Linkage

• Cancel the Tokyo Games—and Abolish the Olympics Forever (The New Republic) In addition to the massive losses that can cripple a city for years, there is the wholesale destruction of affordable housing for Olympic villages and the like, aggressive policing rargeting the poor and minorities, etc. The Olympics are a plague on society.
  
• Interview With Professor Adolph Reed (Matt Taibbi) Perhaps the leading Black Marxist scholar.  Money quote, "Combating racism becomes a convenient alternative to attacking inequality, even those inequalities that appear or that manifest themselves as racial disparities."
  
• Gamers Are Better Than Scientists at Catching Fraud (The Atlantic) So are magicians, because gamers and magicians are looking for deliberate deception, while scientists look for error.
  
• Appeals Court Affirms State Trooper Who Responded To An F-Bomb With An Arrest Owes $15k In Legal Fees (Techdirt) Lower courts are increasingly skeptical of qualified immunity.
  
• Activision Blizzard Sued Over ‘Frat Boy’ Culture, Harassment (Bloomberg Law) It's not just the gaming industry, it's a lot of tech.
  
• Trump’s PAC collected $75 million this year, but so far the group has not put money into pushing for the 2020 ballot reviews he touts (Washington Post) Grifters gotta grift.
• The Antikythera Mechanism: an ancient Greek machine rewriting the history of technology (The Past) A mechanical computer with the most precise machining of anything for the next millenium.
• Gung-ho tank gamer spills classified docs in effort to win online argument (The Register) When hard core gaming goes too far.
  

John Oliver crushing on Octopi may be the cutest thing this week: