Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• Red America’s Compassion Fatigue: A Report From Mobile, Alabama. We’ve heard repeatedly from the country’s vaccine resisters. But what about the people who follow the rules? They’re ignored and forgotten—and they are in pain. (New Republic)
• Internal Alarm, Public Shrugs: Facebook’s Employees Dissect Its Election Role Company documents show that the social network’s employees repeatedly raised red flags about the spread of misinformation and conspiracies before and after the contested November vote. (New York Times)
• Can Extremists Be Deradicalized? Parents for Peace enlists ex-believers to counter the allure of Islamism, QAnon, and other ideologies. Demand has never been higher. (Businessweek)
• How an Adoption Broker Cashed In on Prospective Parents’ Dreams In just a few years, a Michigan woman took in millions of dollars, faking adoptions and ruining families’ lives along the way. (New Yorker)
• Blood, Lies, and a Drug Trials Lab Gone Bad: The system for testing pharmaceuticals in the US relies on contractors adhering to strict guidelines. But one of them chose profits over protocols. (Wired)
• Climate change is turning the cradle of civilization into a grave: Where civilization emerged between the Tigris and Euphrates, climate change is poisoning the land and emptying the villages. (Washington Post) see also Climate change is supercharging California heat waves, and the state isn’t ready Climate change is transforming the character of the West’s hottest periods — making them more frequent, more persistent, more humid and more lethal. Experts say this shift in heat waves should prompt changes in emergency notifications and public health response to keep the death toll from rising. But that isn’t happening. (Los Angeles Times)
• Five tactics used to spread vaccine misinformation in the wellness community, and why they work Experts say the content shared in some wellness communities has powerful emotional and psychological foundations that can cause even science-minded people to question the public health consensus on the ability of vaccines to help curb the spread of the coronavirus. Some voices within the wellness space are adept at building connection, gaining trust and sowing doubt — all while appealing to widely held beliefs about healthy living. (Washington Post)
• NYC Cops Log Millions Of Overtime Hours. New Yorkers Don’t Feel Safer. The NYPD has blown past annual budgets every year for at least two decades, almost entirely due to overtime costs. Those extra hours also drive up the city’s pension obligations. In fiscal 2020, New York City police officers logged more overtime hours than any other big city in the U.S., and violent crime rates still went up.(Bloomberg) see also A Subway Rider Confronted Unmasked Police Officers. They Kicked Him Out. Andrew Gilbert said he repeatedly asked two officers to wear masks in accordance with M.T.A. and Police Department policy. He was eventually pushed out of the station. (New York Times)
• What is Tommy Tuberville doing here? The college football coach turned U.S. senator objected to Biden’s victory on Jan. 6. He’s not looking back. “I have no regrets,” he says. (Washington Post)
• What The Trump Books Tell Us About Jan. 6 For the rest of our lives probably, we’ll be learning new info about the days leading up to Jan. 6. This is just phase one. (Buzzfeed)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Sukhinder Singh Cassidy author of “Choose Possibility” hailed as one of the Top 100 People in the Valley by Business Insider and a Power Woman by Elle. She has 25 years of experience founding, scaling, and running companies: She was an early hire at Junglee (acquired by Amazon), helped to build Google Maps and Local before developing Google International, was CEO of StubHub, and a co-founder of the firms Yodlee and Joyus.
COVID-19 vaccination rates and perceived country corruption
Source: Statistics_Data_Facts
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