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A citizen and the government have a friendly chat about elections.
Written by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton; starring Austin Bragg and Heaton; produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg; cameras by Meredith and Austin Bragg, and Ben Gaskell.
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It’s common to view President Donald Trump’s first term as a tragedy, a national meltdown in which democracy itself is under siege from big tech, foreign governments, and other shadowy actors.
But just as often, it has been a vehicle for farce—and few episodes encapsulate the era’s absurdity and panicky self-regard more than the supposed scandal surrounding social media data mining firm Cambridge Analytica.
The details surrounding the firm’s political involvement are convoluted and multitudinous, but the essence of the allegation was that the firm, which worked under various guises in both the United States and in Britain, was a shadowy operation that used improperly harvested social media data to create psychographic voter profiles that may have helped Trump win the 2016 election, swung the Brexit vote toward British independence, and given foreign rivals (especially Russia) a potent tool for sowing chaos in the Democratic Party via Facebook. The story generated massive amounts of news coverage from major organs of the mainstream press, which in turn resulted in congressional hearings and high-profile government inquiries in both the U.S. and the U.K.
The story, in other words, was a perfect storm of Trump-era panics and paranoias. And it was almost entirely hokum.
For an idea of the sort of media and politics firestorm that Cambridge Analytica’s work produced, it’s worth looking back to early 2018, when The New York Times reported that the company had engaged in a nefarious bit of business: After receiving some $15 million from Robert Mercer, a wealthy conservative donor who backed organizations such as Breitbart News, the company “wooed [Mercer’s] political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.”
To do that, it needed massive amounts of data. And so, the story went, it turned to Facebook. Cambridge Analytica “harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission,” by paying for a data trove from an independent researcher. The result, the Times reported, was “one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history.”
The company had vague links to the Russian oil business, and the Facebook user data in question had been obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, an academic who, The Guardian found, had “unreported ties to a Russian university.” In a rhetorical flourish typical of the sort of coverage Cambridge Analytica sparked, the Guardian‘s report described the voter profiles as a “project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon” and noted that revelations of Kogan’s Russia ties came “at a time of intense US scrutiny of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.”
All of this carried ominous implications not just for Cambridge Analytica, but for Facebook, the source of the user data that allowed the company to create the voter-profiling tool. A New York Times item from March 2018 carried the headline, “Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets off Storms on Two Continents.” The Massachusetts attorney general launched an investigation into the social media giant. Lawmakers such as Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) called for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before Congress. In Britain, members of Parliament made similar calls.
Wanton theft and chilling privacy invasion require immediate Congressional hearings – and action. https://t.co/SY8svzAS8M
— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) March 18, 2018
All the while, the threat of Russian interference into American elections was in the air, even if the direct connections remained murky. As the Times reported: “The two top Congressional Democrats leading inquiries into Russian interference in the 2016 election—Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Representative Adam Schiff of California—called for investigations of the Facebook data leak. ‘This raises serious questions about the level of detail that Cambridge Analytica knew about users,’ said Mr. Schiff, who is the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee.”
The calls for political oversight, the Times noted, followed multiple reports that the company “had used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior” and noted that “the firm’s so-called psychographic modeling underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016,” even if some were skeptical of its efficacy.
The media had uncovered a juicy scandal at the intersection of politics and social media. And Washington and London had taken notice.
Eventually, Zuckerberg testified before a Senate committee, his first appearance before Congress. But instead of a serious inquiry, it turned out more like a circus. Over the course of the hearing, it became clear that most of the senators grilling the tech CEO had no idea how Facebook—or, for that matter, much of the internet—worked at all. They asked clueless questions that could have been answered with a Google search and mostly served to demonstrate how little they understood about the privacy practices they wanted to regulate. But as Reason‘s Robby Soave noted at the time, that didn’t stop at least one from taking the opportunity to attempt to connect Facebook to Russian propaganda efforts, by demanding that Zuckerberg account for context-free print-outs of what appeared to be images taken from Facebook.
