Take-Two Tumbles Most In Months As BofA Calls Grand Theft Auto Reveal “Impressive, But Unlikely To Surprise”
Take-Two Interactive shares plunged the most in nearly seven months on Monday as investors weighed a series of “Grand Theft Auto VI” leaks in recent weeks ahead of the Nov. 19 release.
The leaked clips reportedly expose plot details, character scenes, and gameplay mechanics, prompting Rockstar Games (a studio owned by TTWO) to call the leaks “gut-wrenching” and warn that some of the game’s surprises may have been spoiled.
What X users are saying:
Time to address the elephant in the room:
No self-respecting man would like to play as an empowered, annoying 2/10 Latina in Grand Theft Auto.
So let get this straight…some Gaming writer at Forbes is speculating that GTA6 Online (not GTA6) could be 2 years delayed (according to himself) since $TTWO didn’t mention it on their call and now $3B Mkt Cap gets whipped out ? lol
Omar Dessouky, an equity research analyst at Bank of America focused on gaming, digital advertising, and consumer internet companies, penned a note on Monday titled “GTA 6: Impressive Gameplay Reveal, but Unlikely to Surprise.”
Dessouky pointed out that the trailer released by Take-Two Interactive last week reduced the risk of another launch delay by showing GTA VI is already playable.
“Some details in the footage are consistent with access to a genuine playable build. Were a distributable copy to circulate, it could weigh on sales (particularly the PC version); at this stage, however, there is no clear evidence one exists,” the analyst said.
Dessouky added that the footage delivered few surprises. Many of the mechanics had already been disclosed, while clips released by an anonymous account called CyberLeek stripped away some of the mystery ahead of the mid-November release.
He forecasts that GTA VI will sell 45 million units during fiscal 2027, generate $3.44 billion in combined bookings with GTA Online, and deliver $898 million in incremental net income. Take-Two’s total bookings are forecasted to jump 36% to $9.16 billion.
Dessouky maintained his Buy rating and $368 price target. The stock dropped 6.3% late in Monday’s cash session, marking its largest decline since Feb. 12, when it fell 6.6%.
Federal regulators have authorized a generic ivermectin injection for the prevention of New World screwworm in cattle.
The Food and Drug Administration on Aug. 27 granted emergency use authorization for Bimectin, the injection, for use within 24 hours of birth.
The drug can also be used when castration is performed, or when a wound appears. It cannot be used in lactating dairy cows or in calves destined for veal.
Bimectin is a generic version of Ivomec, which the FDA authorized in February. The FDA previously approved Bimectin for treating and controlling parasites in cattle. The application for Bimectin came from Bimeda Animal Health, an Ireland-based company.
Based on available evidence, FDA officials concluded that the injection may prevent screwworm in cattle, and that the known and potential benefits outweigh known and potential risks. That information includes studies carried out in Brazil and Argentina in the 1990s, and a 2019 study conducted in Brazil, which found ivermectin injection prevented screwworm infestations in cattle, according to an FDA fact sheet.
“The animal safety profile for cattle, including male and female reproducing cattle, is well-characterized, and the information provided support that the food products obtained from the treated animals are safe for human consumption when used under the conditions described in the authorization,” the fact sheet stated.
“This authorization reflects the FDA’s commitment to expanding generic drug options against New World screwworm,” Timothy Schell, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement. “By authorizing both generic and pioneer products, the Agency is ensuring producers aren’t dependent on a single manufacturer or product to protect their herds.”
Ivermectin is an antiparasitic medication widely used in animals. The drug is also available for humans, primarily to prevent worm infections.
Screwworm, a flesh-eating pest, entered the United States from Mexico earlier in 2026 for the first time in years.
The Trump administration has since approved or authorized more than a dozen drugs for screwworm prevention and/or treatment, including an ivermectin oral solution for horses, a medication for dogs and puppies, and a generic treatment for dogs, puppies, cats, and kittens.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its latest update, with data current through Aug. 25, said that there have been three screwworm cases in August, all in Texas. Two of the cases were among sheep, and one was in a goat.
Dr. Anthony Fauci said an aide should delete an email about risky research his agency was funding, according to documents released on Aug. 29 by Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.).
“Please delete this e-mail and then delete from the deleted file,” Fauci told Dr. Clifford Lane, a senior official at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), in a missive on March 4, 2012.
Fauci, NIAID’s director at the time, was commenting on an op-ed that criticized risky research that created a more transmissible H5N1 influenza virus. The research, led by European scientist Ron Fouchier, was funded by the NIAID.
The op-ed said the virus appeared to spread easily and would be lethal to humans if it escaped confinement or was stolen by terrorists. It highlighted the government’s funding of the research.
It also noted that the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity had recommended that papers prepared by researchers such as Fouchier omit key details that might help terrorists make their own versions of risky viruses.
Fauci told Lane that “people are getting to” Phil Boffey, the writer of the op-ed, “and he is swallowing it.” He said that the board’s decision was wrong. And he wrote that if the board maintained its stance, “the field of research on influenza transmissibility and host adaptability has a very serious problem.”
Fauci and Lane did not respond to requests for comment by publication time.
Boffey could not be reached.
Fouchier had told Science magazine that his team created “probably one of the most dangerous studies you can make.”
Several weeks later, Fauci coauthored an op-ed in the Washington Post that said work by Fouchier and another group funded by the NIAID involved careful work in isolated laboratories and advanced understanding of how mutations of H5N1, sometimes known as avian influenza, worked.
“This research has allowed identification of genetic pathways by which such a virus could better adapt to transmission among people,” the op-ed, titled A flu virus risk worth taking, stated.
Fauci’s agency later funded research in China that made a modified coronavirus more pathogenic than the original version, among other gain-of-function experiments.
Fauci’s directive to Lane was one of five times he told aides to delete emails, according to documents obtained and released by Paul. The other instances took place in 2009, 2011, and 2020. Fauci left the government in late 2022.
Paul said in a statement that the documents “show years of ‘delete this email’ orders.” He has referred Fauci to the Department of Justice for prosecution after Fauci, during an appearance before the Senate panel Paul chairs, declined to answer questions. Fauci has not been charged.
Prior to leaving office, President Joe Biden gave Fauci a preemptive pardon covering conduct from Jan. 1, 2014, to Jan. 19, 2025.
It is a federal crime to destroy or attempt to destroy federal records. Dr. David Morens, one of Fauci’s former aides, recently pleaded guilty to violating that law.
SCOTUS Rules Trump Can Build White House Ballroom, Roberts Joins Dissenting Liberals
The U.S. Supreme Court just issued an order allowing construction of President Trump’s White House ballroom project to continue while the administration contests a lower court order that would block much of the development.
The justices voted 5–4 (with Chief Justice Roberts joining the three ‘liberal’ judges in dissent) to grant the federal government’s request to stay a lower court’s order halting above-ground construction of the ballroom while a lawsuit against the project by a historic preservation group plays out.
“We do not pass upon the legality” of the project, the court said in an unsigned eight-page decision from five of the court’s six Republican-appointed justices.
But a judge’s stop-work order was put on hold while the administration pursued appeals.
The Supreme Court’s ruling keeps that order on hold indefinitely, effectively giving a green light to one of Trump’s most visibly audacious projects, which critics see as the latest instance of the president ignoring Congress and flouting norms.
Writing for the dissenters, Roberts said the project is “likely unlawful.”
“The White House is an iconic American building whose symbolism and history are wrapped up in its architecture,” Roberts wrote, adding that it is critical to “ensure that those responsible follow the rules in deciding what to tear down and what to build up at the People’s House.”
Roberts had already blocked the stop-work order from kicking in on Aug. 22 with a temporary measure that gave the justices more time to deliberate.
In his emergency appeal to the high court, the solicitor general warned that stopping work now would leave the half-built project “susceptible to strong winds during extreme weather, and vulnerable to erosion, water, foundation damage, and other setbacks that will fundamentally compromise the integrity of everything currently built.”
The green light means the project could largely be completed before a final ruling on its legality.
Construction on the project, which calls for building a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, began in September 2025.
Building it required demolishing the East Wing, which Trump said was too small and in poor shape.
The facility is now expected to accommodate 1,000 guests, up from the initial 650 people projected, and its original $200 million price tag has doubled, though the true cost of the project is unknown.
Trump has pledged the project will be paid for entirely with private donations, but taxpayers could help fund security-related upgrades if a GOP-led Congress approves it.
‘You Will Only Have Yourselves To Blame’: Trump Warns Anti-Data-Center Crowd Not To ‘Kill The Golden Goose’
Despite recent polls showing that 70% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their area (including 60% of Republicans), President Trump on Monday warned that communities that don’t embrace them will “end up being backwards and poor.”
“The only reason that communities throughout the U.S.A. should not want Data Centers is if they want to end up being backwards and poor,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “If they want to be successful and rich, with far lower taxes and jobs all over the place, let Data Reign.”
And if people “kill the Golden Goose” by successfully resisting AI data centers, “you will only have yourselves to blame,” Trump continued, adding “China could not be happier with this anti Data Center movement. Actually, they can’t believe it is happening!”
