Good morning, everyone.

Hope everyone enjoyed a day free of Instagram temptation. We're expecting rain most of the day here in Nashville on this quiet Tuesday.

A fun fact: one of the new SNL members, Austin Johnson, the man who impersonated Joe Biden, hails from Nashville.

Thanks for reading.

ORIGINAL ESSAYS

Nashville

🎭 ALL THE COUNCIL'S A STAGE

The ordinance set in motion for metro indoor masking with fines for non-compliance comes to its final vote tonight during the Metro Council meeting. Framed as a public safety measure, one can’t help but question whether it's really about safety.

The Nashville Metropolitan area is experiencing a slow recovery from pandemic lockdowns. Businesses can’t seem to find enough workers. Hospitals are short-staffed. Schools are tiptoeing around the minefield of mask mandates. The stage is set. The gavel drops. The Metro Nashville Council Members take up their seats in the David Scobey Council Chamber.

When weighing the effectiveness of the ordinance, taking into account the reality that the enforcement of its $50 fine is not plausible, and considering the toll this two-bit regulation would take on struggling businesses barely meeting their bottom lines, could this ordinance be *gasp* all for show? The words of Shakespeare reverberate down the halls of 1 Public Square,  “all the world’s a stage.”

💉 JAB OR DIE AT VUMC

The deadline for complying with Vanderbilt University Medical Center's vaccine mandate passed on Thursday. 97% of employees received the vaccine, up from 72% just two months ago. Even with the large uptake, 900 employees remain unvaccinated. With labor shortages still omnipresent, VUMC will take it slow in releasing workers who refused the jab promising "final numbers" by the end of October.  

DEVELOPMENT

• ALTA Riverwalk Takes Shape Along The Cumberland River In Nashville (Now Next)
• Music Row building near Rose Park listed for sale (Post)
• Fairgrounds, Trevecca-area site sells for $13.75M (Post)
• Proposed project would yield city’s tallest building, updated Y (Post)
• MDHA committee to vote on mixed-use project (Post)
• North Inglewood eyed for residential development (Post)

National

📸 SOCIAL MEDIA BLUES

In just ten years, we've gone from rapidly adopting and experimenting with social media apps like Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter to universally loathing them. It's one of the few issues that people tend to agree upon: Mark Zuckerberg opened up a portal to hell, and we're all living with the consequences. As internal documents trickle out of Facebook HQ and a new "whistle-blower" takes to the airwaves to indict the company, Facebook is under attack for putting profits over people. Should we be surprised?

What's missing in the entire discussion over Instagram's negative effect on children is whether something like Instagram is even necessary, much less whether it is actually to blame for all the ills of modern life. Think-pieces galore opine about ways to improve Instagram to make it less destructive, but have people considered just logging off? Deleting the app? Is Instagram a social utility or a luxury we choose to partake in? Why do we assume that Instagram and Facebook are even necessary in the first place? Why is this a problem at all when these services are voluntary? Even Hillary Clinton got in the tech-bashing fun which should be your first sign that something else is afoot here. Lawmakers and politicians across the land yell, "Don't blame us, it's the tech companies doing all the damage!"

As if on command, Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp all went offline yesterday and Facebook's stock dropped 4.8% underscoring the drama. To gauge the local temperature, we asked some Nashville business owners “Would you care if social media disappeared entirely?”

• Nick, Manager of Nobles Kitchen & Beer Hall: “Business-wise, yes. Personally, no. It’d be hard for people to know what we are doing every day [Nobles Restaurant schedule].”
• Kathy Bloodworth, Owner of The Peanut Shop: “Hell nah. I would personally miss seeing pictures of friends and family, but no. We’d just go back to doing business advertising the way we used to do it.”

And some "alternative" takes of the situation:

• #CyberPandemic hypothesis (@LaserHodl)
• Brace yourself, the sky is falling. (Mike Solana)

🇨🇳 WHAT'S TAIWAN TO US?

China, flexing on its island neighbor, flew a couple dozen of its outdated warplanes into Taiwanese airspace over the weekend. Part of Xi Jinping's vision for China's future involves folding Taiwan into his "one China" vision. Taiwan became an outpost for supporters of the Republic of China following their defeat at the hands of the Chinese Communists following the Chinese Civil War of 1949. Since then, it's flirted with independence while receiving financial and military support from the US.

