The writer of this article in Texas Monthly, Bryan Burrough, co-authored a recent book about the Alamo: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth (2021)
As the title indicates, the book demolishes one of the biggest myths in American history: the legend of the Alamo. The author follows the trail of hagiographic heroism from 1836, the year of the iconic battle led by William Barret Travis, a man whose own memoirs show that he was a syphilitic womanizer. Like many of the slave traders and land speculators who illegally crossed into the Mexican province of Tejas, Travis was a failed businessman, crushed by debt, who abandoned his wife and children in Alabama to play soldier of fortune on the frontier. Worse, this incompetent officer disobeyed direct orders from Sam Houston to evacuate the old Spanish mission at the Alamo, which was understood by virtually everyone to be impossible to defend against the Mexican army. The predictable result was total defeat and slaughter. After that, myth-makers began re-writing the history to turn the Alamo into a heroic tale of military glory. The mission itself was mismanaged for more than a century, large sections of the original structure were allowed to fall into disrepair, and the iconic shape of the Alamo building - the bell-shaped facade on the front wall of the chapel - was added many years after the battle of 1836. Today the battle over the Alamo continues in the form of struggles by the community to recover the authentic history of the place, while hard-line conservatives insist on maintaining the fiction of the fake past.
Is crypto a scam? It basically works as advertised, so technically it's not a scam.
But the real question to consider is whether society is better off with crypto. Using cost-benefit analysis, we can draw up a simple balance sheet showing the positive benefits and the negative externalities:
POSITIVE SOCIAL BENEFITS
1. Money can be transferred from one person to another without intermediaries such as banks.
2. It provides an alternative to hyper-inflating currencies in places like Venezuela.
NEGATIVE SOCIAL COSTS
1. Data centers waste enormous amounts of energy mining crypto.
2. Crypto facilitates useless financial speculation and criminal activity, e.g., ransomware payments, illicit commerce, etc.
In the final analysis, the benefits are rather small, whereas the costs are significant and will continue to grow as the crypto industry expands.
I still don't see why on earth I'd need crypto for "1. Money can be transferred from one person to another without intermediaries such as banks."
Especially as people deal with real fiat currency.
Let's say I am at a restaurant. I pay $200. My friend wants to give me $100 for their part of the bill. They'd have to convert $100 to 0.00115987 BTC. Transfer those to me and I convert 0.00115987BTC back to $100. This will incur losses. So I ain't even getting my money's worth.
Or alternatively my friend sends me a wire from their bank account to my bank account and I receive it within seconds. This is country dependent but e.g. here in HK FPS takes 2 seconds and costs nothing. SEPA Fast Payment in Europe is similar as is Australia's NPP or Singapore's FAST etc etc etc.
For international my banks all provide free SWIFT transfers. Not instant, takes 1-2 days but hey. Free of charge send and receive for my bank accounts here.
It's a technical solution that can easily be done by banks and banking regulators and doesn't need another 'currency' as intermediary.
> 1. Money can be transferred from one person to another without intermediaries such as banks.
By replacing them with the intermediary of cryptocurrency exchanges and the blockchain itself - both of which charge fees on transfers which are often significantly higher than traditional banks. Is this actually a benefit?
> 2. It provides an alternative to hyper-inflating currencies in places like Venezuela.
Can you point to any evidence that cryptocurrency is actually used as a medium of exchange within these countries? Or is it primarily a means of capital flight?
WRT. negative social costs, I'd add that the anonymous and irreversible nature of cryptocurrency transactions leaves consumers with little to no recourse if they're scammed or make a mistake.
> By replacing them with the intermediary of cryptocurrency exchanges and the blockchain itself - both of which charge fees on transfers which are often significantly higher than traditional banks. Is this actually a benefit?
Your puny brain can't grasp the 4D chess here... it's just like how those Federal agencies are so bloated, that completely bypassing them will fix everything (hint: follow the money -- who's going to get rich when they replace the "bloated" middleman with their own infrastructure? In the case of crypto, it rhymes with boin-case).
Can’t speak for Venezuela but I know it is fairly common in Argentina to use crypto for currency exchange and a hedge against inflation. Not sure about straight commerce but sure it happens as well.
I think the problem is also "Venezuelan banks". Bank runs tend to happen in these countries. A bank run is when people expect a bank to collapse, so they pull out money, forcing the bank into debt, and actually collapsing them. The patch for this is government insurance but Venezuelans likely don't trust their gov enough. Bank runs happen plenty in uninsured finance e.g. crypto too, but crypto exchanges today are more stable.
So crypto helps as an alternative method of holding money. You can buy/sell in USDT over some wallet or exchange. Your wallet is your own, in your device. The government can make it illegal, but that doesn't mean they can stop you. It doesn't collapse, but there's always the risk of being robbed, as with cash or jewelry.
