What are some good DIY Party Favor Ideas you have done or received at weddings you have attended? We are looking to do some ourselves while also saving some money. We are looking at about 100 people. Our venue is a waterfront property and we are thinking of a rustic type feel. Thanks!! =)

So I recently obtained a B-29 from a Shaxx bounty with third eye and outlaw, along with full stability and almost full reload. It's got my favorite red dot sight but the draw back is an 18 round clip. Using it and getting headshots it reloads great from outlaw and pulse rifle arms, but still if I get the kill and miss the precision shot the reload is not the best and an 18 round clip with a average reload sucks. Any thoughts if this gun is good with a better roll?

Disclaimer: It is moronic to buy FDs. That is not the way to consistently build wealth. The very reason FDs pay off such huge returns is because on average their probability of expiring worthless is 99%. If you’re moronic enough to buy FDs with me, only do it with money that you are willing to literally set on fire. Actual fire. There are plenty of safer puts on DASH that will pay obscene returns this year..
TLDR: I believe DoorDash (DASH) is the greatest short opportunity of the year, and what’s more, rather than just having a general feeling, there are specific timetables enabling us to profit bigly. The company even admits themselves that they have peaked as a company.

Analysis:

“Food delivery with third-party apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats is booming, but no one's making money.” – Business Insider.

DoorDash is wildly overvalued. This is true by any metric, were it in essentially any industry. Add to that its in food delivery, which is a horrific, no margin industry in what has become a commoditized business and offers essentially no differentiation with its competitors. There is near zero differentiation between Uber Eats, Postmates, Caviar, Grubhub, DASH, or any local provider. In Austin we have Favor, for example. And nobody cares which company delivers their food, they only care which one does it cheapest.
If you view stock (as you should) as buying the entire business as an owner, how much would you be willing to pay for an undifferentiated company in a no margin commoditized business that has peaked (see below for more on that)? Because it’s currently selling for an insane $56 billion. Outrageous.
So how can we get a banana for scale to understand what that $56 billion means in terms of valuation?
Well, all of DoorDash’s competitors have either sold at or are trading at, or raised money at, a capitalization of 3x to 6x sales. DASH is trading at an absolutely insane 20+ x sales.
Just six months ago Postmates was acquired for $2.65 billion which put it at 4x sales. At 4x sales, DASH would trade at $32.
DASH used to be the business leader in this industry, but over the past 2-3 years Grubhub has exploded in size to take on nearly the same 33% of market share, and after Uber Eats bought Postmates, it too now has about a third of market share. So you now have three giants of roughly equal size battling it out in a business in which customers don’t give a motherloving frick about branding.

But don’t take my word for it on valuation, take smart money’s word

DoorDash raised money just a couple months ago at a $16 billion valuation. That is truly a stunning fact. In just a few months the WSB type day trading call buyers have bid this company all the way up to $56 billion from $16 billion without any material change to the business and completely ignoring the coming vaccine-induced reopening of restaurants. Again, the stock trades for a 300% markup to its recent smart money capital raise based on nothing but unfounded hopium.
You don’t have to take my word for it, your beloved Jim Cramer has even said the same thing, in his own idiotic, covering my ass, round about say nothing way. “It’s true that people using market orders took DoorDash to levels that maybe ... were far higher than they thought they’d have paid.” - Jim Cramer
I don’t care about his commentary, but you people seem to love him, so there you go. 😘

The Company, according to The Company, has peaked. It’s over.

There are two extremely interesting things buried in the S-1 we’re going to get into in a moment. One of them is that you don’t have to take my word for it that this company’s business has peaked. The company says so itself in its own S-1.

The circumstances that have accelerated the increase in Total Orders stemming from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may not continue in the future, and we expect the growth rate in Total Orders to decline in future periods.

To put it simply, COVID numbers are falling, vaccines are rolling out at an impressive 1-2 million per day which puts our stated goal of 100 million vaccinated in 100 days within attainable reach. The economy will be opening up, people will want to be getting out of the house, restaurants will be reopening, and there will be huge pent up demand by people who have had extraordinarily high savings rates over the last year. Big chains will no longer have the need to get help from third party delivery apps at a 15% markup. We all know this is the case, and DoorDash even stated as much in its own filing. This stock is toast.

”Delivery via smartphone is one of those venture-funded sectors where business executives appear to have taken seriously the old joke about “losing money on every transaction but making it up on volume.” – New York Magazine

“DoorDash and Grubhub and Uber Eats... it’s a tough business for them. It’s very competitive. I think the business model is hard.” - Panera Bread CEO.

And Now the Fun Part

There are some wild share lockup expirations coming up. For those that don’t know, when you get these massive IPOs, insiders aren’t actually able to sell their shares on IPO day. They are locked up and the insiders just have to hope for the best that the stock will not lose value over the coming months. If the stock skyrockets in value, but the insiders know the business is trash or has peaked, you get the perfect recipe for a rush for the exits.
I love playing share lockups. I make a lot of money on them by selling spreads. A common question I get when I post them here is “if you know a drop is coming, why doesn’t the market just price it in?” The answer is because it can’t. No matter what the share price does, the lockup expiration date is the lockup expiration date. Insiders have to wait until that date, and it doesn’t matter whether the stock falls 0%, 5%, or 50%, they will all have to wait until that day to sell.
DoorDash has two share lockup expirations coming.
The first lockup expiration is an early release (heh) and hits 90 days after the Dec. 9 IPO, or around March 9, as long as the stock trades 25% higher than the IPO price for five out of 10 consecutive days of trading. That is to say, so long as DASH trades above $127.50 right before March 9, the lockup is triggered. The good news for you with this insane run up in price is that if the lockup isn’t triggered, it means the stock has already fallen from $190 to $127. It’s important to know March 9 is not a hard date exactly...some insiders can be allowed to go a few days prior. Also if they release earnings early the lockup could potentially occur at the end of this month.
I was talking to some folks on WSB about the lockup last week, and someone mentioned they thought only 20% of insider shares will be eligible. DoorDash's management and board members can sell up to 20% of their shares in that first wave, but other insiders can sell up to 40%. This means 113 million shares are eligible for sale in early lockup expiration. DoorDash’s daily volume is only 3-4 million shares. The current public float is roughly 123 million shares. This means you’re about to suddenly double the number of shares on the market.
Door Dash’s second lock-up expiration hits either 180 days after its IPO, which means around June 9 (more or less), or after the release of its first-quarter earnings report (whichever is earlier), and will free up “all remaining shares” according to the S-1, which if my math is correct is roughly 50 million shares.
These two expirations could spark violent sell-offs throughout the year.

Positions

FDs

I never buy FDs. I’ve never once bought them in my entire life. But I’m putting 1% of my portfolio into them on DASH because I’m confident big drops are coming. Unfortunately for you guys, the stock has already started falling this past month from its 🤡-level highs in the $200s, and worse yet the pricing/IV of all options has gotten more expensive. This means, I’m sorry to say, that you’re not going to find any options trading for pennies, or even anything less than $2. For your FDs, I recommend you buy puts at whatever the lowest strikes are that actually have any volume. The strikes go as low as $75, but most days show 0 volume and of course the bid/ask spread is enormous. There has been some volume at $95 recently, and you can get the $75s if you’re patient enough and willing to pay up for them. Expiration dates would be any time in mid to late March (again, looking for whatever has volume) so that it occurs after lockup 1, and the August 20s, which unfortunately are the closest expiration to the lockup occurring around June 9. I wish there was a closer expiration, but hey, more time for the stock to collapse. Plus you could always sell your puts after the June 9 drop with lots of theta meat still left on the bone.

Puts

I own March 12 $160 puts. I think the stock will drop healthily below this, but IV is high. I’m normally taking big swings with spreads, so when I buy puts outright, which is rare, I want to play it a little safer.
I also own the August 20 $145 puts.
And finally, I have six figure credit call spreads open at the $175 level. For newbies, this simply means I: Bought (yes bought) the March 12 $175 calls, and Sold the $172.50 calls.
I went huge on these because all I need is for DoorDash to trade below $172.50 after the lockup expiration and I’ll be having a Merry Christmas. That’s as close to risk free gains as you’re ever going to see in your life.

Bull case

The only bull case is that we’re in a raging, record-setting bull market and all stonks go up. The economy is opening back up, vaccines are rolling out, and stonks go up. But I think if you look at the DASH chart you can see that that is already starting to not be the case.

What are the negatives?

I plagiarized liberally from an old Citron Research report, although it doesn’t even mention share lockups. Yes, that Citron. For those of you who are newer members, I will tell you this; the little smart money social circles in and around WSB do not hate CItron, Hindenburg, or any other short selling firms. We respect them and welcome bearish cases on high flying stocks. Any intelligent trader does. It’s only the pump and dumpers who have a hatred for short reports. You should welcome contrarian views.

Parting Words.

I would welcome anyone pointing out where they think I may be wrong. I don’t care about saving face, I care about not losing money. If I’m wrong, I want to know it. I welcome constructive criticism.

Give Me One More TLDR At The End

This stock is going to collapse because it’s wildly overvalued, employees got in super cheap with shares they are waiting to sell, know the business has peaked, and they want to cash the fahk out. So swallow the high IV and buy puts today as fast as you can.
Love you guys.

