Afternoon Tea - Strategic Blimp Arms Race

A record high 90,000 Americans died of drug overdose last year, it’s Cuomo’ing all the way down, NYC’s city level positions might also be political graveyards, the US military trained the Haitian assassins, Bolsonaro had hiccups for 10 days, Utah cops are kind of out of control, China is building Exotic Airships, and the moon wobbles like Hunter S. Thompson on Ether. It’s Thursday, July 15th 2021, and this is the Tea. As a reward for just about making it through the week, here is a capybara stretching. 

Coastal flooding projections have been ignoring the wobbly moon problem (Grist) While the idea of a wobbly moon is cool, I can hear actuarial modeling firms and insurance companies across the planet just slamming their heads on their desks. This is gonna get messy and weird before we get better at it.

U.S. Had Most Drug Overdose Deaths on Record in 2020, CDC Says (Bloomberg) 90,000 people. 90k Americans who died, not of COVID, not of Cancer, not of Alzheimer’s, but tainted drugs and no public health for dependent individuals to speak of. I guess some people don’t care about those lives, but I don’t know how you can walk away from people who could use the most help, at the hour of their greatest need.

New York takes conservative approach counting virus deaths (Associated Press) Cuomo’s administration intentionally undercounting pandemic deaths? How could this have happened? It’s not like we have a gigantic trail of actions by Andy, consistently downplaying and minimizing the suffering his actions caused, or anything.

Amid losing pattern, city comptroller may not be a good stepping stone for higher office (NY1) It’s not just that holding public office in New York State is a death sentence, but even holding local office in NYC largely is not as smart of a path forward to national visibility as people think. Can people please run for office because they want to do the job, not get a better one?

Miami security firm faces questions in Haiti assassination (Associated Press) & U.S. military once trained Colombians implicated in Haiti assassination plot, Pentagon says (Washington Post) Can “no destabilizing nations in the Western Hemisphere” be a Democratic Party plank? At least for five freaking minutes while we handle the pandemic?

Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House (Guardian) & Taking out the ‘trash streamers’ (.coda) While the liberal-sphere is running away with this, the Guardian piece is a bit more measured than some of the other coverage. The coda piece about trash streamers, a horrifying niche of streaming out of the broken & embattled youth of Russia, is much more interesting. But if you really want to dig in, there’s a corresponding deep comment on Reddit, detailing how Trump’s been financed by Russia for basically the entire life of your average geriatric millennial.

Brazil's Bolsonaro in hospital amid concern over chronic hiccups (BBC News) 10 days of hiccups & constipation so bad they had to go in through his nose. You rarely see this much discomfort being delivered to a person responsible for this much evil. But, the guy is in the process of clear-cutting the Amazon, which I assume earns you some of those good good hexes. I as a rule do not fuck with humans that live so deep in the Amazon they do jobs we don’t have nouns for in English anymore.

Utah Deputy Arrests Person For Destroying 'Back The Blue' Sign, Adds Hate Crime Enhancement For 'Smirking' (TechDirt) & A Utah Police Officer Killed a Man Inside the Police Department. It Was His Third Shooting. (Frontline) To stress, neither of these are BLM stories, and these cops were acting within a monoculture community, even inside their own police station. Both of these stories are from centrist, non-partisan sources. Police need to be held accountable when they act outside of the law. This problem prevents all Americans, of any race, from being truly free.

Gigantic Hangar Near Secretive Chinese Test Facilities Points To Exotic Airship Development (The Drive) If this leads to a Zeppelin based arms race, I’m going to need to get a monocle to wear on the Blimp rides.

Facebook Users Said No to Tracking. Now Advertisers are Panicking (Bloomberg) Remember how Apple was hip-checking Facebook in the new version of iOS? The preliminary data is no longer preliminary, and it’s bad. Facebook attribution is much much less accurate than it used to be six months ago. I’d feel sorry for Facebook and Facebook-first businesses but, you know what kinds of marketing also have piss-poor attribution? TV, Print, Magazine, and every other kind of marketing that isn’t in Glenngarry Glenn Ross. As the Dark Souls streamers say, “git gud casual.”

Song of the Tea: So many people have memories associated with deadmau5 and this track, but very few remixes to the original justice. Rounding out “shimmering chromatic arpeggios” week, we’ve got Adam Pearce doing some good work around the timeless classic from the guy in the mouse head.

You don’t have to move on to let go...

Yours,