Odds and Ends — 23 April 2025

@preparedwombat 77

8 days ago

oddsandends

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

Cheaper, faster, riskier — The rise of DeepSeek and its security concerns

Americans Say Their Finances Are Getting Worse

https://twitter.com/HerbsandDirt/status/1914517646042956140

Coronavirus and Public Health:

Analysis suggests COVID-19 diminishes sperm quality

FDA Suspends Milk Quality Tests

The Food and Drug Administration is suspending a quality control program for testing of fluid milk and other dairy products due to reduced capacity in its food safety and nutrition division.

What could possibly go wrong?

RFK Jr. to Amass Private Medical Records of Americans

The National Institutes of Health is amassing private medical records from a number of federal and commercial databases to give to Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s new effort to study autism.
In addition, a new disease registry is being launched to track Americans with autism.

How is this not a HIPAA violation?

https://twitter.com/scretladyspider/status/1914505117799170270

https://twitter.com/JillianMHurley/status/1914637965638185108

https://twitter.com/PawlowskiMario/status/1914732873807970536

https://twitter.com/TotalSeasons/status/1914799138111189355

Clinics Begin Closing as Trump Continues Freeze

Clinics around the country that provide contraception and other reproductive health services to low-income patients are running out of funds as they await word from the Trump administration on tens of millions of dollars in grants frozen last month.

Politics:

Oklahoma county leaders caught on audio talking about killing reporters, complaining they can no longer lynch Black people

Macron Floats Fresh Election in France

Emmanuel Macron is exploring the possibility of dissolving parliament and holding snap elections as soon as this fall as a return to international prominence helps boost the French president’s popularity at home.

Vance’s Trolling Audition to Be Trump’s Heir

As Donald Trump’s chief attack dog — though not yet his heir apparent — Vance is a prime target of ridicule on liberal social media. But he is also a master troller himself. Vance knows that the surest path to MAGA hearts and Trump’s approval is to enrage liberals. The question is whether he means anything by it.
The answer is unclear. Vance has gone from being a never-Trumper who saw Trump as ‘America’s Hitler’ to an arch-Trumper who sees his boss as part of God’s plan. That is as dramatic a political conversion as can happen. Rather than search for an intellectual key, Vance’s shift can be put down to ambition. The better question is whether there are any limits to his ambition. Judging by his performance so far, the answer is not really.

Tim Scott Silent as Trump Dismantles His Legacy

Senate Banking Chair Tim Scott (R-SC) has spent years boosting a federal program to support minority-owned businesses. President Donald Trump’s administration dismantled it in a matter of weeks.
Scott, along with other Republicans, was integral to congressional efforts to permanently authorize the Commerce Department’s Minority Business Development Agency, expand its services into rural areas and leverage the program to help minority-owned businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Now, the program, which funds grants to business owners and provides technical assistance, support and mentorship, has had 100 percent of its staff, about 50 people, placed on administrative leave or redistributed within the Commerce Department.

https://twitter.com/BrianKarem/status/1914771802947248211

The Force That Holds Trump’s Coalition Together

Time after time… the traditional conservatives have accepted Trump’s authoritarianism and corruption because he stays loyal to them on their key issues. The path of least resistance for maintaining the coalition is to give each faction what it cares about most: Traditional conservatives get low taxes for the rich (and decreased business regulation), while natcons get a free hand to wield state power against their enemies.
This authoritarian-libertarian synthesis might seem ungainly, but it coheres perfectly from the standpoint of those on the right who see progressive taxation and the welfare state as the most sinister threats to liberty.

https://twitter.com/Smorgasboredom/status/1914710928215478721

Federal Prosecutors in Eric Adams Case Resign

Three of the Manhattan federal prosecutors who worked on the criminal case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams resigned Tuesday, accusing the Justice Department of trying to force them to admit wrongdoing in connection with their resistance to dropping the charges.

Judge Orders Trump to Restore Voice of America

A federal judge on Tuesday found the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle Voice of America and affiliated news services were likely unlawful, indefinitely blocking the shuttering of the government-funded news outlet and affiliated news services.

———— Autocracy R Us ————

Livid Judge Castigates Trump DOJ’s Defiance In Abrego Garcia Case

A Ticking Clock On American Freedom

Look around, take stock of where you are, and know this: Today, right now—and I mean right this second—you have the most power you’ll ever have in the current fight against authoritarianism in America. If this sounds dramatic to you, it should. Over the past five months, in many hours of many conversations with multiple people who have lived under dictators and autocrats, one message came through loud and clear: America, you are running out of time.
People sometimes call the descent into authoritarianism a “slide,” but that makes it sound gradual and gentle. Maria Ressa, the journalist who earned the Nobel Peace Prize for her attempts to save freedom of expression in the Philippines, told me that what she experienced during the presidency of Rodrigo Duterte is now, with startling speed and remarkable similarity, playing out in the United States under Donald Trump. Her country’s democratic struggles are highly instructive. And her message to me was this: Authoritarian leaders topple democracy faster than you can imagine. If you wait to speak out against them, you have already lost.

https://twitter.com/EllenBarkin/status/1914815806505988257

Trump Administration Continues to Defy Judge’s Order

Continuing a pattern of stonewalling, the Justice Department has defied a judge’s order to explain what the Trump administration has done, and plans to do, to seek the release of a Maryland man who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador last month.
In refusing to reveal much of anything about the administration’s role in improperly sending the man, Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, to El Salvador or its subsequent efforts to seek his freedom, department lawyers repeatedly claimed that the information constituted state secrets that needed to be protected.

