Odd News

Today's odd news is that a woman was charged this week with possessing Drivers* in Cadillac, MI.

Is it odd? Well I found it resonant, perhaps, or oddly dislocated—like possessing Parrot in Deadhorse.

In November, a man was charged in Cadillac with possessing anything 'cept Cadillac** or Drivers.

And in October, a man was charged with delivery of Go-fast.***

It's evidently a place where traffic stops are fruitful.

Odd news, odd choices.

Robert Barron column: Let’s keep our “World’s Biggest Hockey Stick” title - Cowichan Valley Citizen

The news is that sentiment on the MAN token is bullish right now and prices have risen almost 25% in the past week... so some people, at least, are convinced. But I'd like to see fewer diamond emojis and more references to peer-reviewed articles on neuroscience.

In fact, I'm going to say that talking about "realizing the vision of the MATRIX films" without emphasising proof of neuroscientific engagement on your corporate social media account makes this distinctly odd news.

Here's the website. The crypto highlights are hyperlinked to further information about staking by acquiring a Matrix wallet but references to "brain wave data" are not hyperlinked to further information.... which is a shame, because I was interested to find out what that meant.

Here's a background article from 2018:

Who is behind this?

Some of the best programmers, Chinese cryptographers previously working for Samsung, Amd, Microsoft, Nvidia or Facebook in senior positions (eg senior Microsoft developer), designers of the first wifi in China, communication and command systems of a Chinese aircraft carrier, authors of official programming textbooks at universities, participating in many governmental projects headed by Steve Deng - professor Tsinghua University (competitor Harvard). The proof of the good team of programmers at their disposal is e.g. winning the prestigious PASCAL2 and VSOCO AI competitions in 2017. They beat the teams from Microsoft, Facebook, UC Berkeley and Intel.

Inside the small warehouse on Sussex Lane, DPS CID Special Agents located three pill press machines, two kilos of cocaine, 44 pounds of marijuana, several stolen guns, a stolen car, a kilo of counterfeit Xanax pills with suspected fentanyl, and 17 pounds of fentanyl precursors.

...

"I’ve seen kids getting off of school buses nearby," said Michele Chambers. "I’d never guess anything like that was going on."

That not odd news. I doubt it’s an odd coincidence either.  But it might be an example of some very "odd” marketing.

A school bus is, you might think, the convergence of everything delightful: kids chattering away to their friends, safely on their way to school to receive the privilege of education....

Unfortunately, drugs gangs don’t see it that way at all.  You already know, even if you haven’t thought about it, that organised crime sees a school bus as part-consumer base, part-recruitment opportunity and part-shield (ie, protection from a shoot-out with law enforcement) but what you may not know is that it is often by using symbolic slang like School Bus or Teenagers that drug traffickers advertise their wares locally.

Among many other similar references: a School Bus is a yellow Xanax pill, a Schoolboy is Snow, Young Girls and Baby are MJ (but Baby can also be Snow), a Teenager is a small dose of Snow or Tina and Friends are Fenty pills.  Starting up a distribution point near a school bus stop might simply seem like a kind of sick irony but it’s likely to have many more concrete benefits for dealers, including the opportunity for coded conversations about (for example): “the volume of local traffic and the constant coming and going of school buses”.

So, you won’t find me saying “I’d never guess...” because I tend less to naiveté and more to paranoia these days.  And, although I hate to say it—because a trusting soul is a wonderful thing—it’d probably be a safer world if we were all a little more watchful and sceptical.

Officials from the Bank of Lithuania uncovered “serious infringements” of anti-money-laundering laws and “breaches and shortcomings” in controls at Transactive’s local subsidiary, according to a Jan. 20 statement. Because of the "scale and significance” of the problems, the business must stop taking on new customers and cease providing services to clients in the finance and cryptocurrency sectors pending a review, the central bank said.

Among Transactive’s digital asset customers was Singapore-based Crypto.com, which responded to the loss of service by informing its customers that Euro deposits and withdrawals had been “temporarily disabled.”  ...

The Lithuanian crackdown may help explain the Binance exchange’s well-publicized issues with Euro- and GBP-based withdrawals last week... multiple Binance customers in Europe reported the sudden unexplained absence of a ‘withdraw’ button on both the Binance website and app last week.

....the Lithuanian crackdown came just days after a global law enforcement effort to bring down the Bitzlato exchange. While a relatively small player, Bitzlato was notorious for its dealings with Russia’s Hydra ‘darknet’ market and its largely criminal customer base.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) singled out Binance as Bitzlato’s top receiving counterparty. Reuters subsequently reported that Binance processed over 200,000 transactions for Bitzlato customers involving nearly $346 million worth of BTC. ...

Getting back to Crypto.com, at the same time it was rejigging its European financial dealings, the exchange also appears to have made changes to its American banking connections...

