Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The World Is Still Short of Everything. Get Used to It. Pandemic-related product shortages — from computer chips to construction materials — were supposed to be resolved by now. Instead, the world has gained a lesson in the ripple effects of disruption. (New York Times)
• “A Vast Criminal Racket”: Sebastian Junger on How the U.S. Corrupted Afghanistan Four successive American administrations utterly betrayed the public trust—and lost a righteous war. (Vanity Fair) see also The Coming Demonization of Afghan Refugees The resettlement of Afghan refugees in the U.S. will be a major political flashpoint, it’s a fight Dems can – and must- win. (Message Box)
• The Surfside Condo Was Flawed and Failing. Here’s a Look Inside. How faulty design and construction could have contributed to the collapse of the building in South Florida. (New York Times)
• The Joe Rogan COVID Experience Is Following Its Deranged, Destined Course: Just asking questions, never learning a single thing. He has surfaced illiterate observations on how otherwise healthy young people might not need to take the COVID-19 vaccines. There’s a whiff of inevitability to be found in Rogan’s admission that he contracted COVID-19 after performing a bunch of stand-up shows in Florida last month— one of the literal worst times to perform comedy shows in Florida. (Slate)
• Bitcoin Uses More Electricity Than Many Countries. How Is That Possible? Cryptocurrencies have emerged as one of the most captivating, yet head-scratching, investments in the world. They soar in value. They crash. They’ll change the world, their fans claim, by displacing traditional currencies like the dollar, rupee or ruble. They’re named after dog memes. And in the process of simply existing, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, one of the most popular, use astonishing amounts of electricity. (New York Times)
• A former Marine was pulled over for following a truck too closely. Police took nearly $87,000 of his cash. As he stood on the side of the road, police searched the vehicle, pulling nearly $87,000 in a zip-top bag from Lara’s trunk and insisting a drug-sniffing dog had detected something on the cash. It was only after Lara got a lawyer, sued and talked with The Washington Post about his ordeal that the government said it would return his money.(Washington Post)
• Why Facebook Won’t Stop Pushing Propaganda Vaccine disinformation. The Big Lie. The hate poisoning your community. It all goes back to Mark Zuckerberg’s business model. (Mother Jones)
• A little schadenfreude and Gov. DeSantis’ COVID incompetence The governor and his supporters have been ‘conducting a clinic in informal logical fallacies’ when it comes to COVID, writes columnist Mac Stipanovich. (Tampa Bay Times) see also DeSantis promotes Covid drug that top donor invests in DeSantis has been flying around the state promoting Regeneron, a monoclonal antibody treatment that was used on then-President Donald Trump after he tested positive for Covid. (NBC News)
• Which Senators And Representatives Vote In Favor Of Democracy? Its complicated, but at least we have some nice looking charts to help explain it all. (FiveThirtyEight)
• Why Texas’s Abortion Law May Go Too Far For Most Americans For the first time in decades, the country will get a glimpse of what happens when abortion is suddenly unavailable to nearly all women in one of the nation’s most populous states. For better or worse, Americans’ views on when abortion should be legal will probably get a lot clearer. (FiveThirtyEight) see also The Conservative Justices’ Reasoning in the Texas Abortion Case Is Legal Mansplaining It’s almost impossible to not go one further and declare that the court opted to end virtually all abortion rights in Texas, in the full knowledge that they were blessing an unconstitutional and brutal piece of lawless vigilantism, because it’s only about women. (Slate)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Robert Hormats, Managing Director at Tiedemann Advisors. Previously, he spent 25 years at Goldman Sachs (International), rising to Vice Chairman. Hormats has served five U.S. presidential administrations, most recently as Under Secretary of State for Economic Growth, Energy, and the Environment from 2009 through 2013.
7.3 million US homeowners — more than 14% of all mortgage properties — have been in a forbearance plan over the past 15 months.
Source: @Black_KnightInc via @SoberLook
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