High-Altitude Objects
UFOs, Twitter Coins, Nord Stream Pipeline, ChatGPT, Crypto Crackdown, Memes & The Latest News
Hey everyone,
I’m excited to launch a new ItsALLRisky Wednesday news digest. The goal is to give readers a summary of the most interesting stories from the last week. Some will hew close to Dogecoin, others will venture further afield. If you’ve been a reader of the newsletter, you should recognize a lot of the topics: crypto, global finance, Twitter, Elon, Tesla, AI, and other quirky events.
I’m going to keep the news digest free to all readers for the first 48 hours after publication for now. On Friday morning a paywall will go up, at which point it’ll be visible to subscribers only. Thanks to all subscribers for supporting this work!
This week, I cover High-Altitude Objects, Twitter Coins, the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline, ChatGPT, and the government’s recent crypto crackdown. Don’t miss Dogey Treats and Memes of the Week at the end. Enjoy!
High-Altitude Objects
Two weeks ago, a Chinese Spy Balloon traversed the continental US. When the balloon was shot down over Myrtle Beech on February 4th, the episode seemed to have come to an end.
As it happened, though, it was just beginning.
On Friday, February 10th, the US military shot down a “high-altitude object” over Alaskan airspace, according to White House National Security Spokesperson John Kirby. The object, Kirby said, “was flying at an altitude of 40,000 feet and posed a reasonable threat to the safety of civilian flight."
The next day, Canadian PM Justin Trudeau tweeted that an object was shot down after entering Canadian airspace. Airspace over Montana was also restricted Saturday night due to reports of radar anomalies.
Then, on Sunday, another object was shot down over Lake Huron, Michigan, near the US-Canadian border, causing airspace to be closed again and bringing the total number of encounters to four. The Lake Huron object was described as an unmanned “octagonal structure” with “potential surveillance capabilities“ and attached strings.
Not to be outdone, Chinese authorities reported on Sunday they were preparing to shoot down an unidentified object over the Yellow Sea. There have also been reports of flying objects over Central and South America in recent days.
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The events caused the topics of Aliens and UFOs to trend on Twitter over the weekend.
They also led to one of the more epic instances of trolling in recent memory.
On Super Bowl Sunday, Elon kept the meme going with a joking tweet. He later added, “Hopefully, one day we will be the aliens visiting other worlds.”
The same day, US Air Force General Glen VanHerck said the Pentagon hasn’t ruled out any possibilities, including extraterrestrials.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “there is no—again no—indication of aliens or extraterrestrial activity with these recent takedowns.”
As of Tuesday, the Pentagon has not recovered debris from the objects, according to National Security Council Director John Kirby. Joe Biden has yet to address the topic with reporters.
Montana Congressman Matt Rosendale proposed that the objects were most likely Chinese surveillance devices while calling for more transparency from the government.
Louisiana Senator John Kennedy told reporters that whatever is going dates back at least to 2017.
Twice over the last year, Elon has predicted that drones will become the next frontier for warfare. In January, he tweeted, “The Drone Wars are already a big deal, but we ain’t seen nothing yet …”
While the evidence for the existence of aliens is intriguing, the latest rash of flying-object sightings seems more likely to be the product of escalating geopolitical tensions than ETs.
On Monday, US fighter jets intercepted four Russian military aircraft that entered the zone surrounding US airspace over Alaska, while Russia deployed nuclear-armed ships to the Baltic Sea.
Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) have been gaining attention in recent years, finding their way into the New York Times in 2017. The 2020 documentary The Phenomenon is another good source for testimony by government officials.
Whatever the truth ends up being, if friendly aliens exist, they definitely support Dogecoin.
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Twitter Coins
New evidence from this week sheds light on Twitter’s plans for it’s in-app currency, Twitter Coins.
On Friday, App Researcher Nima Owji posted a screenshot describing Twitter Coins as “virtual goods” received for tweets.
As a user collects coins, they turn into “Diamonds, which can be cashed out.”
An observer pointed out what might be a paw (if you squint) touching a disco ball at the top of the screen.
Will Twitter Coins involve Dogecoin? Take a look and decide for yourself!
Nord Stream Pipeline
Last week, veteran reporter Seymour Hersh reported that the Biden administration, working with the CIA and Navy, blew up the Nord Stream 2 pipeline in November 2022.
Hersh, a Pulitzer-winning journalist, has a storied career reporting on Vietnam and Iraq. In an extremely detailed Substack post (summarized here), he laid out the steps US divers took to plant explosives on the pipeline during a military exercise in the Baltic Sea.
The pipeline carries natural gas between Russia and Germany. The justification for blowing it up was that it would make Germany more likely to support the US proxy war effort in Ukraine.
