'Nobody gives a mojo wire as a present, right?'
...Trump has issued more than 2,000 pardons and commutations this year — 10 times the number he pushed through in his entire first term...
...(N)otorious is the (pardon) case of billionaire Binance founder Changpeng Zhao, dubbed “crypto’s richest man,” who had previously pleaded guilty to money laundering that U.S. prosecutors said benefitted Hamas terrorists and Russian drug dealers. Zhao “rehabilitated” himself by helping to boost the Trump family’s crypto venture, which “raked in about $1.4 billion in revenue over the past year … far more than the president’s real-estate portfolio ever earned annually,” according to The Wall Street Journal. When Trump was asked about this shady pardon on 60 Minutes, he said he didn’t know who Zhao was...
Earlier this year we noted how the Trump administration had cooked up a half-assed wireless phone company. Even calling it a “phone company” was being generous: the branding deal was basically just a licensing agreement and a lazy coat of paint on another, half-assed, MAGA-focused, mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) named Patriot Mobile, which itself just resells T-Mobile service.
What was supposed to set the venture apart was a “bold” new $500 Trump T1 smartphone.
To pitch the phone to unsuspecting rubes, the original press release had a badly photoshopped rendition of the device, peppered with claims the phone would be “proudly designed and built in the United States.”
It didn’t take long for the folks behind the phone to pull all the made in America claims from the website. And while originally the phone was supposed to launch in August or September, not long ago it was delayed until October 31. As November drew to a close, there’s still no sign of the device...
The stock market bounces in recent weeks are just one indicator of the profound uncertainty and heightened risks running through the global economy and financial system.It’s not simply that the hundreds of billions of dollars flooding into artificial intelligence investments might turn out to be a bubble. Or that the use of cryptocurrencies in mainstream banking is spreading even as their values have plunged after soaring to record highs...{snip}...The stock market run-up — the S&P 500 is still up about 14 percent this year despite the recent shivers — could foreshadow widespread economic gains. But (Harvard economist Kenneth) Rogoff doesn’t think that is the case.“A big part of the high stock prices is not a reflection of high future growth,” he said. Rather, it is a sign that A.I. is expected to boost productivity and shrink employment. “The firms all think they’re going to shed a lot of labor, and that’s why the profits will be high,” he said...
The Spotify playlist is...Here.
You can hear Mr. Hodge talk about his century with Mike Boon which, in addition to the music, includes, as you might expect, unfortunately, just a wee bit of Toronto as Center-Of-The-Universe discourse...Here.
You can even watch a chunk of the Hodge/Boon back and forth...Here.
A FIFA-specific bylaw was approved by Vancouver city council Wednesday, enabling $1,000 tickets to be issued for a range of infractions during next year’s World Cup.
The bylaw covers the period from May 13 to July 20 of 2026 and will allow city officials and police to issue tickets levying hefty fines for things like “distributing advertising matter on streets” and “defacing or postering furniture, light standards, poles on streets” and “placing advertising matter on vehicles on streets.”
The goal, staff said at Wednesday’s meeting, is to ensure “brand protection” and target bylaw violations that run afoul of the city’s contractual obligations...
...I don't know. Dude's thesis does not seem too far off the olden days parents' groups who saw Satan in every rock 'n' roll record. Similar arguments to his could be made blaming micro-plastics and wildfire fire smoke for our increasing dimness, if indeed it is increasing. Seems to me the unfettered ability of all of us listening to all of us might just teach us a thing or two about ourselves well worth knowing. I'm certainly paying attention. Could be we have all just taken too much acetaminophen after all...
Mark Kelly—former Navy combat pilot, astronaut, sitting United States Senator—stated a simple legal fact on video: members of the US military can refuse illegal orders. Not as opinion. Not as political positioning. As established law codified in the Uniform Code of Military Justice and affirmed at Nuremberg when “I was following orders” was rejected as defense for war crimes.
The Trump Administration opened a federal investigation into him for saying this.
Jesse Watters praised the investigation on Fox News: “You have to make examples out of people.”
Slow down. Read that again. One more time. Let it register fully.
