Programming Note: I am traveling for a few days, and that has historically meant lighter posting and greater odds of higher volatility…
Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetence, corruption, and policy failures:
• Cabinet Apocalypse: A News Review in an Imagined Conversation: “Calling this meeting to order. That was a long speech that I just gave. State of the Union. Long speech. Not going to stand up and do that again next year. So let’s hear it. Plans to make sure I don’t have to. Plans to end the United States by a year from now. Around the table. Go. Start us off, Linda.” (Thinking about…)
• Binance Employees Find $1.7 Billion in Crypto Was Sent to Iranian Entities: Binance pledged to crack down on crime. But internal investigators at the world’s largest crypto exchange continued to find evidence of potential legal violations on the platform. After Internal Binance investigations uncovered massive flows to sanctioned Iranian entities — and employees who flagged it were fired. (New York Times) see also Binance—Whose Founder Was Pardoned—Now Holds 87% Of Trump’s Stablecoin: The exchange whose CEO received a presidential pardon now dominates the market for the Trump-linked USD1 stablecoin. (Forbes)
• ‘Don’t go to the US – not with Trump in charge’: the UK tourist with a valid visa detained by ICE for six weeks: A British traveler with proper documentation was detained by immigration authorities. The chilling effect on international travel to the U.S. is growing. Karen Newton was in America on the trip of a lifetime when she was shackled, transported, and held for weeks on end. With tourism to the US under increasing strain, she says, ‘If it can happen to me, it can happen to anyone’(The Guardian)
• The Real Reason Anthropic Wants Guardrails: The Atlantic digs into what’s really behind Anthropic’s resistance to Pentagon pressure — it’s not just ethics, it’s a calculated bet on where AI’s long-term value lies. (The Atlantic)
• The Looming Taiwan Chip Disaster That Silicon Valley Has Long Ignored: If China invades Taiwan and cuts off its chip exports to American companies, the tech industry and the U.S. economy would be crippled. (NYTimes)
• They Fought for the C.I.A. in Afghanistan. In America, They’re Living in Fear. Afghan operatives who risked their lives working for U.S. intelligence are now in the U.S. — terrified of deportation by the government they served. A shooting in Washington, D.C., threw their immigration status into jeopardy — and brought attention to a long-hidden dimension of America’s war. (New York Times)
• X Really Is Pulling Users to the Right: Algorithmic radicalization has now come for the elites, too. It’s not your imagination. The platform’s algorithmic and editorial choices are measurably shifting its user base’s political orientation. (New York Magazine) see also The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem: How did the GOP become a haven for slogans and ideas straight out of the Third Reich? It’s not a fringe issue anymore. The Atlantic examines how extremist elements have become embedded in the GOP’s coalition and why the party can’t — or won’t — purge them. (The Atlantic)
• DoJ cases against protesters keep collapsing as officers’ lies are exposed in court: A string of embarrassing defeats for prosecutors as federal agents’ testimony falls apart under scrutiny as experts condemn DoJ effort to cast people as ‘violent perpetrators’. The pattern is hard to ignore. (The Guardian)
• 40 Iranian Doctors and Nurses Describe a Massacre: As street protests spread across Iran in early January, the authorities turned off the internet. Most of the world didn’t see the bloody crackdown that followed. We surveyed Iranian medical workers across 14 cities and 11 provinces about their experiences treating wounded protesters. Despite great personal risk, they shared their stories. Medical workers who treated victims of Iran’s 2022 protest crackdown break their silence, describing in harrowing detail what they witnessed in hospitals and morgues. (New York Times)
• I am a 15-year-old girl. Let me show you the vile misogyny that confronts me on social media every day: Anonymous: Objectification, hate, rape threats: the politicians debating online abuse mean well, but to truly understand, they need to see what I see. (The Guardian)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business this weekend with Jeff Chang, cofounder and President of VEST. The firm manages over $55 billion in client assets across various “Buffered” and “Target Outcome” strategies. Backed by Y Combinator, the firm launched in 2012 and pioneered an approach to portfolio construction based on defined outcomes and engineered certainty.
Why English-speaking countries have especially bad housing crises is their common law systems (adversarial and litigious) vs judge-led civil law systems elsewhere
Source: @jburnmurdoch
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