prosecutors said Tuesday that a plea agreement was never offered, but even if there was one, this trial is happening for two reasons. First, don’t underestimate S.B.F.’s ego. Sam, as I’ve learned over three years of conversations with him, is supremely confident in himself, and a steadfast believer that plenty of the people around him—lawyers, other executives, some reporters—are idiots, or at least can be manipulated. The decision to not settle, in my view, is rooted partially in a belief that he can somehow weasel his way out of this, just like he has weaseled out of so much before.

But it is also a belief, some people close to him have posited, in the math—in the expected-value calculus that undergirded so many of S.B.F.’s choices and eccentricities. In short, is there a sufficient probability that he can find a single juror in the courtroom who believes he is innocent, unfairly targeted, or even just plain sympathetic? “I wonder if it’s his insane views on risk. Like, he might just think the E.V. is there and be committed like that,” one (former) friend said. “He might think a 20 percent chance of zero [time] is better than a 100 percent chance of 20 years.”

Only Sam can answer just how much Expected Value he would extract during prison—though in my time with him, I’ve always gotten the impression that he cares more about his reputation than about prison time. But let’s be real: Whether he gets acquitted probably doesn’t really matter, reputationally. How many people convicted Elizabeth Holmes before a jury even heard a single witness? There is little absolution coming based on the preponderance of information that has been unearthed about FTX, Alameda Research, etcetera. Whatever the jury finds is unlikely to change that impression etched into our culture. Perhaps Sam thinks that flipping the coin, as weighted as it may be, is the only option he has left…

And then there are the parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried. Could they testify? Joe and Barbara are essentially part of Sam’s legal team, but plenty of people also hold them responsible for FTX’s risk-taking in Hong Kong and excesses in The Bahamas. And what about Sam’s brother Gabe, who oversaw his political and philanthropic operation, even though the campaign-finance charge is no longer on the table?

One person who worked for FTX told me that Joe and Barbara’s fall from grace made him more sympathetic to Sam. “I mean, I think it’s sort of worked on me in viewing him more favorably. Kinda like a variant of the ‘affluenza’ defense,” this person told me. “I’ll be honest, I’m pulling for him. Not that I think he has much of a chance of avoiding a long sentence.”…

Late Night Open Thread: SBF, Performing ‘Intelligence’Post + Comments (77)

Late Night Open Thread: There’s One Senator Gonna Miss ‘Leader’ Mitch…

by Anne Laurie| March 25, 202312:19 am| 126 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads

Meanwhile, Sinema eats battery acid. pic.twitter.com/K8nkbacQt0

— Renee (@PettyLupone) March 23, 2023

god willing sinema will flame out of politics completely because she decided she wanted to openly and authentically be the senator from Blackstone https://t.co/AJBMHvi16C

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) March 23, 2023

What’s the term for the opposite of ‘beat sweetener’? Big weekend read from Politico, hot to revive their beloved Dems in disarray!!! trope, even if Sinema isn’t actually a registered Democrat any more:

… As she races to stockpile campaign money and post an impressive, statement-making first-quarter fundraising number, Sinema has used a series of Republican-dominated receptions and retreats this year to belittle her Democratic colleagues, shower her GOP allies with praise and, in one case, quite literally give the middle finger to President Joe Biden’s White House.

And that’s before an audience.

Speaking in private, whether one-on-one or with small groups of Republican senators, she’s even more cutting, particularly about Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, whom she derides in harshly critical terms, according to senior Republican officials directly familiar with her comments.

Sinema’s sniping spree has delighted the Republican lawmakers, lobbyists and donors who’ve taken in the show, giving some of them hope that she can be convinced to caucus with the GOP, either in this Congress or in the case she’s reelected as an independent.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who Sinema has assiduously courted, remains skeptical, however. Believing she remains a Democrat at heart, McConnell has focused on trying to recruit a non-controversial Arizona Republican into the race, somebody who could attract the moderate GOP voters and independents Sinema would need to win the purple state as an independent.

