When a new president is sworn in, they gets told a lot of secret stuff - launch codes, backup plans, etc. But one of the best-kept presidential secrets is the "Enemies Briefcase," a collection of "presidential emergency action documents" (PEADs).

https://t.co/A6Jh3Gkip7

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There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

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First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

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All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

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A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

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The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

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The Democrats are at least two parties. The progressive wing of the party (which is by no means unified) and the finance wing of the party, which is also the party leadership.

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During the leadership race, the progressive wing was represented by @SenSanders and @SenWarren; the former wants to minimize the role of markets in our lives, the latter wants to redeem markets by regulating them. It's a distinction with a difference, but I donated to both.

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Both wings of the party have prominent representatives in Congress; Sandersism are most visibly associated with @AOC (whom I donated to) and Warrenism is embodied by @RepKatiePorter (likewise), who was also one of Warren's law school proteges.

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Porter is a force of nature. She is infamous - and celebrated - for her brutal, no-holds-barred questioning of both corporate and administration witnesses, using a white-board to pin them down and eviscerating any attempts at bullshittery.

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This isn't just about getting facts into the record (though, she is SO GOOD at getting facts into the record!), it's also about effecting change, like when she single-handedly cornered the CDC's chief into guaranteeing universal, free covid

Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

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It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

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Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

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When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

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2022 is shaping up to be a bloodbath. The Trump census cooked the numbers to advantage Republicans, and GOP statehouses are poised to redistrict in ways that will hand potentially permanent minority rule to the GOP in Congress.

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There's a potential way out: #HR1, an omnibus bill of electoral reforms that would create durable, structural protections for voting rights and a level playing field for campaigning.

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To get a sense of how urgent the looming crisis is - and of how important HR1 is - listen to @ryangrim interviewing @schwarz and Rep @JohnSarbanes [D-MD] on this week's

In theory, HR1 could be blasted through - Dems control the Senate, Congress, and the White House, and the future of the party depends on it, but I'm far from confident that they'll find the discipline and political will to make it happen.

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The Democrats keep squandering their majorities and wasting opportunities to make real change - changes that are must-haves, not nice-to-haves; changes needed to head off existential threats to the nation itself.

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My little Jacob Wohl story: August 2016, we're sitting around the trading turrets at my office on a bored to tears slow day. Our receptionist said someone was here for his 2pm appointment. None of us had an appointment on schedule. Who is it? we ask? Some guy named Jacob Wohl 1/

Jacob Wohl, for those out of loop, gained quite a bit of notoriety for becoming the youngest guy to ever get himself barred for life from the financial industry. Now he's waiting in our lobby to pitch something. We're a large merchant bank. 2/

Send him in, we said. In walks young Jacob asking to be seeded with $25mm to start a new hedge fund in exchange for an ownership stake in it. Oh, & he needs an office. And a Bloomberg station. And needs to borrow staff until he can hire some guys. And he needs a leased car... 3/

And he needs an answer today. Right now. Because there's a competing offer from Izzy Englander's firm Millenium (we know those guys well). We fight the urge to literally start laughing, but do ask him...hey, you the same guy who got banned by regulators? He didn't even flinch 4/

He went on about that being untrue & handed over a letter he said was from his lawyer who had confirmed he was not barred, had been vindicated but it 'just wasn't in the system yet at the SEC, CFTC'...whatever that means. 5/

A thread on how absurd the UK is on transgender issues and how the UK got so transphobic

In 2015 Parliament held an inquiry looking into the state of Transgender equality. Trans people of all stripes outlined many different problems across many, many different areas.

As a result Parliament created a list of recommendations including legal recognition for non binary people, gender recognition act reform, allowing 16 year olds to change their legal gender and reform of NHS gender identity services.

The government under Theresa May ignored everything that was recommended except for Gender recognition act reform. This act came into law in 2003 and gave trans men and women (but not non-binary people) the ability to legally change their gender on their birth certificates.

The process at that time to change your birth certificate under the GRA was to make an application to a panel of cisgender people who would decide if you were sufficiently trans based on your payslips, photo ID and bank statements. You would not get the option to speak to them.

(Also this process cost £140 which is just a tax on being trans)

It's funny how so many people who claim to worship "democracy" also dismiss nationalism as selfish xenophobia. Democracy is absolutely meaningless without strong national sovereignty. Under globalism, citizens of any given state have little influence over how they are governed.

Nationalism isn't just mindless tribalism. People are correct to insist their government has a responsibility TO THEM that vastly outweighs any imagined responsibility to foreign governments they have absolutely no influence over, or foreign populations.

We've seen that point taken to absurd extremes by the Left during the Trump administration, with whack-job judges ruling that foreigners have rights that EXCEED those of American citizens, including absolute rights to enter the U.S. and influence its government.

And we're frequently told that some international elite "consensus" completely overrides our ability to make individual decisions - or even to petition our own government, or vote for representatives who disagree with whatever "the world" has supposedly decided.

All of that is the absolute negation of "democracy" in any form, including the dangerous mob rule and majoritarianism that the Left selectively advocates. (Notice they always have a list of things nobody gets to vote on anymore, no matter how strong the majority vote would be.)

If you often procrastinate, open this

Stop being a perfectionist.

The root of procrastination for most people ain't laziness, it's anxiety.

I know your anxiety will tell you the worst case scenario. It’s a damn liar.

If you're a procrastinator, you will find every excuse not to do what u need to do. But here's an advice: DO IT FIRST, I call it reverse procrastination.

Extremely triggered by these well wishers advising Muslim women to not post pictures online, take care to hide addresses etc. what if somebody clicks u while walking on the road? What makes u think you can hide your address? Why can’t somebody click photos of you while you are +

Addressing a gathering? You can be clicked while speaking at a conference? While shopping at your local grocery shop? Should v then stop pursuing our careers? Stop shopping? Stop going out? Erase ourselves from public ? Erase our existence and our voices ?

I was shocked to c all the photos of me when I came out of jail. Especially the ones I had not posted anywhere on social media! Some photos were cropped from my interview videos. Hina Bashir Beg who I met in Tihar told me that she was shocked to c photos of herself splashed all +

Over news & social media. She is a pardanasheen. Never posted pictures of her online. The photo that was splashed all over was from her passport! One photo is all it takes. And these are just some of the cases. The list is endless. We know that these cyber attacks are state

Sponsored. What makes you think that it is difficult for the State to get all your information? And erasing yourself from social media is the solution?
Shifting the blame on women and literally saying that u r responsible for the violence against u makes u complicit in that +