Odds and Ends — 30 October 2025

1 day ago

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

FWIW: Saylor says Bitcoin can surge to $150K by the end of 2025

America’s flatlining income growth is hitting Gen Z the hardest, throttling their shot at homeownership, JPMorgan report warns

Australian Police Use 'Crypto Safe Cracker' to Access $6M Stash

Coronavirus and Public Health:

International air travel—especially packed flights—fueled flu, COVID-19 spread during pandemic, researchers say

Politics:

Tennessee authorities dismiss charges against man who posted Trump meme

Charges were suddently dropped Wednesday against a Tennessee man who had been jailed for more than a month for posting a Trump meme.

The Politics of Moral Inversion: How Trump Praises Perpetrators and Blames Their Victims

Donald Trump’s politics exalts the aggressor and scorns the harmed. It is a politics of moral inversion—one that mistakes domination for strength and grievance for truth.
Such distortions do not fade when their author does; they seep into the civic bloodstream and collect their debt in time.
The reckoning will come, as it always does, in hardship and disillusion, paid not by the powerful but by the people who believed them.
Its arrival is certain, its hour unknown, but every nation that has lived through moral inversion has learned the same truth in the end: when cruelty becomes the compass, the road always circles back.

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1983502408719167946

———— The Trump Shutdown ————

https://twitter.com/MilesTaylorUSA/status/1983540082691711246

Republicans Blame Zohran Mamdani for Shutdown

If you listened to House Republicans on Wednesday, Zohran Mamdani shut down the federal government.
House Republican leadership continually blamed the funding impasse on Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor of New York. It’s the newest GOP talking point with the citywide election less than a week away.
This is no more true than when Republicans blamed the continuing shutdown on the recent ‘No Kings’ rally. But they’re running with it.

https://twitter.com/JonLemire/status/1983508543287283922

———— Affordable Care Act ————

Trump Is Sleepwalking Into Political Disaster

The most glaring self-inflicted wound from Donald Trump’s first term in office was his decision in 2017 to let Paul Ryan and other traditional Republicans push him into a futile war to repeal the Affordable Care Act. From Ryan’s perspective, the decision made perfect sense: He and his allies despised the welfare state in general and the ACA in particular, and saw Trump’s presidency as a final chance to destroy the hated law before its roots grew too deep.
From Trump’s perspective, the move was a fiasco. By dint of the threat to repeal it and take health insurance from millions of Americans, the ACA became more popular. The repeal effort exposed the hollowness of his grand promises to give everybody ‘terrific’ insurance, and drove a midterm-election backlash that handed Democrats control of the House of Representatives.
Eight years on, Trump has plainly failed to learn his lesson.

———— The Epstein Coverup ————

Memoir Omitted Name of Prime Minister Who Raped Girl

Virginia Giuffre’s memoir omitted name of a “well known” former prime minister who raped her because “she feared he’d kill her.”
Said ghostwriter Amy Wallace: “Well, people who read the book will see that the man was a sadist, not just a rapist.”

Likely Ehud Barak, possibly Tony Blair?

———— Autocracy R Us ————

https://twitter.com/atrupar/status/1983526251156410480

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1983554144381387108

https://twitter.com/kyledcheney/status/1983596075236913344

A president who hates his country can't win a war

Trump is as delusional in his public pronouncements, and as completely incoherent in October of 2025, as Adolf Hitler was in April of 1945 — with the caveat that Trump’s sycophants are more loyal, with the exception of Goebbels…
Fascists always campaign on freedom, prosperity and peace. What they deliver is slavery, penury and war.

https://twitter.com/tomaskenn/status/1983528330205999163

https://twitter.com/BillKristol/status/1983532565228089848

https://twitter.com/LongTimeHistory/status/1983207477018505721

Trump Says Jack Smith Should Be ‘Put in Prison’

https://twitter.com/RepJackKimble/status/1982895851937903011