It's been a while since I've written about the former president of the US, Donald J Trump, but he's recently announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential elections, likely in an attempt to shield himself from potential legal consequences of investigations into his involvement with the January 6th insurrection, and the Mar-a-Lago classified and top-secret documents case (and likely many other crimes).
I might well be stealing Mark's thunder here, as he has written extensively on NFTs in the past.
A couple of weeks ago I noticed a video from a YouTube channel I keep an eye on for its coverage of cryptocurrency scams that looked interesting - the tale of Pixelmon, an NFT project that had recently sold over 7,000 NFTs for a grand total of around NZ$100 million. By the end of the week, Stuff and 1News had covered the story. Why did this project make the news here in NZ? Because the NFTs had been unveiled, and they were abysmal. And why did this story pique my interest? Because the person in charge of the project had been “doxxed” (had their identity revealed), and a screenshot of their LinkedIn profile in the video I watched showed that he had recently graduated from the University of Waikato - so it appeared he was one of our own, a Kiwi.
It's nice to be reminded sometimes that the number of skeptics in society is likely to exceed the number of Skeptics in our Society by several orders of magnitude. I was reminded of this recently after seeing a couple of interactions on social media, one where a friend tackled misinformation, and another where it was the friend that was spreading misinformation. In both interactions, the misinformation was quickly and easily debunked, with references given to sources. The first one was about Ukraine's president Zelenskyy being a Nazi, as “proven” by a picture of him holding up a football (I'm from England, so for all you kiwis I mean soccer here) shirt with his name and a swastika on it. The second is about the recent parliament protest, with an image of a child who had supposedly been pepper sprayed by the Police.
I've written in the past about NFTs - Non-Fungible Tokens, as they're called, and Mark has written about cryptocurrencies and the scams that surround them.
This week has seen the news of the ship (the Ever Given) that's been stuck for days in the Suez Canal. Interestingly, having glanced at the headlines and pictures, in my mind the ship was called the Evergreen, but that's the name of the company that runs it (Evergreen Marine).