Odds and Ends — 12 July 2021
Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, and Debt:
Capital International Group purchases 12.2% stake in MicroStrategy
Great buy? Bitcoin trades at record 59% below stock-to-flow BTC price model target
Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:
F.D.A. Will Attach Warning of Rare Nerve Syndrome to Johnson & Johnson Vaccine
Newsmax Host Says Vaccines ‘Go Against Nature’
Politics:
Ashli Babbitt as the 21st-century Horst Wessel: Symbolic martyr to the fascist cause
On the GOP’s Growing Antagonism for Big Business
I can think of a lot of greater tragedies in U.S. politics than headaches for the Chamber’s political strategists, or diminished influence for business interests in general. But the real problem isn’t about business interests. It’s about the collapse of the Republicans’ ability to create policy and function within a democracy, along with partisan polarization that pushes both parties away from pluralistic policy agendas. That’s bad news for everyone.
Trump Lawyers May Be Penalized In Michigan
A federal judge is considering whether to order financial penalties or other sanctions against some of former President Donald Trump’s lawyers who signed onto a lawsuit last year challenging Michigan’s election results.
Biden Rejects China’s South Sea Claim
The Biden administration on Sunday upheld a Trump-era rejection of nearly all of China’s significant maritime claims in the South China Sea. The administration also warned China that any attack on the Philippines in the flashpoint region would draw a U.S. response under a mutual defense treaty.
Scholar Carol Anderson on the “anti-Blackness” coded into the Second Amendment
Serendipity:
Insect Experts Will Change The Name Of The ‘Gypsy Moth’ And ‘Gypsy Ant’
California wildfire generates its own lightning as it more than doubles in size
Visualizing Silver’s Uses Through The Ages
Voice cloning of growing interest to actors and cybercriminals
Meme credit: Dont_click_this_its_a_trap (source)
The thing I don't get about criticism of anti-vaxxers is there should be no need for the microchip and autism nonsense in the first place. You're talking about injecting a substance into someone's body. I don't care if it's saline or heroin. If they don't wanna they don't wanna. End of story.
What's that, it's for the greater good? The list of horrible violations of bodily integrity that could serve the greater good is enormous. The point of liberty is that each decides for himself which greater good to serve and how. If one is compelled to serve some other greater good that's the greater evil.
With few exceptions, Federal law allows employers to require COVID vaccinations and in 21 states, employers are free to refuse employment to nicotine users so in many instances employers at least have a fair amount of discretion over what folks must or must not put into their bodies.
That may not be fair or just, but that’s the world we live in, for now at least.
I agree for the most part. My employer can ask a lot of me. I can decline or not. And if we really butt heads over some darned thing either of us can walk away. That's fair.
If a government is requiring an employer to ask something of employees though that's the same, as far as I'm concerned, as the government coercing the employees directly. It's just like getting a bank to do the gov's warrantless snooping via a KYC scheme (which is also the world we live in, for now.)
Compelling attendance at school, and then coercing a vaccination in order to receive that same compulsory service from the state -- that's serfdom with extra steps. Yet that too is the status quo.
On another note, Mattsurelee's map aligns with my own experience of Arizona. From living here I suspect shared animosity for California is all that keeps the western states from falling into civil strife over water rights and land use.
When I lived in Arkansas I did not sense any particular ill will toward Alabama. Maybe it's something only the true locals understand -- or a sports rivalry? I don't follow sports much.
I don’t know which is funnier on that map, that New Jerseyans (although not born there, I grew up in north Jersey) hate everyone or that Floridians hate Floridians.