The Post-Partisan Emporium

Sam Bankman-Fried's Fall from Grace The Magical, Mystical Gurus of Crypto/Bitcoin and All They Promise Karen Hunt aka KH Mezek Sam Bankman-Fried First of all, I don’t like to say, “I told you so,” but, okay, maybe I do. Back in May, I wrote about the  8 confirmed suicides   tragically connected with the downfall of  Luna and Terra .  Over the past year, I’ve been writing   extensively on the topic of bitcoin and cryptocurrency, some of which I will reference here . This week we witnessed the downfall of one of cryptocurrency’s shining stars,  30-year-old FTX founder, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF). Between $1 billion to $2 billion (so far) in client money has gone “missing” through a “back door.” On Thursday, SBF confessed: “I f**ked up,” in a  lengthy  Twitter thread ,  apologizing to investors and customers of FTX, the exchange platform he founded in 2019. According to  Markets Insider  “ Binance  was in talks to takeover FTX, but t...

I Used To Be Disgusted, Now I'm Disabused Charles Hugh Smith It's certainly possible to be disgusted, but being disabused of the fantasy that the system is self-correcting is the healthier perspective. I used to be disgusted, now I'm disabused : beneath all the self-serving narratives, fad-memes and over-simplifications regurgitated as  serious analysis , these are the core dynamics I see: 1. Imperial corruption of democracy and open markets.  I described this in  Regardless of Who's Elected, Imperial Corruption Rules the Nation : the dynamic adaptive churn of unfettered representative democracy and open markets are anathema to insiders, vested interests and elites, each of which has gained asymmetric power by subverting democracy and markets to serve their private interests rather than the public interest / common good--phrases that are meaningless to insiders, vested interests and elites except as  simulacra  used for PR. 2. The Deep State, the unelected and u...