Judge Says Trump Can’t Invoke Alien Enemies Act

Why Democrats Keep Talking About Due Process

Democrats have a plan for fighting President Donald Trump over the most high-profile deportation case in recent history: Don’t make it about immigration.
As the party lines up to defend Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident mistakenly deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration, Democrats are emphasizing due process and the rule of law — side-stepping the thornier intricacies of immigration policy that have served as a drag on their party for years.

https://twitter.com/BladeoftheS/status/1914383377290920067

Trump Harvests Autocratic Powers

In 2003, the Macedonian police arrested Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen vacationing in their country. They handed the unfortunate man over to the CIA, who shipped him off to one of their “black sites.” For those too young to remember (or who have quite understandably chosen to forget), “black sites” was the name given to clandestine CIA detention centers around the world, where that agency held incommunicado and tortured men captured in what was then known as the Global War on Terror. The black site in this case was the notorious Salt Pit in Afghanistan. There el-Masri was, among other things, beaten, anally raped, and threatened with a gun held to his head. After four months he was dumped on a rural road in Albania.
It seems that the CIA had finally realized that they had arrested the wrong man. They wanted some other Khalid el-Masri, thought to be an al-Qaeda associate, and not, as Amy Davidson wrote in the New Yorker, that “car salesman from Bavaria.” …
An “Administrative Error”
I was reminded of such instances of “extraordinary rendition” in the Bush-Cheney era when I read about the Trump administration’s March 2025 deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego García to a grim prison in El Salvador.

———— Smoot-Hawley 2.0 ————

IMF says Trump’s tariffs will be a drag on global economic growth

https://twitter.com/Scaramucci/status/1914413397715616071

U.S.-Bound Goods Are Stuck in Tariff Limbo

Many U.S. companies are making… hard calls as they try to adjust to President Trump’s new trade war with China. Some are halting imports as they hope for a trade truce that will result in lower tariffs. A few interviewed by The Wall Street Journal are trying to move their production from China to the U.S., but most are considering other Asian countries, saying U.S. production of their goods doesn’t exist.
Many are reluctant to make big changes if the new rules are just going to get overturned by a tweet.

https://twitter.com/ReallyAmerican1/status/1914794361310806482

Bessent Says Tariff Standoff with China Not Sustainable

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told a closed-door investor summit Tuesday that the tariff standoff with China is unsustainable and that he expects the situation to de-escalate.
Bessent added that negotiations haven’t started but that a deal is possible.

Trump ‘Setting the Stage’ for Trade Deal with China

Concepts of a plan?

https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1914796437940158675

New Trade Agreements May Take Many Months

The White House is closing in on general agreements with Japan and India to stave off massive U.S. tariffs, but they are likely to leave many of the thorny details to be hashed out at a later date.
In the absence of full-fledged trade deals, administration officials are working to ink what three people close to the White House described as ‘memorandums of understanding’ or a broad ‘architecture’ for future deals.
It ‘may take months to hammer out the final deals,’ said one of the people, conceding, ‘these things are complicated.’

Um, just a few days ago, they were talking about 90 agreements in 90 days.

———— Student Loans ————

https://twitter.com/blacklionking73/status/1914657703512727755

https://twitter.com/smalls2672/status/1914491407286358148

https://twitter.com/DavidBo03050197/status/1914515282795905148

———— Putin&Krasnov vs. Ukraine ————

Russia Proposes Halting Ukraine Invasion at Current Front

Vladimir Putin has offered to halt his invasion of Ukraine across the current front line as part of efforts to reach a peace deal with President Donald Trump.

Small problem with that. Ukraine has no incentive to let Putin keep what he’s seized. A minor detail.

Something has gone wrong in American democracy. Though our diagnoses differ, the entire political spectrum chafes at the widespread dysfunction. Our traditional modes for understanding democratic decline—tyranny of the majority, corruption, erosion of trust, polarization—all of these shed some light onto our current circumstances, but they fail to explain how policies with broad public support don’t materialize.
While reporting on the democratic terrain in state and local government, I’ve become preoccupied with how easily minority interests are able to hijack broadly beneficial policy goals—often through mechanisms we view as democratically legitimate. Tools developed to push against a potential ‘tyranny of the majority’ have allowed majorities to be subjugated to the will of minority interests time and again. Whether it’s by professional associations, police unions, homeowner associations, or wealthy individuals, majority rule has repeatedly been hijacked.

Over 150 college presidents sign letter rebuking Trump administration 'overreach'

https://twitter.com/anthonyzenkus/status/1914518472379228613

In the old country, we called this embezzlement: DeSantis Diverted Medicaid Funds to State Charity

The $10 million that Gov. Ron DeSantis’ administration diverted to a state-created charity last year consisted of Medicaid dollars owed to state and federal taxpayers, contrary to what the governor and other officials have publicly asserted.