Afternoon Tea 10.7.2020 - Slugfest

Steroid brain, FB (actually) bans QAnon, rules for armed poll watching, and the Pope gives Pompeo the cold shoulder.

October 07, 2020

Diseased Donny sheds while tweeting in all caps (cruise control for cool), Facebook drops the biggest banhammer they’ve ever employed on QAnon, links between the Proud Boys & ACORN-slaying fake news merchants Project Veritas are reviewed, and I was today years old when I learned Eddie Van Halen was Asian. It is Wednesday, October 7th 2020, and this is the Tea.

Trump’s Drugs (Popular Information) You’re not the only one who has noticed King Covita has been prescribed every pharma-sounding noun you remember someone mentioning this year except HydroxychloroQuinn Medicine Woman.

NY Hospital Warns of Critical Bed Shortage Amid Fears of Second COVID-19 Wave (Daily Beast) I actually worked alongside the Dr. Reich quoted in this piece while at Mount Sinai, he being the attending anesthesiologist on the surgeries I was fixing the tech and taking pictures during. He is the opposite of excitable and easily panicked. We are not out of the woods yet.

Facebook bans QAnon conspiracy theory accounts across all platforms (BBC News) After absorbing criticism it didn’t do enough to fight QAnon earlier this summer, something seems to have clicked into place. Facebook took the most sweeping action in its history to wipe away QAnon groups, brand pages, and overtly loud users.

The Cozy Relationship Between Project Veritas and the Proud Boys (The New Republic) In case you needed a Legion of Doom partnership to hate today.

Man charged in death of 80yr old man during dispute over mask in western New York bar (ABC7 Eyewitness News) Old man fight between a 80 year old and 65 year old man over masks at a bar named Pamp’s Red Zone.

The Deep Anthropocene (Aeon) We should probably just throw out all of our classic understanding of early human development and its effects on the planet:

With all these fresh data, it’s now possible to tell a much richer, more diverse story about the gradual evolutions and dispersals of early agriculture. By 6,000 years ago, the British Isles were being transformed by an imported collection of crops, weeds and livestock that had originated millennia earlier in the Near East. Similarly, millets, rice and pigs from central China had been spread as far as Thailand by 4,000 years ago, and began transforming much of the region’s tropical woodland to agricultural fields. New stories are constantly emerging too – including that sorghum, a grain crop, was domesticated in the savannahs of eastern Sudan more than 5,000 years ago, before the arrival of domesticated sheep or goats in that area. Once combined with Near Eastern sheep, goats and cattle, agropastoralism spread rapidly throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa by 2,000 years ago.

Advances in the study of plant silica micro-fossils (phytoliths) have helped trace banana cultivation from the Island of New Guinea more than 7,000 years ago – from where it spread through Island Southeast Asia, and eventually across the Indian Ocean to Africa, more than a millennium before Vasco da Gama navigated from Africa to India. These techniques have also revealed unforeseen agricultural origins – such as the forgotten cereal, browntop millet. It was the first staple crop of South India, before it was largely replaced by crops such as sorghum that were translocated from Africa. Many people might be surprised to learn that the early farming tradition in the Mississippi basin relied on pitseed goosefoot, erect knotweed and marsh elder some 3,000-4,000 years ago, long before maize agriculture arrived in the American Midwest.

Addressing the Rise of Unlawful Private Paramilitaries: 50 State Fact Sheets (Georgetown Law) Fact sheets explaining the laws barring unauthorized private militia groups from poll watching or what to do if armed groups are near your polling place. Because this is where we are.

Trump’s Taxes Give Biden Blueprint to Fix System Rigged for Rich (Bloomberg) When your opponent gives you an opening, take it.

Why Pompeo’s Crusade Against the Pope Failed (Foreign Policy) A nice little reminder of how much more resistible America’s soft power is in the era of Trump.

Immigrating to America: Half-Asian Eddie Van Halen (Asian Dawn) Given the violence Asian-Americans have suffered this year, it’s sadly understood why he kept it a secret.

Song of the Tea: Eddie didn’t want to piss off his band-mates, so he did the infamous guitar riff on Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” for a case of beer and dance lessons.

Don’t let hump day get you down, no matter how stupid the last call you were on is.

Yours,T