James.galbraith

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As the FTX collapse continues to reverberate through the cryptocurrency sector, Telegram CEO Pavel Durov wants to revive some of the good will toward blockchain technology by developing a range of decentralized tools including digital asset exchanges. From a report: "The blockchain industry was built on the promise of decentralization, but ended up being concentrated in the hands of a few who began to abuse their power," Durov wrote Wednesday on his Telegram page. "As a result, a lot of people lost their money when FTX, one of the largest exchanges, went bankrupt." The antidote to FTX's downfall is renewed prioritization of decentralization, he said. Durov maintained that blockchain projects must return to their roots of decentralization, and move away from relying on third-party corporations. Additionally, he said it's possible today for developers to steer the blockchain away from centralization with the release of new products that a wide audience can access. Moving forward, Telegram, a messaging and social-media app, will build non-custodial wallets and decentralized exchanges for millions of people to trade and store cryptocurrencies, Durov said. "This way we can fix the wrongs caused by the excessive centralization, which let down hundreds of thousands of cryptocurrency users," he said. "The time when the inefficiencies of legacy platforms justified centralization should be long gone. With technologies like TON reaching their potential, the blockchain industry should be finally able to deliver on its core mission -- giving the power back to the people."

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Republicans aren’t big fans of regulation, financial or otherwise. Unless you plan on opening your new credit union in a human womb, they're likely to agitate for a more or less hands-off approach. To be fair, too many politicians across the political spectrum are dissuaded from enacting common-sense legislation that would rein in the financial sector and protect ordinary citizens’ money, and one suspects it might have something to do with all that filthy Wall Street lucre sloshing about in Beltway politicians’ campaign coffers. Go figure.

So it was deeply ironic when Republicans acted like the cat who caught the canary after Democratic mega-donor Sam Bankman-Fried, founder of the now-deep-fried cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was outed as a giant financial fraud.

For instance, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson was positively giddy over FTX’s sudden collapse, which occurred after Bankman-Fried apparently made risky bets with investors’ money. Because, you know, nothing like this would have ever happened if Republicans controlled everything.

RELATED STORY: Here's a quick explainer of what happened with crypto giant FTX and how the GOP is lying about it

Watch:

CARLSON: “The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. … The biggest single-day loss of assets in the history of money. … Billions of dollars evaporated in just moments, and it’s still not clear what happened to a lot of that money. It just disappeared, and as it did it sparked a growing financial crisis across entire sectors of the economy. But the story of the FTX implosion is bigger even than the global recession it may cause. It is the story of the complete and utter corruption of the people who run our country. The very people who should have been covering and regulating and reining in FTX and its 30-year-old founder Sam Bankman-Fried were instead profiting from the scam. From the news media paid off by Sam Bankman-Fried, to the leadership of the Democratic Party, also paid off by Sam Bankman-Fried, to the chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the SEC [chair] himself, Gary Gensler. They all knew that FTX was not a real company. And if they didn’t know that, they certainly should have known that, because it was very obvious to anyone who bothered to pay attention.”

Yeah, he donated to Democrats. The Democrats who took his money should be ashamed of themselves, huh? Well, about that.

In a new interview with cryptocurrency blogger Tiffany Fong, Bankman-Fried admitted that he’s donated just as much to Republicans over the years as he has to Democrats.

Weird, right?

BANKMAN-FRIED: “I donate to both parties. I donate about the same amount to both parties. … That was not generally known because, despite Citizens United being literally the highest-profile Supreme Court case of the decade and the thing everyone talks about when they talk about campaign finance, for some reason, in practice, no one can possibly fathom the idea that someone in practice actually gave dark. So, I don’t know, all my Republican donations were dark. … And the reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters freak the fuck out if you donate to a Republican. They’re all super liberal, and I didn’t want to have that fight, so I just made all the Republican ones dark.” 

Yeah, one second while I fix Mr. Bankman-Fried’s quote. Ah, yes, here we go: “All my Republican donations were dark. And the reason was not for regulatory reasons, it’s because reporters decent humans freak the fuck out if you donate to a Republican.”

So, yeah, Citizens United—the landmark Supreme Court case that most Democrats decry and most Republicans defend as a sacrosanct defense of free speech. That’s the lever that charlatans like Bankman-Fried use to magically create the regulatory environment they want. 

So what does Tucker think about tighter crypto regulations, considering that government overreach is Democrats’ original and abiding sin?

From the Nov. 17, 2022, edition of Tucker Carlson Tonight, via Media Matters:

CARLSON: “Sam Bankman-Fried was considered a moral leader even as he was ripping off millions of people. But no one benefited long-term from FTX's collapse or will benefit more than government regulators. They're pointing to FTX and demanding more control over cryptocurrency and ultimately the end of the cash economy. Why do we think they're going to do that? Because they're already working on it. SEC commissioner Hester Peirce said this week the demise of FTX could be a, quote, catalyst for more regulation. So why should you worry about that? Well, because as we saw in Canada last year, crypto is a huge problem for governments. Governments can't control, ideally, cryptocurrency. You can't freeze someone's personal cold wallet with crypto in it if you don't like what they say.”

Carlson: “Democrats let this crypto company run wild, and now its collapse is threatening the world economy! Where are the regulators?”

Also Carlson: “Democrats better not use this story to impose more regulations on crypto companies! That’s socialism!”

RELATED STORY: Did this CEO slip up and brag to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson about illegally bribing an FTC regulator?

Meanwhile, Fox News’ Jesse Watters, the Edward R. Murrow of basement carpet mushrooms, plainly stated that “the Democratic Party finds itself in the middle of the biggest financial fraud case in U.S. history.”

Hmm, yeah. Well, the Republican Party is right in the middle of that muddy scrum, too. Wonder if this new revelation will lead these frauds’ shows for the next several days. That would only be fair, right?

Of course, Republicans have always been hostile to government regulations. Even after the financial sector collapsed the economy in the late 2000s, they seemed to have little appetite for holding the bad guys accountable or meaningfully changing the regulatory environment. In fact, in 2016, nearly every Republican presidential candidate favored either a full or partial repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act, which sought to create a stricter regulatory environment on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis. (Ben Carson’s stance was reportedly “unclear,” like virtually everything else he says.)

Now, the cynic in me wonders if maybe, just maybe, Carlson, Watters, et al, are less interested in keeping the financial industry in check than in using FTX’s abrupt collapse as a cudgel against Democrats. But come on, you’d have to be a monster to think like that, right?

At one point, Carlson even asked, “What about the money Sam Bankman-Fried gave to the Democratic Party? Will the Democrats have to give it back to the people who were defrauded?” Good question! Now do Republicans.

So tune in tonight for Tucker’s lengthy mea culpa. Or maybe tomorrow night. Or perhaps weeks from now. Or months. He has to address this at some point, right?

Right?

Sen. Raphael Warnock is still defending his Georgia seat, and the Dec. 6 runoff is coming fast. If you can—and if you aren’t too tired from saving America on Nov. 8—please rush a donation to Team Warnock now! You can also write letters to Georgia voters with Vote Forward! Let’s finish up strong!

Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link. Or, if you prefer a test drive, you can download the epilogue to Goodbye, Asshat for the low, low price of FREE.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Scientists have long pursued a deeper understanding of wormholes and now appear to be making progress. Researchers announced on Wednesday that they forged two miniscule simulated black holes -- those extraordinarily dense celestial objects with gravity so powerful that not even light can escape -- in a quantum computer and transmitted a message between them through what amounted to a tunnel in space-time. It was a "baby wormhole," according to Caltech physicist Maria Spiropulu, a co-author of the research published in the journal Nature. But scientists are a long way from being able to send people or other living beings through such a portal, she said. "Experimentally, for me, I will tell you that it's very, very far away. People come to me and they ask me, 'Can you put your dog in the wormhole?' So, no," Spiropulu told reporters during a video briefing. "...That's a huge leap." [...] Spiropulu said the researchers found a quantum system that exhibits key properties of a gravitational wormhole but was small enough to implement on existing quantum hardware. The researchers said no rupture of space and time was created in physical space in the experiment, though a traversable wormhole appeared to have emerged based on quantum information teleported using quantum codes on the quantum processor. "There's a difference between something being possible in principle and possible in reality," added physicist and study co-author Joseph Lykken of Fermilab, America's particle physics and accelerator laboratory. "So don't hold your breath about sending your dog through the wormhole. But you have to start somewhere. And I think to me it's just exciting that we're able to get our hands on this at all." "It looks like a duck, it walks like a duck, it quacks like a duck. So that's what we can say at this point -- that we have something that in terms of the properties we look at, it looks like a wormhole," Lykken said.

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On Monday, following delay after delay, the MAGA-controlled Cochise County, Arizona, board of elections missed its deadline to certify 47,000-plus (mostly conservative) votes. The move was seen by most as pure political theater from a deep-red county which has swallowed the Big Lie election denialism hook, line, and sinker. Like all political theater, this will cost taxpayers money.

Before two MAGA-conspiracy theorists who don’t trust “any computers” failed to do their part to certify their constituents’ votes, Arizona State Elections Director Kori Lorick explained that there was no evidence of impropriety in the 2022 midterm elections, and “the secretary will use all available legal remedies to compel compliance with Arizona law and protect Cochise County voters’ right to have their votes counted.”

Late on Monday, Arizona Secretary of State Katie Hobbs, who will be the state’s next Democratic governor, sued the Republican-controlled county for refusing to do its job. The fact that this move does not help Democrats get more votes seems lost on the fake-triots in Cochise County. However, as people have begun to point out, not only is this quixotic conspiracist’s adventure going to be financially costly for Arizonans, the Republican Party officials behind it are putting a lot of conservative constituents’ votes in jeopardy. “Lorick wrote in a letter last week that Hobbs is required by law to approve the statewide canvass by next week and will have to exclude Cochise County’s votes if they aren’t received in time. ” You know what that means? Yes. It means exactly what you think it means.

RELATED STORY: MAGA-controlled Arizona county fails to certify election results by deadline

According to the Associated Press, the loss of Cochise County’s votes—which are expected to greatly favor Republican candidates—would threaten a possible U.S. House seat and a state schools chief position. The best part about this all is that you can now take the next sentence and file it in your “foot, meet mouth” folder. Those seats are expected to go to Republican candidates—but could now flip to the Democratic challenger.

