Creation Moment 11/24/2022 - Big Science & Dirty Money

Whoso is partner with a thief hateth his own soul: 

he heareth cursing, and bewrayeth it not.

Proverbs 29:24

"The FTX scandal has universities and journals scrambling to save

face and replenish funding after a favorite well suddenly dried up

—It’s the biggest financial swindle in history: bigger even than the Madoff ponzi scheme or the Enron scandal.— 

 Leftist politicians fell in love with a sexually-profligate offshore scam artist named Sam Bankman-Fried. Hailed as the youngest billionaire in the world, Bankman-Fried, or SBF for short—a 30-year-old former MIT physics student with academic parents (both leftists)—appeared as a rich darling and savvy star on talk shows and on the covers of leading financial magazines. He ran a popular cryptocurrency exchange named FTX with a million investors. That was until the bottom fell out on November 10.

 

Warning signs should have been obvious. With his flippant jollity, unkempt hair and hoodie, and offshore domicile in the Bahamas, where he lived in a sex commune with 10 employees and partners with little or no financial experience, SBF was a disaster waiting to happen. But recipients of his largess overlooked these warning signs and feted

him as long as the dollars flowed. He was second only to George Soros as a donor to Democrats, and although a few Republicans got pittances from his fake-altruistic gifts, SBF was clearly a supporter of Leftist causes – including Big Science and its pet project, climate change.

SBF’s crytocurrency exchange, FTX, just lost billions of dollars in one day. Investors in his scam lost everything—some who had entrusted their life savings to FTX.

Conveniently for Democrats, SBF’s easy-come, easy-go empire

imploded just after the US midterm elections on November 8. Some are attributing unexpected wins by far-left Democrats like John Fetterman to FTX money. Fetterman had a stroke and could hardly put a coherent sentence together. But he won his Senate contest in Pennsylvania against Republican Mehmet Oz, a heart surgeon and popular TV doctor, after huge inputs of cash from Soros and SBF and other rich

celebrities. The extra cash enabled Democrats like Fetterman to broadcast nonstop attack ads against their Republican challengers. But the damage was done; none of the Democrats are expected to give the tainted money back, and the lame-duck Democrat-controlled Congress has little to no motivation to investigate what happened at FTX.

 

Meanwhile, Big Science is in a fix. They can’t deny having profited from the scam, but one of their big funding wells just went dry. How can they hope to stop climate change without a free flow of dirty money?

 

Crypto company’s collapse strands scientists (Science Magazine, 14 November 2022). Robert F. Service’s subtitle reveals where the pain is being felt: “Foundations supported by FTX committed hundreds of millions of dollars to research on climate, biodefense, and AI ethics.” Service says nothing about SBF’s sex scandal or profligate lifestyle, or his massive donations of millions to Democrats. (Before the collapse, SBF was pledging a billion dollars to re-elect Biden in 2024.)

Last week’s collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX is

sending aftershocks through the scientific community. An undergraduate physics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) who founded FTX and quickly became a billionaire, 30-year-old Sam Bankman-Fried began to back philanthropic organizations that supported a wide variety of science-related causes, most designed to improve human well-being. Now, with FTX in bankruptcy and under investigation for misuse of investors’ money, his formerly flush foundations are suddenly strapped for cash and much of that work is at risk.

One of the foundations, the Future Fund, had promised $132 million for 262 science projects. Some of these were for potentially worthy causes like vaccines and pandemic preparedness. Grantees had already started these projects and had bills to pay. Now, the Future Fund officers said in a statement that “We are devastated to say that it looks likely that there are many committed grants that the Future Fund will be unable to honor.”

 

Why didn’t they warn the grantees about this house of cards wobbling in the wind? If this was for “science” work, who failed to do a proper scientific investigation with controlled experimentation? Can Big Science really be this unscientific?

FTX’s collapse was unthinkable just days earlier. The company, which serves as an online trading platform for cryptocurrency, had assets between $10 billion and $50 billion, according to bankruptcy documents. But it was brought to its knees by an old-style run on the bank, as investors tried to withdraw their money after doubts were raised about FTX’s financial health. The company declared bankruptcy on Friday, 11 November, and just hours later more than $500 million was reportedly stolen from the company by hackers.

Assets? $50 billion looks good on paper, but the collateral for the

spendable US dollars exchanged from crypto is thin air. Crytocurrency is an imaginary type of money that depends for its life on trust in the cloud, where blockchain algorithms guarantee the legitimacy of transactions, but cannot show any tangible ‘stuff’ behind it. 

Its value fluctuates wildly, as was seen in the roller-coaster ride of crypto in 2022. Was Big Science really caught off guard?

FTX Collapse Imperils Philanthropic Research Funding (The Scientist, 15 Nov 2022). SBF had an interesting term, “effective altruism,” for his gifts to foundations. It made him present an image of unselfishly wanting to just help people and the planet out of the kindness of his heart. What’s more altruistic than science? Well, the Democrat party got many millions more than science did.

Many of the grants given or promised by foundations linked
to FTX were for organizations or groups focused on effective altruism (EA), an approach to philanthropy espoused by FTX founder and Chief Executive Sam Bankman-Fried in which donors try to do as much good as possible with the resources they have available. However, according to Science, the FTX-funded Future Fund also awarded millions of dollars for natural science initiatives.

---How altruistic was it, though, for SBF to withdraw investors’

funds for his own Bahamas rich-kid profligate lifestyle, including a Lamborghini, free sex, liquor and drugs? Science Magazine wants you to believe the collapse was just a “run on the bank” when customers got scared......

But SBF, a pampered pervert and scam artist, gambled with the investments of a million customers, and blew it all away. He committed the biggest swindle of all time without remorse or apology." CEH