Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption, and policy failures:
• Times Of Fraud, Mania & Chicanery A 19th century account of financial fraud that reads as relevant today as it did back then: “Without any great violence, all the incentives to commercial crime may be brought under the one common rubric — the desire to make money easily and in a hurry. (Investor Amnesia)
• What a Wuhan lab leak would really mean Scientists and the media eagerly denounced credible evidence as a conspiracy theory (UnHerd) see also Timeline: How the Wuhan lab-leak theory suddenly became credible The source of the coronavirus that has left more than 3 million people dead around the world remains a mystery. But in recent months the idea that it emerged from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) — once dismissed as a ridiculous conspiracy theory — has gained new credence. (Washington Post)
• How Parking Destroys Cities Parking requirements attack the nature of the city itself, subordinating density to the needs of the car. (The Atlantic)
• Heat Listed Chicago’s predictive policing program told a man he would be involved with a shooting. But it couldn’t determine which side of the gun he would be on. Instead, it made him the victim of a violent crime — twice. (The Verge)
• ‘FIND THIS FUCK:’ Inside Citizen’s Dangerous Effort to Cash In On Vigilantism Inside Citizen’s Dangerous Effort to Cash In On Vigilantism Internal documents, messages, and roadmaps show how crime app Citizen is pushing the boundary of what a private, app-enabled vigilante force may be capable of. (Vice)
• California’s stem cell program found a disease cure, but it’s being blocked by a biotech firm Orchard Therapeutics didn’t shelve the cure because it has any misgivings about the cure’s safety and efficacy — in fact, the company just touted a glowing report published just days ago in the New England Journal of Medicine. Rather, Orchard says it did so purely for “business reasons,” meaning that it wanted to invest instead in treatments for more common diseases with more potential for profits. (Los Angeles Times)
• Hoo Boy, the Feds Sure Have a Lot of Dirt on Big Rudy Rudy Giuliani, gin-pickled simulacrum of a lawyer and former personal attorney to Donald Trump, is in even deeper shit than was previously known. And the shit he was in was already known to be very deep. (Gizmodo)
• ‘A united nations of crime’: how Marbella became a magnet for gangsters The new international crime organisations have made Marbella their centre of operations. And as violence rises, the police lag far behind (The Guardian)
• Five days, 100 vaccine doses and a wildfire of conspiracy theories For months, anti-vaccine conspiracy theories had ripped across northern California’s wine country, invisible wildfires of untruth spreading through some of the country’s most vulnerable communities. (Washington Post) see also Influencers say they were offered money to discredit the Pfizer vaccine. In France, some suspect Russia is behind it. Influencers say they were offered money to discredit the Pfizer vaccine. In France, some suspect Russia is behind it. (Washington Post)
• The Marathon Men Who Can’t Go Home In the north Bronx, a small group of elite Ethiopian runners struggle to survive. The persecution they fled was far more harrowing. (GQ)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Carson Block of Muddy Waters. The firm is known for its scathing in-depth research reports and shorts of various companies, several of which have collapsed.
Over 30 Million Americans Believe in QAnon’s Most Outrageous Conspiracy
Source: Vice
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