…today might be one of those days when I just…can’t…I don’t think it’s the date

An anniversary worth marking.I'm sure we're going to see the very people who have trashed its legacy seek to appropriate WW2 today – so let's remember what was really fought for: peace, a more united Europe, a land fit for heroes (mark 2) and the defeat of fascism.

— Otto English (@ottoenglish.bsky.social) 2025-05-08T06:44:10.640Z

…& I already had a headache when I woke up…without anything I could blame that on from the might before…so it isn’t that sort of morning after…but…being reminded that however much of a colossal prick piers is…he does sometimes prove fairly conclusively that he is not, in fact, *the worst*

Piers Morgan is a POS but man is this interview wild – based on the way her tone changes I don't think she realized the implications of what she said until after she said it. If you look closely you can see her realize she is absolutely cooked in real time.

— Based Sonic the Hedgehog (@sonic.bsky.social) 2025-05-07T18:53:30.361Z

…why is this so fucking hard for some people?

On VE Day, remember the war – but can we resolve to honour all who fought in it? [Guardian]

…random contextual nugget…the brits threw some local elections the other day & to the detriment of all some of those places went for team farage…& part of the reform reform has declared will re-brit-ify the joint is to refuse to fly any flag but the union jack or the st george cross on government buildings they control…& besides the fuck-those-other-flags thing in the union sense…what that specifically amounts to is…removing the ukranian one a few of those have been flying

…I guaran-fucking-tee the assholes will be all over how insanely british they feel today & how much of that they’d bind to everything about what ought to be celebrated today…& are congenitally incapable of grasping how many of the fallen they profess to honor would condemn them…&…who am I kidding…my head hurts too much to be hitting it with this kind of shit

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said on Wednesday that his department would build a “real-world platform” that would allow researchers to hunt for causes of autism by examining insurance claims, electronic medical records and wearable devices like smart watches.

— The New York Times (@nytimes.com) 2025-05-08T03:31:27.355Z

…if we keep making using nazi as an adjective fail to be hyperbole while this sort of shite keeps slipping under the radar

Ah, but of course. #OligarchEra 🤡 @washingtonpost.com @jeffstein.bsky.social www.washingtonpost.com/business/202…

— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) 2025-05-07T18:23:17.516Z

…one of these days…I’m going to be in danger of losing all sense that being held responsible for one’s actions is “a thing”…&…I can’t join ’em…so…there’s liable to be some beatings involved…&…that’s liable to go badly…so…not being in a hurry seems like it should be the silver lining…unless you get past the clouds entirely

When Elon Musk’s engineers bundled a batch of prototype satellites into a rocket’s nose cone six years ago, there were fewer than 2,000 functional satellites in Earth’s orbit. Many more would soon be on the way: All through the pandemic, and the years that followed, Musk’s company, SpaceX, kept launching them. More than 7,000 of his satellites now surround Earth like a cloud of gnats. This fleet, which works to provide space-based internet service to the ground, dwarfs those of all other private companies and nation-states put together. And almost every week, Musk adds to it, flinging dozens more satellites into the sky.

…even my undying & ardent affection for the stuff can’t make the irony that people who would put a drone down with a shotgun if they could see it from their property will cheerlead this motherfucker with the cognitive dissonace of a reform supporter thinking they’re “never forget”-ing when the only fallen they acknowledge are the ones the nazis didn’t file under “inferior” the way they do, too…any kind of palatable…&…maybe this headache is my mind literally rebelling against the idea that if I crack & start trying to emulate fictional characters whose whole deal is handing out what some people are begging for…it’s me that’d end up taking the hit…still & all…since we already had piers saying some shit I could get behind…let’s remember a long lost era when clint didn’t come with so much baggage

…I…don’t believe it’s illegal to start wandering the streets with a pick axe handle…but…I expect it would prove even more inadvisable than it would impractical…so my to do list doesn’t have a trip to the hardware store on it…&…I aim to leave the current handles on the pick & the mattock where they are with heads attached…because *those* tools are still good for something…& the only thing it looks like these other tools are good for is making me wonder if they’d be satisfying enough to directly harm to get my ass arrested like I’m younger & dumber…& not just lose chunks of my day to involuntarily day-dreaming about how to put it to the test

On April 22nd, Fight Fight Fight LLC, a company with ties to President Donald Trump, announced that the 220 top investors in its meme coin $TRUMP would be invited to meet with Trump himself. The event was billed as an “intimate private” dinner, but with obvious hints that attendees were buying an elected official’s time. Around the date of the announcement, federal government officials reportedly registered three websites apparently related to the dinner: thetrilliondollarinner.gov, dinnerforamerica.gov, and thetrillion.gov. At least one, it was reported, temporarily directed to a Department of Commerce login portal, suggesting that the coin was somehow linked to the government. The coin’s price jumped by more than 50 percent after the dinner was announced, netting Trump and his allies nearly $900,000 in trading fees in just two days.

Two democratic senators demanded an ethics probe into the May 22 dinner, but in February, Trump fired the head of the body that would typically investigate that type of alleged misconduct.

The meme coin dinner is the kind of open graft controversy that would have been unfathomable under previous administrations, even Trump’s first term eight years ago. Now it’s just one of dozens of ways the president and those in his orbit have enriched themselves. Along the way, they’ve dismantled government watchdogs that crack down on scams of every scale. The president has created his own money-fleecing spin on Reagonomics – instead of promising trickle-down wealth, it’s trickle-down opportunities for fraud.

https://www.theverge.com/policy/662109/trump-white-house-scams-crypto-cfpb-doj-sec

…it’s a lot of flip-flopping for fish that smell this rotten

On Sept. 9, 2024, the F.B.I.’s criminal investigative division reported that “as the use of cryptocurrency in the global financial system continues to grow, so too does its use by criminal actors.” The exploitation of cryptocurrency, according to the F.B.I., “was most pervasive in investment scams, where losses accounted for almost 71 percent of all losses related to cryptocurrency.”

Seven days later, Donald Trump declared on X: “Crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.” In the same post, a month and a half before the election, he promoted his new venture World Liberty Financial Inc.

…&…well…ol’ joe thinks if he’d gone about that race differently it wouldn’t have changed anything…or at least…he says that…along with a few other things…like “what the hell’s going on here? what president talks like that?”

The Joe Biden One [“Political Thinking” BBC radio]

…&…I’m not sure my answers to those two questions are…constructive?

It is quite remarkable for any government official, let alone the leader of the free world, to create and promote a vehicle for rampant speculation and to directly profit from it. Trump seems to show scarce restraint in his willingness to use the levers of power to enrich his family and close associates with little accountability or transparency.

Trump’s release of two meme coins, $Trump and $Melania, [Eswar] Prasad [a professor of economics at Cornell and the author of “The Future of Money: How the Digital Revolution Is Transforming Currencies and Finance”] continued, take “conflicts of interest to an altogether new level, especially given Trump’s official position and his control of the entire financial regulatory apparatus.”
[…]
Trump’s offer, Lessig wrote,

drove up the value of the meme coin, again enabling profit both from sales of the appreciated coin and the transactions that drove the profit up. All of this is unprecedented, whatever the law, because no president so blatantly has tried to benefit personally financially from his acts while president.

https://www.wired.com/story/trumps-quest-for-crypto-riches-is-a-constitutional-scandal-waiting-to-happen

…”waiting”

Let’s look a little more deeply into the legal and constitutional issues raised by Trump’s cryptocurrency enterprise: On May 1, Zach Witkoff, one of the founders of the Trump family’s crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, announced at the Token 2429 Conference in Dubai that Abu Dhabi would use the firm’s stablecoin, USD1, to finance a $2 billion investment in Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world.

The transaction, my Times colleague David Yaffe-Bellany wrote, “would be a major contribution by a foreign government to President Trump’s private venture — one that stands to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the Trump family.”

The arrangement raises the question of a possible violation of Article I, Section 9, Clause 8, of the U.S. Constitution:

No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state.

