What Happened Today: June 27, 2022
U.S. dresses up the Iran deal; Department of Defense’s post-Roe abortion policy; fentanyl breaks into New Zealand drug supply
The Big Story
A historic meeting in March convened by U.S. officials in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh brought together top military officials from the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to coordinate the development of a shared Middle Eastern air defense system to combat the growing threat from Iran. Yet the report of that meeting appeared curiously for the first time yesterday in The Wall Street Journal immediately following news this weekend that European Union representatives had secured an agreement between Western allies and Iranian officials to resume negotiations to revive the Iran nuclear deal. “It’s no accident,” said Michael Doran, director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East and Tablet contributor, about the coincidence. “The Biden administration leaked news of the meeting of Arab and Israeli defense chiefs to inoculate itself from the inevitable criticism that, by returning to the deal, it is selling out its allies.”
The revived Iranian nuclear deal, started under the Obama administration as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, would lift sanctions and restrictions on Iran, giving it new resources to grow its air arsenal and emboldening it to move closer to completing a nuclear weapon. Yet Iranian nuclear capabilities, as well as its swelling stock of drones and missiles, are of existential concern to Israel as well as Arab nations. It’s what brought together for the first time the chief of staff of the Israel Defense Forces, Lt. Gen. Aviv Kochavi, and his Saudi counterpart, Gen. Fayyadh bin Hamed Al Ruwaili, to discuss a potential air defense alliance system that would provide participating nations with an early warning alert of missile threats, which has become urgent as Iran continues to escalate its frequency of aerial attacks in the region.
While the Sharm El Sheikh meeting further strengthens the alliance between Israeli and Arab states that began with the Abraham Accords, the very basis of that alliance is the shared threat from Iran, which all parties to the accords believe will get worse under a new deal. In light of that, the White House’s efforts to engineer a Middle Eastern air defense coalition against Iran would appear to be little more than a campaign that will engender goodwill in press coverage but ultimately be undermined by a new agreement that would provide Iran with additional funds to purchase new weapons. “With its right hand, the White House is helping the Arabs and Israelis to build an integrated missile defense system,” said Doran. “but with its left hand it is helping Tehran overwhelm that system by working to channel to it hundreds of billions of dollars while also legitimating its nuclear weapons program.”
In the Back Pages: War Against the Classics
The Rest
→ In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision on Friday to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Pentagon is reviewing its policies on abortion, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, noting that “[n]othing is more important to me or to this Department than the health and well-being of our Service members, the civilian workforce, and DOD families.” Any Pentagon policy is complicated, however, by the fact that women who serve in the military—14% of active-duty armed service members, or 200,000 women—and are stationed in states where abortion is illegal will need to request permission from their supervisors to travel to states where the procedure is legal, which would force these servicewomen to disclose their private medical needs to their supervisors. It is also unclear if medical professionals in states where abortion is now illegal will be able to inform women about their healthcare options.
→ NUMBER OF THE DAY: 71%
The number of 10-year-olds unable to read a single sentence of written text, according to a new report published by the World Bank, UNESCO, UNICEF, the U.K. government Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO), USAID, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. While these numbers had already been tragically high before the pandemic, standing at 57%, the report found that widespread COVID-era school closures made things far worse, leading to a 14% increase in the illiteracy rate among children that will result in $21 trillion in lost lifetime earnings. In poorer countries across the global south, meanwhile, the drops were even more profound; from South America to South Asia, the illiteracy rate climbed from the low-50% range before the pandemic to the high-70% range after.
Read More: https://phys.org/news/2022-06-year-olds-poverty-unable-simple-text.html
→ For the first time fentanyl was found in New Zealand’s local drug market over the weekend, accounting for 12 overdoses among users who had unwittingly encountered the deadly opioid mixed into cocaine and required urgent medical attention after ingesting it. The appearance of the drug alarmed New Zealand health officials because medical facilities and drug users alike lack familiarity or experience with how to detect fentanyl in the drug supply or how to deal with the type of fentanyl overdoses that have ravaged the United States. “New Zealand is grossly underprepared for a fentanyl outbreak because, in particular, of lack of overdose prevention measures—including access to Naloxone,” said Sarah Helm, the director of the New Zealand Drug Foundation, who noted that the 12 overdoses survived was a stroke of luck. Blair Macdonald, the head of the New Zealand Drug Intelligence Bureau, said, “We’re very concerned. This is a dangerous drug. It is responsible for killing literally hundreds of thousands of people in America.” That includes an increasingly large percentage of American children. Between 2019 and 2021, fentanyl was responsible for 75% of the drug overdose deaths among 14- to 18-year-olds, largely because of illicit prescription pills spiked with the synthetic opioid.
