10 Sunday Reads
Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetence, corruption, and policy failures:
• Anti-Oligarchy Activists Plan to Dox Elon Musk and Hundreds of Billionaire-Linked Homes : The Capytistas, a secretive group claiming more than $1.2 million in backing, started with Elon Musk and Tesla’s board. Members argue that those who buy political power deserve the scrutiny they’ll impose. ( Wired )
• A Chief of Staff Who ‘Will Crack Skulls’ : Trump named Stephen Miller to replace Susie Wiles, completing a decade-long climb from congressional staffer to the most powerful aide in Washington. Wiles was the guardrail; Miller is the accelerant. The two seem to split on forcing journalists to reveal government sources, with arrests among the tactics discussed. Wiles pushed back. ( The Atlantic ) see also Will Trump Be Another Andrew Johnson? : Bruce Bartlett reprints the Reconstruction chapter of his 2008 book Wrong on Race: how the Radical Republicans of the 39th Congress fought a lame-duck president who broke the law to block them. The analogy to a scorched-earth Trump facing a Democratic Congress is left for the reader. ( Bartlett’s Notations )
• Ads in Popular Apps Give Police a Powerful Tool to Spy on Users : Penlink’s Webloc is sold to police in the US, UK and worldwide. It uses technology found in weather, gaming, email and religious apps to locate people using their cellphones. ( Bloomberg free )
• America’s Backlash Against Oligarchy: Why the megabillionaires lost big Tuesday : The midterm result was a tale of many backlashes. There was the backlash of erstwhile Trump voters, particularly young white males, against high gasoline prices and the Iran War. There was the backlash of Hispanic voters against ICE and Trump’s horrific deportation policy. There was the backlash of Black voters against Republicans’ gerrymandering to negate their votes and Trump’s open racism. There was the backlash of women against the destruction of abortion rights and suppression of the Epstein files. There was a backlash of ordinary families against the loss of healthcare coverage. There was a general backlash against Trump’s bottomless corruption and lies. And there was a backlash of patriotic Americans against Trump’s bromance with Putin. ( Paul Krugman )
• Texas Pays Online School Empire For Kids Who Don’t Show Up : Stride, the nation’s largest operator of virtual public schools, has collected more than a billion dollars in taxpayer money in Texas alone. ( Businessweek )
• He Helped Deport 200 People. Now He Has Misgivings . A deputy in small-town Texas became the local face of ICE’s national crackdown. ( New York Times )
• ‘Abusing and Threatening and Harassing’: Inside the Collapse of Leo Terrell’s DOJ Antisemitism Task Force : Once the public face of the Trump administration’s campaign to reform elite universities, Leo Terrell now presides over an operation that former interns and Justice Department attorneys described as isolated, dysfunctional, and beset by internal conflict. ( The Harvard Crimson
• Through the Nazi Lens : Katja Hoyer on growing up with Guido Knopp’s history documentaries, which dominated German television before streaming, and what seeing the Third Reich through its own propaganda footage does to the viewer. ( Katja Hoyer )
• A Soldier Cut Off His Own Foot to Survive. Then Came a Daring Drone Rescue. : Pvt. Kostyantyn Vlasenko, 49, survived for months in a ruined school boiler room near Kupyansk, radioing Russian troop movements to his unit, missing part of one leg and, after the amputation, a foot on the other. Ukraine says its drone extraction was the first aerial evacuation of its kind. ( Wall Street Journal )
• Sacha Baron Cohen’s ‘Ali G: Who Iz I?’ Lands on Prime Video : Drew Taylor: the new Ali G film hits streaming less than a week after its debut. The long-awaited sequel, which marks the comedian’s directorial debut, was only in theaters for a single weekend ( The Wrap )
Video of the day : Why Didn’t Evolution Get Rid of Psychopaths? (Basically Primitive)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Ann Berry , founder and Managing Partner of Threadneedle , an operating and capital advisory platform providing strategic guidance, operating support, and capital to high-growth private companies and investment platforms. She is also General Partner of the Threadneedle Opportunity Fund , investing in data analytics, AI, and web3 companies at the seed stage alongside Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, 776 . Berry also hosts After Earnings , Morning Brew’s interview podcast with public-company CEOs/CFOs.
V oters rejected 44 of 45 data center measures on ballots nationwide.
Source: Paul Kedrosky
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