…my kingdom for a nice piece of hickory

Three plaintiffs separately brought federal court cases claiming the Trump hotel violated the emoluments clause, CREW v. Trump, Blumenthal v. Trump and District of Columbia v. Trump. The Supreme Court dismissed all of them as moot or for lack of standing, without ruling on the legal and ethical issues raised by the petitioners.

Yaffe-Bellany’s reporting on the Dubai conference raised a second legal and constitutional issue.

Justin Sun, a Chinese-born billionaire who runs the crypto platform Tron, led a panel on which Witkoff and Eric Trump spoke.

Sun has an interesting history that raises questions about the bribery provision in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution.

A brief history:

The Securities and Exchange Commission announced charges against Sun on March 22, 2023, “for the unregistered offer and sale of crypto asset securities” and for “fraudulently manipulating the secondary market” through “the simultaneous or near-simultaneous purchase and sale of a security to make it appear actively traded without an actual change in beneficial ownership.”

On Jan. 19, 2025, the day before Trump was inaugurated, Sun announced in a Twitter post that his firm had increased its “investment in World Liberty Financial (the Trump family’s company), with an additional $45 million, bringing the total investment to $75 million.”

On Feb. 26, the S.E.C. and Sun sent a letter to Edgardo Ramos, the federal judge overseeing the case, asking him “to stay this case to allow the parties to explore a potential resolution.”

“The case against Sun appeared ironclad,” Coingeek, an industry newsletter, reported,

but the new-look S.E.C. doesn’t appear to care. It’s perhaps worth mentioning that Sun purchased $75 million worth of WLFI – the governance token for U.S. President Donald Trump’s decentralized finance project, World Liberty Financial (WLF) – at a time when nobody appeared interested in buying into the so-far dormant WLF.

Jacob Silverman, the author of “Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud,” said he considered the Sun investment a particularly open attempt to curry favor. Under the headline “The President Took a $75 Million Bribe, and We All Saw It,” he posted on his Substack, “Justin Sun’s payoff to Trump is now considered a model for how to influence the president.”

In a Times article on April 29 exploring Trump’s crypto dealings, “Secret Deals, Foreign Investments, Presidential Policy Changes: The Rise of Trump’s Crypto Firm,” Eric Lipton, Yaffe-Bellany and Ben Protess wrote:

None of the Trump family’s other business endeavors pose conflicts of interest that compare to those that have emerged since the birth of World Liberty. The firm, largely owned by a Trump family corporate entity, has erased centuries-old presidential norms, eviscerating the boundary between private enterprise and government policy in a manner without precedent in modern American history.

Lipton, Yaffe-Bellany and Protess found:

World Liberty has directly benefited from Mr. Trump’s official actions, such as his announcement of a federal crypto stockpile that would include a digital currency the firm has invested in. The president’s announcement caused a temporary jump in the value of World Liberty’s holdings.

World Liberty has sold its cryptocurrency to investors abroad, including in Israel and Hong Kong, according to interviews and data obtained by The Times, establishing a new avenue for foreign businesses to try to curry favor with Mr. Trump.

Several investors in World Liberty’s coin managed firms that the federal government accused of wrongdoing. They include an executive whose fraud case was suspended after he invested millions of dollars in World Liberty. Other investors and business partners, some of whom haven’t been publicly identified before, are looking to expand in ways that will require the Trump administration’s approval.

World Liberty proposed swapping cryptocurrencies with at least five start-ups, and often used the Trump name to solicit steep payments as part of the deals. Even in an industry with a disreputable history, the deals raised alarm among veteran executives.

[…ok…so time’s winged chariot left me in the proverbial dust at this point so I’ll loft what I’ve got…& then at least try to get to the point I leave off this effort from the NYT…but…unless the headache relents the tunes might be a long time coming…so…if anyone’s of a mind to…feel free to throw a few of those about…I might be a while before I hit play but theoretically the whole world isn’t having a head-splitter of a day?]

In a Jan. 20 article, “Crypto Executives Warn Trump’s Memecoins Harm the Industry,” Bloomberg reported that some crypto investors contended that Trump’s latest foray would “do more harm than good to an industry trying to rebuild its reputation.”

