Odds and Ends — 23 July 2022
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, and Debt:
Is today’s energy crisis as serious as similar previous ones – particularly the 1970s oil shocks? That question is being asked around the world, with consumers hit by high prices, businesses worried about energy supplies, political leaders and central bankers struggling with inflation, and countries confronting balance-of-payments pressures.
So, yes, this energy crisis is as serious. In fact, today’s crisis is potentially worse. In the 1970s, only oil was involved, whereas this crisis encompasses natural gas, coal, and even the nuclear-fuel cycle. In addition to stoking inflation, today’s crisis is transforming a previously global market into one that is fragmented and more vulnerable to disruption, crimping economic growth. And, together with the geopolitical crisis arising from the war in Ukraine, it is further deepening the world’s great-power rivalries.
Costco’s inflation-proof $4.99 rotisserie chicken, explained
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
America is Running Out of ‘COVID Virgins’
The One Time Trump Couldn’t Lie His Way Out of a Crisis
In public, Trump downplayed the pandemic. In private, he was freaking out.
Politics:
24 hours of a coup: Jan. 6 hearings end with damming minute-by-minute account of Trump’s crusade
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley on Trump’s inaction during the Capitol insurrection:
— The Recount (@therecount) July 22, 2022
“You’re the commander in chief, you’ve got an assault going on on the Capitol … and there’s nothing? No call? Nothing? Zero?” pic.twitter.com/IWYFPQsKBD
Read it all: Where Was Kevin McCarthy?
A radical plan for Trump’s second term
Former President Trump’s top allies are preparing to radically reshape the federal government if he is re-elected, purging potentially thousands of civil servants and filling career posts with loyalists to him and his "America First” ideology…
I don’t know who put that Hawley hit out, but right now his tiny tiny testicles are a hood ornament on Liz Cheney‘s SUV.
— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) July 22, 2022
They Knew Exactly Who Trump Was
The Mob Did Exactly What Trump Wanted
As Capitol police battled rioters, Secret Service agents feared for their lives, and legislators fled to safety, the President of the United States sat in his dining room and refused pleas to call it off. For hours, he watched television, never once calling the Defense Department, the D.C. National Guard, or anyone else in law enforcement.
Instead he dialed senators urging them to delay the certification of the presidential vote. And amidst the height of the chaos and the terror, he inflamed the mob he had sent by sending out a tweet attacking his own vice president.
Please let all of that settle in.
Trump didn’t call off the mob, because it was doing precisely what he wanted; and he was using the delay caused by the attack to lobby his allies to help execute his coup. Only when it was apparent that the assault on the Capitol had failed, did he bother to call off his Insurrection.
ABC News: "187 minutes."
— Middle Age Riot (@middleageriot) July 22, 2022
CBS News: "187 minutes."
MSNBC: "187 minutes."
CNN: "187 minutes."
Fox News: "HUNTER BIDEN!"
The effects of the committee’s work may not be evident in the short term (though there are some indications that the hearings have weakened Trump’s grip on the GOP), but they will be felt in the medium and long term as the import of what happened ripens in the national consciousness.
A Trump Indictment May Come First In Georgia
FFS, have these people no shred of decency left?
— Charlie Sykes (@SykesCharlie) July 22, 2022
(Rhetorical question.)https://t.co/xtjIKhYfLz
Serendipity:
NASA images show extreme withering of Lake Mead over 22 years
“We thought we could engineer nature… huge mistake,” the general manager of the Colorado River District says
Image credit: Grandmaster Rathe created by craiyon