What Happened Today: Feb 9, 2022
$4.5 Billion Bitcoin scheme; Republican infighting; U.S. birth rate drop
The Big Story
Yesterday afternoon, married couple Ilya Lichenstein and Heather Morgan appeared in Manhattan federal court after being arrested by the Department of Justice for the theft and trafficking of hacked Bitcoin worth about $4.5 billion—$3.6 billion of which the DOJ recovered, making it the largest-ever financial seizure by a law enforcement agency. Questions remain about how the Bitcoin was obtained; the couple was not charged with the actual 2016 hack of Bitfinex, a crypto exchange, from which their stolen coins originate, leaving the possibility of other conspirators.
However, the theft and recovery indicate three salient truths:
1) Despite fearmongering by pundits and politicians, cryptocurrency is a technology ill suited for large-scale money laundering, as evidenced by the couple’s several failed attempts to launder their coins over five years and by the tiny fraction of the stolen haul the couple was able to convert into liquid assets.
2) The Justice Department used a search warrant to access the couple’s cloud storage account that contained crypto keys and blockchain data linked to the stolen coins—a rudimentary breach of personal files that underscores the reality that email, digital messages, and “secured” cloud documents are simply bits of information you may think you own but that actually exist as someone else’s property.
3) We deserve better personalities from our criminal class. As Michael Lewis said recently about the difference between the colorful Wall Street villains he chronicled in his 1989 classic, Liar’s Poker, and today’s finance swindlers, “My impression is that technology has made the characters somehow a little less rich. It’s more like there’s a flatness to [them] that technology has encouraged.” Indeed, along with their crypto ploy, Lichenstein, an angel investor who claimed to be an “occasional magician,” and Morgan, an aspiring content influencer who wrote limp culture coverage for Forbes and recorded rap videos under the name “razzlekhan,” lit the internet aflame yesterday as the commentary class gawked over the couple’s various failed attempts at internet stardom. But their tedious influencer hustle was in many ways the same thing as their crypto heist—just one more scheme, poorly executed, to take money and time away from other people stuck all day to their screens.
Back Pages: We’re Burning Witches Again, and Joe Rogan Is One of Them
→ The drop in the U.S. birth rate wasn’t as severe as forecasters feared it would be because of pandemic-related disruptions to family planning, but the approximate 7,000 fewer births during the first nine months of last year as compared to the previous year means the birth rate is still at its lowest since the 1980s. Researchers point to pandemic safety-net efforts like stimulus checks, extended unemployment, and student aid repayment and eviction moratoriums as part of why last year’s birth levels didn’t drop further. Some recent studies attribute the continued narrowing of the birth rate to the aftershock of the 2008 Great Recession and the intensifying money woes for millennials who lack financial security to raise families in numbers similar to prior generations.
→ Stat of the day: 35% of unvaccinated parents said they would vaccinate their children under the age of 5, while 73% of vaccinated parents said they’d give the jab to their under-5 kids. That comes from a new Harris/Axios poll just as Pfizer is in the process of accelerating its effort to roll out its vaccine for those age 5 and younger. The sharp divide on parental disposition toward young pediatric vaccines points to a brewing flash point as vaccination status increasingly becomes a gateway for participation in public life.
→ Republican infighting intensifies as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell criticized the Republican National Committee’s censure of Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger after the RNC rebuked the two Republican representatives over their support for and participation in the investigations of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. “[Cheney and Kinzinger] are participating in a Democrat-led persecution of citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse,” the RNC said, but McConnell disagreed: “We saw it happen. It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That was it.”
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us/politics/cheney-kinzinger-censure-republican-party.html
→ A purported Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps document obtained by Radio Free Europe highlights a meeting with high-ranking state officials and corps members from November 2021 that warns the nation’s beleaguered citizens are on the brink of a social collapse. “Social discontent has risen by 300 percent in the past year,” one unidentified intelligence official says in the document, pointing to “several shocks,” including high food and energy prices and crippling inflation that has eroded the already vulnerable public trust. The authentication of the document was not confirmed by RFE, which was allegedly obtained by Edalat-e Ali, a hacker collective that has produced verified state documents in the past. Ongoing street protests against President Ebrahim Raisi’s government over the past two years provide additional context and strengthen the potential legitimacy for the report’s warning that Iranian “society is in a state of explosion.”
Read more: https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-irgc-leaked-document-discontent/31683642.html
→ Perhaps the most convincing evidence thus far that Russian President Vladimir Putin is not going to invade Ukraine is simply the fact that he has not done so yet, or that he was willing to sit through what must have been an arduous five-hour meeting in Moscow with French President Emmanuel Macron on Monday. (Macron is boasting he secured assurances from Putin that the invasion wouldn’t take place, which he relayed yesterday to Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, despite Russian officials denying the promise from Putin.) The threat of invasion has already strengthened Russia’s position to complete its ongoing Nord Stream II gas pipeline project and further revealed the weakness of the U.S. influence in the region (a perennial foreign policy goal for Putin)—all of which suggests the actual attack on Ukraine is likely more trouble than it’s worth for Russia. There’s lower-hanging fruit for Putin to pursue that will further strengthen his alliance with China, and with what seems to be a growing distaste for war among Russians—a recent Levada poll reported 56% of Russians surveyed had a consistent or constant fear of war—the geopolitical headache and required military strain and expense to go into Ukraine appears increasingly undesirable.