I run a private campground. One of the things I have to think about is fire management. Obviously, there’s a lot of wood around here. And obviously, if the campground goes up in flames, I lose my livelihood. I do some land management to protect against that by clearing out dry underbrush periodically and put in rules about fire pits and my staff make routine inspections to make sure they’re followed. Many of you have suggested using fire as a weapon against the inhuman things and each time I point out that this is a forest and while we don’t have a lot of dry wood, the odds of the entire thing going up are not zero.
And then I went and threw a molotov cocktail into a room entirely made of wood.
In my defense, it wasn’t technically in the campground. Only very technically.
If you’re new here, you should really start at the beginning and if you’re totally lost, this might help.
Beau’s assistance had cleared the thorns from my body. I spent a miserable few days coughing up plant matter. At least it’s winter so we don’t have much work to do and I could sit in my house and play video games as a distraction. I’m super obsessed with Octopath Traveler right now.
There were still the thorns planted throughout the campground to deal with, however. I wasn’t terribly worried. We had the stone, the one that contained the thorn’s death, and all I had to do was summon Beau and figure out what the next step was.
Of course, when I summoned him, he didn’t show. I had even made hot chocolate with a bit of Bailey’s. So I drank it all myself and then fueled by booze and a sugar high, I went tromping through the snow to find him.
The thought of him being in danger or otherwise unable to respond was only a vague worry. He’s been elusive ever since I refused to go to the harvesters. It’s hard to tell if he’s angry at me or just being moody. It certainly isn’t because I’m good enough with a knife that I don’t need his help anymore. I intended to ask him what the problem was, once I found him. I decided to walk along the road through the deep woods, as that was both the safest place and where he tended to be found.
It took a few days of hiking around the campsite, but I eventually found Beau. He was up ahead on the road, waiting for me. As I approached, he turned and began walking again, so that I could catch up and we walked along side-by-side.
“I haven’t seen you much,” I said tentatively.
“I’m avoiding you.”
“That’s obvious.”
I waited, but no explanation was forthcoming.
“Did I… upset you?”
He seemed genuinely confused as to why, so I explained how I saw the situation. How I’d ignored his suggestion and gone to the hall of the gummy bears instead. He gave a soft laugh at that and reminded me - once again - that he was not human.
“Why would I take offense?” he asked. “You made a choice that was yours to make.”
“Then why are you avoiding me?”
We walked along in silence for a bit more and the only sound was the packed snow crunching beneath our feet. I was careful to keep some distance between us, keenly aware that my mere presence was contrary to his nature. Like magnets, I thought, pushing each other away.
“You’re marked for death,” he finally sighed. “It hovers over your head like a halo. Here is my mark, wrought of blood.”
He stepped close and gestured, his hand passing through the space a few inches from my hair.
“There are more, now. All of these bargains and debts you’ve accumulated, twisting together into a cord that will someday settle tight around your neck and take away your life.”
“And you’re bound to me,” I whispered.
He took a single step backwards, dropping his hand by his side, his expression grim.
“I feel the fomorian’s mark upon me as well. I do not care to accumulate more.”
I asked him to describe them to me. He hesitated, and then very reluctantly, told me a few. One of shadow, trailing in the wind as if the slightest breeze would eradicate it. I suppose that’s what happens when the person who made that mark is trapped inside the thing in the dark. Good riddance to him. Another of iron, shattered now, and crumbling. The lady with extra eyes. One of thorns, marking the intent of the fomorian.
And of course, a crown of teeth. A very old crown, passed down along the family line. The claim of the beast.
There were more, he said, but he refused to elaborate. He seemed uneasy, as if merely describing them was more familiarity than he cared to have. I didn’t press. Honestly, I’m not sure I want to know exactly how many creatures have it out for me. I’d probably never sleep again out of paranoia.
He soon turned off the road and into the woods. I followed a bit more slowly, struggling through the deep snow. The temperature has been in the teens lately, with the windchill bringing it down to single digits. I envied Beau and his total indifference to the cold.
He led me to a patch of thorns. It was one I knew of already and had tried to uproot. The snow around it was mixed with loose soil from earlier attempts. Let me tell you - it is really tough to dig up bushes in the middle of the winter with the ground as frozen as it is.
Beau extended his cup and held it up over the thorns. He tilted it, slowly, until a thin stream of liquid poured forth. It steamed in the cold air and melted the snow where it struck the ground at the base of the thorns.
“Is that it?” I asked softly. “This will kill them?”
“Yes. My cup carries the stone’s essence and the roots of the thorns will drink deeply of their own death.”
“I’m surprised you’re helping me so directly.”
“It’s not just for you,” he replied, his eyes narrowed as he watched the contents of his skull steam in the snow. “This is my home and as you recall, I am unable to leave it. I have no desire to be ruled by a tyrant.”
A thought occurred to me.
“Do the other inhabitants feel the same?”
“Of course. Do you recall how the musician saved you from the horse?”
Ah. I’d not thought too much of it at the time. I was helping them out with the children, after all, so it stood to reason that they’d want to repay the favor by saving my life. We stood in silence for a bit longer, watching the thorns shrivel into withered, dry branches where the liquid from Beau’s cup had touched them. I could only imagine the roots were now doing the same. Tentatively, I reached out and tapped one of the afflicted branches. It broke off as if it were made of spun sugar and smashed into dust when it landed in the snow. As if it’d been dead for centuries.
“Could I get help from the other inhabitants of the campground?” I asked. “I know the fairy doesn’t want help, but we still have to deal with the formorian’s indirect effects on the land.”
“Don’t,” Beau replied sharply. “You would only endanger them. They won’t take such a risk.”
“You’re helping me,” I said pointedly.
He grunted and turned his back to me, walking back towards the road.
“I was already marked by my association with you,” he said.
When I was trapped in the dream that the master of the vanishing house had wove for me, I told it that I could not love it, for everything I love dies. It feels like another lifetime ago. I withdrew my hand from the bush and stuffed it in my pocket as I hastily followed Beau.
He went from bush to bush, repeating the process with each. After a few more I realized that my presence was entirely unnecessary and probably even annoying to him, so I awkwardly thanked him and excused myself.
I went back to the house and played more video games. I only felt a little guilty about it.
The next day I stumbled into the kitchen and brewed coffee. Then, mug in hand, I went to the kitchen table and pulled back the curtains to get some early morning sunlight.
Beau was standing directly outside.
I screamed in surprise and dropped my mug. It was my “Live, Laugh, Love” mug that I took from the camp lost and found so it wasn’t a huge loss. We wind up with quite a few mugs in lost and found and hardly any of them get claimed. After a year they become camp property. I can’t remember the last time I bought myself a mug.
I invited Beau in while I cleaned up the mess. He hovered uncomfortably in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, not saying anything. Only when I was done mopping up coffee did I turn and ask him what he wanted.
He presented his cup in mute explanation. Only a small drop of liquid remained inside.
“Where’s the pebble?” I asked, going to get my sharpest kitchen knife.
“I still have it, in case the fomorian plants more thorns.”
Blood from that which was already there. Blood freely given. I held out my palm and let my blood drop into the cup.
“Where do you plan on getting the blood forcibly taken?” I asked softly.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. The only staff on site during the winter were my most trusted people, like Ed and Bryan. I didn’t want any of them to be targets.
“I want to leave the campground.”
I sucked in an involuntary breath. He wanted to take blood from someone outside my land. One of the townspeople, perhaps. They’d thrown an uproar over him poisoning a few people on Halloween. I hated to think how they’d react to him stabbing someone.
“Do you have someone in mind?” I asked.
“I do.”“Will you kill them?”
“Will my answer change your decision?”
No. It would not. I needed Beau. And Perchta’s warning… well, it was not so black and white as I’d assumed. There was some flexibility here.
I wish I were surprised by how easily I slipped back into old habits. The same old rationalizations. Better someone else’s life than my own. Better a stranger’s life than someone I know. It feels inevitable that I would resort to this. It takes more than a threat to turn someone into a good person.
I won’t apologize. I won’t make excuses. You know what kind of person I am. I did the calculations, weighed my options, and this is what I chose.
I got my car keys and told Beau to come with me.
We went to someone that lived on the outskirts of town. It took a while to get there, as Beau couldn’t tell me what roads to turn on. He could only give directions in a vague sense, such as east or west. At least he was patient. He barely moved, sitting in the passenger seat, not wearing a seatbelt, with his cup cradled against his chest. Finally, he told me we’d arrived and I pulled into the driveway of a small house surrounded by a stretch of overgrown field that was subsequently swallowed up by forest. A black pickup truck was parked in the gravel driveway.
Beau got out. I stayed where I was for a moment, nervously holding onto the steering wheel, and then I reluctantly followed him. Better if I saw this through. I had to know what I’d done.
He knocked on the door. A man in his late forties, perhaps, answered. His hair was thinning. He squinted at Beau suspiciously.
And Beau… gestured with one hand. Just a simple half-twist of his wrist.
The man coughed. Blood spurted out of his mouth. It streamed from his nose. And my insides twisted with horror as his eyes began to leak blood, as it spilled out through his tear ducts. It beaded up on his forehead, forced out through every one of his pores. It streamed out of him through every available channel, soaking his clothing, dripping from his ears, and he twitched and shook and choked as his skin grew white and his heart raced and then finally collapsed on itself.
He landed face-first onto the pavement of his porch. The blood floated above him as a red mist and Beau made another subtle gesture, directing it to gracefully stream like a river through the air and into his cup. There was far more blood than the vessel could contain - an entire human body’s worth - but the cup never overflowed. It filled and filled, brilliant crimson like a ruby, until there was none left to take.
The bloodless corpse lay on the ground with not a mark on it to indicate what had happened.
I realized that my hands were trembling. I struggled to move, to find my voice. Beau turned around and faced me and there was a soft, satisfied smile on his face.
“Have you always been able to do that?” I demanded, my voice coming out higher than I’d prefer, betraying my panic.
“Yes.”
The expression on the man’s face was burned into my mind. His desperate agony, tears of blood streaming down his cheeks, his body rigid as his own blood clawed its way free of his veins. I tried to banish it with something else. Anything else.
“So the time I found a body like that and spent three weeks hanging garlic up everywhere thinking we had a vampire on the campground… that was you?”
“Yes.”
I took a breath, trying to calm my nerves.
“Do you have any idea how much I spent on garlic?!”
“Do I care?”
I whirled away from him and stalked back to the car, digging my hands into my hair. Okay, the garlic didn’t matter. I just… that was what came to my mind first. Trying to bury what I’d just seen in something more mundane, I suppose. Trying to distract myself from the fact that Beau could kill people in a far more horrifying way than simply slitting their throat or fatally poisoning them.
At least it was relatively fast. I took a deep breath and opened my car door. He’d threatened me with worse when I first met him.
It was a tense drive back to the campground. When we were back on familiar roads I thought to ask Beau why he’d chosen this person, specifically.
“He double-parks.”
“And?”
He glanced at me in mild surprise.
“What else do you need?”
“Are you kidding me? I just let you murder someone because they double-park?”
“Murder?” His tone was sharp. “You let me refill my cup. I drained it to save your land. You ensured my survival.”
Whatever it takes. The family tradition. My grandfather killed his share to protect our land. My parent’s hands certainly weren’t clean. And nor are mine.
I wish I could say that was the end of it. That I let Beau out once we were back at my house and he wandered off and nothing else happened. But what we’d done was not going to go unnoticed.
I stayed up late that night. I was awake because I was playing video games and making yet another attempt at killing that damn direwolf in Octopath Traveler, like seriously, why is that thing so hard to kill? I must be doing something wrong. So after watching my party get their faces ripped off for like the fifth time I finally turned the TV off and went to bed. It was midnight. The little girl was crying softly by the window.
I’d barely climbed into bed when she stopped. I froze. That was never a good sign.
“Oh no,” the little girl whispered. “No no no no.”
I acted on instinct. I threw myself out of bed and took cover behind it. The little girl screamed in fright and then my window shattered. The house shook with the impact. For a moment everything was still, save for the tinkling of some glass remnants striking the ground and the wild sobbing of the little girl.
Then…
“Campground manager!” the fomorian bellowed.
My blood ran cold. I felt frozen in place, cowering there next to the bed. The fomorian’s voice came at a distance. It wasn’t over the house’s property line, at least.
“I will find the one that killed my thorns at your behest!” it continued. “I will drag him here and I will tear him apart, little by little, and eat him alive. You will be helpless to watch and know what fate awaits you.”
Then I heard the cry of a horse and the sound of hoofbeats, receding into the distance. A warning. This was only a warning.
The fomorian intended to kill Beau.
Tentatively, I stood and turned on the bedside light. There was a body wedged through the broken window. It couldn’t fit through the frame, but it’d shattered the glass and now its head and part of its upper body was stuck. The hood of its garment mercifully covered its face, for I recognized it by its bulk.
One of the musicians. The fomorian had killed one of the dancer’s musicians. And, my heart sinking, I knew that it had to be the one that had rescued me from the dapple-gray stallion’s hooves.
I kill everything I love. Everything that gets close to me.
I’m a campground manager. I am also my mother’s daughter and the product of generations that believed life was expendable and we were but prey to these inhuman things. Herd animals, and sometimes one of our own had to be sacrificed to save the rest.
I’m certain that the new sheriff will find out about the body. She might not assume it was me, but I’ll be involved regardless. My family always is, when an odd death occurs. She’ll send the old sheriff because he’s better at dealing with me. And then what? Do I lie to him? I could. I think he’d believe me. I’ve gotten quite good at lying over the years doing this job.
It’s odd, how the thought of lying to him bothers me more than murdering that man did. I suppose that’s a consequence of sentimentality.
Sometimes I think I feel too little and sometimes I wish I didn’t feel so much. I’m starting to think… that maybe I’m a little more messed up inside than I thought.
Do I love Beau? I… would be sad if he were gone. Even after seeing what he did to that man. The need to refill his cup was real, but the criteria with which he chose his victim was… petty. That, I think, is cruelty. Beau is cruel. I can not defend him. Yet humans are stupid, emotional things and we form attachments without even realizing it until one day we realize how painful their absence will be. We bond with animals, with plants, and with people that don’t even exist - a character in a video game or a book.
I suppose I love Beau in the same way I love the barn cat with the kinked tail or the plant that my uncle gave me or Therion in Octopath Traveler.
I don’t want him to die. [x]
Read the full list of rules.
Visit the campground's website.