According to a Gallup poll published in May, 71% of Americans oppose building AI data centers in their local area, including 48% ‘strongly opposed’ – and only about a quarter in favor. Opposition crosses party lines: Gallup’s breakdowns showed 63% of Republicans strongly or somewhat opposed to a data center where they live, while a July Fox News poll found that 60% of Republicans and 53% of self-described “MAGA Republicans” oppose data centers where they live.
At the same time, Beijing structurally benefits from anything that slows US compute (and according to X, are amplifying the outrage).
Some observations
Eighteen months ago, American frontier models from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI had virtually no competition – and the entire AI bubble (circle-jerk) was based on already-insane revenue projections.
Then, Chinese labs began rolling out open-weighted AI models that are up to 90% cheaper per token, for around 95% the same performance as US frontier models. Suddenly, the American AI buildout thesis that led the market to all-time highs this year, was pricked – and companies are migrating towards these cheap Chinese models they can run on their own infrastructure. Chinese providers went from under 2% of OpenRouter tokens a year ago to over 45% of weekly volume by April 2026, and Chinese models surpassed US models in weekly token volume for the first time in February.An a16z partner estimated roughly 80% of US startups build on Chinese base models.
The July tape made it official: chip stocks shed more than $1 trillion as investors began asking whether AI infrastructure spending is peaking faster than expected – even as the hyperscalers, undeterred, still guide to roughly $660-690 billion in 2026 capex, nearly double last year’s.
Chinese AI firms are also starting to run proprietary chips – a workaround to years of banning Nvidia’s top of the line AI chips. Beijing’s Cyberspace Administration barred major tech firms from buying Nvidia chips in September 2025, and state-backed data centers now require domestic silicon. Domestic suppliers are projected to capture nearly 90% of Chinese AI accelerator sales this year. That said, Huawei’s Ascend still trails Nvidia on raw performance and software, and its flagship CloudMatrix cluster draws roughly four times the power of Nvidia’s comparable system – a trade Beijing happily makes, because China is substituting electricity (which it has) for chip quality (which it doesn’t).
China is also able to rapidly expand both data centers and electricity generation because the CCP gives zero fucks about NIMBY Chinese ‘having a say’ over whether they plunk a loud data center or power generation facility next to their house. Instead, provincial officials are rewarded for building, the grid is state-owned, and the new Five-Year Plan explicitly treats data centers as a demand sink to soak up surplus renewable generation. In China, data centers are the solution to too much electricity. In America, they’ve become the cause of expensive electricity.
China Is Loving This
Trump isn’t wrong that Beijing benefits from anything that slows the US buildout. But the astroturf version of the argument was quickly dispelled: data center investor Kevin O’Leary claimed China was behind the protests, admitted he had no evidence, and is now being sued for defamation by two Utah groups. And the polling is real too – Heatmap asked the identical question about data centers in Americans’ backyards four times in 12 months and watched a 33-point collapse, from a 43/42 split last August to 75% opposed now. Public opinion doesn’t move like that because of foreign bots. It moves like that because of utility bills.
The grievances have receipts. PJM’s independent market monitor found data centers responsible for 63% of the capacity auction spike – $9.3 billion recovered from ratepayers in a single year, with measured bill impacts of $21/month in DC, $18 in western Maryland, $16 in Ohio. Total PJM capacity costs went from $2.2 billion to $14.7 billion to $16.1 billion in two years – and the latest auction only stopped at $329.17/MW-day because of a price cap Pennsylvania’s governor demanded. Gallup’s own open-ended data shows what’s actually driving opposition: half of opponents cite resource consumption – 18% each naming water and energy – plus noise, pollution, and traffic. Not anti-AI ideology. Bills.
And when the industry had the chance to carry its own costs, PJM members voted down all 12 proposals to shift them in July. Ratepayers remain the unpaid sponsors of the buildout. Meanwhile, dozens of companies – including Meta, Amazon and Google – have signed onto Trump’s “ratepayer protection pledge” to cover increased energy costs. You don’t create a ratepayer protection pledge against an imaginary grievance.
Meanwhile this is about as bipartisan as it gets: Greg Abbott has frozen new data centers in Texas, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee – Senate Republicans’ own campaign arm, warned in an August memo that the campaign against them “will expand far beyond Ohio,” where the issue has Jon Husted in a dead heat with Sherrod Brown – a Democrat Ohio voters fired statewide just two years ago.