Thoughts and prayers!

Hobbs’ lawsuit is asking the Cochise County Superior Court to require officials to certify the election results no later than this coming Thursday. Arizona state law requires all results to be certified by Dec. 8—“with or without certification from all of the counties.”

Here’s a thought.

Is it likely that the lack of Cochise votes would result in a big flip from red to blue? No. But it is theoretically possible, and an important reminder to conservative voters that their elected officials, who barely care about their voters under any circumstance, drop all pretense of working for their constituency the moment they are elected to office.

The new Secretary of State-elect has this to say:

Elections matter!

Add your name: Thank you for voting, donating and volunteering for Democrats!

Election season overtime is finally winding down, so Democratic operative Joe Sudbay joins David Nir on The Downballot as a guest-host this week to recap some of the last results that have just trickled in. At the top of the list is the race for Arizona attorney general, where Democrat Kris Mayes has a 510-vote lead with all ballots counted (a mandatory recount is unlikely to change the outcome). Also on the agenda is Arizona's successful Proposition 308, which will allow students to receive financial aid regardless of immigration status.

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Out of all the beaten-down public companies in the autonomous driving space, Embark Technology stands out as a conspicuously terrible stock market performer. From a report: The San Francisco-headquartered company, which develops autonomous driving technology for the trucking industry, has presided over a roughly 98% share price decline since going public a year ago. In the process, it's wiped out close to $5 billion in market capitalization. Today, Embark and a few others that carried out SPAC mergers are in that weird category of companies trading below the value of cash reserves. In Embark's case, the company's recent market capitalization of $110 million is actually quite a bit lower than the $191 million cash it had at the end of Q3. In other words, investors seem to think it's worth less than nothing. What happened? What's noteworthy in Embark's case, as opposed to some other venture-backed companies that crashed so mightily, is there's no high-profile scandal. There was also no giant earnings miss, as it's a pre-revenue company. Rather, a mix of factors seem to have contributed to its fall, including apparent initial overvaluation, a sectorwide downturn and a critical report from a prolific short-seller. Collectively, those factors have contributed to erasing billions in valuation from a company that once secured backing from the most famous names in venture.

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European Central Bank officials argued on Wednesday that bitcoin is "rarely used for legal transactions," is fuelled by speculation and the recent erosion in its value indicates that it is on the "road to irrelevance," in a series of stringent criticism (bereft of strong data points) of the cryptocurrency industry as they urged regulators to not lend legitimacy to digital tokens in the name of innovation. From a report: The value of bitcoin recently finding stability at around $20,000 was "an artificially induced last gasp before the road to irrelevance â" and this was already foreseeable before FTX went bust and sent the bitcoin price to well down below $16,000," wrote Ulrich Bindseil and Jurgen Schaaf on ECB's blog. The central bankers argue that bitcoin's conceptual design and "technological shortcomings" make it "questionable" as a means of payment. "Real bitcoin transactions are cumbersome, slow and expensive. Bitcoin has never been used to any significant extent for legal real-world transactions," they wrote. Bitcoin also "does not generate cash flow (like real estate) or dividends (like equities), cannot be used productively (like commodities) or provide social benefits (like gold). The market valuation of bitcoin is therefore based purely on speculation," they wrote.

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Arguments in United States v. Texas dwelled on whether to upend one of the judiciary’s longstanding procedures in order to neutralize the most reactionary judges.

Drew Tipton, a Trump appointee to a federal court in Texas, has spent just over two years on the bench. In those two years, he has repeatedly handed down decisions blocking the Biden administration's immigration policies that were rooted in highly dubious legal arguments.

And because federal trial court procedures in Texas frequently permit litigants to choose which judge will hear their case, Texas’s Republican attorney general often chooses Tipton to hear challenges to Biden administration policies. At least when it comes to immigration, Tipton has acted as a reliable partisan.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court had to confront this set of circumstances head-on.

The Court heard an appeal of Tipton’s decision in a case known as United States v. Texas. Tipton’s order in the case, which he handed down in July, effectively stripped Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas of his statutory authority to set enforcement priorities for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the agency that enforces immigration laws within US borders.

Tipton’s decision invalidated a memo Mayorkas issued in September 2021, which instructed ICE to prioritize undocumented immigrants who “pose a threat to national security, public safety, and border security and thus threaten America’s well-being” when making arrests or otherwise enforcing immigration law.

Based on the justices’ comments at Tuesday’s argument, it is likely that a majority of the Court will ultimately vote to reverse Tipton — potentially by a lopsided margin. But it is unlikely that they will do much to prevent judges like Tipton from tossing a wrench into the Biden administration’s gears in the future.

Tipton claimed that Mayorkas’s enforcement priorities are invalid because federal law requires the government to detain a fairly large number of undocumented immigrants. But, as Chief Justice John Roberts said at one point in the argument, “it is impossible for the executive to do” what Tipton ordered it to do. The government simply doesn’t have the resources and manpower to arrest every single immigrant who falls within Tipton’s order.

That said, several of the justices spent a surprising amount of time taking shots at US Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration lawyer arguing against Tipton’s decision, for a fairly radical argument she made in her brief. That argument seeks to diminish the power of judges like Tipton to singlehandedly sabotage a federal policy. But Roberts, along with Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Ketanji Brown Jackson, all appeared openly hostile to this argument. And only one justice, Neil Gorsuch, seemed to fully embrace it.

The bottom line, in other words, is that the Court is likely to reverse Tipton’s order in the Texas case and restore Mayorkas’s command and control over ICE. At the same time, the Court appears unlikely to go much further or to take any immediate action that will prevent conservative litigants from seeking out judges like Tipton who can be relied upon to short-circuit policies created by Democratic administrations.

Tipton’s decision is ridiculous

Under a doctrine known as “prosecutorial discretion,” law enforcement agencies and their leaders have broad authority to decide when not to enforce a particular law. A traffic cop, for example, may pull someone over for speeding but decide to let them off with a warning. Or a local prosecutor may decide that they won’t bring charges against people who commit minor marijuana offenses.

The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has repeatedly warned judges not to interfere with these sorts of non-enforcement decisions. As the Court held in Heckler v. Chaney (1985), “an agency’s decision not to prosecute or enforce, whether through civil or criminal process, is a decision generally committed to an agency’s absolute discretion.” This principle, the Court added, “is attributable in no small part to the general unsuitability for judicial review of agency decisions to refuse enforcement.”

Mayorkas’s memo is an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. He urges ICE agents to focus their work on certain violators of federal immigration law, such as “a noncitizen who engaged in or is suspected of terrorism or espionage” or noncitizens who committed serious crimes. At the same time, the memo suggests that other undocumented immigrants, such as people of an “advanced or tender age” or those who have a “lengthy presence in the United States,” are less likely to be appropriate targets for enforcement.

Nevertheless, Tipton claimed that two federal statutes — one of which provides that the government “shall take into custody” immigrants who’ve committed certain offenses, and another saying that the government “shall remove” immigrants within 90 days after an immigration proceeding orders them removed — trumps the government’s power to exercise prosecutorial discretion and effectively makes detention of certain immigrants mandatory.

This decision was wrong. The Court has long held prosecutorial discretion is so “deep-rooted” that it can overcome a legislative command stating that law enforcement officers “shall arrest” a particular class of persons. Indeed, over a century ago, in Railroad Company v. Hecht (1877), the Court held that “as against the government, the word ‘shall,’ when used in statutes, is to be construed as ‘may,’ unless a contrary intention is manifest.”

One of the core reasons why prosecutorial discretion exists is that law enforcement agencies will always have what Kavanaugh referred to as “resource constraints.” Unless Congress agrees to fund legions of law enforcement officers, and implement a draconian surveillance state, agencies like ICE will never have the personnel, detention space, and other assets that they would need to arrest every single person who violates a law within the agency’s jurisdiction.

And Congress certainly has not done so here. As the Justice Department explained in a 2014 memo, “there are approximately 11.3 million undocumented aliens in the country,” but Congress has only appropriated enough resources to “remove fewer than 400,000 such aliens each year.”

Indeed, as Prelogar told the Court, “it is impossible for DHS to comply” with every provision of federal law stating that a certain immigrant “shall” be detained. If Tipton’s order were to stand, “DHS would be under a judicially enforceable obligation to take enforcement action against whomever it first encounters on the ground who might be subject to one of these provisions,” and would not have the personnel or resources to focus on immigrants who committed serious crimes like murder or sex offenses.

This argument appeared to persuade a majority of the Court, including Republican appointees like Roberts and Kavanaugh. Roberts repeatedly brought up the fact that it is “impossible” for DHS to comply with Tipton’s order. And Kavanaugh told Texas Solicitor General Judd Stone that “there is a tradition of reading statutes against the backdrop of prosecutorial discretion” because “there are never enough resources — or almost never enough resources — to detain every person who should be detained.”

The Court is unlikely to stop judges like Tipton from making trouble in the future

At least for now, however, the Court appears unlikely to do anything to prevent rogue judges from handing down decisions in the future that sabotage policies those judges disagree with. Indeed, Prelogar spent much of her argument time being attacked for an argument in the Justice Department’s brief that would have permanently diminished individual judges’ power to block federal policies.

When a federal court determines that a policy set by a presidential administration is unlawful, it will often “vacate” that policy — effectively declaring that policy invalid on a nationwide basis. This ability to vacate federal policies gives enormous power to judges like Tipton because it allows them to singlehandedly put such a policy on hold until a higher court intervenes.

Of course, court orders invalidating federal policies on a nationwide basis can also benefit Democrats when a Republican controls the White House. As a practical matter, however, the Supreme Court’s GOP-appointed majority has not treated such orders in an evenhanded manner. It is noteworthy that the Supreme Court refused the Justice Department’s request to intervene against Tipton last July, even though the Court was often swift to intervene when lower court judges vacated conservative policies during the Trump administration.

Lower courts have found this power to vacate federal policies within a statute which says that a court should “set aside” a federal agency’s action that it deems to be unlawful. But Prelogar argued that this reading of the statute is incorrect.

