Odds and Ends — 27 November 2024

@preparedwombat 77

12 days ago

oddsandends

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

Tether to Shutter Euro Stablecoin as Key MiCA Deadline Looms

https://twitter.com/mattmfm/status/1861400295730729286

Changpeng Zhao advocates for ‘real’ blockchain apps over memecoins

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

Sluggish gas exchange in the lungs may be involved in long-COVID brain fog

Politics:

https://twitter.com/derektmuller/status/1861480314704449576

Donald Trump Gets Away With It

Jack Smith is dropping the charges against the president-elect for his assault on the fundamentals of American democracy…
Trump pulled off this legal trick with a simple and effective strategy of running down the clock until being reelected president. Traditionally, defendants have had two ways to beat a rap. They could convince a judge or jury that they didn’t do the crime, or at least that there isn’t enough evidence to prove they did. Or they could look for a way to get sprung on a technicality. Faced with a choice between A and B, Trump chose option C: weaponize the procedural protections of the American justice system against itself.
The problem is not that these protections exist. They are a crucial part of ensuring fairness for all defendants. But just as he has done in other circumstances, Trump sniffed how the things that make the American system great can also be cynically exploited. If you have sufficiently deep pockets and very little shame, you can snow a case under procedural motions, appeals, and long shots, enough to slow the case to a crawl. And in Trump’s case, delay was a victory—not because he could put it off indefinitely, but because he will soon be president again, with the Department of Justice under his authority.

https://twitter.com/RWPUSA/status/1861243721615900928

The Teflon Endures: Jack Smith Ends Trump Prosecutions

It is hard to escape the grim conclusion: No president out of office has done more to grow the power of the presidency than Donald Trump. And the fact that this strengthening of the office is the result of his misdeeds, and empowers the president to undertake further misdeeds with impunity, is profoundly disturbing.

https://twitter.com/PoliticusSarah/status/1861247807467745544

Despite dismissal, legal scholar says "scathing" Trump evidence could still come out

https://twitter.com/JosephPolitano/status/1861218795542499716

I’d call this more than a hint, but that’s just me: Mexico Hints at Retaliation After Trump Threatens Tariffs

President Claudia Sheinbaum suggested Mexico could respond to Donald Trump’s threatened tariffs with levies of its own, warning the economic consequences would be dire.
Sadi Sheinbaum: “One tariff will be followed by another in response, and so on until we put common companies at risk. The main exporters from Mexico to the US are General Motors, Stellantis, and Ford Motor Company, which arrived 80 years ago. Why put in place a tariff that puts them in risk?

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1861254461651354056
https://twitter.com/meiselasb/status/1861204319380611242
https://twitter.com/MrRaceBannon/status/1861474676121166159

Trump’s Mass Deportation Plan Would Wreak Havoc on the Economy

https://twitter.com/TimothyDSnyder/status/1861442282483781851

Nothing to see here folks. Move along: Texas Won’t Examine Maternal Deaths After Abortion Ban

The Texas committee that examines all pregnancy-related deaths in the state will not review cases from 2022 and 2023, the first two years after Texas’s near-total abortion ban took effect, leaving any potential deaths related to abortion bans during those years uninvestigated by the 23 doctors, medical professionals and other specialists who make up the group.

https://twitter.com/covie_93/status/1861463835741241756

A Guide for the Politically Homeless

Those of us who first became politically homeless in 2016 have lately been in a quandary: We need to figure out who we are. If we are not to succumb to the Saruman trap—going along with populist authoritarians in the foolish hope of using them for higher purposes—then we had better establish what we stand for.
Labels matter in politics. They can also lose their meaning. There is, for example, nothing ‘conservative’ about the MAGA movement, which is, in large part, reactionary, looking for a return to an idealized past, when it is not merely a cult of personality. Today’s progressives are a long, long way from their predecessors of the early 20th century—just invoke Theodore Roosevelt’s name at a gathering of ‘the Squad’ and see what happens.
Even the terms left and right—derived, let us remember, from seating arrangements in the National Assembly during the early days of the French Revolution—no longer convey much. Attitudes toward government coercion of various kinds, deficit spending, the rule of law—neither party holds consistent views on these subjects.

https://twitter.com/Angry_Staffer/status/1861443277527880127

Trump’s Modus Operandi

He promises his base crazy shit. He then announces that he’s about to do the crazy shit. The media freaks out at the prospect of said crazy shit. Trump then wriggles out of doing the crazy shit and—this is the key part—his voters give him credit for the crazy shit anyway.

https://twitter.com/theliamnissan/status/1861419252026139106

Donald Trump’s return sends shivers through the anti-misinformation world

The incoming Trump administration’s vow to dismantle the leftwing ‘censorship cartel’ has thrown a shadow over the cottage industry of academics, non-profits and researchers that sprang up to combat a tide of digital misinformation — and threatens to disrupt the Big Tech companies behind the world’s most popular platforms.

https://twitter.com/victoriaslog/status/1861198282464072026

Trump Transition Agreement Lacks Key Guardrails

The Trump transition team said Tuesday it had reached an agreement with the Biden White House to start coordinating the handoff of federal agencies to the new administration.
But the Trump team is still refusing to accept several typical trappings of the presidential transition process, including federal funding, equipment and office space — as well as official government background and security checks for his transition staff. The agreement does not include an ethics pledge for the president-elect, required by the Presidential Transition Act, stating that Trump will avoid conflicts of interest while in office.

https://twitter.com/WalshFreedom/status/1861379438950092877

Too bad, so sad: Rudy Giuliani Loses His Lawyers, and His Cool

The hourlong hearing, punctuated by an angry outburst by Mr. Giuliani, was the most contentious yet in the winding search for his personal assets, which he was ordered to hand over to the two women more than a month ago.
For the first time in weeks, the strain of several cases stemming from Mr. Giuliani’s time as Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer appeared to be getting to him, as he sat slumped back in his chair with his arms crossed.

https://twitter.com/RachelBitecofer/status/1861564764704649483