I’ve been playing around with DeepDreamGenerator’s newish “text prompt” artificial intelligence image creator. This image was generated from the prompt “A wizard casting a spell at a Volkswagen Beetle.”

First Soulbound Daily Focus Chest:

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

For Hive Power Up Day, I staked 137.12 HIVE.

U.S. court rejects J&J bankruptcy strategy for thousands of talc lawsuits

Maryland considers bill urging companies to switch to 4-day workweek

Cash is king in Lebanon as banks atrophy

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

The Covid pandemic drives Pfizer’s 2022 revenue to a record $100 billion

What Is COVID Actually Doing to Our Immune Systems?

Politics:

N.Y. AG’s office: Trump and kids ‘falsely deny facts they have admitted’

Florida Teachers Told to Hide Their Books

Students arrived in some Florida public school classrooms this month to find their teachers’ bookshelves wrapped in paper — or entirely barren of books — after district officials launched a review of the texts’ appropriateness under a new state law.
School officials in at least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have directed teachers this month to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries.

Video of Trump deposition in New York fraud probe shows former president taking the Fifth, repeating “same answer”

Wearing a dark blue suit, red tie and American flag lapel pin, sitting in front of a camera in a downtown Manhattan conference room, Trump answered ‘yes’ when asked by James if he was familiar with the rules for giving a deposition. But as the questioning about his finances began in earnest, the former president—and now candidate for that same office—invoked the Fifth Amendment and continued to do so for nearly four hours.

Putin’s War Pushes Ex-Soviet States Toward New Allies

Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine partly to assert Russia’s regional dominance once and for all.
Nearly a year on, the Russian president has achieved the opposite — and not just in Kyiv.

France open to sending fighter jets to Ukraine

Nazi Homeschool Network Under Investigation by Ohio’s Department of Education

They are investigating a group that advocates white supremacist ideologies with the aim to make sure the children they teach “become wonderful Nazis.”

Minnesota Protects Abortion Rights

Minnesota became the first state since the midterm elections to add substantial legal protections guaranteeing the right to an abortion when Gov. Tim Walz (D) on Tuesday signed a bill codifying access to reproductive care.
Walz signed the Protect Reproductive Options Act, which will add access to contraception, maternity care, family planning and abortion to state law.

U.S. Says Russia Has Violated Nuclear-Arms Treaty

Russia has violated the New START treaty cutting long-range nuclear arms by refusing to allow on-site inspections and rebuffing Washington’s requests to meet to discuss its compliance concerns, the U.S. State Department said in a report sent to Congress on Tuesday.
The lack of inspections has also made it harder to verify the number of warheads Russia has deployed under the accord.

Serendipity:

Black Americans Much More Likely to Face Tax Audits

Black taxpayers are at least three times as likely to be audited by the Internal Revenue Service as other taxpayers, even after accounting for the differences in the types of returns each group is most likely to file, a team of economists has concluded in one of the most detailed studies yet on race and the nation’s tax system.
The findings do not suggest bias from individual tax enforcement agents, who do not know the race of the people they are auditing. They also do not suggest any valid reason for the I.R.S. to target Black Americans at such high rates; there is no evidence that group engages in more tax evasion than others.
Instead, the findings document discrimination in the computer algorithms the agency uses to determine who is selected for an audit.

Gigantic ‘alien’ comet spotted heading straight for the sun

Music That Was Playing While I Worked On This Post:

Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged in New York

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