The raised beds in our backyard are doing well so far this year. The lettuce has been growing so fast that we can barely eat enough of it. It’s too early for the peppers to have produced anything edible, but they’re flowering just fine. Only a few tiny strawberries so far but they’ve tasted amazing, way better than store-bought. No raspberries yet, they’ll be another month or so but have produced heavily for several years now. Sumac has started to grow in among them (having spread from the neighbor’s yard), I need to get medieval on it.



In the “old” raised bed on the south side of the house, the tomatoes and beans seem happy. I planted two rows of carrots (on the right and in front). The one on the right is fine but the one in front is quite spotty. They’re from the same variety of seeds, not sure why one row is so much better looking than the other. Meh, this old raised bed has always been a bit of a crap shoot. The newer backyard beds are behind two fences, the old one is exposed to predation by any deer that might wander through the neighborhood.

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

Binance launches Bitcoin mining cloud services amid SEC crackdown in the US

Other cloudmining services have been lousy “investments”, why would Binance’s be any different?

BlackRock's iShares Files Paperwork for Spot Bitcoin ETF

The SEC has rejected numerous attempts by other fund companies to launch a spot bitcoin ETF.

Coronavirus News, Analysis, and Opinion:

96.4% of Americans had COVID-19 antibodies in their blood by fall 2022

Florida Man:

DeSantis Signs Bill Blocking Direct-To-Consumer Car Sales (With A Carveout For Tesla)

You'll be shocked to hear that dealer lobbyists support the bill.

Politics:

Pardoning Is Not Enough: We Must All Perform Seppuku for Donald Trump

Counting Russia’s dead - and what it says about the changing face of the war

In recent months, the typical Russian soldier killed in Ukraine is a 34-year-old convict recruited from prison.

Trump Rejected Effort to Negotiate Settlement

One of Donald Trump’s new attorneys proposed an idea in the fall of 2022: The former president’s team could try to arrange a settlement with the Justice Department.
The attorney, Christopher Kise, wanted to quietly approach Justice to see if he could negotiate a settlement that would preclude charges, hoping Attorney General Merrick Garland and the department would want an exit ramp to avoid prosecuting a former president. Kise would hopefully “take the temperature down,” he told others, by promising a professional approach and the return of all documents.
But Trump was not interested after listening to other lawyers who urged a more pugilistic approach, so Kise never approached prosecutors, three people briefed on the matter said. A special counsel was appointed months later.

Maybe he’s laying the groundwork for an insanity defense: Trump Thinks He’s Getting His Boxes Back

Putin is setting up excuses to protect himself in case his war in Ukraine fails, says ex-CIA officer

If he fails, I’m not sure that any excuse will prevent him from failing out a window.

the GOP's latest “Biden scandal” collapses into another clownshoes clusterfuck

Behind Trump’s Promise to ‘Go After’ Biden

When Donald Trump responded to his latest indictment by promising to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to ‘go after’ President Biden and his family, he signaled that a second Trump term would fully jettison the post-Watergate norm of Justice Department independence.
The naked politics infusing Mr. Trump’s headline-generating threat underscored something significant. In his first term, Mr. Trump gradually ramped up pressure on the Justice Department, eroding its traditional independence from White House political control. He is now unabashedly saying he will throw that effort into overdrive if he returns to power.
Mr. Trump’s promise fits into a larger movement on the right to gut the F.B.I., overhaul a Justice Department conservatives claim has been ‘weaponized’ against them and abandon the norm — which many Republicans view as a facade — that the department should operate independently from the president.

Supreme Court Upholds Native American Adoption Law

Turd Blossom opines: Karl Rove in Journal op-ed: Trump ‘will pay a high price’ in Mar-a-Lago case

“The blame for this calamity rests solely on Mr. Trump and his childish impulse to keep mementos from his time in the Oval Office, no matter what the law says.”

France presses EU to declare trade war against China

The GOP’s remarkable views of Trump’s classified documents

Multiple polls suggest that Republicans don’t particularly appreciate the potential gravity of the situation or its basic details.

Melania Trump Is Apparently in a Zen Place About Her Husband Potentially Going to Prison

Harris to deliver speech in North Carolina on anniversary of Roe v. Wade reversal

The vice president is set to deliver the speech in Charlotte exactly a year after the Supreme Court overturned the 1973 landmark decision on abortion rights.

It’s probably not a coincidence that she’s giving the speech in what used to be a solid red state but is now trending purplish.

Antitrust Has a Generic-Drug Problem

Brand-name drugmakers like to pay lower-cost rivals not to compete—and courts too often let them.

He couldn’t handle losing the election.

He took our national secrets with him to cosplay the Commander in Chief.

He showed them off and left them strewn all over Mar-a-Lago as a symbol of his power.

He refused to give them back. Even lied about it.

There. You’re caught up.

— Jack E. Smith ⚖️ (@7Veritas4) June 15, 2023

Serendipity:

First synthetic human embryo raises ethical issues

How to Survive a Devastating Earthquake—and Firestorm

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