I’ve been captivated by this one for a while. It’s a shocking saga that exposes a lot of corruption in law enforcement and I’ve never seen it discussed on Reddit, so I figured it warranted a write-up. This is extremely long (I like to go super in depth and include as many details as possible), but it’s worth the read IMO so check it out when you’ve got some spare time. Feel free to skip straight ahead to Donna and Cindy’s murders if you’re in a rush or aren’t interested in the background info.
Background In the mid to late 1980’s, there was an alarming amount of women being murdered in the western states. The Green River Killer, Southside Slayer, and Night Stalker dominated all of the headlines. But through it all, a similar pattern was quietly unfolding in San Diego and receiving almost no media coverage outside of the city.
The string of cases involving missing and murdered women in San Diego during this time period grew to around 43 total, most of which were what law enforcement called “fringe women” - meaning women who were prostitutes, addicts, exotic dancers, homeless, or involved with biker gangs. Detectives still do not know exactly how many perpetrators were involved in all of these slayings and disappearances. In the following years, police hypothesized that an ex-marine named Ronald Elliot Porter (who was already in prison for another murder) was responsible for approximately thirteen of the murders, though he has never been formally charged with them. Another three murders are believed to have been the work of Blake Raymond Taylor who was also already in prison for murder - and just like Porter, has never been formally charged with the suspected slayings. Around nine further cases were solved and lead to the convictions of multiple individual murderers, none of which with any apparent connections to the other San Diego murders. The remaining 17+ murders/disappearances are still considered unsolved. Today I want to tell you guys about two of these women - Donna Gentile and Cynthia Maine - who I firmly believe were not murdered by johns, pimps, or an elusive serial killer, but were in fact killed by the San Diego police officers themselves.
The Complicated Relationships between the Prostitutes and the Police:
To start, it’s important to go over the sometimes hostile - yet often co-dependent - relationship that many members of the San Diego police force had with local prostitutes during this timeframe. One disturbing note is that when police would talk to one another about reported disappearances, murders, or assaults involving prostitutes, they referred to them as “NHI cases” - which stood for “No Humans Involved”. So publicly, police made it quite clear that they didn’t see prostitutes as human beings and had no interest in them or their problems. But for many of these officers, what they did privately was a very different story.
These cops’ main mission was supposed to be clearing the girls from the streets in the hopes they’d give up and move on to bother some other city. They were instructed to arrest for any infraction they could, be it loitering, suspicion of being under the influence, or even just jaywalking - because the more they had behind bars, the less would be out on the street.
With the same group of police officers arresting the same local prostitutes again and again on a daily basis, they eventually got to know each other fairly well. This lead to mixed results, most being quite sketchy and corrupt. Many of the girls reported being sexually extorted on a daily basis, knowing that when a police car pulled up they would be obligated to service the officers if they wanted to continue working that night without going to jail. Personal relationships - both platonic and romantic - developed between several officers and prostitutes. Business arrangements began too, with cops getting in on the action and helping to pimp out these women.
The most dangerous dynamic was the informant arrangements. Immediately after arresting the women, they would be given the options to either go to jail or become an informant. Rather than trying to help these women get out of the lifestyle, officers encouraged them to continue engaging in drug use and prostitution, so long as they agreed to wear a wire and record their interactions with the drug dealers, biker gang boyfriends, johns, pimps, and anybody else that the police may have wanted to lock up. It does not appear that police provided these women with any kind of security measures or even regular checks on their well-being, which could have possibly lead to some of the murders if the targets of the investigations found out. That said, I personally believe the police department’s culpability goes even deeper than that.
First Reported Misconduct Case
In the late 70’s and early 80’s, Sergeant Robert “Bullet Bob” Hannibal was a highly respected San Diego police officer. He had several other cops in the family, including his older cousin Al Quick who retired from the force a few years prior. As an undercover agent in the Narcotics unit, Hannibal put away several high level drug dealers. He was then transferred to Vice where his efforts helped to drive out the local massage parlors, causing practically all prostitution in the city to be done via outcall operations and street walking. He also participated in the informant scheme, luring prostitutes to motel rooms then showing his badge and giving them the options to either be arrested or flip on their pimps and dealers.
Hannibal had taken a particular liking to a specific prostitute-turned-informant named Christine Cole and the two continued meeting even after Hannibal was transferred from Vice to Intelligence. Vice officers had some reservations about a now-unaffiliated detective still spending time with a Vice informant, but his superiors allowed it to continue as they believed Christine told him more than she’d tell other officers.
Hannibal claims his end goal with Christine was to put away Bruce Compton, a man who was running fronts and credit card transactions for multiple local outcall services (and would in the end only be convicted of mail fraud which landed him just six months behind bars). In order for Christine to meet with Compton and record illegal activity, she needed an outcall service to recruit his help for. Hannibal gave her the money to start her agencies. Some were fairly transparent and others were hidden under fronts. The two of them started three prostitution agencies in all: Fantasy Outcall, California Fantasy Fashions, and California Fantasy Lingerie. He later involved his retired motorcycle cop cousin Al Quick in the arrangement, which was supposed to be a fake callgirl company but quickly developed into the real thing as time went on. The men ran the prostitution ring with Christine in a three-way partnership, hand-picking the prostitutes they’d employee, transporting them to johns, and profiting off of the outcalls. Quick allegedly had sex with several of the girls, and Hannibal admitted to sleeping with at least one of them as well.
When a neighbor of Christine submitted a tip that a rogue cop was running a prostitution ring, Hannibal - who helped work the case - framed one of their competing outcall companies in an effort to shield he and Quick’s operation from the investigation. Vice became suspicious around this time and began trailing Christine which resulted in them catching Hannibal and Quick red handed, in addition to spotting Christine at a bar being affectionate with San Diego County Supervisor Paul Eckert, who lost his re-election campaign after the embarrassing publicity that followed.
Hannibal was fired from the police department after he, Quick, and Christine were initially indicted for pimping, pandering, and obstruction of justice. They took a deal, pleading guilty to the obstruction of justice charge and each serving one year in prison.
It was this case that made the Internal Affairs bureau first begin to have concerns about the troubling dynamic between the San Diego police force and the city’s sex workers.
Donna Gentile:
Donna Gentile was a young woman living in San Diego alone while the rest of her family resided in Pennsylvania. She had dreams of working in law enforcement, though her impoverished living conditions had forced her into prostitution in late 1980. In February 1981, she met Officer Larry Avrech of the San Diego Police Department. She told him about her dreams of working in law enforcement, so he invited her for a civilian ride-along, which was approved by the department. After their day together on the job, Avrech drove her home and the two had consensual sex. Avrech maintains he had no idea she engaged in sex work at the time, nor did the department when they approved her request to ride along with him.
For the next two years, Donna worked as a security guard, was not involved in any prostitution or crime, and lived with her work supervisor whom she had fallen in love with. When they broke up in 1984 and she no longer had a place to stay, she returned to prostitution out of desperation and racked up three arrests, which were dropped to lesser charges after she agreed to help as an informant.
Later that year, Donna was caught in a Vice sting that was supervised by Lieutenant Carl Black and included Officer Larry Avrech, who she had spent time with several years prior. She described Lt Black as being sympathetic and kind to her but she could not say the same for Avrech who allegedly prepositioned her for sex as soon as he had her alone. Donna claimed he said he’d go easier on her if she gave him what he wanted so she did and they had sex. She also claimed Avrech continued approaching her and extorting sex from her for months after. So long as she was giving into Avrech, he would tip her off to upcoming Vice raids.
During this time period, Lt Black took an interest in her as well. “He treated me real nice, like a friend and never like a prostitute,” Donna said, “He said he wanted to watch after me and help me get off the streets”. Lt Black helped her pay her bail bond and legal fees in addition to contacting her probation department to ask them for leniency. He also introduced Donna to his girlfriend and several of his close friends. When Black and his girlfriend planned a four-day vacation to the Colorado River with two other police sergeants and their significant others, they invited Donna to come along. She said they “had fun and water skied” - and that the other officers did not know she was ever involved in prostitution, so it was refreshing for her to feel “normal” and respected. Avrech later learned of the trip and of she and Lt Black’s friendship, which Donna says he used to blackmail her. He told her that if she didn’t keep giving him what he wanted, he would report what he knew to his superiors which would get Lt Black fired and charged with a crime. “I liked the Lieutenant and didn’t want to see his career harmed because of me,” Donna explained. Eventually, she said she began rejecting Avrech’s constant extortion attempts and told him she didn’t want to see him anymore and didn’t care who he told. In a last ditch effort to get more sexual favors from her, he allegedly approached her with a $50 bill and a signed letter requesting leniency to the judge presiding over her case. She still said no and told him to leave. She recalled that he didn’t take it well and began harassing and threatening her on a regular basis.
By August of 1984, she was fed up with his behavior and finally went to his superior Sergeant Harold Goudarzi to report that one of his officers was harassing, threatening, and extorting sex from her. He reluctantly forwarded her complaints to Internal Affairs, where they were taken fairly seriously because of the Hannibal/Quick saga that occurred shortly beforehand. They told her if she would be an informant and record Avrech’s harassment and threats, they would investigate him and hold him accountable, so she did it. When IAB questioned Avrech, he attempted to divert the focus to Lt Black and the vacation he brought her on, so a separate investigation of Lt Black was opened as well. Around the time that Avrech and Black became aware of the investigations, Donna alleges that several other members of the San Diego police force began harassing her on a regular basis. They followed her home often, parking outside of her house and waiting for any excuse to hassle her. She was given almost 20 citations in a short timeframe, some just within hours of one another, all for petty things like flicking cigarettes out on the ground and parking too close to a curb. They would even use timers to measure how long she stopped at stop signs, arresting her if she was just seconds below the minimum time. Some of the officers made threats, which Donna’s friends believe were intense enough to make her fear for her safety.
The Internal Affairs investigations of both officers continued until March of 1985, resulting in suspensions for both men. It is around the same time that Donna again went to the police to formally report the continuing harassment. She stated that in addition to Avrech, there were multiple other San Diego East County police officers tormenting her, and she was able to list the names of seven of them. The officers listed in her report were Michael Blakely, Curtis Meyer, Richard Draper, Robert Candland, Frank Christensen, James Brook, and Jeffrey Dean.
The civil service hearings for Avrech and Black were set to occur shortly after. Donna was called to the stand at Avrech’s and called a “liar, troublemaker, and known complainer” by Avrech’s former superior Sergeant Harold Goudarzi. It was decided that Avrech did violate police Department policies and would be fired, however he would face no criminal charges and would not be punished for the alleged sexual misconduct. Black’s hearing was scheduled two weeks after Avrech’s and resulted in him also facing no criminal charges but only being demoted instead of fired. Donna was supposed to be a witness in this hearing as well but she did not attend because on June 23 1985, a little over a week after Avrech’s hearing and just two days before Black’s, Donna was found murdered in a ravine off of Sunrise Highway about 40 miles east of San Diego.
Her body was found hidden under brush and tree branches, naked with her clothes methodically cut off of her body. The medical examiner believed that she had been murdered approximately 24 hours before she was found. She had been severely beaten, then strangled to death. Gravel had been forced into her mouth and “tamped” down her throat by a foreign object, with some of it making it’s way into her airways - showing that she was alive and breathing when this occurred. The autopsy listed her cause of death as “manual strangulation and airway obstruction by foreign material”.
Because her body was outside of the city, the investigation fell to the San Diego Sherriff’s Department rather than the San DiegoPolice Department that she had been harassed by. A veteran homicide detective named Thomas Steed was assigned lead investigator. The day after Donna’s body was found, Steed reports that a member of the San Diego Police Department arrived at Steed’s office and asked him if he “knew who he had back there” (referring to Donna’s body), then told Steed “that he was in a lot of trouble and this would be the end of his career”. The officer identified himself as Robert Candland, who Steed later learned was one of the officers Donna reported for harassment before her death. Candland was not the only one hostile to Steed’s investigation. Pretty much every time he contacted the San Diego PD asking for information or records, he was ignored or told to “take his request to Internal Affairs”. There was only one problem: the man now in charge of Internal Affairs was Sergeant Harold Goudarzi, the former superior and close friend of Avrech who publicly insulted Donna at the hearing just a week before her death. Predictability, Internal Affairs was as unhelpful as the local PD, refusing to even send over her arrest reports or lists of her regular clients. Eventually, whenever Steed called officers, they would tell him that their supervisors ordered them not to speak to him under any circumstances. The few that did speak to him had to do so secretly in meetings arranged by phone so as not to alert any other officers on their radios.
Soon after, a witness came forward and told Steed she was positive that she overheard two men planning Donna’s murder. She stated that a man in what appeared to be an unmarked police car picked her up on El Cajon Blvd and drove her to a motel where he paid her for sex. When he removed his pants, she noticed that he placed a police badge on the nightstand along with his belt. When they were finished, he left her in the bed and she either laid down or watched tv while he made some phone calls. Soon after, a second man arrived at the motel room and they slipped away to have a hushed private conversation. She was able to overhear bits of it and was certain that they were talking about murdering a prostitute and making it look like a “sex date gone wrong”. She was briefly fearful for her life before she heard the men use a name to refer to their victim, and to her relief it was Donna’s, not hers. Steed showed her several police yearbooks to see if she recognized any of the officers inside as the men she heard planning the murder. After scrolling through many pages, she finally spotted one, pointing at a photo of Lieutenant Carl Black and identifying him as the second man who arrived after their transaction. It took several more dated yearbooks before she finally recognized another one. “That’s the first man who picked me up,” she said upon seeing the face of Robert Hannibal, the San Diego Intelligence Officer who was fired two years prior for involvement with prostitution. Steed immediately called Black and requested he take a polygraph, which he initially agreed to. But minutes before the test was set to start, Black left the room and refused to come back.
Steed has never verbally accused any specific San Diego officer of Donna’s murder. But he has pointed out that this was far from the average “prostitute murder”. Most of the murdered prostitutes in the area were either left posed in suggestive positions in public areas or haphazardly thrown from vehicles onto the side of the road. Donna’s crime scene was different. She was hidden, tucked under foliage in a ravine far outside of the city. No souvenirs were taken, something else that distanced her case from most of the others. No fingerprints were reported to have been found, which made their job harder as prints were how several of the other San Diego murders were eventually solved. Additionally, her dress was cut off with a quick and clean slice from bottom to top. Typically, the local prostitute murders occurred during or after the sex acts when victims were already naked. The very few times Steed had seen other homicide victims with clothes cut off of them, there was a clear struggle taking place which caused the cuts to be jagged, messy, jutting in multiple directions, and usually nicking the woman’s skin in multiple places since she was moving during the killer’s cuts. No such struggle was noted in Donna’s case, just one quick and easy slice that didn’t stop or touch her skin whatsoever - leading Steed to believe she was already dead when the dress was removed from her body solely for the purpose of staging the crime scene - indicating that the motive for her murder was not sexual in nature and only meant to look like it was. Steed was especially interested in the meticulous way that the tire tracks and footprints were obscured. He could see vague outlines of where the vehicle pulled up to ditch her body. But there were no precise, identifiable tracks. It appeared that after the body was put into place, the car was driven back to the paved road, off of the impressionable dirt/mud, and parked there while the perpetrators returned to the scene on foot. They then used branches, leaves, and brush to obscure all of the tire tracks - stopping every few steps and doing the same to their foot prints as well. They carefully filled in every print and track from the body to the highway, then presumably fled in their vehicle. In summation, this crime was committed by someone who knew exactly what detectives would look for.
What I find to be the most compelling thing about Donna’s murder is that she effectively provided testimony from the grave. In the course of their investigation, detectives found multiple documents that showed she anticipated her life would end soon. Among the most damning was a letter she had handwritten to her cousin in mid-1985 while briefly incarcerated for her solicitation charges. It was written on labeled Las Colinas County Jail stationary. “I reported the patrolmen for sexually harassing me,” she wrote, “My life is in danger when I get out. The cops are waiting for me”. Her brother also came forward to present detectives with additional written correspondences from the same time period in which Donna again expressed fear for her life due to speaking out against the San Diego PD. One document even showed Donna begging to remain incarcerated after her sentencing was completed because she believed the police officers were lying in wait and would harm her the second she left the secure confines of the jail. Donna’s lawyer Douglas Holbrook soon came forward with an even bigger bombshell. He said that a few weeks before her death, she handed him an audio cassette tape and told him to play it for the media if anything ever happened to her. Steed put the cassette into a player and it was indeed Donna’s voice eerily forewarning the listeners of her eventual murder. “In case I disappear somewhere or go missing, I want my lawyer to give this to the press,” Donna began. “I have no intention of disappearing or going out of town without letting my lawyer know first. Because of the publicity that I have given a police scandal, this is the reason why I’m making this... I feel someone in a uniform with a badge can still be a serious criminal... This is the only life insurance that I have.”
Detectives and relatives often point to the key detail that Donna, after writing that she knew she was in danger for opening her mouth, was found aspirated on gravel. This is not something typically seen in the average prostitute murder and many believe it indicates that whoever forcibly tamped the rocks into her mouth had done so as punishment for her speaking out against them.
Another detail that was overlooked - and seemingly irrelevant at the time - was a piece of paper found in Donna’s things at the murder scene. Written across the paper scrap was a phone number belonging to a woman named Cynthia Maine.
Cynthia Maine
Donna’s friend Cynthia Maine - or “Cindy” as her family called her - was a local girl living a similar lifestyle. Growing up, she was a heavy set child with very low self esteem that carried on into adulthood. Steve Smith, her first real love, was an addict during their relationship and eventually involved Cindy in his drug use since she was the main provider in the house and he needed her money to support his habit. Pretty soon both of them were addicts and Steve was encouraging Cindy to engage in sexwork in order to raise money. Even after giving birth to their son Marky, Steve continued pimping her out on the San Diego streets. After tiring of this cycle and moving home to her mother’s with baby Marky, she planned to get her life back together but ultimately returned to the streets soon after.
On July 2nd 1984, Cindy was arrested by Officer John Fung for “suspicion of being under the influence”. She was then given the typical ultimatum: leniency if she’d flip, hard time if she didn’t. She chose the former and began informing on all of the dealers she knew in the area and wearing a wire at drug buys. She had halted her own drug use around this time, proudly keeping track of every day of “clean time” in her journal.
It was about a month after this arrest that Cynthia first read about the murder of her close friend Donna Gentile. Her mother remembers her sobbing over the newspaper.
Throughout that month, her relationship with Officer John Fung evolved. Cindy had a certain respect for law enforcement officers because her own father was once a member of the San Diego PD. Many of her prior customers on the street were police officers as well, but Fung seemed different than the rest. She believed their bond was something deep and special. Cindy introduced Fung to her sister on one occasion and to her mother countless times as he arrived at their home on a daily basis and often came in for coffee. Her mother remembers Fung leaving love letters and sweet notes on their front door addressed to Cindy. Cindy’s journal details the one month anniversary of when they met, talks about her making him chocolate covered strawberries and other baked goods, and references their sexual relationship. Much like Donna’s relationship with Black, Cindy believed Fung truly wanted to help reform her and take care of her. She even credited him as her main inspiration to stay clean and sober.
In September of that year, Cindy was sentenced to several months in Las Colinas County Jail (the same jail Donna Gentile spent time in) for a check fraud scheme she was previously involved in. She was originally sentenced to about four months but in November, halfway into her sentence, she was approached with a deal from some detectives who were seemingly investigating police misconduct (possibly related to Gentile’s death, but I am not certain about this as I have yet to see any further details on what investigation her intel was needed for). They pressured her to answer their questions, promising that she could immediately go home to her young son if she did. She agreed and provided the officers with honest answers, admitting that several members of the police force were clients of hers when she was doing sexwork, that some of them harassed and extorted the girls, and that she was romantically involved with one of them. Like Donna, she provided all of the names she knew and agreed to testify in civil hearings or court if needed. In exchange, she was sent home with her family right after, two months before schedule.
She was glad to be home with her child, but she couldn’t stop second guessing her actions and wondering if she had made a mistake. In the following weeks and months, she mentioned to her mother and sister that she was very fearful of retaliation from the police officers she informed IAB about. Both of them downplayed her fears because they were a police family themselves and couldn’t imagine an officer harming innocent people. Then, on February 21 1985, mere months after she provided intel on the officers, Cindy left young Marky in the care of her mother while she went out for a movie. She never returned.
She was reported missing five days later on February 26th, but the police had no interest. “We don’t actively look for these kinds of people.” they told her mother Lynda. So her family began searching for her on their own. They drove up and down the San Diego streets searching for any sign of Cindy, her car, or her possessions. They called Officer John Fung but he told them he had no idea where she was and to stop bothering him. When they pointed out to the police department that Fung would be the most likely person to have helpful information since he spent more time with her than anyone else they knew, Fung refuted it and claimed he barely knew her and she was just another hooker informant. He admitted showing her kindness, but said that was just because he was a kind person in general, not because he had any specific liking for her. He then refused to answer any calls or letters from the family.
Again, unlike the typical behavior of the prostitute thrill killers in the area, Cindy was not found thrown out of a vehicle on the side of the road, disposed of in a dumpster, or posed in open spaces for others to find. Like her friend Donna - the other outlier in the string of murders - Cindy was well hidden, this time even better than Donna was considering Cindy’s remains still have yet to be located. It’s believed that much like in Donna’s case, Cindy’s murderer seemed to know what they were doing.
Six weeks after Cindy’s disappearance, her mother Lynda finally found her car in the parking lot of a restaurant in La Mesa. She pleaded with the police to check it for prints or blood, but they refused. “Look it lady,” one officer told her, “There’s blacks and whites, and then there’s prostitutes.” She realized then that there was nothing she could ever say or do to get this police department to see her daughter as a human being worth looking for.
Afterward:
When police refused to help look for Cindy, her sister and mother had gone to the local newspapers to express their frustration and journalists were quite interested in all of the connections. After all, Donna and Cindy were good friends. They both were prostitutes-turned-informants with close relationships to members of the local police department, who denied the connections after. Cindy’s disappearance and Donna’s murder occurred just seven months apart, right after both left jail and provided incriminating information about officers. The officers implicated by the tipster in Donna’s case were one man personally involved with Donna and one man who was a known criminal that had lost his badge after illegal activity with prostitutes. The officers trying to shoo away both cases were deeply involved with the suspects. It was a perfect storm of sex, drama, corruption, and crime - so the headlines wrote themselves.
After taking some heat from the press, it was decided that the cases of Donna and Cindy - along with the other 40+ missing and murdered women - warranted a second look. So, the Metropolitan Homicide Task Force, “MHTF” as they called it, was started. MHTF would be split into two branches, the Serial Killings Unit and the Police Corruption Unit, with four officers assigned to each. Detective Steed from the San Diego Sheriff Dept was uncomfortable handing over the Gentile case to the new task force, citing his distrust with the SD PD, so he was brought in as well and assigned to the Police Corruption Unit. The only problem was that the man in charge of that unit was none other than Sergeant Harold Goudarzi, the former Internal Affairs supervisor who had previously refused to help Steed’s investigation due to his dislike for Donna Gentile and his close friendships with Avrech, Black, and the others. Steed quickly realized that the mission of MHTF was just to look good to the public and not to actually track police misconduct. When he continued looking into officers involved with Donna and Cindy, he was fired from the MHTF by Goudarzi for being a “maverick who was out of control”.
After a Roladex belonging to callgirl madam Karen Wilkening was found, it was discovered that Vice officers had removed the names of several members of law enforcement before it was entered into evidence. Because of this, the investigation was moved away from San Diego PD and placed into the hands of the San Diego District Attorney, who convened a grand jury on the allegations of police corruption. There were some links between the Wilkening case and the San Diego Prostitute Murders (including evidence that members of MHTF were listed in the Roladex, and that Donna Gentile herself had worked several parties thrown by Wilkening), so the MHTF was disbanded and the Prostitute Murders (including Donna and Cindy) were also handed over to the DA’s office.
The DA would go on to investigate and discipline several members of San Diego law enforcement. Detective Chuck Arnold and his former partner John Lusardi (who was on the MHTF) received suspensions for previously ordering prostitutes from Wilkening for Lusardi’s bachelor party. Former police chief Bill Kolender was also investigated for allegedly being a client of Wilkening. Sergeant Alfonso Salvatierra was investigated after sexually explicit photos of both Donna and Cindy were found in his locker at work. Eventually, Sergeant Harold Goudarzi himself would be suspended for having a sexual relationship with Denise Loche, a prostitute who acted at as informant for the Donna Gentile case.
No criminal charges were ever filed against any of the men involved, despite the grand jury all agreeing that there were serious problems with corruption in the city’s law enforcement.
Donna and Cindy’s murders still remain unsolved. While for decades after, officers continued trying to sweep them under the rug as most likely being the victims of typical prostitute thrill killers like Ronald Elliot Porter and Blake Raymond Taylor, their families - and most locals - still believe that San Diego Police Officers got away with murder.
Photos of the individuals involved: https://imgur.com/a/HnJa9On
A source link: https://apnews.com/article/9c3a112a6ed8e128c2018ddf169b3a41
Thanks for reading all of this and for caring about these women who have been ignored for so long. I’d be super interested in hearing your thoughts on this case.
Update: Since writing this, I started looking up the cops involved on Facebook and BeenVerified just to see if they’re still around. I found John Fung and he appears to have a normal life. Larry Avrech’s Facebook page was far more surprising. His whole Facebook page is about Donna, he has even written a book in which he claims all of her allegations were lies and Lt Black was the only criminal. He claims to know who killed her now and wants to expose him in the book. I don’t know what to think about it, I tend to believe he did everything he was accused of because Donna had no real reason to lie and endanger herself for no reason. That said, I do not believe he killed her (he would have done so before she testified against him, not after. And he wasn’t mentioned by the tipster who heard the planning). I’m interested to hear who he thinks did it. I definitely buy into the Black/Hannibal theory, I wonder if he does too. I bought an e-copy and will update y’all as I read.

