December 24, 2022

Tory Lanez Found Guilty of All 3 Charges in Megan Thee Stallion Shooting Trial

https://www.vulture.com/2022/12/tory-lanez-verdict-megan-thee-stallion-shooting.html



Tory Lanez has been found guilty in the 2020 shooting of Megan Thee Stallion. A jury convicted Lanez, born Daystar Peterson, of all three charges, including assault with a semiautomatic firearm, after deliberating for a day and a half. According to journalist Meghann Cuniff, Lanez’s father and stepmother caused a scene in the courtroom after the verdict was announced, standing up and screaming in anger. Reportedly, Lanez was remanded on the spot and led out in handcuffs. He now faces up to 22 years in prison and potential deportation.

https://twitter.com/meghanncuniff/status/1606432727951364096
The two-week trial capped off a yearslong legal and public struggle between Lanez and Megan, born Megan Pete, over details of the July 2020 shooting. Megan, who gave emotional testimony during the trial, has said for years that Lanez shot her in the foot following an argument. Prosecutors argued Lanez shot her in an argument over his career after she hurt his ego. Megan initially did not tell police about the shooting, citing recent police killings of Black Americans at the time.

Lanez has maintained his innocence since the shooting, even rapping about it on his 2020 album Daystar, while continually attempting to discredit Megan on social media. However, he did not take the stand in his defense. His lawyer posited that Megan’s former friend, Kelsey Harris, instead shot her in an argument over their relationships with Lanez. In court, Harris testified that she did not recall details of the shooting, including her previous statement to police that Lanez threatened to shoot her, and said she did not witness the shooting. Megan claimed in her testimony that Lanez offered both her and Harris $1 million to stay quiet about the shooting; Harris denied taking a bribe. Under cross-examination by Lanez’s attorney, she said she did not shoot Megan.

In closing statements, Lanez’s lawyer called Megan “a liar.” Prosecutors, meanwhile, reminded the jury of how difficult the legal battle had been for Megan. “I wish he would’ve just shot and killed me if I knew I was going to have to go through this torture,” she previously testified of the ongoing public scrutiny brought by the shooting. Shortly after the verdict was announced, Meg’s attorney, Alex Spiro, released a short statement. “The jury got it right, I am thankful there is justice for Meg,” he said.

https://twitter.com/meghanncuniff/status/1606435876346957825
snip

December 23, 2022

Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist.

The porn trilogy for Nintendos. Atari games from the 1980s. Pristine nostalgia, potentially worth millions, gone in a night.

https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2022/06/rare-nintendo-atari-games-stolen

https://archive.ph/v65on



He tries his best to forget about the safe. But when he has a few free minutes and is cleaning the pins of old Nintendo cartridges with rubbing alcohol and Q-tips, a little piece of him dies every time he thinks about how he could’ve been so naive. When he ran the place, he would man the counter from a swivel chair next to the cash register, a can of Diet Coke by the keyboard of his desktop computer, his palms at the edge of a Super Mario World mouse pad. He’d lined his shelves with Pokémon and PAC-MAN figurines, Sonic the Hedgehog plushies, T-shirts and stickers with the store’s logo, dog-eared stacks of GamePro and Nintendo Power, and a feng shui of other games. Drawers nested all sorts of controllers smothered in black cords. Until he was forced to sully the store by putting jail bars on the windows and installing security cameras out front, Trade-N-Games had been lighthearted in spirit and charming in its accentuations. He’d wanted customers to experience what it had been like to be part of the video game generation that had discovered Nintendo and Sega. He had wished to replicate for people that feeling that usually disappears as they settle into adulthood. There’s a “great buys” bargain bin and a giant glass collector’s case.

A placard above the employee gate by the desk reads NINTENDO REPAIR AVAILABLE HERE. The AS SEEN ON YOUTUBE sign he’d taken down. He’d had a kind of philanthropic hubris as an owner and collector, someone who never gave a second thought to keeping his legendary game collection a secret. He’d gladly let YouTubers film in the back; he would even open the safe back there and show them, item by item, his Louvre. Other collectors had rare games, sure, but in the back room of his store, and especially in the safe, he was proud to own 10,000 of what he described as “cherry” copies—his preferred term for virgin condition. The cardboard on his Super Nintendo games was still crispy, as collectors like to say. His Sega Genesis and Master System games were as pristine in their clamshells as if they had been hanging from the racks at KB Toys.

