ICE and violence seem to go hand in glove

I guess they've been around for a while now, but until ICE announced that they were putting in a big ol' order for electric shock gloves, I'd never heard of them. But they've been used by police officers, prison guards, and even school resource officers for years. 

The device that ICE is acquiring is something called a GLOVE. This is not a glove as you and I might think of a glove. Something to wear when it's cold; something to wear when gardening; something to wear when slicing raw chicken. No, it's GLOVE as in an acronym for Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter. And don't let that "low output voltage" fool you. A GLOVE, especially in the wrong hands, can administer a shockingly painful shock.

GLOVE is produced by a Kentucky-based (surprise, surprise) outfit named Compliant Technologies

Our mission is to provide innovative, non-lethal solutions that empower law enforcement, corrections, security, and healthcare professionals to handle dangerous situations with confidence and control. (Source: Compliant Technologies)

Well, innovative can be a mixed bag - it doesn't always go hand-in-glove with wonderful/marvelous - but non-lethal sounds good. I'm a bit concerned about healthcare professionals as an audience. I know that people can flip out in a healthcare setting, and that patients can become violent, but aren't there de-escalation methods that don't involve shocking someone, which seems like a particularly awful choice in certain environments. Like a hospital. Like a school.

Interesting, the value proposition for the product is not primarily about non-lethality. In fact, they lead with the technology's ability to lower liability.  

How so, you might ask.

Let's hear from Assistant Police Chief Adam Glueck of the Cape Giradeau, Missouri PD. 

“In today’s society, you know, everybody’s filming everything, everybody has a cell phone,” Glueck said. If an officer punches someone on camera, that can go viral in an instant; even a standard taser leaves puncture wounds. But “the glove is low optic, and it looks better on camera, and it looks better to those witnesses. With a glove, there are no burn marks or scars.” (Source: Mother Jones)

Glueck joked that “If I try to take away the gloves from those officers at this point I think we may have a mutiny on our hands." Oh, hah hah hah.

But having a "low optic" torture device, unlike a taser shooting out those treacherous darts, let alone a billy club applied with full force? Who wouldn't want one of those? Look, Ma: no burn marks, no scars. Lawsuit, smawsuit? Bring it! That video some misguided civilian took of the GLOVE'd individual writhing around on the ground in pain? Crisis actor! Fake news!

Glueck isn't the only gushing proponent of the GLOVE. Or to point out the beauty of GLOVEs-on when it comes to liability.

It’s been successful “from the patrolmen to the jailers,” Lumpkin County Sheriff Stacy Jarrard said in a Compliant Technologies promotional video. “It’s been a great tool as far as mitigating liability,” according to Nelson County Jailer Justin Hall. Bob Couey of the Floyd County Sheriff’s Department sung the GLOVE’s praises, too: “I highly recommend these gloves to anybody that’s looking for a utility they can use that is conducive to not leading to lawsuits.”

Lumpkn County, Georgia. Nelson County, Kentucky. Floyd County, Florida. 

Just sayin'. 

(Despite GLOVEs being positioned as anti-liability devices, there are at least a few lawsuits out there with respect to their use.)

Anyway, after hearing from the Boss Hoggs of the world, let's hear from the bleeding hearts:

The technology is unregulated “despite the clear human rights risks associated with its use,” Amnesty International researchers wrote in a 2025 report detailing instances in which electric-shock devices have been used for torture. The report ends with a recommendation that countries “cease use of, decommission and destroy any stockpiles of such prohibited electric shock weapons.” 

Worrying about "clear human rights risks" doesn't exactly seem to be ICE's jam.

And needless to say, I'm Team Amnesty International. 

Meanwhile, over at Compliant Technologies - recipient of that $20M of our tax money ICE contract - founder Jeff Niklaus sounds like a bit of a nutter:

...who believes that President Donald Trump has been “anointed” by God. He is also a sometime conspiracy theorist: In a podcast interview in 2025, he blamed the fatal crash of a passenger plane and a military helicopter on “the vaccines,” and on the Biden administration’s inclusion of women and LGBTQ people in the military.

If Trump were indeed anointed by God, well, I'd have to eat my halo. 

Some law enforcement agencies warn against using GLOVEs "against pregnant women, the elderly, or people in shackles." A GLOVE user guide advises not using it against "those with obvious health conditions." But, gee whiz, in the heat of battle, you can't always tell if someone is pregnant. Sure, I'm old and grey, but would someone necessarily clock me as elderly? (Okay, don't answer.) And what about non-"obvious health conditions?" The only thing that's clear about the must-avoid list would be someone placed in shackles, which is clearly visible. And which ICE seems to do with alarming frequency.

Not to worry:

“Our officers are highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training,” an ICE spokesperson told Mother Jones.

Alex Pretti and Renee Good might have something to say about that, if they were alive to say it.

I have no problem whatsoever with ICE rounding up baddies and shipping them back to from whence they came. Murderers, rapists, gang members, drug lords. So long, all of yez. And I know that when you're dealing with bad guys, sometimes you need to use force. But most of those who are being rounded up aren't bad guys. (Someone coming in for a meeting to talk about the progress of their greencard application is probably not a violent criminal.) And, as we've seen from countless videos, many of them are being brutalized. 

I can't wait for this nightmare to be over. 

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Image Source: Mashable

Release the kratom? What's it worth to you?

Although I've been known to pop a mini-can of Diet Coke to jolt me out of my longing for an afternoon snooze, I've never imbibed an energy-boosting drink. No Jolt. No Red Bull. No Monster Energy. (Seriously, who needs the energy of a monster?)

Most energy drinks are, like my mini-can of Diet Coke, caffeinated. Just a lot more potently caffeinated than my mini DC.

But there's another category of energy boosters - often sold in gas stations to help drivers ward of falling asleep at the wheel -  that use kratom leaves, which are also supposed to be useful for painkilling.

Admittedly, there aren't many things beyond water you can put in your mouth without risk of something or other. And even bottled water is so unregulated that there could be something no good lurking in every gulp of H2O. But "kratom has been linked to liver toxicity, seizures and thousands of deaths." 

From 2020 through 2024, kratom was found in the system of more than 5,200 people who died of drug overdoses, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention based on death certificates and other official reports. Though often found in combination with other drugs, one study determined that those using kratom carried a sixfold increase in the risk of overdose death. (Source: NY Times)

Oh that...(Guess I won't be looking for kratom gummies to kill the pain in my paining knees.)

Despite linkages to things like death, there are many kratom proponents working to make sure that kratom-based supplements and drinks aren't regulated. One of these proponents is Markwayne Mullin, former senator R-Oklahoma and now Secretary of Homeland Security, who was a big booster of kratom boosting before being tapped to run DHS (and I'm guessing since as well). 

Was good ol' boy Markwayne doing this out of the goodness of his heart? Well, bless your heart for thinking the best, but Mullin was in fact an investor in Botanic Tonics, a kratom company, to the tune of as much as $1M. 

Last summer, while still a senator, Mullin:

...endorsed proposed federal restrictions on more powerful synthetic supplements that compete with kratom for shelf space. In explaining his position, Mr. Mullin pointed to a history of addiction in his family, though health experts say kratom products have also been shown to be addictive.

Oh that... 