What’s good newcomers, OG’s, Millennials, Boomers, boys, girls, 🦍, 🍉 and former 🥭 tweet enjoyers.
OBLIGATORY - $GME🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 (YES THAT IS 7 ROCKET EMOJIS SO YOU KNOW IM DAMN SERIOUS).
It’s ya boy here, ElJefe and boyyyyyy do I have something to share with you!
Hold onto your seats, because what I’m about to share IS a doozy and it might help make a lot of connections with what the fuck is going on related to this whole GME fiasco, that is now turning into some chance opportunity for $SLV to return to the main stage as another “squeeze opportunity”.
Listen we all should know by now that the news we are shown is mostly used to control a narrative for a certain group and this is NO DIFFERENT OF A TIME. The thing that is so unique with this situation is how intertwined things are more than you are lead to believe.
Does anyone find it amazing that 1 company Robinhood) was able capture the attention of millions upon millions of NEW retail investors by simply creating an app that is understandable and is easy to use? Think of it, Robinhood opened the door to change people’s lives by guiding them through the transaction process for stocks and people started to open their eyes and realize that making money to sustain your life doesn’t need to take a whole bunch of your time away from you.
So here is where the story begins.
Robinhood as many of you know was heavily funded by a Market Maker that is known as Citadel (previously Wellington management, which was founded in 1933 by Walter L. Morgan(weird coincidence, but maybe popular name in the day 🙃) as the first balanced mutual fund).
Citadel not only is a market maker, but they also are the providers of a certain component of the transaction process known as immediate or cancel interface. Check out “Citadel Connect” - which essentially is known for the immediate or cancel interface that is baked directly into the transaction process for Brokerages. So they have their hand in a lot of cookie jars across brokerages, to say the least. They also provide a system of algorithmic trading that helps automatic trading for their clients and more! Check out their website, it is eye opening the power this single company really has over the exchange.
Now keep in mind from before, Citadel gave Robinhood a SIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF MONEY to get them going because they saw a huge opportunity with having MORE retail traders joining the party and that opportunity was DATA. Citadel has instant and live trading data access to every single trade you make (hence why you usually notice an immediate opposing force from the stock you are buying - buy call and stock goes down right away, buy put and stock goes up right away), this is not something you are imagining, Citadels algorithm is literally taking this data in real time, and placing the most favorable trade for Citadel, which usually starts mind fucking you with your position right off the bat. Remember emotional trading will always lose, and they fuck with your emotions IMMEDIATELY (usually).
So Robinhood —> Citadel.
Next is JP Morgan. The banker. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Wait up. A Morgan started the original Citadel (Wellington), remember? Seems like a killer coincidence! Is Walter somehow related to John Pierpont? Even if indirectly, they bare the same family name... hmmm weird, but I can’t seem to find any relation on good old Google! So we’ll leave this just as a coincidence.
Back to JP Morgan - they would be the next in line to pay up or default and they are fully aware of the immensity of an infinite squeeze and now are in a position where they would be ones losing huge amounts of money. They have a lot of smart people working for them that quickly caught onto this and starting creating a contingency plan of some kind of to recoup some of the losses they are about to experience.
This is where $SLV/Silver comes into play and WHY YOU ARE SEEING IT POP UP MORE FREQUENTLY.
For those who unaware, $SLV is the ishares Silver Trust (which is blackrock’s silver etf). The silver squeeze IS something to have happened before and guess who was able to benefit SIGNIFICANTLY off of the sell off of the last $SLV rally... JP Morgan. How’d they do this? They shorted the fuck out of it. Check out JP Morgan’s history with the precious metals market - https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/09/29/jp-morgan-settles-spoofing-lawsuit-alleging-fraud-in-metals-trades.html. They paid, but still made out like bandits with profits.
Weird how when JP Morgan is about to lose a metric fuck ton of money, $SLV all of a sudden becomes “viral” and we start seeing it popping up everywhere as the “next squeeze”, but maybe just a coincidence, right?
Recap Robinhood —> Citadel —> JP Morgan would be the defaulted order. JP Morgan will need to recoup losses somehow, and what better way then A short on Silver whilst writing options during the run up?
Hence why $SLV has became viral.
So in essence. Stay the fuck away from Silver stocks unless you really know what you’re doing. Our mission is to focus on 💎🤲🏻ing GME. EVERYTHING ELSE THAT IS BEING SHILLED IS A DISTRACTION.
Also, Citadel should be another entity we are burning at the stake, not just Robinhood. Citadel is pulling off the greatest heist in history and the rest of the hedgies are just benefiting from this fiasco.
🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🌚🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🍉🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍🦍💎💎💎💎💎💎🤲🏻🤲🏻🤲🏻🚨🚨🚨🚨🚨🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥭🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵🥵
$SLV CREW 🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡🤡
GME & AMC CREW 👑👑👑👑👑👑🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴🤴👑👑👑👑👑👑
TLDR: HOLD GME IT IS A REALLY GREAT STOCK , SLV IS DISTRACTION (at least during this), BUY TANGIBLE SILVER. IT IS IN JPM’S BEST INTEREST AT THIS POINT FOR GME TO FALL AND THEY ARE DOING DAMAGE CONTROL TO RECOUP LOSSES BY SHILLING SLV AND THEN SHORTING BECAUSE BLACKROCK HAS A MASSIVE POSITION IN GME.