It’s entirely possible, however, that such a Republican doesn’t run or can’t clear a primary in Arizona’s MAGA-fied state party…

Which all raises the question for McConnell: Should his efforts to woo a mainstream Republican fail, would he be better off attempting to cut a deal with Sinema or hope a candidate like Lake can prevail in a three-way race against a current and former Democrat? One potential arrangement: Sinema could remain an independent but caucus with the Republicans in exchange for a ceasefire in spending from the National Republican Senatorial Committee and McConnell’s Super PAC.

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Otherwise, McConnell could find himself ushering the election-denying Lake into the Senate, a step he may be less inclined to take as he considers his legacy and, more proximately, the group of mostly newcomers who’ve already tried to overthrow him once from his post. Remarkable as it may sound, on the vote that counts the most for the longest-serving Senate leader, the one to extend his record further, the independent may be more likely to support McConnell than the Republican…

At another Republican-filled fundraiser in Washington this year, Sinema chided Schumer.

Taking questions around the room, as she prefers to do rather than give remarks, the Arizonan encountered a lobbyist who said he was hoping to work with the Senate Democratic leader on finding a compromise over energy permitting. Sinema looked at the lobbyist and shot back: Oh, good luck, according to an attendee.

It’s not just liberals who she’ll take aim at, though. At fundraisers, Sinema has mocked the name Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) bestowed on the climate bill, the Inflation Reduction Act, likening it to the moniker of the initially unpopular health law now known as “Obamacare”: the Affordable Care Act.

And when a Republican donor told the Arizona senator that it was not Manchin but Sinema who “carried the water for us in this last Congress,” she responded: “You’re hired.”

When the donor said, “Without you our taxes would’ve gone through the roof,” she concurred: “They would have.”…

Cue the old George Bernard Shaw joke: You’ve established what you are, now we’re just haggling over the price.

It has been established: Kyrsten Sinema wants money. Mitch McConnell, ‘preeminent fundraiser’, has money. While he’s ‘Leader’, Sinema has entree to all the top-dollar Repub donors. But once he’s out of the Senate, well…

Lol sinema is like "how DARE you lump me in with manchin- can't you see I'm WORSE?" https://t.co/vyC2Slnxrn

— Hemry, Local Bartender (@BartenderHemry) March 23, 2023

Arizona voter:

I hope Sinema isn’t on a Gabbard arc but uhhh it’s not looking good. https://t.co/OdXCB4qF6n

— Jean-Michel Connard (@torriangray) March 23, 2023

You want to know why Kyrsten Sinema travels in GOP circles? It’s because in under 5 years, she has increased her net-worth to over $11M from a net-worth of over $32K. She was paid a hell of a lot of money to sell out.

— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) March 24, 2023

I get why the Party has to do this walk on eggshells, institutionally, but everyone at the DNC is going to be fighting each other to be on the ground for Gallego come 2024

The AZ GOP nominated Masters. AZ Dems want to eat her heart Aztec-style. She has no constituency. https://t.co/AgB3Mx1Mj7

— Jack Walsh (@JackWaltimore) March 23, 2023

Late Night Open Thread: There’s *One* Senator Gonna Miss ‘Leader’ Mitch…Post + Comments (126)

Late Night Open Thread: Other 2024 Protest Vote Alternatives

by Anne Laurie| March 9, 20232:47 am| 54 Comments

This post is in: 2024 Primaries, Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads

If you thought Marianne Williamson’s candidacy was risible, behold the GOP alternative!

We’re literally addicted to China. They push digital fentanyl via TikTok. Our national debt is essentially financial fentanyl.

The real Declaration of Independence of the 21st century is from the CCP. Time to do it now. pic.twitter.com/i3ctHoWuYV

— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) March 6, 2023

Pretty clearly, even more than Williamson, Ramaswamy’s ‘campaign’ is less about politics than about raising his media profile, and I wish the GOP joy of him. Just imagine the epic debates between him and Andrew Yang, while literal dozens of supporters wrangle in the audience.

