Peace Out
Israel
For many people, the last weeks have been upsetting and confusing. Hamas’s surprise attack against Israel, Israel’s brutal sanctions and bombing campaign against Gaza have fanned the flames of a conflict few Americans understand, but everyone feels obligated to have an opinion about.
Here is my suggestion: it’s okay not to know what to say or think about Israel and Palestine. You can grieve the dead Israeli civilians and the dead Palestinians, if you want. You don’t owe anyone else an opinion, or a rebuttal, or a spirited debate. And, please, for all our sakes, do not wade into arguments about this shit on social media. Spend your time doing literally anything else - we’ve got plenty of idiots filling our feeds with their freshly birthed takes on international law.
As a secular American Jew who didn’t do his Birthright, Israel existed in a mostly symbolic state in my life. We talk about returning to the Holy Land at Passover, but it was never on my list of destinations. For years I’ve been staunchly anti-Zionist, more sympathetic to the suffering of Palestinians at the hands of a series of right-wing Israeli governments than I was to the ‘suffering’ of their oppressors, who have used the billions in US aid they receive each year to build a kind of Silicon Valley But Sleazier in the Middle East. But, for me, all of it was abstract. Likud bad, most Israelis probably okay, etc.
The conflict has presented me with the opportunity to read some reasoned, thoughtful writing about ways to put the bloodshed in context as a Jew - David Klion’s piece on this is good. If you’ve got the stomach to learn more about genocide and war crimes, this piece in Jewish Currents provides good background. Elsewhere, in the New Yorker, Isaac Chotiner interviews a human rights expert on the subject. If you really want to go down the rabbit hole of Israel’s dark history, this video is unflinching.
I realize I’ve just told you it’s okay to not have opinions about the war whilst burdening you with my own, but hopefully you’ve stuck with me this far because we’ve reached the scam content.
The Hamas attack has done more than just inflame international tensions - it’s also brought every American business idiot out of the fucking woodwork to insist anyone offering even mild criticism of Israel be silenced, censored, and expelled from respectable society.
What set them off? Not the despicable acts in Gaza, obviously, but instead a coalition of student groups at Harvard writing a letter blaming Israel for creating the conditions that led to the attacks. In response, the opinion police have tried to completely ruin the students’ lives:
But within days, students affiliated with those groups were being doxxed, their personal information posted online. Siblings back home were threatened. Wall Street executives demanded a list of student names to ban their hiring. And a truck with a digital billboard — paid for by a conservative group — circled Harvard Square, flashing student photos and names, under the headline, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”
Normal stuff! At Harvard and elsewhere, wealthy alumni who believe their donations entitle them to direct policy at colleges freaked out over any perceived failure to condemn Hamas quickly or forcefully enough:
At the University of Pennsylvania, donors are pushing for the resignation of the president and the board chairman, after a Palestinian writers’ conference on campus invited speakers accused of antisemitism.
At Harvard, a billionaire couple quit an executive board. Another donor pulled money for fellowships. And Lawrence Summers, a former Harvard president and Treasury secretary, criticized the leadership for a “delayed” response to the Hamas attack and the student letter.
In what can only be described as peak irony, the rich people threatening a bunch of college students for having opinions requested (and were granted) anonymity to brag openly about their unchecked power:
In conversations with The New York Times, more than a dozen donors said they felt they had a right and an obligation to weigh in. Some of the donors who discussed the matter asked not to be named, because they did not want to speak publicly on a rapidly evolving issue that has elicited death threats on both sides. Some, but not all, of these donors are Jewish, though they hold a range of religious beliefs and not all have a history of being active in pro-Israeli causes.
Yeah, right. If you thought it was bad reading some old colleague’s LinkedIn post about support for Israel, imagine what university staff are dealing with right now - every blowhard dipshit you’re forced to treat politely because they’re dangling obscenely large checks in your face is now suddenly a full-throated Zionist and Likud supporter.
Harvard, a hedge fund that dabbles in the education business, has a fifty one billion dollar endowment. Why are they caving to this shit! The answer, of course, is that the war in Israel has become about class solidarity. Wealthy Catholics and Presbyterians are losing their minds over college students because, as always, they believe the biggest threat to their entrenched power is a bunch of young people who don’t think it’s very cool that the US has a growing concentration of impossibly wealthy people who can ruin their lives with a single phone call.
These folks can pick up a phone and secure editorial space in the New York Times. They can pen missives in the Wall Street Journal with the truly absurd headline “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students”, because if there’s anything truly disqualifying as a lawyer it’s defending ‘monstrous crimes’.
The uproar seems cartoonish and stupid, because in America we do still have pretty lenient free speech laws. France has banned pro-Palestine demonstrations. Germany has banned ‘support for Hamas’ granting its government authority to surveil and arrest people for donations or social media posts. They’ve also stopped all aid to Palestine while they conduct an audit, because it’s definitely possible to determine where your humanitarian donations are going in a war zone.
