SB-F/BS

“The Communist Party credits itself with ‘lifting millions from poverty,’ but it is more accurate to say that the millions have lifted the Party.”--Link

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The Hawaii volcano has become active. Is that a risk to global warming? Will the debris result in sun blockage and global cooling?

Should the volcano be capped?

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One of the largest lithium battery storage centers in the world is in Escondido, California. But it can only store enough power for twenty-four thousand American homes for four hours. There are about 134 million households in the United States.

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Ahmed Abdel-Basit Mohamed, also known as "Basit," was sentenced to death in Egypt for his role in deadly terrorist attacks there. He now lives freely in the US. Basit confirmed the Egyptian government's accusations when he publicly bragged about his involvement in a terrorist attack in Egypt in which 506 people were wounded or killed.
He operates from his New York apartment and often streams live videos from Times Square. During his multi-hour videos, Saber routinely incites terrorism, assassinations, kidnapping and torture in an extremely graphic manner. The calls for violence in his videos are viewed by millions of people across the world.
According to Basit's LinkedIn profile, he is currently an Adjunct Professor of Astronomy at Manhattan College.
He has a LinkedIn account!
(from Gatestone via Don)

SB-F/BS

Sam Bankman-Fried, aka SBF, is an MIT physics grad, who honed his trading skills at renowned quant shop Jane Street Capital. He noticed a disparity in crypto pricing across countries and began to arbitrage with success before launching a successful firm of his own, Alameda Research. In 2019 he founded crypto exchange FTX, hailed by some as the best derivatives platform ever built.

In addition to running the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried continued to run Alameda Research, essentially running both an exchange and a hedge fund.By March 2021, FTX had bought the rights to rename the home of the NBA’s Miami Heat as the “FTX Arena.”
As recently as September, FTX was believed to be worth $32 billion.

At the beginning of November, the website CoinDesk reported that “Bankman-Fried’s trading giant Alameda rests on a foundation largely made up of a coin that a sister company invented, not an independent asset like a fiat currency or another crypto.

FTX entered negotiations with the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, seeking to be acquired by the larger exchange. Binance declined, stating, “The issues are beyond our control or ability to help.”

FTX has since filed for bankruptcy, and John Jay Ray III, who managed the Enron restructuring, is running what’s left of the company, declared in the bankruptcy filing that basically no one at FTX left any records of what they were doing, and may well have never understood what they were doing when they were actually doing it. Ray wrote:

"I have over 40 years of legal and restructuring experience. I have been the Chief Restructuring Officer or Chief Executive Officer in several of the largest corporate failures in history. I have supervised situations involving allegations of criminal activity and malfeasance (Enron). I have supervised situations involving novel financial structures (Enron and Residential Capital) and cross-border asset recovery and maximization (Nortel and Overseas Shipholding). Nearly every situation in which I have been involved has been characterized by defects of some sort in internal controls, regulatory compliance, human resources and systems integrity.

Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information as occurred here. From compromised systems integrity and faulty regulatory oversight abroad, to the concentration of control in the hands of a very small group of inexperienced, unsophisticated and potentially compromised individuals, this situation is unprecedented."

“Many of the companies in the FTX Group, especially those organized in Antigua and the Bahamas, did not have appropriate corporate governance. I understand that many entities, for example, never had board meetings.”
“The FTX Group did not maintain centralized control of its cash. Cash management procedural failures included the absence of an accurate list of bank accounts and account signatories, as well as insufficient attention to the creditworthiness of banking partners.”
“The FTX Group’s approach to human resources combined employees of various entities and outside contractors, with unclear records and lines of responsibility. At this time, the Debtors have been unable to prepare a complete list of who worked for the FTX Group as of the Petition Date, or the terms of their employment. Repeated attempts to locate certain presumed employees to confirm their status have been unsuccessful to date.”
“Employees of the FTX Group submitted payment requests through an on-line ‘chat’ platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalized emojis.”
“Corporate funds of the FTX Group were used to purchase homes and other personal items for employees and advisors. I understand that there does not appear to be documentation for certain of these transactions as loans, and that certain real estate was recorded in the personal name of these employees and advisors on the records of the Bahamas.”
“The FTX Group did not keep appropriate books and records, or security controls, with respect to its digital assets.”
“One of the most pervasive failures of the FTX.com business in particular is the absence of lasting records of decision-making. Mr. Bankman-Fried often communicated by using applications that were set to auto-delete after a short period of time, and encouraged employees to do the same.”
(Culled from NR.)

With the infrastructure of the company inexplicable to experts, money vanishing, and investors losing everything, it is curious that the event is being seen by news and political analysts as a laboratory for socially conscious investing rather than incompetence and theft.