Somehow 2021 is halfway over. Not quite sure how that happened so fast, but here we are.
Hopefully you will get to enjoy some R&R over the long weekend.
Joe Biden comforts ‘amazing, resilient’ families at site of Miami condo collapse
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jul/01/miami-condo-collapse-joe-biden-visit
Prosecutors allege a 15-year tax fraud scheme as the Trump Organization and CFO Allen Weisselberg are arraigned on multiple criminal charges
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-business-weisselberg-indictments/2021/07/01/e2b774a0-da15-11eb-bb9e-70fda8c37057_story.html
Whoa!
A very smooth move on Bezos’ part as I’ll have to wish him well because Wally Funk seems just wonderful.
‘No one has waited longer’: trailblazing female pilot Wally Funk will go to space with Bezos
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jul/01/jeff-bezos-space-flight-pilot-wally-funk
Branson, on the other hand:
Billionaires’ race to space: Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson now set to beat Blue Origin’s Bezos to space
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/07/01/branson-bezos-space-race/
Meanwhile…on earth.
Canada Lytton: Heatwave record village overwhelmingly burned in wildfire
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-57678054
Good news for the J&J gang:
Maybe I should save this for Brain Drain, but here’s a fun bot to follow on Twitter for all you mystery fans:
Have a great day. Do tell what you’ve got going on this weekend too!
If only this benighted country had morris dancers, or at least a lot more of them. They might lighten the national mood.
I got my 2nd vax shot (Pfizer) yesterday. I’m feeling miserable right now… really sore in one arm and feel so very tired. I think I slept for more than 10 hours and I still feel like sleeping more.
It sucks, but it isn’t as bad as those coworkers who got the 2nd Moderna shot who felt like someone hit them (mildest) to fever/chills/aches for up to several days.
Oh no! I hope you feel better soon. I went to Target this week and wore a mask even though I am fully vaxxed because third wave and anti-vaxxers stroll among us and I was the only person wearing a mask. FFS. Then I went to the drive-up window at the pharmacy and the pharmacist is wearing a mask even though we have a wall between us. Go figure. Somehow I feel the pharmacist is the better role model.
Lytton, WTF. But the article said most people who died lived alone in unventilated homes. Honey, an unventilated home is gonna kill you anyway.
congrats on the second dose!
hopefully your side effects don’t stick around too long, but at least it’s better than covid…
Hope the side effects lessen or go quickly. Like others on here, I am wearing a mask in public places, but have started going to restaurants…it still feels risky. (We have a higher than sensible number of the unvaxed, due to the prevalence of conservative, pentecostal, and Anabaptist groups ’round here.)
Completely out of nowhere, I was thinking of this last night while I was trying to fall asleep. Well, it didn’t come out of nowhere, exactly. Usually you don’t hear a sound in this apartment, but I distinctly heard a male voice droning on but so softly I couldn’t make out what he was saying. In the clear light of day I realized someone either next door or below us must have been watching something like an audience-free Colbert Report or (shudder) Chris Cuomo, and at a louder than usual volume.
@MatthewCrawley that is creepy, more so for its reality.
Not that anyone really cares, but if you watch it through it says the first known broadcast dates from 1973 but “may have” started up years earlier. The footage of the men piling the cement blocks is from the construction of the Berlin Wall, 1961. The footage of the tanks rolling through the streets and the populace fleeing the (presumably) tear gas is from the brief uprising of 1953. The footage of the Checkpoint Charlie stuff predates the Wall: take it from this correspondent who spent a grim week transiting through Checkpoint Charlie post-Wall.
Oh and for sprots lovers yesterday was not only Canada Day but also Bobby Bonilla Day.
https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/31732959/bobby-bonilla-day-explained-why-mets-pay-119m-today-every-july-1
Avid readers of the Washington Post of a certain age also need to know that yesterday Ben Bradlee’s third wife and fellow Washington Post…writer, or something, she was on the payroll..Sally Quinn turned 80 years young!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sally_Quinn
Sadly, Bradlee’s second wife, Toni, née Antoinette Pinchot, was unavailable for comment, having died a decade ago. But Ben and Toni had a great life together (before cub reporter Sally Quinn entered the scene and upset the apple cart) because Ben was probably JFK’s closest confidante after JFK’s brother/Attorney General Bobby. I mean, if you leave the womanizing of both men aside, and Bobby himself was no slouch, as you would have done during the Kennedy administration, it must have been exciting, a fresh new administration after 8 years of Eisenhower. The irony being that Ike was almost certainly in a lot better health than JFK, hopped us as Jack was on every painkiller and stimulant known to modern medicine at the time, but that too was in the spirit of the age!
God I’m bored.
…look, I know I’m kind of a heathen about the sports thing…but that link said it would explain the deferred paycheck thing & at no point seemed to cover the part where instead of paying $5.9 million one time they agreed to spend $1.2million-ish 25 times…the extra part of that payment is over 3x the original price…I get the part where they list out in the madoff thing & maybe didn’t have $5.9million laying about at the time but is there more to it?
The mores of the Camelot age (and really the years preceding) seem so … odd, now. It really was generally accepted though not acknowledged that men had other … well, let’s call them ‘interests’ outside of marriage. Often their wives knew and chose to look the other way (as Jackie apparently did) so as not to impede their husbands’ careers or upset their own lifestyles.