A sitting senator stated constitutional law. The executive branch opened an investigation into him for stating it. State propaganda praised this as making an example.
This isn’t approaching fascism. This isn’t fascism-adjacent. This is fascism—the actual thing, not the metaphor, happening in real time on national television while we debate whether calling it fascism is too divisive...
...Not so long ago, the dolts among us were free to think their thoughts quietly to themselves with no easy way to share them. At worst, a person would usually just embarrass himself in front of his own family or bowling team. Bad ideas had a harder time scaling and reproducing, so lots of stupidity stayed local, and everyone else could happily overestimate the average person’s intelligence because they saw less of it. But then we connected everyone on the planet and gave them each the equivalent of their own printing press, radio station, and TV network. Now, even those with nothing useful to say can tell the whole world exactly, or more often vaguely, what they think...
Swedish defence company Saab is intensifying its campaign to secure Canadian aircraft sales by offering to build the entire GlobalEye military surveillance plane in Canada if the Department of National Defence orders it.
In an interview at the Saab factory in Linköping, in southern Sweden, David Moden, senior sales director for the GlobalEye, said that building the entire aircraft in Canada would create 3,000 jobs. “We are offering a made-in-Canada solution by building and installing the plane’s sensors there,” he said...
President Trump assailed an American journalist in the Oval Office on Tuesday for asking Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, about the violent death of a Washington Post columnist at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul in 2018. U.S. intelligence has said the attack was carried out on the prince’s orders.“You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Mr. Trump told the journalist, Mary Bruce of ABC News, later referring to her query as “a horrible, insubordinate, and just a terrible question.”“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about,” Mr. Trump said, referring to the murdered journalist, Jamal Khashoggi. “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen.”...
...The Turkish Football Federation suspended 149 referees and assistant referees earlier this month, after an investigation found officials working in the country’s professional leagues were betting on football matches...
{snip}
...One referee had placed bets 18,227 times and 42 referees had bet on more than 1,000 football matches each...
Over the weekend, the President of the United States fell for obvious satire from a website literally called “The Dunning Kruger Times.”
Donald Trump—a man with access to the best, most accurate information on basically any subject—posted to Truth Social a screenshot claiming that “DOGE halts yearly payments of $2.5 million to Barack Obama for ‘royalties linked to Obamacare.’ Obama has collected this payment since 2010, for a total of $40 million in taxpayer dollars.”
Trump’s comment on this fabrication? “WOW!”...
Jack Posobiec posted a video purporting to be from the streets of Manhattan in 1993, showing mostly white members of the public, with the implication that the population had been transformed by immigration.
“NYC in 1993. Now exists only as a memory,” he wrote.
...Stephen Miller, the powerful and ultra-hardline White House deputy chief of staff, who has spearheaded Trump’ anti-immigration crackdown, posted a screenshot from New York City government website to imply that the Uganda-born Mamdani’s win had been brought about by immigrant votes.“Almost 50% of New Yorkers live in family households with at least one immigrant,” the post read...
...I saw Carlton Fisk, for real, in 1993.Which was a time when both baseball and American exceptionalism still meant a lot to me.And on that particular day Fisk was toiling near the end of his career for the Chicago White Sox warming up a guy named Jeff Schwarz in the right field bullpen of Oakland Alameda County Coliseum.Truth be told, I was actually more interested in Mr. Schwarz that day because, after 11 years in the minors as a draft and follow straight out of highschool, Schwarz was finally getting his first shot in the show. To put that in perspective, Schwarz made more in meal money in that, his only full season in the big-leagues, than he made in all of 1992 when he was toiled for the Vancouver Canadians.How do I know this?Because Schwarz told me so himself later that very afternoon as we sat in the bar of the Oakland Airport Hilton where Goose Gossage was holding court a scant six feet away.Another interesting thing about Schwarz was the fact that he liked to loosen-up by long-tossing with both his right and left hands.I never did find out what a crusty old customer like Carlton Fisk, who by then had been in the majors for more than 20 years and had caught more games than anyone else in baseball history, thought about Mr. Schwarz' feats of ambulatory ambidextriosity.I do, however, know that Pudge hated watching himself on T.V.In particular he said he never, ever, watched video of himself hitting that walk-off shot in Fenway Park during the 1975 World Series.Why?Because, Fisk said, he had his own memories of that moment and he didn't want the eye of the camera to turn them into something they were not...