In November 2021, Crypto.com announced an ‘integration’ with Silvergate Bank, the crypto-friendly U.S. bank that formerly counted Binance and FTX/Alameda Research among its clients. The integration offered Crypto.com’s institutional clients the use of Silvergate’s controversial Silvergate Exchange Network (SEN) for real-time, 24/7 U.S. dollar transfers to and from Crypto.com.

“There’s a chance that the game’s popularity will decline, which might cause the IIIvium token’s value to drop”

“All ILV incentives from the yield farm are frozen for a year before they can be withdrawn”

🤔

Speaking of value, Illuvium experienced one helluva crazy price spike at the end of May 2021, when it shot up to an ATH of $2868.95, and another at the end of November 2021, achieving a high of $1848.46.  From there it declined consistently over 12 months and was fluctuating around $40 a year later.

ILV has been rallying of late. That may be a response to the launch of Illuvium: Zero last month. $94.42M of ILV has been traded in 24h and the price has risen by 56.47% in just the past 7 days. The current price is $92.20 per ILV. Still, that’s a long way off the ATH, though, right?

So, I guess my “odd news” point is that gaming trends, crypto market volatility, currency risk and credit risk are all separate dimensions of the financial risks you take on with play-to-earn games, if you decide to donate your time/labour to a game by way of investment (rather than hobbying). Personally, I find it a little odd that crypto journalism doesn’t try to sketch out these risks the way that TradFi journalists would feel bound to do but I get that the sentiment around crypto is entirely different.

Anyway.... dodging round the ice hero pillars to capture dangerous beasts in the overworld with those shards sounds awesome. And the value of processing IRL stress by chillaxing with a good capture game...? Priceless.

That's an odd headline and I don't really know where to start:

There are no UK F-16s and no plans to invest in them. 🤷🏻‍♀️

The nearest British jet is a Typhoon (which is arguably better in some respects).

The impracticability consideration relates primarily to the super-sophisticated F-35s, not to F-16s, which have been built under licence in, eg, Turkey, and bought and flown all around the world.

The US is (obviously) not being led by UK on this and would not enjoy the implication of coordination here.

There is a grand history of countries saying they will not supply a certain type of equipment to Ukraine only to do a u-turn in short order and so the lede here is probably "the US may possibly be thinking about supplying Vipers to Ukraine".

Trump rambles incoherently on social media in a self-pitying vein about Alphonse “Al” Capone and calls the FBI “intelligence lowlifes” and “these Misfits” (presumably in reference to the 2021 film about a gold heist rather than the 1961 Marilyn Monroe/Clark Gable film about a mustang rancher, but ...🤷🏻‍♀️)

Mask Network enables users of Twitter to send cryptocurrency, interact with decentralized applications, and share encrypted content. 

Mask Network is up with news that Elon might be incorporating crypto payments into Twitter.

Nothing odd about that but, since you ask, here’s something from a couple of years ago....

Mask Network, founded in 2017, launched $MASK in February 2021 via Mask's Initial Twitter Offering (ITO) feature.  

If you take the stocks of companies like 3M and Honeywell International to be very rough proxies for public sentiment about the strength of PPE manufacturers (cf face masks), then you can say that MASK token launched when public confidence levels were at their highest. This is particularly true in the case of Honeywell which went on something of a tear from March 2020 (as one would expect) to hit an all-time high of $228.06 on August 16, 2021, with a sharp little rally occurring in late February 2021. What is interesting about that, perhaps, is that the vaccine roll-out in January/February 2021—which might arguably have portended a diminution in demand for face masks—didn’t dim the “pro-PPE” sentiment but seemed to spur it on to new highs.

You say I'm the CEO (or is that Chair? Major shareholder?) 🤪... well, let me be the one to figure out when feedback is required (how are our people feeling?) and when it's not (you're out on an unjustified limb with your crazy conspiracy theories, Perks).

In so far as we have anything at all in this, my contribution to it has been to throw myself over the wall of respectable public opinion and into the hinterland of crazy. To do that takes...a lot of something or other. It's like putting creative writing out there, only not nearly as much fun. It means I get plenty of strange looks and carry an extraordinary amount of baggage—the baggage of IRL failure and ostracisation. What I don't need to add to that is a raft of my own agents and editors telling me, after self-publication, that the things I write are "wrong" and need...what? tweaking? deleting? reprinting? disowning? (Just think for a moment about the fact that the only way I knew for years that there was anything to this was a constant raft of thinly veiled death threats.) What I'm saying is that what I do is a vaguely creative, largely isolated, deeply personal activity which can't adapt to some kind of bizarre corporatist measurability moneyball schtick. That might work for your bit of it—the money, the strategy, the deliveries, the tips, the kilos...the god knows what—but it won't work in a world of patterns, of light and shade, of ephemeral connections, things whispered on the winds of public interest, flotsam in the wash of social media—a world of dancing words. All you will achieve is withdrawal.

