Afternoon Tea 9.16.21 - Melancholic Joy

WIki Bans, Confused Time Travelers, Abortion Reversal Ads.

September 16, 2021

Wikipedia banned Chinese propagandists, Facebook served up ads for “abortion reversal,” Piers Morgan is joining Fox News, an ad agency astroturfed climate change conversations for energy companies around the world, and “Melancholic Joy” is a thing. It's Thursday, September 16th 2021, and this is your Tea. Thursday’s vibe to play you out for the week is coming at you from Technical Hitch. Titled “The Mad Man Waltz,” Technical Hitch is a master of a little-known genre of music called Hi-Tech. It’s like psychedelic trance but faster, more orchestral & regimented. Like if John Phillip Sousa did Mescaline before composing waltzes.

Exclusive: Wikipedia bans 7 mainland Chinese power users over ‘infiltration and exploitation’ in unprecedented clampdown (Hong Kong Free Press) For people that don’t work in digital marketing, Wikipedia banning you means you’ve done some pretty terrible things.

Fossil fuel firms sue governments across the world for £13bn as climate policies threaten profits (Sky News) & How One Firm Drove Influence Campaigns Nationwide for Big Oil (NY Times) Can we nationalize oil companies that sue the nation for profits? Fossil fuel firms and the marketing agencies that do their dirty work are getting brazen in their twilight years. The list below includes half a dozen argumentative archetypes we’ve all seen on social media.

Facebook made money from dangerous 'abortion reversal' ads that targeted teens and were seen 18.4 million times (Business Insider) Fake abortion reversal procedures, greenlit to be seen way too often. This is why the problem won’t go away by playing bad topic wack-a-mole.

Trumpworld’s Fingerprints Are All Over Arizona’s Phony Audit (Rolling Stone) & The January 6th attack never ended (Popular Information) When you realize the A-squad of Trump’s team was pushing as hard as they could to keep power illegally, you start to understand just how anti-democratic one party is.

Peter Thiel Gamed Silicon Valley, Donald Trump, and Democracy to Make Billions, Tax-Free (Bloomberg) Whenever someone talks about how awesome Peter Thiel is, we roll our eyes and tune out. For exactly this reason. He’s not a genius or a revolutionary, just another rich dude willing to do anything to keep his money.

Trinidad & Tobago Has Confirmed They Have No Record of Nicki Minaj's Cousin's Friend's Swollen Balls (Esquire) That this needed to be checked & reported means that we’ve lost any sense of who should be able to speak about what with authority.

Piers Morgan is Joining Fox News (Mediaite) Someone tell all the women with nice feet, Piers is incoming. Hide the red bottom shoes, the man can’t help himself.

Loan Forgiveness for Disabled Borrowers Was 10 Years in the Making (ProPublica) When you fight for justice, prepare for a very, very long fight.

CV Research - Cannabinoid Research Library (Lex Pelger) Not a news article, but the only real comprehensive research hubs associated with THC, CBD, and the rest. Fantastic work by Mr. Pelger & CV Science.

The ‘melancholic joy’ of living in our brutal, beautiful world (Psyche) Binary thinking always leads to ruin. There is so much more to existence than a single feeling at a time:

In the end, both the optimist and the pessimist have it wrong, because each is looking at only part of the evidence. When we open our eyes to the fullness of reality, what we find is a chiaroscuro canvas of both darkness and light. The totality of evidence elicits in us something like ‘melancholic joy’: a grateful and uninhibited joy for the goodness of being, but one tinged by sadness at the pervasiveness of evil and melancholy because it all comes to an end.

Poem of the Tea: Rounding out the week with more melancholy by Vievee Francis.

Yours,