"works as advertised, so technically it's not a scam."
It often does not work as advertised. It is not an efficient form for transferring money compared to say, Wise. I used to be able to buy a game off Steam or a burger off a crypto wallet, but neither of these things are available today.
So the use case then becomes that they hodl on to something that increases in value in time. But that sounds a little like a scam as well.
Stablecoins are in actual use and not a scam, but they're effectively USD to USD, at a loss.
Based on field work conducted with officers and IT personnel in the Los Angeles Police Department, the author convincingly shows that law enforcement generally follow an "institutional data imperative," i.e., a mandate to collect as much information as possible, in part by securing routine access to a wide range of data on everyday activities from non-police databases. Data originally collected for one purpose is used for another (p. 53).
The story lede of this article is buried in the final paragraphs:
Aside from the fact that California produces far more solar power than it can effectively use, solar projects "have cleared thousands of acres of pristine land in the Mojave Desert, where it has angered local residents worried about declining property values and environmentalists concerned about the loss of wildlife habitat."
As the final graph of the article notes, the people who live in the California desert regions are not deceived.
"We have this planet to save and they are throwing away power?" said Mark Carrington, a resident of Desert Center, a town east of Joshua Tree National Park, which has been nearly surrounded by solar projects.
I was unable to find a "letter" from Missouri Governor Michael Parson about this case, but there is a press release from the Office of the Governor (url copied below). Here are some of the highlights of the Governor's statement to the press:
The Governor's Office offers the following summary of the crime: "Marcellus Williams murdered Felicia Gayle on August 11, 1998. He burglarized Ms. Gayle’s home, ambushed her as she left the shower, stabbed her 43 times and left the knife lodged in her neck."
Because of the bloody and brutal nature of the crime, the police were able to recover DNA evidence at the crime scene. However, as the Innocence Project observed, the DNA evidence that was left behind by the killer does not match Marcellus Williams. The perpetrator left a knife in the victim's neck, but the DNA recovered from the knife - which could have conclusively determined who killed the victim - was contaminated and destroyed by the state, as noted by the Innocence Project.
Yet, the governor's press release completely ignores these facts, and then proceeds to deliver an astonishing statement: "I also want to add how deeply disturbed we’ve been about how this case has been covered. Mr. Williams’ attorneys chose to muddy the waters about DNA evidence, claims of which Courts have repeatedly rejected. Yet, some media outlets and activist groups have continued such claims without so much of a mention of the judicial proceedings or an unbiased analysis of the facts."
DNA is proven science, and a true "unbiased analysis of the facts" would presumably include the critical details that (1) none of the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Williams, and (2) the murder weapon was mishandled by state investigators, thereby destroying potentially exculpatory evidence that could have exonerated Williams.
The other evidence cited by the Governor's Office is all circumstantial. Contrary to the Governor's assertions, the witnesses who testified against Williams were in fact incentivized with reward money, and they did not offer details of the crime that were unknown to the public through media reports.
In summary, there is no direct evidence connecting Marcellus Williams to the crime scene. The real murderer in this case is Missouri Governor Mike Parson.
DNA evidence is notoriously iffy. I would not convict / not convict someone based purely on that. There's so many confounding factors. No one knows whose DNA was left. There's no way to know any DNA is 'the killers'. For all we know Gayle was having an affair. That doesn't explain the hard facts of why her stuff ended up in his car and she died in a manner that fits Williams' previous violent attacks.
Look... obviously I can't see he did or did not do it with incomplete information. However, it's pretty clear the innocence project is wildly manipulating the story. Moreover, the innocence project frequently calls out the iffi-ness of DNA evidence when it suits them, and are now claiming that we should listen only to it.
The truth is that the police recovered some DNA and it happened to be a man's they cannot connect. It could be her killer. It could not be. It could be a friend; it could be an affair partner; who knows. Either way, that man did not have all her stuff, and did not confess to the murder.
> DNA is proven science, and a true "unbiased analysis of the facts" would
DNA exists sure. but no one knows whose DNA was collected, and DNA matching is not 100%.
> none of the DNA evidence recovered from the crime scene matched Williams, and (2) the murder weapon was mishandled by state investigators, thereby destroying potentially exculpatory evidence that could have exonerated Williams.
Why would we expect any of the DNA to match? DNA of all sorts of people are everywhere. It doesn't seem there was much struggle. There was no rape. Exactly what do you expect to find?