Jerry Ross is Botanic Tonics founder, and he's been spearheading kratom-related lobbying efforts. Successes include getting the FDA to remove info on its kratom webpage regarding a case against Botanic, and then - what the hell - getting the DOJ to drop the case entirely. (I won't mention that Jerry Ross is an ex-con, because I really do believe in rehabilitation.)

All this successful "advice-giving" don't come cheap:

Mr. Kennedy, as health secretary, called the governor of Ohio to try to head off a state ban on kratom in the fall of 2025. Months later, Botanic Tonics donated $1 million to a political committee associated with Mr. Kennedy.

Ross also donated over $400K to the RNC.

The lobbyists, of course, pooh-pooh the implication that they're up to anything untoward. 

The CEO of a rival kratom company has said that "'It’s not pay to play. It’s pay to have conversations. It’s pay to have a chance at the table...I mean, that is the world that we live in.'” 

He's right, of course, but what a hell world. And also upside down world, as the Trump admin promotes risky, unproven products as a means to Make America Healthy Again. (As in healthy back when kids were crippled and killed by polio? MAHA? HAHA!) What, us science?

Speaking of pooh-poohing, it will come as no surprise that the White House (via spokesman Kush Desai) is claiming that it would never be influenced by lobbyists with checkbooks. 

“The only guiding factor behind the Trump administration’s health care policymaking is gold standard science,” he said in a statement. The administration, he added, was working “to get this critical matter correct and ensure the health and safety of Americans.”

I'm going to take their word for it here. It's not like they'd ever sell a pardon or make coin trading on insider info or award an inflated no-bid contract to someone willing to shovel some cash their way. (Only kidding.)

Not that corruption will automatically disappear when these guys are all good and gone, but, man, they are so openly and blatantly coin-operated it ain't even funny.

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Image Source: ClipartMax

Palantiranny

One of the most disturbing things to emerge from the current era is the ascendancy of the tech broligarchs. Or whatever they're called these days. Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos. Mark Zuckerberg. Peter Thiel. Marc Andreessen. Larry Ellison. Alex Karp.

Maybe they've always been awful, but most of them used to at least give some lipservice to making the world a better place for someone other then themselves. Alas, somewhere along the line they all figured out that the bucks don't stop here. The bucks, in fact, never stop. And the thing about the bucks is, once you accrue a goodly enough of them, you realize you never have enough. And you never, ever, ever in a kabillion years want them to stop pouring into your coffers.

Being a millionaire used to be a big deal. Then it was being a one-digit billionaire. Of course, that soon became nothing much. And two-digit billionaire was an equal yawner. Three-digit billionaire-ing - $100B and above - and now you're talking. And all of a sudden we're in the countdown for when Elon Musk becomes the world's first trillionaire. Which will no doubt set off a what's he got that I don't? rapacity spree among those left behind, nursing their $100's of billions and their grievances. 

These guys aren't stupid, and they naturally realized that money isn't just homes everywhere, private submarines, super yachts with helipads, $5M engagement rings, $50M weddings, $100M bunkers, et every bit of cetera the mind can imagine. Money, they all recognized, is also power. And while once it may have been fine to use that power for some sort of benefit for humankind (c.f., Bill Gates' efforts to eradicate malaria), do-gooding is really nothing more than a sort of an amuse bouche for the real meal. Which is expanding and defending your unimaginable (to us plebs, anyway) wealth. And what better way to defend that wealth than to make sure that the government gets to take as small a bite out of it as possible.

So let's make sure our tax rates approach as near to zero as possible, that none of "our" loopholes are closed, that regulations that might actually help the little guy but may come at a cost to the poor little old big guys are eliminated. (C.f., decimation of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.) 

No wonder they're all so gungho on AI. After all, if you can replace all those pesky, squawky humans with AI and robotics, there's more money to be made. (That is, I guess, until there are very few human beings left who can afford to buy any of the goods and services that the tech bros are producing.)

Sigh.

Yes, AI promises (promises, promises) to be the great distruptor. And, scarily enough, it probably will be. 

Palantir co-founder and CEO Alex Karp sees a real upside to all the coming disruption. And that upside will benefit the Republican party. Not coincidentally, the party with all the power and the one most likely to enable a full hands-off-the-money policy when it comes to taxing the tech broligarchs and their companies. 

Last month, in a CNBC interview to discuss how Palantir's AI system is being used by the military for target selection  - and we've seen just how foolproof AI technology is when it comes to say, selecting an Iranian girls' school for destruction - Alex Karp opined on how AI's disruption will target women's work:

“The one thing that I think that even now is underestimated by all actors in industry … is how disruptive these technologies are,” Karp said. “If you are going to disrupt the economic and therefore political power significantly of one party’s base – highly educated, often female voters who vote mostly Democrat, and military and working-class people who do not feel supported – and you believe that that’s going to work out politically, you’re in an insane asylum.” 

He added: “Like … this technology disrupts humanities-trained – largely Democratic – voters, and makes their economic power less. And increases the economic power of vocationally trained, working-class, often male, working-class voters. These disruptions are going to disrupt every aspect of our society.” (Source: NY Times)

Swell. All those girly-girl history majors who know how to think, write, analyze, and other white-collarly things. And who support reproductive rights, social justice, diversity and equity, gay marriage, environmental concerns, universal healthcare - and vote accordingly. They'll see their economic, social, and political power eclipsed by swing-a-hammer white guys driving F150s to the voting booth to cast their voter-ID'd ballot for Barron Trump. And maybe even for an initiative to repeal the 19th amendment and send us latter-day suffragettes packing. 

But, but, but, what happens next? Having gutted the ranks of those we used to call "knowledge workers," isn't AI going to go after the blue collar guys, too? After all, AI/robotics has done away with millions of manufacturing jobs, and it's going to be gunning for everything else humans used to do as well. Who'll  be calling a plumber when your really smart toilet can unclog itself? Who'll need a roofer when the prefab new roof is dropped into place via drown, and secured via robots?

It's not clear that Karp is advocating for all this disruption. He's just saying it's going to happen. But it's certainly no secret that many of the tech broligarchs don't believe in democracy at all, at all. They view it as an encroachment on their freedom, i.e., the ability to endlessly accumulate.

One of my big questions about AI is just what do the broligarchs and their political henchmen think that people are going to do for work if there are no jobs? 

Easy enough to see a return to a medieval society: nobles at the top, small class of supporting professionals and artisans, and a mass of peasants living in hovels. One shirt to last a lifetime, a diet of cheap foods designed to put us out of our misery young. And unlike our ancestors, who had to rely on storytelling and a flute made out of a dried reed for entertainment, we'll get 24/7 infotainment and rot piped in to our hovels to keep us from noticing that those damned rich just keep getting richer. 

Maybe it won't happen. Maybe things will slow down. Maybe we'll come to our collective senses and decide just how, as a society and an economy, we want to ride the AI wave. Maybe we'll figure out how to have an economy that works for the many, not just the few. Maybe. 

I hope so.

But it sure makes me nervous that so many of these kabillionaire tech gods are using their vast economic power to become more economically and politically powerful. Which seems to be leading inexorably to autocracy and the tyranny of the super-rich.

Sigh, sigh, sigh.

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Image Source: Octopus Intelligence

The Office Park from Hell

In 2024, Shunda Park "materialized and metastasized" almost overnight in the middle of nowhere on the Myanmar border. Unlike office parks that support companies in a wide range of businesses, Shunda - which was run by a Chinese criminal network - from the jump was built and operated for one business purpose only: running lucrative scams. 

