Elizabeth Warren Questions the Role Cryptocurrencies Played In Hamas Attack

(Permanent Musical Accompaniment To The Last Post Of The Week From The Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian)

We have been skeptical about cryptocurrency here at the shebeen for years, based on our firm belief that, if someone comes up to you and says, “Hey, I invented new money!,” he is probably going to steal something from you. Now, it seems that Hamas did a lot of business in crypto in the run up to its attack on Israel last weekend. This has brought crypto back onto the radar of Senator Professor Warren. From Politico:

Senate Banking Chair Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio) — one of the industry’s fiercest critics — is vowing to use his committee to examine the role crypto played in the Israel attacks. The Hamas connection is also giving fresh momentum to a push by Warren to pass a bill that would impose new anti-money laundering rules on crypto — an increasingly bipartisan effort that digital asset firms have tried to quash. “The danger of crypto-financed terrorism is real and should be an urgent priority for Congress,” Warren said in an interview. “There’s a growing bipartisan coalition of senators who are committed to passing this bill and fighting back against terrorism worldwide by choking off the financing.”

While crypto’s use by Israel’s attackers is still being understood, the linkage is shaping up to be the latest in a series of political liabilities incurred since last year’s market meltdown and arrest of Bankman-Fried.

Warren’s bill is co-sponsored by Republican Roger Marshall of Kansas. And, if Politico is correct, the Hamas connection caught the crypto industry and its substantial lobbying arm flatfooted.

Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), who sits on the House Financial Services and Intelligence committees, said the latest controversy underscores why crypto advocates need to better “articulate what their use case is…As long as the use case is some weird combination of libertarian fantasies and drug dealers and terrorists, members of Congress are not going to be excited to give the industry the benefit of the doubt,” he said.

I’m no marketing whiz, but I don’t think, “Join Our Weird Combination of Libertarian Fantasy And Terrorism” is going to fly.

One of the least savory elements of Ron DeSantis’ unsavory rise to presidential also-ran is his deliberate destruction of New College, the small, progressive institution that wasn’t bothering anyone until DeSantis and his hatchetman, Christopher Rufo, chose to make it their lab rat. The Sarasota Herald-Tribune set about counting the cost.

New College of Florida lost more than twice the normal number of students it usually does between fall semesters this year, according to a report sent to faculty from the college’s provost Wednesday. The college also had “by far” the lowest retention rate of first-year students in the college’s history, at 64.9%, Interim Provost Brad Thiessen wrote. The drop in retention rate and the spike in the departure rate followed the dramatic overhaul launched by Gov. Ron DeSantis early this year with the appointment of six new members to the board of trustees, who fired the sitting president and appointed former DeSantis education commissioner Richard Corcoran as president. Between fall 2022 and the start of the 2023-24 academic year, Thiessen said 27% of New College’s 691 students left the school, the equivalent of about 186 students. That compares with 13% and 14% the preceding two years, respectively, according to the report, or about 93 students per year.

Here’s the herring in the pickle barrel.

Corcoran and the board members are tasked with transforming New College into a more classical liberal arts school, akin to the Christian, conservative Hillsdale College in Michigan. The school’s leadership moved quickly to dissolve the college’s diversity department, abolish the gender studies program, fire an LGBTQ librarian and deny tenure to the faculty members set to receive it. Meanwhile, in this year’s U.S. News and World Report rankings of top liberal arts colleges in the country, New College dropped 24 spots compared to the previous year to No. 100. Corcoran also has established an athletics department to drive up enrollment numbers, which increased first-year enrollment to a record figure. However, increased enrollment came with a decrease in overall grade point average and test scores, which had historically helped the school earn a national reputation as a top public liberal arts college.

Well, we certainly couldn’t have the good folks at the Pizza Ranch in Bettandorf finding that out, now, can we?

Oh, look, there’s another sucker stepping up to the carny booth. From the New York Times:

Representative Austin Scott of Georgia, a mainstream conservative and ally of the ousted former Speaker Kevin McCarthy, said he would seek the nomination. He effectively was putting himself forward as a protest candidate against Mr. Jordan, a hard-right Republican who is the chairman of the Judiciary Committee. The surprise move promised to prolong the infighting that has raged among Republicans since a hard-right faction of Mr. Jordan’s supporters forced out Mr. McCarthy last week and then refused to back the party’s chosen successor, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, for the post.

Mr. Scott’s entry into the race was unexpected and came after no one else raised a hand on Friday to challenge Mr. Jordan. Mr. Scott, in his seventh term representing a largely rural and deeply conservative district in southern Georgia, has seethed publicly against the hard-right rebels who removed Mr. McCarthy. He pledged to return Congress to its normal operations. “When I woke up this morning, I had no intention of doing this,” Mr. Scott told reporters. He added: “But I believe if we as Republicans are going to make the majority, we have to do the right things the right way. And we’re not doing that right now.”

To his credit, Scott did vote to certify the results of the 2020 election, so I guess that makes him “mainstream.” From CNN:

Earlier this month, Scott criticized the Republicans who voted to remove McCarthy as speaker and said Republican leadership “will have to decide to either hold these members accountable or lose the faith of the rest of the conference.” “The eight Republicans who supported Joe Biden and the Democrats’ desire to remove Kevin McCarthy as Speaker are nothing more than grifters who have handed control of the House to the Democratic Party in the name of their own glory and fundraising,” he said in a statement. After receiving a bachelor’s in business administration from the University of Georgia, Scott spent 20 years owning and operating an insurance brokerage firm. He began his political career in the Georgia House of Representatives in 1997, where he served until being elected to Congress in 2011.

Good luck with that, Congressman. Keep in mind the eternal wisdom of Guy Clark — Lord, you’d think there’s less fools in this world.

Weekly WWOZ Pick To Click: “Oye Isabel” (Iguanas): Yeah, I pretty much still love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathe Archives: Here, from 1925, is the airship Los Angeles on a visit to Mayaguez. “Natives Throng Along The Shore”? I mean, really. History is so cool, but subtitles often are not.

I’m getting a little queasy at the people referring to the civilians living in Gaza as “human shields.” It’s dehumanizing and renders them into little more that inanimate destruction. I never thought I’d prefer the phrase “collateral damage,” but it’s at least more honest.

Discovery Corner: Hey, look what we found! From Smithsonian:

Members of the Aasvik family were conducting their search using a metal detector outside their home in Jomfruland, a remote and sparsely populated island off mainland Norway’s southeast coast. When they reached an area of land underneath a large tree, the device indicated it had detected something. Intrigued, the family started digging. In that spot, they found two bronze ornaments that local government archaeologists later identified as brooches. The larger of the two is oval-shaped and likely helped fasten the shoulder straps of a woman’s halter-style dress. The other, smaller brooch was circular; experts initially found it more challenging to identify.

Jomfruland is rural and remote even by Norwegian standards, which are considerable. But it is the home to the the Nokken, a water troll who sometimes transforms himself into a beautiful white horse.

Both objects had been engraved with elaborate depictions of animals, as well as geometric patterns, according to Live Science’s Tom Metcalfe. Archaeologists think they were once covered in gold, based on traces still present on the items. The discovery suggests that an aristocratic Viking woman was buried at the site some 1,200 years ago.

Primo real estate for millennia, water trolls notwithstanding.

Hey, Phys.org, is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

New research being presented this Monday (Oct. 16) at the Geological Society of America’s GSA Connects 2023 meeting by Matthew Lamanna, a paleontologist and the principal dinosaur researcher at Carnegie Museum of Natural History, describes exciting fossil finds from a site known as the Cañadón Tomás Quarry in southern Argentina’s Patagonia region. “In general, dinosaurs and other continental vertebrates from the Cretaceous tend to be less known from the Southern Hemisphere than they are from the Northern, and that creates an imbalance in our understanding of biodiversity, evolution, and paleobiogeography,” says Lamanna.

This place is a dino gold mine. It was discovered because an oil company was required to do a paleological impact study before it could work there.

“The paleontological impact study was done by people from the Museo de La Plata and they found some bones belonging to hadrosaurs (large-bodied duck-billed dinosaurs)…Continued excavations at the site have revealed dozens of bones from hadrosaurs. These plant-eaters are common and well known in Northern Hemisphere sites from Late Cretaceous times, but they are comparatively rare and poorly known from Southern Hemisphere sites. Interestingly, the hadrosaur fossils at Cañadón Tomás appear to belong to individuals of multiple sizes.

So far, they also have found fossilized snakes, a couple of smaller predators, and even the jawbone of a small mammal. They all gathered there then to make us happy now.

I’ll be back on Monday as the House of Representatives shifts into overdrive and heads for the cliff. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snakeline. And wear the damn masks. Take the damn shots, especially the damn boosters, and especially the newest one. And spare a moment for the people of Israel and Gaza, the people of Ukraine, and of the earthquake zones in Iraq, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Morocco, and in the flood zone in Libya, and in the wildfire zones nearly everywhere, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’re getting.

Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976. He lives near Boston and has three children.