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Yahoo
13-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Review: Schedule I Is a Multiplayer Co-op Black Market Econ Simulator (opinion)
Schedule I is a computer game that lets you rise from a lowly weed dealer to be Walter White or Tony Montana. More specifically, the game is a black market econ simulator in the tradition of Drug Wars—a buy-low-sell-high drug-dealing game that was, to the chagrin of DARE, very popular on high school graphing calculators. Schedule I's gameplay is straightforward: Sell drugs, buy better equipment, hook new customers, and dodge the cops. The gimmick is that it doesn't skip over mundane tasks. Instead of clicking "grow OG Kush" from a drop-down menu, players have to plant seeds, water, trim, and package bud before they can sling it. Black market econ simulators give insights beyond the typical computer game, illustrating how rational actors navigate and price-in prohibition, including violence. The graphics, though, have a goofy South Park aesthetic that keeps it all lighthearted. Best of all, there is multiplayer co-op support, so you and your crew can build a drug empire together. Go ahead, all the cool kids are doing it. The post Review: Schedule I Is a Multiplayer Co-op Black Market Econ Simulator appeared first on
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Yahoo
Brickbat: Two-Tiered Justice
A federal judge sentenced Los Angeles County Sheriff's Deputy Douglas Kirk to four months in prison after he was allowed to plead guilty to a misdemeanor charge of excessive force despite being previously convicted of a felony. In February 2025, a federal jury convicted Kirk of the felony, which carried a potential 10-year sentence, for his actions during a June 2023 arrest in a Lancaster, California, grocery store parking lot, where he used excessive force on a couple. But after the new Trump-appointed U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli took office, prosecutors offered Kirk a deal to plead guilty to a misdemeanor. The post Brickbat: Two-Tiered Justice appeared first on
Yahoo
30-05-2025
- General
- Yahoo
Brickbat: Third-Rate Romance
Mark Brave, formerly the sheriff of Strafford County, New Hampshire, received a prison sentence of three-and-a-half to seven years in prison after pleading guilty to perjury, theft, and falsifying evidence. Brave spent $19,000 in county funds on travel and accommodations, to conduct extramarital affairs. He will have to pay the money back as part of his sentence. The post Brickbat: Third-Rate Romance appeared first on
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Brickbat: Tough Guy
Justin Gaither, a former police officer in Venice, Illinois, was sentenced to two years in prison after pleading guilty to deprivation of rights under color of law. Gaither struck a handcuffed man twice in the face, without provocation, leaving the suspect with a broken nose. The post Brickbat: Tough Guy appeared first on
Yahoo
23-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Review: Was Charles Manson Carrying Out a CIA Experiment? (opinion)
One of America's more famous documentarians, Errol Morris, was intrigued by Tom O'Neill's Chaos, a 2019 book delving into the mysteries around the murders committed in 1969 by people associated with the hippie cult leader Charles Manson. In a new Netflix feature documentary exploring O'Neill's theories and findings, Morris shows his work, and we hear him telling O'Neill on camera he isn't quite buying the story O'Neill is selling. Partly because of his connections to the Haight Ashbury Free Medical Clinic, which was haunted by CIA-associated mind control researcher Louis Jolyon West, and partly because of the mysterious leniency in how the legal system treated Manson before he was eventually arrested for the murders, O'Neill thinks it likely Manson was either a confidential informant and thus under the law's protection to some extent, or carrying out a CIA-planned experiment using something like West's techniques to turn his "Family" into mind-controlled murderers. O'Neill certainly provides fodder for both theses, the first seeming more likely if only because it's less baroquely sinister. But alternate explanations require a differently cynical view about government than O'Neill's evil one: that perhaps California law enforcement was lazy and incompetent, or that West's claims about his experimental brainwashing powers were exaggerated to keep the CIA money flowing. The facts that Manson did eventually face justice and life in prison and never hinted at any of this, and that the world does not seem crawling with people with this brainwash-to-murder power, indicates that some skepticism about O'Neill's thesis is warranted. But he presents it with dogged research powers—and a fair assessment of what he has and has not proven. The post Review: Was Charles Manson Carrying Out a CIA Experiment? appeared first on