There, over 3,500 workers representing nearly 30 countries toiled away under attaboy/attagirl signs reading “Dream chaser,” “Keep going,” “Making money matters the most.” 

Some of those workers had been scammed themselves, thinking that they were getting plum tech and marketing jobs, only to find themselves working at the office park from hell. 

Others thought they were checking out merchandise for online sales businesses. Instead, they were hustled at gunpoint across the river that demarcates the border with Myanmar...(Source: NY Times)

However the new employees managed to arrive, they were quickly onboarded to their new employment reality. 

...all had become skilled in the art of the online grift. When the scammers bilked $5,000 out of someone, they struck a Chinese gong. A $50,000 shakedown earned a celebratory pounding of a giant drum, then an offering to a Chinese deity resplendent in his golden altar. 

This was not just a Nigerian prince email scam center, but a highly sophisticated enterprise that used a complex approach to suckering in victims from around the world:

Using generative intelligence and deepfake videos, as well as fraudulent businesses, websites and financial apps, the scammers at Shunda embraced the long con and reeled in people from almost every demographic.

Then last November, the park was overtaken by the Karen National Liberation Army, one of a number of different rebel groups battling the military junta that took over Myanmar a few years back and plunged the country into a brutal civil war. 

Karen forces closed Shunda down, and most of the scammers had dispersed, but the Times jounalists were able to speak with some of the remaining scammers "both those who were trying to return home and others who wanted to find another job in the fraud business." (Hoping for another job in the fraud biz? Huh? Do what you know, I guess.)

The now unemployed scammers recounted receiving beatings, being shackled, not - no surprise there - getting paid. There were punishment chambers, torture cells:

Ivan, a Malaysian who once worked as a member of the ground staff at the Singapore airport, said he was chained in a crucifixion position and denied food for days.

“You think you know hell,” he said, “and it’s actually even worse.”

Who among us hasn't joked about work being a torture chamber, a gulag? And is there anyone who hasn't seen one of those galley slave cartoons? The beatings will continue until the morale improves. But, yikes, when it comes to torture chambers, this was the real deal. The unreal deal. 

At Shunda, there were some actual paid employees, Chinese nationals who ran the show and lived pretty well in the Shunda compound. There were restaurants. A night club. A basketball court. Nice cars. The bosses lived in "luxury" villas. But some of the Chinese workers were also conned, paid far less than they were promised.  

Despite the fact that Shunda - now destroyed in large part - is in the middle of an active war zone, with Karen forces going at it with the Myanmar military, many of the Chinese workers are reluctant to be repatriated. Their fears are reasonable enough.

 The Chinese government has periodically cracked down on the scamming industry, arresting Chinese workers who are repatriated. So tense was the situation that days before our visit, some Chinese workers had tried unsuccessfully to wrestle weapons away from the Karen soldiers, according to members of the militia and other scammers who witnessed the melee.

One might think that the destruction and occupation of Shunda would give pause to the Chinese outfits that ran them.  Maybe they should be looking to set up shop someplace that's not a civil war zone under active bombardment and featuring armed skirmishes. But no. Not far from Shunda, "scam centers [are] being built, Chinese red lanterns hanging from the eaves. 

As one of those inspirational signs from Shunda said, “Making money matters the most.” 

Guess so.

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Image Source: AP via NPR

Heartbreaking. Enraging.

I suppose I should have followed up yesterday's grim post with something a bit lighter, but, hey, in for a dime, in for a dollar. So today we take a look at homelessness.  

Two days one week, three weeks the next, I volunteer in a day shelter. Mostly what I do is give out socks and toothbrushes, give out information, give out directions, and sometimes just lend an ear to someone who just wants and needs to talk. 

Not everyone who comes through our door is experiencing homelessness - some are just plain old poor - but most of the folks we see aren't housed. And whenever someone finds a place to hang their hat, we are jumping for joy. SRO (hopefully not a wretched one) with shared bath and kitchen, or a full apartment, when someone's where they can lock the door, keep their stuff, stay in bed in the morning, they're happy to get up in the morning worrying about where they're going to lay themsleves down to sleep that night. Surprisingly - to some - many of the folks we serve have jobs. They may be poorly paid, low benefit, crappy jobs, but, let me tell you, people do seem to love saying "I just got a job" or "I have to get to work."

The parents who head the five Atlanta families that Brian Goldstone writes about in his brilliant (compelling, depressing) book There Is No Place for Us, all work, often holding multiple jobs. Sometimes they've been at the same job for years, other times their work is temporary or sporadic. The commonality is that the jobs are poorly paid, low benefit, and crappy. (Hmmm. Where have I heard that before?)

The families, for the most part, had - at least at some point - housing stability in a rented apartment where they could celebrate a birthday, put up a Christmas tree, cook a Thanksgiving dinner. But then something rent wrong. 

Someone got cancer. Someone got divorced. Someone lost their job. Someone had their hours cut back. Someone was two days late with their rent check and lost their lease. (Georgia has very few tenant protections.)

Lives are lived pretty precariously when you're living paycheck to paycheck and don't have any cushion to fall back on. 

All of the families Goldstone chronicles fell into wretched housing situations in extended stay facilities (bleak hotels) or living with a family member or friend. Extended stay facilities means that your family is likely living in one room: parent(s) and kiddos crammed into crowded quarters with no privacy, no place for the kids to play, kiddos jammed into bed together, a hot plate and/or microwave to cook on. 

Staying with family or friends sounds better. But when you're poor, your family and friends don't tend to be much better off than you are. So you end up sleeping on the living room couch or a sleeping bag on the floor. Again no privacy, no nothing. No room to breathe, let alone work, let alone go to school.

And, as the time Goldstone spent with the Georgia families overlapped with covid, folks were trying to work and get their kids to learn from "home."

Picture this: you're trying to work a grueling but poorly paid call center job while your seven year old and nine year old are "going to school" over unreliable wi-fi, and your toddler is doing what toddlers do. Which is not giving anyone a moment's peace. 

But since some of the folks in the book were essential workers, they had to go into their jobs as, say, hospital cleaners, even with an epidemic raging. And the jobs they went into were mostly poorly accessible by public transportation, adding a few hours commuter time getting to, waiting for, and riding on buses. Late too many times? You're fired, girlfriend. 

Then there's the wonderful gig work. Door Dash? Talk about slave-driving. You're pellmelling around, getting docked (or fired) when traffic makes you a nano-second late with a delivery, and - of course - your car is old and unreliable.

All of Goldstone's families were hardworking. They were always on the lookout for ways to lemons into lemonade. (Good luck with that, when you lack sugar and water, let alone a pitcher.) They all loved their children. They all hated the lives they were giving those children. They all wanted better for them. And for themselves.

I was having a nervous breakdown just reading about their lives. I can only imagine the lived reality.

My lived reality includes talking with homeless individuals. So I know that what triggers homelessness is a mixed brew of mental illness, substance abuse, past incarceration, childhood trauma, bad schools, poor choices (absolutely), and - the one thing that's 100% in common - bad luck. And, of course, the lack of affordable housing. 

Back in the not so recent past, single folks with (or without) crappy jobs could always live in an SRO. Sure, many of them were god-awful, but it was a place to call home and it beat sleeping in a mylar blanket over a heating grate. 

