Odds and Ends — 16 April 2025

@preparedwombat 77

15 days ago

oddsandends

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, AI, and Debt:

Crypto’s debanking problem persists despite new regulations

OpenAI Plans to Build X-Like Social Platform Amid Ongoing Rift With Musk

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

Research links COVID to poor kidney outcomes in US youth

Politics:

https://twitter.com/MattPolProf/status/1911790203049591009

Immigration Lawyers Received Notices to Self-Deport

Two immigration lawyers in Massachusetts who are U.S. citizens have said they received notices from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security telling them that it’s time to leave the United States.

https://twitter.com/brad_polumbo/status/1912149595380924918

———— Autocracy R Us ————

State Terror

Yesterday the president defied a Supreme Court ruling to return a man who was mistakenly sent to a gulag in another country, celebrated the suffering of this innocent person, and spoke of sending Americans to foreign concentration camps.
This is the beginning of an American policy of state terror, and it has to be identified as such to be stopped.
So let’s begin with language, because language is very important. When the state carries out criminal terror against its own people, it calls them the “criminals” or the the “terrorists.” During the 1930s, this was the normal practice. Looking back, we refer to Stalin’s “Great Terror,” but at the time it was the Stalinists who controlled the language. Today in Berlin stands an important museum called "Topography of Terror"; during the era it documents, it was the Jews and the chosen enemies of the regime who were called "terrorists." Yesterday in the White House, the Salvadoran president showed the way, referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia as a "terrorist" without any basis whatsoever. The Americans treated him as a criminal, even though he was charged with no crime.
The first part of controlling the language is inverting the meaning: whatever the government does is good, because by definition the its victims are the "criminals" and the "terrorists." The second part is deterring the press, or anyone else, from challenging the perversion by associating anyone who objects with crime and terror. This was the role Stephen Miller played when he said yesterday in the White House that reporters "want foreign terrorists in the country who kidnap women and children."
The control of language is necessary to undermine a legal or constitutional order…
Trump spoke of asking Attorney General Pam Bondi to find legal ways to abduct Americans and leave them in foreign concentration camps. But by "legal" what is meant are ways of escaping law, not applying it.

https://twitter.com/leftcoastbabe/status/1912010201693348047

A Test of the Rule of Law Is Coming

Yesterday in the Oval Office, Miller and Trump were forced to insouciantly pretend that the Supreme Court hadn’t ruled against them. What comes next, should the court “clarify” its position? Don’t be surprised to see the Trump administration drop the pretense and deny the validity of the Supreme Court’s rulings altogether.
Donald Trump added a portrait of President Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office — an addition reputedly encouraged by none other than Stephen Miller. The reason suggests itself ominously enough in the current context. Jackson is famous for many things, but none more relevant now than his reaction to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Worcester v. Georgia (1832): ‘John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it.’
A test of the rule of law is coming. It is not enough to write about this phenomenon with clinical detachment; it must be opposed. If not, I assure you that the spirits unleashed by Trump and Miller, perhaps seemingly innocuous now, will eventually consume us all. I’m not here to persuade you. I’m here to warn you.

https://twitter.com/FPWellman/status/1911846399748059379

https://twitter.com/marlene4719/status/1911916188067672240

‘You Are Here’

If there were a map that showed democracy slipping into dictatorship, we would be at the spot marked ‘You are here.’
We shouldn’t sugarcoat the danger. Due process matters to immigrants and Americans alike. When the presidency refuses to honor it, we are all in danger.

https://twitter.com/TristanSnell/status/1911983490909851969

‘This Is Not Incarceration’

Do you believe that anyone from America who goes into CECOT will ever come out?
I do not. This is not incarceration; it is liquidation.
Incarceration is a penal act. It is controlled by laws. There are well-understood mechanisms governing the length of terms, applications for parole, processes for release.
Liquidation is a political act. It is arbitrary, opaque, and unappealable. There are no controlling laws or processes. There is only power.
This is why Donald Trump cannot allow Kilmar Abrego Garcia to return to the United States. And it is why the democratic opposition must go to the mattresses to bring him home.

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1912201695037190191

https://twitter.com/camiloreports/status/1912232309237096589

Will the Supreme Court Stop Donald Trump?

