Great Reads Today

You Have Been Warned I:

Wall Street Silver @WallStreetSilv

Klaus Schwab is now part of the G20 and here he is giving his instructions directly to our "elected" leaders… 🔊sound ...🧐 #WEF #KlausSchwab

What we have to confront is a deep systemic and structural restructuring of our world. This will take some time and the world will look differently after we have gone through this transition process.

Ezra Levant 🍁🚛 @ezralevant

Why are Klaus Schwab (and Bill Gates) at the G20 Summit? Why are they participants on the same level as leaders of sovereign countries?

Peter K Hanse @PeterKHanse

@ezralevant

You Have Been Warned II:

Elon Musk and U.S. senator have confrontation on twitter over verification

Gotta luv some of Musk’s cheeky comebacks. Markey’s complaint re a fake impersonating account led to this:

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@SenMarkey @washingtonpost Perhaps it is because your real account sounds like a parody?

And Markey’s photo led to this:

Elon Musk @elonmusk

@SenMarkey @washingtonpost And why does your pp have a mask!?

And there’s lots more.

And here’s an excellent article by Sohrab Ahmari:

The Lost Art of Spotting Sociopaths

Maybe if people read more books they’d have seen Sam Bankman-Fried coming.

…

Sam Bankman-Fried’s downfall makes you wish there were still novelists toiling in the 19th-century tradition of realism. The cryptocurrency titan who placed selflessness and “effective altruism” at the center of his hucksterism: it is the sort of saga that cries out for a Trollope, a Thackeray, or a Balzac. Alas, even if there were novelists of that caliber in our midst—and there probably aren’t—the reality might exceed their talents.

Not that Bankman-Fried’s alleged misdeeds are all that interesting in themselves, mind you. No, financial skullduggery is always at bottom quite boring. The “literary” aspect of this story, rather, has to do with the wider culture’s inability to see them coming. Simply put, too many Americans seem to have lost the ability to identify sociopaths.

This is very true. When I wasn’t involved in CI in my previous life, I was mostly doing financial investigations. When I first started down that path I thought it would be interesting, but I quickly found out the truth of what Ahmari says: financial skullduggery and its perpetrators are “always at bottom boring.” In fact, their schemes usually aren’t that complicated once you look at them. They usually rely on people being gullible. And so Ahmari continues:

But first, the facts. These might appear complicated, because a dense fog of technical jargon and math wizardry permeates the crypto universe. But what lies beneath isn’t, in fact, all that complex. Cryptocurrencies are a class of unregulated and highly speculative assets—databases whose values, for those who trade in them, are a function of a desire to circumvent central-bank-regulated currencies for shady or utopian reasons, as the case may be.

…

Still, in this case, you have to wonder why more clients didn’t wonder if something foul was afoot, just judging by SBF’s persona. …

Any one of these things might have been overlooked. But in their totality, they screamed: “Obvious Sociopath.”

Maybe the loss of a literary culture is precisely to blame. Would the kind of culture that produced the character Becky Sharp in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair have possessed the moral and psychological facility for spotting the red flags planted all over SBF? It’s probably romantic to imagine so. In the event, our culture is as illiterate as its business villains: SBF himself, after all, is a self-described hater of books. “I would never read a book,” he told an interviewer in September. “I think, if you wrote a book, you f—d up, and it should have been a six-paragraph blog post.”

That statement alone should land him in prison, if you ask me.