"I have an image in my head of what I looked like, sounded like, and played like back then and I want that to be what stays with me."
When Thomas Lukaszuk said he could bring Elections Alberta pro-Canada petition forms signed by 300,000 Albertans in the three months allowed by the United Conservative Party’s “citizen initiative” legislation, there were many who said it couldn’t be done...
{snip}
...And yesterday, Mr. Lukaszuk and his supporters delivered 61 boxes containing petition sheets with 456,365 signatures to Elections Alberta’s modest headquarters in an Edmonton industrial park. That’s almost certainly enough to ensure Elections Alberta can validate enough to reach the 294,000 required by the law...
What's it all about Alfie?
Well, apparently, it's a concerted effort to beat the separatists at their own rigged game.
Imagine that!
Given that the Hawk is already there, isn't it about time Dave Steib was ushered into the Hall of Fame?
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It turns out there just might be one good tech baron out there who is most definitely not trying to take over all the means of production - Jimmy Wales...
Locally, in Lotusland, the city is considering a proposal for a massive box in the sky at Yukon and Broadway on a lot so skinny, our Eastside bungalow would hardly fit. The folks at CityHallWatch are on that one...
...As a teenager, Connolly became active in her community, volunteering with two Catholic lay organisations - the Legion of Mary and the Order of Malta.This involved bringing meals-on-wheels to elderly people and cleaning their homes."The joke was that I was out saving the world and not doing the housework at home," she recently told podcaster Síle Seoige...{snip}...The mother of two was in her early 40s when she entered elected politics in 1999.She recalls being encouraged to stand for the Labour Party by the outgoing President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins and his wife.Her main reason for getting involved was an ambition to address Ireland's housing shortage which she has described as the "defining social crisis of our time".Connolly served 17 years as councillor in Galway, including a one-year term as mayor of her native city...{snippety}...Connolly is an outspoken critic of Israel's actions in Gaza and has vowed to use her presidency to be a "voice for peace" in an increasingly uncertain world.She opposes the increasing militarisation of Europe and has warned against a "building consensus" to weaken Ireland's policy of military neutrality.She told BBC Talkback that when she canvassed voters, Gaza was "top of the list of their concerns" and was raised more often than any other issue, including Irish unity...
One of the most remarkable political stories in my life is the transformation of Ireland from the most church dominated and one of the most conservative nations in western Europe to a secular nation with no time for the world’s bullshit...{snip}...The Irish remind me of the many ex-Mormons I have known in my life (this happens when you are from the West) who have been lied to their whole lives, know it, are angry about it, and have no time for your nonsense. Given how the Catholic Church treated the Irish people over the centuries and the sexual exploitation of children endemic to it, it’s like a national waking up and a determination to never go back to the old ways...
...“No self-respecting country ever does anything under pressure.” ...
A proposal: Think in terms of all the time, money, thought and effort expended over the last half-century in destroying social safety nets, in disenfranchising and dispossessing a large part of the population, in misinforming and distracting anyone subject to swallowing the narrative and in building a whole infrastructure in both physical and legal structures to prevent effective resistance to the above, and you will have an idea of the resources necessary to address these questions, the time, the funds, the re-education, the legal re-jigging, the attitude adjustment, the patience, the tolerance, the intelligence and the fortitude to mend our whole civilization. As long as politicians are left to govern without consequence and independently of the informed consent of the population, we will flounder with mere attempts to look good for the next election cycle, and the results will be dire.
The most expensive political ad campaign of the year is being run by the Department of Homeland Security.
Why it matters: DHS disputes that its ads are political. But it has spent at least $51 million this year on ads thanking President Trump for securing the border, according to AdImpact...{snip}
{snip}
...In 2018, (Kristi Noem) told the Argus Leader, a South Dakota newspaper, that Mount Rushmore came up during her first visit to the Oval Office, when she was a candidate for governor."He said, ‘Kristi, come on over here. Shake my hand,’" Noem said. "I shook his hand, and I said, ‘Mr. President, you should come to South Dakota sometime. We have Mount Rushmore.’ And he goes, ‘Do you know it’s my dream to have my face on Mount Rushmore?’"Noem said she started laughing, but added: "He wasn’t laughing, so he was totally serious."...
"...We're the Nazis in this game, and I don't like it. I'm embarrassed and I'm pissed off.Yeah.I mean to say something and I think a lot of people in this country agree with me...'
...In the household of North America, one inhabitant has taken the momentous decision to empower a lie-based political movement led by a career fraudster — long after his authoritarian ambitions and violent means were laid bare. Whether this act of political suicide evolves as a murder-suicide is of more than passing interest to the US’s northern domestic partner.The consequences of US failure cannot be contained within US borders. As a direct result, African children who were alive on Jan. 19 are dead today. Summary executions, without even a pretense of law, have become US policy in the Caribbean Sea. Putin continues slaughtering Ukrainians while cashing dividends from a shrewd political investment. China is better-positioned for power.Canada’s precarious state is not the direst consequence of US political degradation. But it’s an all-but-impossible one to rectify. Joined at the hip to the US, Canada can only hope that Trump doesn’t continue to hold its trade hostage, or spill authoritarian values and violence over the border...
There's a lot of talk these days, some might call it hype for the merch machine, twenty years down the road, about re-investigating the good Docktor's demise.
Personally, I'm not sure there's much there, there.
Then again, as reader Lew E and I discussed on the thread to last week's post, and as HST himself once wrote....
...History is hard to know because of all the hired bullsh*t...
Fear and Loathing, The First Part, 1971
Not to mention the hangers on and the ten percenters.
Sod the streets at once!
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George Orwell’s 1984 warned of a future where Big Brother watches every move. Today, modern technology is making that vision a reality, and Oracle founder Larry Ellison—the world’s second-richest person—sees a growing opportunity for his company to help authorities analyze real-time data from millions of surveillance cameras.
“Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on,” Ellison said in an hour-long Q&A during Oracle’s Financial Analyst Meeting last week...
...This isn't like the early days of the web, or Amazon, or any of those other big winners that lost money before becoming profitable. Those were all propositions with excellent "unit economics" – they got cheaper with every successive technological generation, and the more customers they added, the more profitable they became. AI companies have – in the memorable phraseology of Ed Zitron – "dogshit unit-economics." Each generation of AI has been vastly more expensive than the previous one, and each new AI customer makes the AI companies lose more money...
"...Nixon was so crooked that he needed servants to help him screw his pants on every morning..."
...The charges (against the former FBI Director) were filed in the eastern district of Virginia only after Erik Siebert was forced out as US attorney (by Donald Trump) for reportedly finding no grounds to indict (James) Comey...
{snip}
...Trump has spent the hours since Comey’s indictment was announced insulting him on Truth Social, calling him “One of the worst human beings this Country has ever been exposed to” Thursday night and “A DIRTY COP” Friday morning...
Christopher Guest on Maron - it turns out that there really is a method in his mad(cap)ness.
Jonathan Goldstein and Heavyweight are back! - The first episode is a touching one about JG's longtime nemesis Gregor's Mom.
The MoCo's Frontburner, which is more often miss than hit for me, had an excellent recent episode on the incredible life and times, including how he's dealing with the coming end of his life with dementia, of Robert Munsch.
It was the stuff of Bond villains. Two ageing autocrats, their younger ally in tow, ambled down a red-carpeted ramp before a military parade in Beijing when a hot mic picked up a question that seemed to be on their minds: how long could they keep going – and, between the lines, might science allow them to rule for ever?
With advances in technology, Russia’s Vladimir Putin assured Xi Jinping via his translator that “human organs can be constantly transplanted, to the extent that people can get younger, perhaps even immortal”.
The Chinese leader replied: “By the end of this century, people may live to 150 years old.”
Nearby, North Korea’s Kim Jong-un – three decades younger than the two 72-year-olds – appeared to take note with a smile....
