Odds and Ends — 3 March 2023
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
Bitcoin, Ether Drop Over 5% in Massive Sell-Off as Market Continues to Digest Silvergate
Meh. Time to buy more $HIVE.
Can solar power help fix drought-ravaged farmlands?
FTX presentation shows ‘massive shortfall’ in firm’s assets
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
Covid Can Boost Your Response to Flu Vaccines—if You’re a Man
The U.K. Briefly Considered Killing All Pet Cats Early in the Pandemic
Covid-19’s Enormous Death Toll: Worldwide Life Expectancy Has Experienced A Steep Decline
Politics:
Texas Bill Gives Tax Cuts to Heterosexual Parents
A newly introduced Texas House bill proposes property tax cuts for couples who get married, stay married, and have lots of children.
There’s a catch though. In order to qualify for the tax benefit, couples need to be heterosexual, never divorced, and their children born or adopted after their date of marriage. LGBTQ couples, single parents, divorced parents, and blended families will not qualify for full benefits.
The Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment says hello. Why do wingnuts have such a hard time understanding something that basic?
Trump can be sued by police over Jan. 6 riot, Justice Department says
Every time one of these racially incendiary arguments comes along, the cycle repeats itself. The offender gets canceled. His opinion is dismissed as unthinkably repellent. He and his allies seize on that dismissal as evidence that the establishment is suppressing dissent. Nothing should be unthinkable, the dissenters argue. There’s some secret truth, some taboo insight, that the cancel culture is hiding from you.
Sorry, but there’s no great insight here. You can watch hour after hour of Adams’s livestreams, as I have, and you won’t find that nugget of forbidden truth. His reasoning is as sloppy as his research. In every way, he’s just wrong.
Florida bill would require bloggers who write about governor to register with the state
In what alternate universe would that survive a court challenge?
How “Anti-Catholic Bias at the FBI” Is Becoming a Conspiracy Theory in Real Time
Rupert Murdoch usually settles his many lawsuits — so why is he toughing out the Dominion case?
Trump himself is, in many ways, the typical Fox viewer: Elderly, obsessed with his baseless grievances, and hostile to anything resembling reality-based journalism. His response to all this has been telling. Unsurprisingly, he has a sociopath's lack of remorse for getting Fox News into this situation in the first place, by making the Big Lie a thing their audience wanted to hear more of. Instead, he's been raving on Truth Social about "how weak and ineffective Fox News is" and how they should defend themselves instead by doubling down on the lies, but this time in a court setting.
They're probably not going to do that, because that's committing perjury.
Michigan attorney general says FBI confirmed she was target of plot to kill Jewish officials
Stop Calling It The ‘Culture Wars’
By almost any measure, Republicans have already won once they’ve “made it a partisan issue.” What seems to get misunderstood is that that’s the actual goal. Corporations and institutions don’t want to pick sides. They want to play it down the middle. So Republicans keep shifting the “middle” farther and farther right. By this point in these controversies, the game is basically over already.
What’s maddening is that everyone keeps getting played.
‘Stockpile food and water’: South Africa faces ‘civil war’ conditions if power grid collapses
Do South African Hivelandians agree with this assessment?
Five Nazis arrested after Fresno bombings
Serendipity:
Stone Skipping Is A Lost Art. Kurt Steiner Wants The World To Find It.
Asbjorn Halvorsen and Otto Harder - the story of two team-mates and a war
Join Hive using my referral link