Yet it hardly mattered that the legislators who’d gathered to demand answers from Zuckerberg had no idea what they were talking about: They were determined to bring Facebook under their control. “If Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix their privacy invasions, then we are going to have to,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D–Fla.) said at the time. “We, the Congress.”
Zuckerberg has since become a fixture in Washington; he made his fifth appearance last week. These appearances have become ritualized performances for both the CEOs and the lawmakers who question them, forums for prepared speeches with conclusions baked in. No one learns much from these faux public trials, but the march to regulation continues apace, often abetted by Facebook, which has taken to saying that some regulation might be necessary, as long as the company gets to help write the rules. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which The New York Times once described as having “thrust Facebook into its biggest crisis ever,” had evolved into an all-encompassing, never-ending entanglement amongst America’s axis of cultural and political power: big tech, big media, and big government.
Yet just a few weeks before Zuckerberg’s latest, we actually did learn something from a government investigation into the intersection of politics and technology. In early October, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), a government body that oversees data privacy, finished a yearslong review of the incident that started it all: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. U.K. data privacy laws tend to be more strict than in the U.S., and the ICO has the power to penalize companies and otherwise compel them to take action; it is not inherently sympathetic to corporate interests.
And yet what it found was that the Cambridge Analytica scandal, such that it was, had been blown wildly out of proportion, and had mostly been the result of misunderstandings and hype.
The dreaded psychographic models they built relied on commonly used, off-the-shelf analytical tools that company leadership had talked up in order to make them sound more powerful than they were. Aside from some minor inquiries, the ICO found no evidence that Cambridge Analytica was involved in the Brexit campaign, nor did they find significant evidence of Russian involvement. The company did maintain lax data security in some instances, with some staffers keeping information in their personal Gmail accounts—although often it was shared through more secure methods as well.
And the Facebook data trove at the heart of the controversy was largely deleted in 2016 after Facebook requested that Cambridge Analytica do so. The data itself was not directly used in its 2016 election campaign efforts, although it may have indirectly informed some of the company’s models.
The ICO found the company guilty of no illegal behavior. Instead, the report found that Cambridge Analytica was primarily guilty of hype—of overselling its analytical capabilities and the value of its psychographic models and their ability to shape political campaigns. The company’s leader, Alexander Nix, had been suspended in 2018 after an undercover video caught him suggesting that bribery and seduction could be used to influence foreign elections; he’d called Cambridge Analytica’s voter models their “secret sauce.” But as the Financial Times points out, the depth and detail of the company’s vaunted voter profiles had been heavily exaggerated. And the company’s employees knew what they were selling was bunk: As the ICO report dryly notes, “There appeared to be concern internally about the external messaging when set against the reality of their processing.”
Cambridge Analytica wasn’t a sinister new way to use social media as mind control. It wasn’t a Russian intelligence front group. It wasn’t a powerful tool for subverting democracy. It was a scam, run by a shady frontman with a penchant for promotional self-aggrandizement. And it fooled just about everyone, from the right-wing power brokers who funded it to the journalists who covered it to the bumbling politicians who used the scandal as an excuse to wage a political prosecution of some of the nation’s largest and most successful companies.
The Cambridge Analytica story is, at heart, a story of confusion and self-delusion, in which media paranoia and political misunderstandings intersect with right-wing pomposity and empty tech-world hype and hubris.
The real story wasn’t what happened with the company’s vaunted models; it was what so many influential figures on every side of the issue thought was happening that wasn’t. What many viewed as apocalyptic was in fact ordinary—a confluence of vanities, paranoias, and misunderstandings rather than an elaborate master plan. And if the latest big tech hearing is any indication, these sorts of misunderstandings are going to keep happening, regardless of how the election turns out.
