The Kerry Kampaign

We come to the end of yet another year of media driven climate change hysteria. It's worth noting Chilton Williamson, Jr.'s entertaining, albeit snarky, ode to the predicted climate change apocalypse—a long-running mass hysteria event that set the stage for the even more extreme hysteria associated with the Covid pandemic:

Historically, plagues, earthquakes, meteors, eclipses and the warnings of religious prophets have been among the principal causes of mass irrational fright. Today, observations and measurements by scientists and the theories [and computer models] they construct from them, together with the prophesying of a Swedish teenager with the gaze of a prime candidate for the exorcist, are chiefly responsible for the panicked, directionless charge ...

Liberals [Progressives] have acquired in subsequent decades what amounts to an inchoate fear of nature and natural forces. Their phobia is one result of their reevaluation of technological progress and their lessened confidence in the ability of applied Western science to solve wide-ranging problems of a practical sort. Historically, liberalism and scientific thought have been inseparable allies in the effort to understand the laws of nature for the purpose of controlling, dominating, subduing and exploiting it for the material benefit of an ever wealthier and progressively freer human world.

Today, this loss of confidence in the scientific-political project of the past six centuries has combined with the neopaganism which personifies the earth as “Gaia,” a living, breathing, semi-sentient being that deserves a degree of human respect that begins to approach conceding a claim to “rights.”

... So it is that, at a moment in history when the human race should be preparing its defenses against the future [natural] warming of the planet — an empirically observable fact, whatever the cause — by building, for instance, dykes as the Dutch did in the three centuries between 1200 and 1500, we are planning instead to mobilize societies under authoritarian, and doubtless in the end dictatorial, regimes to prevent the unpreventable. Meanwhile, we are launching flights of bogus “experts” and bureaucrats on hundreds of pollutive private jets to gather at luxurious private resorts around the world for impotent and futile [John] Kerry Konferences. 

During Covid, we saw the tendency of progressive leaders "to mobilize societies under authoritarian" policies and mandates, going so far as to criminalize behaviors that these leaders deemed (without scientific basis, compelling evidence, or common sense) to be "harmful." Opposition to these petty dictators was censored and demonized. And worse, their policies and mandates did almost nothing to address the problem in real terms. The catastrophic damage to lives and livelihoods that resulted was at first ignored and then minimized by their propaganda media.

As time passes, it's likely that the same leaders or their ideologically similar descendants, will enact analogous authoritarian policies and mandates that deal with climate change. The policies and mandates they enact will do little if anything to address the problem but will do serious and possibly catastrophic damage to lives and livelihoods around the world.

Williamson addresses the most disheartening aspect of this when he writes:

Thankfully, an international effort to coordinate, direct and regulate the political, economic and social systems of the world’s 195 countries is precisely the sort of project to which fallen humanity is spectacularly unsuited, given its irredeemably rivalrous, competitive, devious, selfish and stubborn nature. It has been, as it remains, liberals’ conviction that a liberal education can remove these morally unpleasant but practically useful human qualities and replace them with the liberal idea of sweetness and light, an ambition that has only grown stronger the further it retreats ahead of them.

In fact, the present Kerry Kampaign to lessen and even to halt the progress of a warming atmosphere is doomed to fail, as the vast majority of the world well understands.

Deep down, anyone who can think critically understands this, and that includes at least some of the political leaders who are its strongest proponents. But there's enormous power in laws that control large populations and large sums of money, and climate change gives these leaders that power. What better excuse than one that "saves the planet."

UPDATE-1:

Because climate change is one of the most pervasive narratives pushed hard by the Left, their trained hamsters in the propaganda media (a.k.a. mainstream media) work every day to suppress opposing expert views. Chris Morrison comments:

The political fiction that humans cause most or all climate change and the claim that the science behind this notion is ‘settled’, has been dealt a savage blow by the publication of a ‘World Climate Declaration (WCD)’ signed by over 1,100 scientists and professionals. There is no climate emergency, say the authors, who are drawn from across the world and led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever. Climate science is said to have degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science.

The scale of the opposition to modern day ‘settled’ climate science is remarkable, given how difficult it is in academia to raise grants for any climate research that departs from the political orthodoxy. (A full list of the signatories is available here.) Another lead author of the declaration, Professor Richard Lindzen, has called the current climate narrative “absurd”, but acknowledged that trillions of dollars and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists currently says it is not absurd.

Particular ire in the WCD is reserved for climate models. To believe in the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. Climate models are now central to today’s climate discussion and the scientists see this as a problem. “We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models,” says the WCD. “In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science.”

There is an eerie similarity between the propaganda media's treatment of the WCD and their treatment of the Great Barrington Declaration (GBD)—a document written by public health experts who (in 2020) opposed government policies associated with the Covid pandemic. Both got little if any coverage when they were released and no critical analysis or investigation after the fact.

The GBD has now been proven to be correct in its criticism and its alternative policy approach. It's highly likely that the WCD will be proven correct as well. And that's what frightens the leftist journalists and climate alarmists. When Greta Thurberg—a humorless teenager with no scientific background—is your spokesperson, why even consider the opinion of 1,100 scientists and professionals. After all, according to Greta (and that eminent scientist, Al Gore), "the science is settled." That statement shows a profound ignorance of scientific investigation, but for the Left, ignorance is indeed bliss.

UPDATE-2 (12-30-2022):

This summary statement comes from an article that addresses the faux urgency the swirls around the "climate change crisis" provides a perfect conclusion to a year of climate hysteria:

There is growing realization that these emissions and temperature targets [set by the UN and other climate alarmists] have become detached from the issues of human well-being and development.  Yes, we need to reduce CO2 emissions over the course of the 21st century. However once we relax the faux urgency for eliminating CO2 emissions and the stringent time tables, we have time and space to envision new energy systems that can meet the diverse, growing needs of the 21st century.  This includes sufficient energy to help reduce our vulnerability to surprises from extreme weather and climate events.

As I mentioned in the body of this post, climate policies and Covid policies circa 2020 - 2022 have a lot in common. Both are authoritarian, both are NOT based on reliable or even generally repeatable science, both play on fear, both exhibit a hypocrisy that is breathtaking (i.e., the elites who suggest them do NOT abide by them), and both do NOT consider the collateral damage they have done and are doing to the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people worldwide.

The Twitter Files—COVID Edition

The first of what may be a number of Twitter Files related to COVID was released this morning. To the surprise of no one who has been following the catastrophic government response (and subsequent cover-up) to the pandemic from the beginning, David Zweig, the independent journalist who reports on the files, summarizes:

I suggest that you read Zweig's analysis in it's entirety.* The bottom line might best be summarized by this meme:

U.S. government agencies, working in conjunction with Twitter (and also other social media platforms), suppressed critical public health information. Their actions—censorship, dishonesty, and outright propaganda—were (and are) reprehensible in an open democracy and should be roundly condemned by all political ideologies.

Yet, many progressives, most of whom made up the legion of catastrophists who adopted the government narrative as their own, are oddly silent on much of this. 

In blue states during 2020 and 2021, authoritarian mandates were adopted and praised by those same progressives, who claimed that they were "following the science." Nothing could be further from the truth. 

They remained silent as epidemiologists and public health experts were censored; they condemned those who voiced concern about lock downs, school closures, and mask mandates that were unsupported by the data or the science. They cheered as young people who had little risk of death or serious illness were forced to become vaccinated under threat of job loss. 

And now, they continue their fantasy thinking, arguing that the Twitter Files, written in the words of the same government agencies they praised, are a "nothingburger" or "slanted reporting" or "biased." 

They seem unable to admit that they were wrong about the government's response to the pandemic, their virtue signalling reaction to it, and hard facts that now demonstrate that the positions they championed did far more harm than good.

The propaganda media (a.k.a. main stream media), an arm of the progressive movement, refuses to report on the Twitter Files, opting instead to continue its vicious and dishonest attacks on the messenger—Elon Musk. The deep state (e.g., the FBI) suggests that the Twitter Files are "disinformation" or "Conspiracy Theory"—the 'go to' smear made by those who have been proven to have done wrong. 

In my view, the most damaging aspect of all of this is a loss of trust. Despite all of the evidence to the contrary, progressives may continue to believe that big government has our best interests at heart; that it makes decisions based on the best and most complete data available; that it tells the truth. But tens of millions of citizens have now rejected that notion. And that's not good for the country.  