So, to my knowledge, no one has done a write-up on the batshit insane history of the Beach Boys and the various inter-politics of band-members that extends to their fanbase, which is why I'm doing this now. I don't really use Reddit so excuse any formatting errors, I'm not entirely sure how to use italics on this thing, but I feel this story is worth sharing anyways.
Okay, let's start with the basics, the Beach Boys are a classic rock band most famous for being pioneers of surf-rock. They didn't invent the genre but they were one of the earliest commercially successful surf-rock bands to have vocals, basically cementing the vocal-jazz/doo-wop sound vocal style that's all over the genre. The band was formed by the three Wilson brothers (Brian, Carl and Dennis), their cousin Mike Love and their childhood friend Al Jardine. Brian Wilson was the group's leader, writing all of their songs and eventually producing their records, with Mike Love functioning as the group's lyricist and arguably their lead vocalist (all of the members sung lead but Mike didn't play any instruments so he tended to sing lead a bit more often to give him shit to do on stage). This was how the group functioned from the early 60s until 1964.
Here's where the issue begins, for various reasons (largely due to having a panic attack on an airplane) Brian Wilson decides that touring and surf rock sucks complete ass, and that he'd rather innovate in the studio. A solution is agreed upon where Brian will write and record in Los Angeles for most of the year as the other Beach Boys tour, occasionally stopping back in Los Angeles to provide vocals on the instrumentals that Brian cooked up. Lyrics are to be provided by Brian, although he eventually elects to just hire other lyricists. To make up for his absence they recruit another musician named Bruce Johnston to tour with them, who eventually just joins the band.
So Brian gets more studio time, drifts away from surf-rock and eventually rock altogether, discovers psychedelics and records some of the greatest records of all time. "Pet Sounds", the Beach Boys fourth album to be recorded in these circumstances, is largely considered the band's masterpiece and consistently ranks near the top of most "Greatest Albums of All Time" charts (it's currently #2 on Rolling Stone's list, for example). It's really incredible psychedelic pop, genuinely a fantastic record and one absolutely worth listening to in full ("Wouldn't It Be Nice" was used in a Fallout advertisement a few years ago and got some attention because of it, "God Only Knows" was performed Bioshock Infinite by a barbershop quartet, I think Reddit likes these sort of things, they're also just very famous songs in general). There's some other material recorded around here that's also fantastic but is not necessary to understand this post.
These albums were weird, and they were critically acclaimed, but they weren't as successful as past Beach Boys albums (at least not in America, they sold fantastically in the UK). After one of them was cancelled near its completion ("SMiLE", an album with it's own insane fan history I may write-up later) the band became significantly less successful, Brian Wilson became reclusive and the power in the band generally shifted to the other members.
For the most part, this has been true since 1971. Brian has come back a few times, most notably in 1977 with "Love You" (a very weird but very good early synth-pop album), but a history of mental health issues prevented him from ever fully returning and the power in the band gradually shifted over to Mike Love. Here's the thing though, Mike Love is an asshole.
Mike Love's many faults are too long to list here, but to put it plainly he's a money-grubbing Reagan-Republican jackass who trampled Brian's creative vision to push the band back towards its surf-rock roots, in the process creating some of the worst records of all time. The Mike Love-helmed Beach Boys albums must be what the Beach Boys sound like to people who hate them, they're truly dreadful. In the mid-90s he somehow got the rights to tour under the Beach Boys' name, and has been doing so consistently since.
This is where the fans split. To those who consider themselves fans of the Beach Boys there are two general mindsets: one that considers Mike Love to be the antichrist and one that doesn't. Can you guess which side I'm on? To those who prefer the Beach Boys' experimental works, he's a greedy businessman ruining the band's legacy, but those who prefer their surf-rock tend to be more in favor of the guy. This split is largely across political lines too, Mike fans tend to be more right-wing and Brian fans tend to be more left-wing.
Many arguments are had over the merits of these two sides of the band. As Reddit leans younger, more tech-savvy and more left-wing, thebeachboys is mostly in favor of Brian, but on Facebook it seems way more violent. If you search for concert footage of Mike Love's "Beach Boys" and contrast it with Brian Wilson's solo touring it's apparent what types of crowds they're playing to.
Now, some Beach Boys fans are bipartisan and that shouldn't be left unstated, but this is certainly true for the majority of them. This is where our most recent issue comes to play.
So a few weeks ago on New Year's Eve, after Trump lost the election but before he was out of office, he held a party at his Mar-a-Lago resort and the Beach Boys performed at it alongside Vanilla Ice. "The Beach Boys" in question were Mike Love and a handful of touring musicians but no other members, not even Bruce Johnston who is a republican and has toured with Mike before. To say this caused a shitstorm would be an understatement.
Beach Boys fans are insecure about many things and I'll be the first to admit that, "Pet Sounds" pretty directly inspired the Beatles' "Sgt. Pepper's" and yet the Beatles and the Beach Boys are often considered to be in different leagues which Beach Boys fans don't really like. One thing that fans of Brian are particularly insecure about is "The Beach Boys" being used when referencing Mike Love's touring band. You can bet that when dozens of articles from major news publications come out about "The Beach Boys" performing at Trump's mask-less party in the middle of a pandemic that these fans would be fucking pissed. And they were.
This was easily the most active I've seen Beach Boys fans in awhile, especially on Twitter where just about every tweet about the matter had a dozen Beach Boys fans underneath it clarifying that Brian had absolutely no connection to the concert. In a rare move for him, Brian (or at least his social media team) came out to condemn Mike Love for playing a mask-less concert in the middle of a pandemic to support a man who was voted out of office and wouldn't admit it. Al Jardine, another Beach Boys’ member who regularly tours with Brian agreed, and former Beach Boys’ collaborators had some more colorful things to say (including Van Dyke Parks, the lyricist for Brian’s “SMiLE” project who has pretty regularly shit-talked Mike Love over the years).
While this wasn’t the first controversy surrounding where Mike Love’s touring band choose to play concerts, there was a similar controversy a few months ago when they performed at a party for Trump’s re-election in October and another one back in February when they performed at a Safari Club (Brian Wilson is very strongly in favor of animal rights), but this was truly the last straw. Bipartisanship is nearly impossible to maintain with the current politics of band members, and while a true reunion of the band has been discussed to occur sometime later this year (or whenever quarantine lifts) it seems considerably unlikely. The band, the real band with Brian participating, is probably just over forever now. You'll still be able to see Mike Love's bastardization of "the Beach Boys", and you'll still be able to see Brian tour (and Al too, probably) with his incredibly superior backing band, but the true Beach Boys are done.
I, and I assume many others, have found some hope though. The sheer amount of backlash seems to show that the Beach Boys’ legacy hasn’t been ruined, that Brian’s experimental music has been and will continue to be properly appreciated, and that attempts to destroy with this boomer surf-rock garbage have ultimately failed. It’s nice to know, but we can’t really be sure for now. Knowing Mike Love, he’ll pull some more shit.
I don’t really know how to end Reddit posts but if any of you want a real belly-laugh I suggest you check out Mike Love’s 2017 double-album “Unleash the Love”, specifically its second disc which consists of re-recordings of classic Beach Boys songs. I don’t want to spoil it but pay attention to the vocals, they’re uhhh kinda hard to miss.
And if you want some good music to listen to, listen to Pet Sounds! It’s seen as a masterpiece for a reason. If you’ve already listened to it, then listen to their other stuff like “Friends” and “Wild Honey”. That “SMiLE” album I’ve mentioned a few times in this post was eventually released in like 2011 as “The Smile Sessions” and it’s fucking mesmerising, really worth a listen. Get involved with the Beach Boys fan community too, speaking for the Brian-side of the group there’s a lot of really good and really talented people working hard to preserve the band’s legacy. Brian’s current touring band actually consists of a bunch of Beach Boys fans (namely Darian Sahanaja, the main organiser) who were able to perfectly replicate the very complex arrangements of Brian’s songs live.
So yeah, that’s all. Have a good one, listen to the Beach Boys, and don’t be like Mike Love.
Edit/Author's Note: Just to be safe, I added a couple sentences to show that all of this did have consequences as to follow Rule 10. Didn't really impact the pacing or the point, just emphasized what's at stake in a clearer way. Also, you've all been super cool in the comments, very nice to see people who've decided to check out Pet Sounds after this. I know "thx fer de updoots" is a fucking meme but it's nice how welcoming you all are, I'll probably do a write-up on the history of SMiLE and all of the bootlegs people did sometime in the next couple weeks. Okay, author's note over.

I love making combat encounters. I have a lot of advice on how to make them, but there's one point that I come back to more than any other:
Attack the players' STRENGTHS, not their weaknesses
If you have a fire-focused wizard in the party, don't throw a fire elemental at them. Throw a swarm of treefolk at the party instead, a terrifying encounter that the party can only overcome because of their wizard. Give the wizard a chance to shine, fireballing swarms of enemies that take double damage from fire.
Which encounter do you think they'll enjoy more? Fighting the fire elemental, or fighting the treefolk swarm?
So often DMs ask forums for help figuring out how to negate their players' coolest abilities, ways to stop the players from playing their characters the way they envisioned them. They try to disable or negate the players' cool feats, builds, or strategies. If a ranger has a favored enemy that gets them a bonus when attacking orcs, don't take orcs out of your campaign. Add more orcs. Make a major boss an orc! Stack the deck against the players, but give them chances to shine with their special abilities.
There's psychology underlying this. On a player's turn in combat, they're looking for opportunities to do something cool and useful. If they can't find something that seems valuable, they get frustrated. If they see a perfect opportunity to use a key spell or class feature to huge effect, they've found what they're looking for. This makes them satisfied and happy, it gives them a chance to shine.
If your paladin is immune to charm, throw an enchanter at the party that attempts to charm everyone - so the Paladin gets to feel good about their immunity. If your acrobatic rogue can do massive burst damage, let them know that if someone risks climbing onto the monster's back they could get automatic critical hits stabbing it in the back of the head.
Give your players opportunities to shine, and cool stuff to do that's way better than normal. Give them chandeliers to drop on enemies, give the clerics undead to turn, and give them foes that take triple damage from their favorite damage types.
Then mix it up with a foe that has some resistances or immunities to all their favorite toys, just in very small doses. The one time that Sleep magic shows up in a campaign shouldn't also be a special magic that also affects the warforged (which are normally immune to sleep spells).
Attack the players' strengths, not their weaknesses.
EDIT - Since people seem to like this advice, I do a podcast called The GM's Guide too. #shamelessplug

Disclaimer: It is moronic to buy FDs. That is not the way to consistently build wealth. The very reason FDs pay off such huge returns is because on average their probability of expiring worthless is 99%. If you’re moronic enough to buy FDs with me, only do it with money that you are willing to literally set on fire. Actual fire. There are plenty of safer puts on DASH that will pay obscene returns this year..
TLDR: I believe DoorDash (DASH) is the greatest short opportunity of the year, and what’s more, rather than just having a general feeling, there are specific timetables enabling us to profit bigly. The company even admits themselves that they have peaked as a company.

Analysis:

“Food delivery with third-party apps like Grubhub and Uber Eats is booming, but no one's making money.” – Business Insider.

DoorDash is wildly overvalued. This is true by any metric, were it in essentially any industry. Add to that its in food delivery, which is a horrific, no margin industry in what has become a commoditized business and offers essentially no differentiation with its competitors. There is near zero differentiation between Uber Eats, Postmates, Caviar, Grubhub, DASH, or any local provider. In Austin we have Favor, for example. And nobody cares which company delivers their food, they only care which one does it cheapest.
If you view stock (as you should) as buying the entire business as an owner, how much would you be willing to pay for an undifferentiated company in a no margin commoditized business that has peaked (see below for more on that)? Because it’s currently selling for an insane $56 billion. Outrageous.
So how can we get a banana for scale to understand what that $56 billion means in terms of valuation?
Well, all of DoorDash’s competitors have either sold at or are trading at, or raised money at, a capitalization of 3x to 6x sales. DASH is trading at an absolutely insane 20+ x sales.
Just six months ago Postmates was acquired for $2.65 billion which put it at 4x sales. At 4x sales, DASH would trade at $32.
DASH used to be the business leader in this industry, but over the past 2-3 years Grubhub has exploded in size to take on nearly the same 33% of market share, and after Uber Eats bought Postmates, it too now has about a third of market share. So you now have three giants of roughly equal size battling it out in a business in which customers don’t give a motherloving frick about branding.

But don’t take my word for it on valuation, take smart money’s word

DoorDash raised money just a couple months ago at a $16 billion valuation. That is truly a stunning fact. In just a few months the WSB type day trading call buyers have bid this company all the way up to $56 billion from $16 billion without any material change to the business and completely ignoring the coming vaccine-induced reopening of restaurants. Again, the stock trades for a 300% markup to its recent smart money capital raise based on nothing but unfounded hopium.
You don’t have to take my word for it, your beloved Jim Cramer has even said the same thing, in his own idiotic, covering my ass, round about say nothing way. “It’s true that people using market orders took DoorDash to levels that maybe ... were far higher than they thought they’d have paid.” - Jim Cramer
I don’t care about his commentary, but you people seem to love him, so there you go. 😘

The Company, according to The Company, has peaked. It’s over.

There are two extremely interesting things buried in the S-1 we’re going to get into in a moment. One of them is that you don’t have to take my word for it that this company’s business has peaked. The company says so itself in its own S-1.

The circumstances that have accelerated the increase in Total Orders stemming from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic may not continue in the future, and we expect the growth rate in Total Orders to decline in future periods.

To put it simply, COVID numbers are falling, vaccines are rolling out at an impressive 1-2 million per day which puts our stated goal of 100 million vaccinated in 100 days within attainable reach. The economy will be opening up, people will want to be getting out of the house, restaurants will be reopening, and there will be huge pent up demand by people who have had extraordinarily high savings rates over the last year. Big chains will no longer have the need to get help from third party delivery apps at a 15% markup. We all know this is the case, and DoorDash even stated as much in its own filing. This stock is toast.

”Delivery via smartphone is one of those venture-funded sectors where business executives appear to have taken seriously the old joke about “losing money on every transaction but making it up on volume.” – New York Magazine

“DoorDash and Grubhub and Uber Eats... it’s a tough business for them. It’s very competitive. I think the business model is hard.” - Panera Bread CEO.

And Now the Fun Part

There are some wild share lockup expirations coming up. For those that don’t know, when you get these massive IPOs, insiders aren’t actually able to sell their shares on IPO day. They are locked up and the insiders just have to hope for the best that the stock will not lose value over the coming months. If the stock skyrockets in value, but the insiders know the business is trash or has peaked, you get the perfect recipe for a rush for the exits.
I love playing share lockups. I make a lot of money on them by selling spreads. A common question I get when I post them here is “if you know a drop is coming, why doesn’t the market just price it in?” The answer is because it can’t. No matter what the share price does, the lockup expiration date is the lockup expiration date. Insiders have to wait until that date, and it doesn’t matter whether the stock falls 0%, 5%, or 50%, they will all have to wait until that day to sell.
DoorDash has two share lockup expirations coming.
The first lockup expiration is an early release (heh) and hits 90 days after the Dec. 9 IPO, or around March 9, as long as the stock trades 25% higher than the IPO price for five out of 10 consecutive days of trading. That is to say, so long as DASH trades above $127.50 right before March 9, the lockup is triggered. The good news for you with this insane run up in price is that if the lockup isn’t triggered, it means the stock has already fallen from $190 to $127. It’s important to know March 9 is not a hard date exactly...some insiders can be allowed to go a few days prior. Also if they release earnings early the lockup could potentially occur at the end of this month.
I was talking to some folks on WSB about the lockup last week, and someone mentioned they thought only 20% of insider shares will be eligible. DoorDash's management and board members can sell up to 20% of their shares in that first wave, but other insiders can sell up to 40%. This means 113 million shares are eligible for sale in early lockup expiration. DoorDash’s daily volume is only 3-4 million shares. The current public float is roughly 123 million shares. This means you’re about to suddenly double the number of shares on the market.
Door Dash’s second lock-up expiration hits either 180 days after its IPO, which means around June 9 (more or less), or after the release of its first-quarter earnings report (whichever is earlier), and will free up “all remaining shares” according to the S-1, which if my math is correct is roughly 50 million shares.
These two expirations could spark violent sell-offs throughout the year.

