Elizabeth Lopatto

I enjoyed this write-up of the Afroman defamation trial, which, by the way, he won. Mike Masnick cuts to the core: the police think they should be able to do whatever they want, including screwing up, without fear of embarrassment.

Ellis says he was offered money to use a prediction market’s odds to write “a couple of stories each week,” and it was enough money that it was hard to turn down.“Taking money from a Polymarket to hype their gambling odds on a TV show is ethically the same as taking money from a network to write positive things about their programming.,” he wrote.

For those of you not familiar, Afroman was raided by the police and then made two music videos (“Will You Help Me Repair My Door“ and ”Lemon Pound Cake”) about it. The officers sued him for using surveillance footage of their raid in the videos. On cross-examination during the trial, Afroman gave a stirring speech on the importance of the First Amendment. He’s also released another video, “Battle Hymn of the Police Whistleblower.”

According to the Arizona attorney general, Kalshi is illegally operating a gambling business. It’s the first criminal case against the prediction market, which told Reuters that “States like Arizona want to ​individually regulate a nationwide financial exchange, and are trying every trick in the book to ‌do ⁠it.” The case is part of an ongoing dispute between states and the CFTC about who has jurisdiction over Kalshi and similar companies.

”The hacker expressed disgust at the presence of child abuse images on the device and left a message threatening to turn its owner over to the FBI, the person said.” Apparently they didn’t realize they were on an FBI server.

In this personal review of Everybody Loses, Jonny Auping recalls his time with a bookie: “thank God it was illegal bookies who got their hooks in me first. If it was the NFL and NBA peddling this stuff straight into my veins before I had any experience with my compulsions, I really can’t say how far it would have gone.”

Apparently he wasn’t satisfied with just the book. Sort of a shame McKenzie couldn’t release it on April 1, don’t you agree?

Fortune has a report on how Epstein got into Gates’ inner circle, and then leveraged a bridge player rumored to be Gates’ ex-girlfriend against him: “The richest man in the world is so cheap, his former bridge girl and toy, lives on a friends sofa,” Epstein wrote. Epstein wanted Gates to manage a “donor-advised fund” to reduce his taxes.