And what Trump fails to see, apparently: the CCP would entertain exactly none of this. There is no mechanism in China for citizens to oppose infrastructure – and what the no-veto model produces isn’t just speed. Many local-government data centers run at 20-30% utilization, Beijing is now planning a national scheme to resell the surplus compute, and even SMIC’s own chairman warned the rushed buildout “has not been fully thought through.” The people of Licking County get a say. The people of Gansu get a ghost data center.
Trump says China “can’t believe” the anti-data-center movement is happening. Of course not – there is no version of it available to Chinese citizens.
Amazon Shares Tumble Amid News Of FTC ‘Advertiser Deception’ Lawsuit
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is about to drop a lawsuit on Amazon today alleging that the e-commerce platform manipulated prices paid by businesses to advertise on its retail platform, which made the company tens of billions of dollars over a seven-year period, WSJreports, citing agency officials.
According to the report:
The lawsuit, joined by a bipartisan group of more than 20 state attorneys general, will allege that Amazon deceived advertisers by secretly raising the minimum price advertisers had to pay to place ads promoting their products, FTC officials said.
The case, to be filed in a Seattle federal court, will become the consumer-protection agency’s third major case against Amazon, which agreed to pay $2.5 billion last year to settle an earlier suit alleging it tricked people into signing up for its Prime service and made it hard to cancel the subscription. Another lawsuit alleging that Amazon engaged in illegal monopolization is headed for trial next year. -WSJ
Amazon’s digital advertising platform is the third-largest in the world, behind Alphabet’s Google and Meta – earning $68 billion in ads in 2025, according to the report – which claims that advertisers suffered billions of dollars in harm by paying higher prices for ads. Some states may attempt to claw some of the money back.
Shares shot sharply lower on the news.
Every time a shopper searches for a product on Amazon, merchants compete to offer different types of ads to get in front of consumers. According to the FTC, Amazon began changing its ad auction strategy in 2018 – raising prices on advertisers in a way they wouldn’t notice.
The way this worked was through a mechanism called a “soft reserve”:
The company had historically run a special type of auction, popular in Silicon Valley, designed to attract more bids and protect winners from dramatically overpaying. That formula tended to reduce the price a merchant paid to advertise.
To raise the price, Amazon began entering its own bid, known as a “soft reserve,” which was higher than the price of the runner-up bidder, the FTC will allege. Under the rules of the auction, that raised the price paid for an ad. Amazon knew the merchants’ competing bids and didn’t disclose its new practice, officials said.
Amazon’s ad executives tracked the “surcharge” they earned from the strategy and sought to limit how much others knew about it, FTC officials said. The executives initially deployed the strategy only on popular shopping days when companies would think higher ad rates resulted from intense competition for shoppers’ attention, the officials said. -WSJ
According to the FTC, Amazon’s goal was to capture more of the value of each retail sale connected to a successful ad – in recent years intervening in auctions to raise the minimum price 70% – 80% of the time.
“Prepare For More Severe Scenarios”: Bank Of England Chief Warns Of AI Threat To Global Financial System
As the world marches towards open-weight, efficient, unrestricted frontier AI models out of China, Western leaders are starting to panic over the lack of guardrails. Most recently, Bank of England Governor Andrew Bailey suggested that the threat posed by AI could lead to a chaotic correction in global financial markets, as frontier models are now showing “increasingly sophisticated autonomy and problem-solving abilities, as well as threat capabilities.”
“Financial institutions, financial market infrastructures, and technology providers will therefore need to strengthen vulnerability management, response and recovery capabilities, and prepare for more severe scenarios involving simultaneous disruption across multiple firms or shared technology dependencies,” Bailey wrote in a two-page letter published Monday to G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in his capacity as chair of the Financial Stability Board – an international body that coordinates international policy and provides recommendations to national authorities.
Bailey says the cyber risk posed by AI is “the most immediate concern” for the global financial system.
“Frontier AI may have the ability materially to alter the speed, scale and economics of cyber risk, which could undermine market confidence system-wide, especially due to highly concentrated third-party service providers,” he wrote, adding. “Recent developments have also highlighted to me that many jurisdictions do not have the protocols in place to manage the development, release, and deployment of advanced frontier AI models, heightening risks for the financial sector and beyond.”
Bailey’s warning comes one month after the Bank for International Settlements warned that the AI bubble itself is one of three of the most alarming threats to global prosperity at this time.
“Disappointment in returns could trigger a sudden pullback in financing and turn the capex boom into a protracted investment bust, with potential knock-on effects on financial conditions,” the BIS said, before observing that “a major equity-market correction could have larger macroeconomic consequences today than in the past.”
Google Maps has updated its site to include Lake America in place of Lake Ontario, following the direction of President Donald Trump’s executive order renaming the Great Lake.