Positions

FDs

I never buy FDs. I’ve never once bought them in my entire life. But I’m putting 1% of my portfolio into them on DASH because I’m confident big drops are coming. Unfortunately for you guys, the stock has already started falling this past month from its 🤡-level highs in the $200s, and worse yet the pricing/IV of all options has gotten more expensive. This means, I’m sorry to say, that you’re not going to find any options trading for pennies, or even anything less than $2. For your FDs, I recommend you buy puts at whatever the lowest strikes are that actually have any volume. The strikes go as low as $75, but most days show 0 volume and of course the bid/ask spread is enormous. There has been some volume at $95 recently, and you can get the $75s if you’re patient enough and willing to pay up for them. Expiration dates would be any time in mid to late March (again, looking for whatever has volume) so that it occurs after lockup 1, and the August 20s, which unfortunately are the closest expiration to the lockup occurring around June 9. I wish there was a closer expiration, but hey, more time for the stock to collapse. Plus you could always sell your puts after the June 9 drop with lots of theta meat still left on the bone.

Puts

I own March 12 $160 puts. I think the stock will drop healthily below this, but IV is high. I’m normally taking big swings with spreads, so when I buy puts outright, which is rare, I want to play it a little safer.
I also own the August 20 $145 puts.
And finally, I have six figure credit call spreads open at the $175 level. For newbies, this simply means I: Bought (yes bought) the March 12 $175 calls, and Sold the $172.50 calls.
I went huge on these because all I need is for DoorDash to trade below $172.50 after the lockup expiration and I’ll be having a Merry Christmas. That’s as close to risk free gains as you’re ever going to see in your life.

Bull case

The only bull case is that we’re in a raging, record-setting bull market and all stonks go up. The economy is opening back up, vaccines are rolling out, and stonks go up. But I think if you look at the DASH chart you can see that that is already starting to not be the case.

What are the negatives?

I plagiarized liberally from an old Citron Research report, although it doesn’t even mention share lockups. Yes, that Citron. For those of you who are newer members, I will tell you this; the little smart money social circles in and around WSB do not hate CItron, Hindenburg, or any other short selling firms. We respect them and welcome bearish cases on high flying stocks. Any intelligent trader does. It’s only the pump and dumpers who have a hatred for short reports. You should welcome contrarian views.

Parting Words.

I would welcome anyone pointing out where they think I may be wrong. I don’t care about saving face, I care about not losing money. If I’m wrong, I want to know it. I welcome constructive criticism.

Give Me One More TLDR At The End

This stock is going to collapse because it’s wildly overvalued, employees got in super cheap with shares they are waiting to sell, know the business has peaked, and they want to cash the fahk out. So swallow the high IV and buy puts today as fast as you can.
Love you guys.

I've gotten more than a few DMs so I just want to offer my thoughts in a larger setting. I apologize for wasting others time and space.
Background: MBA w/+20 years including stints in Investment Banking, Equity Research, VC and Corporate. ( = I know enough to be dangerous.)
Should I invest tomorrow?
I would invest with the understanding that you're playing a high risk/high reward game vs. the best on Wall Street (WS) who aren't accustomed to losing. (Hell, you put a 50% dent in one of the most high profile HFs on the Street.) Reddit/WSB (WSB) is beating WS at its own game and WS will not accept that. The reason that I would still buy shares is because I'm perfectly comfortable waiting out the shorts, who I believe didn't cover entirely based on some sketchy trading volumes and price action on Thursday known as ladder attacks, which is basically artificially lowering a security's price by selling it back and forth between two parties. (Note: the WSJ is reporting that Melvin closed their positions at a loss of 50% to the fund. Maybe they did, though I don’t trust Melvin or the WSJ. Regardless, I have no doubt that other HFs are salivating at the short opportunity given where GME shares are currently trading.)
The key is the somewhat unreliable short data which comes out next week. As I mentioned in a previous post, getting accurate short data is next to impossible. It makes polling data look flawless by way of comparison. It has gotten to the point that I don't believe anything I read because there is not only time lag but synthetic longs and ladder attacks all of which serve to obscure the data. No firm wants it positions known so there is a strong incentive to obscure/hide the data. Another reason why Melvin publicly releasing its positions is just highly unusual/odd.
I would also be aware that a lot of HFs are making bank off the GME volatility by selling options and taking long positions. Just look at thetagang. The group is making their entire investment decisions based solely on the option premium without any concern for the underlying narrative to the point where they're short GME puts at the 200 strike. (And they think WSB is full of retards!)
To use an analogy, I'm a lifelong Giants fan who put a $1,000 down on the Giants beating the Pats in the 2008 Superbowl. The Pats went undefeated all season and the Giants entered the playoffs as a wildcard. The bookie even told me when I placed the bet that I was just throwing away my money. I bet the money line, i.e., no points, and ending up winning $5,000. The bookie just smiled at me when I handed him my ticket. Sometimes you just gotta trust your gut and stay loyal to your instincts no matter what others think. It's what separates the men from the boys.
TLDR: It’s a cliché, but don’t invest in GME what you can’t afford to lose. At this point, you're going against some very powerful hedge funds, i.e., the Pats in 2008. That said, WSB already scored a very impressive victory and is retarded enough to not realize how good their competition really is (just like the Giants in the Super Bowl).
How will the media portray the narrative?
The media have already started spreading the narrative that WSB is going to cause a financial collapse rather than the true culprits, namely, the HFs which leveraged up 5x to short 120% of a company's shares outstanding setting the stage for an infinity squeeze, which is the financial equivalent of a nuclear chain reaction. I mention this because the greatest risk IMHO is government intervention to quell the markets when the HFs start unloading positions to meet margin calls and borrowing costs. Nobody will lose sleep over a few billionaires losing a few commas in their net worth but hitting 401Ks, pension funds, and endowments is a different story. The official narrative will involve large commercial banks which loaned Melvin and other HFs billions to leveraged up with. These banks are regulated by the SEC and FDIC because they hold commercial deposits. When the narrative shifts from Melvin and HFs to names you recognize, e.g., JPM, BofA, Citi, rest assured the game is almost up. My guess is we're in the seventh or eighth inning of this game before it's stopped.
When people ask me about WSB I first discuss the HFs who created the conditions and then secondly note that thankfully we're dealing with a relatively small company in GME with a market cap of $20bn (so far!) compared to a company in the S&P 500, which is the basis for index funds and portfolio construction. In short, WSB did everyone a favor by calling attention to such a disastrous scenario in as optimal circumstances as possible. We should be very thankful WSB alerted the public to a systematic flaw in the financial system before a much greater meltdown occurred.
TLDR: The media are the PR firms for Wall Street. They exist to promote a narrative and receive access and compensation in return. They have no interest in reporting how the retail investor is being swindled. In contrast WSB did everyone a favor by pointing out a very serious systematic flaw in as optimal fashion as possible. This is the truth and the message that needs to be heard.
What’s the next step?
FINRA releases short data next Tuesday, February 9th for the period ending this past Friday, January 29th. Roughly 700mn GME shares changed hands last week or 10x the total shares outstanding so I'm pretty sure the short interest (SI) has fallen below 100%. However, I expect it to still be well above 50% given the typical HF’s risk appetite by which I mean they expect the retail investors to run for the exits sending shares back to $20-ish levels. I would love to know the borrowing costs for these firms because it basically tells you how long they can wait before such costs negatively impact their returns. My guess is until March when they have to report 1Q results to investors.
TLDR: Short data will show a decrease in SI, which is not necessarily a bad thing but it’s important to note that the risk/reward profile of the trade has moved.
How much good did this GME trade really do besides transfer a lot of wealth?
A heck of alot. At a minimum, WSB drew well needed scrutiny to the role of option clearings firms such as Citadel* and Wolverine, i.e., the shadow economy, and their dual roles as market makers and hedge funds (players and referees). This screams conflict of interest. A revolution doesn’t happen overnight but this is another step forward in demonstrating how rigged the game is against the retail investor and guy in the (Main) street. Our regulatory agencies exist to enforce transparency and fairness. WSB has demonstrated that the derivatives market and particularly short selling lack both and have the capability to cause a financial panic. And of course, there is the unbelievable amount of charitable donations from WSB gains which prove who the real Robinhood is. (Sorry, couldn’t resist).

• Citadel alone handles more than 25% of US equity flow. The company is a monster and barely anyone knows it exists, which is how they like it. They tell Wall Street what the regulation is and they pay Washington to enforce it. Former Fed heads Bernanke and Yellen have received almost a million in combined comp for speeches and advisory services from Citadel. In short, Citadel makes Goldman look like the United Way. And oh, yeah, 40% of Robinhood's revenue comes from Citadel in return for order flow. Assume what you will.

TLDR: Sunlight is the best disinfectant – Justice Brandeis
*********************
For the questions below and messages:
As I tried to communicate in the write-up, I would characterize the trade as more risky than a week ago when the SI was above 100%. I have no doubt many shorts have since closed. That said, I suspect the SI is still well above 50% given where the stock is and typical HF risk appetite. This is not a trade for your parents or grandparents.* There is serious risk here that the share price collapses based on who the counterparties are and the lower SI. That said, I still like it and I'm in it. IMHO, it comes down to a game of chicken in the sense of who is willing to hold longer. HFs have investors to report to in 1Q vs. WSB who have bills, rent, and life to deal with. As my old coach would say, who wants it more.

• The market has returned ~11% per year for the past decade. A good HF aims for 2x that. You guys are banking +1,000% returns on a trade lasting approximately a month against the best HFs on the Street. These returns are not normal or even within several standard deviations. They are clearly not for the faint-of-heart. We are in unchartered waters here. No shame in heading back. The fact you've come this far is simply amazing. Even you wife's boyfriend would be proud of you.

