Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• As the pandemic exploded, a researcher saw the danger. China’s leaders kept silent. kept silent. (Washington Post)
• In Florida, DeSantis punishes Disney — by giving it a big tax cut Up in their corporate suite, executives of the Walt Disney Co. must be laughing themselves silly. They could only have watched in amazement as Florida’s Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, pursuing his vendetta against the company for its opposition to his so-called “Don’t Say Gay” law, signed a measure that awards the company a tax break estimated at $164 million a year and stuck voters in the Orlando area with the cost. (Los Angeles Times) see also DeSantis aims at Disney and hits Florida’s taxpayers Aspiring culture warriors soon learn that government cannot engineer sweeping changes into existence. (MSNBC)
• War Is Making One of the Richest Countries Even Richer Hosting the football World Cup is a coup for Qatar, but it’s Europe’s hunt to replace Russian natural gas that will give the Gulf state real influence. (Bloomberg)
• ‘Lives were being ruined’: the dark history of Girls Gone Wild Joe Francis, the founder of the hugely successful softcore porn company, was supported by major celebrities yet allegations of violence and coercion have persisted (The Guardian)
• In the dark: Seven years, 60 countries, 935 internet shutdowns: How authoritarian regimes found an off switch for dissent. (Rest of World)
• Major Insurers Are Scamming Billions from Medicare, Whistle-Blowers Say: Billing for illnesses that don’t exist, like prostate cancer in a woman. (Bloomberg)
• A bite mark, a forensic dentist, a murder: how junk science ruins innocent lives Charles McCrory has spent decades in prison for the murder of his wife, convicted on the strength of bite mark evidence. The problem? CSI-style forensics and the parts played by so-called “expert witnesses” – forensic dentists, ballistics experts, FBI laboratory agents, lie detector examiners, blood stain investigators – is bad science. And, it in inadvertently putting innocent people behind bars. (The Guardian)
• The Sandy Hook Father Who Refused to Let Alex Jones Win Conspiracy theories have loomed over the school shooting in which his son, Noah, died. Leonard Pozner reflects on how the truth can triumph online. (New York Times) see also Alex Jones: What a POS. Nothing says “cowardice and scumbaggery” more than this complete and utter piece of sh*t. This is a man who has spent the last several years leveraging his godforsaken media company to claim time and time again that the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School was a “false flag” hoax. To refresh your recollection of those events, 20 children and six educators were killed during that tragedy. Twenty. Children. And. Six. Educators. F*ck you, Alex Jones. (Petition)
• The Chilling Fate of the Nurse Who Accidentally Killed a Patient What the RaDonda Vaught case says about our health care system. (Slate)
• The Price Kids Pay: Schools and police punish students with costly tickets for minor misbehavior: Across Illinois, police are ticketing thousands of students a year for in-school adolescent behavior once handled only by the principal’s office — for littering, for making loud noises, for using offensive words or gestures, for breaking a soap dish in the bathroom. (Chicago Tribune)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Michael Lewis. We discuss Season 3 of his podcast Against the Rules. We also delve into the 30th anniversary of Liar’s Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street, and his new audio recording of the book. He is also the author of Undoing Project, Moneyball, Flashboys, The Big Short, and so many others.
Twitter, Tesla and Copious Emojis: What and When Elon Musk Tweets
Source: Wall Street Journal
Sign up for our reads-only mailing list here.
~~~
To learn how these reads are assembled each day, please see this.