In the interplay between the courts and the executive branch, judges apply what is known as the ‘presumption of regularity.’ Courts generally proceed on the assumption that government officials have acted properly. ‘The presumption of regularity supports the official acts of public officers, and, in the absence of clear evidence to the contrary, courts presume that they have properly discharged their official duties,’ the Court ruled in a 1926 case.
But the presumption of regularity is not an imperative of ignorance or a rule mandating that judges be ostriches. The Trump Administration has, repeatedly and flagrantly, squandered its entitlement to the presumption. It has dismissed lower-court judges as pesky underlings whose orders can be disregarded. Now, with its escalating defiance in the case of Abrego Garcia, it is treating instructions from the Justices themselves with similar disrespect. The country is about to see whether the judiciary will insure that it suffers consequences.

https://twitter.com/ReichlinMelnick/status/1911821888709447927

Trump II Hits A New All-Time Low In Oval Office Debacle

We’re five days and counting into the executive branch engaging in ongoing contemptuous behavior toward the judicial branch by refusing to abide by a district court order backed by the Supreme Court. The Trump administration’s conduct has been on brand: egregious, contemptible, and brazen. It has refused to comply with deadlines; rebuffed the judge’s repeated demands for information; shifted its arguments and positions in an attempt to re-litigate already-decided matters; and sent DOJ lawyers into court to absorb judicial fire unarmed with facts or legitimate legal arguments.

https://twitter.com/KyleKulinski/status/1912230420147732543

Line Crossed

Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote in How Democracies Die that there is no single moment when a country obviously “crosses the line” into dictatorship and that “nothing may set off society’s alarm bells.”
In fact, they wrote: “Those who denounce government abuse may be dismissed as exaggerating or crying wolf. Democracy’s erosion is, for many, almost imperceptible.”

https://twitter.com/VautismSpeaks/status/1911841337986715783

https://twitter.com/JamesTate121/status/1911864114424459329

———— Smoot-Hawley 2.0 ————

The perils of Trump's chips strategy: the US will struggle to take on Asia

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1912191842579370409

The White House pressed for fast negotiations with its shock and awe tariffs. Now it can’t drum up enough interest from a ‘first mover’

https://twitter.com/JamesTate121/status/1912130590205235498

Why would Country X agree to this? Given Trump’s fickle and erratic nature, they’d have no reason to trust that any agreement wouldn’t be abrogated on a whim: U.S. Plans to Use Tariff Negotiations to Isolate China

The Trump administration plans to use ongoing tariff negotiations to pressure U.S. trading partners to limit their dealings with China, according to people with knowledge of the conversations.
The idea is to extract commitments from U.S. trading partners to isolate China’s economy in exchange for reductions in trade and tariff barriers imposed by the White House. U.S. officials plan to use negotiations with more than 70 nations to ask them to disallow China to ship goods through their countries, prevent Chinese firms from locating in their territories to avoid U.S. tariffs, and not absorb China’s cheap industrial goods into their economies.

Once upon a time (and not even that long ago), blatant conflicts of interest, especially involving foreign entities, were something presidents sought to avoid. No previous inhabitant of the White House would have wanted to be seen doing personal business with companies from countries that seek to influence American foreign policy. Such dealings risk violating the Constitution, which prohibits government officials from accepting ‘gifts, titles or emoluments from foreign governments.’
But during Trump’s first term, the court system largely blew off his commercial entanglements. Now he not only does business with foreign as well as domestic companies that have a direct interest in his policies, he advertises and celebrates them. We know the identities of the golf-tournament sponsors not because investigative journalists burrowed deep into secret contracts, but because they appear on official websites and were displayed on a billboard, observed by The New York Times, at his golf course.

Countdown to April 20: Americans brace for Trump’s big decision

What Americans should do if the president invokes the Insurrection Act

Ro Khanna Compares J.D. Vance to Stalin

Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) unleashed an early 2028 attack on Vice President J.D. Vance Tuesday, attempting to frame President Trump’s heir apparent as a threat to the Constitution while comparing him to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Said Khanna, at Yale Law School: “Vance has not only declared war on the courts, but on the universities. And it is no accident. As Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Stalin, strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university.”