Good morning. Hello. How are you? #583
I'm not gonna say Razzlekhan is innocent, but... I kinda think she's innocent?
Good morning, hello, how are you? Did you see that thrilling mixed doubles curling championship game? Man, that was just great. Also kinda shocked on the game for the bronze, really thought England had that one in the bag, Sweden had whiffed it so hard in their previous game against Italy. I’m excited there’s so much more curling to come, though it’s hard for me to imagine the men’s or women’s curling (seriously, someone let me know if Olympic events are supposed to be capitalized or not) can possibly be more exciting than the mixed doubles. Mixed doubles anything is kind of the best. Mixed doubles bricklaying. Mixed doubles accounting. I’m for it.
Except skating. Boring.
Also I would like to state for the record that the Super Pipe is bullshit. It is too big, they can’t get good camera angles in it, it makes the rider look small and all the stunts boring and that pipe should be smaller and it is absurd, completely absurd, that the Super Pipe is so big and expensive there are only like five of them on the planet. Just make a smaller half-pipe for god’s sake. Come on.
So I spent three hours last night watching every single video on Razzlekhan’s YouTube Channel. Razzlekhan is, of course, the alter ego of one Heather R Morgan, no relation to our esteemed artist friend Heather Morgan. Heather R Morgan aka Razzlekhan, along with her husband (fiance?), the much more boring Ilya Lichtenstein, are accused by the feds of, well, not exactly accused of being behind the 2016 hack of a hundred-some thousand bitcoins, that is now worth jut over $4 billion. No, the Feds didn’t accuse them of the hack, but the Feds did accuse them of acting like they were behind it, being in control of all of the stolen proceeds and trying to money launder it.
It’s actually a pretty interesting complaint, and it raises some interesting questions. Like: “okay, so the Feds got control of the stolen bitcoin because Ilya left the password, like a dummy, on a cloud storage service. Except his password doc was encrypted (it reads like he was using 1Password or something but doesn’t say so) and the feds just say they magically decrypted it, hand-wave, never mind how, never mind that the Feds can magically decrypt things, which decryption algorithm did you say that was again?” Everyone is mocking Ilya for putting the passwords on a cloud storage system which was, yeah, dumb, but significantly less dumb if you realize he had the file encrypted and probably assumed that, you know, encryption was… safe?
It also raises the question of: “okay, so did they do the actual hack or not?” Because the Feds don’t actually say that. But also, now that I have watched all 50 or so of Razzlekahn’s YouTube videos, I have trouble believing it. I can’t say this is a rational feeling. It is hard to explain. The videos are all over the place: there are several batshit, and just bad, hip hop videos.
OH SHIT. STOP THE PRESSES.
I just went back to start linking to videos as I was writing that paragraph, and THEY ARE ALL GONE. WTF. THAT IS SO SAD. All that’s left is one relatively boring — but also kind of telling in a way — inspirational video about being your best self, and a livestream from the BLM protests. Looks like a few people have saved some of her other videos, here is her “Versace Bedouin” video, which is kind of one of her two Razzlekhan mission statements, along with being the “Turkish Martha Stewart.”
But really, the whole channel was magical, it was a gem. And while maybe it was understandable to take it down (though who took it down? Isn’t she in custody?), since people are so mercilously, relentlessly mocking her hip hop videos this week, I think maybe it was an unwise move.
Because after watching every video, I am sort of convinced she’s innocent. Again, it is hard to explain why, without watching them all. I think it has something to do with them being so bad on many levels: technically, artistically. But they feel so real, so personal, so much the creative output of a genuine person, it is almost completely impossible for me to watch these and believe that the person making this output is simultaneously holding back a deep, deep secret. That she could dissemble so expertly while making such inexpert art is a contradiction my subconscious refuses to believe. She bedazzled her elliptical, for god sakes. I am so sad I did not take a picture of the Bedazzled elliptical. It looked good!
There are tons of videos about upcycling found, free, and thrift store items. There are a bunch of super amateur healthfood cooking videos. She says she has synethesia. She says she was one of the first 100 people to get MERS. She speaks Japanese and Korean and Russian. She grew up in a small town in California and had what appears to be a shitty upbringing. The principal of her school sounds like a dick. One of you enterprising reporters jockeying for writing the definitive profile and, hence, the film rights — go interview that principal right now. At the beginning of the pandemic, after filming a fantastic (I am using the word losely here) #metoo inspired hip hop video in an Arizona (?) airplane graveyard, she went back to Northern Cali for a while to take care of her grandmother. She’s lived in Egypt, Turkey, “the Middle East,” Japan, New York, SF. She brings unbridled amateur enthusiasm to everything. She clearly has a personal style that is dorky and hopelessly uncool but she leans into it, she doesn’t shy away from it, she doesn’t let society tell her to tone it down, even though it is bad. I kind of love it. And after writing that paragraph, I realize that about 80% of what I just said, one could read it and go “yep, checks out.” And it could easily read as supporting evidence for her definitely being guilty. And I am no expert at what an expert hacker behind a four billion dollar crypto hack looks like, but I’d put… eh, up to $50 down on a bet that this ain’t it.
Also, Razzlekhan, if you’re out there reading this from jail: You should totally flip on your husband.
I’m not quite ready to spin up the Free Razzlekhan movement, but I would click a like button on a page. I can’t help it. She just seems innocent. Also the Feds didn’t actually accuse them of the hack, just of money laundering, and most of it they were pinning on Ilya. At one point, she is trying to open a crypto account and the “bank” is doing its KYC (know your customer) checks required by the feds, and she explains the bitcoins as coming from her boyfriend, who gifted them to her years ago. And, yeah, in another episode she sets up a shell company to pay herself some bitcoin and it is very very obviously bad and illegal. I wouldn’t be shocked if she knew, but I suspect the “my boyfriend gifted these to me,” is broadly true. That she knew he had some ill gotten gains, somehow. I have trouble believing she knew it was in the billions. And I know she was a “tech CEO,” went through a prestigious incubator (I can’t find her Facebook page, but Ilya and I have a few mutual friends on Facebook, all in the NY VC scene), and she claimed in her Forbes writer profile (another brilliant aspect to this) that she focused on anti-hacking and cybercrime. LIke yeah, I know all that looks suss, but I still bet she is at least partially innocent. It is a hunch.
And I am so sad you can’t watch all of her YouTube videos now, so I will be alone in this hunch. But I bet if you watched them all, you’d agree with me.
The one where she buys a bunch of Turkish fabrics on Etsy and her and her friend Cornell (WHO IS CORNELL? Also, Cornell is hot) go through them on YouTube? Just too genuine.
I will leave you with something semi-serious. Please consider donating to the Democractic Association of Secretaries of State. Republicans are outraising Democrats 3:1 at the Secretary of State level, and these are the people who are protecting our election integrity at the state level. Winning these races is crucial to the Republican plan to sow election chaos. It’s one donation that can go directly to fighting against this.
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/dass
ActBlue should really make a cool little widget for placing in Newsletters. Substack should then parse ActBlue links like they do for YouTube n shit. Is that thing open? Or does Substack have to choose you’re worthy of auto link expansion? Hrm. Will investigate. But I digress. Donate! Please!
Okay let’s do a mix. SAD MIX. Well. “Moody and Quiet.” Please bring on the Anaïs Mitchell discourse, not only because her new album is great (thank you, Conrad, for alerting me to her last year), but because my autocorrect of adding an umlaut to Anaïs to make Anaïs hasn’t gotten this much use in years.
Have a good Wednesday. Don’t go stealing $4 billion in Bitcoin today. Bedazzle your elliptical instead. Choose the healthier path.