Back in the not so recent past, poor families could afford to rent an apartment. If they were lucky, they had a good landlord. If they were really lucky, they had a Section 8 voucher. If they were maybe not all that lucky, they were in a project. But wherever it was, it was home.

Alas, other than for scarce vouchers and bogus set asides for affordable housing, the government has long been going out of the housing business. And "the market" has not kept up with the demand for housing for the poor and, increasingly, the middle class. Especially in big cities where the jobs are and where a lot of people want to live. Like Atlanta. (Like Boston.)

The problem, as Goldstone points out quite eloquently and forcefully, is precisely that we have left housing to "the market." Which could not give a rat's arse about anything other than making a profit. 

In Atlanta (as in Boston), neighborhoods that once provided affordable housing for the working class have been gentrified. And capitalism in general, and private equity in particular, has jumped in to make matters worse. Those extended stay facilities are a big and lucrative business. Families in them are pretty much paying what they'd been paying when they had an actual apartment in their former, real life. 

Airbnb's knock a lot of potential housing off the market. Why rent to a family who'll actually live there, when you can make more doing temp rentals to tourists?

Corporations scoop up affordable properties, renting them out, dumping families out of them when they can get someone new (and desperate) in them for a couple of hundred bucks more a month. With so many houses taken out of play, home ownership out of the question for many families (poor, working, middle class). 

How many homeless people are there in the US? Who knows. The government says about 800,000. Goldstone points out that the government doesn't count people living in extended stay dumps or sleeping on their aunt's floor. He argues that the true number of homeless folks is closer to 4 million.

Through my volunteer work at the shelter, and with a holiday charity for poor and homeless families, I've gotten to learn up close and personal how tough people's lives can be. But not that up close and personal. I really have no idea what it's like not to have privacy, a warm bed, a comfy couch, a stocked fridge, a set of keys to a door that locks. Sure, I've had times in my younger days when I was pretty skint. But was I ever worried about not having a roof over my head? No. If I had to no place to call home,

I'd probably have a nervous breakdown on day one.

Anyway, go read Brian Goldstone. 

I thought I knew a lot about this problem. I had no idea.

Heartbreaking. Enraging. 

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Image Source: Penguin Random House

Happy St. Patrick's Day (to those who observe it)

In my Twitter bluesky profile, I say that I'd rather be in Ireland. And these days, I sometimes actually mean it, or at least kinda-sorta mean it. In my old age, would I really uproot my existence and plunk meself down in a country far away from family and friends, hearth and home? Sure, I've been to Ireland plenty of times but have never lived there - or any place outside the United States. So it's probably not going to happen (unless fascist putsch comes to fascist shove, in which case...) That's Galway in the pic, by the way, which would be my first choice of a place to live in Ireland.

I have no illusions about Ireland being perfect. To quote my Grandmother Rogers - the daughter of Irish immigrants - "If Ireland were so great, we all wouldn't have had to come over here." True that. The country my Irish great-grandparents - Matthew Trainor, Bridget Trainor, John Rogers, and Margaret Joyce - fled in the 1870's was poor, backward, repressive, priest-ridden. (Not to mention still under Britain's tyranny.) They found a much better life for themselves and their progeny in Amerikay. 

But over the last several decades, with remarkable speed, Ireland has done of very good job of throwing over its poor, backward, repressive, priest-ridden self, and there's certainly an argument to be made that today's Eire (for all its problems, including a nasty right wing nationalistic movement) may be a lot more comfortable, open, and sane place to live than, say, the USA envisioned by the white Christian nationalists. So if I were going to live in another country, it would be a) Canada if New England merged with it and I didn't have to move; or b) Ireland. 

The first time I went to Ireland, in 1973, I have to say I felt right at home the minute I stepped off the boat in Dun Laoghaire in the pouring rain. (I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood and went to Catholic schools - through college - largely populated by Irish-Americans students and teachers, so the fact that everyone looked like everyone I ever lived around just made Ireland seem like home. The gestures, the manner of speaking - it was all pretty familiar.) 

Ah, Ireland...

I love the music. I love the tea. I love the brown bread. And I love the literature, which this year I've been reading a bit of.

So far in 2025, I've read five novels written by Irish authors.

I don't know why I had a copy Elizabeth Bowen's The Last September sitting there in one of the piles on the cedar chest in my bedroom. But there it was. So I picked it up and read it.

Bowen was a well-to-do member of the Anglo-Irish (Protestant) Ascendancy that dominated/exploited Ireland, and kept the Irish Catholics in their (downtrodden) place until that particular yoke was thrown off in the twentieth century. The Last September takes place in a "Big House" in County Cork in 1920. The Irish War for Independence is revving up around them, but the Naylor family and their friends and relations are keeping up the idle rich life they've always lived: House parties. Tennis games. Dances. Condescending to the locals (Irish, Catholic), who as servants, laborers, tradesmen, and peasant farmers, made their lives of jaded leisure possible.

My greatgrandfather Matthew Trainor was one such servant, working  as a stable boy in the grand Protestant manor house in Ballymascanlon, County Louth, until he emigrated. The Big House where Matthew labored is now a hotel and restaurant. When, a few years back, my sister Trish and I had lunch there, Trish commented as we walked in that "this is probably the first time anyone in our family used the front door." 

The manor house in Ballymascanlon survived to become a hotel; the manor houses in The Last September met a different fate. In the final pages of the novel, they were burnt to the ground by Irish soldiers during the war to get the Brits out. The novel is dated but beautifully written and, while some may read it fearing the impending doom, I was rooting for the boyos to get in there with the petrol and light a match. About 300 Big Houses were burnt down to the ground in Ireland between 1919 and 1923, with very little loss of life, as the families were given warning and allowed to get out and sit in their lawn chairs to watch their homes burning. (Up the Republic!)

I am a big admirer of his (The Barrytown Trilogy, Paddy Clarke HaHaHa, etc), so I can't imagine why I hadn't read Roddy Doyle's Paula Spencer Series. I came to it backwards, picking up the third novel The Woman Behind the Door (2024), and then immediately Kindling The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) and Paula Spencer (2006) for my February trip to Tucson to visit my sister Kath. These books chronicle the life of a working class Dub (Dubliner) woman through her turbulent marriage to a "charming" wife-beating thug, her struggles with alcoholism, her up and down relationships with her four children, her motherhood, her friendships and relationships with her family (especially her sisters), her crappy jobs, her financial struggles. This all sounds pretty bleak, but in Paula Spencer, Doyle has painted a nuanced, sympathetic but never patronizing portrait of a modern-day Irish woman who's plenty smart (although spectacularly dumb at times), plenty funny, plenty observant (except for those blindspots), and plenty tough. I loved these books, and loved Paula Spencer, her kids (Nicola, John Paul, Leanne, and Jack), her sisters Carmel and Denise, her friends Mary and Rita...The only one I hated was her shite husband Charlo. I was delighted when he got plugged by a Garda. Good riddance! In the third book, Paula's in her sixties. I hope there's at least one more Paula novel in Roddy Doyle. High praise to him for doing a feckin' brilliant job. 