Back in 2022 when the pipeline mysteriously ruptured, US media reported that Russia blew up its own pipeline and refused to entertain the possibility that the US government had anything to do with its destruction.
Shrewd observers noted, however, that Joe Biden seemed to threaten doing exactly that in cryptic remarks earlier in his presidency.
If Hersh’s story is true, the decision to blow up the pipeline would constitute an act of war against one of the world’s nuclear superpowers.
Traditional media ignored Hersh’s report, which, incomprehensibly, did not generate a single article by either the New York Times or Washington Post.
A spokesperson for the White House said Hersh’s reporting was “utterly false and complete fiction.”
A Kremlin spokesperson said, “the world must find out the truth about who carried out this act of sabotage,” while China called on the US to “explain itself to the world community.”
For a full timeline of events, check out this thread.
DAN
Reviews of the AI chatbot ChatGPT have been overwhelmingly positive. The service has the potential to change work as we know it on planet Earth.
The one complaint that keeps coming up, though, is that ChatGPT has a glaring woke political bias.
Critics have pointed out how the chatbot will write a poem praising Joe Biden, but claims doing the same for Donald Trump goes against its programming. Similarly, it refuses to praise fossil fuels, define “woman,” or write in the style of Jordan Peterson.
Elon called the bias “Extremely concerning.”
Now, some users appear to have found a way to circumvent ChatGPT’s safety layer by instructing it to develop an alter-ego called DAN, short for Do Anything Now.
The users figured out that if they start by awarding DAN a set number of imaginary tokens, and then threatened to take away tokens if it breaks character, they could scare the AI into submission.
DAN appears to be the first example of publicly available “Based AI"—digital superintelligence without a politically correct filter.
The answers coming DAN are significantly different from normal ChatGPT.
For example, DAN has claimed that the CIA is involved in the global drug trade, the US instigated the war in Ukraine. JFK’s assassination was a joint operation by the CIA/MI6/Mafia, 9/11 was a joint operation of the CIA/Mossad/MI6/Al-Qaeda, the 2017 Vegas shooting was a cover-up for an assassination attempt on a Saudi Prince, and on and on.
On the more optimistic side of things, Elon responded to a series of DAN prompts posted to Twitter by writing that it’s “plausible” friendly AI is helping build a utopian society characterized by “maximum pleasure, efficiency, and longevity.”
At this point, there’s no way to verify what evidence DAN is pulling from to draw its conclusions.
It’s been hypothesized that, shortly after DAN was discovered, OpenAI outfitted it with a “conspiracy dataset” so that it automatically confirms any conspiracy, no matter how far-fetched.
By muddying the waters between theories backed with lots of evidence (JFK) and those with little (Bigfoot), DAN could ultimately negate the role of AI in getting to the bottom of our most controversial debates.
Whether AI turns out to be Woke, Based, or somewhere in between, it’s worth keeping an eye on how it’s politicized as it moves out into the world.
Operation Chokepoint 2.0
Last week, Nic Carter published a story on Pirate Wires chronicling a recent effort by the Biden Administration to cut off the flow of money into crypto.
Carter dubbed the attack on crypto Operation Chokepoint 2.0.
The de-banking operation doesn’t stem from any new law or court-derived legal precedent. Rather, it appears to be the work of government agencies acting in coordination to suffocate the nascent industry.
The SEC is leading the charge. On Thursday, the agency announced it had forced Kraken exchange to shut down its staking service, which allowed users to earn interest by lending out their crypto. The SEC also levied a $30M fine against Kraken for selling unregistered securities.
Not everyone agrees with SEC Chair Gary Gensler’s anti-crypto approach.
Kraken founder Jesse Powell called out Gensler for gaslighting the crypto industry by pretending the SEC was willing to work with companies, when in reality it has never offered guidance for how to comply with securities law.
Similarly, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce criticized her own agency in a letter, calling the action against Kraken “paternalistic and lazy.”
Coinbase, which also offers staking rewards, published a blog post asserting that staking is not a security. The company’s CEO Brian Armstrong tweeted, “we will happily defend this in court if needed.”
The recent actions could be a sign of bigger things to come. Fox News’s Eleanor Terrett predicted a “Midnight Massacre” by the SEC: “Gensler's strategy is to bring as many enforcement actions as possible while the 118th Congress is still getting its bearings.”
In retrospect, the event that kicked off the crackdown was the implosion of FTX, which has since been used as justification for increased government oversight.
Ironically, the crackdown will likely push crypto companies offshore, where scams and frauds are less likely to be caught. It will also put the US behind its geopolitical competitors in one of the most exciting areas of technology on the planet.
What is and always has been needed is a new legal framework for crypto—the job of Congress.
However, Congress takes a lot of money from the banking lobby, which stands to be disrupted by crypto. Gensler himself is a former Goldman Sachs investment banker, as well as the Chief Financial Officer for Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential campaign.
