Odds and Ends — 17 September 2022
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:
Celsius requests permission to sell off its stablecoins
Over half of that would come from the company’s share of interest income from USDC reserves.
Johnson & Johnson and a New War on Consumer Protection
The company has spent billions on cases about one of its most popular products. As its executives try a brazen new legal strategy to stop the litigation, corporate America takes note.
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
How long will it take to understand long Covid?
Covid long-haulers experience a litany of symptoms, and researchers have proposed a variety of theories to explain them. It’s a morass to figure out, but the answers are important for the multitudes still suffering from an infection that happened to them months or even years ago.
Coronavirus in China: food shortages and chaos reported in locked down Lhasa
Politics:
Trump all but calls for another January 6 if he’s indicted
Why Support for Ukraine Will Withstand Russian Pressure
Trump openly embraces, amplifies QAnon conspiracy theories
Trump Team Claimed Boxes Were ‘News Clippings’
Months before National Archives officials found hundreds of classified documents they retrieved from former president Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, they were told that none of the material was sensitive or classified and that Trump only had 12 boxes of ‘news clippings’.
The characterization made in the call vastly misrepresented the scale and variety of documents, including classified records, eventually recovered by the Archives or the FBI.
Sending people north to make a point has happened before: the Reverse Freedom Rides
Kyrgyzstan reports heavy fighting with Tajikistan, 24 people killed
Nice Democracy You’ve Got Here. Shame If Something Happened to It.
No single strategy can handle the range of problems Trump faces. With some clever forum-shopping, he managed to get the FBI investigation into the hands of a judge whom he appointed late in his term—she was confirmed after the 2020 election—and whose rulings have baffled and appalled legal experts. But this is a stalling tactic, not a solution, and not every judge draw will be so lucky. A second strategy is to cry political persecution, which is good at rallying the minority of the population who already stands behind him but unlikely to win over those who don’t, especially because the claims are so unpersuasive.
This brings us to a third gambit: threats. If the people pursuing these criminal investigations into his conduct don’t back off, he warns, someone—not him, mind you—might do something dangerous. In this heads-I-win, tails-you-lose logic, the justice system can either exempt Trump from the rule of law or risk someone destroying it by other means.
Ken Burns connects the past and the present in ‘The U.S. and the Holocaust’
A boil-water notice has been lifted in Jackson, Mississippi, after nearly 7 weeks
"It is a great day to be in Hattiesburg. It's also, as always, a great day to not be in Jackson."
— Ashton Pittman (@ashtonpittman) September 16, 2022
—Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, belittling his own capital city that just spent more than 1.5 months without clean running waterpic.twitter.com/KOuPdFLu9D
New Poll Shows Republicans Are Sinking Fast On Abortion
Serendipity:
Book Excerpt: Rituals and the Search for Order
Research suggests that we spontaneously engage in ritualized behavior when facing stressful and uncertain situations.
