La Lune

Lofi

“It's a poorly recorded song and that is supposed to be a part of its charm,” is how Mint’s Shephali Bhatt describes the growing popularity of “lofi flips” among India’s Gen Z. If you’ve ever relaxed/studied you’ve probably heard lofi beats already, but out here in the depths of at least five overlapping catastrophes1 can we ever have too many lofi beats?

Lunar

Everyone was excited about the blood moon last night except astrophysicist and science communicator turned contrarian social media crank Neil deGrasse Tyson, who called the event “long and boring” before whining about the lack of good pollution these days. What a dick. Look at this magnificent orange lad:

Luna

As Terra’s stablecoin dyad went into its algorithmic death spiral last week, the Luna Foundation Guard’s $3.5 billion Bitcoin backstop “became untraceable after it was moved to two cryptocurrency platforms, according to blockchain forensics firm Elliptic,” reports Bloomberg’s Dave Liedtka. LFG claims the Bitcoin was given to unnamed “counterparties,” who sold it and used the proceeds to buy collapsing TerraUSD in a transparent attempt to manipulate the market into re-overvaluing the organization’s failing beanie, which ended up potentially being one of the worst “buy high, sell low trade[s] of all time.” As stupid as that is, it’s still somehow the most positive story about what happened to all that money. Coindesk’s Sam Kessler and Shaurya Malwa report that “LFG denied accusations that it bailed out whales with the bitcoin trove,” although Do Kwon and LFG haven’t yet identified the “counterparties” they transferred the Bitcoin to, or who those counterparties bought UST from and at what price. Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin, already regretting “the dangers to overeager investors, the soaring transaction fees, and the shameless displays of wealth” resulting from his invention, called for Terra to compensate smaller holders of its toxic beanies, citing the FDIC’s $250,000 deposit insurance as a relevant precedent. And crypto’s rediscovery of the need for financial regulation proceeds apace. Meanwhile at Terra-sponsored Nationals Park, no one ever knew what all those ads were about anyway.

Song of the Summer: “Crypto Boy”

Lunacy

After yet another bloody weekend of racist mass murder in America, Nicholas Confessore and Karen Yourish from the New York Times tackled the Buffalo shooter and Tucker Carlson’s mutual ideology, the “great replacement theory,” calling it “A Fringe Conspiracy Theory… once confined to the digital fever swamps of Reddit message boards and semi-obscure white nationalist sites” before later clarifying that by “fringe” they mean “one in three American adults now believe that an effort is underway ‘to replace native-born Americans with immigrants for electoral gains.’” But it’s never been a fringe theory among racists, and racists have never been a fringe group of Americans. As Kaitlyn Greenidge pointed out, Tom Buchanan was reading about replacement theory in The Great Gatsby. Replacement theory (aka ”white genocide,” aka “eugenics”) has always been the core premise of American white supremacy, which was the founding ideology of America as a nation. The name “great replacement“ may have been coined recently by a castle-dwelling French ex-leftist, but the ideas are hundreds of years old, which of course you’d know already if you read The New York Times.

Loons

I recorded some lofi birds to relax/camp to this weekend at Baxter State Park here in Maine.

Today’s Song: Billie Marten, “La Lune”

~ There is no dark side of the tabs, really. Matter of fact, it’s all dark ~

Sound on today. Tweets @fka_tabs & @TodayinTabs. If you feel like crying, watch the video for Kalush Orchestra’s “Stefania,” filmed in the Ukrainian war zone. “America can, should, will, and must blow up the moon.” —Neil deGrasse Tyson