Tag: Glenn Greenwald

Even a Leftist Admits the Dangerous Hypocrisy

photog 4 Comments Current Events , , ,

H/T to Tim for the link on my feed.  Greenwald is a progressive.  But he’s an honest man.  He believes in the concept of equality under the law.  And he sees that the Justice Department has been weaponized against its enemies.  And he knows once equal protection has been eliminated everyone is the potential target.  He knows that the Deep State has then become an unassailable tyrant.

That’s when the FBI starts killing old crippled men and tossing them in the street as a warning.

 

What’s Next for Tucker Carlson?

photog Uncategorized , , , , , , , , ,

Well, now there’s no reason to watch Fox News anymore.  It should be interesting to see how Carlson decides to go forward from here.  I’m assuming he’s not hurting for money.  He should probably start a channel on Rumble and put up a paywall.  He’s one of the more interesting people in broadcasting.  People will pay to get his content.

The other possibility is he goes into politics.  That I see as more problematic.  Politics is a very dirty game.  If you don’t need to use it to make lots of dirty money it won’t be an interesting career.

I think Carlson could form some kind of relationship with the likes of Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Salena Zito, Sharyl Attkisson and a few other real journalists to produce a media outlet that would provide the kind of reporting and opinion that can’t be found anywhere else in the media.  They would have believability.  That’s something that is so sorely lacking everywhere else.

If done right and without all the overhead that comes with a Fox News or a CNN, Carlson and a few reporters could break away from the dying landscape of network and cable news shows that no one needs or wants anymore.  News and analysis.  With the internet and a few resources like Rumble and maybe Elon Musk’s Twitter who needs studios and boardrooms?

Come to think of it, Carlson interviewed Musk last week.  Maybe those two could strike up a deal where Tucker’s content was available exclusively on Twitter with some of it behind a paywall.  It could make both of them a lot of money.  And it could serve as a model for the future.  I’ve heard that Musk wants to add a “substack” option to Twitter.  Having someone like Tucker Carlson as his first big “channel” might be just the thing he needs to steer talent to his platform.

So anyway, Tucker’s “firing” could be a very opportune moment to start seeing a new journalism.  Without the bloat of the dinosaur media, a cadre of people who want to tell interesting stories that have some resemblance to objective reality could provide a service that people would be willing to pay for.  I, even I, would pay a little bit for that.

Now it’s also certain that all the usual suspects on the Left will be gunning for Tucker Carlson.  I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s a target for the Justice Department’s attack dogs.  Their hatred for him probably rivals how they feel about Donald Trump.  After all he’s another traitor to his class.  They’ve already once gone after his family at home.  He had to move away from Washington to protect them.  This is not a trivial threat.  Hopefully he’s made enough money to be able to afford professional security services.  But no one is safe from the abuse that the FBI can bring to bear.  We’ll have to see whether these problems crop up for him.

Well, these are interesting times.  Tucker Carlson has been the only truthful voice in mainstream news commentary.  I hope that he will be able to find a way to continue shining a light on the criminal activities of the Washington regime.  There isn’t any other voice out there that has both his reach and credibility.  Hopefully someone like Musk who has the reach and also the money to set up a platform for him will come along and take advantage of this interesting opportunity.

Gameplay and Reddit and Melvin.  OH MY!

photog Current Events , ,

This morning the Fatman sent me this link to Glenn Greenwald trying to shed some light on the meltdown that some Reddit investors inflicted on Melvin Capital for their obviously obscenely extreme short positions against Gameplay.  And recently he had reminded me of a story I told him about the 1987 Black Monday Wall Street crash that I was involved in.  Back in the mid-eighties photog was a young struggling engineering student working all kinds of crazy jobs to feed his family and looking at an economy that didn’t particularly need engineers.  So, I got my Series 7 license and went to work at a number of different Wall Street firms, some more and some less reputable.  But by 1987 I had been employed at a discount broker taking orders on their options desk for a couple of years and was about to move over to a small specialty firm that handled institutional accounts.  In fact, the week before the crash I had accepted the offer and I would be leaving that next Friday.

Now back then if the Dow Jones Industrial Index dropped fifty points that was a really bad day.  So, as you can tell on Wall Street numbers have changed orders of magnitude in term of impact on the economy.  And the whole Black Monday drop was only 500 points but back then that was an earthquake.  But probably what very few people remember is that the Friday before Black Monday the market dropped a hundred points.  And that was a very big deal.  And for one small investor that first smaller drop was even more important.

Options are a way to bet on the market when you don’t have the wherewithal to buy stock and certainly don’t have the money in your account to be allowed to short a stock.  Back then the equity requirements to short stocks were a lot lower than they are now but still you needed at least 25% of the value in your account to short shares of a stock.  But options are a way to leverage changes in stock price by paying someone who does have stock to guarantee a buy or a sell at a particular price by a particular date.  And as a consequence, a market can then be made in those options.  But since these options expire at a certain date, on that last day if the option price is “out of the money” meaning that exercising the option by buying or selling the stock at that required price wouldn’t make the one exercising the option any money then it is worthless and the option itself has no trading value.  At that point the option trades for almost nothing.

So, every month when various options expired, we’d see the index options, the OEX options, that traded against a basket of blue-chip stocks reach down to the lowest levels they traded at like an eighth or a sixteenth before expiring worthless.  And every month like clockwork we would have a visit from the cabbie.  He was a Jamaican cabbie who would come in with his paycheck and put in a buy order for as many out of the money OEX put contracts as he could get for five hundred dollars.  Five hundred dollars was his paycheck that he would deposit in his account.  And every month he would call up just before the end of the trading day and ask what they were trading at.  And every month we would laughingly tell him that they were worth squat.