“It’s official! LAKE AMERICA on Google Maps,” Steven Cheung, assistant to the president and White House director of communications, posted on X on Aug. 30.
Google released a statement on the changing of the name of the body of water.
“The U.S. Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) has formally changed the name for ‘Lake Ontario’ to ‘Lake America’ in the United States,” the company said.
Since it updates Google Maps to reflect name changes in official government sources, people using the application in the United States will see “Lake America,” Google said.
In Canada, users of Google Maps will continue to see “Lake Ontario,” and those outside of the two countries will see both names, the statement reads.
Trump signed an executive order on Aug. 27 directing the Department of the Interior and the U.S. Board on Geographic Names to update federal records to identify Lake Ontario as Lake America.
The president said the change recognizes the United States’ role in protecting and maintaining the Great Lakes. The order cites nearly $4 billion in U.S. spending on the Great Lakes ecosystem during the past decade and said the U.S. Coast Guard operates nine of the 11 icebreaking vessels serving the lakes.
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney rejected the change, saying that Canadians would continue calling it Lake Ontario. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has also said the state will retain the lake’s traditional name.
Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum announced on May 9 that her government had sued Google over the company’s decision to label the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America after Trump changed the name of that body of water.
Google made the change for U.S. users after Trump’s executive order directed the federal government to adopt the new name. Users in Mexico continued to see the Gulf of Mexico, while users elsewhere saw both names.
Sheinbaum had threatened legal action in February, arguing that the United States could rename only the portion of the gulf under its jurisdiction, not the body of water. She disclosed the lawsuit during her briefing but provided no details about where it was filed or what relief Mexico was seeking.
After the publishing of George Orwell’s 1984, communist governments and organizations around the world condemned the book as “anti-Soviet slander” and “capitalist propaganda.” Orwell died only eight months after the book’s release and his personal feelings on the details of the story are limited to a few personal letters to friends and publishers.
Orwell was a Democratic Socialist, but even he was disturbed by the path that socialist movements had taken in light of genocidal far-left governments. His criticisms of Stalinist politics were treated by leftists as a betrayal.
However, it was Orwell’s depiction of women within authoritarian systems that angered the political left most of all. They have attacked 1984 for decades as “misogynistic”and “blind to gender oppression”. But as time passes, Orwell’s views on leftist women have proven more and more prophetic and they were written well before second wave feminism became a reality. In 1984, the character of Winston Smith described them thus:
“He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones. It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy…”
“She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none, that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her…”
The women in Orwell’s Stalinist world were a key tool in controlling society. They are easily brainwashed to serve “Big Brother”, turning them into affection-less robots. Their ability to nurture a family is conditioned out of them and if they are allowed to have children, they have no care for them. The children immediately become property of the state.
It’s not just women’s biological habit of following the dictates of the herd, it’s also their inherent desire for chaos that makes them destructive to society at large. Nearly every civilization from the beginning of recorded history has understood this problem and sought to keep it contained. Only in the modern west in the past century have we abandoned reason for madness.
I have said it many times in previous articles and I will repeat it here now: Feminism is by far the most destructive movement in the history of western civilization. In the US, almost every political and social crisis we face today can be linked directly or indirectly back to the rise of feminist ideology. The weaponization of mentally ill women is the single most effective attack on the foundations of our culture.
It’s not because women are particularly scary or dangerous. It’s because, as western men we have adopted principles of fairness; to care about elevating those who are weaker than us and value their contributions. Feminism is designed to exploit our love of fairness and our love of women and it turns our love into a weakness.
Compare the west to almost any other civilization in this regard and you will find undeniable differences. There is no such thing as fairness, equal rights or feminism throughout most of the world. Women are, at best, barely tolerated. At worst, they are chattel to be abused with impunity.
Often considered one of the greatest accomplishments of the First World (as opposed to the third world), men have ALLOWED women to rise to equal standing. In many cases, we have prioritized them and given them privileged status, and this is where we made a big mistake.
All of our problems with feminism are self created. Western men allowed the ideology to spread. Conservatives talk a lot about the dangers of “suicidal empathy” when it comes to liberals and mass immigration, but we suffer from suicidal empathy when it comes to women.
The early women’s suffrage movement had numerous ties to Marxist causes and the communists saw very early how useful women could be in destabilizing western nations. Marxists like Friedrich Engels argued that women’s oppression began with the institution of private property and class division, not biology.
This, of course, is pure nonsense – A great lie which requires us to ignore thousands of years of recorded history from every feudal monarchy and empire that existed previous to the 18th Century Enlightenment.