> The presence on the knife of a male DNA profile is also significant and worthy of additional testing and evaluation. In briefing, the State argued that the presence of DNA on a kitchen knife is unremarkable because anyone in the home could have used the knife. However, the State has long recognized the power of DNA found on a murder weapon and has relied upon such evidence to secure convictions. Here, the only male who lived in the home was the victim’s husband. Additional testing could be performed to develop a profile from the husband for comparison to the profile found on the knife. Assuming the victim’s husband (who is not and never was a suspect) is excluded as a match, it is then clear that the DNA matches the killer. Yet, law enforcement has never conducted such testing.
The innocence project is making the wild claim that the male DNA on the kitchen knife is certainly the killers. Let me ask you... how many men have you had at a dinner party? The idea that their DNA on the murder weapon should be sufficient to indict them, while all the other physical evidence linking Williams to the murder is not sufficient is... a stretch. Under this scheme, Mrs Gayle's dinner guest from the night before is more likely to be the murder culprit than the random attacker who just happens to have a ton of her personal belongings after she is killed? Come on. Let's live in the real world.
What we do know is that Williams has a track record of violence and then not doing anything to address it, while blaming others for his crimes.
It's insane the amount of bullshit people will pille up to defend a man who, even if he was innocent on this case, was clearly a criminal with antecedents and no sign of working on a better life.
Even if he was innocent in this particular case, society just got rid of problematic and disruptive individual that clearly had no will to behave in society.
In any way you put it, it's actually a very positive outcome for everyone but yet we get all this nonsense.
And let's be real, the chance he was actually innocent is so slim it's a complete waste of time trying to do that.
If we were talking about an upstanding citizen with a good life and a lot to lose, yes, it would smell fishy and would need a lot of consideration/better evidence; but this is not the case at all, even if there was a mistake it is a rather small mistake everything considered.
Many of the contributors to this thread are under the wrong impression that the police found the victim's laptop and other items in Marcellus Williams' car. This is not true. According to Wikipedia, the murder occurred in August 1998, but it was not until May 1999 that the victim's family "announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction in the case. In response, two individuals, Henry Cole and Lara Asaro, named Marcellus Scott Williams as the culprit."
The wikipedia article continues: "Lara Asaro, the girlfriend of Williams at the time of the crime, gave testimony that Williams had confessed to her... This is after she discovered evidence from the crime scene in Williams' car."
This is an important clarification: The police did not find the victim's property in Williams' car. Rather, Williams' ex-girlfriend, who was incentivized by reward money, claimed, more than 8 months after the crime, that she saw the victim's property in his car.
This is one of the the main reasons that the Innocence Project correctly argues that there is no reliable evidence linking Marcellus Williams to the murder.
"The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle. The police also recovered the laptop computer from Glenn Roberts. The laptop was identified as the one stolen from Gayle's residence."
The full quote from the article in justia.com states the following: "In November of 1999, University City police approached Asaro to speak with her about the murder. Asaro told the police that Williams admitted to her that he had killed Gayle. The next day, the police searched the Buick LeSabre and found the Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator belonging to Gayle. The police also recovered the laptop computer from Glenn Roberts. The laptop was identified as the one stolen from Gayle's residence."
The only thing linking the laptop to Williams was the testimony of a witness. Even if the witness is telling the truth, he has no way of knowing how Williams obtained the laptop.
By any reasonable standard, all this is extremely flimsy evidence: More than a year after the murder, the police found a "Post-Dispatch ruler and calculator" in the suspect's car that belonged to the victim? And someone testified that Williams had the victim's laptop. And it is on the basis of this pitifully weak evidence that you would justify the execution of Williams, the suspect? Even though, as the Innocence Project correctly observes, there is no direct physical evidence linking Williams to the crime scene, and the DNA recovered from the crime scene does not match Williams?
I was just helping everyone understand that your important clarification, was in fact, wrong.
Since I wasn't on the jury, I can't say whether or not I would have been ok with the death penalty in this case, although the murder was particularly heinous.
This is the second time in as many days I've seen some one use the argument that the severity of the crime meant the standards for conviction should somehow be less stringent. Sadly, I don't get the impression is an uncommon way of thinking.
This line of thinking peeks through all the time from otherwise intelligent people. Merely mentioning how heinous a crime was when we're talking about the guilt or innocence of a suspect should immediately kill your credibility. Too bad the criminal justice system doesn't care about that.
Horribly, you regularly see this in supreme court cases. Some case has the conservatives denying a significant right to a criminal suspect and the decision will start with a lurid depiction of the crime they were convicted of through the denial of some right.
its not a deterrent for multiple other reasons too:
1. most murderers do not expect to get caught if they are acting at all rationally, and do not care if they do not, and,
2. unless you execute a high proportion of people committing a particular crime any one criminal knows they are unlikely to be executed.
I think the Tutu quote at the end of the video.
Most of the rest of the work world has abolished capital punishment, and most of the rest uses it very sparingly. The big exceptions are China and the Middle East. Good company to keep?