The words “set aside,” Prelogar claimed in the Justice Department’s brief, “means that courts disregard [illegal policies] when deciding the cases before them, not that they vacate the statutes.” When a court determines that a policy is illegal, it should simply hold that it does not apply to the parties before the court, rather than eliminating that policy on a nationwide basis. Prelogar’s argument largely tracks a novel argument raised by University of Virginia law professor John Harrison in a 2020 law review article.

Without getting into the details of this argument, which are extraordinarily technical and which received only a few pages worth of attention in the Texas parties’ briefs, it’s safe to say that Prelogar is calling for a radical shift in how the lower courts approach federal policies they deem unlawful.

As Roberts joked, the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — which he and several of his colleagues used to serve on — would sometimes vacate federal policies “five times before breakfast.” And the DC Circuit, which hears a steady stream of challenges to federal agency actions, has an unusual amount of expertise on this area of the law.

And yet, it’s not hard to see why Prelogar seeks such a radical change from the Supreme Court. Just six days after President Joe Biden took office, Tipton handed down his first order blocking a Biden administration policy — that one invalided the administration’s decision to pause deportations for 100 days while the new administration was getting a handle on how it wanted to approach immigration enforcement. The Texas attorney general’s office routinely obtains orders halting Biden administration policies, in no small part because Texas federal courts allow them to handpick which judges will hear most of these cases.

This practice is unlikely to end until the Supreme Court does something to shut it down.

And yet, Prelogar’s proposed solution appeared to throw the Court into disarray and to divide the Court in unfamiliar ways. Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Jackson — all of whom served on the DC Circuit — took turns tearing into Prelogar’s proposal, sometimes in a mocking tone. Meanwhile, archconservative Justice Neil Gorsuch, who called for limits on individual judges’ power to block federal policies during the Trump administration, appeared sympathetic to Prelogar’s arguments.

Even Justice Samuel Alito, the Court’s most reliable Republican partisan, conceded that the question of whether a single judge can vacate a federal policy “does seem to me like a pretty big issue” — although he questioned whether it would be appropriate for the Court to rule on this issue after receiving only a few pages of briefing on it. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett also made comments suggesting that they take this issue seriously, but believe that it should be resolved in a future case with more robust briefing.

So the good news for the Biden administration is that several members of the Court, at least, appear open to ideas that might limit lower court judges’ power to singlehandedly block federal policies. It is far from clear, however, whether Prelogar’s proposal, or any other, will receive five votes when it is presented to the Court in a future case.

And, in the meantime, judges like Tipton will most likely be allowed to act as agents of chaos.

A new flu vaccine might not seem like a big deal, but this isn’t the kind of vaccine you can currently get at the local pharmacy. In a study published this week in Science, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania reported the first results from animal trials of a new messenger RNA-based vaccine against the flu. This is not a vaccine against a specific strain of flu, like those which are mixed together to generate the cocktail seen in annual flu shots. This is a vaccine against flu. All flu. Even against strains we’ve yet to see.

The reason that flu is so difficult to stop, and that it returns year after year in spite of readily available vaccines, is that flu viruses have a revolving set of surface proteins that can be swapped out without affecting the virus’ effectiveness, while allowing the virus to bypass existing immunity. So people can catch Influenza Type A H3N2 in one season, the follow it up with H5N1 the next year. Or they can come down with a version of the equally severe Influenza Type B with wholly different mix.

The Type A flu is particularly worrisome, because it can spread from animals to people. Many of the past large pandemics have emerged in just this way, with a new flu strain jumping from birds or farm animals to people. But if the new vaccine is as effective as animal trials suggest, the possibility of such a pandemic would be greatly reduced. Because this is a vaccine against Type A or Type B, H-anything N-anything. It’s a universal flu vaccine.

In those names of flu, “H” stands for hemagglutinin, and it’s the protein the virus uses to stick to the outside of a cell. “N” is kind of the opposite. It’s the protein neuraminidase that the virus uses to escape from a cell after reproducing. If you think of human cells as having lots of entry and exit doors, each one of which has a different lock, H and N are the keys the virus is carrying to get in and get out.

If two viruses that are are coded H5N1 and H5N3, they’re both carrying the same (or similar) version of hemagglutinin, but they’re carrying quite different versions of neuraminidase. Still, if someone was recently infected by the first virus, they’d have pretty good protection against the second. However, if something like H3N2 rolled up, neither of the defenses the body has cranked up against H5N1 would hold.

Each year, researchers look at the cases of flu they are seeing, with an eye toward those which haven’t been around in awhile, and try to produce a vaccine that hits the most likely varieties. They get especially worried when they see a virus in animals carrying a protein pair that hasn’t run around in humans for decades.

That’s what makes this new vaccine strategy exciting.

Current influenza vaccines, composed of four influenza viral antigens, provide little protection beyond the viral strains targeted by the vaccines. Universal influenza vaccines that can protect against all 20 lineages could help to prevent the next pandemic. Designing and manufacturing a vaccine that can provide such broad protection has been challenging, but the demonstration of the feasibility of mRNA–lipid nanoparticle COVID-19 vaccines offers a possible strategy.

If it seems like that vaccine design includes just about every buzzword for hot new vaccine technologies, you’re right. The mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from BioNTech and Moderna are the fist such to be authorized for use in humans. But now that the door is open, there’s tremendous potential in this technology, including a superior flu vaccine.

The vaccine produced by by the Penn team targets all 18 known versions of hemagglutinin.  So even if something like the current flu being passed around among bird species makes the leap to humans tomorrow, we would already have a vaccine that was substantially effective. 

This wouldn’t mean an end to annual flu shots, and those shots would continue to focus on the most likely varieties to be seen in a season. However, they could also sharply reduce the chance of serious illness from any flu.

There are still several steps remaining to show that this vaccine is safe and effective for humans. Among other things, there are concerns that getting enough vaccine to generate a response to all 18 versions of “H” may turn out to require too large a dose, leading to unpleasant reactions. (Which is exactly why it’s difficult to make a universal COVID-19 shot that addresses all known variants.)

But since the technologies involved in this vaccine have already been tested against COVID-19, expect this vaccine to move forward without running into worries about the use of mRNA or lipid capsules. It won’t be a part of any vaccine you use this year. But next year? Maybe.

 

Rep. Mary Peltola’s August special election win to be Alaska’s lone member of the House of Representatives made history: She was the first Alaska Native in the House, and the first Democrat in 50 years to represent Alaska in the House. It was also one of the special elections that hinted, correctly, that November wasn’t going to be the red wave Republicans were crowing about. 

Now Peltola has done it again, winning a full term in Congress after defeating Sarah Palin for a second time in a row.

Democrats want to make farming more climate-friendly. Republicans want to help farmers do business.

Now it appears there’s a way to please both: promoting farming methods that help growers use less fertilizer.

Democrats and Republicans have been bitterly divided over whether measures to address climate change should be part of the half-trillion-dollar farm bill that Congress will write next year. But a push to include funding for so-called regenerative agriculture is appealing to GOP lawmakers who are watching farmers contend with sky-high fertilizer prices and other mounting costs.

“If we want to make sure these practices and others like them are more widely adopted, we have to make sure they are voluntary, they keep the farm profitable, and that [USDA] is equipped at a staff level to help farmers carry them out,” said Rep. Dusty Johnson (R-S.D.), a House Agriculture Committee Republican, who pointed out that many South Dakota farmers are already using regenerative methods to improve their soil.

To be regenerative, a farm can undertake any number of practices to sequester carbon and restore soil health. The most popular is cover cropping, the planting of an alternative crop like a legume or leafy green in between planting the principal crop, like corn or soybeans. This helps reduce erosion and also naturally restores the building blocks of plants, like carbon or nitrogen, that are stripped from the soil after intensive farming by scrubbing them from the air as part of the plant's natural respiration cycle. They can also help make the soil more sponge-like, increasing water penetration and irrigation.

Other practices include avoiding tilling, which can kick up nutrients out of the soil; rotating and incorporating livestock into growing operations; and leaving unplanted “buffer” strips in between crop fields.

Democrats are largely aligned with Regenerate America, the leading coalition lobbying lawmakers to expand regenerative agriculture in the farm bill. They want Congress to direct the USDA to deploy more resources to improve soil health across existing conservation programs, and pump up some of those oversubscribed programs with nearly $5 billion in additional funding. Much of that is already contained in the Agriculture Resilience Act, a bill introduced by Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), that proponents want to use as a guide for what to include in the next farm bill.

Democrats secured $20 billion for the programs in the Inflation Reduction Act, their climate and tax reconciliation package. A House Republican aide with knowledge of plans said that will likely influence the baseline funding of the farm bill, and that Republicans could look for ways to redirect the funds.

Supporters of the funding also want a comprehensive soil health education platform available for farmers and USDA’s technical service providers, who help farmers make decisions when they enroll in conservation programs.

Republicans are cautiously on board with the idea of helping farmers save money while they improve their soil, within limits.

Rep. G.T. Thompson (R-Pa.), who is expected to take the gavel of the House Agriculture Committee next year, said he has “been leaning into the climate discussion.” But at a recent hearing, he said he would not “have us suddenly incorporate buzzwords like regenerative agriculture into the farm bill or overemphasize climate within the conservation or research title, while undermining the other, longstanding environmental benefits that these programs provide.”

Other lawmakers don't want the farm bill to turn regenerative agriculture practices into a mandate for farmers that benefits some but not all.

Rep. Doug LaMalfa (R-Calif.), the top Republican on the House Agriculture Conservation and Forestry Subcommittee, said he’s “cautious to have a whole big push towards this terminology of regenerative agriculture because agriculture tends to know what it's doing over time anyway … they do what works pretty well.”

“If a guy's finding he could do that and use less fertilizer, great for him,” LaMalfa said. But LaMalfa, a rice farmer, cautioned that not all operations, including his own, can use the regenerative practices.

However, he said, he’s still “certainly” open to boosting existing USDA conservation programs as long as they remain voluntary.

In the Senate, Sen. John Boozman (R-Ark.), the top Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee, supports expanding regenerative practices — but his office steered away from wholesale endorsement of it by name.