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Late Night Open Thread: Other 2024 Protest Vote AlternativesPost + Comments (54)

Late Night Open Thread: Effective (for Its Proponents) Altruism

by Anne Laurie| March 1, 202310:57 pm| 87 Comments

This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Glibertarianism, Grifters Gonna Grift, Open Threads

FTX donated millions of dollars to an obscure organization for a real estate investment: the purchase of a centuries-old castle in Czechia. What need would a charitable movement have for a palatial property with a lake and a frisbee golf course? https://t.co/hRBbJXjxOi

— Forbes (@Forbes) March 2, 2023

fascinated by the EA forum discussions on why it was actually *very necessary* for them to buy country houses and castles.https://t.co/cfTT4Rh0op https://t.co/1LJdu5U06d

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) February 28, 2023

This is, of course, a new skin on a very old game — what J.K. Galbraith sarcastically called “Horse & Sparrow Theory“. At least its ‘Prosperity Gospel’ proponents during the First Gilded Age, Andrew Carnegie and his peers, had the self-preservation instincts to endow public libraries and museums across America. Today’s smarm-grifters just swindle-stole a pleasant public venue in central Europe to use for their ‘conference center’. Not just crooked, but lame!

Four months before FTX collapsed into a multi-billion dollar catastrophe of doomed investments and shadowy subsidiaries, the crypto exchange donated millions of dollars to an obscure organization for a real estate investment: the purchase of a centuries-old castle in the scenic Czech highlands.

In July 2022, the $4.5 million gift was quietly bestowed by the FTX Foundation, the exchange’s philanthropic arm, and is one of dozens of donations now sitting in the crosshairs of the sprawling FTX bankruptcy proceedings.

The FTX Foundation does not appear to have disclosed the donation before it was shuttered in December. But according to Irena Kotikova, a former Czech Association for Effective Altruism chairperson who applied for the grant, the funds were disbursed last July to the European Summer Program on Rationality (ESPR), a Czech educational non-profit with ties to “effective altruism,” a social movement promoted by FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried. Roughly $3.5 million was reportedly used to acquire Chateau Hostacov, “a renaissance chateau hidden away in the center of the Czech Republic.”

In its simplest form, effective altruism advocates doing the most good for as many people as possible. The philosophy nominally took shape around 2011, and encourages the use of evidence and reason to determine how to best save the world. To some adherents, this has meant “earning to give” — a sort of moral imperative for taking that Wall Street job, or running a multi-billion dollar crypto exchange (ideally not into the ground) in hopes of, say, safeguarding humanity against artificial intelligence or preventing a nuclear catastrophe. As Bankman-Fried once said: “I wanted to get rich not because I like money, but because I wanted to give that money to charity.” (A few months later he told the Wall Street Journal that his charitable efforts were “as much PR as anything else.”)

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FTX Foundation was launched in 2021 with a pledge to allocate 1% of FTX’s revenue fees to charitable causes, on top of contributions from Bankman-Fried and lieutenants Caroline Ellison, Gary Wang and Nishad Singh. One year later, its Future Fund initiative emerged to focus specifically on effective altruism projects. The foundation’s entire team would eventually resign in November, citing “fundamental questions about the legitimacy and integrity” of their benefactors. By that time, it claimed to have donated $190 million to more than 100 projects.

Before FTX imploded, however, a portion of those funds were used to acquire a company that owned Chateau Hostacov last October. “ESPR can’t return the property or the money at the moment because there is currently no mechanism that we are aware of that would make it possible to legally send money ‘back to FTX’ such that it would reliably make its way back to customers who lost their money,” Kotikova later wrote on the Effective Altruism Forum. Former FTX Foundation staff, as well as ESPR representatives, did not respond to requests for comment…

Too bad, so sad!

anyway I wish to set up an immersive discussion space for ludic engagement (buy a big downtown DC house with a huge boardgaming table), please give me $2 million.

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) February 28, 2023

anyway this is a very very common form of charity grifting. https://t.co/VOrYC4j05c

— James Palmer (@BeijingPalmer) February 28, 2023

Apparently Czechia does have an extradition treaty with the US, so it’s not even like SBF and his polycule was looking for a(nother) bolt-hole — they just wanted a nice place in the country when they visited Davos or their Swiss bank accounts, I guess.

beginning to think that the movement that rose to public consciousness because it was championed by a crypto guy who is now charged with financial crimes might not be entirely on the level

— Rosvo1 🦀 (@Rosvo11) February 28, 2023

Gonna give twenty dollar bills to panhandlers purely out of spite now

— GiveThonks (@GThonks) February 28, 2023

pic.twitter.com/zfQ2JnR1Es

— Comrade Sisko 🖖🏾✊🏿☭ (@Pinko69420) February 27, 2023

Late Night Open Thread: Effective (for Its Proponents) AltruismPost + Comments (87)

Godsdamned Glibertarians Open Thread: Rand Paul Is At It Again

by Anne Laurie| May 12, 202210:48 pm| 47 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, GOP Death Cult, Open Threads, War in Ukraine

! Rand Paul just unilaterally blocked swift passage of Ukraine aid. He wanted the rest of the Senate add language to the bill he plans to vote against anyway bc debt/inflation.

