r/WallStreetBets reveals the soulless face of a dying regime.
American Mind: First, the story of the Sky King: In August 2018, a Horizon Airline employee with no piloting experience hijacked a turboprop from the Sea-Tac airport and flew in wild loops against the backdrop of the setting sun. He wheeled over the Olympics for an hour before crashing on an uninhabited island in the Puget Sound.
He died on impact. But in that hour, the 29-year-old Richard Russell, ordinary in every respect, became a kind of folk hero. The internet, or at least the part of it anons like me inhabit, watched in awe as he pulled off one improbable aerial maneuver after another before steering the plane into oblivion. It was an outrageous act. We saw something beautiful in this. We saw something deeply human.
Cracks in the Surface
Redditors captured national headlines last month by driving the price of GameStop stock over 14,000%, catching bearish institutional investors in a classic “short squeeze.” A spike last Wednesday drove the shares up 40% and sent the broader market into a frenzy. Everyone wanted in on the action. New “meme stocks” like AMC, Nokia, and Blackberry—hot brand names from 2005—percolated up from the online ferment to ride the tail winds of GameStop’s success. Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports purportedly invested a million bucks in a handful of these names. Others followed. I followed. On Wednesday, 1.25 billion shares of AMC were traded, up from a daily average of about 25 million.
Suddenly everyone was an expert in gamma squeezes and options trading. The blue checks flooded the take market. Narratives began to emerge. “White supremacist neo-Nazis were targeting Jewish financiers.” This was “the Capitol siege all over again.” There were calls for the SEC to do something to regulate the speculation. Midwits decried the disconnect between GameStop’s stock price and the company’s underlying financial health. This is a perversion of market dynamics, they said. They wagged their fingers. This is not funny, they insisted. You kids better cut it out. This is illegal. You’re going to hurt yourselves. You’re going to crash the market. You’re going to lose your money. Nag. Nag. more
h/t Joe6Pak
Interesting read. I’ve stated it before and will state it again here: The LAST thing someone wants to do is put me in the position where I have nothing left to lose.
God have mercy on us.
Similar to what Crackerbaby says, this article closes with this:
A paradox arises: How do you win a game of chicken against a man who has already been committed by forces beyond his control to annihilation—or, in any case, against a man who sees himself that way? Who looks out to the cliff’s edge and prays for it, who in that final exalted moment, suspended mid-air, flying toward sunset, is confirmed in his conviction that it was all worthwhile?
I am in no way going looking for a game of chicken, but if one unwantedly presents itself to me, I am prepared and willing to win to protect my family and myself.
I believe there are many others like me. And if the other side really wants to play that game, I believe that they are going to lose in a bad way. As we will all lose in a bad way. When we win the individual game of chicken, the roosters will throw us in jail if we are tainted by being conservative. But I am still prepared to do it if forced into the situation.
Love isn’t all ways on time, oh no no noohhh whoowhoo.
Richard Russel actually has my respect. I smile when I think of him. Regardless of how you view his death he clearly and verbally did not want to harm anyone else. He chose his own exit on his terms and did something that he would never have been able to in his situation. Who Barrel rolls a bombardier? His lord will judge him.
I do have a problem with the whole Gamestop thing. As long as all the activists CLEARLY KNEW that by getting in once the stock started to climb that they were VERY likely to loose then fine.
I feel though, that the early guys getting in suckered everyone else to follow while also hammering the shorting Hedge funds. There was definitely a group that KNEW when they would get out and everyone else looses money.
If you know you are taking Gamestop for a Barrel roll into a mountain FINE. But, if someone convinced you you could take it for a ride, complete the barrel roll and land without getting arrested or killed, then someone coerced you, manipulated you, and needs to answer for it.
There will be a court case.
Great Article MJA
Dark. Prose bordering on poetry: “It is, as far as I can tell, the plan to comfort the American people in this deranged march to our national death with an increasingly tedious iteration of bread and circuses. IPAs, designer meds, porn, and video games are enough for some, it seems, but, thank God, they do not sate us all. Say it with me: I will not eat the bugs. I will not live in the pod. The narratives we have been given to understand ourselves, to prime us to accept this debased existence, do not obtain for us all.
We do not hate ourselves. We do not hate who or what we come from. And we intend to respect ourselves enough to fight against the degenerate and malignant forces insisting we believe otherwise.”
He does manage to leave God out of the conversation, and that changes everything.
I personally believe they have pushed, and continue to, push their agenda to the max in order to see at what point WE push back.
I suspect, and hope, our push-back will be suddenly monumental and non-stop, as opposed to their expecting incremental increases of resistance that would allow them to regroup.
It’s interesting – but I don’t buy the GameStop story as some sort of allegory for everything.
Investing is investing. You need to make smart decisions with your assets or you will lose them. In the GME story the hedge funds shorted more than 100% of the available shares, because they had gotten away with it before, then went on public TV and bashed the stock in an effort to push it down. A savvy Redditor saw the way to drive the stock up. But everyone involved knew they were taking a risk.
In 1929 people were taking risks. Smart people weren’t. Same today. In 2008 people were taking risks. Smart people weren’t. One important aspect though is that for *certain* people and businesses government ameliorated the risks. Guess what – that encourages them to take greater and greater risks until the great fall. Exactly what happened in 2008, and every other time too. Take government out of the business of financial protection and people will be smarter with their investments.
All this naysaying aside, I am glad to see AMC making a comeback. I hope they come out with new versions of the Gremlin and Javelin.
Not the Gremlin.
Never The Gremlin.
We had one. It was the worst car since our 56 Ford Station wagon. And that one turned me off Fords for nearly 50 years. The Gremlin made the Ford look good.
RickeyG The marlin rocked.
There are tens of millions of fails to deliver on the books of most major brokerage firms due to hedge funds naked short selling thousands of companies out of business. Naked short selling is illegal, and each fail to deliver represents a share of counterfeit stock, yet the SEC has done nothing about it. It’s been going on for at least 30 years and is one of the reasons I left the securities industry. I hope the hedge funds go bankrupt. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of crooked scum bags.
As economist Gerald Celente says; “When people have NOTHING left to lose… they LOSE it!” 😳
Why did the wsb people want to take down the hedge funds?
Why? Cause Fuck Em, that’s why.
RickeyG – Don’t fergit the
PacerPisser!TRF The rolling fish bowl.
My brother has had a robins egg blue AMC pisser in his shop lately that one of his customers wants to restore. Why, I don’t know, everything AMC and Rambler ever made was a POS. The 70’s were the worst decade for cars including the Chevy Vega, Ford Pinto, Ford Grenada’s, anything AMC, Mustang 2’s, Ford Mavericks, Chrysler Cordoba’s etc. and that butt ugly Cadillac with the sawed off boat tail.
@Anonymous
At least the Gremlin was not the Pinto. BOOM!
“RickeyG – Don’t fergit the Pacer Pisser!”
Or the Hornet, god love it. The most normal-looking and dependable of them all.
The only new car my wife’s parents ever bought new was a barf green AMC Hornet station wagon in the mid 70’s.
STENDEC