the-happy-man

[the-happy-man]

Americans are outnumbered by their guns: Pine, the San Mateo supervisor, spoke emotionally at the Monday press briefing as he blamed the tragedies on the surfeit of guns in the US, 120 for every 100 residents, with almost one-third of Americans admitting to carrying guns daily.

[the-happy-man]

In 2022, an extensive historical study of acts of extremist violence, committed between 1948 and 2018, found that the likelihood that an act of violence was committed by a right-wing extremist was virtually equal to the chance that it was committed by an Islamist extremist, while the likelihood that such an act was committed by a left-wing extremist was far lower.

[the-happy-man]

"SOFT ON CRIME" Our global hysteria over muggers and shoplifters is perfect cover for the parasite class — who are also, by their untrammeled greed, driving others to the desperation of street crime. Meanwhile, obviously: "Is corporate wrongdoing on the rise? Statistics certainly suggest so. The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s latest annual report on its whistleblower program showed a record 12,210 tips were provided in 2021 – a 76% increase against 2020, itself a record-breaker. The commission also made more financial awards to whistleblowers than in all previous years combined – in other words, the information given was real and significant enough to lead to real consequences."

[the-happy-man]

Recently I was deep in the Instagram account of a CEO whose company we believe is a house of cards. I gazed for a long time at a snap of a family member, posing on the steps of a private jet with champagne and a gun. If I had to paint a portrait called “Hubris,” it would look something like that.

Far from being an easy way out, fraud is a high-wire act, the rewards high, the penalties higher. Companies therefore go to great pains to conceal it, making death threats to whistleblowers or putting tracking devices in short-sellers’ cars.

The consequences of this hubris can be catastrophic. Investors risk losing money, of course, but people also risk losing their lives, perhaps because the company has made savage cuts in lifesaving equipment they use or sell, or through cheating their own emissions tests (Volkswagen), or pretending they can monitor cancer from blood samples (Theranos).

There is something unique to our era that encourages the charlatan.

As well as investigating corporations, I am also a novelist, and I think we live in the age of the corporate fairy-tale: a magical land of unicorns and eternal growth. “What’s the story?” investors like to ask about the latest hot start-up, willing the narrative to be true even as they live the myth of their own absolute rationality.

Elon Musk once said: “Brand is just a perception, and perception will match reality over time.” Put another way, if the emperor believes he is wearing wonderful clothes, others will start to believe it too. When I was researching my debut novel, in which a tyrant’s wife stands trial for her husband’s corruption, I found someone else making an eerily similar point to Musk. It wasn’t from another business leader; it was Imelda Marcos. “Perception is real,” the wife of the former Philippines dictator said. “And the truth is not.”

The tools for this are often simpler than you think: we are all susceptible to charm and its ugly sister, bullshit. Image, for example, is key. Theranos’s Holmes and Wirecard’s Braun both favored a black polo neck: the Steve Jobs echoes were deliberate. As Musk says, perception will match reality over time.

But it’s difficult to ask so-called stupid questions. I have lost count of the times that I’ve listened to executives bamboozle their own stakeholders with complex or subtly nonsensical language. It takes strength to push back. “Excuse me,” a gruff Scottish accent interrupted on one earnings call, amid a sea of smooth American tones. “But nothing you’re saying makes any sense.” I wanted to cheer.

[the-happy-man]

“It’s like I was put back to the day before I ever used a drug,” she said.

In larger doses, iboga has powerful psychoactive effects, which have been harnessed for centuries by the Fang, Mitsogo and Punu people of the Congo Basin, as part of the Bwiti religion. The ongoing poaching is depleting natural reserves of iboga in Gabon’s forests and cutting Gabonese people out of an industry that would not exist without their Indigenous knowledge.

[the-happy-man]

The fashion house, which has deep ties to the Surrealist art movement, was originally established in 1927.

[the-happy-man]

How America might do the UK, and itself, a huge favo(u)r: Draft New York City-born Boris Johnson to run for POTUS in '24.

The Congressional Research Service concluded in 2011:

"The weight of legal and historical authority indicates that the term 'natural born' citizen would mean a person who is entitled to U.S. citizenship 'by birth' or 'at birth,' either by being born 'in' the United States and under its jurisdiction, even those born to alien parents; The predominant legal scholarship holds that the term natural born citizen applies, quite simply, to anyone who is a U.S. citizen at birth, or by birth, and does not have to go through the naturalization process. The child of parents who are U.S. citizens, regardless of whether he or she is born abroad, fits into the category under most modern interpretations."

American case law also includes as natural born citizens those born in the United States and subject to its jurisdiction regardless of the citizenship status of one’s parents.

