Daily Bafflements

• Today in Billionaires: Ty Warner, the “Beanie Baby billionaire” who admitted to hiding millions of dollars in Switzerland to evade tax, has been let off a jail term because, according to the judge, he demonstrated a “depth of humanity” that “he had never before seen in a criminal defendant.” Vague profiling aside, the judge went on to insist that “Society will be best served by allowing him to continue to do his good works,” and that the money hidden from the taxman was but a drop in the ocean—in the context of Warner’s enormous fortune. Far be it from us to argue that Warner’s charitable acts, which include making a Princess Diana memorial Beanie Baby that retails at exorbitant prices on eBay, were equally negligible, in that context.

• Over at The Awl, Manisha Aggarwal-Schifellite writes about how Esquire turned the bachelor into a “symbol of postwar consumerism,” most often by casting vinegary aspersions on women, suggesting that they were the only real impediment to men controlling their own lives. Men should cook for themselves, Esquire drolly insisted, not least because “Women don’t seem to understand fish—and, we suppose, vice versa.”

• Press biases and scaremongering advertising both at home and abroad have eclipsed the actual facts in Greece:

The German tabloid Bild has aimed a flurry of attacks at the liberal Syriza supporters, at one point holding a mock “referendum” with loaded language that painted Greece as a leech on Germany’s finances. That nine out of ten of its readers voted to cut off support to the ailing state reflects that the newspaper is not out of line with German public attitudes. In another instance, the newspaper posted a video of Greeks admitting they were confused by the referendum’s terms.

 (Via. Mashable.)