Odds and Ends — 6 November 2024

@preparedwombat 77

9 days ago

oddsandends

Cryptocurrency, Investing, Money, Economy, Business, and Debt:

Republican Senate majority signals more ‘pro-crypto Congress’

Mapped: U.S. State Economies Compared to Entire Countries

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

Surveys reveal Americans' persistent mistrust in COVID vaccine science

Politics:

I was about as wrong as you can be. My crystal ball prediction about the election turned out to be pure fail. American voters are stupider than I could have imagined.

https://twitter.com/susie_dent/status/1854071082988237264

This is Us

Whatever the final margin, the American people have returned this blatantly, dangerously unfit man to power. In the end, nothing mattered. Not the sexual assaults, the frauds, the lies, or the felonies. Not the raw bigotry of his campaign; not the insults, nor the threats. In the most graphic terms imaginable, the American people were warned of the danger. His previously loyal vice president refused to endorse him; his top general called him a ‘total fascist’; some of his closes aides and cabinet members described in detail his erratic character and his indifference to the Constitution.
But in the end, Trump was right. He could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone and still win a presidential election. But, we know now that it was worse. Trump never fired a weapon on a New York City street, but he stood at the center of our politics and incited a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. And it didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter that he tried to overturn a free and fair election…
This is the hardest part about today: realizing that our fellow Americans saw all of that; watched all of that; listened to all of that, and still said, ‘Yes, that’s what we want.’ That’s who we are.

https://twitter.com/larainenewman/status/1854068129468395684

Donald Trump’s Revenge

Electing Donald J. Trump once could be dismissed as a fluke, an aberration, a terrible mistake—a consequential one, to be sure, yet still fundamentally an error.
But America has now twice elected him as its President. It is a disastrous revelation about what the United States really is, as opposed to the country that so many hoped that it could be.
His victory was a worst-case scenario—that a convicted felon, a chronic liar who mismanaged a deadly once-in-a-century pandemic, who tried to overturn the last election and unleashed a violent mob on the nation’s Capitol, who calls America ‘a garbage can for the world,’ and who threatens retribution against his political enemies could win—and yet, in the early morning hours of Wednesday, it happened.

https://twitter.com/MuellerSheWrote/status/1854153674186170397

Reflections On America's New Autocracy

We should brace ourselves for immense depravity, but remain prepared to guide and stiffen the spines of the last bastions of resistance.
The United States and the world will soon be in the hands of mercurial, vindictive, greedy men with scores to settle and few checks on their power.
Perhaps there’s some solace in that word ‘mercurial.’ Who knows what Donald Trump, the 78 year old former president and current president-elect, will choose to do with his time and authority? Maybe some semblance of stability can be salvaged through the fact that he mostly just wants to be the center of attention.
But I don’t take much solace at all. First, the people who’ve attached themselves to Trump know this about him, and they are ambitious. They have already reasoned that they’ll be empowered to fill all the gaps in his attention, and their ranks include corrupt oligarchs, conspiracy theorists, white nationalists, religious extremists, and fascists. Think Trump might ultimately not care that much about abortion? Well, the people serving under him do, and he won’t be checking their work.

https://twitter.com/JoyceWhiteVance/status/1853856900598899099

Man arrested in alleged neo-Nazi-inspired plot to destroy Nashville energy facility

Israel’s Netanyahu dismisses his defense minister as wars rage. Protests erupt across country

What happens to Trump's criminal cases after election win

‘A gift to the Kremlin’: uncertainty over Ukraine’s future after Trump victory

Uncertainty? Trump will sell them out.

https://twitter.com/theliamnissan/status/1854039200611303529
https://twitter.com/AjaRaden/status/1854002724066693514