The Cambridge Analytica “scandal,” then, is a synecdoche for so much of the Trump era, and the way that mostly unfounded anxieties about elections, technology, and secretive corporate plots have spread across the corridors of American power and cultural influence. In the end, Cambridge Analytica’s systems didn’t amount to much. They didn’t represent what so many powerful people thought they represented. And the tragedy wasn’t what so many thought it was; it was what we failed to learn, and the mistakes we are likely to keep repeating as a result.
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A citizen and the government have a friendly chat about elections.
Written by Austin Bragg, Meredith Bragg, and Andrew Heaton; starring Austin Bragg and Heaton; produced by Meredith and Austin Bragg; cameras by Meredith and Austin Bragg, and Ben Gaskell.
from Latest – Reason.com https://ift.tt/3mT9VX7
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UK Raises Terror Alert Level To “Severe”, Meaning Attack “Highly Likely”
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/03/2020 – 11:50
Days after imposing a one-month (at a minimum) lockdown, the UK is raising its terror alert level to “severe” (from “substantial”), meaning an attack is “highly likely” following Monday’s attack in Vienna, and the attacks last month across France.
Another suspect in last night’s attack was arrested in Linz, the capital of Upper Austria, just this morning, and Austrian officials have been suspiciously mum on the number of assailants who managed to escape the scene last night (one attacker was killed, at least 2 have been arrested). The death toll in yesterday’s shooting has climbed to 4.
Three people were killed in a knife attack in Nice, one of several attacks that unfolded last month, which prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to declare a crackdown on Islamic terror.
Assessments of threat levels are taken by the Joint Terrorism Analysis Center, which is part of MI5. They include:
To be sure, Wales’ two-week firebreak lockdown is nearing its end, but England’s lockdown is just beginning. People are already terrified enough by the resurgence of the coronavirus across the continent. The British terror level was finally lowered to substantial in November 2019 from severe for the first time in 5 years. Severe is the second-highest level, with only “critical” above it.
Though an attack is now deemed “likely”, the alert doesn’t offer any advice other than for Britons to remain ‘alert’.
Home Secretary Priti Patel described the move as a “precautionary measure” and said it was “not based on any specific threat”.
“The public should continue to remain vigilant and report any suspicious activity to the police,” she said.
But the alert is bound to cast a distinctly Orwellian pall over life in the UK, as fear, surveillance, violence and death become the backdrop to ordinary life.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/34QRfRE Tyler Durden
The year 63 BC was an election year in ancient Rome, and an ambitious 37-year old was locked in a heated race for one of Rome’s most powerful offices: pontifex maximus.
The young politician, of course, was Julius Caesar. And he ran a cutthroat campaign against his opponents– two seasoned senators, both of whom Caesar publicly accused of corruption.
Caesar reputedly spent so much money on his campaign that, on election morning, he told his mother that he would either win, or he would have to leave Rome forever to flee his angry creditors.
The Romans didn’t invent elections; there’s evidence of voting that goes back nearly 1,000 years before Rome, to civilizations in ancient India and Mesopotamia.
And the Greeks, of course, developed the concept of democratic elections more than any other ancient culture.
(The Greeks even held ‘negative elections’ where they would vote on which former politicians should be banished for corruption and incompetence.)
But the Romans elevated elections to a full blown commercial enterprise. They were willing to spend big to win– a practice that continues to this day.
The Center for Responsive Politics recently estimated that the 2020 US Presidential election will cost a record $6.6 billion. That’s nearly THREE TIMES as much as the $2.3 billion spent in the 2016 campaign.
It’s not just the Presidency either. Even a ‘lowly’ Congressional seat costs big money these days, with a whopping $7.25 billion spent in the 2020 election. That’s double the amount from 10 years ago.
But the real cost of elections goes far beyond dollars and cents.
The biggest example is the emotional cost; I’m not sure many of us have ever witnessed such drama to the extent that has unfolded in this election.
The constant shouting and screaming, the media and celebrity shrieking, the Twitter rage… it never stops.
Countless people get behind their candidates as if their lives depend on it, with utter devotion and euphoria for their chosen one, and unmitigated hatred for the opposing side.