“One person’s definition of regenerative ag may be different than another’s, but Ranking Member Boozman is supportive of making the conservation programs that are funded through the farm bill work better for our nation’s producers while helping them address their unique resource concerns, whether that’s soil health, erosion, water quality, water quantity, etc.,” his spokesperson said in a statement. “What he doesn’t want is what we saw in the Inflation Reduction Act where Congress funds one specific set of resource concerns focused on climate at the expense of other resource concerns like water quantity that producers across the nation are facing as drought continues to expand.”

Republicans could be swayed by the argument that regenerative agriculture is better for business. “We were saving one million dollars a year in input costs and we were increasing yield year-over-year in both corn and [soy]beans,” said Rick Clark, an Indiana farmer who transitioned to regenerative agriculture several years ago and testified to its benefits at a recent House Agriculture Committee hearing.

Democrats, for their part, are likely to keep pushing the issue.

Rep. David Scott (D-Ga.), who will likely continue as the House Agriculture panel’s top Democrat, called regenerative agriculture “the way we make sure that we have food security” in the future.

Robert Bonnie, the undersecretary for conservation at USDA who is responsible for designing much of the department’s climate policy, said the approach should be more focused on outcomes than labels.

“It's easy to get caught up on terms [like] regenerative or climate-smart or all of these things,” Bonnie said in an interview. “There's not a bright line between, you know, different types of agriculture. What we’re interested in is climate-smart practices that both reduce the greenhouse gas emissions, storing more carbon and in many cases can contribute to the resiliency of those operations as well.”

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They’re not even really bothering with the “thoughts and prayers” or expressions of regret at the violence after the mass shootings they inspire any longer. No, the people who have been targeting the LGBTQ community with classic stochastic terrorism—dehumanizing and demonizing them, describing them as worthy of violent expulsion, and then leaving the violence to the angry extremists they inspire—are just making the briefest of nods before moving straight ahead with the narrative that really, the victims had it coming, and the perpetrators were entirely justified.

That, at least, was the narrative emerging from the more influential quarters of right-wing media after Saturday’s mass shooting at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs—on Fox News with Tucker Carlson, and on social media among major influencers like Tim Pool. They seem to have reached the point in their campaign of eliminationism against the LGBTQ community generally, and the transgender community specifically, where the restraints of the civilization they claim they’re defending are disposable, and they can just get straight to the business of directing vigilante mob violence against them.

Carlson—who has been leading the stochastic terror campaign against transgender people in recent months, notably in inspiring bomb threats against children’s hospitals that provide gender-affirming care, which he has described as “sexual mutilation of children”—provided the most egregious example of the right’s utter lack of common decency in responding to the violence in Colorado. He invited Jaimie Michell of “Gays Against Groomers”—the kind of liberal-hating liberal who always turns up on Tucker’s show, for some reason—onto his nightly Fox News program Tuesday to talk about how there’s some kind of conspiracy underway to “attack children.”

First, Carlson brought up the Balenciaga ads featuring children whose teddy bears are attired in BDSM wear—which he claimed “promoted pedophilia, I don’t think anyone disputes that” (though, in fact, Balenciaga, which has apologized for the ads and yanked them, does dispute that). That created an opening for Michell to denounce “everyone who’s behind this push to sexualize and indoctrinate and mutilate kids.” She regularly describes gender-affirming care as “mutilation,” in fact—making it clear that, even if Michell is presuming to speak on behalf of gays and lesbians, she is clearly opposed to the transgender component of the queer community.

Michell went on to suggest to Carlson that there’s a conspiracy afoot by “powerful interests” to subject children to sexual assault:

The floodgates seem to be open, and people are just full steam ahead trying to attack and assault children, which is a red line for everybody, it should be—well, you would think for everybody. For the majority of people it is, and that’s why there’s such a strong visceral reaction coming out against it, just as much as there is in support of it.

And I do love that you’re saying, and I appreciate your saying that not all of us in the gay community support this, it’s actually quite the opposite. There’s the fringe minority within our community that does, but they are so loud because they have the backing of every powerful institution in this country as we’re seeing, and we’re doing everything we can to stop it.

I want to be clear that being anti-’groomer’ and anti-child sexualization and mutilation is not anti-gay, it’s not anti-LGBTQ. It shouldn’t have to be said. What is anti-LGBTQ that these people need to understand, and what is putting our community in great danger, is claiming that all of us support this, and associating us all with this. Saying that ‘groomer’ is an anti-LGBTQ slur, that is doing irreparable damage to us as a whole, and it’s putting a really large target on our backs.

Michell appears blithely unaware that it’s not the transgender or drag-queen components of the queer community who are labeling their outreach efforts—part of an explicable campaign to gain acceptance and normalization—“grooming” or “innately sexual.” It’s the homophobic right that sees nefarious “sexual content” in merely acknowledging the existence of transgender people (see especially Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law) that has been doing so—along with their neofascist troll hordes online, and their neofascist Proud Boys and other street thugs who show up to threaten violence, wearing “Kill Your Local Pedophile” T-shirts.

Moreover, it’s also coming from right-wing shills like herself who buy into the whole bogus “grooming” narrative, which is based on the lie that all LGBTQ folk are pedophiles. Perhaps she hasn’t heard the hate preachers who declare their death wish (“Shoot them in the back of the head!”) for every member of the queer community because they are, by these bigots’ definition, pedophiles.

“Put them to death. Put all queers to death. They die,” proclaimed one fundamentalist preacher, adding: “When they die, that stops the pedophilia. It’s a very, very simple process.”

When she tells Tucker, “What’s being done in our name is putting us all in danger,” she’s throwing the entire transgender and drag-queen communities under the bus. But this is not surprising; on her social media accounts, she regularly refers to transgender, queer, intersex, and asexual people as “the infiltrators.”

It’s a shared animus. Carlson has advocated for vigilante violence in response to the presence of transgender children in schools.  “You would have to hate children in order to sexualize them. Because sexualizing children screws them up for life. Ask anyone to whom it has happened, period,” he said earlier this year. “No one should put up with this. No parent should put up with this for one second, no matter what the law says. Your duty, your moral duty, is to defend your children. This is an attack on your children and you should fight back.”

Carlson told his audience that in a “healthy” country “with an intact social fabric, neighborhood dads would give out instant justice to anyone who even thought about sexualizing their kids.”

So he and Michell were on the same wavelength on Tuesday, as she gave Carlson’s audience a public justification for armed men to walk into drag-queen shows and open fire:

And unfortunately, you know, the tragedy that happened in Colorado Springs the other night, uh, it was expected and predictable. We all within Gays Against Groomers saw this coming from a mile away. And sadly, I don’t think it’s gonna stop until we end this evil agenda that is attacking children.

That’s their position: Either stop providing children with material that might make them think of LGBTQ people as normal, and stop providing gender-affirming care to children who need it, or expect to be mowed down at random by one of the terrorists who agrees with us that you’re a bunch of pedophiles by nature. Fall into line with us or prepare to face the consequences.

This was the position of a number of right-wing influencers, notably YouTuber/podcaster Tim Pool, who has an audience in the millions. To them, it was obvious that family-friendly drag-queen or queer events were, in fact, attempts to recruit children into sexual behavior. “We shouldn’t tolerate pedophiles grooming kids,” Pool tweeted. “Club Q had a grooming event. How do prevent the violence and stop the grooming?”

Far-right pundit Kurt Schlichter, who frequently indulges fantasies about inflicting violence on “the left,” chimed in: “I don’t think we have to tolerate pedophiles because some asshole shot up a gay bar,” he wrote. “Frankly, a lot of people trying to convince us we need to tolerate pedophiles seem to be happy to use any excuse to silence our opposition.”

Pool added: “the grooming of children is not stopping. people are calling for more violence. I do not think legislators will stop the grooming. people will not stop calling for violence. so you tell me what happens next.”

He went on: “it seems that around 10 pm Club Q posted they were having an all ages drag show the next day. About 2 hours later the shooter came in. People keep calling for woodchippers and this is what happens.” His posts inspired a round of celebratory “woodchipper” memes from his fans in the replies. One person in the replies asked: “Does the shooter have a Go Fund account?”

Newsmax host Jenna Ellis, a former Trump attorney, argued that the victims’ lives were forfeit anyway:

The five people killed in the nightclub that night, there is no evidence at all that they were Christians. Assuming they have not accepted the truth and affirmed Jesus Christ as the lord of their life, they are now reaping the consequences of eternal damnation.

This is, again, how stochastic terrorism has always worked: Announce and identify the target with eliminationist rhetoric, and then let random actors inspired by the surrounding hateful rhetoric conduct the acts of violence it’s intended to inspire. Statistically predictable, but individually unpredictable.

“The way they soften up the support for this kind of violence is essentially by making it seem morally justified in the minds of people who believe this,” Alejandra Caraballo of Harvard Law School told NBC News. “The way they do this is by constantly painting LGBT people as pedophiles and ‘groomers,’ and so people feel morally justified in carrying out this violence.”  

Caraballo noted that a worrisome context of this rising tide of anti-LGBTQ speech on social media is that it’s occurring as Twitter, under Elon Musk’s ownership, is now rolling back suspensions of major anti-LGBTQ accounts, which now have been “let off the leash.”

“This is an ‘In emergency break glass’ moment for social media,” Caraballo said. “This is priming some very violent people to do shocking acts of violence, and this is all being pushed on social media and on Fox News, on Tucker Carlson.”

It won’t be ending soon, either. A group of Proud Boys in Ohio has announced that it plans to show up Dec. 3 to a drag queen story-time event in Columbus. Their post warned: “It’s gonna be wild!”

Shares of Zoom have tumbled about 90% from their pandemic peak in October 2020 as the former investor darling struggles to adjust to a post-COVID world. Reuters reports: The stock was down nearly 10% on Tuesday after the company cut its annual sales forecast and posted its slowest quarterly growth, prompting at least six brokerages to cut their price targets. The company, which became a household name during lockdowns due to the popularity of its video-conferencing tools, is trying to reinvent itself by focusing on businesses, with products such as cloud-calling service Zoom Phone and conference-hosting offering Zoom Rooms. Analysts, however, say any turnaround in the business is still a few quarters away as growth in its mainstay online unit slows and competition from Microsoft's Teams and Cisco's Webex and Salesforce's Slack gets intense. "Zoom has a fundamental flaw -- it has needed to spend heavily to keep hold of market share. Spending to cling onto, rather than grow, market share is never a good place to be and was a sign of trouble ahead," Hargreaves Lansdown equity analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said. The company's operating expenses surged 56% in the third quarter as it spent more on product development and marketing. Its adjusted operating margin shrank to 34.6% from 39.1% a year earlier.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Crypto is the cat with nine lives, but some wonder if FTX might be the last one.

