Odds and Ends — 27 May 2026

@preparedwombat 78

1 day ago

oddsandends

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

https://twitter.com/sk8ballin3/status/2059267854663393398

I vibe-coded a billionaire jet tracker to warn people about a possible apocalypse. Then the data started getting weird.

Coronavirus and Public Health:

Long COVID may be more widespread than previously thought, Mass General Brigham study says

Researchers say one in six patients developed chronic disorder

https://twitter.com/LauraMiers/status/2059397519109439842

Iran:

https://twitter.com/DrNeilStone/status/2058162868550353192

The Iran Deal Is in the Hands of a Terrible Negotiator

Donald Trump’s reputation and political career were built on his dealmaking prowess, yet the president keeps demonstrating that he is a terrible negotiator.
Repeatedly over the past nine years, Trump has gotten rolled by counterparts during high-stakes exchanges. North Korea, Russia, Russia again, China, and China again have gotten the better of the United States. Trump has had to slink back to Washington without much to show except empty talk about friendship with whatever dictator has just run circles around him. He’s had some success in brokering agreements when acting as a third party (though not nearly as much as he pretends) but much less luck when his own government is a participant.
The one glaring exception came when he was effectively negotiating with himself, getting his own administration to set up a $1.8 billion slush fund for his political allies.

https://twitter.com/robertgraham/status/2058689176459981078

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/2059681413780131922

Politics:

The One Republican Who Could Lose Texas

The field in the Lone Star State is set. Last night, Texas Republicans nominated Trump-backed and scandal-plagued Attorney General Ken Paxton for Senate. Paxton defeated John Cornyn, a four-term incumbent and former Senate Majority Whip.
This is an absolute gift to Democrats.
The Paxton-Cornyn primary was one of the most brutal and expensive in modern political history, with accusations of adultery, bribery, support for Sharia law, and so much else. The end result is a bruised and battered, very vulnerable Ken Paxton running against an incredibly talented and well-funded Democrat in James Talarico.

“To call Ken Paxton ethically challenged is to call Jeffrey Dahmer suffering from an eating disorder.” — Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC)

Texas Senate Race Will Be a Referendum On Healthcare

What will be at stake in the general election, beyond the question of just how much personal awfulness Texans will overlook? To an important extent it will be a referendum on healthcare.
Texas’s healthcare policy stands out, even among red states, for its cruelty.
Texas has refused to expand Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. That is, it has turned down federal money that would have provided essential healthcare to hundreds of thousands of its residents, at almost no cost to Texas taxpayers, and injected large amounts of money into the Texas economy.
Texan politicians have tried to justify their adamant opposition to expanded healthcare as a matter of principle, a way to prevent dependence on government programs. But in reality there’s no way to make sense of this choice except as a reflection of the drive to keep low-income people desperate and subservient.

https://twitter.com/DougJBalloon/status/2059638417479307556

Trump’s Board of Peace Has No Money

The official fund for Donald Trump’s Board of Peace is empty and the organization is stuck in a legal and political limbo that has held up projects to rebuild Gaza.
The U.S. president described the board, which solicited $1 billion ‘lifetime membership’ fees from world leaders, as one of the ‘most consequential’ international organizations created. Member states pledged $7 billion for the board’s Gaza ‘relief package’, and Trump promised a further $10 billion in US funding.
But four months after its establishment, the board’s financial fund set up by the World Bank has received no money from donors.

All but three of the 6,069 refugees taken in by the United States since October are White South Africans.

———— Blatant In-Your-Face Corruption ————

A Metastasizing Scandal

It’s imperative to keep turning up the heat on the Trump-Blanche slush fund swindle…
The American people are being compelled to fund—and by funding to implicitly endorse—a bounty for the people who stormed the Capitol, beat police officers, and tried to stop the peaceful transfer of power.
All of us are, in effect, being conscripted into Trump’s campaign to rewrite the history of January 6th. The message the fund sends—that the rioters were victims, that their convictions were injustices, that the government owes them not accountability but a check—is sent in all of our names, with all of our money. We are being made, without our consent, co-signatories to the biggest lie of Trump’s presidency.

An Innovator in Corruption

He saw that private lawsuits could be used as a way to legalize bribery and extortion—that’s what his defamation suits against CBS and ABC were.
Trump understood that while it might be illegal to go to CBS and ABC and demand that they pay him protection money, he could use a civil lawsuit as justification for creating a private legal contract that amounted to the same thing.
He further understood that if he filed a civil suit against the U.S. government and then became president, he could direct the government to settle with him on whatever terms he desired.
These are ideas which seem to have occurred to no one in American history prior to Trump. When it comes to corruption, the man knows how to think laterally.