Things have become so crazy that couples even break up over politics.
A recent study by Wakefield Research found that 11% of couples in the United States have split up over political differences. And among Millennials, that number rises to 22%.
I find it remarkable that we allow extreme emotions for politicians (who we’ll most likely never meet) to cause a breakdown in relationships with some of the actual people who are in our daily lives.
These extreme emotions will be felt even more acutely today, and in the coming days (or weeks) as the results are announced.
Grown adults are going to break down and cry as if their dog just died. Others will hoot and cheer like they’ve just won the lottery.
And this happens every time. Every few years it’s the same cycle… the same drama. We’re told every single time that ‘this is the most important election of our lives.’
Naturally there’s an entire industry counting on us being emotional. The media sells more ads, the politicians get more votes. Billions of dollars at stake depend on us being in a total frenzy.
Look, I’m not being dismissive about elections. Obviously the people who come to power can and do have enormous influence on our lives.
They can wreck havoc and destruction, even when they’re well-meaning.
They can burden future generations with ever-increasing debts, debase the currency, regulate entrepreneurs out of business, embolden extremists, tax people’s prosperity away, and all sorts of other terrible things.
So, yes, to a degree, it’s always important.
But in the midst of all this drama is a central theme that’s almost always lost.
People tend to forget that WE have a much bigger impact on our own lives than any politicians or government.
Elections deceive us into pinning all the hopes and dreams for our future on some political candidate, like he or she is going to walk across the water and sprinkle prosperity everywhere.
But this is an absurd fantasy.
What we do matters far more– the plans we make, the actions we take, the things we do to improve our own lives.
This is like voting for yourself. And we have the opportunity to do this every single day.
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It’s common to view President Donald Trump’s first term as a tragedy, a national meltdown in which democracy itself is under siege from big tech, foreign governments, and other shadowy actors.
But just as often, it has been a vehicle for farce—and few episodes encapsulate the era’s absurdity and panicky self-regard more than the supposed scandal surrounding social media data mining firm Cambridge Analytica.
The details surrounding the firm’s political involvement are convoluted and multitudinous, but the essence of the allegation was that the firm, which worked under various guises in both the United States and in Britain, was a shadowy operation that used improperly harvested social media data to create psychographic voter profiles that may have helped Trump win the 2016 election, swung the Brexit vote toward British independence, and given foreign rivals (especially Russia) a potent tool for sowing chaos in the Democratic Party via Facebook. The story generated massive amounts of news coverage from major organs of the mainstream press, which in turn resulted in congressional hearings and high-profile government inquiries in both the U.S. and the U.K.
The story, in other words, was a perfect storm of Trump-era panics and paranoias. And it was almost entirely hokum.
For an idea of the sort of media and politics firestorm that Cambridge Analytica’s work produced, it’s worth looking back to early 2018, when The New York Times reported that the company had engaged in a nefarious bit of business: After receiving some $15 million from Robert Mercer, a wealthy conservative donor who backed organizations such as Breitbart News, the company “wooed [Mercer’s] political adviser, Stephen K. Bannon, with the promise of tools that could identify the personalities of American voters and influence their behavior.”
To do that, it needed massive amounts of data. And so, the story went, it turned to Facebook. Cambridge Analytica “harvested private information from the Facebook profiles of more than 50 million users without their permission,” by paying for a data trove from an independent researcher. The result, the Times reported, was “one of the largest data leaks in the social network’s history.”
The company had vague links to the Russian oil business, and the Facebook user data in question had been obtained from Aleksandr Kogan, an academic who, The Guardian found, had “unreported ties to a Russian university.” In a rhetorical flourish typical of the sort of coverage Cambridge Analytica sparked, the Guardian‘s report described the voter profiles as a “project to turn tens of millions of Facebook profiles into a unique political weapon” and noted that revelations of Kogan’s Russia ties came “at a time of intense US scrutiny of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential election.”