It is a dangerously slippery slope when the Zionist Israeli narrative is used as a cudgel to curtail free speech and debate. It should be entirely uncontroversial to say you support Palestinians without having to ‘condemn’ Hamas, as if the two are entwined. We should not humor anonymous university ‘donors’ who have chosen which side of the war students are allowed to support. Their outrage is as performative as everything else they do - many of them undoubtedly write big checks to the openly anti-Semitic Republican party.
Really, attacking college kids instead of using their access to pressure the US government to urge Israeli restraint is the punching down we’ve become accustomed to from our elites. For them, going Full Zionist is the easy thing to do, because it doesn’t piss off any of the wrong people.
Inequality
Speaking of our country’s elites, the FT has new data on just how stark the life expectancy gap is between America’s haves and have-nots:
Even the most disadvantaged in Japan and Switzerland typically make it to 60. In France, Germany and Britain, they die at about 55. In the US, it’s just 41.
[…]
For men at the bottom of the US economic ladder, it’s even worse. My calculations suggest the average age of death in that group is just 36 years old, compared with 55 in the Netherlands and 57 in Sweden.
The poorest 10% of Americans - men especially - barely make it to their 40th birthday. A grim statistic, especially considering the US is enjoying one of the most widely prosperous times in its history.
Literally this week, the Federal Reserve released data showing that American families’ wealth grew an astonishing 37% between 2019 and 2022. The average person in the richest country in the world got much richer, and yet we’re still dying much, much younger than people in peer countries. The poorest of us are, at least. The median American can expect to live about six years less than they would in a wealthy European or Asian nation, but the bottom decile live twenty years less.
So, what’s causing this stark divide? Guns and drugs!
Wealthy Americans who live in the parts of the country with high opioid use and gun violence live just as long as those who live where fentanyl addiction and gunshot incidents are relatively rare. But poor Americans live far shorter lives if they grow up surrounded by guns and drugs than if they don’t.
As a matter of fact, drug deaths set a record last year, killing a hundred and ten thousand people. Despite an endless series of docudramas about the Sacklers and billions in settlements from drug companies and pharmacies, deaths of despair are going up, not down. This is what our elites ignore while they rant about college students or taxes or whatever the outrage du jour happens to be. Because they’re going to live to eighty, so what’s the big deal?
Elsewhere, the WaPo details how other red-state policies like cigarette taxes, expanding health care, and even seat-belt regulations are shaving years off the lives of their residents. The richest nation finds itself saddled with one major political party running more than half its states whose political platform consists of finding creative ways to inflict harm on the most vulnerable.
Air Pollution
We have talked a couple times around here about air quality - mostly as it relates to clouds and the warming planet. The data had me puzzled - if reducing aerosols in the air is the goal of half the air quality folks, aren’t they worried about the other half of the community linking the reduction in air pollutants with our oceans starting to boil?
A recent editorial in the NYT led me to this piece from August that offers a more thorough explanation:
“Overall, vast emissions of aerosols since the start of the industrial age have had a profound cooling effect,” wrote Geeta Persad, Bjorn Samset and Laura Wilcox in an eye-opening Nature commentary published late last year. “Without them, the global warming we see today would be 30 to 50 percent greater.” Nevertheless, they went on, “the impacts of aerosols on climate risk are often ignored.”
Basically, while we were emitting all the carbon from manufacturing and fossil fuel consumption, the other emissions we treat as dangerous air pollution were cooling the planet, offsetting some of the damage.
Now, we’re removing aerosols but not slowing down our carbon emissions, so the result could be even more dramatic warming as the cooling blanket of nasty shit we’d spewed into the air isn’t around to blunt the sun’s rays. Great!
The science around aerosols and cooling is newer and less well-understood than the impacts of carbon, so scientists don’t yet know how wide-ranging the effects will be, but if this summer was any indication, it could get much worse much faster than expected.
Elsewhere in air pollution, it was recently revealed the EPA has been using legal loopholes to exclude certain types of air pollution from its estimates, leading regulators to declare the air cleaner than it actually is:
Regulators have exploited a little-known provision in the Clean Air Act called the “exceptional events rule” to forgive pollution caused by “natural” or “uncontrollable” events – including wildfires – on records used by the EPA for regulatory decisions, a new investigation from the California Newsroom, MuckRock and the Guardian reveals.
Again, if you lived through the last year, you’d be aware of the impact wildfire smoke can have on people far away from the blaze itself. Meanwhile, the EPA has been giving companies and localities a pass on increased air pollution due to manmade natural disasters.
