Odds and Ends — 20 April 2025

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

Feds Mistakenly Order Estonian HashFlare Fraudsters to Self-Deport Ahead of Sentencing

Bitcoin up 33% since 2024 halving as institutions disrupt cycle

Canary Capital Seeks SEC Approval for Tron ETF With Staking

Why would any sane person invest in anything related to Justin Sun?

Coronavirus and Public Health:

Scientists Discover Drug That Could Finally End Long COVID Suffering

CDC’s top laboratory on sexually transmitted diseases is shut by Trump administration

‘We are blind,’ researcher says, noting the lab is crucial to tracking drug-resistant gonorrhea and other diseases

Politics:

Pope Snubs J.D. Vance

Pope Francis skipped the Vatican’s official meeting with Vice President J.D. Vance Saturday, instead having his No. 2 give the vice president a lecture on compassion.
A statement from the Vatican said there was “an exchange of opinions on the international situation, especially regarding countries affected by war, political tensions and difficult humanitarian situations, with particular attention to migrants, refugees, and prisoners.

Obsessed With Elite Institutions They Want to Destroy

One of the more peculiar positions of the American right is its simultaneous obsession with and hostility to education, and particularly with elite educational institutions. Donald Trump has picked fights with Ivy League schools and talks about them as woke hellscapes; he’s also exceptionally proud that he has a degree from one, and judges others’ intelligence by which schools they attended.
Conservative culture warriors want to take over elite universities because those universities have such cachet, even though in taking them over, conservatives would kill exactly what has made those institutions desirable and admirable: their dedication to rigor and excellence.

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1913753994679234888

https://twitter.com/shannonrwatts/status/1913950103435465162

———— Autocracy R Us ————

The Supreme Court's Late-Night Alien Enemy Act Intervention

First, the full Court didn’t wait for the Fifth Circuit—or act through the individual Circuit Justice (Justice Alito). Even in other fast-moving emergency applications, the Court has often made a show out of at least appearing to wait for the lower courts to rule before intervening—even if that ruling might not have influenced the outcome. Here, though, the Court didn’t wait at all; indeed, the order specifically invites the government to respond once the Fifth Circuit weighed in—acknowledging that the Fifth Circuit hadn’t ruled (and, indeed, that the government hadn’t responded to the application in the Supreme Court) yet. This may seem like a technical point, but it underscores how seriously the Court, or at least a majority of it, took the urgency of the matter…
Second, the Court didn’t hide behind any procedural technicalities…. Here, though, the Court jumped right to the substantive relief the applicants sought—again, reinforcing not just the urgency of the issue, but its gravity.
Third, and perhaps most significantly, the Court seemed to not be content with relying upon representations by the government’s lawyers.

After remarkable Supreme Court rebuke, Trump administration slams ‘meritless litigation’

MAGA Goes Into Full Meltdown Over SCOTUS Ruling on Deportations

https://twitter.com/RachelBitecofer/status/1913364393460633678

Trump Seeks to Shift the Focus Away from Rule of Law

In the unlikely yet profound showdown between the president and the migrant that has captured international attention, the courts have uniformly determined that one of them recently violated the law. And it wasn’t the migrant.
According to liberal and conservative judges all the way up to the Supreme Court, President Trump’s administration broke the rules by deporting Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and must try to fix the mistake. But Mr. Trump and his team are trying to rewrite the narrative so that it is a dispute about illegal immigration rather than the rule of law.
It is a fight that Mr. Trump seems to welcome. His administration could easily have avoided it by simply bringing Mr. Abrego Garcia back from El Salvador and following a process that might have resulted in him being deported anyway. Instead, Mr. Trump opted to double down, defying the courts and reverse-engineering a justification for a deportation that his administration initially acknowledged was wrong.

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1913614771846361517

“The death of human empathy is one of the earliest and most telling signs of a culture about to fall into barbarism.” — Hannah Arendt

———— Smoot-Hawley 2.0 ————

Inside Trump’s Tariff Brain

Stop trying to predict and appraise President Trump’s tariffs policies based on economic theories or market realities. Tariffs are pure psychology for the president, fused into his brain like no other topic.
Trump’s tariff brain is unpredictable to the outside (and to market analysts) but wholly knowable to those who know how his mind works.
Said one adviser: “There’ll be trial and error. There’ll be pushing the envelope. There’ll be all of that Trumpian stuff.”

https://twitter.com/KrangTNelson/status/1913636820618723425

MAGA base thinks Trump’s trade war will bring ‘pot of gold.’ But they’re only willing to wait for so long.

———— Putin&Krasnov vs. Ukraine ————

https://twitter.com/kvistp/status/1913349295094243575

https://twitter.com/EdKrassen/status/1913720808498671956

https://twitter.com/hitchrogers/status/1913682194041540692

———— Mors Imperii ————

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1913411086143074374

https://twitter.com/RepJackKimble/status/1913459848156438932

Health Insurance for Millions on the Chopping Block

The likelihood of Donald Trump and his allies in Congress taking Medicaid away from millions of low-income Americans—and, in the process, rolling back a huge piece of the Affordable Care Act—has increased significantly in the last two weeks.
The change has been easy to miss, because so many other stories are dominating the news—and because the main evidence is a subtle shift in Republican rhetoric.
But that shift has been crystal clear if you follow the ins and outs of health care policy—and if you were listening closely to House Speaker Mike Johnson a week ago, when he appeared on Fox News.

Losing International Students Could Devastate Colleges

For years, American colleges and universities have attracted growing numbers of international students who often pay full tuition, effectively subsidizing domestic students.
But the Trump administration’s recent move to deport hundreds of students here on visas, and his trade war with China, have stoked fears that the United States is no longer a welcoming place for international students. This week, the administration also asked Harvard to hand over lists of foreign students, adding to a sense of panic on campuses.

https://twitter.com/krassenstein/status/1913395080267788559

Former Trump Staffers Liken Him to a ‘Royal Despot’

A number of prominent Republicans, including several former members of the first Trump administration, have signed an open letter decrying the president for using his power to punish two former administration officials who criticized him, likening his actions to those of a ‘royal despot.’
From the letter: “For a president to personally and publicly direct the levers of the federal government against publicly named citizens for political reasons sets a new and perilous precedent in our republic. No matter one’s party or politics, every American should reject the notion that the awesome power of the presidency can be used to pursue individual vendettas.”

https://twitter.com/barbarismcrit/status/1913561286345925020

Serendipity:

https://twitter.com/RealEmirHan/status/1913327312604373341

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