Avoid your eyes!mine sunday morning Look at incompetence, corruption and policy blunders:

• Police in this small Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’: AL.com conducted months of research and dozens of interviews and found that Brookside’s finances were driven by ticketing and aggressive policing. In the two-year period from 2018 to 2020, fines and forfeitures in Brookside soared by more than 640% and now account for half of the city’s total revenue. The police chief is calling for more. (Alcoa Network)

• Why Millions Think Trump Doesn’t Lie Why is Donald Trump’s ‘big lie’ so hard to discredit? It’s been a living question for more than a year, but there’s another lurking within: Do Republican officials and voters really believe Trump’s claim that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election through corrupt votes — exactly Those votes put so many Republicans in office — and if they really believed, what were their motives? (New York Times)

• Empty rooms, rotten fruit and boredom: life in quarantine on an infected cruise ship Welcome to the omicron wave of cruise ships, isolated from the world with windowless rooms and humble meals. “They were like, ‘We’re going to give you the bare minimum you need to survive.'”(Washington post)

• The true cost of policing New Jersey officials earn an average of $123,000 a year, adding tens of thousands of dollars to their salaries with little oversight. (New Jersey Net) see also Anatomy of a Murder Confession: Texas Ranger James Holland is known for luring killers into confessions. But did some of his methods — from lying to suspects to hypnotizing witnesses — also lure innocent people? (Marshall Plan)

• Revealed: Flint water poisoning allegations that never came to light A former criminal prosecution team investigating the Flint water crisis is building a racketeering case against state officials. Then the team is disbanded (protector)

• Texas grid failure is a warm-up A year after the deadly blackout, officials have done little to prevent the next one – and it could be worse. (Texas Monthly)

• How refrigerators are proxies for climate catastrophe: Developments in cooling technology help explain why so-called solutions to global warming are only making things worse. (New Yorker)

• Sex toys, cybercrime and bike sponsorship: NextHash’s bizarre tale What are the clues linking bicycles to North Korean military hacking and the adult industry? NextHash, the last title sponsor of the Qhubeka team. (Cycling Tips)

• Revealed: The billionaire who funded the coup think tank Conservative big donors, including DeVoses and Bradleys, are pouring big money into the Claremont Institute think tank, fueling Trump’s electoral fraud illusions. (Rolling Stones) see also The time to prosecute fake Republican voters is long overdue Those individuals who signed and delivered fraudulent Electoral College ballots claiming their state voted for Donald Trump must be held accountable. (barrier)

• The Destruction of Joss Whedon The creator of Buffy, once a Hollywood feminist icon, is now accused of being a misogynistic outcast. How did he get here? (Condor)

Be sure to check out our Master of Business interview Portfolio Manager this weekend with Tina Vandersteel, Head of GMO’s Emerging Countries Debt Team GMOsforeign currency and local currency debt portfolio. Before joining GMO in 2004, she worked in fixed income research at JP Morgan, developing quantitative arbitrage strategies for emerging debt and high yield bonds.

The true death toll of the pandemic

source: economist

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