One of us went home with her arm in a sling; the other three developed itchy, painful red blisters all over our faces and extremities. If you’re looking for a sign from God to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two.
Yes. We’ve a pair today, sometimes getting jostled out of the way by a male cardinal.
“Using a rover-enabled chemical experiment that had never been performed on another planet before, researchers detected more than 20 #organic #molecules in clay-rich #Martian sandstones.” #Mars #life #IsThereLifeonMars? gizmodo.com/nasas-curios...
Important read:
Photo of a tiny yellow goldfinch perched on a bird feeder.
#Goldfinch at the bird feeder, Apr 20/26
#goldfinches #birds #BirdSky
As this insightful piece in #TheAtlantic points out, for #Trump, the universe outside him doesn’t really exist. I wrote about that his warped, obliviating vision last fall: doncurren.blogspot.com/2025/09/entr...
“This is different from classic #narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the #universe vanishes.” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
coral peony.
“This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all.”
Late stage capitalism abounds with ironies …
“If you’re looking for a sign from God as to whether hanging out with the richest man on Earth is right for you, pay attention when he sends you not one plague, but two.” www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...
“An #LLM is trained on the accumulated output of #human #writing — billions of documents, articles, conversations, books — the materialized #GeneralIntellect, scraped from the public #internet and converted into a #proprietary #asset.”
“ #Capital cannot generate #profit from something it does not own. So, it does what it has always done with #common #resources and encloses them.” open.substack.com/pub/beerandf...
Without naming President #Trump or other officials, the group promises “to take officials to task when they ignore the #ruleoflaw or distort and disregard the #facts.”
www.wsj.com/science/spac... #astronauts #democracy
3 CIBC: … well above the 0.2% consensus expectation, while the prior month's reading was revised up by a tick to 0.6%.
#retailsales #usecon
2 CIBC: However, that didn't stop #consumers from #spending elsewhere, as the control group of sales that feeds more directly into non-auto goods #consumption in #GDP (and excludes gasoline, autos, restaurants, and building materials) posted a 0.7% increase … 🧵
#usecon #retailsales
1 CIBC: #Retailsales surged in the #US in March, driven both by higher #gasoline #prices and resilience in discretionary categories. The 1.7% headline increase was above the consensus expectation of 1.4% and included a 16% jump in gasoline station receipts. 🧵
#usecon
A Financial Times graph illustrating the breakdown of the previously tight correlation of US job openings and the S&P 500 beginning at around the start of 2024.
“( #techoptimism) has also been a key driver behind the disconnect between the tougher #economic reality facing #UShouseholds … and #businesses and ever-rising stock values” open.substack.com/pub/adamtooz...
“The video narrators performed ‘ #Albertan,’ but there were these moments where you’re like, ‘OK, so this person is not from here,’ ” said Chris Ross, the senior analyst at the Observatory, who led his team’s recent probe into thousands of suspicious #YouTube #videos” www.thestar.com/news/investi...
3 Bloomberg: “Near-term caution is warranted given the market’s narrow breadth, light volume and unresolved #risks stemming from the #conflict in #Iran,” said Anthony Saglimbene at Ameriprise. #markets #stocks #stockmarkets
2 Bloomberg: JPMorgan Chase strategists today raised their year-end forecast for the #S&P500 #index to 7,600 from 7,200. The #Nasdaq100, meanwhile, logged a 13-session rally, its longest winning streak since 2013, before slipping yesterday. 🧵
#markets
A Bloomberg chart showing the percentage of S&P 500 stocks participating in the recent rally is relatively low.
1 Bloomberg: The record-breaking advance in #USstocks has many of the hallmarks of an unloved #rally. That includes #lowvolumes, muted #investorsentiment and a small group of #shares leading the charge.
The #S&P500 is up almost 9% in April, closing above 7,000 for the first time last week 🧵
#markets
2 BMO: The risky business is still supporting the #USD index, while the #Canadian dollar has weakened to $1.365 (73.2 cents US). #markets
1 BMO: #markets are in wait-and-see mode. North American #equityfutures look to recover (by about 0.3%-to-0.6%) from yesterday’s losses. #Treasury #yields nudged higher at the long end (10s just under 4.26%). #WTI prices have slipped by about a dollar
& the May contract is trading around $88/bbl. 🧵
A FRED chart showing that increases in consumer prices in the early 2020 period were more than matched by wage increases.
“Using the eve of the pandemic as a baseline, we see that large increases in #consumerprices were more than matched by large increases in #wages” open.substack.com/pub/heatherc...
“He added an Islamic prayer to be as insulting as possible, he later told senior administration officials. That, like his threat that ‘a whole civilization will die tonight,’ was ‘improvisational,’ officials told Dawsey and Linskey.” open.substack.com/pub/heatherc...
The Frogs Sing Loudly in Spring
Christi Belcourt ~ Métis
2021
“Ms. Parido’s unlikely path from selling venison nuggets and dried sardines to organizing a federally sponsored pavilion on a global stage started in 2024 …”
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/a...
“I said to Tommy once, ‘When did you last change your strings?’ ‘cause they were so caked in dirt and grit,” he remembers. “And he looked at me, like, ‘I should change them?’ And I said, ‘Well, yeah.’ And he said, ‘Well, probably about five years ago’" #guitarists www.guitarworld.com/artists/guit...