Basically, polluting industries have spent time and money working with local politicians to request exemptions from the Clean Air Act because, with wildfires making the overall air quality much worse, they’d have to invest in cleaning up their own emissions to balance it out, which they obviously do not want to do. It is a stupidly obvious yet alarming trend - the government essentially ignoring the impact of decades of pro-business policies on the climate so those businesses can continue to make the problem worse.
Debt
When we talk about debt, what we’re really talking about is a two-tiered system of obligations. If you are an average person, trying to borrow money requires jumping through hoops like navigating the three secretive credit bureaus, proving you’ve got enough income, and then making your payments on time every time lest you slip up and bring your personal finances crashing down.
If you are a business, or a large corporation, debt is simply an accounting issue. If you end up with too much debt, you can call your lenders and say hey, let’s renegotiate how much I owe you because I can’t pay it back, and they’ll usually say sure, okay.
If even that doesn’t work you can go through a corporate bankruptcy, which is when a judge steps in and decides how much you have to pay to whom, and when. This is a little less friendly than talking directly to your lenders, but not much.
Sometimes, your balance sheet might also include liabilities, like if you were responsible for distributing tons of dangerous medication that addicted and killed people.
Anyhow, Rite Aid filed for bankruptcy this week after years of losing money while it tried to compete with larger pharmacy rivals and faced lawsuits related to the opioid crisis. The plan is to restructure its debt, shield it from some of the lawsuits, and close a bunch of stores.
Rite Aid was one of the outspoken ‘victims’ of the retail theft crime ring stories that have been circulating for the last couple years despite no evidence. A look at their finances seems to indicate that, in fact, the problem was they ran their business poorly, had too many locations, and took on too much debt.
So that’s one comparison between normal debt and corporate debt, and if you were a normal person who got out over your skis like Rite Aid did, you could declare bankruptcy and discharge some or all of your debt via the court system. Sure, you’d ruin your credit for up to a decade until the bankruptcy was removed from your reports, and you’d have to check ‘yes’ on every financial form asking whether you’d declared bankruptcy for the rest of your life, but let’s say for our purposes it’s sort of the same thing.
There is one kind of debt you can’t easily discharge, though - student loans. Even in bankruptcy, the bar to discharge student loans is higher than other kinds of debt. Many have argued that this insistence on paying the government back for money it loaned people for education is needlessly cruel, especially with tuition prices rising into the stratosphere. Opponents of student debt relief have argued that people who take out loans should pay them back. That’s just being responsible.
I wonder what those folks think of the news that the SBA has stopped trying to collect $62 billion dollars’ worth of pandemic loans from small businesses?
The U.S. government has halted some efforts to collect an estimated $62 billion in past-due pandemic loans made to small businesses, concluding that aggressive attempts to recover the money — a portion of which may have been lost to fraud — could cost more than simply writing off the debt.
Ahhh, right. Of course. When it’s student loans, the government will hound you to quite literally the end of your life to be repaid, but when it’s a bunch of small businesses that may have taken out loans with fake documents? Too much work! They can’t be bothered.
The weird American obsession with repaying personal debt - effectively eliminating lending risk - combined with its laissez faire approach to business and corporate debt can be infuriating, especially if you’re a person who ends up in debt and feels like they have no good options. If you were a company, you’d have not only a host of pretty reasonable avenues, but any choice you made wouldn’t follow you around for the next decade of your life like a dark cloud. I’m not saying we need to make collecting business debt more punitive, but making personal debt less threatening and ominous would have a significant impact on making life in this country less shitty for those not blessed with big balance sheets.
Short Cons
American Prospect - “A paper published today by the American Economic Liberties Project, a group that fights economic concentration, finds that consolidation, rising prices, and surging investor compensation in the heat pump market could blunt the effectiveness of federal spending.”
WSJ - ““In many instances, it’s just a rigged market for billions and billions of dollars,” Icahn said in an interview.”
WIRED - “New research shows the number of deepfake videos is skyrocketing—and the world's biggest search engines are funneling clicks to dozens of sites dedicated to the nonconsensual fakes.”
The Hill - ““If you know about 10 years ago, I was here in October because I was kicked out from UPenn, was forced to retire,” Karikó told the Nobel Prize organization in an interview Monday.”
ProPublica - “Republican leaders asserted their rights to block the most routine give-and-take of lawsuits, resisting handing over documents, providing discovery or submitting to depositions — in effect squashing Bonilla’s efforts to uncover how the 2021 maps were drawn.”
Insider - “In the summer of 2021, Insider has learned, Thiel began providing information as a "confidential human source," or CHS, to Johnathan Buma, a Los Angeles-based FBI agent who specializes in investigating political corruption and foreign-influence campaigns.”
CNBC - “In 2012, someone stole 50,000 bitcoin from the Silk Road, an illegal dark web marketplace. Over time, the value of the stolen bitcoin skyrocketed to more than $3 billion dollars and for years it remained one of the biggest mysteries in the world of cryptocurrency.”