...In October, federal agents arrested Cody Holmes, the 31-year-old former CFO of Shangri-La Industries, a downtown Los Angeles-based developer who was supposed to be providing housing for homeless people in Southern California. First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli for the Central District of California, a Trump appointee, charged him with mail fraud.

[b]Holmes, who pleaded not guilty, is accused of embezzling more than $2 million in taxpayer funds slated for homeless housing construction to host extravagant parties; a $46,000-per-month Beverly Hills mansion; private jet travel; leases of exotic cars; high-end handbags totaling $128,000; a $35,000 diamond watch; and 20 VIP passes for the 2023 Coachella Music and Arts Festival.

Meanwhile, Shangri-La Industries executives showered Newsom and Los Angeles County Democrats with political donations as they were applying for some $100 million in state contracts that the CFO later allegedly looted to fund his and his ex-girlfriend’s lavish lifestyle.

Even after federal prosecutors exposed the massive fraud, Newsom and L.A. Democrats haven’t severed ties with the embattled developer and have kept political donations from the firm’s executives. Newsom has also allowed the construction firm to continue to tout his endorsement on its social media....

Holmes allegedly defrauded the California Department of Housing and Community Development by submitting fabricated bank accounts in its applications for state contracts to build homeless housing. Acting on behalf of Shangri-La, Holmes allegedly falsified $160 million in assets controlled by Shangri-La and its affiliates to demonstrate that the firm had liquid funds to contribute to the construction projects, according to court documents....

Illegal checkpoints on public streets have a long history in Marxist and anarchist tradition.

They symbolize organized self-defense against "oppressors," an empowerment of "the people" to seize urban space to confront the class enemy.

When organized as barricades to block passage, they become instruments of insurrection, dating back to the 1848 revolutions of Europe and the 1871 Paris Commune

Marxists treat barricades as symbols of transition from civil protest to armed struggle.

Barricades mark the point when Marxists stop appealing to constitutional authority, and build structures for alternative power.

For anarchists, the barricade represents "direct action" and "horizontal self-organization" - the building of defenses without formal hierarchies or central leaders.

Anarchists view barricades as a reclaimed public space. Checkpoints and barricades turn the streets from channels of commerce and state control into zones of collective autonomy and mutual aid during insurrections or insurgencies.

Image: Antifa's Capitol Hill Occupied Protest checkpoint, Seattle, 2020

Early Davos impressions. Will need to process, consolidate into an article.

- There’s kind of a distributed consciousness at play here. Almost nobody I talked to knows what the AI stuff is about, in concrete details. They just have vibes. And yet they dropped almost all of the infamous climate justice and most of the DEI sloganeering for AI.

- In my research, when there’s a shift going on and nobody can name it, it usually means an underlying second order crisis … not as simplistic as “we want to control you all with AI”

- Everything is a vibe. They vibe off each other in feel-good slogans. I don’t know if this is the normal, or if this is a “transition” year because they don’t know what to do with AI… earthshaking concrete changes have come from WEF before, like the very real ESG metrics that Schwab put out.

- The shift could also be due to the new leadership

- This is a rich person’s paradise and we were the poorest there. It costs $25,000 a night to stay in Davos. @LarryTaunton
taught me tricks to avoid that.

- If advertisements are anything to go by, the “Big Four” accounting companies are the most powerful companies on Earth, period. (Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG)

- There’s a strange sense of desperation at losing the narrative here.