Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• ‘Shameful’: AARP’s partnership with healthcare giant faces backlash amid recent controversies: AARP has no fiduciary duty to seniors or retirees. They are up for sale to the highest bidder. Numerous transactions with various corporate entities confirms this. (Fox Business)
• ‘It’s a Heist’: Real Federal Auditors Are Horrified by DOGE: WIRED talked to actual federal auditors about how government auditing works—and how DOGE is doing the opposite. (Wired) see also Inside Elon Musk’s ‘Digital Coup’ Musk’s loyalists at DOGE have infiltrated dozens of federal agencies, pushed out tens of thousands of workers, and siphoned millions of people’s most sensitive data. The next step: Unleash the AI. (Wired)
• The Unbelievable Scale of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem: Meta pirated millions of books to train its AI. Search through them here. (The Atlantic)
• America’s Real Criminal Element Is Lead: The hidden villain behind violent crime, lower IQs, and maybe even the ADHD epidemic. (RIP Kevin Drum). (Mother Jones)
• The End Game: A World Where Everything is Broken, and Nobody Cares: Welcome to the New Gilded Age—Same Greed, Different Billionaires. (The American Pamphleteer)
• Why Techdirt Is Now A Democracy Blog (Whether We Like It Or Not) When the very institutions that made American innovation possible are being systematically dismantled, it’s not a “political” story anymore. It’s a story about whether the environment that enabled all the other stories we cover will continue to exist. (Techdirt)
• The NIH’s Grant Terminations Are ‘Utter and Complete Chaos’ The Trump administration is rapidly canceling hundreds of grants, in the most aggressive attack yet on American science. (The Atlantic)
• Battle without Bullets: The Christian Right and Fourth Generation Warfare: Aside from resorting to one of the oldest and vilest of populist appeals, prospective voters—most of whom had likely never heard of Protocols— were being misled that the ruling political establishment was “failed” and “corrupt,” and that it had “robbed our working class” and “stripped our country of its wealth.” The direct and devastating assault on the legitimacy of the country’s government and political, economic, and media elites, suggested was comprised of predators who posed an existential threat to voters’ towns, companies, jobs, and families; it had, he suggested, no moral right to govern. (Political Research Associates)
• The Diseases Are Coming: Elon Musk’s slash-and-burn government tear will have lasting effects on global health. (The Atlantic)
• Should a Student Reporter Face Prosecution for Embedding with Protesters? Dilan Gohill won an award for his work at the Stanford Daily, but his coverage of campus protests has set university officials against him. (Columbia Journalism Review)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview this weekend with Jim O’Shaughnessy, founder and CEO of O’Shaughnessy Ventures LLC (“OSV”), an investor in and accelerator of creative endeavors, fueling the worlds of art/science/tech. He is also the host of the Infinite Loops pod. Previously, he was founder andchair OSAM, which developed Canvas custom index (since sold to Franklyn Templeton), and Firector of Systematic Equity for Bear Stearns. His latest book is “Two Thoughts: A Timeless Collection of Infinite Wisdom.”
Why the Maga mindset is different
Source: Financial Times
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