Some of the criticism aimed at Trump and documented by Bloomberg:

• “The Trump launches are ‘now clearly a blight that we will have to work to put behind us,’ said Rob Hadick, general partner at the crypto-focused venture-capital company Dragonfly Capital.”
• “In a post on X, Balaji Srinivasan, an angel investor and former chief technology officer at the U.S. crypto exchange Coinbase Global Inc., said memecoins are a zero-sum ‘lottery’where the ‘price eventually crashes and the last buyers lose everything.'”
• “Gabor Gurbacs, the director of digital-asset strategy at the investment provider VanEck until last year and the founder of PointsVille, said the memecoins ‘cost the U.S., the presidency and his family a lot of credibility.’ Gurbacs wrote in an X post that the consequences of the launches ‘haven’t even started’ and called on Trump to fire his crypto advisers.”

The growing controversy over Trump’s attempts at crypto profiteering has put passage of the cybercurrency industry’s key legislation pending before the Senate in jeopardy.

In a May 5 article, “Trump Crypto Deals Provoke Senate Backlash and Calls for Investigation,” Yaffe-Bellany and Lipton wrote that Democratic senators, including some who had supported the legislation, are now expressing “concern that the legislation would directly benefit the Trump family’s crypto business.”

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, told The Times, “It’s a selling of influence, a conflict of interest, just a massive form of corruption.”

…clint’s pale rider was ostensibly a man of the cloth…& presumably there was some faith behind the swing of the sledgehammer to the one dude’s groin

…but…who really has time to get down with yesterday’s news?

May 7th marks 25 years of Putin’s reign. Here is a collection of essays on what drives the Russian leader, how he transformed the country, and where he fits into the arc of Russian history.

— Foreign Policy (@foreignpolicy.com) 2025-05-07T11:30:51.582Z

…all our tomorrows are all well & good…but

For Trump, a critical determinant of his ability to continue to profit from cryptocurrency will be the outcome of the 2026 election.

If, as appears possible if not probable, Democrats retake the House next year, the likelihood is that Trump might well be impeached for a third time, and crypto would almost certainly be a centerpiece of that proceeding.

The prospects that two-thirds of the Senate would vote to convict Trump of any impeachment charges about crypto – or anything else – are, however, slim to none, even if Democrats surprise everyone and retake the upper chamber.

So what Trump can look forward to is holding office through to Jan. 20, 2029, while he and his business partners continue to come up with new digital currencies and new marketing techniques to raise their potential profits.

At that point, with Trump no longer in office, the Supreme Court will once again be able to rule that any pending complaints involving foreign or domestic emoluments are moot.

In other words, Trump is well on his way to becoming the greatest grifter of all time.

Who’s the Greatest Grifter of Them All? [archive.ph/NYT]

…maybe it’s not giving him his due…let alone rendering unto caesar

Donald Trump has put forward the idea of a ‘Trump Card Visa,’ selling U.S. residency for a cool $5 million—naturally, because why wouldn’t he? And who’s handling the tech side of things? Oh, you probably guessed it—Elon Musk’s DOGE, of course.

— WIRED (@wired.com) 2025-05-08T11:39:41.273Z

…but…at least for me…& YMMV according to your definition of the grift…he’s a runner up even in that running…& that’s not even including dead people in the competition

…there ain’t enough hickory…& my fucking head hurts…so…while I go lie down in a dark room & resist the temption to chew asprin like they’re candy…if any of y’all know any good witches…I’m pretty sure if you cursed these fuckers with non-stop migraines they’d get a lot less fuckery accomplished

Trump’s “big beautiful bill” is running into a wall in the sharply divided House Republican conference, with tensions spiking over Mike Johnson’s handling of the party’s biggest sticking point: overhauling Medicaid.

— Jon Cooper (@joncooper-us.bsky.social) 2025-05-08T11:44:25.093Z

…so if they could get on that…they’d be welcome to take this one off my hands for the cause?