It would be easy to write crypto’s obituary right now. The technological ecosystem has never quite managed to justify the logic of its existence or reach the mass adoption its boosters have promised for years. The latest crypto winter is turning into the crypto ice age, with company after company appearing to be in trouble and, at the very least, facing questions about their stability.

Months of turmoil in the space have culminated in the spectacular implosion of crypto exchange FTX and the incredible downfall of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried. His business operations have been revealed to be a disaster, and Bankman-Fried as a deeply unserious person and potential fraudster.

According to a count from the website Web3 is Going Just Great, $12 billion have been lost to intentional crypto grifts and scams. That count doesn’t include the $8 billion that appears to have been lost by Bankman-Fried, not to mention other recent high-profile collapses. (Disclosure: This August, Bankman-Fried’s philanthropic family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, awarded Vox’s Future Perfect a grant for a 2023 reporting project. That project is now on pause.)

For those who have been paying attention to the sector, this sort of feels like waking up from a worldwide hypnosis. The metaverse thing, which is basically Zoom meetings with legless cartoons, never made sense. Neither did this idea that images of pixelated punks and weird-looking monkeys were worth millions of dollars as NFTs. Thousands of crypto tokens and coins spun up out of thin air have been revealed to be nothing more than magic beans. Project after project has fallen apart, often taking customers’ money with them, and then there’s the multitude of outright crypto scams.

Crypto isn’t just a financial space where the line goes up and the line goes down; it’s also a place where the line goes poof! and disappears.

“We’re back to the Dark Ages with regards to trusting crypto,” said Phillip Shoemaker, the executive director of Identity.com, an identity verification company that works in the Web3 space, and a tech industry veteran who was once the head of the Apple App Store. At the same time, this isn’t entirely new. “With crypto, we have these massive ups and these massive downs, and it’s a super volatile asset, and we know that.”

This could — and in many people’s minds, should — be the death knell of the industry. Will it? Ehhh.

Crypto has undergone a series of boom-and-bust cycles and a number of high-profile collapses over the years. In 2014, Mt. Gox, a Tokyo-based crypto exchange, went bankrupt after losing hundreds of thousands of bitcoins. In 2017, US authorities shut down the exchange BTC-E amid money laundering allegations. (Disclosure here: I had invested about $100 in Litecoin on the exchange a few years before and that money is absolutely gone.)

In 2019, Canadian crypto exchange Quadriga went under. Canadian authorities later determined it was a Ponzi scheme orchestrated by a founder who, before its downfall, mysteriously died. The arena is rife with scams and schemes and so-called rug pulls and pump-and-dumps. There’s constant hand-waving from regulators and policymakers and critics that something has to be done about crypto, but exactly what that something is remains hazy at best. Until very recently, a lot of those lawmakers and policymakers were listening to Bankman-Fried.

Crypto may be the cat with nine lives; it’s just not clear which life it’s on right now.

“There are many people who tell you, ‘Hey, the market crashes every few years.’ I think eventually that logic has to run its course, or that pattern,” said Jacob Silverman, a journalist currently working on a book on crypto and fraud with crypto critic and actor Ben McKenzie. “Sam was supposed to be the safe bet.” The thing is, in crypto, there might be no such thing.

FTX’s collapse is bad bad bad

What happened with FTX and other major crypto collapses in recent months is bad for customers, for investors, and for the industry itself, full stop. Venture capitalists are likely to think twice before investing in the next crypto project that comes before them. Interest from retail investors in the space is slowing down. Some institutional investors previously skeptical of the space had opened up to it somewhat in recent years as prices climbed and it became clear there was money to be made. Bridgewater’s Ray Dalio went from warning bitcoin could be outlawed to thinking it might be a gold-like alternative. Now, institutions are likely to become hesitant about how involved they want to be.

“You don’t want to be the last person in, but there’s obviously a danger of going full throttle into it, so we’ve been going very slowly,” one senior vice president at a major hedge fund told me. He asked for anonymity to speak candidly about the situation. “We were actively uninterested five years ago, and now, we’re dabbling. Is this going to make institutional players more scared? It can’t make anybody more comfortable knowing that one of your major counterparties is clueless, for lack of a better word. That’s just terrifying.”

A trader at another prominent hedge fund said he hasn’t spoken with anyone in traditional finance who thinks crypto is going to “die die,” though he added that “obviously, expectations have been scaled back quite a bit.” He admitted that in recent months, he looked at Bankman-Fried and wondered how he and others were pulling off some of what was supposed to be this wild business success. “There’s been moments when I’ve been sitting here where I’m like, ‘Am I just actually a fucking idiot? I don’t get it, how are these dudes making so much money?’ And now I’m like, ‘No, no, actually, you understood exactly what was going on here.’”

What was going on here, to be clear, is that a lot of fake money was being made up and a lot of real money was being lost. “It’s like if you had supermarket loyalty points, and you’re counting them as money, and you’re only solvent if you’re counting your own loyalty points that you made up as your assets,” said David Gerard, a prominent crypto blogger and critic based in the UK. “Their liabilities were real, but their assets were imaginary.”

FTX’s downfall has caused contagion across the crypto industry, with other companies being caught in a crunch. Troubled crypto lender BlockFi, which Bankman-Fried said he would bail out in June, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in late November as part of the FTX fallout. There have been rumblings of more bankruptcies on the horizon, and US exchange Coinbase has seen a significant drop in its market value.

“It’s obviously a super, super dark cloud. And the other unfortunate thing is it’s not only impacted FTX, it’s metastasized to affect a lot of different funds and startups in this space that have had a pretty substantial role in building out this entire industry,” said Caitlin Cook, head of marketing and communications at Hxro Labs, a contributor to Hxro, a network building crypto derivatives infrastructure. “It wasn’t a contained blowup, it’s very clearly spread.”

Doug Colkitt, the founder of Crocodile Labs, which is developing a decentralized crypto exchange, said there are a lot of projects that had ties with FTX that are now just completely shutting down. “Up until last week, they had years of runway. That’s zero now,” he said.

And it’s not just a financial problem, it’s a morale problem. Many crypto believers and builders, the people dedicated to the cause and entwined in the HODL culture — holding on for dear life — will stick around. But not everyone.

“I’ve never talked to so many people in the space and who have been in the space full-time for years who have said, ‘I think I’m done, I think I can’t do it anymore,’” Colkitt said. “People lost significant amounts of money, they had their projects destroyed. Even if you didn’t, you have friends in the space who were just zeroed. It’s a very, very pessimistic mood right now.”

Crypto exchange Binance and its CEO, Changpeng Zhao, have tried to shore up confidence in the industry, promising to put together a crypto recovery fund of up to $2 billion. Those actions have echoes of vows made by Bankman-Fried and FTX to save the industry as crypto prices fell and companies faltered over the summer, and, well, we’ve just seen how that turned out.

Everybody hates Sam

It should go without saying that Bankman-Fried has plenty of enemies at the moment.

He has undertaken major efforts to place himself and his companies at the center of the crypto narrative in recent years by hosting flashy conferences, partnering with big celebrities, hobnobbing with regulators, making splashy investments, and injecting large donations into political and philanthropic causes. He’s attracted a lot of media intrigue and coverage — the son of fancy lawyers who went to a fancy college, a disheveled wunderkind who seemingly figured this whole confusing system out.

Neeraj Agrawal, director of communications at Coin Center, a crypto-focused policy think tank, told me in a text message that he doesn’t feel there’s “much else to say” about Bankman-Fried. “It sucks that one guy can do so much damage,” he said.

Among those who have been working to legitimize crypto in terms of policy and regulation, there’s a sense of frustration that Bankman-Fried sucked all of the air out of the room after a pretty rapid rise. “You can ‘communicate’ for a decade and then one guy comes along and undoes any good you’ve done,” said Jerry Brito, the executive director of Coin Center, on Twitter. “Kinda demoralizing.”

There was also a sense that Bankman-Fried was trying to push regulators and policymakers in directions that would have favored his company — something many in the industry, including the Binance founder who ultimately helped orchestrate FTX’s collapse, took issue with.

Some people in the industry say that this is proof that centralized exchanges like FTX won’t work. They say that decentralized finance, or DeFi, which tries to replicate a lot of the financial system, but without intermediaries and depending largely on smart contracts, is the way. “In DeFi, you see every single loan,” said Tarun Chitra, founder and CEO of Gauntlet Networks, a financial modeling platform for blockchains. “You entered that contract and you getting wiped out means you took irresponsible risks. Whereas in this centralized finance space, they just let people keep taking irresponsible risks with customer money.”

It is worth noting that many in the DeFi space worried the legislation Bankman-Fried was backing could kill DeFi altogether in the US, giving centralized exchanges like FTX an enormous leg up.

The argument that DeFi is the answer to this is a little hard to swallow, at least for now. For one thing, DeFi is still a nascent space that is very difficult for regular users to navigate. It is often subject to scams, too. And regardless, most regular people looking at the crypto space aren’t really going to get the difference.

“From one perspective, especially building decentralized protocols that are competing or hoping to provide an alternative to centralized exchanges like FTX, we hope that some fraction of people would move over and at least realize the distinction there. But the reality is, for 90 percent plus, it tarnishes the entire space,” Colkitt said.

Bankman-Fried is not really doing himself any favors here by putting out weird tweets, giving terrible interviews to reporters, and in a DM exchange with Vox’s Kelsey Piper, appearing oblivious to the weight of the situation and its consequences. A pullback of the curtain of the boy genius’s business operations and balance sheet reveals a complete and total mess.

“I always thought he was a clear-eyed trader who was in a business that I thought was a little shitty,” the hedge fund vice president said. “If even half of the reporting is to be believed and the bankruptcy filing is accurate, that’s a fucking shitshow. I cannot believe they were that stupid.”

Crypto people will say that Bankman-Fried was an outlier, and are now trying to distance themselves from him. But it’s not clear how much of an outlier he and FTX really were. Again, these kinds of implosions in crypto are not exactly uncommon. “[Crypto] is set up to produce people like Sam or elevate people like Sam,” Silverman said.

If you take a step back, so is a lot of finance and startup culture, where some figures have been able to fake it until they make it and then, ultimately, are caught faking it. (See: Bernie Madoff and Elizabeth Holmes.)

Maybe the question isn’t whether crypto will die but whether it should

Basically no one I spoke to for this story on either side of the crypto debate said they think this is the end of the industry, though their reasons as to why were different.

Hilary Allen, a law professor at the American University Washington College of Law and an expert in financial stability regulation — who is not a fan of crypto — said she just doesn’t see the efforts to get the government’s blessing on it stopping, given how much money, despite significant losses, is still on the line. “There are still people in the crypto industry lobbying for legislation that would allow crypto access to the government safety net to allow it to keep going,” she said. “The rhetoric from people who have large crypto positions is entirely cynical because crypto has no value if you have no one to sell it to. They have a vested interest in maintaining that rhetoric. There’s a lot of sunk cost here.”

Alex Gladstein, chief strategy officer at the Human Rights Foundation and an advocate largely for bitcoin for humanitarian and cross-border reasons, believes that crypto remains “cyclical” and that a bull cycle will come back around. “It’s a massive setback for the crypto industry, and I hope people learn the right lessons,” he said. (One lesson here: Don’t leave your money on the crypto exchange, really, even if those crypto exchanges are easier to use and promise they are super-duper aboveboard.)

Jonathan Victor, ecosystem lead at Protocol Labs, an open-sourced research and development lab, said he sees this moment as a “reset” and an “end of a certain era of crypto with the headiness of people doing stuff.” But he sees it as an opportunity to keep trying and creating something useful in the space. “It definitely creates noise, and it affects, in the short term, the general perception around things, but ultimately the true weighing machine for all of this stuff is: Do we build valuable things?” he said.

It is probably true that this is just another crypto bust and that in X amount of years from now, we’ll see another boom. (Fortune’s Term Sheet reported that some venture capital firms are already on the hunt for where to park their money in the arena next.) It will probably look different, because it always does, and likely have new players and technologies and acronyms that we’ll all have to learn about if we want to play along. And after that boom cycle, let’s face it, there will probably be another bust.

But maybe there’s a distinction here between what will happen and what should. Crypto’s not great for the planet, it’s wildly volatile and speculative, and it’s costing a lot of people a lot of money that results in very real pain. I’m not saying there are no upsides to it or dismissing the possibility that someday its potential will be realized. But you do have to wonder how much and how long any of this is worth it.

Crypto remains largely a solution in search of problems, and in the process of that search, it’s causing a lot of problems on its own.

Update, November 29, 2022: This piece has been updated with BlockFi’s bankruptcy and Binance’s crypto recovery fund.

Rian Johnson’s murder mystery follow-up takes on the self-styled founder class, with riotous results.

There’s a song on the Beatles’ self-titled album — more commonly called the White Album — entitled “Glass Onion,” and it’s a bit of a head-scratcher. “I told you about strawberry fields / You know the place where nothing is real / Well here’s another place you can go / Where everything flows,” the song begins. It’s self-referential, with nods to songs like “I Am the Walrus,” “Fixing a Hole,” and “The Fool on the Hill,” and the lads croon about “looking through a glass onion,” where you can “see how the other half live.”

What does it mean, you might ask? Well, nothing, and that’s why John Lennon wrote it, explaining in 1970 that “I was having a laugh because there’d been so much gobbledegook about [the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album], play it backwards and you stand on your head and all that.” People had been reading way too much into Beatles lyrics; Lennon wanted to screw with them a bit by serving up cryptic lyrics that didn’t mean anything at all. (Charles Manson didn’t get the joke and became convinced — or at least convinced his followers — that the White Album was actually the Beatles’ attempt to contact him and his “Family,” and warn them about a coming race war; eventually, this became the impetus for the infamous murders of Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, and three others on Cielo Drive. But that’s another story for another day.)

Netflix

Anyhow, don’t read too much into the lyrics of the song — but maybe read a little because they seem to have furnished a bit of a jumping-off point for Rian Johnson as he wrote and directed Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. It’s the sequel to his 2019 smash hit Knives Out, and similarly, this film concerns a big mystery with a big cast of characters. The only holdover from the first film is Detective Benoit Blanc, played by a ludicrously accented Daniel Craig, who looks like he is, once again, having a blast. (And who wouldn’t? They shot in Greece during the pandemic.) This time, he’s ended up at the island home of a tech billionaire named Miles Bron (Ed Norton) with a bunch of Bron’s college friends for a weekend away and some kind of unspecified surprise.

(Miles Bron is not exactly an anagram for a certain owner of Twitter, but it’s not all that far off! But I’m sure I’m reading into things.)

The fun of the Knives Out series is, in large part, that you’re just being invited to join a party. Yes, there are murders, but it’s still a good time, and everyone seems to be having fun making the movie. The guests aren’t just Norton and Craig, but Kate Hudson, Dave Bautista, Kathryn Hahn, Janelle Monáe, Leslie Odom Jr., and Jessica Henwick, plus a whole lot of surprise celebrities who show up for brief and delightful cameos. They’re all trying to solve the mystery, and so are you. And in the end, it’s immensely satisfying.

In that way, it’s clear that Johnson is working in the long tradition of the great Agatha Christie, who frequently populates her mystery novels, led by detectives like Miss Marple and Inspector Poirot, with casts of characters that represent people from across the many social and cultural strata of the 19th century. There are spinsters, doctors, educated gentlewomen, badly behaved cads, servants, inspectors, ministers, you name it — all types who sometimes subvert but more often fulfill the stereotype. And since you know what each person’s characteristics are likely to be, it’s much easier to sink into the mystery and enjoy it as it hums along.

Like Christie, Johnson puts a detective at the center — Blanc, in this case — who seems a bit eccentric and easy to underestimate but is actually very cunning and observant. Your job is to spar with him, to try to solve the mystery before he does. All of that makes Glass Onion a blast and prompts the audience not just to sit passively but actively take part in the movie.

But at the same time, both Knives Out and Glass Onion harbor a bit of an edge as, I suppose, befits the title of the series. The first film was not just a fun mystery-comedy; it was satirical, a skewering of old money and a kind of pseudo-progressive type who really just wants to preserve their own social standing. (Remember the Hamilton references?) The series got its start as a barbed look into “how the other half lives,” as Lennon wrote.

John Wilson/Netflix

For the second film, Johnson coasts on over to the world of self-styled “founders,” which I think used to be called the “creative class” — people who worship innovation, live by smoke and mirrors, go around talking about moving fast and breaking things, and get rich by means that are perhaps less than ethical. The film takes great pleasure in skewering them all, slowly unpacking and exposing their hypocrisy, stupidity, and banality.

Of course, there’s a layer of irony in jabbing at tech founders and innovators when your movie is bankrolled and distributed by one of the biggest tech stories of them all: Netflix, which has altered the shape of cinema and entertainment irrevocably in the past 15 years or so. In fact, even this film is part of Netflix’s effort to figure out how it will stay alive; it’s getting a one-week run in limited theaters, followed by several weeks’ pause before it lands on the streamer. An odd strategy for a sequel to a movie that sold far more tickets than anyone thought it would and made a huge return on its modest budget. Whatever Netflix’s strategy here — perhaps an effort to sell out theaters in the one-week run, garner tremendous buzz, and end up with lots of subscriptions from people who wanted to see it in theaters and couldn’t get a ticket? — it’s the kind of experimenting that today’s Silicon Valley types seem to exult in. It’s exactly the kind of thing Miles Bron and his buddies might try to do.

But then, maybe that’s the point? There’s a good chance that Glass Onion is, in a sense, satirical about itself — a murder mystery with an edge that’s directed reflexively. All in good fun, of course.

Or maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s just having a laugh. There’s been so much gobbledegook, after all. The joy of Glass Onion is that you can read into it, or just let it flow over you and enjoy the ride.

Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery opens in theaters on November 23 for one week and then will premiere on Netflix on December 23.

Shipments of integrated and discrete graphics processing units dropped to a 10-year low in the third quarter as PC OEMs reduced procurements of CPUs, and gamers lowered their purchases of existing graphics cards while waiting for next-generation products. From a report: In contrast, miners ceased to buy graphics boards due to changes that happened to Ethereum. In general, sales of standalone graphics cards for desktops hit a multi-year low. Usually, PC makers increase procurement of PC hardware components in the third quarter as they assemble computers to sell them in back-to-school and holiday seasons when sales are high. But as demand for PCs softened recently, manufacturers initiated inventory corrections and lowered their components buying to sell off what they already have. As a result, sales of integrated and discrete GPU dropped to 75.5 million units in Q3 2022, down 10.5% sequentially and 25.1% year-over-year, according to Jon Peddie Research. In addition, shipments of desktop GPUs fell by 15.43%, and notebook GPUs decreased by 30%, which is the most significant drop since the 2009 recession, JPR notes.

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It's time once again to check in with Elon Musk's new and improved Twitter and—yep, still a garbage fire. After buying the already-struggling company for a plainly ridiculous $44 billion, Musk's first and only task is to somehow bring in enough money to justify the price he paid for it.

You'd think that, anyway, but in practice, Musk has focused much of his attention on online performance art announcing new but nebulous changes to Twitter's content moderation practices that seem to prioritize right-wing hate and conspiracy accounts while mocking anyone who expresses alarm over it and, inside the company, firing anyone and everyone who might be in a position to tell him how that might backfire. And, you guessed it, now Twitter's financials are cratering. Again.

A new Media Matters analysis reports that 50 of the top 100 recent advertisers on Twitter have effectively stopped advertising on the platform in the last few weeks. Some announced the suspension of their ad campaigns, while others ended their ad campaigns without public explanation. The advertisers who paused their campaigns were big spenders before the Musk takeover, accounting for more than $750 million in revenue in 2022. A similar analysis by The Washington Post counts the number of top-100 advertisers who have now paused Twitter ad campaigns in the last two weeks at "more than a third."

