Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• A Reckless Gamble: Wars rarely go to plan, especially if you believe your own rhetoric (Comment is Freed) see also Scammy Instagram ‘war pages’ are capitalizing on Ukraine conflict Beware: Despite their claims, these accounts are not run by journalists on the ground. (Input)
• The Right’s Would-Be Kingmaker Peter Thiel, one of Donald J. Trump’s biggest donors in 2016, has re-emerged as a prime financier of the Make America Great Again movement. (New York Times)
• The Abortion Pill Is Safer Than Tylenol and Almost Impossible to Get Mifepristone could—but probably won’t—revolutionize a post-Roe world. (Businessweek)
• The Lasting Legacy Of Redlining: We looked at 138 formerly redlined cities and found most were still segregated — just like they were designed to be (FiveThirtyEight)
• Who Is Behind QAnon? Linguistic Detectives Find Fingerprints Using machine learning, separate teams of computer scientists identified the same two men as likely authors of messages that fueled the viral movement. (New York Times) see also Belief in QAnon has strengthened in US since Trump was voted out, study finds Surveys by the Public Religion Research Institute reveal QAnon believers increased to 17% in September from 14% in March (The Guardian)
• The Supreme Court is not being honest with you: Justice Amy Coney Barrett appears to be quite unfamiliar with her own judicial record, and that of her colleagues. (Vox)
• Austrian Programmer And Ex Crypto CEO Likely Stole $11 Billion Of Ether Who hacked The DAO in 2016, diverting 3.6 million ether? We identify the apparent hacker — he denies it — by following a complicated trail of crypto transactions and using a previously undisclosed privacy-cracking forensics tool. (Forbes)
• Study: ‘Stand your ground’ laws linked to 11% rise in U.S. firearm homicides Stand-your-ground laws are associated with an 11 percent increase in monthly firearm homicide rates, according to the new study, with especially striking jumps in Southern states that embraced stand-your-ground early on. That amounts to 700 additional homicides each year, according to the findings published Monday in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal. (Washington Post)
• Florida governor: school districts that defied no-mask mandate to lose $200m Ron DeSantis is backing a bill that would strip education funding from Democratic counties that retained Covid precautions. (The Guardian)
• Why America Has Been So Stingy In Fighting Child Poverty For decades, many American economists were pretty much obsessed with trying to document the ways in which welfare programs discouraged work, or broke up families, or encouraged pregnancy, while ignoring all the benefits that society gets from having kids grow up in a more financially secure environment. Aizer, Hoynes, and Lleras-Muney analyze research papers in America’s top academic journals since the 1960s, and they find that prior to 2010, fewer than 27 percent of all articles about welfare programs even bothered to try and document their benefits. (NPR)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business next week with Sebastien Mallaby, whom we previously had on as a guest (MiB is here) discussed “More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and the Making of a New Elite.” His new book is a must-read, a powerful tour de force on the history of the VC: “The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future.”
200 Years of Systems of Government
Source: Visual Capitalist
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