Crypto & Zeebugs & Gay Stuff, Oh My!

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It’s Crypto, Bro!

Disclaimer: I despise crypto as an investment. I don’t understand it. I don’t believe you understand it either… and it annoys me to no end when some dude tries to explain it to me and I leave the conversation more sure than ever that its all a scam and he leaves thinking I’m an idiot for not spending $400k on a digital cartoon monkey. But I digress…

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Once upon a time a horrible fat little baby was born to two insufferable Stanford professors. They gave him a hyphenated last name, because of course they did. The year was 1992 and Samuel Bankman-Fried (Sam) came screaming into the world, and every day since has been a little worse than the day before.

Sam went to college at MIT where he graduated in 2014, even fatter, more insufferable, and in desperate need of a shower and a hair cut. He apparently received neither.

Somewhere around 2017 he used his family’s many wealthy contacts to found something called Alameda Research. It was apparently some kind of hedge fund and it probably never actually made money.

You might be asking yourself, why would anyone, anywhere give Sam money? Well, Sam went to MIT so they assumed he was smart (he’s not). Sam also pretended to be woke (he’s not). Whether you call it ESG or DE&I or anti-racism… it’s all shorthand for the same thing, bullshit. And there is nothing rich liberals love more than giving money to bullshit.

At any rate, Sam had this cynical plan to tell morons that he was a super woke person and if he could just become an incredibly wealthy super woke person, he would do good things with the money… as opposed to all those other unwoke rich people who just keep all their money in a Scrooge McDuck style tower and swim around in it.

In 2019 Sam decided that he wanted to go into the big time. He moved to the Bahamas and into a luxury building with 9 or 10 other ugly nerds and founded a crypto company called FTX complete with its own coin. There are stories about everyone who lived there banging each other too. What a sight that must have been… just a room full of nerdy guys with boobs and nerdy girls without them. Pasty skin without a suntan in sight. Gross.

Because intelligence is apparently completely detached from how much money a person has, rich idiots started investing large sums in FTX and its crypto-coin and attaching their names and reputations to Sam’s company. Sam, being a complete fraud as well as a fat, filthy, little shit… gave small percentages of the money he stole to the Democratic Party, BLM, “woke the whales”, or other insufferable grifts so that he could continue scamming stupid people by claiming he was virtuous. (As an aside… it’s actually pretty perfect. He stole peoples’ money and gave a little bit of it to charity and called himself “generous”. No wonder the Democrats liked him so much.)

To be clear, FTX was, is, and always will be a complete lie and scam. He used Alameda Research to make non-arms length trades with FTX to raise the price of the coin. Sam didn’t actually invent this (Sam didn’t invent anything)… it’s the first step in a classic “pump and dump” scheme. As the coin began to rise in value, he sold it to stupid people who thought it would be a good idea to pay millions of dollars for a string of worthless computer code because they have nothing better to do. After all, Sam was super woke. He really cared about people! F*cking idiots… LOL.

Anyway, Sam got big time rich on paper. Like big time rich… tens of billions rich. FTX bought the naming rights to a stadium in Miami. He signed deals with big athletes and stars to promote FTX. Sometime earlier this year, he even reached out to Elon Musk to try to put some money into Twitter. Elon took one look at the kid and was like “Nah bro”. (Think about that. He tried to give Elon Musk $3 Billion and Elon was like, “keep it”. That’s really saying something.)

At some point Alameda Research (now headed by the strangest looking nerd girl on earth, and sometimes sex buddy of Sam, Caroline Ellison) needed some money, so Sam decided to rob the accounts of people who owned FTX’s coin and deposit it with AR. Maybe this was to pump the price further, maybe it was to subsidize AR. I don’t know and don’t care, but it was theft. Going into a client’s account and removing their money without their permission isn’t some sophisticated fraud… its simple theft. He stole their money. He did it on purpose. There is no way to sugar coat that no matter how much the New York Times wants to cover for their woke little benefactor.

At some point one of the biggest holders of the FTX coin discovered that AR was pretty much a fake company that was almost completely funded with stolen assets from FTX. This made the investor angry (obviously) and they wanted out. This created a liquidity crisis because Sam didn’t actually have all the money he claimed he had. He had a bunch of crypto that he completely made up and falsely pumped the value of, but not much actual money.

There wasn’t an easy way out of this, so he approached the investor who wanted out and attempted to sell him FTX. The investor looked at the due diligence docs for less than a day and backed out of the sale. The value of FTX and Alameda Research collapsed into nothing and everyone lost their money. (What the investor found was the AR and FTX were so intermingled with funds and debt that one couldn’t really separate the two… and neither did anything more than speculate on the value of the FTX coin and rig the market by trading it between the two entities).

