Afternoon Tea 2.18.20201 - Day Tripper

Fled Cruz, Ted Cruise, Ted Ruse, Shred Cruz, add your favorite at the bottom!

February 18, 2021

China & India stand down from Yellow Alert, a FBI agent totaled a Ferrari F50 in seconds, Cuomo won’t interview Cuomo on CNN anymore (again), billionaires making fake worlds instead of making this one better, and trips to Mexico are a bad look when parts of your state are on ice and you’re a Senator. It's Thursday, February 18th 2021, and Perseverance has landed.

NASA Lands Perseverance Rover on Mars (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory) Just a quick pop over to our neighboring planet. We are capable of such wonderful derous things if we only just apply ourselves. It has a drone named ingenuity that will become the first Earth device to attempt controlled flight on another planet.

Billionaires See VR as a Way to Avoid Radical Social Change (Wired) Why make this world better, when we can just make fake worlds for the poors? This usually ends up with Gundams or the Second Renaissance.

Satellite images show China emptying military camps at border flashpoint with India (Reuters) While puffy prose from military officials on either side of the Indian/Chinese border is not to be trusted, these images confirm unqualified good news. If China is not just withdrawing troops, but also dismantling infrastructure, that means the withdrawal isn’t a ploy, and we can feel a mote better about that particular conflict touchpoint. 1 down, 300 squillion to go.

ERCOT Didn’t Conduct On-Site Inspections of Power Plants to Verify Winter Preparedness (NBC DFW) 40% of the state’s generation system, accounting for 9.2million homes worth of electricity remains offline. Instead of doing on-site inspections to powerplants, ERCOT conducted “virtual tabletop exercises” with 1 out 6 of the power generation facilities. As a note, Texas has no rules requiring power plans to have any form of winterization. I hope the D&D game these guys played with power stations was fun, as many Texans remain forced to huddle together over dice for warmth.

These Ted Cruz Cancún Trip Memes Are Perfect for a Short Flight (Teen Vogue) If you didn’t hear, Ted Spooge had his “long planned” trip morph into a spontaneous ask from his daughters. And even that looks to have been cut short, with ticketing having been reworked this morning from Saturday to Thursday. I assume his welcome committee will be overjoyed to see him:

13 Curses to Mutter Against Ted Cruz While You Boil Snow to Drink (Texas Monthly) My favorite: May you drink some water made from melted icicles, only to learn from TikTok that icicles contain “roof poop.”

It’s Always The Same Lie (Defector) When you & everyone you know, believe that government shouldn’t help you, eventually you create a situation where it can’t. And it’s not just happening in Texas:

Texas isn’t the only state that’s been forced to bear these failures of government. In January 2016, the Michigan governor promised to look into how American citizens in Flint had ended up with tap water that ran brown and was poisoning people. The scandal got so large that Presidential candidates went to the tiny town to say their piece. And what happened? Basically nothing. No one went to jail. In 2019, they said they would keep investigating, but nothing has happened. People are going to be sick for the rest of their lives and the people responsible will pay no price. 

There’s New York, too, and Iowa and California and Florida and so many other states where thousands upon thousands of people have needlessly died due to state and local governments botching their pandemic response. Americans are being failed in every state. They are dying and suffering while our representatives are arguing over whether to give us 1,400 more dollars in the 11th month of a pandemic. Every level of the United States government is lying to you right now. They are looking you dead in the eye as your family members freeze and cough and drown in debt and telling you that, actually, you’re fine.

CNN says it reinstated a ban on Chris Cuomo covering his brother, Gov. Cuomo (New York Post) Governor Cuomo, like all politicians, is not your friend.

The next frontier in drone warfare? A Soviet-era crop duster (Bulletin of Atomic Scientists) Apparently all planes are potential drones, as you can just retrofit any old plane with the novel tech that is being worked on right now.

Stolen $3 Million Ferrari F50 Gets Totaled by FBI Agent During Joyride (MotorBiscuit) The full story is wild, but the idea that a FBI agent lost control of the car in seconds, destroying a car that might have cost over $1mill to purchase.

Song of the Tea: They actually did it. Now to keep the thing operational and stop slapping each other for long enough to go visit it. So, some funky Holst for you.

The storms are withering, but they may pass soon. Hold on, we'll make it together.

Yours,