Afternoon Tea 6.8.21 - Titanosaur

Italian neo-nazis planned exploding a NATO building, the richest people ever pay the smallest amount of income tax ever, Etsy & Amazon are selling fake vaccine cards, Nigeria banned Twitter, the FBI got the Colonial Pipeline ransom back, and new dinosaur just dropped. It’s Tuesday, June 8th 2021, and this is your Tea.

Italian neo-Nazis were plotting to bomb NATO base, police say (Politico EU) I can’t say I expected Italian neo-Nazis to be this well put together, but given this detail: “One of the accused was voted the winner of an online Miss Hitler beauty pageant in 2019, calling herself Miss Eva Braun.” I’m not sure why I’m surprised?

The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax (ProPublica) In the same tier as the Panama Papers, this massive investigation shows exactly how little those with the most pay. If you don’t have time for a sprawling journalistic masterpiece, they built out a quick list of the top 10 takeaways for you as well.

Hiding The Union Busters (Daily Poster) Did you know that the industry that helps corporations fight unionizing drives makes $340 million a year? You do now.

Etsy is profiting from fake COVID vaccination IDs and misinformation merchandise (MediaMatters) And it looks like so is Amazon:

Nigeria’s Twitter Ban Is Another Sign Dictatorship Is Back (Foreign Policy) Nigeria banned twitter again. The way authoritarians act against social media platforms is starting to become a reasonable canary in the coal mine for free expression in a state.

Colonial Pipeline’s Ransom Is Mostly Recouped, DOJ Says (Bloomberg) The FBI got access to the coinwallet the hackers demanded the BTC be deposited in, and recovered ~64 of the 75 BTC ransom. The word is that the FBI leaned on Coinbase who gave up the goods, but nothing confirmed yet, and the gov’t is being very quiet about its methods. This is causing some concern in black hat hacker communities, but that’s mainly because those people can’t conceptualize of the US gov’t actually not fucking something up. It’s all fun and games until the FBI Party Van is outside your house.

Designer David Korins on Creating Community in the new Drama Bookshop (Broadway Direct) The Drama Book Shop will reopen at 266 West 39th Street on June 10! Lin-Manuel Miranda & James Nederlander straight up bought the thing with the producer and director of Hamilton. So theater & speech team geeks (Big ups Extemp & Student Congress!) can fall in love with the place for generations to come.

Brazil’s hottest TikTok celebrities are…English teachers? (RestOfWorld) Sure what the hell. Get that paper boo boo. Teachers are crapped on universally, so if this academy teaches people English and the teachers go omni-viral because of it, good. More cash for them.

New species of dinosaur – up to 30m long – confirmed as largest ever found in Australia (Guardian) Copper, the newly & semi-hyperbolically named Titanosaur, was discovered in SW Queensland. This lends further weight to the idea that everything in Australia, even when it was part of Pangea, could kill you. In this case, Copper could kill you without even noticing you were there.

Song of the Tea: Popeska is an artist that pops up on my radar occasionally, but I’m always better for it. More Time takes soaring vocals, energizing them with oddly compelling synthy electro-pop melodic rolls. It almost feels like a track you’d hear in a Michael Bay Transformers movie, but it’s too synth-chip for that, which is weird when you think about it. Don’t think about it though, just let it ride.

The thing is, you think you have time.

Yours,