So, like I was saying, everyone lost their money. Well… most people lost their money. There are a couple of winners here. The Democratic Party got hundreds of millions of dollars in donations as did some other politically connected left wing charities and media organizations. Oh… and of course there’s Sam. Poor Sam. If you read the news his net worth is now zero! And if you believe that, I have an NFT to sell you.

I assure you, Sam has been squirreling away gold, bitcoin, US dollars, Euros, anything else he could get his hands on. I’d bet about anything he is still a billionaire and nobody will ever find any of it. He’s sitting in the Bahamas right now, playing dumb, saying he “made some mistakes”, and waiting to find out if the US is going to come after him for real prison time or if he can strike a deal, pay a few million in fines, do a couple of years at “Club Fed” and move to Costa Rica for the rest of his life with his fortune.

If it looks like the US is going to come after him for grown up felonies, he’ll be on a private jet to somewhere lovely without extradition before you can say, “It’s Crypto, Bro!”.

Question: What lesson can we learn from this?

Answer: There is no lesson. It was all a scam. It was obvious. If you gave your money to that insufferable fat little Sam or his strange mousey little sex buddy, that’s on you. What could anyone possibly learn from something like this?

Here’s one thought… if you have millions of dollars that you insist upon giving away, send it to me. If I get enough of it, I might actually do something good with it… but probably not.

Klaus Schwab Went to the G20

You weel eeet zee bugs unt you weel be happy

Hey! I found the bad guy everyone! He’s right there!!! Someone go get him!

I know we have our issues, here in America. I know we have differing outlooks on things like climate change and politics and various other things, but here’s something we should all be able to agree upon. Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) are the scariest group of supervillains to show themselves in recent memory.

Seriously, if you were to ask Marvel to create a new supervillain, it might be a older bald German wearing a futuristic space costume and telling everyone that he wants to control all the wealth of the world by making its inhabitants “own nothing and be happy about it”.

Klaus Schwab wants you to eat bugs. He wants to completely control you and your life. He wants to dictate what you can see and hear, therefore what you believe… and he wants to do it all from his lair on an island shaped like a skull. Okay, I might have made that last part up, but the rest is true.

I have a couple of questions for Klaus:

• How do you expect to make me eat bugs? Because, I don’t want to eat bugs. As a matter of fact, I’m going to need you to go ahead and write this down… I’m not eating bugs for your stupid climate theory or for any other reason. Got it?

• Who, exactly, put you in charge of stuff? Did someone vote for you? Can I have their phone number?

• Why were you at the G20? Who invited you? I’d like their phone number too, please.

• What is with the supervillain costume in the photo up there? Like… what is that? What do those symbols mean? Why are you wearing that?

• Can I get a list of American politicians that you know and make contributions to? (That’s an important one… I’m going to need that right away.)

• Why hasn’t anyone killed you and placed your head on a spike yet? I mean… I’ll get the spike if someone can buy me a ticket to Davos (wherever the hell that is).

On another topic, but still connected: How did Bill Gates become the Covid guy? Isn’t he a tech billionaire who founded Microsoft? I never even hear him talking about Windows anymore… it’s all “climate change” this and “make sure you get vaccinated” that.

What in the hell does Bill Gates know about any of that? He’s a computer nerd…Why does the mainstream media call me a conspiracy nut for not immediately taking the Windows 95 guy’s advice on experimental vaccines?

Seriously… what the hell is happening? Bill Gates is a vaccine czar and some German supervillain is trying to make me eat bugs. Are you people really not seeing this?

Either way, none of those assholes need come anywhere near me with their chips, their theories, their bug-food, or anything else. If they do they’ll get a live action remake of Copperhead Road by Steve Earle.

I learned a thing or two from Haji, don’t ya know…

Gay stuff! 🌈

The LGBTLMNOPs made a diagram:

Oh. Well that explains it 🤷‍♂️

Someone sent me that chart. It’s supposed to explain the new LGBTQIALMNOP pantheon and how sex stuff works now. As you might imagine, I have a few thoughts:

• This was definitely developed by a woman.

• Yes, I am a gay man. Yes I know about gay culture and some of the various groups of gays and lesbians. No, I don’t know what this is, nor can I explain it in any way. I have no idea what an “Ando-Skoliosexual man” is, nor do I have any interest in ever meeting one. Please don’t ask me about crap like this because I know as much as you do…

• Sexuality is certainly not easy… but it is incredibly simple. Either you are horny for somebody or you are not. If you like people with the same parts as you, you are a gay. If you like people with different parts, you are straight. That’s it. No chart required.

