Afternoon Tea 11.17.21 - Suicide Bomb Trio

India’s digital & physical smog is getting worse, the latest exploding national tech scene is emerging in Pakistan, 100,000 Americans died of drug overdose during the pandemic, CRT as a moral panic is a new page of a very old playbook, the Staples Center is now Crypto.com Arena, and a trio of suicide bombers attacked Kampala, Uganda. It’s Wednesday, November 17th 2021, and this is your Tea. Your hazy, hump day vibe is a classic from Russian future garage and ambient producer Volor Flex.

More kids in hospital, schools shut as smog smothers Delhi (Reuters) & India: Terror cases over social media posts on Tripura violence (AJZ) & Loans that hijack your phone are coming to India (RestOfWorld - March 2021) India has been forced to shutter coal plants in an attempt to clear up this pervasive smog that is putting kids in hospital just walking to school. Shaping the news has gotten wild due to BJP & Facebook’s abuse of their net, but it is about to get way worse. Loan caveats are being created that allow originators to cut off a person’s phone, a feature we assume arrives in the USA any minute now.

Three suicide bombers kill three, wound dozens in Ugandan capital (Reuters) Can’t say we remember the last time three different suicide bombers attacked soft targets, anywhere in the world.

Pakistan’s tech ecosystem is booming. Here’s why it will slow down in 2022 (RestOfWorld) & As Pakistan’s IT sector booms, software companies and startups lock horns over tech talent (Profit.PakistanToday) As India descends, the Pakistani tech sector is booming so hard, they’re fighting for talent as deeply as American recruiters are.

Overdose Deaths Reached Record High as the Pandemic Spread (New York Times) 100,000! Congratulations everyone, great work all around. We managed to crest into 6 digits worth of totally unnecessary opiate overdose deaths. Can’t wait for the next fake story about how fentanyl caused some cop to OD because it was in a La Croix can in the next room.

Your Red Snapper Filet Might Have Been Caught By Drug Runners (Texas Monthly) We don’t even know where to start with how to fix problems like this.

The fake news sites pushing Republicans’ critical race theory scare (Guardian) & Moral Panics Work (In These Times) Just because the CRT scare is based on totally made up bullshit, doesn’t mean that a. it’s going to be pumped through the astro-turfed digital noise system any less furiously, and b. that people won’t believe it.

From Crypto to Christie’s: How an Indian metaverse king made his fortune (Reuters) LA’s Staples Center will be renamed ‘Crypto.com Arena’ (The Verge) Stories like these remind us of this axiom from John Maynard Keynes, “The stock market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.”

You Have Every Right To Be Angry (Ed Zitron) & I Give You Permission To Do Nothing (Defector) If the articles about how bad remote work is piss you off, you’re allowed to be. If you don’t want to keep grinding through to the end of the year, you don’t have to. People on the internet said so.

A Plan to Perfect the New York City Street (Curbed) & Mayor-Elect Eric Adams Tells Stephen Colbert New York City Is ‘Boring Now’ (CBS2 New York) The first article is a lovely look at what could be. The second is a video where our mayor-elect reminds us of what is:

You know, the man’s not wrong. We’ve got the prices & culture of Dubai, but with Bacon Egg & Cheese sandwiches.

Canajoharie man fights to keep his emotional support pig (ABCNews 10 Albany) Stop harassing this man and let him keep his emotional support pig. Did no one read Charlotte’s Web?

Poem of the Tea: Alex Dimitrov forces us to contemplate, What if it’s right?

Yours,