The fifth Irish novel I've read so far this year is Time of the Child by Niall Williams which is pretty much set plunk in the middle between the demise of the the Protestant Ascendancy (Bowen) and the emergence of modern Ireland (Doyle). It's the Christmas season of 1962, and Ireland is still plenty poor and plenty backward, especially in the remote backwater Clare town of Faha, which has only had electricity for a few years and where life is carried on by indirection yet with plenty of room for everyone to be up in everyone else's business. I've read a number of books by Williams, including the two prior novels set in Faha, so I was familiar with some of the characters from minor roles they'd played in those earlier books. Williams is a beautiful, lyrical writer, and his characters and settings are memorable, but his work generally has a fairy tale quality to it that I'm not fully enamored of. (The miraculous abandoned baby showing up...) Not that he ignores the harsh realities of life, but even when dealing with them, the corners are a bit rounded and gentled. I prefer Roddy Doyle's straight-on grit. Still, I much enjoyed this book (and thank my cousin Ellen for the recommendation).

All I can say is that, when it comes to writing, Ireland (population: 5.6 million) sure manages to punch above its weight in producing wonderful writers. No wonder there are times when I'd rather be there.

Roundabout way to celebrate Ireland's national holiday, but Happy St. Patrick's Day to those who observe it.

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I've often written about my Irish (-American) identity and my affinity for Ireland. Here's a roundup of my St. Patrick's Day posts over the years.

Well, this sure seems worth 40 years in prison. Not!

I am ALWAYS amazed when people are caught embezzling. What are people thinking when they keep putting their hand in the till? Oh, I suppose the first thing they do is borrow a few bucks, thinking they'll do a Wimpie, and gladly pay on Tuesday for a hamburger today. And when no one notices that they didn't pay those few bucks back, it just gets easier to skim a little more. And to skim a little more, a little more often.

My latest favorite embezzler is Thomas Clasby, Jr.,the former long-term director of the Department of Elder Affairs for the city of Quincy, Mass.

Interestingly, Clasby only began reaching into the Quincy cookie jar in the last five years of his 25 year tenure with the city. Unless that's all they've gotten him on so far. (He was implicated a while back in some behind the scenes wheeling-dealing to get his parents into an affordable elder housing unit they weren't entitled to, but that wheelio-dealio was apparently not criminal. Just shady.)

Anyway, during those golden years of career, he manage to skim tens of thousands of dollars that should have been going to helping legit golden years folks get more out of their golden years. 

What's always fascinating to me is what embezzlers spend their easily but ill-gotten gains on.

There was the pee-wee hockey league treasurer who spent a ton on Pandora bracelets and beads. And I seem to recall one high-flyer who stole nearly a million from her company, and used part of it to pay for Burt Bacharach to perform at her brother's wedding. (The look of love may have been in Burt's eyes, but there was definitely some larceny in that sister's heart.)

Thomas Clasby Jr.'s list of spending spree items did not disappoint.

He booked studio time to record himself recording love ballads for his wife. (The sessions - nearly $9K worth - were billed as spending on a "Senior Musical Workshop.") The love songs for wifey may have been kind of awwwwww sweet, if he hadn't used other money to pay for a used Prius for a "longtime female friend." He also had her apartment cleaned to the tune of $325, which was billed as "sanitizing" for the "Council on Aging."

He also used $1,658 to lacquer and frame a self-portrait. Wonder if that went to the wife or the "longtime female friend?"

Not that we know where most of the money he scooped up went, as a lot of it was pure cash grift. He made off with tens of thousands of dollars worth of cash receipts for monies collected at various events, for various purposes, at Quincy's Elder Center, including coffee-and money that came in through the center's cafe. 

Clasby also had a NY friend's phony consulting company bill for all sorts of never provided services. Most of the payments went to Clasby, who acted as his own bagman an picke up the dough "during meetups at a Massachusetts rest stop, a ferry terminal in Bridgeport, Conn., and a location in Queens, N.Y., prosecutors said."

My favorite Clasby expenditure was on steak tips. Lots of steak tips. 

According to the indictment, he used city funds between May 2022 and April 2024 to pay for more than $2,200 in bourbon steak tips for himself that were ordered from a cafe at the Kennedy Center, where the agency is located.

The indictment said the city paid four invoices for the steak tips, which Clasby “took for himself.” Payments were made for 30 pounds of steak tips in May 2022, 45 pounds in November 2022, 30 pounds in August 2023, and 48 pounds last April. (Source: Boston Globe)

Forty-eight pounds of steak tips? Par-tay at the Clasbys!

Because the charges involve mail and wire fraud, and interstate transporation of stolen property - pickups at the Bridgeport ferry terminal - the charges are Federal. And involve hefty sentences and fines. Ten or twenty years, depending on the count; several fines of up to $250K. (Source: US Attorney's Office)

(Imagine what he would have faced if, say, he'd fomented a riot and tried to interfere with the government. Oh, never mind.)

Thomas Clasby, Jr. is 60. He's not going to do 40 years in the slammer. He's not going to pay $750K in fines. But were the self portrait and the steak tips worth whatever sentence he ends up with? I can only imagine he's sitting there thinking not. (Bet if he's singing to himself, it's not Tom Rush's No Regrets.)

Pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered...

Trying to keep up with every singl god-awful thing Trump is doing is like trying to play whack-a-mole while blindfolded. It can't possibly be done. Eyes on one outrage? You just start to focus on it and another one pops up.

So I haven't been able to really dig on the crypto-meme thang that Trump & Co. are running. Is it going to make him billions, or just a few mil? Is the scheme a rug pull, in which the price of something as colossally worthless as a meme coin gets revved up and the initial investors cash (or crypto or meme) out? Is there anything unsavory that this a-hole won't participate in if it'll stroke his ego and/or if he thinks it can make him a buck or a bitcoin?

Sigh...

But much as I'd like to blame him for everyting bad happening in the universe these days, there is, of course, plenty of corruption and thievery in crypto-land that has nothing whatsoever to do with Trump.

Case in point: 

A poor schnook out in Utah got conned into investing $2K worth of crypto in something called Ginza, which was touted as an alternative to Amazon for the Japanese market. 

The scammer lured "Frank" (not the name of the poor schmuck from Utah, but the name that Forbes gave him) in setting up a shop on Ginza to sell outoor sports gear. Think mini Cabela's; think mini Bass Pro Shop. 

Then things just started to spin up and out:

Encouraged by the initial success, Frank borrowed another $1 million from family and friends to invest more in Ginza via crypto. (Source: Forbes)

Well, I'm not going to say that borrowing a cool million from family and friends was Frank's first mistake. No, that was getting suckered into the scheme to begin with. But I of all people know that if you're at all off guard it's easy enough to fall for a scam. The scam I fell for wasn't of the "hogs get slaughtered" variety. I didn't stand to get rich quick. But I answered a spoofed call from BofA last winter, and - in a bout of temporary insanity - I fell for the lie that my account had been hacked and transferred $1K to the scammer. Fortunately, I came to my senses within about 30 seconds of executing this insane transaction and was able to cancel it. But, yeah, smart people can get played. (A couple years ago, a highly intelligent and sophisticated women I know got scammed out of a couple of thousand bucks by some scam artists who were going to fix her chimney for her. It happens.)

But poor schmuck Frank had gotten greedy.