• Seriously, stop asking me about crap like this. I don’t know what a pansexual or a demisexual is and I don’t care. Gays aren’t doing this. Gays aren’t even organized enough to make a fricken’ chart like this. This is something else, and I don’t like it.

Democrats trick Republicans into going back to the not so gay 90’s:

The Republicans are falling into a trap. I’ll write a full article on the subject sometime soon because I have a lot to say about it, but I’m trying to keep this article light, so let me just summarize what’s happening and make a brief comment:

Democrats have decided to put Republicans on record as either being for or against gay marriage.

Yeah… that gay marriage. The one that got settled by the Supreme Court almost a decade ago. You remember… it was that subject nobody really cared about back when it happened, and even fewer people have strong feelings about it now.

Well the Dems, in what is frankly a smart political move, have decided that congressional Republicans should be on the record as either in support of gay marriage or against it. Not in 1997. Not in 2010. Now… in 2022. So they have drafted a “protect marriage bill” in the Senate to codify the Obergefell decision in the event that someone, someday, successfully challenges it in court.

I want to be super clear here… there is no challenge to gay marriage in court. Nobody on the right wants to revisit the biggest losing issue in the past 100 years for Republicans… which was their stance on gay rights. Well, almost nobody…

There are a few people who are hell bent to die on this hill… again. Those people are religious right conservatives and their friends at the Daily Wire. Don’t ask me why they doing this, but they are dusting off all the old arguments and putting their Santorum sweater-vests back on. They are pulling out all the old idiotic logical fallacies, and generally just having a political loser reunion over a subject that is long settled, not up for debate, and over. Huzzah! Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead!

It is breathtaking in its stupidity and I don’t understand it at all, but Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh got goaded into an ideological discussion with Joe Rogan on his podcast on the subject. He did an okay job of explaining his thinking without insisting that the GOP revisit the subject in law, but was very much against the idea of gay marriage. Not to be outdone, his colleague Ben Shapiro, said on his podcast “If you vote for the idea that society has an obligation to recognize male-male or female-female dyads in the same way that society has to recognize male-female, you should not be in the Republican Party”.

He said this the day the Senate voted to move the aforementioned legislation to codify Obergefell forward.

Seriously, Ben? A gay marriage litmus test to be a Republican? That’s your fricken idea?

Look, I don’t like any of this talk because I’m gay and don’t want to see us move backward on gay rights… but honestly, even more than that… I just can’t believe they are doing something so stupid. The issue of gay rights was a complete and total LOSER of an issue for conservatives and the GOP. It was terrible for them. And it’s not like people have gotten more conservative on the subject. Gay acceptance is at an all time high in this country. Everyone knows a gay person these days. What do you expect the American public to do, just give all their gay friends and family members the middle finger? It’s not gonna happen.

This is flat out maddening. And yes… I get that they are making a very traditional, logical argument based in both faith and the pragmatic idea that society should be promoting traditional marriage… but … UGH. It’s just so stupid. It’s so stupid. So breathtakingly stupid.

I wish I had one of those little spray bottles that people use on cats and I could just sit in Shapiro’s studio and every time he ventures anywhere near the subject I could just spray him in his stupid face and say “TSSST! No! Bad Ben! Stop talking about gay marriage. Bad Ben Shapiro… Bad”.

For the love of Pete, conservatives… Don’t play this game. There is no win for you here. You need to get together as a caucus and abstain in unison from the vote… with ZERO exceptions. Or all vote for it… Or all against it… It doesn’t matter, but make it clear you are protesting having to do this. It’s settled. And for the love of everything holy, Do not get goaded into debating it. You won’t win and it will be thrown back in your face all over again. Idiots!

Disclaimer: I recognize that this there is a nuanced line here… but two things can be true at once. It is perfectly consistent for a person to both support gay rights, including the right to marry, and oppose giving children hormones so they can pretend to be a different sex. Again, I’ll get into it in a forthcoming article.

Non Sequitur

Well, it’s been a little over a year since I started this project here on Substack. To date, Line of Fire has grown to followers in the hundreds with great engagement and well above average open rates compared to other content creators on Substack. The articles are getting shared are getting a lot of views and the trend has been up from day one.

I enjoy having this outlet. On a good day, I think I am saying things many of you want to say but aren’t always able to for reasons of jobs, relationships, etc… I sincerely appreciate having this audience and I look forward to putting out a lot more content!

I have played around with the podcast idea and have had a few people approach me to try it out. I promise that if I decide to do that, you all will the be first to know.

Again, thank you all for being out there and engaged. We are just getting started and there’s a lot more to come, so stay tuned! And as always, share this stuff around with anyone you think might enjoy it.

You’re the best and happy Friday!!

—Virgil