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This is part II ! Read part I first if you haven't done it already.
Next we get to Louis XVI's trial, and OS is already doing as if Robespierre was the ultimate dictator of France, with him playing chess against Austria and Prussia. Yet at this point he's a mere conventionnel. A popular one, sure, but he is in no way more powerful than any of his 748 co-workers at this point. And he was far from being the only one advocating for Louis' death; maybe he didn't even have the most influential speech in this direction, as that title could be attributed to Saint-Just. 29 errors. This emphasis on Robespierre is completely unjustified : again, he is a mere deputy at this point, and he's part of the opposition at that. What's next ? Ah, OS peddles the idea that Louis' fate was decided by one vote - it was not. There was an absolute majority of just one vote not in favor of death, but in favor of death without conditions - 70 other deputies voted for death with a conditional sentance, making a total majority of 431 for death against 290 for all other options. 30 errors.
Surprisingly, OS says nothing egregiously wrong after that - until he says "so as the Revolution turned increasingly violent and anti-christian" : again this is caricatural as it doesn't take the slightest nuance into account and hammers how horrifically violent the Revolution was - the reality is that it was not violence per se that apalled the conservative, but violence against refractory priests. But let's be lenient for once, because was indeed perceived rabidly anti-clerical, albeit things are always more complex. Still his introduction of the Chouannerie and the Vendée rebellion are approximately correct. But then he confuses the royalist insurrections with the federalist insurrections, the latter being actually republican. In Toulon, it was originally a federalist revolt that was later taken over by royalists; for the other cities and regions in revolts - Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux and Normandie, all these regions saw federalist insurrections, but as OS doesn't introduce the federalist revolts (to sum it up briefly, a violent reaction of certain departements to the eviction of tne Girondins) them and just paint France in two colors, we're left misguided. 31 errors.
"The republic sent a relatively unknown young captain by the name of Napoléon Bonaparte (of course his face is comically ugly, why do you even ask, it's the French Revolution, all of its protagonists were ugly !) to help stage the siege of the city."
Not really. The Republic sent general Carteaux, and latter Dugommier; Bonaparte was only their subordinate and not the commander-in-chief. 32 errors.
"General Jean-Baptiste Carrier committed brutal atrocities. [...] [He] was later found guily of war crimes."
He was not a general, but a civilian; specifically, a Représentant en Mission, aka an envoy of the Convention whose task is to apply the Convention's laws in the regions. As for him being found guilty of war crimes, that's stricltly impossible since war crimes became a legal charge more than a century afterwards, as conferences, such as the Hague's and Geneva's set up rules for warfare. So this is an anachronism. 34 errors. Otherwise, yeah, the repression in Vendée was indeed gruesome.
Back to Paris, where OS butchers the complete story of the Girondin's expulsion from the Convention. His chain of events is :
the government is increasingly unpopular -> Marat calls for the elimination of the traitors in the Convention and his put on trial -> Robespierre calls to insurrection.
Both the timeline and the facts are thrown in the trash : Marat was indeed tried, but in april, and he was acquitted on the 24th of that month, more than a month before the eviction of the Girondins. Many other events made them unpopular : they had created a commission to investigate the Paris Commune, that they suspected of treason, which logically didn't please the sans-culottes who hold the Commune. They were also holding to their old motto that property and economic liberalism were both sacred, even though food was still very costly and many sans-culottes demanded price fixing. What really lit the fuses though is that on may 25th, feeling that there might be an insurrection, Isnard, the girondin president of the Convention, threatens to have the entire city razed to the ground - really, I'm not making that up. That's exactly like the Brunswick manifesto. That's why Robespierre indeed called for an insurrection a few days later : he feared that a violent purge coming from the right may happen soon, and while it is easy to dismiss it as sheer paranoia, remember that all these men had lived through the Champ-de-Mars massacre, during which two men who were considered as heroes, Lafayette and Bailly (the guy who prononced the Tennis Court Oath first and the National Assembly's first president, it's him you see standing above everyone else in David's painting of the event) odered the National Guard to fire on the crowd. When even supposedly dedicated revolutionaries betray you, it's easy to think that others might do the same. I also want to add that the Girondin were not instantly executed : they were merely placed under house arrest, allowing many to flee Paris for province, where they would spark the federalist revolts I mentioned earlier.
Anyway, one error for all this. 34 errors.
"Robespierre and his radicals would be in almost total control of the government."
Good thing you said almost, because it's not the case. Even in the most dire moments of the French Revolution, the government, or the Committee of Public Safety that more or less acts as a government needs the approval of the Convention to pass any decree. This is no governmental dictatorship. 35 errors.
"In death, he became an even more powerful inspiration for the extreme levels of violence that were about to rip throughout the new republic".
While this is true, OS' heavy insistance about how horrifically violent the Revolution was falls under the paragraphs I've written above about the violence of the Revolution. But indeed, Marat's assassination confirmed the suspicions many had about traitors within their ranks. I want though to heavily insist myself on one point, and OS is going to introduce it for me.
The Reign of Terror. I want to introduce to you a new theory that has emerged at least in french academic research : the idea that the Republic basically became a totally centralised and dictatorial regime officially promoting Terror at this point is... wrong. More on that later. But first let me dump the inaccuracies that OS put in his account : the Committee of Public Safety was established on april 6th 1793, and the Revolutionary Tribunal was established on march 10th 1793; both were established as the Girondins were still firmly sitting in the Convention and government. Now the factual inaccuracies : the CPS (if you allow the abbreviation) was not a dictatorship, and Robespierre was not at its head. It needed the approval of the Convention to pass anything, and it couldn't force his will on all the other committees. Because it was not alone. There was a committee of finances, a committee of public education, a committee of the navy and the colonies, etc. The CPS simply led and coordinated the whole thing.
Internally speaking, its 12 members were strictly equal. Robespierre was not at its head - there was no "head of the committtee" and decisions needed to be approved by the majority of its members. If Robespierre is in the minority, he is powerless. So he was not, I repeat he was NOT a dictator; he has never been more than one of the 12 members of one of the executive branch, albeit the main branch. And he needed, like all the members of the CPS, to be reelected each month to keep his seat. So OS' heavy insistance on what Robespierre wanted is completely off the mark since Robespierre's personal desire don't matter that much.
Now onto the Revolutionary tribunal. Contrary to what OS depicts, and to a popular conception of it, the Revolutionary Tribunal was a real tribunal, not a sham : there were procedures, attorneys, exhibits, and half, half of the people who passed before it were acquitted. In total, that already makes five more errors : we're already at 40.
But now we get onto the interesting part. OS claims that Terror was proclaimed to be the order of the day. What does that mean exactly ? It means that in early september, after hearing of the betrayal of the admirals who gave Toulon to the Coalition forces, a group of sans-culottes entered the Convention and demanded that Terror be the order of the day. And by that, I mean the order of the day of the Convention, the official topic of today's debate in the assembly. And yet... it never happened. Historians such as Jean-Clément Martin dug into the Convention's (rigorously organised) archives and found no trace of the word Terror in the Convention's order of the day on september 5th 1793, nor in any other day of the French Revolution. That's right : there has never been any official reign of Terror. When Terror was indeed applied, it was largely the result of local iniatives that the Convention couldn't control, such as some Representatives in mission's crimes (Fouché in Lyon, Carrier, in Nantes, Barras and Fréron in Toulon), or the results of political moves to eliminate rivals and please the radical part of the public opinion. The conclusion that Martin and others like Michel Biard draw is that far from being a hyper-centralised and bloodthirsty dictatorship, France during the "Terror" was actually in a state of anarchy, to put it bluntly; the decisions the Republic then took in terms of internal traitors hunt ought not to be compared with, say, the USSR, as it is commonly depicted, but to the decisions France took again during WW1, when deserters where being shot, the press' freedom was being suppressed and the opposition parties were forced into a Sacred Union for the sake of maintaining a unified and efficient war effort. This is, according to Martin, and I'm firmly inclined to believe him, a far better comparison than François Furet's old song about the Revolution being the mother of totalitarianism, a theory that is nowadays out of favor. So OS now has 41 errors. To be specific, when the sans-culottes asked for Terror to be the order of the day, Thuriot, President of the Convention, answered "you're right : justice is the order of the day"². The central government never claimed to rule with Terror during the actual "Reign of Terror"; even Robespierre's famous speech about Virtue and Terror is not enough to prove the contrary, as Robespierre here is simply defining the principles of the Revolutionary Government in times of crisis : remember that he and the rest of the Conventionnels were dedicated republicans who had advocated for more liberty and equality during the days of the Constitutional Monarchy; their hands were forced by a one of the most dire crisis of French history, with civil war and external war in which France was alone and on the verge of collapse, but they were all clearly saying that laws like the suspect laws were exception laws, and that they would be removed once the dust would have settled. Terror was rarely mentioned by those members of the Revolutionary Government, and when it was, it was either to condemn it or to call it a necessary evil. None of these men were "bloodthirsty" : we don't live in a fairy tale with bad guys rubbing their hands and preparing plans to dominate the world. It was after the Terror supposedly ended that the Thermidorians, men such as Fouché and Barras who had defintely ruled with Terror in their proconsulships, absolved themselves of all their crimes by creating this false narrative of an almighty and bloodthirsty Robespierre overseeing mass executions all across France. OS is blindly listening to these sympathetic men when he says :
"Fear had become an official government policy."
This is a myth. Don't get me wrong though : it is neither the actual violence, nor the death toll I'm questioning (though the death toll will always be a complex question), it's the way violence was implemented. 42 errors.
So what does OS have to say about what's coming ?
The usual story of Robespierre being a psychopath who personally oversaw the spying and executions, even though he was neither a dictator, nor even a member of the Committee that actually took charge of the spying : the Committee of General Security, whose president Vadier, hated Robespierre and played a key role in his elimination. 43 errors. Also, the 40 thousands execution OS quote still leaves me skeptical, but as I couldn't find a death toll that was both more precise and more convincing, I'll go with it. I'll be happy to hear a more recent calculation though.
OS then arrives to Marie-Antoinette, and that allows me to jump on another topic : remember that quote from Danton ? "We must be terribe so the people don't have to" ? Well that was the spirit behind the infamous "loi des suspects", the law of suspects, that allowed the government to imprison anyone deemed suspect; if we don't take such decisions, there will be new September massacres : that's the logic behind it. It's a way of institutionalising a practice that would otherwise happen illegally, thus more violently, at the expense of the government's image. It is also to please the sans-culottes that the revolutionary tribunal launched a wave of executions of celebrities now labelled as traitors in october and november 1793 : Marie-Antoinette of course, but also Bailly, the Girondins, former conservative member of the Constituant Assembly such as Barnave, royal princes such as Philippe Egalité, who happened to be the king's cousin and the father of a deserter, and even Louis XV's last mistress, madame du Barry !
The idea behind these trials (those one being indeed show trials, unlike the trials faced by non-celebrities) was to satisfy the radical's demands for harsh punitive measures while also eliminating old enemies, or simply people whose death doesn't cost much to the Convention. They were, to put it bluntly, feeding the popular movement with heads they could afford to chop.
"Robespierre had saved the Revolution through Terror."
Wrong on both accounts. The revolutionary government as a whole managed to save the French republic from collapsing, Robespierre again wasn't alone in the government, nor was he at its head. Just for the anecdote, Furet calculated that the members of the CPS worked between 16 and 18 hours a day. The guys spent gigantic quantities of energy on reorganising the nation's whole war effort for victory. At least, OS somewhat acknowledges that. Still, 45 errors. We arleady adressed the question of Terror.
"Even the french military has got to act together again and pummeled the Allies at the Battle of Fleurus. For Danton and his followers, the time was right to try to normalize the French Republic."
This is probably the most scandalous timeline inaccuracy of te whole videos, since OS presents Danton's demand for clemency as a consequence of the Battle of Fleurus. However, Danton was executed in early April, and Fleurus was won in late June. You see how distorted the chronology is here ? That's seriously an hallucinating inaccuracy, doing ten seconds of actual research would have prevented it. What's even more infuriating is that OS twists the timeline seemingly only because he wants to show Robespierre was a bloodthirsty monster. This passage is one of the worst of the entire videos, OS, tell me, how the hell did you arrived at such a catastrophically inaccurate result ? 46 errors.
So apparently Robespierre alone decided to sent the Dantonists to the guillotine because he wanted the war and the Terror to continue. Robespierre was advocating for a quick end to the war; that's even what led Carnot, fellow member of the CPS partially in charge of the military matters, to actively take part in Thermidor, because Carnot was all for a war of conquest - and plundering I should add. So the war point doesn't stand. I'll repeat it : at this point, peace was not an option, unless France was to surrender to the Coalition. 47 errors. And as we saw, Robespierre was not the almighty dictator OS' seems to think he is : 48 errors.
Now a complex question must be asked. Why were the Dantonists tried (in what was clearly a show trial) and executed ? The popular explanation is that Robespierre was a mad psycho and that he killed them all by sheer sadism or lust for power. An explanation more accurate is the one given by Martin. It is essential to know that before the Indulgents/Dantonists, another group had been elminated : the Exagérés/Hébertistes, who were actually further left than most of the CPS, including Robespierre. These two groups both criticized the government for opposite reasons : the Hébertistes wanted more heads and less churches, and the Dantonists advocated for the abolition of the "exception laws" and the release of all prisoners - while the situation was still dire, because France could not be considered safe from invasion until the victory at Fleurus in late June. Here, it is extremely important to remember that Robespierre was no dictator and that decisions didn't come from him alone. He was indeed in agreement with the rest of the CPS that both groups needed to be eliminated; the most right-wing members of the committee, like Carnot and Barère opposed Hébert's atheism and revolutionary zeal, while the most left-wing, Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois, opposed Danton's penchant for corruption and leniency. It also didn't helped that Danton refused to disscoiate from fis close friend Fabre d'Eglantine, whose reputation had just been badly marred by the East India Company scandal. Robespierre was not the driving force here, and McPhee even argues that he seems to have been "cajoled" into signing Danton and co's arrest wanrrants. So it was decided that both groups would be eliminated one after the other : first the Hébertistes, and then to reassure the sans-culottes who loved Hébert and might feel betrayed, the Dantonist soon followed. It's as simple as that : the CPS wanted to eliminate two potential rival (or even insurrection callers) from both sides of the political spectrum in order to maintain a central position and please everyone - because again, the government aimed at forming a "Sacred Union" avant la lettre. In this regard, the elimination of the Dantonists can be compared to the Bonnet Rouge trial : in 1918, Clémenceau had a bunch of journalist and politicians advocating for a compromise with Germany arrested, tried and condemned, for the sake of maintaining a "Sacred Union" that would be hell-bent on winning no matter what. The Great War with Indy Neidell had some episodes about that trial.
"Robespierre went "a bit mental"."
Classic old song about Robespierre being a bloodthirsty and almighty psychopath. It's still egregiously wrong, but OS' is still clinging to it, probably because it was more difficult to do actual research than to produce dumb memes. I have already said it, and anybody who has the patience and the willingness to read a good biography of Robespierre, such as Hervé Leuwers' or Peter McPhee's : Robespierre was neither a bloodthirsty psycho nor an almighty tyrant. 49 errors. But what about the Cult of the Suprem Being ? Clearly that was Robespierre creating a crazy cult because he was a megalomaniac madman ! Well, not really. First let's remember one thing : deism, Robespierre's spiritual belief, was vastly widespread in the 18th century. Several american Founding Fathers, such as Jefferson and Thomas Paine (and possibly Washington), as well as several philosophers of the Enlightenment era such as Voltaire and Diderot were deist. To sum it up very briefly, it means believing in a super-human entity from which the universe is originated, but all the dogma and rites of Christianity are swept aside (that's really an oversimplification though). There was no darwinist theory of Evolution, no Plate Tectonics theory, no Big Bang Theory (no, not the series !). So being deist made sense, and it was not Robespierre's personal sect. Now what about the festival ? First, Robespierre presided it... because he was President of the Convention at this moment. That doesn't give him any special powers, and besides the presidency of the Convention changed every three or two weeks. He sure pushed for the thing, but the initiative came from the Committe of public instruction, not from him, and it was NOT, as OS' ridiculously portrays, a cult to Robespierre. This passage is one of the most blatantly and wholly inaccuracte passage of the videos, and yet there is some serious competition, as I think now is pretty clear since we're already at 50 errors !
What exactly was this cult ? It was three things :
- a new civic form of spiritualism that didn't include any rite or clergy, so it was NOT a religion; its goal was to make principles of equality, liberty and fraternity truly sacred.
- an appeal to the still catholic peasantry who can see in this "catholicism with extra steps" and forgive the Republic about the harsh treatment of the refractory clergy.
- a pretext to organize great national festivities to unite the people of France as they had been united by the Fête de la Fédération organized by the Constitutional monarchy on July 14st 1790. What's that ? Ah, yes, OS didn't even mention it back then, even though it was a crucial moment in the history of the French Revolution. 51 Errors.
Then comes Thermidor. This post is getting too long by now, so let's make it quick (or as quick as possible) : as insanely frustrating as it is to admit it, OS' account of Thermidor isn't inaccurate. It's thoroughly lacking, but the channel is called Oversimplified after all. He however really misses what happens after Thermidor. Because Thermidor was not the revenge of the moderates against the extremists : it was mainly a new internal purge inside the Montagne, the left side of the Convention. Not like Danton's and Hébert's elimination, but similar to that of the Girondins : a vague group, the robespierrists, who is partially (only partially, through Robespierre and his allies) in charge of the government, and who is suddenly - and violently (in the 48 following Robespierre's death, more than a hundred people were sent to the guillotine, which is the deadliest moment of the whole period, and it happens AFTER Robespierre's death, so OS' grandiloquent sentence about Robespierre being "the last victim of the moustrous system of Terror he had created" is pure nonsense : 52 errors) by a loose coalition that will soon break away. Indeed, "a more moderate group called the Thermidorian took over the Convention", but it actually took them a few weeks; Billaud-Varenne and Collot d'Herbois, the most radical members of the CPS, will not be forced to resign before early September, a full month after Robespierre died. To sum it up very basically, Thermidor was an internal purge within the Montagne, which left it too weakened to face the increasingly powerful centre-right, especially as the danger of invasion seemed to fade away. Some montagnards will switch sides, such as Fouché and Barras, and other stayed true to their conviction : they were slowly but steadily eliminated between Thermidor and the creation of the Directory. That's why more than a year passes between Thermidor and the Directory. It was not a sudden turning point.
To add insult to injury, this period saw an gigantic black legend appear, as everyone now charged Robespierre (who couldn't defend hismelf anymore) with every crime he could think of to make evryone forget their own crimes. Vadier, president of the Committee of General Security, even had a false seal with a fleur-de-lys fabricated and hidden in Robespierre's room so that Robespierre could be accused of wanting to marry Louis XVI's daughter to become King, as ludicrous as it sounds. Sadly, this black legend is still the popular conception of Robespierre. I'm not saying he was a saint, but damn, posterity has really been unfair with him, more than with anyone else I can think of, and this kind of video is exactly what allows this black legend - this complete myth of a bloodthirsty pyscho dictator that doesn't hold any ground - to still thrive. 52 errors.
"[The Directory had] the purpose of preventing power from falling into the hands of a single individual - again."
For the last time, Robespierre has never been a dictator. I think I made it pretty clear. 55 errors. What actually prompted the thermidorian to adopt such a "careful" constitution was more the fear of seeing monarchy restored through legal means, as royalist were rapidly gaining ground via elections; they won the legislative elections of 1797 and almost restored monarchy. Having five Directors sharing the executive power meant that several sincerely republican directors could nip in the bud any such attempt to restore the monarchy. That's what happened in 1797, during the coup of Fructidor, which led to entire elections being cancelled because people had not voted correctly - which of course spurred a wave of disgust for the Republic in France, understandably so. Ironically, the thermidorian legend succeeded way beyond the thermidorians' expectations, as it ended up tainting the image of the Republic as a whole, which also resulted a decline in republicanism.
[Talking about the crushing of the royalist insurrection of Vendémiaire] "From this moment on, the people of Paris would never again be able to stage a popular uprising and lost their control over the Revolution."
OverSimplified...? Are you even conscious of what is written in your script ? *"*Never again be able to stage a popular uprising" ? Ever heard of the July 1830 and 1848 Revolutions, of the Paris Commune, and all ? Okay, okay, he's only talking of the French Revolution, and it is true that there was no longer any major insurrection in Paris after that, but then, choose the right words, because "never again" means "never again", not "for the next 35 years".
There is then a whole passage about custom relaxing, and it's true that old religiosity lost some of its grip on everyday life. Suicide and divorce for example became more and more common despite being of course completely condemned by the Church. I guess that "It was social anarchy" is some weird and exaggerated way of seeing things, but frankly, after all the avalanche of nonsense that was the previous part, I'm inclined to be lenient towards that.
Surprisingly enough, OS then goes on to describe pretty accurately the last years of the Directory, even though it is of course hugely simplified - at least it's not the sheer inaccuracy we saw earlier.
However, OverSimplified eventually claims to take stock of the French Revoluion as a whole, and boy, this is the grande finale :
"The French Revolution ! Born with great promises of liberty and equality. The commone people dared to challenge an oppressive system that had existed for centuries."
For now, all seems alright.
"Before they knew it, they found liberty sidelined by Terror, equality that possibly didn't hit the mark, and an absolute monarchy replaced with an absolute dictator."
It's tiring by now. We get it, it was violent. But I repeat it : it was NOT exceptionally violent. And what it achieves surpasses what it costed. For all the talks about the revolutionaries being sadistic and bloodthirsty monsters, the guys actually had sane and human programs : the revolutionary government, along with the representatives in mission, even some of the most criminal ones, redistributed the lands of the expelled and executed, sometimes even freely and to the poorest like with Saint-Just's decrees of Ventôse 13th, created taxes directed at the richest ones, rebuilt and reinvigorated the army, not only saving France from invasion but also laying the foundations of Napoléon's Grande Armée, they began implementing free public school as much as they could given the circumstances, before the Directory decided to focus on education for the wealthiest classes, they made the food crisis less severe, they abolished slavery and proclaimed full equality of rights for all citizens, no matter their skin color, on February 4th 1794; the Republic saw France's first elections being held with universal male suffrage, the constitutional monarchy having only accepted census suffrage. While on August 4th 1789 the Constituant assembly had agreed to authorize the peasantry to pay their nobles to get rid of the old feudal dues, in August 1793 the revolutionary government abolished feudalism altogether, without condition. Now of course, not all of this was implemented efficiently : the abolition of slavery for example was impossible to force upon french islands in the Indian ocean who were out of reach, and these measures were often accompanied by a brutal repression. I'm not denying the violence. I'm trying to explain it rather than just patronizingly judge it as the result of dirty savages being bloodthirsty. I'm sick of seeing videos like this that paint the Revolution as little more than a giant bloodbath. It's both egregiously simplistic and reductive, and an inuslt to the generations of historians who worked and are still working to truly understand this incredibly complex event. If you zoom back and include the "respectable" part of the Revolution, going from 1789 to 1792, it is also the final abolition of the three orders and their inequalities, the birth of nationalism, the creation of a modern administration, and in general the creation of a modern France. If the French Revolution is generally considered to be the starting point of a new era, it's not without reasons. 53 errors.
"He (Napoléon) restored the Catholic Church"
For the last time : no, the French Revolution has never abolished the Church. Napoléon didn't "restore" anything, he just gave a new regime for the Church, in the Concordat of 1801. 54 errors.
"and got rid of that crazy calendar."
Laugh all you want a this "crazy calendar"; for many people it had a true sense, and this patronizing attitude does you no credit at all, OS. 55 errors.
And then we have a cliffhanger.
In my final assessment about Oversimplified's videos about the French Revolution, I must conclude that they're neither funny, nor instructive. They manage to be completely wrong on almost every single thing or person they talk about, while indulging in a generally conter-productive, moralizing and patronizing narrative, that doesn't do anything else than strengthening an outdated, ridiculous and completely erroneous vision of the French Revolution. I don't know if it's laziness, ignorance, or even dishonesty, or the three combined that led OverSimplified to produce such bad videos, but what I'm sure of is that with them, he well earned the nickname of OverFalsified. And since, according to seemingly everyone on this sub, his other videos are good, I beg OverSimplified's team to do something, anything to repair the damages, even a simple tweet would be welcome : the first part has 19M views, the second one has 14M. Looking at the comments and like/dislike ratio, one has to admit that what is being told in this videos is blindly believed by a majority. Take a little walk at HistoryMemes and search "French Revolution", "Terror" or "Robespierre": you'll see that this insultingly simplistic take on the French Revolution, that of a mere bloodbath led by a megalomaniac psychopath, is broadly accepted. And this is discouraging to say the least. Thanks, OverSimplified.
And thank you for reading this huge wall of text, I didn't think it would be that long.
Sources :
Nouvelle Histoire de la Révolution Française, Jean-Clément Martin, 2019
La Terreur : Vérités et Légendes, Jean-Clément Martin, 2017
Le Dictionnaire des Révolutionnaires français, Pierre Brasme, 2014
Robespierre, Hervé Leuwers, 2014
Les Sans-Culottes parisiens en l'an II, Albert Soboul, 1958
¹: La Terreur : Vérités et Légendes, p. 23
²: La Terreur : Vérités et Légendes, p. 27