But on that Friday before the crash, he bought his options for pennies on the contract and then in the last hour the market went down a hundred points.  And the value of his puts went from virtually nothing to fifty thousand dollars.  And everyone on the trading floor was flabbergasted that the cabbie had pulled off a home run.  So, when he called up and asked for the quote on his OEX puts I respectfully told him.  He told me to sell them at the market price which I did.  But when I asked him if he wanted to have the proceeds sent to him, which I assumed he would, instead he said to buy as many contracts of out of the money OEX puts as I could get.  So, I bought him $50,000 of out of the money OEX puts.  And then the trading desk went wild laughing at this madman who had just flushed the biggest bonanza we had ever seen down the drain.  Because after a 100-point loss, the market would regain the value or at worst hold steady there for a month or two before it continued its way up.  Those puts would slowly erode before expiring worthless.

That night Camera Girl and I joined a friend from the office and his wife at an off-off-Broadway play about, of all things, a stock investor who loses his shirt and kills himself and finds himself in hell.  It was a pretty terrible play.  My friend and his wife were struggling actors who worked other careers to enable their avocation.  And after the play we laughed and talked about the cabbie and how foolish he was but I remember saying to my friend, “Yeah, but what if the market crashed on Monday and went down two hundred points, then he’d have the last laugh.”  And we all laughed at how unlikely that would be.

So, the market tanked Monday and went down five hundred points and the cabbie made some millions.  I didn’t get to speak to him because I was too busy with the fallout of the crash to care about anything but getting through the day.  First, I called my new employer and made sure I still had a new job to go to next week.  Then I slogged through thousands of calls to former investors who would have to liquidate their accounts to meet their margin calls.  It was a crap storm of mammoth proportions that taught me many valuable lessons about the cyclical nature of human endeavors.

But the story of the Jamaican cabbie was an object lesson that combining intelligence and a little luck can accomplish some remarkable results.  I hope that guy took that pot of gold and lived a very happy and useful life.  That kind of luck and courage deserves to be rewarded.

Now back to the Reddit boys.  Regardless of anything else this Gameplay “play” means, it has highlighted just how horrible Wall Street has become.  To relentlessly short a company out of existence is so emblematic of the bloodless inhuman nature of our financial system.  And now that the governmental and industrial powers-that-be are rushing to the defense of one of their fellow vultures it’s plain for all to see that there are two different systems available.  One for the corporate titans that are too big to fail and one for the rest of us who are meant to fail whenever it is necessary to squeeze a little more blood for the vampires to suck.  Maybe it’s a case of the vampires deciding Melvin Capital is just one more victim for their feeding frenzy.  I’m sure honor among thieves is pretty thin.  Or maybe it really is David vs Goliath.  Who knows?  But what is clear is that America is broken.  To the Masters of the Universe in Silicon Valley and on Wall Street we are cattle and slaughtering us is just part of the business cycle.  After all you can always get more cattle.

Addressing the Status of Less Crazy Leftists

photog Current Events , , ,

Recently during a phone call, a friend of mine asked my opinion on Glenn Greenwald.  For those unaware Greenwald was involved in the Snowden NSA leaks and has written on many aspects of the government overreach on privacy issues.  He has of late been very critical of the lock step solidarity by the tech giants and the Democratic/MSM complex to censor important news stories based on partisan viewpoint.

During the phone call I was pretty heatedly adamant that Glenn Greenwald wasn’t an ally, he was part of the Left and therefore my opponent.  But thinking about it for a while I figure it’s worthwhile clarifying exactly how I characterize guys like Greenwald and Taibbi.  In a short phrase I’d call them honest Leftists.  They believe in most of the things that the woke psychos believe in but they also believe in the Bill of Rights.  They don’t think it’s acceptable for the government to conspire with the media to railroad someone even if he’s a no-good conservative.  They probably don’t mind if Google algorithmically advantages the Left and disadvantages the Right but they don’t want it suppressing news outlets from broadcasting their stories across their platform.

And when I see a Matt Taibbi story calling MSNBC and the New York Times hypocrites for running stories that they know are false in order to advantage the Democrats, I praise him.  And when Greenwald is willing to walk away from the website that he founded because the owner forbids him to speak honestly about the Hunter Biden story then I praise him.  And what I am praising is his honesty and moral consistency.  And nowadays that’s a lot.  On left or right that’s a rare thing.  It’s an admirable trait and deserves praise.  It should be recognized and praised.

What it’s not is a reason to “reach across the aisle” and try to form an alliance.  That was the mistake that conservatives made with the neoconservatives.  Conservatives thought that because both sides wanted a strong defense against the Russians and free market capitalism that we could join forces and work a compromise that would work to both sides’ advantage.  Instead we got a series of wars in the Middle East and a globalist financial agenda while they adopted all of the social policies of the far Left.  That meant gay marriage, transgenderism, open borders, intersectionality in our schools and BLM in the streets.

And as long as all of these things were slowly assimilated into the culture without violence in the street and approved by the Supreme Court voted in by the Uniparty then the neocons would be fine with it.  And if you weren’t fine with it  then you were a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic bigot.  And the same slippery slope goes double for Matt Taibbi and Glenn Greenwald.  All they require is that all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed.  They are honest and they honestly want all the things that make life in America awful.  The only difference is that they’re willing to let you say what you think before they call you a racist homophobe.  The woke people want to silence you so you can’t even say it, or write it or even think it.  They need to be dealt with drastically.  They need to be put out of business.  Taibbi and Greenwald can be ignored.

Bottom line, I respect Taibbi and Greenwald.  But they are not my friends, allies or partners.  They are my enemies even if they are enemies whose honesty I respect.