All of this carried ominous implications not just for Cambridge Analytica, but for Facebook, the source of the user data that allowed the company to create the voter-profiling tool. A New York Times item from March 2018 carried the headline, “Facebook’s Role in Data Misuse Sets off Storms on Two Continents.” The Massachusetts attorney general launched an investigation into the social media giant. Lawmakers such as Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D–Conn.) called for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to appear before Congress. In Britain, members of Parliament made similar calls.
Wanton theft and chilling privacy invasion require immediate Congressional hearings – and action. https://t.co/SY8svzAS8M
— Richard Blumenthal (@SenBlumenthal) March 18, 2018
All the while, the threat of Russian interference into American elections was in the air, even if the direct connections remained murky. As the Times reported: “The two top Congressional Democrats leading inquiries into Russian interference in the 2016 election—Senator Mark Warner of Virginia and Representative Adam Schiff of California—called for investigations of the Facebook data leak. ‘This raises serious questions about the level of detail that Cambridge Analytica knew about users,’ said Mr. Schiff, who is the ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee.”
The calls for political oversight, the Times noted, followed multiple reports that the company “had used the Facebook data to develop methods that it claimed could identify the personalities of individual American voters and influence their behavior” and noted that “the firm’s so-called psychographic modeling underpinned its work for the Trump campaign in 2016,” even if some were skeptical of its efficacy.
The media had uncovered a juicy scandal at the intersection of politics and social media. And Washington and London had taken notice.
Eventually, Zuckerberg testified before a Senate committee, his first appearance before Congress. But instead of a serious inquiry, it turned out more like a circus. Over the course of the hearing, it became clear that most of the senators grilling the tech CEO had no idea how Facebook—or, for that matter, much of the internet—worked at all. They asked clueless questions that could have been answered with a Google search and mostly served to demonstrate how little they understood about the privacy practices they wanted to regulate. But as Reason‘s Robby Soave noted at the time, that didn’t stop at least one from taking the opportunity to attempt to connect Facebook to Russian propaganda efforts, by demanding that Zuckerberg account for context-free print-outs of what appeared to be images taken from Facebook.
Yet it hardly mattered that the legislators who’d gathered to demand answers from Zuckerberg had no idea what they were talking about: They were determined to bring Facebook under their control. “If Facebook and other online companies will not or cannot fix their privacy invasions, then we are going to have to,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D–Fla.) said at the time. “We, the Congress.”
Zuckerberg has since become a fixture in Washington; he made his fifth appearance last week. These appearances have become ritualized performances for both the CEOs and the lawmakers who question them, forums for prepared speeches with conclusions baked in. No one learns much from these faux public trials, but the march to regulation continues apace, often abetted by Facebook, which has taken to saying that some regulation might be necessary, as long as the company gets to help write the rules. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which The New York Times once described as having “thrust Facebook into its biggest crisis ever,” had evolved into an all-encompassing, never-ending entanglement amongst America’s axis of cultural and political power: big tech, big media, and big government.
Yet just a few weeks before Zuckerberg’s latest, we actually did learn something from a government investigation into the intersection of politics and technology. In early October, the U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), a government body that oversees data privacy, finished a yearslong review of the incident that started it all: the Cambridge Analytica scandal. U.K. data privacy laws tend to be more strict than in the U.S., and the ICO has the power to penalize companies and otherwise compel them to take action; it is not inherently sympathetic to corporate interests.
And yet what it found was that the Cambridge Analytica scandal, such that it was, had been blown wildly out of proportion, and had mostly been the result of misunderstandings and hype.
The dreaded psychographic models they built relied on commonly used, off-the-shelf analytical tools that company leadership had talked up in order to make them sound more powerful than they were. Aside from some minor inquiries, the ICO found no evidence that Cambridge Analytica was involved in the Brexit campaign, nor did they find significant evidence of Russian involvement. The company did maintain lax data security in some instances, with some staffers keeping information in their personal Gmail accounts—although often it was shared through more secure methods as well.