He has this power because the Senate runs on *unanimous consent*, not nearly unanimous consent.

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) May 12, 2022

McConnell and Schumer both implored Paul to allow a vote on his amendment but let the bill be voted on today. Their joint entreaty didn’t persuade him.

— Steven Dennis (@StevenTDennis) May 12, 2022

If they had any initiative, McConnell and his henchmen would take up a collection to have Rand Paul’s neighbor come back and finish the job. We Dems couldn’t get away with anything like that, but it’d be a winner for the Red Meat side…

Oh, wait — I forgot for a minute that #MoscowMitch is also on Putin’s payroll!

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Godsdamned Glibertarians Open Thread: Rand Paul Is At It AgainPost + Comments (47)

Same Old Same Old Open Thread: Former South African Reverts to Time-Tested Excuses

by Anne Laurie| April 27, 20229:32 pm| 40 Comments

This post is in: Glibertarianism, Open Threads, MONSTERS, social media

Three things:

1. Implies he’s fine w China, Russia etc dictating his policies, bc their laws authorize censorship, & those laws must be the will of the people

2. Implies he’ll be OK if US govt censors Twitter

2. You can become incredibly rich & still not know how to think https://t.co/I81WCvRjCv

— Dana Houle (@DanaHoule) April 26, 2022

When Elon Musk was growing up in apartheid-era South Africa, various combinations of ‘but it’s the law’ and ‘will of the people’ were the English-ancestry minority’s go-to explanation to outsiders. The Boers were stone cold bigots, the Not-Whites were impossible, what could an embattled minority of pale-skinned Anglicans be expected to do about the unfairness of it all?…

I thought I might be the only one biased by such memories, but then a whole bunch of twitter feeds pointed out Ben Shapiro’s response to Mr. Musk:

a truth and reconciliation commission for twitter is the funniest thing i’ve read today, bravo pic.twitter.com/6ThYGkKxxB

— b-boy bouiebaisse (@jbouie) April 26, 2022

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Same Old Same Old Open Thread: Former South African Reverts to Time-Tested ExcusesPost + Comments (40)

Putin dreamed of ending NATO, and now it’s Finnish-ed.

It’s easier to kill a dangerous animal than a man who just happens to have different thoughts/values than one’s own.

Fani Willis claps back at Trump chihuahua, Jim Jordan.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Jack Smith: “Why did you start campaigning in the middle of my investigation?!”

You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. Go Senator Whitehouse!

I’m pretty sure there’s only one Jack Smith.

“That’s what the insurrection act is for!”

“Can i answer the question? No you can not!”

Is it negotiation when the other party actually wants to shoot the hostage?

Peak wingnut was a lie.

“The defense has a certain level of trust in defendant that the government does not.”

Teach a man to fish, and he’ll sit in a boat all day drinking beer.

“What are Republicans afraid of?” Everything.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

The new republican ‘Pastor’ of the House is an odious authoritarian little creep.

Someone should tell Republicans that violence is the last refuge of the incompetent, or possibly the first.

But frankly mr. cole, I’ll be happier when you get back to telling us to go fuck ourselves.

I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.

Everybody saw this coming.

Reality always lies in wait for … Democrats.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

The line between political reporting and fan fiction continues to blur.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

Late Night Spooks Open Thread: Hall of Crazed Mirrors

Late Night Open Thread: SBF, Performing ‘Intelligence’

Late Night Open Thread: There’s One Senator Gonna Miss ‘Leader’ Mitch…

Late Night Open Thread: Other 2024 Protest Vote Alternatives

Late Night Open Thread: Effective (for Its Proponents) Altruism

Godsdamned Glibertarians Open Thread: Rand Paul Is At It Again