Because of their biology, women are naturally removed from the power dynamic except for influencing men to take actions in their favor. For women as a group to have power requires numerous artificial social constructs and laws be put in place.
Marxists also argued that the family unit must be targeted for deconstruction as a social pillar. They claim that the family unit is “how capitalism uses women as free labor to raise new workers for the system.” In reality, the family unit represents the atomic core of any civilization. Breaking it apart, and using women to do it, will inevitably destroy that civilization and make it ripe for conquest.
Leftists and their globalist cohorts do not care about women. Feminism does not care about women. The goal of these movements is to turn women into suicide bombers. Their goal is to radicalize women to forsake their biological and psychological imperatives, turning them into corrosive saboteurs willing to sacrifice their own happiness for the sake of the Marxist cult.
Millions of women have even been convinced that their grand mission requires them to kill their own children. Sometimes this is done in the name of freeing themselves from the “shackles” of the family unit. Sometimes it’s done as an offering to the collective feminist coven to prove they are “worthy.”
This is why a child killer like Lindsay Clancy, a woman who openly confessed to the crime, has attracted the full attention, adoration and protection of the liberal congregation. She didn’t just go to a clinic and abort a baby, she went the Full Monty; she murdered her own growing children in cold blood. She looked into their eyes when she did it, and the feminists are impressed and they want more.
What has followed is a sort of hysterical worship, a swirling vortex of dark-feminine chaos as the brood searches for ways to protect Lindsay Clancy from punishment while also rationalizing her crimes. The case has become a nexus point for the ever festering conflict between the champions of moral order and the terrorism of morally relative chaos.
In my recent articles I have talked about the eternal battle between the producer class and the pillager class, but this is only half the story. The other half is the battle between the champions of conscience and the purveyors of subjective nihilism. The political left has happily embraced nihilism.
We might find it bewildering, but this is why these people are defending a child murderer. If Lindsay Clancy can be glorified, even deified as a oracle of the feminist calling, then any evil can be justified. “Do as thou wilt” could become the prevailing ideal of a soulless age brought into being by female insanity.
All they have to do, in their view, is help Clancy to escape blame and responsibility for her crime.
The postpartum excuse is the most common strategy because it works. Around half of all female child murderers who use this defense get off with a jury decision of “not guilty by reason of insanity.” The concept ignores the fact that ANYONE who kills kids is mentally ill or broken in some way. Postpartum is simply a more acceptable excuse for diminishing the crime.
It’s a way to paint the killer as a victim; a more empathetic victim than the dead children.
If western women can be convinced that they can get away with murdering their offspring out of the womb, we would be setting a new and horrific precedent. The feminist mob will jump on every crime involving a woman in an effort to leverage them out of repercussions. The legal system already has so many double standards in favor of women, but we are getting dangerously close to a two tier system.
If Clancy escapes with a lesser charge or institutionalization instead of prison, leftist women will see this as political victory. That said, the case is opening the door to an awakening among men. Young men are using the case to “test” their girlfriends and wives. If these women show any inkling of sympathy for Lindsay Clancy, men are dumping and divorcing them without a second thought.
It’s a smart move and, for now, it’s the only strategy against the ongoing cancer of liberal female derangement. But it doesn’t solve the greater issue of feminism as a societal influence. In the meantime, families are not being built.
I would point out that there are men who kill their own children as well. It’s not as if this crime is exclusive to women. However, I can’t find a single instance in which a mob of men rallied together to defend a father who murdered his family. This is strictly female behavior.
The Clancy trial is nearly over, and regardless of what the jury decides to do there’s no denying that the event has reminded us, once again, that western men have ignored the single most poisonous problem in our society for far too long.
Liberal women are the most privileged, most entitled and most coddled people on the planet. No other group comes close. Their obsessive grasping for power by any means necessary is corrosive. Their rabid efforts to elevate their own egos as the focal point of politics, government and the social contract is sinking our nations one by one.
Perhaps this quest for power needs to end? Perhaps western men need to finally abandon the liberal experiment in equality or “equity” and bring our countries back to the models they were founded on? Or at the very least, we need to bring back certain limitations. Not all freedoms are good and we have seen where our current path leads.
If liberal women have been weaponized, then liberal women need to be nullified and controlled. Or, at the very least, their level of participation in institutions of power needs to be restricted. In other words, we would have to set aside our empathy, be the bad guys and TAKE power (and rights) away from the leftist cabal. We would have to fundamentally overturn every facet of feminism and erase it from our daily lives.