→ QUOTE OF THE DAY: “Off the charts. Everything was delayed, delayed, delayed.”
Shawn Inman, owner of distributor Spinner Ag Incorporated in Zionsville, Indiana, discussing the chemical shortage that is hampering American agricultural output. The United States’ farmers are facing widespread shortages of chemical weed killers and fungicides that threaten to disrupt a growing season already made difficult by drought conditions covering much of the United States. While many of these setbacks are the result of pandemic-related supply and shipping issues, there is a sense among farmers that agribusinesses are using the delays and shortages to boost profits, with the price of chemicals like glyphosate and glufosinate—commonly used on farms to fend off weeds and pests—jumping more than 50% since this time last year, leading to big revenue boosts for chemical companies. The U.S. Department of Agriculture is now looking into whether moves from these manufacturers and distributors are illegally anti-competitive, though critics say the agency is not moving nearly fast enough.
→ Many on one side of the political spectrum are reeling from the Supreme Court’s decision last Friday that overturned Roe v. Wade, but as Ars Technica founder Jon Stokes wrote in this Twitter thread, most of those angry people wouldn’t feel so surprised, at least, if they saw it as the culmination of a long, concerted “disciplined game” played by the conservative right to patiently build a political coalition to achieve major planks of its agenda—a type of political organizing, in other words, that goes above and beyond “a few marches when you got mad enough plus some crusading on Slack & social media.”
→ In a Friday afternoon raid of the Orlando Museum of Art, the FBI pulled 25 works from the walls of an exhibition dedicated to the work of Jean Michel-Basquiat, the pioneering postwar artist who died at the age of 27 in 1988, alleging that these paintings were in fact forgeries. One of the paintings, for example, was done on cardboard with a shipping label that Fedex only began using six years after the artist’s death. The warrant also charged that there had been “attempts to sell the paintings using false provenance, and bank records show possible solicitation of investment in artwork that is not authentic,” though these charges were not brought against the Orlando Museum of Art, which is not suspected of any wrongdoing. The museum director and the owners of the paintings—whose names have not been released—claim that Basquiat painted the works in 1982 when he was working in a studio below the Los Angeles home of the famous art dealer Larry Gagosian, and that Basquiat sold the works to a screenwriter who stashed them in a storage facility and promptly forgot about them, letting them languish there for 30 years until the storage locker was seized for nonpayment of rent and its contents sold off. Asked about this, Larry Gagosian said that he “finds the scenario of the story highly unlikely.”
→ Japan is reporting record-breaking heat, notching its first 105-degree Fahrenheit June day ever. China is reporting similar heat, with 25 locations across the country observing their hottest days ever. The regional heat wave now has officials worrying about power shortages, with the 14 million inhabitants of Tokyo being advised over the weekend to conserve energy. “We are struck by unusual heat for the season,” Kaname Ogawa, director of electricity supply policy at Japan’s economy and industry ministry, said in a statement. “Please cooperate and save as much power as possible.”
→ MAP OF THE DAY:
With Roe v. Wade overruled, the patchwork map of states where abortion is or is not banned will now be a crucial resource. Such maps will only become more complicated as each state addresses the legality of abortion in its own helter-skelter way. One such map—from Insider.com—illustrates where abortion is legal, where it isn’t, and where the status is unclear or in flux.
→ On a small island jutting off the coast of Croatia, two archeologists discovered the 6,000-year-old remains from a Neolithic settlement, including stone walls, flint knives, and ceramics. The archeologists made the discovery after noticing unusual shapes and patterns in aerial imagery of the area. “I thought, Maybe it is natural, maybe not,” said Mate Parica, a professor at the University of Zadar. Because most Neolithic ruins are found in caves, where fragile materials are protected from the elements, the discovery of these island ruins is especially rare, and they offer a rich site for further exploration.