This in and of itself very likely creates a bias against the defendant. For me, there is overwhelming evidence that many innocent people have been executed. To support the death penalty, you seem likely to either not believe in systemic injustice (which means you are also probably more likely to believe flimsy testimony) or accept that innocent lives are a tolerable tradeoff to ensure that some people are executed for their crimes. Both groups seem more likely to convict to me than a random sample.
Personally, I also feel that it is morally wrong to give jurors life and death decision making power. The jurors themselves can be deeply harmed by this if they later learn that they convicted a defendant on the basis of false evidence.
I think the bigger problem though is that the death penalty is too abstract. There are many people who believe that certain crimes are worthy of execution. I don't personally agree, but I accept other's beliefs on that point. But even if I grant the righteousness of execution in certain cases, it seems nearly impossible to implement justly and without heavy costs to society. This includes the costs to the people who must carry out the execution as well as the exceedingly high financial costs relative to other forms of punishment.
Indeed, it starts with the judge deciding (without trial or jury) whether capital charges can be brought. Then a capital jury is chosen.
In practical terms, it also requires an incompetent lawyer. Ruth Bader Ginsberg said "No well defended person receives the death penalty." I read that in an article about the one isolated case where she was wrong.
I also suspect that the death penalty corrupts the societies that use it.
If the ruler and calculator in fact belonged to the victim that is an important clarification of your "the police did not find the victim's property in Williams' car", and your reaction is unnecessarily dismissive. Just acknowledge the error and move on, no need for sarcastic defensiveness.
Even if the police were able to establish that the ruler and calculator belonged to the victim, it is merely circumstantial evidence. It does not prove Williams was the killer.
Here is a quick summary of the main issues: (1) There is no reliable evidence that Williams is guilty of the crime; (2) The DNA evidence from the crime scene does not match Williams; (3) Numerous legal experts, including St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney Wesley Bell, argued convincingly that Williams' death sentence should have been commuted to life in prison, at a minimum; (4) A Republican governor ignored the facts and legal opinions and simply murdered Williams.
Juries absolutely do make errors, including ones which result in innocent people being put to death.
In a number of cases, the Innocence Project has certainly managed to find hard DNA evidence that linked the actual murderer to the crime, resulting in saving people from death row. One of my friends worked on some of these cases. As former law enforcement, he was very much aware of the various ways the system can fail. Police officers commit perjury on the stand, "expert" witnesses use pseudoscience with zero factual evidence (there are processes to prevent this which have gotten slightly better), and there are shockingly terrible public defenders.
> Even if the police were able to establish that the ruler and calculator belonged to the victim, it is merely circumstantial evidence. It does not prove Williams was the killer.
I agree. You were still wrong in ways that do matter. Acknowledging it gracefully makes your case stronger, not weaker.
In your prior comment you say that Asaro was incentivized by a reward offered in May 1999, but that doesn't agree with waiting for the police to approach her in November.
The "approach" by the police was essentially an offer to either testify and get the reward money and have police drop some charges against her, or not testify and face the charges herself.
Circumstantial. There are a 1000 different ways he could have obtained those items without committing a murder. Prove that having them is proof positive he killed someone.
I don't think we should have capital punishment at all, anywhere, and certainly this is a textbook example of why, but circumstantial evidence is real evidence, admissible in court cases.
My understanding is that the opposite is closer to the truth: most cases are made on circumstantial evidence. Jury instructions apparently tell jurors not to weight it any differently than direct evidence.
Multiple witnesses seeing a suspect run out of a store holding a smoking gun shortly after the store clerk was shot is both circumstantial evidence and plenty for a DA to bring to trial.
"Circumstantial" evidence is often stronger than "direct" evidence. e.g. DNA is almost always "circumstantial", yet more modernly maligned eye witness evidence is "direct".
[1] Ruler is in the folded laptop, laptop gets stolen, laptop is sold, ruler inside, buyer is told he can keep the cool ruler.
[2] Murderer specifically tries to pin the murder on someone else. Someone else being prosecuted is a good way to live free after, gifts his laptop and a ruler to the suspect or leaves them somewhere where they are discovered and taken.
Is that unlikely? Is it more unlikely than a murderer keeping the laptop and ruler from a victim, tying him to the murder?
For me this alone would be absolutely insufficient evidence, to sentence someone to death. The ease with which some here would do this shocks me.
Fair, but the Innocence Project did not argue that the defendant received inadequate representation. So presumably the defense would have had to offer an explanation during the trial and the jury was apparently unconvinced.
Juries can get things wrong, but we’re also just getting the cliff notes of the trial rather than the whole story.
https://www.jornada.com.mx/2025/07/02/mundo/022n1mun
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