 
Four years ago, I wrote a comment defending the SCMP as a reliable news source on China-related matters:

However, I won't deny that there are sometimes clear signs of editorial decisions being influenced by the establishment, like the lawyer's "confession", and that there might be a slow and insidious ideological creep towards the CCP party line, but because of the core audience of the paper, which consists of expats and relatively well-educated, mostly western-minded readers, they can't be quick or overt, or they risk losing their prestige and readership.
This is why I think the SCMP's in a sweet spot right now, where it offers coverage and opinions from both sides of the ideological divide, and from both halves of the geopolitical world. Whether the paper will continue to stay in this sweet spot is something I can only guess at, but it seems to me as though there are few incentives for it to move out of its current general position within the next few years.

I again defended the paper two years later, then quoted my initial comment in defense of the paper nine months ago, saying that the part about it being in a "sweet spot" still stood.
 
Today, I'm here to say that the SCMP has moved out of the "sweet spot" and will provide arguments and evidence supporting this claim. Some might say that I'm making a mountain out of a molehill, or that I'm stating the obvious, but I feel it's important to update this piece of information to reflect reality, so on top of educating would-be readers of the paper, this is also a post for my conscience and integrity.
 
Some of you might be thinking, "Who is this person and why should we care?"
 
I made a ton of posts on /geopolitics from March to June of last year, along with high-effort submission statements, to spread awareness of China's role and behaviour in the ongoing pandemic--mostly to do my part in countering disinformation. The vast majority of these posts were based on SCMP reports, which I continued to feel at the time were reliable (and because negative news pieces on China are far more credible and convincing when they come from a reputable paper owned by a Chinese company than, say, Fox News). I might have posted more SCMP articles on the subreddit than all other users combined, possibly increasing its exposure and perception as being reliable and impartial.
 
I began observing anomalies around April. It is very likely during that this time that authorities had felt the paper crossed a line with its unfavorable articles regarding China's role in starting the pandemic, its subsequent behaviour, and its outlook, and began subtly clamping down. It was also around that time that I started reading RTHK (a public outlet also based in the city) and other sources to diversify my intake, but also to compare their coverages and find discrepancies.
 
What first caught my attention occured in a series that explored "the global backlash that China may face as a result of its actions and rhetoric during the coronavirus pandemic", which I posted to the /geopolitics (links in this comment). At the time, I wrote:

I noticed how this series started off as something that would be both highly prominent and regularly featured under the SCMP 'Spotlight' section, and this is evident in the articles--the blazing-hot topic, the feature length, the deeper research, the commissioned artwork, etc. As the series progressed, its later pieces were published with basically no fanfare--not only were latter pieces published in an extremely rushed manner (Dates of publication: April 24, 28, 28, 28 ,29), the third one --which is about China's role in the global economy yet only had CCP members and nationalists as its sources and interviewees-- was 'spotlighted' (and still visible on the scmp.com front page at the time of writing) while the second, fourth, and fifth --which were far less China-friendly-- were basically buried at birth or immediately overshadowed.

Though this was redacted due to various issues, further observation showed this to be true. I didn't bother redacting my redaction as the post was already old.
 
In July, the CCP imposed the National Security Legislation on the city where the paper is based. Though this alone doesn't make the paper unreliable, the legislation includes provisions on media outlets. The intent to rein in the media is clear--examples have been made, are still being made, and will in all likelihood continue to be made, so editorial independence is jepoardized through external and internal means (self-censorship). The government has also publicly confronted Jack Ma (founder of SCMP's parent company Alibaba) with Xi personally approving the move, which will likely translate into greater oversight over the paper. On top of all of this is increased pressure to push nationalism, which means this greater oversight will likely be exercised. In short: the bigger picture portrays a paper destined to push the party's narrative--though in a softer and more refined manner than outlets like Global Times.
 
There are other clear warning signs in the coverage. For instance:
 

• A substantial and consequential contradiction between official police statements given at different dates regarding a key moment in the 2019 unrest was noted in an RTHK article but not in relevant articles by the SCMP.
  
• RTHK: Police arrest producer of RTHK Yuen Long programmes
  
• SCMP: Hong Kong protests: anger mounts as police are accused of trying to rewrite white-shirt mob attacks in Yuen Long with arrest of opposition lawmaker
  

 

• A substantiated claim by government labour advisers that the government "intended to create false information" when they claimed that there was a consensus to wait until 2030 to give blue-collar workers the same number of public holidays as office staff was omitted from SCMP's reporting of the issue.
  
• RTHK: 'Govt gave false information in holidays proposal'
  
• SCMP: Raising statutory holidays from 12 to 17 by 2030 the ‘most acceptable’ deal for Hong Kong employees, employers: labour minister
  

 

• Most recently, the paper omitted coverage of the first anniversary of Dr. Li Wenliang's death. On a slow news day, there wasn't a single article on this major event (at the time of writing). Instead, Dr. Li was briefly mentioned in a routine coronavirus update while an SCMP editorial published on that day stressed global failings and said that there shouldn't be politicization of the pandemic.
  
• This is particularly troubling, because as late as December, the outlet still found it appropriate to publish articles like, 'Remembering Li Wenliang: the Wuhan doctor who warned the world about the coronavirus'. It should be remembered that the CCP had started to take action against Jack Ma (founder of parent company Alibaba) around this period. This change is a major indicator of the direction the SCMP is heading in.
  
• RTHK: Covid whistle blower Dr Li Wenliang remembered
  
• SCMP: Lessons of Covid-19 must be heard to stop the same mistakes
  

 
There are other examples of omission, massaging, and favoritism that becomes evident when reading SCMP alongside RTHK and other outlets, but an exhaustive list of them is not feasible for obvious reasons. Had any of these occured in the opinions section, I wouldn't have thought much, as the opinions section is by definition built on biases--however, the incidents occured in its reporting. Given the general trends and the bigger picture, it's highly unlikely that the paper can genuinely change its direction. This is not to say we should throw out the baby with the bathwater, as the paper does a lot of high-quality and accurate journalism and has stellar infographics, but it should be clear that the paper is no longer as trustworthy as it once was on matters related to China, and that this is virtually guaranteed to worsen over time (pardon the premature title).
 
This article is not an attack on the good folks who work at SCMP--they are victims of their circumstances and are no doubt under serious pressure. I reckon they'd done a good job of sticking to their principles; especially over the past two eventful years--if anything, they should be praised.
 
Also note that this report is not an endorsement of RTHK as a replacement for the SCMP as a source of relatively-neutral news, as the scope of news of the smaller and diversified institution is different from the city's historical 'paper of record', that's backed by a technology giant. More importantly, on top of the imposement of the National Security Legislation, the public station has been under siege by the pro-government camp since the unrest in the city two years ago. Given the power disparity, it, too, will eventually be brought to heel.
 
To borrow a saying from talk-show hosts: "There's a saying in American politics: 'There is nothing in the middle of the road except yellow lines and dead armadillos.'" It seems that news readers are being increasingly forced to choose between extremes, since the middle ground is being increasingly hollowed out. If forced to choose, readers who read to gain knowledge would go with what they see as the lesser of two evils: the one less likely to contain falsehoods. This does not work in China's favor.
 
 
This article is dedicated to Dr. Li Wenliang. May he rest in peace.