We have seen what these women do with liberty and we’re not impressed. The celebration and adoration of a child murderer is, in my view, the last straw. If their first inclination is to use their freedoms as a license to tear the world down instead of building things up, then they no longer deserve those freedoms.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.
Words cannot do justice to the sheer idiocy of the story that broke this past week. It is hilarious, depressing, fascinating and deeply embarrassing for the human race all at once…a story that is proof that we may collectively be both far more gullible and far more comfortable with deception than even the most cynical among us previously imagined.
The story centers on a man named Daejon Love who, according to federal prosecutors, allegedly spent years convincing women that he was a professional football player for the San Francisco 49ers when he wasn’t.
Not trying out for the 49ers. Not once affiliated with the team. Not played professionally somewhere else and exaggerated the details. He convinced women that he was an actual NFL player for one of the most famous franchises in American sports when we wasn’t.
Yes. You read that right. In an era in which the entirety of all human knowledge is accessible from a 6 inch by 2 inch rectangle sitting in literally everyone’s front pocket, this 35 year old allegedly constructed an elaborate fictional life around himself that everyone believed and no one took the time to fact check. He did it by, among other things, carrying a 49ers helmet and gear around with him and wearing them…no matter how absolutely f*cking ridiculous it looked…all the time.
He even had a 49ers birthday cake made with his name on it and apparently created a video of himself “signing” with the team. He carried the helmet everywhere, including to the beach, where he filmed himself running some of the worst wide receiver routes ever captured on camera while some rando with a vermicelli noodle for an arm underthrew him passes as he lumbered around full sized telephone company construction cones set up on a beach.
Eventually, according to reporting on the FBI investigation, Love’s fake online footprint became convincing enough that search engines and artificial intelligence occasionally helped perpetuate it. AI started listing him as a professional NFL wide receiver when he wasn’t.
I couldn’t help but read the story yesterday and realize it is a perfect analogue to our modern stock market. You don’t have to be an actual NFL player anymore. You just need the helmet, the jersey, some followers, a few pictures standing next to expensive shit and enough people repeating the story. Eventually an algorithm looks around, sees that everybody else appears to believe you’re an NFL player and concludes that you must, in fact, be an NFL player.
Look, many of today’s big name stocks are exceptional businesses generating actual free cash and net income. Just like Jerry Rice used to actually make his way onto the field and catch actual passes in real NFL games.
But there’s also a growing number of Daejon Love companies in today’s market, because somewhere along the way Wall Street decided that actually turning a profit no longer mattered. If Jerry Rice is a fat free cash flow yield, Daejon Love is the 10-K of a company posting massive losses while pointing to its revenue, narrative and bullshit future projections instead of its net income and capital needs.
Nowadays, revenue can be projected decades years into the future and slapped with a multiple that would have gotten you involuntarily committed in 1995.
Revenue projections are faking you’re an NFL player when you’re not. Like with Daejon, narratives get you “investors”. If you’re a 35 year old dipshit pretending to be someone else with all your free time instead of working an actual job for a living, revenue projections get you laid under false pretenses by women who’d never want to talk to you otherwise.
Net income, on the other hand, is terribly inconvenient. The line of thirsty women dries up quick when it comes down to profit and loss. The second that reality starts inching into the picture, you become the guy no one can stand or wants to talk to.
The modern market would much rather hear that revenue grew 48% than that you lost $2 billion last year.
Nowadays, when investors ask, “Did the company actually make any money?” analysts respond, “Why are you being so negative? Revenue grew 48%!”
When investors ask, “Okay, but did free cash flow grow?” analysts respond, “You’re missing the opportunity. Revenue grew 48%.”
When investors ask, “How much capital expenditure did it take to generate that growth?” analysts respond, exasperated, “This guy just doesn’t understand AI. Revenue. Grew. 48%.”
This is essentially the Daejon Love method of equity valuation: don’t ask whether I play for the 49ers. Just look at my helmet.
Federal prosecutors say Love and his alleged accomplice, Taylor Jamie Chan, built an elaborate system designed to convince women that Love was extraordinarily wealthy. Fake investment accounts were allegedly displayed. Chan allegedly played the role of Love’s successful financial adviser. Three way FaceTime calls reportedly showed supposed investment gains. The government says at least 26 women ultimately sent approximately $1.3 million.
The appearance of wealth established credibility. Credibility attracted money. The incoming money helped finance the appearance of wealth. That appearance attracted additional money. Every additional participant therefore helped validate the story for the next participant. Daejon invented the public relations department of a Ponzi scheme.