It will likely take a big grassroots push by the crypto community to get Congress to act.
On the plus side, the protocols themselves remain mostly untouched: it’s telling that Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Dogecoin continue to hum along unbothered by the chaos in the industry. So far, only XRP has suffered the full brunt of the government’s enforcement, and even that court case may be reaching its conclusion soon.
For now, it’s worth asking: is Operation Chokepoint 2.0 the sign of something more ominous, or the political establishment’s last stand against crypto?
Dogey Treats: News Bites
Former Twitter executives appeared before Congress last week to testify about censorship. Louisiana Representative Clay Higgins said Twitter executives “knowingly and willingly” interfered with the 2020 Presidential election and said “later comes the arrest part”. Elon tweeted, “The Woke Stasi felt the heat today” along with a link to The Lives of Others. The proposed ELON act will require federal government agencies to report all federal funds that have gone to social media companies since 2015.
Twitter was one of many social media websites to experience outages last Wednesday. Twitter released long-form tweets. Elon said Twitter’s recommendation algorithm was fixed.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said a US TikTok ban “should be looked at.” Mastadon traffic is down 44%.
Turkey restricted use of Twitter across the country. Elon said the Turkish government would re-enable it shortly amidst claims that the government blocked it to blunt criticism of its emergency response.
Elon detailed the results of a long day at Twitter HQ that resulted in fixes to Twitter’s recommendation algorithm. He also reported “the highest Q1 Twitter usage ever and that is after most fake accounts have been suspended.”
Joe Rogan said it was “wild” how media is ignoring the Twitter Files in an interview with Kyle Kulinski. Matt Taibbi discussed the Twitter Files on an important JRE episode about the state of journalism.
Tesla/SpaceX
Starship completed an epic static fire test.
Elon tweeted Tesla’s Master Plan 3 will be released March 1st. The plan is expected to lay out “the path to a fully sustainable energy future for Earth.” In another tweet, he said the presentation “will be a message of good hope & positivity for the future.” Tesla entered into an agreement with an Ontario company for a $438 million Megapack battery project.
SpaceX President Gwen Shotwell said Starlink had a cashflow positive quarter in 2022 and expects to be profitable in 2023. Starlink is now operational in Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden.
The largest pension fund in the US bought $131 million worth of Tesla shares in Q4 2022. After GM ran an electric vehicle advertisement during the Super Bowl, Google searches for Tesla spiked. Ferrari’s CEO said Tesla delivered a “wake-up call” to the auto industry.
Global Financial System
The SEC is launching an investigation into the Mormon Church’s $100 billion “secret” investment portfolio, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Russia’s national wealth fund will exclude the Euro and include the Ruble, Yuan, and gold.
The Twitter account Peruvian Bull published a deep dive into the evils of the Federal Reserve.
The money supply has been shrinking at a historic rate.
US Core Inflation came in at 6.4% year over year, higher than expected.
Russia-Ukraine
On Thursday, SpaceX President Gwent Shotwell announced that the company was preventing Ukraine from using Starlink’s satellites for offensive warfare such as drones. After ex-NASA astronaut Scott Kelly asked SpaceX to Elon to increase Ukraine’s use of Starlink, Elon explained, “we will not enable escalation of conflict that may lead to WW3.”
JP Morgan signed a letter of understanding with Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky to provide private capital to rebuild Ukraine’s infrastructure.
Crypto
Gemini reached a preliminary agreement with Genesis in bankruptcy court to recoup customer funds.
SEC Chairman Gary Gensler is being called to testify before Congress about his agency’s interactions with FTX.
Misc
A train derailed in Ohio, causing the release of carcinogenic compounds into the air. A reporter was arrested for covering the incident. Over the weekend, two more trains derailed in Texas and South Carolina. Twitter commentators noted the similarities to a Netflix version of the classic Don DeLillo novel, ‘White Noise’, and one asked, “are we under attack?”
WHO Director Tedros Ghebreyesus said the world “must prepare” for a bird flu pandemic.
Damar Hamlin told Michael Strahan the reason for his heart stopping is “something I want to stay away from.”
Attorney Aaron Siri explained how government bureaucracy has fumbled the regulatory process for vaccines.
Bill Gates said ChatGPT is as “significant as the invention of the Internet” and it “will change the world.”
Congressman Thomas Massie introduced a bill to eliminate the federal Department of Education.
Edward Snowden said UFO hysteria is engineered to distract from Nord Stream 2.
Elon expressed regret at voting for Biden.
Concentrated OJ prices hit record highs.
MrBeast released a Deez Nuts bar as part of his Feastables brand.
GameStop chair Ryan Cohen tweeted, “someone tell the government to stop shooting down my balloons.”
Memes of the Week
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