On 28th October last year, the US air force announced plans to replace its entire fleet of F-15 fighter jets—officially named the "Eagle" but affectionately nicknamed "Big Bird"*—based in Okinawa, Japan, with a “rotational” force. It was a move widely (tho' not necessarily correctly) interpreted as being a lessening of commitment to the US military bases on the island, chief among which is Kadena Air Base.

In a mildly odd coincidence, that week was also a newsworthy week for the Kadena coin (KDA), a token native to the Kadena blockchain, which achieved a temporary gain in value when UK-based start-up Database of Native Assets (DNA) launched its tech enterprise "creating unique digital passports which prove authenticity and ownership of jewellery, collectibles, art, rarities and luxury goods" on the Kadena platform. 

KDA also spiked on March 11, when it was listed by Binance. That was a day after a Japanese court awarded over $11million to residents of Okinawa seeking compensation for US air operations in the context of parallel legal claims which also sought to bring an end to US air operations altogether.

In fact, the history of Kadena runs broadly inverse to the fortunes of US military operations in Okinawa.

Kadena was initiated in June 2016, a couple of months after an article appeared in the Japan Times on 27 April outlining and substantiating concerns expressed by US veterans that they were victims of exposure to Agent Orange and/or Agent Pink while stationed on the island.

The initial successful seed funding round for Kadena took place within two months of an award of $265 million to residents of Okinawa in 2017, one month after a US sailor was arrested for exposing himself and masturbating in front of Japanese women in Kitanakagusuku Village, one day before demonstrations in Henoko and at the end of a period of unexplained difficulty in retaining and deploying Japanese security guards to the bases.

And on 11 April 2018, Kardena closed another funding round on the same day that a court in Okinawa sentenced a U.S. Marine based there to four years in prison for killing a 61-year-old man in a car crash while driving under the influence of alcohol.**

Does that qualify as a mildly odd coincidence? Perhaps not... but, just maybe.

Or...

Perhaps that's all just a way of saying that I found this article from The National Interest last month strange, discombobulating and vaguely hyperbolic:

One of the long-running geopolitical gordian knots of our time is the question of whether Iran is poised to cross the "nuclear threshold" and what (if anything) can be done by way of intervention to prevent it becoming a nuclear power.

In 2017 for example, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace held a panel event entitled "Beyond the Nuclear Threshold" which focused on the Iran Deal.

And in July 2020, the NY Times reported that a critical threshold had been passed because Iran's stockpile of nuclear fuel was sufficiently large to make a bomb.

There are many such examples.

My interest in this story has been piqued by three or four convergent factors besides than the obvious imperative that we should all be interested in the preservation of humankind and the avoidance of mutual destruction. First, the story was of professional interest because I was involved at one stage in trying to interpret both the Iranian sanctions regime as it applied to banking and finance and assess the impact of the JCPOA on emerging regulation; second it was of personal interest, because I'm certain that "nuclear" is one of those "code words" that people use to achieve a subtextual meaning that I've never fully understood; and, third, my curiosity was piqued because I once heard someone say "Jo knows all about Israeli intelligence on Iran's nuclear programme" which was both startling and utterly perplexing to me—just at it would be to you, mutatis mutandis—but also vaguely threatening and anxiety-producing.

As to the second of these, I've given up the game of trying to interpret subtexts from an alphabetical perspective, but I will mention—because it's relevant here—that my long and deep involvement in that exercise left me with a perennial interest in the letters "NU" as they appear in the word "nuclear".

So there we have it—a variety of "nuclear" threads which have to do largely with words, not weapons, which converge only for me and which don't mean anything to anyone else at all.

But here's the (mildly) odd coincidence. On 23 January, the Institute for National Security Studies in Israel presented a strategic assessment to President Isaac Herzog which warned that Iran would soon become a "nuclear threshold state", and the term "threshold" suddenly zipped to the top of the news cycle again.

Following the presentation of the assessment, the former commander of Israel’s navy, Eliezer Marom, was reported as having said that, in light of the fact that Iran is on the threshold of obtaining nuclear weapons, it would be better to attack “now than later.”

"In my understanding, I think Israel has to attack, because the situation right now is that Iran is a threshold country - 100 percent," he replied.

That had exactly the effect one would suppose—inflamed tensions and more than a frisson of geopolitical anxiety.

Meanwhile, a cryptocurrency token named "Threshold" also hit the crypto news on 23 January when Coinbase listed it as a new asset on its roadmap:

Threshold (T), which nearly doubled in price following the listing, is the umbrella token under which two other companies and their tokens are in the process of merging (following a proposal that was adopted at the end of 2021 and initiated in February last year). Those tokens are produced by Keep Network (KEEP), and NuCypher (NU). KEEP and NU will be delisted on 6th February. Transfers of assets to Threshold from KEEP and NU have been possible from 25th January.