Nothing about the store’s appearance alluded to the miracle of his collection. It was just a single-story former laundromat with a workaday sign. He’d had the idea to paint Mario and Luigi so big, anyone could see them from the main road beyond the parking lot in an antiquated strip mall, the Dye Hard Salon on one side and Murphy’s GOOD EATS Diner on the other. Trade-N-Games, this pixelated utopia in a suburb of St. Louis, had turned out exactly how he’d imagined it more than 20 years ago. The exception to his vision took the form of the scarred tracks of dolly wheels leading from the back of the store across the blue carpet, crushed into permanence by a 700-pound safe dragged out the door in the middle of the night.



Jason Brassard was racing 100 miles per hour to Trade-N-Games around 4:30 in the morning on August 16, 2019, a .38 caliber pistol by the cup holder in his truck. The trip was three miles from his condo in High Ridge, a commute that usually allowed an opportunity for his thoughts to drift, work with video games never being something to cause him stress. But he was terrified now, his hand pressed into the car horn to warn other drivers to stay away. A phone call had startled him awake, the Jefferson County alarm company telling him the front door of the store was open. He knew he would beat the police there. And he knew it’d be the newer games, he could feel it, straight through three consecutive red lights, barely easing off the pedal. It’d be the games arranged on the most prominent rows inside the store. They’d take the PlayStation 4s, and the used Nintendo Switch consoles, and popular games like Skyrim (dragons versus glitches, 2016), like Breath of the Wild (Link of Zelda fame versus his own sense of curiosity, 2017) and Mario Kart 8 (go-karts versus go-karts, 2014). Who would want to take anything else?

snip

December 23, 2022

Planet Uterus - Life (deep ambient techno) dropped 22 Dec 2022

Traumprinz has released a new mix.

https://ra.co/news/78279

Available now on the artist's Planet Uterus SoundCloud account, the hour-and-a-half session called life spans 16 original cuts. It's the first mix by Traumprinz, whose other aliases include DJ Healer, irini and Prince Of Denmark, in a year.

Traumprinz has largely remained anonymous for most of his decade-long career, yet has amassed a cult following for his style of hypnotic techno. For more on the artist, revisit Henry Ivy's review of his 2021 mix, lost in dreams.

Listen to life.



tracklist /

0:00 im rausch der tiefe
9:21 the day after tomorrow
14:55 about leaving
21:31 elevate this
25:50 floodgate
32:19 the luring of the beyond
38:21 closedgates iii
42:30 take your time
47:20 psi
51:05 trippyaf
57:35 upstairs
1:02:52 climber
1:07:52 light flooded
1:13:39 life (beautiful (no matter what))
1:19:00 broken home
1:23:52 outro

December 23, 2022

FIFA's access all areas accreditation really is good

https://twitter.com/martynziegler/status/1605552250952110081

December 23, 2022

Joe Lieberman to Kyrsten Sinema: Come on In, the Water's Warm

Few others know quite what it’s like to infuriate the Democratic Party by leaving it.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/22/us/politics/joe-lieberman-kyrsten-sinema-democrats.html

https://archive.vn/dPufI



If there’s anyone in America who knows what it’s like to infuriate your party as you leave it behind, it’s Joe Lieberman, the former vice-presidential candidate and senator from Connecticut who made a similar calculation when he became an “independent Democrat” in 2006 — and won.

And though they differed over the Iraq war, which Lieberman, now 80, passionately supported, he’s thrilled that Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona is joining him in exile to become the 22nd sitting senator since 1890 to switch parties. Sinema made her move official last week by filing federal paperwork as an independent candidate, though she has yet to say that she will run again in 2024.

Lieberman dared not risk another independent run in 2012, and is now a lobbyist. I spoke with him about life as a political apostate, his decision to endorse John McCain in the 2008 presidential election and how he threatened Democratic leaders who tried to punish him afterward. Here’s our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity:



snip

December 22, 2022

The Child Tax Credit Was a Little Too Subtle

Why doesn’t anyone care about the expanded child tax credit? A $100 billion policy—effective, important, elegantly designed, competently managed, and noncontroversial—is gone, at least for now. And nobody, save for a few politicians and wonks, seems to have noticed or to care.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/child-tax-credit-democrats-inflation-postmaterialism/672543/

https://archive.ph/tCbhX



The expanded child tax credit (CTC) provided no-strings-attached cash payments to 39 million families in 2021 and 2022, lifting millions of kids over the poverty line. But Democrats have failed to get a renewal of the program into the $1.7 trillion spending bill making its way through Congress, just as they failed to get it into the Inflation Reduction Act they passed earlier this year. As a general point, the CTC has languished in policy obscurity. Did Democrats crow about it in their recent campaign ads? No. Did it sway many swing voters in the midterms? No. Have large protests pushed for the policy’s reinstatement? No. Many studies suggest, as does common sense, that handing out all that money should have helped Democrats at the polls. Somehow, it did not.