FOOTNOTE (added: 12-27-2022):

*  Zweig has published an article that describes his finding in The Free Press. It begins with a statement that many of us who doubted the veracity of the government claims and resultant policies (and condemned the propaganda media for being complicit) have believed since April, 2020:

I had always thought a primary job of the press was to be skeptical of power—especially the power of the government. But during the Covid-19 pandemic, I and so many others found that the legacy media had shown itself to largely operate as a messaging platform for our public health institutions. Those institutions operated in near total lockstep, in part by purging internal dissidents and discrediting outside experts.

Twitter became an essential alternative. It was a place where those with public health expertise and perspectives at odds with official policy could air their views—and where curious citizens could find such information. This often included other countries’ responses to Covid that differed dramatically from our own.

But it quickly became clear that Twitter also seemed to promote content that reinforced the establishment narrative, and to suppress views and even scientific evidence that ran to the contrary. 

The Cathederal

Weekly releases of The Twitter Tiles provide hard written proof (much of it in their own words) that the FBI and intelligence community worked regularly with Twitter 1.0 to suppress information (tweets, links, articles, position papers, newspapers) that did not conform to the approved government and deep state narrative. Soon, I suspect that new editions of The Twitter Files will show that the same operators and others in the public health community (think: Anthony Fauci and/or his minions) worked to suppress expert views that opposed government COVID policies (and the lies that enabled them), but that remains to be seen.

And yet, the trained hamsters in the propaganda media (a.k.a. main stream media) don't find this the least bit interesting or newsworthy because it happened largely under the watch of a Democrat president and was initiated by embedded deep state partisans who supported the Democrats. Imagine, for just a moment, the media uproar had a right-wing cabal within the FBI leadership and intelligence community, under the auspices of the hated Donald Trump, done the exact same thing and suppressed progressive voices. But that didn't happen.

The Twitter Files are a 'nothingburger,' the propaganda media claim. After all, a federal law enforcement agency and a variety of secret intelligence agencies getting involved in partisan politics is nothing really—as long as they're protecting our side. Anyhow ...

During the past week, Elon Musk suspended eight left-leaning members of the propaganda media (a.k.a. main stream media) for various offenses that supposedly violated Twitter 2.0's terms of service (BTW, I'm against these suspensions in principle, but can't help a feeling of schedenfreude at their occurrence). 

All of a sudden the propaganda media have become strong proponents of free speech. Their concern was nowhere to be found when conservative voices along with America's second oldest newspaper were banned from Twitter 1.0. But now that left-wing voices are given a timeout, the elites can't control their angst. Now, Musk's actions are akin to "fascism" and as far from a "nothingburger" as you can get. BTW, the offending hamsters were reinstated in less than a week.

Nonetheless, leftist politicians in the U.S. and Europe are threatening government action, and the intelligencia along with all the 'smartest people' in the media are in an uproar. Rod Dreher characterizes this poetically as "the cathederal turns Torquemada on Elon Musk."

And it's true. Elon has done something that is unforgivable. His heresy is that he has demonstrated just how embedded the partisan deep state is in the media (there were about 80 ex-FBI agents working for Twitter 1.0).  So much for the apolitical, competent FBI we see on vacuous TV shows. So much for catching bad guys. Elon has ruined that image, and the Torquemadas within the deep state are going to try to make him pay. The most frightening thing is, they just might succeed. 

Totschweigetaktik

This humble blog has been in existence since November, 2005—that's just over 17 years! During that time, I have often noted that the obvious bias of the main stream media toward a certain political ideology. That bias was evidenced whenever important politically sensitive stories arose. Major media print and video outlets, along with virtually all social media platforms, outright refused to report stories that might be damaging to their favorite political actors or narratives. Sure, they sometimes mentioned the story, but they uniformly showed an amazing lack of curiosity in their reporting, especially when in-depth investigation might have led to damaging revelations.

When this blog was launched in 2005, all of this was already occurring, but it was subtle. Today, the media's bias is in-your-face—so blatant that major stories are buried if they conflict with the approved narrative. The story of The Twitter Files, posted here and here, is a case study in the media's bias, demonstrating their attempt to bury a major news story that could hurt their preferred political party.

In essense, The Twitter Files document an attempt by arms of the federal government to influence the actions of social media companies in an effort to censor or otherwise mute opinions that the current government and their deep state functionaries didn't like. Ironically, it's everything that the media claimed would occur at the behest of the previous hated  administration, but did occur when driven by opponents of that administration. 