The stock market has developed its own similar loop. A company projects enormous future revenue, investors bid up the stock, and the higher valuation gives the company access to more capital. It raises money, makes acquisitions, increases spending, and uses its expensive stock as currency to generate the growth needed to justify its valuation. That growth pushes the valuation higher, allowing the cycle to repeat. In effect, the company is trying to grow into a valuation that is itself financing the growth. It works until the market stops providing cheap capital, the promised cash flows fail to materialize, and the entire loop begins to reverse.
This is when everyone in the world discovers you don’t play for the 49ers.
This is what makes the Love story such a wonderful metaphor. Again, Love’s fabricated internet presence became substantial enough that Google searches and AI generated results occasionally identified him as an actual 49ers player. The internet had effectively begun marking his bullshit to market. He could point toward the search result and say, effectively, don’t take my word for it. Google says I’m an NFL player.
Wall Street does this every day. Don’t believe the narrative? Look at the stock price. Don’t believe the stock price? Look at the market capitalization. Don’t believe the market capitalization? Look at the revenue growth. Don’t believe the revenue growth? Look at total addressable market. Don’t believe total addressable market? Look at the analyst price targets.
Why did the analysts raise their price targets? Because the stock price went up. Excellent. Due diligence complete. Look at the f*cking helmet.
Then, at some point nobody remembers which piece of evidence was originally supposed to independently validate which other piece of evidence. The machine is simply validating itself.
This isn’t entirely irrational. Rapidly growing companies should often prioritize expansion over maximizing near term profits. Amazon famously spent years reinvesting enormous amounts of money into its business. Many of the greatest companies in history would have been badly misunderstood if investors had looked exclusively at current year earnings.
But Wall Street has taken a reasonable idea and, as Wall Street tends to do, driven it directly through the guardrail. Remember WeWork’s “Community Adjusted EBITDA”?
We have entered an environment where investors can seemingly forgive almost anything if the revenue chart points northeast. No profits? Growth company. Negative free cash flow? Investing for the future. Massive stock based compensation? Noncash expense. Enormous capital expenditures? Building the infrastructure for the future. Constant dilution? Funding growth. Acquisition spending? Expanding the platform. Adjusted EBITDA? Now we’re talking.
This becomes especially entertaining when discussing AI. The AI revolution is real. The demand is real. The infrastructure buildout is real. The revenues are real. And some of the companies supplying the boom are producing extraordinary amounts of actual free cash flow and net income.
But the market doesn’t stop with those companies. It takes the legitimate economics at the center of the boom and radiates them outward. The chip company makes enormous profits, therefore the data center company deserves a giant multiple. The data center company is growing rapidly, therefore the electricity provider deserves an AI premium. The electricity provider needs generation, therefore nuclear is an AI trade. Nuclear needs uranium, therefore uranium is an AI trade. Data centers need cooling, so cooling is an AI trade. They need copper, so copper is an AI trade. They need buildings, so buildings are an AI trade. They need financing, so private credit is an AI trade.
Eventually the non-English speaking man on an e-bike from Senegal delivering the DoorDash lunch to another man responsible for emptying the portable shitters at the construction site of a data center will soon trade at 28x revenue himself…because he has “exposure to the AI infrastructure ecosystem.” This is how things lead up to a crash.
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Once the narrative attaches itself to a company, investors begin valuing revenue differently. Revenue is where imagination lives. Net income is where imagination goes to die. Free cash flow is worse because it asks the deeply antisocial question of whether shareholders will ever actually receive any money.
You can build magnificent valuation models when you don’t concern yourself with that detail. Take a company with $1 billion in revenue. Assume the addressable market is $100 billion. Assume it captures 20% of that market. Assume 30% margins once it reaches scale. Assume the market continues paying a premium multiple in 2032. Discount everything back using whatever rate produces the number you wanted before opening Excel. Congratulations. Your $15 billion company is worth $60 billion.
Valuation increasingly seems to work the same way. A company worth $20 billion can look speculative. At $50 billion, it becomes interesting. At $100 billion, institutions start paying attention. At $250 billion, analysts explain why it has a defensible moat. At $500 billion, portfolio managers explain why they have to own it. At $1 trillion, CNBC installs a permanent camera outside headquarters. At $2 trillion, somebody explains that you’re thinking too small. At $4 trillion, the valuation itself becomes part of the bull case. Obviously the market wouldn’t value it at $4 trillion if it weren’t worth $4 trillion. Right?
Price creates legitimacy. Legitimacy attracts capital. Capital pushes up price. Price creates more legitimacy. It’s the custom 49ers helmet of finance.
And if the stock gets there before the earnings do, simply extend the forecast another five years. Again: look at the jersey. Don’t ask who’s wearing it.
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