The World Needs a Shot of Patrón
Cinco de Mayo, Giving Tuesday, and Murder Hornets?! | #TC63
Welcome to Third Cultured, a Queer Reading of the American Empire through crisis-after-crisis — written by yours truly, Kyle Borland.
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"I am greeted with a hostile press the likes of which no president has ever seen. The closest would be that gentleman right up there. They always said nobody got treated worse than Lincoln. I believe I am treated worse."
— President Donald Trump at his Lincoln Memorial town hall Sunday night. It is worth noting that Lincoln’s presidency ended in his assassination.
American Empire & Other Wars
As if bees didn’t have it bad enough right now, the Asian “Murder Hornet” has arrived in the United States. They feed on bees – which are responsible for pollinating a third of US produce – and can destroy an entire hive in hours.
B-1B Lancers flew over the South China Sea and were deployed to Guam to counter China’s aggression in the region.
H. R. McMaster, a retired US Army lieutenant general and a former White House national security adviser, laid out his vision of China’s grand strategy in The Atlantic: “co-option, coercion, and concealment.”
In his latest jab at Huawei, President Trump signed an executive order barring US power grid entities from buying/installing electrical equipment manufactured outside the US, stressing that, “foreign adversaries are increasingly creating and exploiting vulnerabilities in the United States bulk-power system.”
Iran’s parliament agreed to slash four zeros from the rial, after a sharp fall in value as a result of crippling U.S. sanctions. The Toman, equal to 10,000 rials, will replace the rial as the national currency.
Japan is developing a hypersonic anti-ship missile to defend against Chinese aircraft carriers in the East China Sea and defend its claim to the Senkaku archipelago (which China and Taiwan also claim). An early version will be ready by 2026. Once successful, Japan would be the fourth country in the world with hypersonic gliding technology, after China, Russia, and the US.
North and South Korea exchanged gunfire over the weekend but Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stressed on Sunday that it was “likely accidental.”
On Monday, SCOTUS began two weeks of oral arguments which will allow livestreaming of its audio for the first time in history and the first time arguments will be heard via telephone rather than in-person.
Russia’s pipe-laying vessel has arrived in the Baltic Sea to finish Nord Stream 2, an $11 billion gas pipeline that the US targeted with sanctions last year.
Trade talks between the UK/the US will begin on Tuesday via video conference.
Trump to nominate Keith Dayton, a retired Army lieutenant general who currently serves as the senior U.S. defense adviser to Ukraine, as the new Ambassador to Ukraine – finally replacing Marie Yovanovitch and Bill Taylor (key witnesses from the president’s impeachment trial).
The US DNI urged France to follow Berlin in banning Hezbollah on its soil.
The Senate is back to confirm more judges and appease Moscow Mitch.
The US Treasury imposed sanctions on Taif Mining Services and its owner Amir Dianat, an Iranian-Iraqi national, for illegally collaborating with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) by shipping missiles on behalf of the IRGC’s elite Quds Force and smuggling "lethal aid" from Iran to Yemen.
Venezuela thwarted a predawn amphibious raid near Caracas aimed at overthrowing Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his socialist government. It was not supported by the US and eight deaths are reported.
“Look, we’re going to lose anywhere from 75,000, 80,000 to 100,000 people; that’s a horrible thing.”
— President Donald Trump at his Lincoln Memorial town hall Sunday night.
COVID-19 Updates (Graphic: NYTimes)
Total Confirmed: 3,578,301; Total Deaths: 251,059; Total Recovered: 1,162,279
US Cases: 1,212,343; US Deaths: 69,723; Recovered: 187,297; Tested: 7,285,178
As of May 1, there are 9,497 confirmed cases of coronavirus within the Department of Defense. Of the current cases, 4,704 were military service members, 887 dependents, 1,123 civilians, and 431 contractors. 284 of these cases required hospitalization, and there have been 27 deaths. 2,325 have recovered.
$8.2 billion – World leaders, minus the US, raised $8.2B during a virtual summit held to support the swift development of vaccines and drugs to fight the coronavirus. It is unknown why the US chose not to participate alongside its allies, including Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson, Japan’s Shinzo Abe, Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
America’s expected death toll increased to 100,000 during President Trump’s town hall from the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday. He also announced it’s likely the US will reach 3,000 deaths/day by June 1.
Americans’ desperation to reopen isn’t surprising given our racial history. (Graphic: NYTimes)
What does seem clear is that the sudden urgency among conservatives to send people back to work, despite the ongoing danger, has led some to wonder if their lives are as essential as their labor. “Now that the virus has become clearly racially identified,” Chidi said, “there is a fear it will start to be ignored, that it will look like a risk borne by black people, and so broader white society will stop caring as much about who lives or dies.”
It hardly seems coincidental, he says, that the calls to reopen the economy grew louder as it became clear the black community was bearing the brunt of the outbreak. “I’ve seen the libertarian right, the authoritarian right, the right in general starting to become much more vocal than a month ago,” he notes. “They’re like, ‘Fuck it, open up.’ That taboo has been broken.”
As many Americans work for Amazon (840K) as there are Sarahs (842K). Even though the company has made more money than God during the pandemic, Bezos & co have routinely intimated, isolated, and removed any whistleblowers that move to shed light on the working conditions within the company. The tactics were brutal enough that an Amazon VP “quit in dismay” over the firings, calling the company “chickenshit” for firing and disparaging employees who have organized protests.
Berkshire Hathaway sold all of its $6 billion in airline stocks, as air travel plunges by 90 percent, and carriers burn through between $10–12 billion/month. Berkshire reported $50 billion in losses during Q1.
France extended its COVID emergency measures until July 24.
Global anti-China sentiment is at its highest since Tiananmen Square in 1989, according to an internal report from the China Institutes of Contemporary International Relations (a think tank affiliated with China’s top intelligence body, the Ministry of State Security). The hostility is led by the US, including “turbocharging” pressure to “decouple” the two nation’s supply chains, so Beijing is preparing for the worst: an armed confrontation between the two superpowers.
J. Crew filed for bankruptcy, the first major retailer to fall victim to COVID.
New Zealand and Australia are looking to form a “travel bubble” since it seems they’ve beaten this wave of the virus.
Of the top 25 coronavirus clusters in the United States, six are slaughterhouses.
A CDC survey released May 1 found that, across the country, there were 4,913 cases of COVID-19 at meat and poultry processing facilities, which have resulted in at least 20 deaths. These figures understate the scope of the problem since four states did not provide any data to the CDC, testing is not comprehensive, and some processing companies are reticent to report illnesses to state authorities. Multiple plants have closed, suggesting a serious outbreak, without disclosing the number of positive cases.
Russia recorded 10,633 new coronavirus infections in 24 hours and now has 134,686 cases total, the seventh-highest tally in the world.
San Francisco businesses, residents, and UC Hastings are suing the City to force it to clean up the Tenderloin District’s “deplorable conditions” that they worry could lead to a COVID outbreak. Sidewalk encampment in the neighborhood, comprising a large portion of downtown San Franciso, has grown from 158 on March 3rd to 391 on May 1.
Superstar cities are seeing their Millennial exodus accelerate.
Venezuela’s western state of Portuguesa saw a prison riot that left at least 46 people dead and 60 injured. The cause of the riots was a recent COVID-related ban on inmates' family members bringing them food during visitation, a common practice in Venezuelan prisons.
A Cultural Thing
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