Miranda Devine comments:

If anything is an existential threat to democracy, it is Big Tech’s assault on free speech, in service to one side of politics and under the instruction of intelligence operatives determined to rig elections against recalcitrant Republicans. In fact, the lead agency tasked with election security, the FBI, is revealed as a prime culprit.

The best description for what The [New York] Times and WaPo are doing is “totschweigetaktik,” a great German word for “death by silence,” a tactic to kill ideas or news stories by ignoring them.

One example: The Hunter Biden Laptop scandal is a study in Washington corruption that is so broad and deep that it makes one wonder whether decisions on the Ukraine and China are being driven by actions that are in the best interests of the United States or something considerably more sinister. Maybe that isn't the case, but the august pillars of the media community haven't even investigated, or reported, or asked public questions. Instead they apply totschweigetaktik.

Another example: As the near-complete failure of most of the key pillars of COVID-related public health policy espoused by Anthony Fauci and his minions become impossible to ignore, we learn via The Twitter Files that the sainted Dr. Fauci and/or his people worked overtime to censor or shadow ban other medical experts who offered alternatives that we now know would have been more effective, less damaging to lives and livelihoods, less destructive to childrens' education and psyches, and certainly less costly. Instead social media censored and the main stream media applied totschweigetaktik.

But there's even more. There is compelling circumstantial evidence that Anthony Fauci was involved in approving gain-of-function research that may very well have lead to the weaponized version of COVID that escaped from the Wuhan lab in China. But Fauci was perceived as a key player in the defeat of a hated president in 2020, so the media decided he was unassailable—no serious investigation, or reporting, or public questions for key players. On the social media side, people were banned from the old Twitter for even suggesting that Fauci might have culpability. Again, social media censored and the main stream media applied totschweigetaktik.

The danger of  totschweigetaktiks that it allows one politicial party to act with impunity, and as we saw over the past few years, to enact authoritarian policies that are never questioned publicly. Totschweigetaktiks is dangerous, but it's also effective, so it will continue.

Going forward, I'll refer to the mainstream media by a different name. They've earned the name "propaganda media."  They are an embarrassment to a once-respected journalistic profession, and they should be ashamed. But of course, that would require a level of character, self-awareness, and humility that the members of the propaganda media simply do not have.

UPDATE-1 (12-13-2022):

Glen Greenwald is a left-leaning journalist who has slowly been red-pilled on media related issues as he watched the propaganda media reject journalistic ethics and professional responsibilities and become a PR function for the Democratic party. He writes:

The same worthless media liberals who never break stories, who never do any reporting, who just sit around mimicking each other every day - speaking only to and for one another in servitude to Dems - all write the same articles because they're all hive-minded empty herd animals. 

Over the years (e.g., here), I've often referred to those who reject hard evidence, cherry pick information to fit a specific narrative, and never, ever offer an opinion that dissents from their ideologically similar clones as "The Stepford Wives." I think that about covers it.

UPDATE-2 (12-13-2022):

And then there are these decade old tweets:

 

The Twitter Files—II

When Elon Musk released The Twitter Files—the first traunch of internal Twitter emails and other documents that clearly indicate what many of us have known for years—that Twitter elevated covert censorship of any view that opposed their preferred political narrative—the left-wing commentariat (including major main stream media sources) acted with laughable predictablilty. 

1.  Prior to the release, they demonized Twitter's new owner, Elon Musk, suggesting that he:

• had no right to fire senior executives and pare down twitter's employees (he had every right to do exactly that); 
• was a right-wing stooge (Musk voted for Joe Biden and is one of the strongest advocates for a clean energy future, hardly right-wing positions),
• would foster "hate speech" (e.g., inveterate liar, Rep Adam Schiff (D-CA) made up statistics with that claim—all false); 
• that he was a "threat to democracy" (their operative phrase indicating an amusing level of psychological projection)

2.  They demonized Matt Taibbi, who did actual journalism in reporting the contents of The Twitter Files, suggesting that he was "doing PR for a right-wing billionaire." Again, the projection here is comical. Major main stream media sources (including social media) have been doing PR for the Democratic party for more than a decade. With each passing year their efforts to suppress opposing views have become more blatant. In the past few years, they have become proponents of outright censorship, cloaking this authoritarian (and unconstitutional) position as an attempt to eliminate "hate speech" and "misinformation." 