It is important to note that the U.S. Supreme Court has not weighed in specifically on this issue.

As for Boris's kerfuffle with the I.R.S. — all is forgiven! Just lead us!

[the-happy-man]

As an outlet for heretical thoughts like this, Johnson started writing in a style too lyrical and philosophical for scientific journals. Her typed musings would later turn into the 2020 popular science book The Sirens of Mars. Inside its pages, she probed the idea that other planets are truly other, and so their inhabitants might be very different, at a fundamental and chemical level, from anything on this world. “Even places that seem familiar—like Mars, a place that we think we know intimately—can completely throw us for a loop,” she says. “What if that’s the case for life?”

But because scientists can’t reliably say that ET life should look, chemically, like Earth life, seeking those signatures could mean we miss beings that might be staring us in the face. “How do we move beyond that?”

A new NASA-funded initiative called the Laboratory for Agnostic Biosignatures (LAB). LAB’s research doesn’t count on ET having specific biochemistry at all, so it doesn’t look for specific biosignatures.

One good attempt at a definition [of life] came in 2011 from geneticist Edward Trifonov, who collated more than 100 interpretations of the word “life” and distilled them into one overarching idea: it’s “self-reproduction with variations.”

[the-happy-man]

It is successful tax avoidance by the parasite class that is the strongest pillar propping up global inequality, and its dismantling would be the quickest solution.

Oxfam found that 143 of 161 countries actually froze tax rates for the rich during the pandemic, and 11 countries reduced them.

[the-happy-man]

The breakdown of these figures exposes how on a global basis, extreme wealth is accumulated not by innovating or increasing production, but by taking advantage of rising prices and exploiting labour. In this effort, wealthy people are enabled by lack of regulation and taxation. The result is a bonanza of plunder with no sheriff in town.

It’s not only the hope of a world recalibrated by Covid towards stronger public infrastructure that is turning to dust in our mouths. An older dream is dying too: of a post-cold-war globalisation that was supposed to bring us all closer, usher in a utopia of free trade, growth, employment and sustainable development. What this model of globalisation ended up achieving was standardising ways for wealthy people to pay as little as possible, concentrating economic activity on those with purchasing power and hanging the rest out to dry. Our lives are indeed becoming more similar across the world.

[the-happy-man]

Navalnaya: I try as often as possible to tell people that I love them. I used to care about being an intellectual person, reading, watching movies. Now, I think spending time with your closest friends and your loved ones is much more important.

I tell all my friends: Moscow is the best city, it has everything! Also, I miss the people in Russia. They’re so different from Californians. The Russians understand that life isn’t ideal, but that you can and you must try to improve society. I like that. They don’t have that false optimism they have in California. I would like to go to Moscow someday and settle there.

[the-happy-man]

[the-happy-man]

As Syracuse University biologist Scott Pitnick has pointed out, sperm cells are the only human cells designed to perform functions outside of the actual body. They must undergo radical physical changes as they undertake their journey from the testes through the complex female reproductive tract. Even today, scientists "understand almost nothing about sperm function, what sperm do" Pitnick told Smithsonian Magazine.

"He reassured the Royal Society that he had not obtained the sample by any 'sinful contrivance' but by 'the excess which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations,'" Cobb explained.

What a relief.

[the-happy-man]

Ultimately, however, I suspect this shift in tactics between the two cases reflects a growing sense of frustration in the larger public over the continuing failure of Attorney General Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice to hold Trump accountable for leading, quite literally, an attempted fascist coup.

[the-happy-man]

Japan is a pioneer in adjusting to the skewed demographics of an ageing society, with the impact of its low birthrates exacerbated by a fierce resistance to immigration.

As [Kerala, India] struggles with an increasing number of destitute elderly, the government is planning to give the state new powers to seize property that parents had handed over to their children, if the older generation is not being well cared for, and return it.

Because no state has the "powers" to take care of the people itself, of course.

[the-happy-man]

He says the site provides an ID verification check for premium members, marked on their profiles. “If we introduced a global criminal record check on all users before they were allowed to use the site then it would impose a large cost to sign up.”

Wells also says the site refers people who say they have suffered sexual assaults to an external 24-hour multilingual helpline, Yacht Crew Help.

Desperate to protect other women, Russell also sent [Crewbay] a list of safety tips for first-time crew, including suggestions such as asking captains for a copy of their passport, video chatting before jumping on board and noting the contact details for local police. The platform took a year to post the list of tips to its site and did not include specific warnings about sexual harassment and assault, despite Russell’s numerous requests.