Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Big Money Behind the Big Lie Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy are being promoted by rich and powerful conservative groups that are determined to win at all costs. (New Yorker)
• A Crimson Tide of Debt Instead of propelling students into the middle class, many public institutions such as the University of Alabama are leaving them saddled with large loans. (The Atlantic)
• Where a Vast Global Vaccination Program Went Wrong After months of struggle, the U.N.-backed Covax alliance will soon have many more doses, promising relief for vaccine shortages in poorer countries. But it faces a deepening crisis: difficulties getting shots into arms as the Delta variant spreads. (New York Times)
• Phantom Warships Are Courting Chaos in Conflict Zones The latest weapons in the global information war are fake vessels behaving badly. (Wired)
• ‘It has to be known what was done to us’: Natick couple harassed by eBay tell their story for the first time In June 2020, federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against six former eBay employees and a contractor. The company apologized to the Steiners, and in a lengthy statement said it had conducted its own investigation that had resulted in terminating all of the employees charged by the government plus communications chief Wymer, who has not been charged. (Boston Globe)
• Snowden — Apophenia: How the Internet Transforms the Individual into a Conspiracy of One The easier it becomes to produce information, the harder that information becomes to consume — and the harder we have to work to separate the spurious from the significant. (Continuing Ed)
• Here’s how police can get your data — even if you aren’t suspected of a crime And you may never know they did it. (Vox) see also What Philadelphia Reveals About America’s Homicide Surge There are many explanations for the rise in killings in U.S. cities, including the pandemic and the choices made in response to it. In Philadelphia, the causes, the human costs — and the suffering — are particularly stark. (ProPublica)
• Yep, it’s bleak, says expert who tested 1970s end-of-the-world prediction A controversial MIT study from 1972 forecast the collapse of civilization – and Gaya Herrington is here to deliver the bad news (The Guardian)
• What I Heard in the White House Basement: I knew the president had clear and straightforward talking points—I’d written them. (The Atlantic)
• Wayne and Susan LaPierre Ordered Their Hunted Elephants Turned Into Stools and a Trashcan The NRA chief and his wife had a long list of trophies shipped and taxidermied — all on a contractor’s tab. (The Trace)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Sandy Rattray, Chief Investment Officer of Man Group and a member of the Man Group Executive Committee. Man provides a range of funds for institutional and private investors globally and is the world’s largest publicly traded hedge fund company, with about $125 billion in funds under management.
“The vaccinated said their top five targets of blame are 1) the unvaccinated (79%), 2) Trump (36%), 3) conservative media (33%)” — so about one in three cited the damaging role of right-wing TV, radio, etc.
Source: Axios
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