It’s not really a “rich” thing either. I know numerous examples from my childhood and teen years. I’m sure that sort of thing happens still, but people seem more likely to divorce and move on rather than make accommodations. I’m sure part of it is two incomes vs. one, inability to conceal activities (everyone carries a camera), unwillingness on the part of others to help deceive a spouse, and a lot of other things, but the attitude toward these activities has shifted, too. I just find it interesting.
I’m bored too.
The movie The Apartment is great about that theme, and one of the few that took a sour rather than tragic or comic perspective.
When you said “Camelot” I was thinking what does King Arthur have to do with this?
The Midsomer Murders Bot is a delight. Thank you @MegMegMcGee.
Here I go again, being an old, but the Boy Scout settlement doesn’t surprise me. A childhood friend was a dedicated Scout. He lived with his grandparents who were often desperate to keep him busy. They tried to get me to go a couple of times but it wasn’t my thing.
I remember a single Scoutmaster that spent large amounts of time with my friend. He spent time with both of us, actually. I didn’t think much of it at the time but eventually this guy disappeared and my friend lost interest in scouting. He never mentioned anything untoward to me, so it might have been nothing, but when I see stories like this I always think of that guy.
I and my boys were Scouts at various levels at various times. IME there have always been a lot of nerds and misfits involved in scouting.
Yeah, I don’t want to besmirch all Scouting, but this situation, when I think about it from an adult perspective, seems pretty sketchy. A kid who’s basically been abandoned by his parents and dumped on his grandparents, spending lots of time alone with an adult. I lost touch with him long ago — around middle school. He has an unusual name, and some Googling suggests he’s married, has kids, and lives back in his home state.
The Trump Co. tax case is interesting. The relatively small scale suggests this may be limited, but the weirdness and sloppiness suggest it may not.
Was Trump want to cheap out on paying the guy who was key to keeping his operations under wraps? Or was he cash strapped? Or maybe both at different times?
Was he actually setting up Weisselberg to be criminally complicit in order to control him?
There are parallels to the illegal Stormy Daniels payoff and the tax fraud that Trump’s father pulled off, so it will be interesting to see what happens given the wide swath of documents NYC and NY State now have.
This is an interesting overview of the case.
https://www.vox.com/22555751/allen-weisselberg-indictment-trump-grand-larceny
The charges are relatively minor, but Vance is using them to put heat on Weisselberg. Trump claims “everybody does it,” and he’s not wrong, if “everybody” means rich people, which it does. Funny thing is, he’s not saying “I didn’t do it,” he’s saying “no big deal.”
Apparently, Weisselberg is being pressured to flip on Trump, because he’s the only one who can testify that yes, Trump ordered people to overvalue properties for loans and undervalue them for taxes (tax fraud, bank fraud, insurance fraud, but fraud). Without Weisselberg, it seems prosecutors can’t prove Trump knew about it.
It seems to me that Weisselberg is screwed no matter what. It remains to be seen if that will motivate him to turn on Trump. It worked on Cohen, but Weisselberg may be made of sterner stuff, or Trump may have other dirt on him sufficient to keep him in line.
…I also saw it noted somewhere that even if it might be true that “everybody does it” (for a given value of “everybody”) it’s also true that everybody also promises not to…in writing…legally-binding writing…in the text for the covenant on loans there’s generally a “we promise not to cook the books” bit
…& somewhere towards the end of that charges there’s one specifically about having produced a falsified accounts which could be considered grounds for creditors to make demands & ultimately call in loans…which, if the whole org really is as much of a debt-obfuscation enterprise underwritten by grifting as it’s been looking…could feasibly cause them real problems down there on the bottom line?
I think the creditor threat is the biggest looming problem for Trump. Governments can fine him millions, but creditors control hundreds of millions.
Creditors probably don’t want their dealings exposed almost as much as Trump doesn’t want them exposed. They probably want to avoid the investigation spiraling into loans made to non-Trump companies. So their incentive to cooperate is limited, and right now investigators have very limited access to the broader activities of Deutsche Bank and other entities. But big lenders may decide at some point to cut their losses if they can figure out a way to contain the risks.
The problem right now for both the Trump org and the creditors, is that these kinds of indictments drastically reduce the value of the debt. So, if Deutsche Bank wanted to sell off their debt to another bank, they would have to eat a bunch of it in loss…which, in a really perverse way, becomes another aspect of being too big to fail. It’s most certainly in the bank’s interest to make this go away, and if it means finding ways to kill the prosecution of this case, then so be it.
I don’t see any evidence that Trump is smart enough to set anyone up. Everything he does is hamfisted thuggery.
I don’t think Trump is nearly as skilled of a backstage operator as someone like Cheney, but I think he is very good at a few things, and one of them is playing up his buffoonery to hide the few things he is good at doing.
He’s a Three Card Monte operator who operates in an alley off of Wall Street and always finds a few hotshot VPs who think that because they understand high finance they won’t get fleeced by a guy with a bad haircut. He knows enough to run the game, how to create a distraction and grab the money if things get tight, and which fire escape to run up if the cops show up.
Midsomer Murders Bot for President!
It’s Fur Face Friday!
https://backtalkvillage.blogspot.com/2021/07/fur-face-friday.html?m=1
in unrelated news…..i finally got one of me noobies all trained up…and he fucked off to a better paying job *sigh* good on him tho
i have a new noobie now
a big black guy named ashley…dudes a blast
all muscle and tats and at least half his teeth are gold
first impressions couldnt be more wrong…dudes a sweetheart
suspect his past is much like mine tho…. hope he sticks around