By either metric, Twitter's spendiest advertisers are holding off on giving Elon Musk money until they get a clearer idea of what, exactly, their brands might soon become tied to. As an expert told the Post, Musk is becoming "a very strong brand himself, and a controversial brand."

That might be an understatement. One of Musk's first public acts after taking over Twitter was to personally promote a hoax news site's fake coverage of the attack on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's husband. He's mingled with some of the most notorious conspiracy promoters on the hellsite, both before and after, in apparently unending quests to seek out public approval from anyone willing to give him some.

The man has a brand indeed, and the brand is "what if MAGA conspiracy crank, but rich."

As for why Elon Musk is proving so blazingly incapable of managing a social network, we all have our theories. One anecdotal account that's getting traction today is a Tumblr post by a self-identified former SpaceX intern who describes high-level company management as being focused primarily on keeping Musk from doing damage: "I cannot stress enough how much of the company culture was oriented around managing this one guy."

"Twitter has neither of those things going for it. There is no company culture or internal structure around the problem of managing Elon Musk, and I think for the first time we’re seeing what happens when people actually take that man seriously and at face value."

We can't vouch for that account, though it does contain some anecdotes (ahem, "rocket cake") that can be verified elsewhere. Almost anyone who has worked inside corporate culture, however, is very familiar with the notion of instituting layers of management whose primary task is to keep the higher-level boss from constantly shattering underlings’ projects by instituting new weird demands that range from the impossible to the absurd.

Sure enough, when Musk came to Twitter, he brought along a team of top-level yes men from his companies to perform "code reviews" and otherwise allegedly judge the fitness of Twitter's current architects, and nearly all of the Twitter executives who did not have years of experience fluffing Elon Musk's ego were swiftly kicked to the curb.

It's a vanity project for Elon; he imagines himself enough of a genius to turn around a company he knows nothing about and wants to learn nothing about. His primary tool to turn Twitter into a profit center will be to insult people incessantly until that magically happens, but, in the meantime? He's losing more of the company's top advertisers by the day, even as his Twitter purchase is putting a billion dollars worth of new pressure on the social network. That still doesn't sound like a plan to us, but what do we know?

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Herschel Walker’s campaign is as bumbling as the Republican Senate candidate's ability to state a cohesive thought, but this latest misstep is particularly egregious. CNN reports that Walker is getting a tax break this year on his Dallas-area home. The problem is that’s a break given to folks for their primary residence, and someone obviously forgot to tell Walker that he’s running for Senate in Georgia.

According to CNN, which reviewed the candidate’s tax records, Walker is set to receive a homestead tax exemption to the tune of $1,500 on his Texas “principal residence,” breaking all kinds of tax laws in both Texas (obviously his home state) and Georgia.

The Heisman-winning football player received a tax break in 2021 and 2022 for his Texas home—even after announcing his run in Georgia.

RELATED STORY: ‘Are we more afraid of being on Breitbart’ or ‘of the dead people?’ reporter asks media

Georgia State University law professor Anthony Michael Kreis told CNN that Walker isn’t actually breaking the rules as a candidate, but it does make him look pretty shady politically.

“At the end of the day, this is more of a political problem than a legal one, in all likelihood … where Walker can be painted as a carpetbagger. It does call into question whether Walker’s change of residency was made in good faith,” Kreis said.

Walker has voted twice in Georgia, but still kept the exemption. He’s still not technically breaking the law. The U.S. Constitution states that candidates don’t have to have a primary residence in the state where they’re running—at least until they actually win the seat.

But Walker isn’t just taking advantage of tax breaks while running for office; he’s also been swamped with all the work of trashing transgender athletes.

In a new ad released just days after the shooting deaths of five people at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs where at least two of the victims were trans, Walker called transgender girls and women athletes “biological males.”

Nadine Bridges, executive director of the nonprofit One Colorado, said in a statement, according to The Hill, “Shame on Herschel Walker — and shame on every politician using LGBTQ lives as political props.”

Walker appeared in the 30-second ad with Riley Gaines, a former University of Kentucky swimmer and vocal right-wing anti-trans extremist. Gaines obviously still butt-sore over a tied competition with University of Pennsylvania transgender swimmer Lia Thomas for fifth place in the women’s 200-meter freestyle finals.

Referring to Thomas, Gaines says in the ad: “I worked so hard—4 AM practices to be the best—but my senior year, I was forced to compete against a biological male.”

Walker finishes the ad by saying, “That’s unfair and wrong.”

Sarah Kate Ellis, the president and chief executive of the LGBTQ media advocacy organization GLAAD, told The Hill, “Airing this kind of rubbish under the guise of a political campaign was already deplorable enough—but in the wake of Saturday night’s massacre at Club Q, it’s simply unconscionable.”

Of course, what’s wrong is Walker releasing the ad a day after five people lost their lives senselessly in a club while just trying to live their lives. But Walker’s anti-LGBTQ ad isn’t just an ad. In a campaign speech on Sunday, he went all-in on the anti-trans hatemongering and never once mentioned the Colorado Springs shooting that had taken place the night before.

Walker’s comments, according to an audio recording from Jezebel:

“Do y’all know what the definition of an enemy is? A enemy is somebody that don’t like you. But they been telling you they don’t know the definition of a woman either. So think about that either. They don’t know the definition of a woman. But I’m going to tell you the definition of a woman. Because it written in my great book. It said ‘a man and a woman.’ And there’s a difference between the two of them. So that’s the reason men shouldn’t be in women’s sport—here’s a difference.

But then, yet, they trying to tell you a man could get pregnant. Get that out of your head. No, he can’t. No, he can’t. All they’re trying to do is take you down in that elevator, take you down in that elevator and lie to you. But I’m going to tell you right now, I’m not going to lie to you. I’m going to tell you, we’re in a mess. We’re in a mess because we put weak leaders in Washington. Weak leaders in Washington that not representing us.”

But Walker hasn’t been busy simply isn’t trashing trans folks, he’s an equal opportunist clown whose aides have zero qualms about lying about the most easily fact-checked items.

The Walker camp lunged at the chance to denounce one of the candidate’s former high school football coaches after the man said he was voting for Democratic incumbent Sen. Raphael Warnock.

Curtis Dixon taught at Walker’s Johnson County High School and worked as the school’s assistant football coach. When asked about who he was voting for in the upcoming Senate runoff, Dixon did not mince words.

“Ask him what he has done to be a senator,” Dixon said. “I’ll tell you what he’s done. Not a blessed thing.” 

Dixon went on to compliment Warnock on his ability to reach across the aisle, whereas Walker doesn’t have the ability or criteria to be a senator. “He’s not ready,” Dixon said at a Wrightsville, Georgia, campaign rally for Warnock.

The Walker camp immediately released a statement denying that their candidate knew Dixon. According to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, Scott Paradise, Walker’s campaign manager, said of Dixon in a now-deleted tweet, “[he’s] obsessed with Herschel but doesn’t know him.”

Early voting in Georgia starts today. And here’s one of the GOP candidates who actually made it to a runoff, speaking during an interview on Fox News: “This erection is about the people.” That just about says it all.

Raphael Warnock needs all the support he can get to help our Democratic majority in the Senate. Chip in $5 today to his runoff campaign.

Click here to sign up for a Vote Tripling shift with MoveOn—on Saturday when early voting begins, next week during early voting, or on Election Day, Dec. 6.

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Put on your olive shirt, gaze with steely resolve across the Rio Grande — and make immigration reform less likely.

We’ve known for some time now that the presence of far-right extremists within the ranks of our police forces is a serious problem, one that was amplified by the Jan. 6 insurrection, where a number of officers were participants. Despite that, there’s been little effort among either police authorities themselves or their civic and federal overseers to confront the issue and begin rooting white supremacists out of our policing system.

Of course, when these bigots and their activities are publicly exposed, as with the neo-Nazi Massachusetts officer exposed by HuffPost’s Christopher Mathias last month, there’s an immediate uproar and the affected local authorities scramble to repair the damage. The same dynamic is occurring now in Idaho, where a now-retired Boise police captain was recently exposed as a contributor and speaker for this year’s white nationalist American Renaissance (AR) conference. And it’s going to keep happening.

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The Boise cop, Matthew Bryngleson, was exposed by researcher Molly Conger this weekend in a thread that detailed the officer’s real identity leading up to the annual AR gathering in Burns, Tennessee. Using the pseudonym Daniel Vinyard (taken from a racist skinhead character in the film American History X), Bryngleson was a scheduled speaker described as “a retired, race-realist police officer.” The title of his speech: “The Vilification of the Police and What It Means for America.”

AR is one of the longest-running white nationalist operations, founded in the 1990s by Jared Taylor, who specializes in giving an academic veneer to old-fashioned racial bigotry, particularly of the eugenicist variety. One of Taylor’s most durable propaganda campaigns involves blaming Black people for crime in America; among the people influenced by his spurious smears was mass killer Dylann Roof.

That was the topic when Bryngleson and Taylor engaged in an interview that was posted to the AR website in September. Bryngelson told Taylor stories from his career and his interactions with Black people, whom he described as criminals whose crimes “the sound human mind can’t even comprehend … let alone carry them out.” At one point, Bryngelson used a transphobic slur to describe someone.

Taylor asked Bryngleson to describe his experience as a police officer in dealing with nonwhites, and he replied:

Whatever the worst crime of the day is, it’s usually a Black person or a nonwhite. Of course white people do DUIs, they do domestic violence, they steal, but when it’s something where you pause and go, “Holy cow, I can’t believe that happened in this town,” almost always it’s someone who is not from there, and it’s a Black person, almost always without fail.

It’s a script. It’s what happens every single time no matter what the case is. You can catch them just finishing beating someone and during the subsequent resisting of arrest, the fight, we’re called racists. We can catch them in the act and the mere fact that we are catching them is racist. It’s 100% of the time we’re accused of being racist. Especially in this town, obviously, there are so few Black people there, but when we do encounter them, of course it’s going to be white officers because that’s mostly what we have, and when they get arrested they’re going to scream racism every single time.

Under his pseudonym, Bryngleson also authored a couple of pieces for the AR website. One of them described how he reached a point in his police career when he “became aware of the violent tendencies of Blacks.” Another recounted “microaggressions” from nonwhite and liberal members of the Boise City Council.

He described growing up in southern California before moving to a predominantly white northwest city 22 years before—in fact, following the blueprint of multiple other right-wing officers who have moved to Idaho in the same time period, and becoming a leading component in the state’s far-right radicalization.

“I picked the location because it was mostly white,” he wrote, adding that “the overwhelming majority” of officers who relocated “came to escape Black violence and rear their children in an area where they won’t be subjected to ‘diversity’ in the schools and violence in their neighborhoods.”

Bryngleson had been sworn in as a captain in April 2021 and has been an officer on the force for nearly 24 years. He was one of several officers who filed allegations against former Boise Police Chief Ryan Lee, an Asian American who was recently forced to resign amid allegations of abusive behavior.

Bryngleson also hosted a heavy-metal program weekly on the community FM station, Radio Boise 89.9, early Sunday mornings from 1 AM to 3 AM from 2013 to 2018. He frankly discussed working as a cop during banter on the show.

Mayor Lauren McLean immediately launched an investigation into Bryngleson’s history with the department and whether his views affected the cases he handled, and particularly any convictions he may have been responsible for, as well as how widespread his malign influence was within the department and whether its culture tolerated him knowingly.

“This is no time to consider circling the wagons and I will not tolerate anyone who tries to impede this investigation in any way,” McLean’s statement read, and added a warning to serving officers:

And for those in BPD: if you cannot or will not cooperate fully and honestly, I suggest that now is the time to leave this department. And honestly, the profession. The people of Boise rely on you to protect and serve them. The people of Boise deserve better. Everyone should trust that they will be treated fairly. We can’t expect that one would be able to trust that someone who perpetuates such blatant racism, while serving as an officer, would be able to treat those he reviles so deeply in a fair way. In the way that members of our community—any community—deserve and expect.

Other law enforcement officials also condemned Bryngelson, including former Ada County Sheriff Gary Raney, the Treasure Valley Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), and Boise’s Police Union.

“Bryngelson’s thoughts, beliefs, and actions are unbecoming of a law enforcement officer of any rank and they are devastating to our membership and our community relationships,” the FOP’s statement said.

In addition to reviewing Bryngleson’s cases, Ada County officials will also need to take a harder look at the circumstances of Lee’s ouster. As the Idaho Statesman editorial board says: “[N]ow because of what we know about Bryngelson’s deplorable views on people who are not white, we can’t help but wonder if the complaints against Lee were tinged by racial bias.”

The deeper problem, however, is that these revelations keep happening, and they will keep happening. That’s because this is a systemic problem related to police culture and training, and it’s a problem within every law enforcement body in the country. Responding to a scandal here and another one there won’t address how deeply this is embedded in law enforcement nationally, and how profound its ramifications are both for how policing is conducted in America and how it affects its relations with an increasingly angry public.

A powerful indicator of how deeply the infection runs within law enforcement culture is how police officials have responded to efforts in Minnesota—where a cop’s murder of a Black Minneapolis man in 2020 set off months of protests nationwide—to ban police officers from being involved in hate, extremist, or white supremacist groups. Police groups have come out in opposition to such bans, they say, because the wording is too vague and they might infringe on people’s First Amendment rights.

Fridley Police Chief Brian Weierke, president of the Minnesota Chiefs of Police Association, said the rule banning applicants or officers from participating in or supporting white supremacist, hate or extremist groups needs to be more clearly defined so the rule isn’t “weaponized.”

Carver County Sheriff Jason Kamerud said the new rules would hurt recruitment efforts, even as law enforcement nationwide has struggled to recruit and retain officers the past couple of years due to “protests,” the pandemic, and “political rhetoric calling for defunding police.”

Until the nation’s civil authorities—from mayors to governors to senators and presidents—make it a top priority to weed out bigoted extremists from the ranks of our law enforcement bodies, Police Captain Matt Brynglesons will keep happening. And so will George Floyds.

Urgency is building in the Senate to get cannabis legislation passed before the year is over.

The specter of a Republican-led House has lit a fire under proponents of cannabis banking legislation, according to three House and Senate staffers involved in discussions on both sides of the aisle.

Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), Sens. Steve Daines (R-Mont.) and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and other lawmakers met with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer last week to talk about the SAFE Banking Act. Lawmakers and staffers all said a concerted effort is underway to find common ground between Republicans and Democrats.

“We're serious. We want to do this,” Brown said. “I'm actually fairly optimistic and hopeful that we will come to an agreement.”

The key to passage is twofold. They must find a pairing of financial services and criminal justice reform-centered cannabis legislation that progressive Democrats and conservative Republicans can all accept. And then they must receive signoff from the leaders of the Senate Banking Committee, House Financial Services Committee, and the four corners of party leadership in both chambers.

Both efforts are already underway: Daines last week said Republicans are open to the HOPE Act — a bill introduced by Reps. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) that creates grants for state expungement programs. Joyce said research language is also on the table.

“We're open to some additions to it,” Daines said. “I think the Hope Act is one, but if it gets bigger than that, I think we're gonna have a problem.”

Brown, meanwhile, is working with Senate Banking ranking member Pat Toomey (R-Penn.), House Financial Services Chair Maxine Waters (D-Calif.) and House Financial Services ranking member Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.).

“Some things will be kicked upstairs to the leaders — others will be done on our level,” Brown explained.

Criminal justice reform

The SAFE Banking Act has already passed the House in some form six times. But it’s been stuck in the Senate, where it either went too far for certain Republican leaders or not far enough for progressives.

The bill would not solve all banking issues faced by the cannabis industry, but it would make it easier for cannabis businesses to open bank accounts and get loans. Many industry representatives and even some advocates argue that the bill would particularly help smaller and minority-owned companies since most of the country’s largest cannabis companies already having access to banking services.

The bill, however, has sparked resistance from some progressive drug reform groups who argue that the cannabis industry should not be given a leg up when there are still so many people in other states experiencing arrest and incarceration for marijuana-related crimes.

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) has repeatedly said he opposes passage of a bill that helps weed businesses without in some way helping communities that have been hurt by the criminalization of marijuana over the years. Schumer and Brown backed Booker’s position, while Republicans largely held firm that SAFE Banking didn’t need any companion bills.

But it’s now the eleventh hour, and Republicans are starting to come around to the HOPE Act — a states-rights-focused expungement bill.

Joyce, a co-chair of the Congressional Cannabis Caucus, has been campaigning hard for the bill with other Republicans since it was introduced last December, and met with Schumer earlier this year to discuss common ground.

Ocasio-Cortez plugged the bill during a House Oversight Committee subcommittee hearing last week, and said she plans to discuss it more with fellow Democrats during the lame duck.

Neither Booker nor Brown, however, would share details on their discussions around the HOPE Act, leaving open the question of how Senate Democrats feel about the expungement bill.

"It's not impossible to get HOPE passed in a Republican-led House, but doing so creates significant hurdles," one senior House staffer said via text, speaking anonymously to offer a candid assessment of the legislative dynamics. "Playing a waiting game could derail progress for years to come."

Question marks

Democrats are working on getting the green light from Toomey and Senate Judiciary ranking member Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) for the bill to move forward. Toomey and his office declined to provide any updates to POLITICO.

A further complicating factor is resistance from advocacy group Drug Policy Alliance, which has significant influence with progressive lawmakers like Booker. Maritza Perez, director of the group's office of federal affairs, told POLITICO on Friday that if substantial amendments aren't added to either the SAFE Banking Act or the HOPE Act, DPA won’t support a cannabis package.

Brown, a key negotiator, also indicated this week that SAFE needs some tweaking.

“What passed the House is very inadequate,” Brown said. “My main focus is to protect the workers in this industry.”

The talk of eleventh-hour changes to the language of SAFE are not going over well with Republican supporters who have also been working months to bring the two sides together.

“When people add things to SAFE [such as] different financial decisions or market decisions, I think that will bog it down,” Joyce said. “The way it exists now, there seems to be consensus on its ability to move.”

The overall mood on this banking bill, however, is entirely different from the last Congress. While it still faces hurdles, lawmakers seem genuinely optimistic that the legislation could pass in this session, and are taking steps to work out their differences.

Last week, the Senate passed a landmark medical marijuana research bill by unanimous consent. After its passage, Schumer lauded the prospects of the cannabis banking bill.

“I’m still holding productive talks with Democratic and Republican colleagues in the House and the Senate on moving additional bipartisan cannabis legislation in the lame duck, and we are going to try very, very hard to get it done,” he said.

A CNN guest on Tuesday slammed Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker for releasing an ad targeting teen transgender athletes hours after a gunman murdered five people at an LGBTQ club in Colorado Springs. After host Don Lemon played a clip of the Walker ad, he brought on Los Angeles Times columnist LZ Granderson to discuss its poor timing in the wake of a deadly attack on the LGBTQ community in Colorado. Granderson started out by noting that it was strange to see Walker spending time talking about transgender athletes when polls show voters are most concerned about issues such as the cost o…

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Lawyers for collapsed crypto exchange FTX said on Tuesday, in the company's first bankruptcy hearing, that regulators from the Bahamas, where FTX was headquartered, have agreed to consolidate proceedings in Delaware. From a report: FTX's lawyers, who were brought in by new leadership to handle restructuring, filed an emergency motion last week to secure the move to the U.S. The hearing on Tuesday was the initial step in the resolution of the largest cryptocurrency bankruptcy on record. "What we are dealing with is a different sort of animal," said FTX counsel James Bromley. "Unfortunately, the FTX debtors were not particularly well run, and that is an understatement." Regarding FTX's founder, this was an organization that was "effectively run as a personal fiefdom of Sam Bankman-Fried," an FTX attorney told the court. [...] Bankman-Fried exercised a level of control over the business that "none of us have ever seen," Bromley said, referring to the bankruptcy experts and attorneys the company has employed as part of the restucturing process. "The FTX situation is the latest and the largest failure in this space," Bromley said. "There was effectively a run on the bank, both with respect to the international exchange [...] as well as the U.S. exchange. At the same time that the run on the bank was occurring, there was a leadership crisis [...] The FTX companies were controlled by a very small group of people, led by Mr. Sam-Bankman-Fried. During the run on the bank, Mr. Fried's leadership frayed, and that led to resignations."

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