'Nobody gives a mojo wire as a present, right?'
...Trump has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations this year — 10 times the number he pushed through in his entire first term...
...(N)otorious is the (pardon) case of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, dubbed “crypto’s richest man,” who had previously pleaded guilty to money laundering that U.S. prosecutors said benefitted Hamas terrorists and Russian drug dealers. Zhao “rehabilitated” himself by helping to boost the Trump family’s crypto venture, which “raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year … far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually,” according to The Wall Street Journal. When Trump was asked about this shady pardon on 60 Minutes, he said he didn’t know who Zhao was...
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a “phone company” was being generous: the branding deal was basically just a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.
What was supposed to set the venture apart was a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone.
To pitch the phone to unsuspecting rubes, the original press release had a badly photoshopped rendition of the device, peppered with claims the phone would be “proudly designed and built in the United States.”
It didn’t take long for the folks behind the phone to pull all the made in America claims from the website. And while originally the phone was supposed to launch in August or September, not long ago it was delayed until October 31. As November drew to a close, there’s still no sign of the device...
The stock market bounces in recent weeks are just one indicator of the profound uncertainty and heightened risks running through the global economy and financial system.It’s not simply that the hundreds of billions of dollars flooding into artificial intelligence investments might turn out to be a bubble. Or that the use of cryptocurrencies in mainstream banking is spreading even as their values have plunged after soaring to record highs...{snip}...The stock market run-up — the S&P 500 is still up about 14 percent this year despite the recent shivers — could foreshadow widespread economic gains. But (Harvard economist Kenneth) Rogoff doesn’t think that is the case.“A big part of the high stock prices is not a reflection of high future growth,” he said. Rather, it is a sign that A.I. is expected to boost productivity and shrink employment. “The firms all think they’re going to shed a lot of labor, and that’s why the profits will be high,” he said...
The Spotify playlist is...Here.
You can hear Mr. Hodge talk about his century with Mike Boon which, in addition to the music, includes, as you might expect, unfortunately, just a wee bit of Toronto as Center-Of-The-Universe discourse...Here.
You can even watch a chunk of the Hodge/Boon back and forth...Here.
A FIFA-specific bylaw was approved by Vancouver city council Wednesday, enabling $1,000 tickets to be issued for a range of infractions during next year’s World Cup.
The bylaw covers the period from May 13 to July 20 of 2026 and will allow city officials and police to issue tickets levying hefty fines for things like “distributing advertising matter on streets” and “defacing or postering furniture, light standards, poles on streets” and “placing advertising matter on vehicles on streets.”
The goal, staff said at Wednesday’s meeting, is to ensure “brand protection” and target bylaw violations that run afoul of the city’s contractual obligations...
...I don't know. Dude's thesis does not seem too far off the olden days parents' groups who saw Satan in every rock 'n' roll record. Similar arguments to his could be made blaming micro-plastics and wildfire fire smoke for our increasing dimness, if indeed it is increasing. Seems to me the unfettered ability of all of us listening to all of us might just teach us a thing or two about ourselves well worth knowing. I'm certainly paying attention. Could be we have all just taken too much acetaminophen after all...
Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes.
The Trump Administration opened a federal investigation into him for saying this.
Jesse Watters praised the investigation on Fox News: “You have to make examples out of people.”
Slow down. Read that again. One more time. Let it register fully.
A sitting senator stated constitutional law. The executive branch opened an investigation into him for stating it. State propaganda praised this as making an example.
This isn’t approaching fascism. This isn’t fascism-adjacent. This is fascism—the actual thing, not the metaphor, happening in real time on national television while we debate whether calling it fascism is too divisive...
...Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team. Bad ideas had a harder time scaling and reproducing, so lots of stupidity stayed local, and everyone else could happily overestimate the average person’s intelligence because they saw less of it. But then we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think...
Swedish defence company Saab is intensifying its campaign to secure Canadian aircraft sales by offering to build the entire GlobalEye military surveillance plane in Canada if the Department of National Defence orders it.
In an interview at the Saab factory in Linköping, in southern Sweden, David Moden, senior sales director for the GlobalEye, said that building the entire aircraft in Canada would create 3,000 jobs. “We are offering a made-in-Canada solution by building and installing the plane’s sensors there,” he said...
President Trump assailed an American journalist in the Oval Office on Tuesday for asking Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, about the violent death of a Washington Post columnist at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. U.S. intelligence has said the attack was carried out on the prince’s orders.“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Mr. Trump told the journalist, Mary Bruce of ABC News, later referring to her query as “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.”“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the murdered journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”...