3.  They worked hard to suppress any reporting on the content of the Twitter Files. In the first traunch, there is clear and irrefutable evidence (confirmed by Twitter employees themselves) that Twitter and likely other social media sources) suppressed the Hunter Biden laptop scandal in October, 2020. Frankly, no one really cares that Hunter Biden was a drug addict or that his choice of lifestyle was, well, questionable. But the laptop files indicate that Hunter Biden was a bag man for the Biden family; that Hunter essentially was highly compensated by some unsavory characters for providing access to the then-VP of the United States; that family members were enriched by that access with monies offered from countries including China, and that Joe Biden was involved and had knowledge (albeit with plausible deniability) of what was going on.

4.  They worked very hard to convince all Democrats that all of this was a "nothingburger." Just more "dissinformation." Gullible members of Biden's party accepted that claim without blinking an eye. In essence, their position is the evidence is tainted or non-existent even when described in contemporaneous internal Twitter docs written by Twitter employees.

Now, the second Traunch of The Twitter Files has been reported by Bari Weiss (read the whole thread). In it, she provides evidence that secret technical groups within the old Twitter (headed by senior executives) worked to suppress and/or downgrade any trending tweets that conflicted with the narrative du jour. Others outright banned opposing voices.

At the time, Twitter execs denied doing this (as they were doing it). Particularly egregious, was the censorship of medical experts who questioned the government's COVID policies, among them Stanford’s Dr. Jay Bhattacharya (see here, here and here for my early posts on his work).

By suppressing debate of what have now been proven to be ineffective and damaging government policies enacted during the pandemic, Twitter's senior execs and the engineers who did their bidding were complicit in the damage to lives and livelihoods that occurred because Twitter and other social media made it difficult or impossible to question the efficacy of lock downs, school closures, mask and vaccine mandates.

Those who celebrate censorship of opposing viewpoints (note: Dr. Bhattacharya's concerns were neither "hate speech" nor "misinformation") will continue their unhinged demonization of the new Twitter under Musk and the journalists who are reporting the dangerous and truly unAmerican actions of the old Twitter. They will shout "nothingburger" until they are hoarse. But the truth is slowly coming out, just as it did with the COVID debacle or the Hunter Biden laptop. The only real question is whether it will matter.

The Twitter Files

Sometimes I wonder whether it's better to simply believe and accept every narrative that is widely promulgated by left-leaning media, entertainment, and institutions. Life would be easier if we simply accepted the old saw that states: 

We know they're lying; they know we know they're lying; we know they know we know they're lying, but they lie anyway, with impunity and immunity from any blame or responsibility.

Certainly, not every narrative is a lie, but many are based on half-truths while others are flat-out dishonest. And yet, when the truth comes out, when hard irrefutable evidence (often written in the words of those who push the narratives) is published, they continue to obfuscate and lie. When the evidence is incontestable, they try to change the subject by attacking the messenger or adding still another layer of conspiracy accusations on top of the bogus claims they originally made. And when all of that fails, their trained hamsters in the media simply disregard the story, essentially censoring it by omission. All of this has become so commonplace, it's almost laughable, and it works. And that's why ... maybe ... we should just throw up our hands and accept the slow erosion of our freedoms. Nope.

For a number of years, those of us who argued that most, if not all social media had become a tool of one political party were labeled as "conspiracy theorists." The heads of every major social media platform told us censorship wasn't happening; that they following their terms of service without regard to ideology; that they never allowed the government or any political party to influence their decision making.

We knew they were lying. They knew we knew they were lying. But they lied anyway, assuming, correctly at the time, that the truth would remain buried.

Until Elon Musk acquired Twitter and released The Twitter Files.

The Twitter Files story is evolving daily. Matt Taibbi provides an up-to-date summary.

Using internal Twitter documents released by Elon Musk, along with actual emails written by operatives within the federal government, the Biden election campaign, and later the Biden administration, it's now clear that Twitter became a tool of the Democratic party as it worked to suppress a major influence peddling scandal involving Joe Biden and his son in the month prior to the 2020 election. It's very likely that similar things happened on other social media platforms.

One would think that a government dictating who they wanted censored or banned from social media might be considered a "threat to democracy." As Harry Truman said: “Once a government commits to the principle of silencing opposition, it has only one way to go, and that’s down the path of increasingly repressive measures until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens.” Remember, President Truman was a member of the political party that has in recent years tried hard to use social media to silence its opposition.