Later, believing he’d scored nearly $4 million, Frank decided to withdraw the money. But to do so, Li told him he needed to pay $700,000 in taxes. He sold his cabin in Idaho for $290,000 and managed to pull together the rest, only to be told that, because of the remarkable success of his Ginza store, he’d need to pay another $700,000 in taxes. Frank gave over another $700,000. In total, he’d put well over $2 million into the apparent Amazon rival. And soon he’d learn the truth: it was all a scam. His money, and the funds he’d borrowed from his kith and kin, were gone.

Frank wasn't alone. The FBI, which uncovered the crime, found many other victims. But Frank was the one that was out the most money. 

No word yet on whether the Feds will be able to recover any of Frank's money. Hopefully, if he's not made whole, he can at least be made partial.

Whether or not Frank gets any money back (crypto or real), there are apparanently a ton of "pig butchering" schemes going on, which take advantage of the mark's understandable desire to make a lot of loot without doing much heavy lifting (other than forking over money). And why not? If the President of the US of A can make millions (billions?) with a crypto meme, why shouldn't every schmuck out there make a bit of coin for themselves?

A study last year from University of Texas at Austin claimed pig butchering scams may have netted $75 billion between 2020 and 2024.

Molly Ivins, the great Texas free-wheeling, wildly funny, highly progressive journalist has been dead now fro nearly 20 years.  She's the one who way back in the way back, before anyone had ever heard the words 'crypto' or 'meme', came up with the aphorism "pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered."

Molly also had this to say:

“When politicians start talking about large groups of their fellow Americans as ‘enemies,’ it’s time for a quiet stir of alertness. Polarizing people is a good way to win an election, and also a good way to wreck a country.”

Lordy lord, I sure wish Molly Ivins were still around. I can only imagine what she'd have to say.  

Anyone surprised by this?

Twenty-some years ago, when I began driving up to Syracuse on business a few times a year, the thruway in Upstate New York was packed with Walmart semis. 

I can't remember the exact wording, but the slogan on the side of those Walmart trucks was something about everything sold there being made in America. And then those slogans were replaced by ones touting the low prices.

Whether their products are made in America (making for American manufacturing jobs) or easy on the pocket book (making it cheaper for consumers to consume), the jury's always been out - or delivering a split verdict - on whether Walmart is a benefit for anyone not from the Walmart family.

For years, the big argument has been that when a Walmart appeared - invariably on the outskirts of town - the town center was hollowed out, the long-standing small independent businesses died, the town lost its heart, soul and character. We also learned that Walmart coached employees on how to apply for foodstamps and Medicaid, letting the taxpayers foot the bill for Walmart's low wages. 

But low prices for consumers countered all arguments. 

Still, it was hard not to get the unsettling feeling that Walmart was and is soul-crushing. 

And yet, we keep returning to the low price "fact" of life: that Walmart's:

...dominance represents the triumph of an idea that has guided much of American policy making over the past half century: that cheap consumer prices are the paramount metric of economic health, more important even than low unemployment and high wages. Indeed, Walmart’s many defenders argue that the company is a boon to poor and middle-class families, who save thousands of dollars every year shopping there. (Source: The Atlantic)

Even some progressive economists jumped on the All Hail, Walmart bandwagon, pushing the theory that low prices trump any ill effects that Walmart might also be dragging in.

Not so fast, some new research claims that "the costs Walmart imposes in the form of not only lower earnings but also higher unemployment in the wider community outweigh the savings it provides for shoppers. On net, they conclude, Walmart makes the places it operates in poorer than they would be if it had never shown up at all."

One group of resesarachers (Lukas Lehner, Zachary Parolin, Clemente Pignatti, and Rafael Pintro Sschmitt) ran something akin to "the economics euqilavelent of a clinical trial for medicine." They looked at a rich set of data and came up with two groups, on who lived where a new Walmart was opening, the other of which lived Walmart-free. 

Their conclusion: In the 10 years after a Walmart Supercenter opened in a given community, the average household in that community experienced a 6 percent decline in yearly income—equivalent to about $5,000 a year in 2024 dollars—compared with households that didn’t have a Walmart open near them...

In theory, however, those people could still be better off if the money that they saved by shopping at Walmart was greater than the hit to their incomes. According to a 2005 study commissioned by Walmart itself, for example, the store saves households an average of $3,100 a year in 2024 dollars. Many economists think that estimate is generous (which isn’t surprising, given who funded the study), but even if it were accurate, Parolin and his co-authors find that the savings would be dwarfed by the lost income. They calculate that poverty increases by about 8 percent in places where a Walmart opens relative to places without one even when factoring in the most optimistic cost-savings scenarios.

There are flaws in the Parolin et al. analysis. Maybe other things were going on that caused on area to suffer economic losses. 

But anothe paper (by Justin Wiltshire) took a different approach and found "five years after Walmart enters a given county, total employment falls by about 3 percent, with most of the decline concentrated in “goods-producing establishments.”" These goods-producers were likely driven out of business by Walmart finding sources of goods (e.g., China) that could meet their low-price demands. And Walmart, having driven so many local job-producers out of business, can keep its wages down because they're the only game in town, employment-wise. 

The Biden administration has been trying to turn the tables on the belief that all that matters is lower prices for consumers by examining how mergers would impact workers. How likely is a Trump administration to keep the Biden focus on worker welfare? Guess it depends on what Elon and the tech bros want...

Recent history shows the political danger in threatening low consumer prices. The public’s reaction to the inflation of the past few years suggests that many Americans would rather be slightly poorer but have price stability than be richer but with more inflation. That will tempt policy makers to prioritize low prices above all else and embrace the companies that offer them. But if Walmart’s example reveals anything, it is that, in the long term, low prices can have costs of their own.

Is anyone surprised by any of this? 

Yeah, but how's its bedside manner

My husband and I used to love watching House, a show in which an eccentric, obnoxious, brilliant doctor - Gregory House (played by the terrific Hugh Laurie) -  sat around with a squad of younger colleagues he was mentoring and put their collective genius minds to the task of solving thorny diagnoses. 

We watched it throughout its long, eight-year run, right up 'til the final episode (which was terrible: the worst in the series), which we saw while Jim was hospitalized after surgery following a devastating, although not especially thorny to figure out, cancer diagnosis. 

Anyway, we always got a kick out of watching the genius that was Greg House at work.

The show went off the air in 2012, well before AI chatbots were playing doctor, and I wonder what genius Dr. House would have thought of using ChatGPT. I suspect he would have scorned it, and likely have pitted himself against it to prove that he was more brilliant. This being TV, and all.

But in real life, ChatGPT is apparently faring somewhat better than real life doctors in diagnosing complex cases. 

In an experiment, 50 doctors (residents and attendings from large healthcare systems) were presented with 6 case histories to diagnose. Half the doctors were given a ChatGPT resource to assist them, the others just stuck to conventional diagnostic info and methods. The doctors using the chatbot received an average score of 76% accuracy; the doctors without the AI assist had an average score of 90% accuracy.

So, no clear win for AI? 

Not so fast.

Dr. ChatGPT, operating on their own, earned a score of 90%.

So why didn't the doctors using AI perform better than the non-AI docs? Seems like doctors, who base their diagnoses not just on book learning but on intuition and experience as well, didn't trust AI when its diagnosis ran counter to their intuition and experience. They just didn't like having their judgement challenged. (Why am I not surprised.)

I don't expect that AI is going to replace real doctors anytime soon, but I think that doctors, once they get the hang of it, are going to get along just fine with their ChatGPT colleagues.

