Afternoon Tea 10.21.21 - Narrative Laundering

Zero Coin, National Archeology, Wuhan TRUTH

October 21, 2021

Trump’s social media platform is funded by a SPAC CEO who lists their address as from Wuhan, China might go to Zero Coin production, Narrative Laundering is our new favorite Information Operations tactic, Japan is puzzled as to how it made so much progress on COVID so quickly, and Xi Jinping demands National Archaeology. It’s Thursday, October 21st 2021, and this is your Tea. Today’s vibe is a rare repetition, as Empty Space by xKore will always find its way back to us after a day of frustration.

Xi calls for developing archaeology with Chinese features (ChinaDaily - Heavily Biased) We’d usually not link actual government deployed propaganda, but the use of “National Archaeology” as a euphemism for changing the past to align with the party’s ideal history, was just close enough to a term used in 1984 that we had to mention it.

Former U.S. president Donald Trump launches 'TRUTH' social media platform (Reuters) & Trading in Trump-linked SPAC halted as shares soar on social media deal (The Hill) It took less than a day for the Trump-based social media platform to be both inundated with Hell Realm content and to be shown to be somehow associated with Wuhan. Maybe Trump knew this whole time if COVID was a bio weapon and decided to wait to make his GuySpace debut with that info.

This is the true scale of China’s bitcoin exodus (Wired) China might as well have waved a magic wand and shut down all coin ops at once. We don’t know what happens when China goes from Coin Capital of the world to Zero Coin production. Here’s to hoping they don’t need as much coal this winter.

Vaccines, masks? Japan puzzling over sudden virus success (AP) It’s almost as if thousands of horny athletes from all over the globe, and the commensurate press junket, finally departing after months in country, helped Japan get back to stable public health?

How Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Gwyneth Paltrow Short-Circuit Your Ability to Think Rationally (Businessweek) This pile of behavioral & cognitive fallacies is exceptional. Narrative Laundering is a word to describe behavior we’ve seen in spades over the last few years. Faux Intimacy is what you experienced if you as a reader ever thought I was communicating intimately but publicly, to you in this one-sided parasocial relationship, though it was never purposefully done on the part of our writers.

There’s Nothing Honorable or Decent About Colin Powell’s Long List of War Crimes (Jacobin) by Kelsey D. Atherton, this is the most correct writing about Colin Powell’s legacy that we’ve seen in the last two weeks. Denial of the Mỹ Lai massacre, assisting in covering up when Reagan’s team traded weapons for hostages, the list is long and withering. If you don’t believe us, this opener will prove it:

Colin Powell, soldier, statesman, and lifelong public servant to the imperatives of empire, died yesterday, at the age of 84. He is survived by his wife, three children, and four grandchildren. He was predeceased by his eponymous doctrine and at least 185,000 Iraqi civilians.

Apple Rejects Horoscope App Because They Already Have ‘Enough’ (UberGizmo) & Apple removed a popular Quran app in China (The Verge) Apple banned two apps from its Apple Store. One because it felt like it, the other because China told it to.

Poem of the Tea: Rounding out our no-poetry week of Poems, this visualization of the wasteland cable TV has become should do nicely:

If you spend years of your life helping people, and they turn around and call you rude for not helping them fast enough or in exactly the way they demand? Stop.

Yours,