Odds and Ends — 1 October 2023

preparedwombat(78)

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2023-10-01 14:16

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

For Hive Power Up Day, I staked 225.216 HIVE.

’Counterfeit people’: The dangers posed by Meta’s AI celebrity lookalike chatbots

Elon Musk Is in Hot Water And This Time It Has Nothing To Do With Twitter

The Most Pressing Issue on Ethereum is Validator Size Growth

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

‘COVID isn’t done with us’: So why have so many people started rolling the dice?

Florida Man:

DeSantis Super PAC Cuts Back TV Ads

Never Back Down, the super PAC supporting Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s presidential bid, cut more than $530,000 in reserved time on broadcast television stations in Iowa and New Hampshire on Friday in what the group said was a shift in strategies following the second Republican debate.

That swooshing sound you hear is the DeSantis campaign going down the drain.

Politics:

Joe To Big Kev: This is My Offer. Nothing.

In the end they agreed to give up all their demands and settled for giving Vladimir Putin a big sloppy kiss in the form of killing any new aid to Ukraine in this continuing resolution. This was the sweetener that made the capitulation possible. It’s a telling but unsurprising signal. For the Trumpist Right today, Ukrainians are just Democrats with a funny alphabet. Doing Putin a solid provided enough psychic satisfaction to make this happen.

Trump Loses a Battle in His Long War on Reality

This episode came to mind as I read the ruling issued this week by New York Judge Arthur Engoron, who pronounced that Donald Trump had committed fraud for years by massively overvaluing his properties and assets and who ordered several of Trump’s businesses removed from Trump’s control. This was a major blow to Trump’s corporate and real estate empire. It was also a stunning defeat for Trump in his decades-long war on reality.
…Trump for most of his life has acted as if the truth means nothing and he can concoct his own convenient reality. He has done this through deception, bullshit, subterfuge, and never-ending image spinning. That is, through unrelenting fraud…
Joe Biden put a stop to that in 2020. And now so has Judge Engoron. His ruling repeatedly says to Trump: Just because you say something is so doesn’t make it so. Much of it describes how Trump brazenly lied and declared specific properties to be much more valuable than they were to secure loans and deals. Engoron over and over states that Trump’s assertions are detached from reality and that Trump does not possess the power to define what is real or not.

James Carville On McCarthy’s Speakership: ‘When You Elect a Bowl Of Jell-O, What You Get Is a Bowl Of Jell-O’

What you get when you combine word salad and delusions of grandeur:

https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1707867912550089029?s=20
- Acyn

Republicans Turn on James Comer

After a dud of a first impeachment hearing Thursday, some House Republicans are pushing to take the Biden inquiry away from House Oversight Chair James Comer (R-KY) and put it in the hands of Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH).

Gym Jordan? Oh, that will end well.

https://twitter.com/RadioFreeTom/status/1707890996829200816?s=20
- RadioFreeTom

U.K. To Offer Military Training Inside Ukraine

Britain’s government wants to deploy military instructors to Ukraine, in addition to training Ukrainian armed forces in Britain or other Western countries as at present.