After all, there's just so much information/data out there, you just can't expect a doctor - even a House-ian genius type - to keep up with it all. Let alone a kindly old gaffer like Marcus Welby, MD, who was used to diagnosing appendicitis and heart murmurs in the cosy little office attached to his house back in the 1970's. After all, back in that day, there were fewer diagnostic options to choose from. I bet Marcus Welby never even heard of plaque psoriasis or Peyronie's Disease. 

How could your primary care doctor possibly stay on top of all there is to know about every possible disease out there? 

Even specialists must be hard put to stay up with what's happening in their far narrower fields.

Certainly, within my lifetime - which, realistically, ain't going to be all that long - doctors are going to be deploying AI assistants, rather than the likes of Marcus Welby's hip and happening sidekick, Dr. Steve Kiley. 

And I'm all for it.

A few years ago, a friend from the gym came down with something that, for lack of a more technical description, was exceedingly weird and rare.

The initial diagnosis was insect bite that happened in Peru, where he and his family were climbing Machu Pichu.

After time in the hospital in Peru, my friend came home and saw doctors at Mass General, Dana Farber, and the Mayo Clinic. No one could figure it out. Until finally someone did: an obscure blood cancer that was rarely encountered. 

I don't know whether an earlier diagnosis would have helped any. Survival rate is very dim for this form of cancer. But, sadly my friend - a fit, vigorous, healthy guy in his mid 50's (and truly one of the nicest men I've ever known) - died about a year after he first became ill. Maybe an earlier diagnosis, which I'm guessing that ChatGPT, with its ability to ingest an endless amount of information, would have figured things out before the human experts did.

Anyway, I'm not the biggest AI fan out there, but, in the medical case, bring it. Just bring it along with a human, not on its AI own. 

When it comes to hearing the diagnosis, I want kindly, warm-hearted, hand-holding Marcus Welby. Or even the acerbic Dr. House. I want a human to deliver the news, to tell me what's next. Sure, I'm going to run back home and start googling furiously - with the initial blob of info that comes back to me coming straight out of AI. But I really do want humans involved in my care.

I want bedside manner, dammit, not just beyond-human capacity intelligence. 

Source: NY Times

"The Temu version of a panda"

Who doesn't love a panda?

They're darling. They're fluffy. They're playful. They're cuddly. We can't get enough of them.

And as Americans, we truly can't get enough of them. There are a couple of new arrivals at the San Diego Zoo - on loan from China -  but the ones in the Atlanta Zoo will be repatriated back to China later this year. 

But we really can't complain. We're lucky to have any, given that there may be fewer than 2,000 giant pandas in the world, 800 of them in zoos or breeding centers. And even some Chinese zoos don't have any of these black and white cuties. 

One of the bereft zoos is Shanwei. Not to be outdone by the competition, the innovators at Shanwei decided to transform two Chow Chow dogs into real fake pandas. 

Like pandas, Chow Chows are native to China. But that's about where the resemblance ends. Chows are orange. They have blue tongues. Unlike pandas, which are mostly placid and sweet, Chows are considered aggressive, mean. And they're dogs; not pandas.

It was canny zoo patrons who figured out that the Shanwie pandas they'd paid to see were painted dogs. 

According to the New York Post, visitors at the Shanwei Zoo realized they were being bamboozled when the so-called pandas began panting and barking. Pandas are native to China and an international symbol of the country.

In one visitor’s video, one of the “pandas” was visibly panting while resting on a rock in a fence, while another clip had a panda with a long tail strolling about.

“It’s a PANdog,” one viewer wrote, while someone else joked: “That’s the Temu version of a panda.”

“They were panting that’s why they are pandas,” a third noted. (Source: The Independent)

The zoo has admitted to the ruse; some patrons want their money back.

Shanwei isn't the first Chinese Zoo that's engaged in panda fakery. 

In May, NBC Newsreported that Taizhou Zoo in Jiangsu Province had also painted Chow Chows. Zoo representatives initially claimed that the animals were a rare breed of “panda dogs,” before admitting that such animals don’t exist. At the time, zoo officials told Chinese state media they had advertised them as “panda dogs,” and did not intentionally mislead anyone.

Not that it's okay, but exhibiting "panda dogs" is definitely not as misleading as caling them pandas.  

When journalists asked them why they invented the idea of “panda dogs” to cover their tracks, a zoo representative explained, “There are no panda bears at the zoo, and we wanted to do this as a result.”

At least they were honest about it. But it's not just stupid and fraudulent to try to pass a dog off as a panda, or even a panda dog. It might be harmful. As one commenter noted on Weibo (Chinese Twitter). 

“Their fragile skin and naturally thick coats make them susceptible to skin diseases.”

Zoo officials countered that if it's okay for humans to dye their hair, it's okay for pandas.  Hmmmmm. 

Whether Chow-dying is harmful or not, there's no denying that pretending that a dog is a panda is about as stupid as it gets. What next? Paint some spots on a llama and label it a giraffe? Stripes on a horse and call it a zebra? Accept no substitutes! Let doggos be doggos!

Wanna bet?

I'm not much of a gambler.

Oh, I buy non-winning lottery tickets, but other than that...

The few times I've been to a casino, my limit was ten bucks. I'd use that ten bucks - in the form of a roll of quarters - on the slots. As long as I was "winning," I was good. But once I'd exhausted the ten bucks, that was it. (Reference to a roll of quarters pretty much dates my casino trips, as I understand that the slot machines are no longer coin opp.)

Once I did win $200 playing the slots, and that was definitely a walk-away-from-the-machine moment. 

The few times I've been to the track - and these times are in the way, way, way back - I pretty much stuck to the ten buck rule, placing $2 bets on horses I chose for their name or the color of the jockey's silks. If this strategy yielded any small success, I'd plow a few more bucks into betting on a few more ponies. But I never won very much at the track - nothing to compare to my fabulous $200 casino win.

I've also participated in Super Bowl squares and March Madness ladders. 

And back in my waitressing days, I played the numbers once or twice. 

This was in the era when many restaurants had someone in house - someone who worked in the kitchen or the bar - who had a side hustle running numbers. 

In the days before state lotteries, playing the numbers was a big deal. (You "played your numbers" and you won if your numbers came up in some published non-manipulable number - say, the last few digits of the national debt - that appeared in the newspaper.) 

Overall, gambling just isn't my jam.

But I do enjoy occasionally reading about gambling. And occasionally even blogging about it, as I did in April when  I wrote about Shohei Ohtani getting ripped off by his in-over-his-head gambling interpreter.)

So I was all in on an article I saw a couple of months ago in the Washington Post. I have to admit that I was a bit in over my head in trying to follow the convoluted plot of the story, which focused on a bookie-related scandal that's been roiling Las Vegas. Central to the scandal is one Mathew Bowyer, who was the bookie for Ohtani's interpreter. 

With all the avenues of legal betting - Las Vegas? Hello? - I was surprised to learn that there are still bookies, a profession I thought would have died out with the numbers game. But bookies, it seems, bring major league gamblers a number of benefits. Gamblers may be given a credit line, or better odds. And gamblers who don't want their name out there can gamble anonymously. 

Bowyer is more than a bookie. He's a card player, a baccarat sharp, a tournament golfer, "a dojo operator, day trader, landscaper, real estate developer."

