Afternoon Tea 10.15.2020 - Budget Ratfucking

Rudy Giuliani is what happens if you use the process Luthor created Bizarro with, on Meowth from Pokémon.

October 15, 2020

Freshman college enrollment is down 16%, the Scottish origins Fried Chicken, Roblox doing album launches, and Don Luthor, America’s Bizarro Mayor & The Legion of Gloom fired a double-barrel shotgun of lies at the Biden campaign in an attempt to recreate the 2016 Butter Emails Pennant Run.

New Students at U.S. Colleges Drop, Worsening Campus Crisis (Bloomberg) That thing Scott Galloway said was going to happen that I amplified? It’s happening. First year Undergrad enrollment down 16%, total undergrad enrollment down 4%. For the first domino, that’s a pretty big domino.

How will Trump and Biden handle veterans issues? Here’s what they told us. (MilitaryTimes) Military Times spoke to the Trump & Biden campaigns about veterans issues so you didn’t have to. Read to return fire when someone pops off at the mouth about stolen valor.

Notre Dame calendars show more events not listed on Amy Coney Barrett's Senate paperwork (CNN) No, not those unlisted anti-choice Notre Dame speaking events, the other unlisted anti-choice speaking events.

Here's the truth behind the Republicans' big lie about 'court-packing' (Alternet) Great look at the GOP governors expanding or dare I say, packing, their courts. Presented for no reason at all.

Roblox has big plans for virtual music events (The Verge) If you have kids that aren’t into Minecraft, they might be into Roblox online. Who had 1million people watch an album debut within the Roblox virtual space last month. Because 2020.

The surprising origin of fried chicken (BBC Travel) I was today years old when I learned that the first recipe for fried chicken, thought to be printed in 1824 regional cookbook from a slave recipe, is actually the second oldest. The gold medal goes to:

an even older recipe appearing in a 1747 British cookbook, The Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy – only it’s not actually called “fried chicken”. Simply titled “to marinate chickens”...

“Cut two chickens into quarters, lay them in vinegar, for three or four hours, with pepper, salt, a bay leaf, and a few cloves, make a very thick batter, first with half a pint of wine and flour, then the yolks of two eggs, a little melted butter, some grated nutmeg and chopped parsley; beat very well together, dip your fowls in the batter, and fry them in a good deal of hog’s lard, which must first boil before you put your chickens in.”

"…authored by an English woman, Hannah Glasse, and published in Dublin…in an essay on 18th-Century Scottish cuisine, Stana Nenadic, professor of social and cultural history at the University of Edinburgh, points out that in 1773, biographer James Boswell wrote a diary entry explicitly describing a fried chicken dinner that an elderly tacksman served him at Coire-chat-achan on the Isle of Skye. Mariani's theory then, is that as hundreds of thousands of Scottish and Scots-Irish settlers emigrated to the Southern US colonies during the 1700s, they brought their tradition of frying chickens in fat with them.

When you browse Instagram and find former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott's passport number (Mango.PDF.Zone) Hysterically well narrated discussion by an ITSec professional who found a pretty sizable security hole in the design of the Quantas flight site. No seriously, when your tagline is “Do Not Get Arrested Challenge 2020” when your goal is to get an airline to fix a gap in their systems, quotes like this on how he “hacked” the Qantas site make my heart sing:

Everything you see when you use “Inspect Element” was already downloaded to your computer, you just hadn’t asked Chrome to show it to you yet. Just like how the cogs were already in the watch, you just hadn’t opened it up to look.

But let us dispense with frivolous cog talk. Cheap tricks such as “Inspect Element” are used by programmers to try and understand how the website works. This is ultimately futile: Nobody can understand how websites work. Unfortunately, it kinda looks like hacking the first time you see it.

And now, what you’ve been waiting for…

Yawning at depravity (Popular Information) & Trump Knew for Days That Rudy’s Hit on Hunter Biden Was Coming (The Daily Beast) I won’t be linking to the NY Post Piece, the Biden-killed-Seal-Team-6 social media extravaganza, or even the right-of-center commentary on it.

To be clear, this is basically Butter Emails 2.0: The 4th down Hail Mary pass that worked last time because it involved Wikileaks and the whole extended universe of criminals that we barely even remember (Steve Bannon? Michael Cohen? Sean Spicer? Scaramucci?). This time, not only are the platforms once burned twice shy, but the Russian support bench, and international league of gentlemen are gone. Replaced by Rudy Giuliani, the Dark Carnival Pokémon that he is, and his pile of cut-rate Eastern European fixers.

How do I know both stories are nothingburgers? The create date metadata of the PDF files that Rudy is saying represent Hunter Biden’s emails…were created 9.29.2019 & 10.10.2019, several months after April 2019, the date Hunter supposedly dropped his laptop off to be repaired (never to be seen again). What is the significance of those dates? It’s the same time Giuliani lost his JV goon squad, Igor Fruman & Lev Parnas, when they were arrested for breaking campaign finance laws. Without the GOP equivalent of Bulk & Skull, imagine the ideas that raced through the rotten cheesecake that is his brain.

In case we think that Rudy is playing 12D chess, here’s him faking a Chinese bow using a racist Asian accent on video after an interview with Sean Spicer. 45 said he hired the best people. If you’re unsure if it’s working, I’ll just leave you with this lovely Vanity Fair article titled “Rudy Giuliani Is My Father. Please, Everyone, Vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.” by Caroline Rose Giuliani.

Song of the Tea: To understand “Sad Boy” as a genre, imagine peak Boyz II Men/90s Singing in the Rain R&B, then strain it through softboys in Singapore, South London, South Korea, and Stockholm. From an artist named Ecco2k, soft sorrow about crushing rocks with Oystercard, the London equivalent of a Metrocard.

So close, yet so far.

Yours,T