Taiwan is situated crucially between the East and South China Seas. The Taiwan Strait, the channel of water between mainland China and Taiwan connecting the two seas, is one of the most heavily trafficked waterways in the entire world. So long as Taiwan remains separate in practice from the Chinese mainland, Xi's tenuous hold on power has a crucial weakness. But when the Chinese send fighter jets into Taiwanese airspace, they are not only provoking Taiwan but America, its sworn protector, as well. Many speculate that war between the US and China could break out were China to make a lunge for Taiwan. While not a certainty, the US's hold on Taiwan gives it leverage against the Chinese Communist Party. Anything that threatens that would be met with a response. Whether that response would be martial or economic would depend largely on the context.

The question is: of what difference is this to us? In truth, very little. The capture of Taiwan would only threaten the interests of America's "global" capitalist class.

🦄 WOKE-ACRACY

• Black History Month website brands white people ‘genetically defective descendants of albino mutants’ (Telegraph) Unsurprisingly, the website was run by a self-loathing white man looking for social cred, so he could get invited to a black party or something.
• Black student is revealed to have written N-word graffiti that called for death of black people and led to walk-out at Missouri high school (Daily Mail) Can one commit a hate crime against one's own race? Starting to see a trend here?
• Why our preferred pronoun for God should be ‘they’ (Religion News) "Father in heaven, dost thou protest should I choose to refer to thee as 'them' and not 'he'? Hast thou stated how one must call to thee?"
• Wearing second-hand clothes ‘an example of white privilege’, students told (Telegraph) Nothing screams whiteness more than sustainability.
• Austin, Texas, police to stop responding to nonemergencies beginning today (Fox) "Define non-emergency, operator."

Entertainment

THINGS TO DO

You can view our full weekly event calendar here.

Tonight
Not much going on tonight, but if you're feeling adventurous, a trip out to Dee's Country Cocktail lounge to catch Darrin Bradbury's expired, but still pungent, country tunes is worth your time.

🪕 Darrin Bradbury & Friends Tuesday Night Residency @ Dee's, 6p, $5 (Info)

COMING THIS WEEK

🎥🤵 No Time To Die Opens Thursday, 10/7‌‌
The new James Bond flick and Daniel Craig's last as Brittain's finest MI6 agent sees 007's tranquil retirement in Jamaica interrupted by an old CIA agent asking a favor.

🎥🐑 Lamb Opens Thursday, 10/7‌‌
The new flick from A24 follows a childless couple who discover a strange and unnatural newborn in their sheep barn. They decide to raise her as their own, but sinister forces are determined to return the creature to the wilderness that birthed her.

COVID Gutter

Trends and news concerning everyone's favorite viral pandemic.

Jacinda Ardern—the smiling girl-boss czar of New Zealand's COVID Zero policies—announced yesterday that the nation will no longer pursue the eradication of the COVID-19 because, well, it's unachievable. Yeah. Sorry about that economy there, mate.

Meanwhile, in Tennessee,  cases are down 50% and hospitalizations down 39% in the past month.

HEADLINES

• Covid Mandates Are Turning Australia Into A Police State (Evie) The number of 12-17 year old presenting to ED with self-harm or suicidal ideation increasing by 47% in the year to July 2021 compared to 2019 in Australia.
• Fauci Tells Vaccinated Americans Not to Plan for Christmas Yet (NRO) Does anyone listen to this garden gnome anymore?
• Israel will require a booster shot to be considered fully vaccinated. (NYT) One shot, two shot, three shot, four! Hey, pretty baby. Don't worry. It'll work this time.

INFORMATION

• Here’s a List of the Published Side Effects of Lockdowns (Caldron Pool)

Around the Web

💰 Invest In Stocks Like Nancy Pelosi How to invest like the best-performing investor of the past decade.

🪙 Missouri Mayor To Give $1,000 In Bitcoin To Every Household Jayson Stewart plans to give every household in Cool Valley $1000 worth of Bitcoin. Cool Valley, Missouri, a small town in the St. Louis County area, has about 1,500 residents.

🇺🇸 Can the South escape its demons? To save America, the old Confederacy must adapt to progressive politics.

🎥 What are frankincense and myrrh? What is frankincense and myrrh and where do they actually come from

Political Theater Highlight Reel

1. Krysten Sinema (D-AZ) confronted by a passenger on her flight.
2. Chris Rabb (D-Phila.) announces parody legislation enforcing reproductive responsibility among men to highlight gendered double standards regarding reproductive rights
3. Rand Paul (R-KY) humiliates Biden's HHS Sec. on Natural Immunity
4. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and a cringe-worthy stump speech to nobody

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Have a great Tuesday