Many political stories end up being much ado about nothing. But the quiet demise of the CTC is one of the most baffling things I have witnessed in American politics: no ado about so, so much. How the policy failed to create its own constituency is the $100 billion question, of interest to the Democratic politicians hoping to reinstate it as well as to experts designing new social programs in the future. Politicians, the CTC shows, have enormous capacity to improve citizens’ lives. But don’t expect those citizens to thank them at the polls for doing so.

The expanded CTC was part of President Joe Biden’s American Rescue Plan, passed in the spring of 2021. The policy had three main features. First, it beefed up an existing tax credit paid to the parents of dependent children. Under the new provision, families got $3,600 a year for each kid under 5 and $3,000 for each kid ages 5 to 18. Second, it paid out that money in installments; parents received a couple hundred bucks per kid each month from July to December and a final, larger check this spring. Third, it made the credit fully refundable, meaning that families that did not owe any federal income tax still got the full amount.

In practical terms: Cash suddenly started showing up in tens of millions of bank accounts. The impact was enormous and instantaneous. The transfers, a kind of Social Security for kids, drove child poverty down to its lowest-ever level. The rate of food insecurity in recipient households fell by more than 25 percent. Those families were less reliant on friends and family for help, experienced fewer medical hardships, and were more on top of their utility bills. Studies showed that the recipients used the money for essentials—food, gas, rent, clothes, day care—and that the transfers did not lead parents to reduce their work hours or quit working.

snip

December 22, 2022

Why No One in Politics Wants to Talk About the Sam Bankman-Fried Scandal

The fallout from the crypto controversy is widely spread — and it has hit both parties.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/21/us/politics/sam-bankman-fried-ftx-political-donations.html

https://archive.ph/rfKYc


Sam Bankman-Fried in the Bahamas in April. He agreed this week to be extradited to the United States after being charged with offenses including wire and securities fraud and money laundering.

snip

Billboards with his frizzy-haired visage popped up in Manhattan; journalists examined his growing political empire and his “schlubby” personal style. Endless articles were written about “effective altruism,” his utilitarian-tinged philanthropic philosophy. At one point, Forbes pegged his net worth as high as $26.5 billion; Fortune ran a cover, cringe-inducing in hindsight, asking, “The Next Warren Buffett?” It’s hard to quickly sum up the extent of the influence operation Bankman-Fried, 30, and his associates built during his meteoric ascent. My colleagues have described it as “a network of political action committees, nonprofits and consulting firms” that “worked to court politicians, regulators and others in the policy orbit.”

Last week, Bankman-Fried was arrested in the Bahamas, and a federal grand jury indicted him on eight charges that include wire and securities fraud and money laundering, along with conspiracy to commit those offenses. He has agreed to be extradited to the United States as soon as Wednesday, a decision one of his lawyers said defied “the strongest possible legal advice.” Bankman-Fried has denied wrongdoing. The extraordinary financial scandal has also become a sticky political morass, sucking in dozens of lawmakers and groups. Prosecutors also accused Bankman-Fried last week of defrauding the Federal Election Commission by running what’s known as a straw-donor scheme — making political contributions under someone else’s name.

Bankman-Fried’s contributions, Damian Williams, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, said last week, “were disguised to look like they were coming from wealthy co-conspirators when in fact the contributions were funded by Alameda Research,” a hedge fund closely tied to Bankman-Fried’s cryptocurrency exchange, FTX, “with stolen customer money.” FTX, under new management, said on Tuesday that it wanted to recoup that money, and is threatening legal action if the cash is not returned voluntarily. It’s not clear how much is considered stolen, but Bankman-Fried and his associates poured at least $70 million into various campaigns over 18 months.