→ Green tech companies are watching their stocks fall by as much as 75%, as electric-car makers and battery suppliers face growing investor skepticism. In the past week alone, two top executives were investigated by their board of directors, resulting in management shake-ups, while a startup lithium producer saw its stock tumble 25% amid allegations that its technology has yet to work. In addition to the bad press and underwhelming products, the sector also faces considerable technological and environmental challenges. The Metals Co., a deep-sea mining startup, saw its stock decline 90% as environmental opposition to seabed mining grows. In late January, a federal judge canceled leases of more than 80 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico—the largest lease sale in U.S. history—ruling that the Biden administration had failed to adequately take climate change into account when making the deal.
→ A new single, “Diet Coke,” out this week from rap artist Pusha T and produced by Kanye West, solidifies that King Push is the collaborator who instigates the most interesting ideas from the mercurial producer. The single also strengthens the possibility that West’s recent forays into uninspired Christian and gospel music was just a weak, self-flattering astroturf campaign to distract fans and himself from his highest calling: Classic Coke hip-hop.
→ In January 2021, President Biden issued an executive order to phase out privately operated for-profit criminal detention facilities, making good on a campaign promise to do so. One year later, however, business is still booming for some private prison companies, who have pivoted from incarcerating criminals to detaining and tracking immigrants. In previously confidential documents, the GEO Group, a multibillion-dollar private prison company, speaks of the “opportunity” the company has found in the “Border Inflow” and particularly for its “electronic monitoring business.” The GEO Group has also managed to maintain some of its private prison contracts and keep facilities open, using complex workarounds to circumvent the executive order. “In one such scheme,” The Intercept reported in October, “the GEO Group has proposed a huge payout to a small California city to subcontract with an embattled private jail 250 miles outside its jurisdiction.”
→ The GEO Group’s pivot to the “electronic monitoring business” parallels a similar shift underway in U.S. immigration policy. Instead of detaining immigrants awaiting hearings in detention facilities, the Biden administration is piloting a new program that tracks immigrants with ankle bracelets and mandates at-home confinements and curfews. There are almost 180,000 undocumented immigrants now monitored with ankle bracelets, and the Biden administration hopes to expand the practice by moving resources away from the costly and controversial for-profit detention facilities and toward monitoring technologies and enforcing at-home curfews. This shift toward “at-home” detention, which is being rolled out in Baltimore and Houston this month, comes in the wake of a record-breaking year of detentions on the southern border.
We’re Burning Witches Again, and Joe Rogan Is One of Them
A segment of the public, whipped into a frenzy by baby-boomer musicians Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, demanded that music streaming giant Spotify sacrifice popular podcaster Joe Rogan for spreading misinformation about the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant vaccines. Faced with the crime of giving a platform to guests who question the science—seemingly the best practice for advancing the state of scientific knowledge—Rogan pledged more balance, and Spotify said it would place a mandatory disclaimer before each show. This witch wasn’t so much burnt as singed, and the stock market responded to this irrational act of sacrifice as one might expect in an increasingly irrational age: Spotify’s stock rebounded in the wake of Rogan’s apology.
As we regress to a superstitious, quasi-pagan world of witch burning, civil discourse will be replaced with superstition and scapegoating, and our science will ultimately suffer. But why is this so? The big answer, as I argue in my book, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life, is mimetic desire, the phenomenon that philosopher René Girard summarized as “desir[ing] what others desire because we imitate their desires.” Girard perceived a close connection between mimetic desire and violence. “People everywhere today are exposed to a contagion of violence that perpetuates cycles of vengeance,” he wrote.
The mimetic contagion of anger and moral outrage is always dressed up as exceedingly rational: There are good reasons for it, in the minds of the accusers, just as there were in the minds of those who were burning witches in 17th-century Salem. There is an inverse relationship between science and sacrificial rituals because the rituals lock people into a kind of hermetic incomprehension that prevents true knowledge. The only way out for those caught up in it is not through; it’s seeing themselves as rivals to the very object of their outrage. And that is a level of self-awareness that few seem capable of reaching.
“More and more … modern individualism assumes the form of a desperate denial of the fact that, through mimetic desire, each of us seeks to impose his will upon his fellow man, whom he professes to love but more often despises,” Girard wrote. These small, interpersonal conflicts function as a microcosm of the instability that threatens the foundations of the entire world—and the world of 2022 is exceedingly unstable, at least by modern standards.
Read the rest here: