Odds and Ends — 10 September 2025

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

Kraken Expands Tokenized Equities Platform, xStocks, to European Investors

Kraken has expanded its xStocks offering to the European Union, allowing investors to trade tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs.

https://twitter.com/BraddrofliT/status/1965561786696171993

Morgan Stanley Abandons Bullish Call on Argentina

The Wall Street bank, alongside rivals including Bank of America Corp. and JPMorgan Chase & Co., advised clients to buy the government’s bonds ahead of a key local election in Buenos Aires this weekend, betting that the president’s recent political stumbles had already been priced in during selloffs that swept through the nation’s financial markets the past few months. On Sunday evening, word came that Milei’s party had been handed a crushing defeat in the vote, a troubling sign ahead of nationwide congressional elections next month, and by Monday morning, the bullish calls had backfired spectacularly.

Coronavirus and Public Health:

Nasal spray for allergies may help prevent COVID, common cold infections

Politics:

https://twitter.com/MikeNellis/status/1965584450638557554

Czech Republic and allies break up Belarus spy network across Europe

The New Symbol of the Brazilian Right

Brazil’s Independence Day has become the moment for the country’s nationalist, right-wing movement to take to the streets, protest the left and hoist the yellow and green of the Brazilian flag. This year, it carried a new banner. An American flag the size of a basketball court unfurled over several lanes of São Paulo’s main avenue on Sunday, with demonstrators holding the flag aloft as they protested the expected conviction this week of former President Jair Bolsonaro on charges of planning a coup.

https://twitter.com/TheRealJChubby/status/1965221760980430977

———— The Epstein Coverup ————

https://twitter.com/MeidasTouch/status/1965217835476779282

Trump Calls Epstein Letter a ‘Dead Issue’

“I don’t comment on something that’s a dead issue. I gave all comments to the staff. It’s a dead issue.”

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1965203517150519504

Trump’s Epstein Letter Is the Final Test

In a way, Donald Trump and his allies have spent their entire political lives preparing for this moment. The whole miserable decade of ‘alternative facts,’ of witch hunts, of flooding the zone with shit—it all amounted to a long, powerful education for his base. It’s a training in a certain kind of zen meditation, in which stories damaging to Trump pass from the eyes and ears directly out of the body without ever intersecting the brain. By now, the base has gotten in their 10,000 hours. They’ve become masters of the craft. They can perform all sorts of remarkable feats—the media-cope equivalent of lying on beds of nails while cinderblocks are smashed on their chests. These cinderblocks, they whisper serenely, are just a liberal plot. If I pay attention, the Democrats win. This Epstein story might as well be their final test. They’ve clamored for years for more information about Epstein’s sexual-deviant associates—and here Trump is, wallowing in that muck of perversity, clear as day. Trump plainly thinks he’s got them well trained enough that he doesn’t even need to find a good cover story. They’re ready to excuse him all on their own.

https://twitter.com/JoJoFromJerz/status/1965383169915679167

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1965438951369617659

The Epstein Letter Is Real, and It’s Bad

The president’s initial strategy of denying that the document exists leaves him with few options now that it has been made public.

https://twitter.com/acnewsitics/status/1965447366603145586

https://twitter.com/TheRealThelmaJ1/status/1965411128022089915

———— Violence Against Women ————

https://twitter.com/Kasparov63/status/1965415394635907269

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1965513615303475428

———— Gaza and Qatar ————

https://twitter.com/TheMaineWonk/status/1965425531425620444

https://twitter.com/FirstbloodH/status/1965409922868498584

———— Autocracy R Us ————

Fascist at Home, Fascist Abroad

It used to be that one could roughly say that while paleocons were fascists at home, reimagining America as a white ethnostate, they were relatively more dovish abroad and skeptical of foreign entanglements, while the neocons were fascists abroad, favoring unabashed imperialism, foreign adventures, and unilateral wars, but broadly in support of center-right liberal democracy at home. The current fusionism of the right is the worst of all possible worlds: fascist at home, fascist abroad.

ICE Scraps Paperwork

For more than 15 years, before they conducted any operation to arrest an immigrant in the United States, officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Enforcement and Removal Operations division have been required to fill out a form with details about their target — name, appearance, known addresses and employment, immigration history, any criminal history and more — and give it to a supervisor for approval. This year, in a sign of how the agency has moved from targeted enforcement to broad street sweeps under the Trump administration, that policy has been ended.

In New Book, Think Tank Behind Project 2025 Takes On the Constitution

MAGA Dreaming of Even Greater Power Grabs

Trump has spent his first eight months smashing norms — and crossing legal lines — in his dizzying pursuit of mass deportations, crime crackdowns, government purges and more. But in MAGA’s maximalist mindset, it’s not enough: The base sees a shrinking window for its revolution, with Trump term-limited and potential midterm losses looming next year. On every political front, the movement is pressing for more — now.

Trump Quietly Builds a National Voter Roll

The Justice Department is compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.

https://twitter.com/RachelTrue/status/1965159200260325594

https://twitter.com/DoctorHenryCT/status/1965241298761503078

———— Blatant In-Your-Face Corruption ————

https://twitter.com/ItsDeanBlundell/status/1965522080847593690

———— Putin&Krasnov vs. Ukraine ————

https://twitter.com/saintjavelin/status/1965383860142965078

https://twitter.com/RonFilipkowski/status/1965362808989851695

https://twitter.com/general_ben/status/1965405096487104901

NATO Says It Scrambled Fighter Jets to Shoot Down Russian Drones Over Poland

The incursion marked the first time that NATO fighters engaged enemy targets in their own airspace. Poland’s leader called it “a large-scale provocation.”

https://twitter.com/JayinKyiv/status/1965285744186196328

https://youtu.be/lkngFw0-4SU?feature=shared

https://twitter.com/slantchev/status/1965088331869675693

https://twitter.com/olex_scherba/status/1965482094110683635

https://twitter.com/Maks_NAFO_FELLA/status/1965374981488922770

———— You will hear of wars and rumors of wars. ————

Trump Sounds Increasingly Militaristic

He has campaigned for a decade on ending wars and even recently lobbied extensively for a Nobel Peace Prize. But his second term has involved increasingly threatening – and potentially risking – military confrontations. The bellicose rhetoric has kicked into overdrive in recent days.

Gabbard Retracted Intelligence Report on Venezuela

Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, took the unusual step of ordering the National Security Agency to retract an intelligence report on Venezuela.

———— Mors Imperii ————

https://twitter.com/donwinslow/status/1965512580765766109

A Shutdown Is the Least-Bad Option for Democrats

A shutdown is probably the least-bad option for the Democrats; they perhaps might consider a fixed-time shutdown followed by normal negotiations with an abnormal president; and while this is something of an opportunity for the party, no one should expect too much from a situation in which they really don’t have all that much leverage at all. They should do what they can, but as long as Republicans have working majorities in both chambers, Congressional Democrats are just not the ones in a good position to defend the republic.

https://twitter.com/JaneBro16697771/status/1965473592063475942

Should Democrats Shut Down the Government?

Under ordinary circumstances, people like you and me — who believe that government is essential for the common good — would fight like hell to keep the government funded beyond September 30. But we are not in ordinary circumstances. The U.S. government has become a neofascist regime run by a sociopath… So I for one have decided that the best route is to shut the whole fucking thing down.

https://twitter.com/Matthewtravis08/status/1965468212415312131