Afternoon Tea 2.10.2021 - Cracks Begin To Show

Adults teach children to prepare for the future. Sometimes.

February 10, 2021

Planet Lockdown is just as dumb as Plandemic, MLB players getting LoJack’d 4 COVID, Conde Nast owes $2.4 mill in rent, a Chinese Physics lab denied it’s working on time travel, Pablo’s hippos are getting out of hand, and they’re pretending Velveeta Elvis is “Mayor,” a character, at the estate he agreed never to live at, to try and get them to let him live there. It’s Wednesday, February 10th, 2021, and this is the Tea.

YouTube and Facebook allowed another COVID-19 conspiracy theory video to go viral (Media Matters) If anyone sends me Planet Lockdown unironically, asking me what I think about it, especially if they asked me about Plandemic, I’m going to assign actual homework.

MLB Players to Wear Electronic Tracers, Face Discipline for Violations (Sports Illustrated) Apparently agreed to by the players union and ownership, the contact tracing within the club facilities I can understand. But the bolded bit from this excerpt is what concerns me:

“Every covered Individual must wear a Kinexon contact tracing device at all times while in club facilities and during club directed travel and while engaged in team activities, including group workouts and practices,” the manual says. “Repeated failure to wear the devices or repeated failure to return the devices to the Kinexon device docking station may be a basis for discipline,” the manual says.

That means that players will technically need to have some contact tracing device (Not phone app) on/on their person while traveling between cities and potentially around hotels? When does my employer get to stop knowing my behavior again?

Conde Nast Skips $2.4 Million Rent Payment on Manhattan Lease (Bloomberg) Large corporate entities are going to start flatly declining to pay rent bills before renegotiations of their lease. What’s the old expression? When you owe the bank a thousand dollars, you have a problem, but when you owe the bank a million dollars, the bank has a problem?

Younger Democrats Are All Out of Fucks to Give for Republicans’ Feelings (The Rude Pundit) I’m usually not a Blogspot reposting kind of person, but this is such perfect, crystalline truth about the differences in playbooks and outlook. Even just this first paragraph is perfect to remind your Boomer parents why you don’t see the world the way they do.

Let us say, and why not, that you're a Democrat who came of age in this century and then got elected to Congress. Your adult experience of the Republican party really starts with George W. Bush and the Iraq "war" and the economic meltdown and the fucktastrophe that was the response to Hurricane Katrina. You don't fondly remember Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan getting their Irish on to cut deals. You don't give a goddamn about how chummy Bob Dole and George McGovern were. You don't give a fuck about how there used to be liberal Rockefeller Republicans or there were glory days of cooperation or any of that bullshit that people exaggerate like their dick size on a Grinder profile. You only know Republicans as the savage motherfuckers who have twice wrecked the country and who treated Barack Obama like shit, who blocked progress in every area, who filled the judiciary with brutal idiots with culture warrior and evangelical nutzoid street cred, and who whine like wounded bitches whenever anyone dares to call them on their fuckery.

Trump Now the ‘Mayor’ Of Mar-A-Lago, Lawyer Claims In Bid To Let Him Live There (HuffPo) Back in 1993, he was given permission to build the club (which I never have to spell correctly again, thank the Old Gods & the New) on the condition he never live there full time. Now they’re trying to whine about him being a “bona fide employee” of the estate. Like when you make a Golden Retriever “mayor” or when we let Gramps just kinda wander the grounds in his bathrobe because he’s not doing any harm.

China’s State Physics Lab Denies It Is Working on a Time Machine (YiCai Global) Hey y’all, why did you feel the need to deny it, this loudly. What are ya working on back there? I’m curious now.

OpenLux: the secrets of Luxembourg, a tax haven at the heart of Europe (Le Monde) Hard-hitting French journalism, documenting a hilarious amount of tax evasion among the world’s elite.

The Possible Xinjiang Coal Link in Tesla’s Bitcoin Binge (Bloomberg) Because BTC and other digital coins need to be “mined” and that mining requires electricity, global mining junkets have quickly coalesced around the cheapest power pricing in the world. One of those places is Xinjiang, and because it’s not super easy to transport the stuff, it gets burned to make digital currency.

The Problem With Mental Health Awareness (The Nation) I had a two hour conversation at a party in Brooklyn with a veteran I know with bipolar disorder. I asked him how he manages to hold down such an amazing job in tech, especially when his symptoms get bad. He said that he makes enough money for he and his team to be able to handle it. Optimal mental health is a luxury good in this country.

Pablo Escobar’s hippos must be culled to halt biodiversity disaster (The Guardian) I assume the scientists are right, but like…who is going to actually do that? I’m certainly not going to lead the excursion to take out a platoon of invasive cocaine hippos, I tell you what.

Humans Are Pretty Lousy Lie Detectors (Scientific American) Just stop with the bullshit. The blinking, the looking places, the fidgeting, all of these weird ass tactics are just a response to someone injecting tension into a situation and hoping the other person cracks.

Song of the Tea: A Porter Robinson show is one of a handful where I’ve watched people cry literal tears of joy. Sobs and spasms of sheer happiness and serotonin. You used to see it at Above & Beyond or other “don’t kill my vibe” style events. And his refrain that “I’ll be alive next year” is the reminder. We’ll get through this.

Yours,

Editor’s Note: Trying to understand the visual space Substack provides, to get a sense of additional logo & branding possibilities. Thanks to a talented artist and dear friend.