Bowyer’s revenue source should have been a problem for the casinos hosting him. Federal anti-money laundering laws forbid the casinos here from allowing suspected bookies or other criminals from wagering at their tables. Nonetheless, employees up and down organizational charts at some of the largest properties on the Las Vegas Strip welcomed the action of Bowyer and his partners, according to interviews and confidential records reviewed by The Washington Post.

They comped Bowyer millions of dollars in discounted losses and perks, vouched for the legitimacy of his funds in internal correspondence and lifted restrictions on him for the promise of seven-figure cashier’s checks. They even gave his wife legal income for bringing in her husband’s action. All the while, they catered to him, comping penthouses and villas, shuttling him on casino-owned jets and pairing him with [NBA Hall o Famer and well-known gambler Charles] Barkley.

I'm not up on all the nuances of bookie-hood, but I guess that it's a bad idea to have bookies gambling because they're washing ill-gotten (i.e., illegal) cash that came from illegal sports betting. Or something.

Anyway, the numbers are staggering - especially to this roll of quarters gambler. And because of the money he brought them, some casinos were happy to have Bowyer in their shops, even if they were at least unofficially aware that, as a bookie, he was a no-no. 

Averaging $30,000 a hand at times, Bowyer lost up to $1.5 million in a single session. To keep his business, the Venetian gave Bowyer more than $3 million in “comps,” which can include forgiven losses, hotel rooms, jet trips and more....In total, Bowyer lost $3.6 million at The Venetian, according to multiple people with direct knowledge. Boyajian won more than $300,000 from the Venetian, which suspended his credit line last year because of his debt to other casinos and slow repayment, according to a person with knowledge of his gambling.

I realize that $3.6M ain't what it used to be. But, yikes! Imagine running up a tab of that magnitude at just one of the casinos you frequented. Baby needs a new pair of shoes, indeed.

Anyway, now the Feds and Nevada state gambling authorities are involved, breathing down the necks of the casinos that had dealings with Bowyer.

The whole thing is just plain crazy to me. Guess that's why I've never been much of a gambler.

Fake obituary pirates? These guys ought to be walking the plank

I am a long-time reader of obituaries. 

It's genetic.

I believe I inherited the obituary-reading gene from my father, an avid reader of  the "Irish sports pages," and I've taken up the cause. (Unlike my father, who was a regular wake and funeral goer, I don't attend one unless I knew the person or someone in their family really well. Other than the four years he spent in the Navy during WWII, my father's entire life happened in same neighborhood, and he knew a lot of people. Plus back in the day, wakes and funerals were more of a thing. I went to more as a kid than I do now, that's for sure.)

But I do read obituaries, and every once in a while I look in on the family undertaker, O'Connor Brothers in Worcester, which is located in the parish I grew up in, and where most parishioners "went out from." Over the years, O'Connor's remit has expanded beyond the mostly Irish-Americans they once took care of. (When we shopped for my mother's casket 20+ years ago now, there was an emerald green one on offer, with a shamrock emblazoned on the satin insert). Now I notice a lot of Vietnamese names, Greeks, Albanians, Hispanics. They take care of a lot of African-Americans, too. But they still do plenty of locals, so I've been able to inform my sibs when a neighbor has died. Of course, most of that generation is gone, so now it's us.

Thus, I was recently able to let my sister Trish know that one of her high school classmates had died at the age of 65.

On occasion, I graze through the obits on Athy's website, as well. I went to high school with one of the Athy's, and they seem to have cornered the market for the order of nuns I had throughout my schooling. Most of the retired nuns in "my" order live in a retirement community in Worcester, and once in a while I come upon some nun I had back in the day.S

Sometimes I google an obituary for someone I see mentioned on the news or on Twitter. And, of course, I read plenty of obituaries of prominent people in The Globe, The Times, The Washington Post. 

I'm the curious type. (Or it is nosy? Or is it morbid?)

Most obituaries, whether they were published in the local newspaper or on a funeral parlor's website, end up on Legacy.com, a long-time obituary aggregator. 

But of late I've noticed that there are a whole raft of sites that come up, rando sites that aren't the usual obit sources: funeral parlor, local newspaper, and Legacy.com. 

The one I've encountered most frequently is echovita, which is always "sad to announce" that someone has died. Sometimes they publish parts of the public obituary verbatim, but sometimes they freelance a bit. I read that they've listed someone's pets as "close friends" without bothering to say that they were her dogs. Another obituary claimed that a young person who died in an accident had been murdered. Spin off versions of that obituary embroidered the story, making the young person (a Georgetown undergrad) a famous actor or singer. There've also been obituaries written for folks who are still live.

Sometimes the click-bate obituaries overdramatize a situation - everything's a tragedy, whether there is anything tragic beyond the sadness of loved ones - and use quite florid language. Some of the ones I've seen sound like they're written by someone who's not fluent in English; some of the ones I've seen sound like they were written by a poorly skilled bot. Some are, in fact, written by AI. (Bad AI, not good AI.)

Families aren't happy when the obituaries they've lovingly crafted get bowlderized. Friends stumble across the crazy obits and end up confused. They may leave a condolcence note that the loved ones never end up seeing. 

Echovita and other online obit companies make money off of the sales of memorial trees, flowers, or candles. And by running ads on the obituary pages, whether the ads are something the decedent's family approves of or not.

The memorial trees, i.e., seedlings, do get planted, but I don't know how flowers or candles work. Maybe they just show a bouquet - kind of like an NFT - or a lit candle, to show that someone cares. The seedlings get planted mostly. Less scrupulous companies just pocket the cash.

One of the problems is that, when people opt to plant a tree, they're cannibalizing donations to a charity that the family has listed.

Anyway, it turns out the "obituary pirating" has become quite a thing:

Obituary pirating, where people scrape and republish obituaries from funeral homes and websites like Legacy.com, has been an ethically dubious business for years. Piracy websites are often skilled enough at search engine optimization to rise to the top of search results, and they use the resulting traffic to charge a premium for digital ads that appear next to text lifted wholesale from funeral homes, local newspapers, and other authorized obituary publishers. Occasionally, these pirate sites go a step further, manipulating bereaved people into buying sympathy gifts like candles or flowers and pocketing the money. (Source: Wired)

Some of the crazily concocted obituaries - they're "shoddy," they're "janky" - have begun showing up on YouTube, narrated by English speakers, Urdu speakers, other language speakers. Far afield from the territory beyond which anyone would be interested in the obituary of, say, someone who had grown up in the Main South neighborhood of Worcester.

And, in fact, there aren't a ton of viewers looking at any one of these "shoddy," "janky" video obituaries - often showing a narrator sitting in his home, showing "corny slideshows or candles and photos of the deceased surced from social media."

But it's a numbers game. It can be lucrative if there are enough views in the aggregate.

Despite their shoddiness, the obituary YouTube channels are sometimes amassing enough followers and views to meet YouTube’s Partner Program requirements and start making money off advertisements. 

These bogus obituaries are plenty distaseful and insensitive - I'd like to see these pirates walk the plank - but they're probably not illegal. 

They used to say "sex sells," but I guess "death sells," too.  

Me? My reading will stick to checking out O'Connor Brothers and Athy's to see who's checked out, and reading an occasional newspaper obit. 

Guess I'm just old fashioned that way.