Afternoon Tea 10.28.2020 - In The End

Marriott pitches hotel rooms as offices, Trump froze out his supporters & Double Guantanamo’d Obama’s drone war in Yemen, a Brazilian MP tried to walk away with cash in his pants, what QAnon & Stranger Danger have to do with each other, and Macron’s France is learning what it means to be the antagonist of the Muslim world. It’s Thursday, October 29th 2020, and this is the Tea.

Trump Escalated Obama’s War in Yemen (The Daily Beast) Can anyone explain why we were bombing Yemen in the first place? Our escalation from providing arms to MBS to actually bombing the snot out of the Houthis & Yemeni defense forces is one that doesn’t even have a pretense of propriety.

Hundreds forced to wait hours in freezing temperatures after Trump’s Nebraska rally (The Hill) In what might be the most on-the-nose metaphor of the year, the logistics geniuses over at the Trump campaign didn’t understand parking lots and bus contracts, so hundreds who were bussed in to give Trump his dear sea of shining faces, ended up stuck in the cold. Trump fans getting frostbite at a rally that shouldn’t be happening due to the administration’s own distancing guidelines is perfection. Also, this video they broadcast at it was WILD. Like, Linkin Park meets 1984 meets 2099 agitprop levels wild:

Brazil leader’s ally suspended after underwear cash jackpot (AP) My guy hid a bunch of bills in his pants and tried to walk away from cops that found all his dirty safe money.

DRAG THEM: A brief etymology of so-called “cancel culture” (Communication & the Public) Very strong work by Meredith D. Clark at the University of Virginia:

Marriott Pitches Hotels to Remote Workers Fleeing Stress at Home (Bloomberg) Hotels providing daycare is a legitimately novel idea. Expect staycations in hotels to eventually turn Marriott into a WeWork competitor. Watch this space.

Reddit will allow employees to work from anywhere, going forward (TechCrunch) Unlike Google & Facebook, Reddit won’t be re-scaling pay to local conditions, potentially giving it a massive edge in hiring.

I Ran the Numbers Again. Stocks Are Not the Economy. (Bloomberg) Anyone who tells you the economy can be scrutinized by evaluating how stocks are doing is wrong & probably selling something.

Half-True Crime: Why the Stranger-Danger Panic of the '80s Took Hold and Refuses to Let Go (Jezebel) Compelling read on the thread line between black swan events like the murder/kidnapping of a famous person’s child and the overprotection/paranoid insanity that drove us to thinking our communities were deeply unsafe.

When the Looting Starts.... (Historic.ly) The word looting was not only stolen from the Indian people (around the 1760s), it was used to specifically to denote anti-colonial violence. To put the Wal-mart/Target pilfering in context.

Three dead as woman beheaded in attack in French church (Reuters) & Macron vs. Erdogan is a fight both leaders want (WaPo) & Pakistan National Assembly resolves to recall French ambassador, forgetting they already did that (Geo.tv) After today’s terror attack in Nice, the dangerous game French president Macron has been playing in an effort to generate support from French hard-liners might have worked out a little too well.

After the Islamofacist beheading of a school teacher that shocked the conscience, France has been having a bit of a post-9/11 moment. Fearing a Marine Le Pen challenge from the right in the next election cycle, France has started picking fights with the Muslim world, to the point where he was being referred to as Sheik Macron, for how he was telling the Muslim world how to be Muslim. This has escalated into diplomatic rows with Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan. Which led to Iranian newspapers printing this semi-bad ass political cartoon of Macron:

To those correctly stating that this picture makes the guy look like a either a Romulan wizard or an Orc shaman instead of a devilish trickster, you get 10 points. The second joke that went viral referenced an obscure character named Dabura, a devil who was mind-controlled into fighting the show’s heroes. #MaijinMacron trended shortly after. The situation is very tense, but France has been here before. We shall see if they take the path of communication and diplomacy, or get the Maijin demon pact and go full “Clash of Civilizations” on the Middle East like we did.

Lastly, I was interviewed in a Greek-American publication about the upcoming election and how Biden or Trump would handle Greece, Cyprus & Turkey. It is weird seeing your words in a language you don’t speak. As the on-page auto-translation isn’t perfect, my English answers are below:

1. What do you expect to change in America with this election? I don't expect much change. But if the GOP loses the Senate and Trump loses by a wide enough margin to prevent calls of cheating from being convincing, we might have a shot at stamping out the most recent COVID flare-ups, and repairing some of the damage to our reputation around the globe.

2. How do you think the candidate you support will view/act on Greek-Turkish issues? I believe Trump has shown time and time again that he's eager to support Turkey, sometimes even over his own citizens. Like that time Turkish security guards beat up American protesters and Trump had nothing to say. The same can be said for our non-response to the Turkish claim that the Greek/Cypriot oil shelf is theirs. This is the one issue that's actually united Greeks, Cypriots, Jordanians, Israelis, and Egyptians. I think a Biden administration would need to be pushed to consider the Cypriot people, but he would behave more predictably & respectably towards Greece, tolerating bad behavior by Erdogan less.

3. What is your prediction for the result? I think if Trump had just taken the playbook Obama & Biden wrote before they left the White House, handed it to Fauci, and said, "send Pelosi the bill" he would have won a landslide unlike anything we've seen in the recent era. But I voted early today at the Museum of Moving Image. The line was 5 blocks long. I've never seen Astoria participating in the democratic process like that. Ever. 69 million people have already voted, which is more than half of the 2016 total. I think it is going to be Biden, and every day I am more convinced.

Song of the Tea: Stunning poetry by Taz Ahmed, visualized by Nix Guirre, Catch These Ink Stained Hands…

It’s hard to get excited about Halloween when the whole year has been a horror show.

Yours,T