And the Facebook data trove at the heart of the controversy was largely deleted in 2016 after Facebook requested that Cambridge Analytica do so. The data itself was not directly used in its 2016 election campaign efforts, although it may have indirectly informed some of the company’s models.
The ICO found the company guilty of no illegal behavior. Instead, the report found that Cambridge Analytica was primarily guilty of hype—of overselling its analytical capabilities and the value of its psychographic models and their ability to shape political campaigns. The company’s leader, Alexander Nix, had been suspended in 2018 after an undercover video caught him suggesting that bribery and seduction could be used to influence foreign elections; he’d called Cambridge Analytica’s voter models their “secret sauce.” But as the Financial Times points out, the depth and detail of the company’s vaunted voter profiles had been heavily exaggerated. And the company’s employees knew what they were selling was bunk: As the ICO report dryly notes, “There appeared to be concern internally about the external messaging when set against the reality of their processing.”
Cambridge Analytica wasn’t a sinister new way to use social media as mind control. It wasn’t a Russian intelligence front group. It wasn’t a powerful tool for subverting democracy. It was a scam, run by a shady frontman with a penchant for promotional self-aggrandizement. And it fooled just about everyone, from the right-wing power brokers who funded it to the journalists who covered it to the bumbling politicians who used the scandal as an excuse to wage a political prosecution of some of the nation’s largest and most successful companies.
The Cambridge Analytica story is, at heart, a story of confusion and self-delusion, in which media paranoia and political misunderstandings intersect with right-wing pomposity and empty tech-world hype and hubris.
The real story wasn’t what happened with the company’s vaunted models; it was what so many influential figures on every side of the issue thought was happening that wasn’t. What many viewed as apocalyptic was in fact ordinary—a confluence of vanities, paranoias, and misunderstandings rather than an elaborate master plan. And if the latest big tech hearing is any indication, these sorts of misunderstandings are going to keep happening, regardless of how the election turns out.
The Cambridge Analytica “scandal,” then, is a synecdoche for so much of the Trump era, and the way that mostly unfounded anxieties about elections, technology, and secretive corporate plots have spread across the corridors of American power and cultural influence. In the end, Cambridge Analytica’s systems didn’t amount to much. They didn’t represent what so many powerful people thought they represented. And the tragedy wasn’t what so many thought it was; it was what we failed to learn, and the mistakes we are likely to keep repeating as a result.
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The Federalist Society’s yearly National Lawyers Convention will be all online this year, and will be entirely free (except there’ll be a modest fee for lawyers who want Continuing Legal Education credit). You can register here, see the overview agenda here, and see the details on the panels and the panelists here. (I’ll blog briefly about a few particular panels in coming days.) Speakers will include Justice Samuel Alito, the retired D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown, and Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia.
As is the norm for Federalist Society conferences, the panels include many liberals and other non-Federalists, including:
The panel topics include:
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JPM Stunned After Kolanovic Accuses Co-Workers Of Political Bias, Slams Biden Policies
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/03/2020 – 11:37
On more than one occasion in the past year, sparks flew within JPMorgan’s trading floor when the egos opinions of the bank’s (countless) strategists clashed with each other, most recently at the end of September when as we reported “A Storm Erupts At JPMorgan” when quant disagree with quant over the impact of month-end rebalancing. Those storms however pass quickly because, after all, it’s just opinions, not political views or ideological bias that is at stake.
That changed this morning when one of the most iconic JPMorgan strategists, the man who this website first thrust into the public eye (as Bloomberg admitted in 2015), stunned his co-workers when i) he accused them of political bias and ii) slammed Biden’s policies – an unheard of event at the traditionally democratic bank.
According to Bloomberg, during a broad internal chat with more than 250 sales, trading and research workers, Marko Kolanovic, perhaps the bank’s most famous quant and strategist, “accused his colleagues of allowing political bias to influence their market research.”