In 2022, Bankman-Fried donated about $40 million to various candidates and political committees, overwhelmingly to Democrats. Those donations were “mostly for pandemic prevention,” Bankman-Fried has insisted. But a less lofty aim of his influence-peddling, clearly, was to shape federal regulations in his company’s favor. Before his arrest, Bankman-Fried told Tiffany Fong, a YouTube journalist, that he had also donated about the same amount to Republicans in ways, he suggested, that would not necessarily pop up in federal campaign finance reports.



snip

December 22, 2022

Mike Lindell turns his 'stolen election' fantasies on new target: DeSantis

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/12/21/lindell-desantis-miami-dade-win/

https://archive.ph/5LhoH



For the past few years, Republicans have largely stood by as various figures have sought to raise their profiles in the conservative movement by advancing baseless allegations of voter fraud — from Trump-aligned lawyers such as L. Lin Wood, Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani to MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell.

An apparent obstacle to the party taking action: Such figures were saying much the same thing as Donald Trump (and some were directly working for him, to advance his stolen-election cause in public and in court). So the GOP simply offered its own watered-down reasons for questioning the 2020 results, while sidestepping the actual claims made by Trump and these emerging thought leaders.

Now one of them has trained his “stolen election” claims on a new target — and a Republican, at that: Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. On his show Tuesday, Lindell indicated that he’s going to turn his crack team of voter-fraud investigators on DeSantis’s win in the 2022 midterms. The purported reason? The margin of victory was just too big — particularly in Miami-Dade County. (The unstated but more likely reason? DeSantis is a growing threat to Trump.)

Lindell previewed his case on air after initially pausing while he got some advice from his lawyer about what he was about to say. (Lindell is being sued over his false claims about voting machines in the 2020 election.) He went on to repeatedly reference “Dade County” even though it has been called Miami-Dade County since 1997. “I don’t believe it,” Lindell said, of DeSantis’s win there. “So it’s just going to show everybody — just like we always tell you about Democrats where they stole their elections … I’m going to find out if Dade County — what happened there.”

snip


eating their own!

December 22, 2022

Congress has a $1.7 trillion bill to fund the government. Here's what's in it.

Major boosts for Pentagon spending — and items as varied as election reform and a TikTok ban — are part of the sweeping package known as the omnibus

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2022/12/22/spending-bill-omnibus-congress/

https://archive.ph/rBN70



Congressional lawmakers hope on Thursday to finalize a bipartisan, roughly $1.7 trillion bill that boosts domestic and defense spending through most of 2023, funding the government and averting a catastrophic shutdown in the waning hours of the year.

The compilation of long-stalled appropriations bills, known as an omnibus, would provide nearly $773 billion for domestic programs and more than $850 billion for the military, covering expenses through fiscal 2023, which concludes at the end of September.

Lawmakers also added about $45 billion of emergency aid to Ukraine while using the must-pass measure as a vehicle to advance a slew of additional proposals — including an overhaul of how the country counts electoral votes in presidential elections.

A trio of negotiators — Sens. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and Richard C. Shelby (R-Ala.) and Rep. Rosa L. DeLauro (D-Conn.) — released the 4,155-page omnibus in the early hours Tuesday morning after months of bipartisan talks. House Republicans largely sat out of those discussions, arguing that their counterparts in the Senate should not have negotiated with Democrats until next year, when the GOP assumes control of the House.

snip

December 22, 2022

Nendo designs polyhedral Christmas tree with flickering star-shaped cutouts

https://www.dezeen.com/2022/12/17/nendo-polyhedral-christmas-tree-star-shaped-cutouts/



Japanese design studio Nendo has created a gold-coloured Christmas tree for the Tokyo Midtown shopping centre in Roppongi, Tokyo, with kinetic cutouts designed to resemble "sparkling lights". The 7.5-metre-high tree, which sits in the middle of the shopping centre, has a polyhedral surface made from flat metal panels that have been bolted together to form a pyramid.







Behind the panels, which have fluttering star-shaped cutouts, sit 416 compact fans. These were programmed to move the panels in patterns up, down and across the tree. "The pieces not only sway and move with the wind but can also stop swinging in the air catching the wind at the programmed timing," Nendo said. "By continuously receiving a certain amount of airflow, the pieces also float upward in a sustained manner."







The patterned cutouts, which Nendo said resemble "sparkling lights", appear to swirl around the tree or create a rhythmic pattern that moves up and down the conical installation. Matching cutouts in the same colour, described by Nendo as a "matte champagne gold", were hung from the ceiling elsewhere in the shopping centre.



These pieces, which comprise both the cutout stars and the squares from which they were cut, can be seen on Tokyo Midtown's garden terrace as well as in its galleria and atrium terraces. "The theme glitter in the air translates to creating the uplifting and shimmering atmosphere, the very essence of Christmas, by literally generating 'glitters' by 'air'," Nendo said of the decorative ornaments.

snip