The Twitter Files represent a threat to the existing political power structure, to the institutions that comprise the deep state, and to the media that once used Twitter as their tool and playground. For that reason, the fury of these entities has been unleashed against anyone who tries to make people aware of the Twitter File contents.

If the pro-censorship forces succeed, we all will lose.

Force Field

It appears that it's possible to create a 'force field' that can protect (or at least postpone) even the most unscrupulous operators from indictment and imprisonment. The force field is created when the unscrupulous operator has one or more of the following characteristics: (1) they belong to an appropiate intersectional group; (2) they adopt language that causes our moral betters to swoon at their stated intent (no matter that their language and their actions have no connection to one another); (3) they are praised by all the best media with puff pieces that tout their brilliance, their intent to "change the world," and their supposed charitable selflessness; (4) they become major political donors to the political party favored by main stream media but also hedge by donating to movers and shakers in the opposition party.

The story of the now infamous FTX and it's founder, Sam Bankman-Freid (SBF) is an example of just how easy it is to create the force field. I made an attempt to explain the FTX saga in my first post on the subject. Yet, time has passed and it seems that the force field is holding. 

David Z. Morris discusses the latest developments:

In the weeks since Sam Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency empire was revealed to be a house of lies, mainstream news organizations and commentators have often failed to give their readers a straightforward assessment of exactly what happened. August institutions including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have uncovered many key facts about the scandal, but they have also repeatedly seemed to downplay the facts in ways that soft-pedaled Bankman-Fried’s intent and culpability.

It is now clear that what happened at the FTX crypto exchange and the hedge fund Alameda Research involved a variety of conscious and intentional fraud intended to steal money from both users and investors. That’s why a recent New York Times interview was widely derided for seeming to frame FTX’s collapse as the result of mismanagement rather than malfeasance. A Wall Street Journal article bemoaned the loss of charitable donations from FTX, arguably propping up Bankman-Fried’s strategic philanthropic pose. Vox co-founder Matthew Yglesias, court chronicler of the neoliberal status quo, seemed to whitewash his own entanglements by crediting Bankman-Fried’s money with helping Democrats in the 2020 elections – sidestepping the likelihood that the money was effectively embezzled.

Perhaps most perniciously, many outlets have described what happened to FTX as a “bank run” or a “run on deposits,” while Bankman-Fried has repeatedly insisted the company was simply overleveraged and disorganized. Both of these attempts to frame the fallout obfuscate the core issue: the misuse of customer funds.

Banks can be hit by “bank runs” because they are explicitly in the business of lending customer funds out to generate returns. They can experience a short-term cash crunch if everyone withdraws at the same time, without there being any long-term problem.

But FTX and other crypto exchanges are not banks. They do not (or should not) do bank-style lending, so even a very acute surge of withdrawals should not create a liquidity strain. FTX had specifically promised customers it would never lend out or otherwise use the crypto they entrusted to the exchange. 

In reality, the funds were sent to the intimately linked trading firm Alameda Research, where they were, it seems, simply gambled away. This is, in the simplest terms, theft at a nearly unprecedented scale. While the total losses have yet to be quantified, up to one million customers could be impacted, according to a bankruptcy document. 

Morris goes on to describe the "special exemption" offered to SBF's girlfriend's hedge fund, Alemeda Reseach, the large personal loans offered to FTX's executives, bailouts to other struggling crypto lenders, the secretive purchase of a small U.S. bank, and the on-going attempts by a wide array of mainstream media sources to soften their reporting on FTX. Read the whole thing.

It has become increasingly clear that FTX and the people who were involved in running it were part of a grift. Hundreds of thousands on otherwise innocent (and unsophisticated) investors have been screwed, along with dozens of sophisticated investors who (amazingly) refused to do necessary due diligence and lost hundreds of millions as a consequence. The principals of FTX and Alemeda should be indicted, and if convicted, they should be imprisoned.

We have just lived through an era in which the FBI does early morning armed raids to arrest supposed wrong-doers for relatively minor offenses, leading them out to waiting media in handcuffs. We have seen the FBI raid an ex-president's residence on the suspicion of a crime, confiscating hundreds of documents and trumpeting the likelihood on an on-going criminal investigation. Yet for SBF, the DoJ and FBI are strangely passive. 

The force field holds. The question—knowing what we now know—is why?