“Wait so our commodity guys base their forecast based on our FX guys’ forecast, which based forecast based on our economist forecast, who bases his forecast of party preference,” Kolanovic quipped, and incidentally he was absolutely right, because the kind of narrative “goalseeking” that finally caused Marko to snap is the same bullshit that banks have subjected their clients to for the past 6 months, first claiming Trump is good for stocks, then Biden, the a Blue Wave, then a Red Wave, flip-flopping daily to make each and every outcome bullish, just to prevent clients from selling stocks.
Marko reportedly erupted when one of the bank’s derivatives sales traders had just posted a summary of the commodities strategists’ views on how a win by former Vice President Joe Biden would affect the market, saying there would be “very little impact” on U.S. oil production, which of course is utter garbage, and the Croatian strategist promptly made it clear:
“Lol. Its a joke — with Biden you remove Iran sanctions” Kolanovic responded, but it was his slam of Biden next that may have cost Kolanovic his job under the very pro-Biden Jamie Dimon. According to Marko, under Biden the “economy slows down under pressure of massive taxes, and Covid is treated with lockdowns.” adding that “Its a joke. Should be the opposite of that.”
One worker said the bank’s trading floor fell silent after Kolanovic’s remarks in the chat.
Why? Because by telling the truth, Kolanovic may have just “canceled” his job courtesy of the tolerant left which is always willing to listen to constructive criticism but only as long said criticism doesn’t actually touch on any of the left’s fanatical beliefs.
As Bloomberg adds, the chat group which is intended for sharing insight on the derivatives market, “has been a flashpoint for workers in the past when participants made comments about race and politics. One individual making inappropriate remarks was chided by a more senior participant in the chat, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/3l6KJvu Tyler Durden
The Federalist Society’s yearly National Lawyers Convention will be all online this year, and will be entirely free (except there’ll be a modest fee for lawyers who want Continuing Legal Education credit). You can register here, see the overview agenda here, and see the details on the panels and the panelists here. (I’ll blog briefly about a few particular panels in coming days.) Speakers will include Justice Samuel Alito, the retired D.C. Circuit Judge Janice Rogers Brown, and Secretary of Labor Eugene Scalia.
As is the norm for Federalist Society conferences, the panels include many liberals and other non-Federalists, including:
The panel topics include:
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Thousands Of Witches Are Casting “Binding Spells” On Donald Trump To Lose The Election
Tyler Durden
Tue, 11/03/2020 – 11:15
Who knew Trump Derangement Syndrome had made its way all the way to the supernatural realm?
In a move we are not quite sure is going to necessarily translate to the voting booth, thousands of delusional adult “witches” are apparently planning to cast a “binding spell” on Donald Trump heading into the election to try and get him to lose the election.
Heading into Halloween, the witches believed that the two full moons during the month of October would give them “extra magical powers” to exert influence over the election, according to The Sun.
The witches had planned on several “binding” events around Halloween to try and usher Joe Biden into the White House. They have mobilized their efforts online, using hashtags like #BindTrump and #MagicResistance.
The group’s last attempt at using magic spells to remove Trump from office came during last year’s impeachment inquiry, which resulted in precisely nothing but a massive waste of time.
One witch from a Facebook group called “Bind Trump”, with over 6,100 members, had called for magic to be used against Trump in his last presidential debate, which Trump won handily over Joe Biden.
“Trump needs to go off the rails again in the third and last debate,” one witch wrote in late October.
“This will drive the election home-and him out in the landslide our nation and the world so urgently needs.”
Some witches have already claimed victory in placing a spell on Trump, claiming that it was their magic that resulted in the President getting coronavirus. Pam Grossman, a podcaster and author on witches, told The Sun that the “two powerful full moons” in October had given the witches more power.
“I think the symbolism of it starting with a full moon and ending with a full moon also feels really powerful. It’s bookended by these two incredible cosmic moments, and so that feels like a big portal for change and transformation as well,” she concluded.
If you say so, Pam.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2I4i5Nk Tyler Durden