→ Wimbledon Watch: Defending champion Novak Djokovic clocked 2.5 hours on court for his easy 3-1 victory over South Korea’s Soonwoo Kwon, while on the women’s side, all eyes were on Emma Raducanu, the 19-year-old Brit who catapulted herself into the spotlight after winning the U.S. Open last year as a mere qualifier. Raducanu was through today in a straight-set victory over Alison Van Uytvanck.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
War Against the Classics
By Scroll Critic John Pistelli
You’d be forgiven for thinking that the study of Greek and Roman classics has been a particular casualty of the past decade’s furious culture wars. Recently, for example, we’ve witnessed everything from an editorial in Inside Higher Ed defending Socrates’ death sentence to the YA author of a “sapphic retelling of The Odyssey” admitting she never read the original poem in its entirety. More gravely, curricular changes have been considered or implemented, expelling Homer, Virgil, and other classical authors from syllabi, whether in American high schools or Oxford University’s Classics department.
Like many apparent novelties introduced by today’s social justice movement, however, attacking the classics is a long tradition pursued by writers and thinkers who are themselves luminaries of the Western canon. It’s a tradition that extends back to well before even the last round of culture wars in the late 20th century, which saw the publication of paradigm-shattering books like Edward Said’s Orientalism (which traced the East-West divide back to the Iliad), Martin Bernal’s Black Athena (which claimed that Greek civilization derived from African and Semitic sources), and I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates (which emphasized that the Athenian philosopher was tried and sentenced to death essentially for opposing democracy).
For one thing, there has long been a tension between the worldview of Greek and Roman writers like Homer, Plato, Ovid, and Aurelius and the values enshrined in the Jewish and Christian testaments—hence the fundamental distinction many thinkers have made between Athens and Jerusalem or Hellenism and Hebraism. The classics celebrate worldly heroism, submission to the impersonal and amoral force of fate, a plurality of gods, and reason’s power to access metaphysical truth. The singular God of the Bible, by contrast, condemns rival deities, communicates through revelation, and commands humility and personal morality, not the warrior’s triumph or the philosopher’s insight. The Christian canon’s most memorable rebuke of the classical mentality comes when Dante places the classical Ulysses in Hell for his questing hubris and immoderate desire, later championed by Tennyson in an era of imperial expansion, to “sail beyond the sunset.”
Modern authors have often pursued a more secular version of the same argument: that classics promote a dangerous amorality, one incongruous with emerging democratic thought. According to Ian Watt’s pioneering study The Rise of the Novel, Puritan writers Daniel Defoe and Samuel Richardson, middle-class men who lacked the aristocrat’s classical education, both rejected the epic as a backward, barbarous survival of violent and undemocratic ages. Instead of writing to a Homeric or Virgilian heroic model, they wrote what they saw and felt, inventing the realistic modern novel in the process.
Likewise, among the Romantic poets, William Blake exclaims in a note “On Homer’s Poetry,” “The Classics! It is the Classics, and not Goths nor Monks, that desolate Europe with wars.” With his idiosyncratic and visionary faith, Blake renews the Christian charge against the classics’ seemingly nihilistic celebration of the warrior’s triumph—a very un-Christ-like ethos. He also hints at a political motive when he defends his ancestors, Northern Europe’s indigenous peoples, the Goths, deprecated as warlike barbarians by Greco-Roman colonizers. The claim, Blake implies, is pure projection.
Blake’s charge is a prologue to the 20th century’s revision of the classical legacy. Some writers adopted and revised the classics with subversive intent, undermining them from within. James Joyce recast Homer’s violent Odyssey in Ulysses as a pacifist and anti-imperialist lower-middle-class domestic epic, the story not of a 20-year journey but of an ordinary 24 hours. Joyce’s Ulysses slaughters his wife’s suitors only by driving them from her mind with his superior kindness and sensitivity.
But other writers—especially literary critics and theorists—reprise Blake’s and even Dante’s anti-classic censures more forthrightly. In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, perhaps the discipline of comparative literature’s founding book, Erich Auerbach famously contrasts The Odyssey unfavorably with the Hebrew Bible. Homer’s world is one of aristocratic stasis and paradoxically mystifying clarity; neither its characters nor its world are capable of psychological depth or historical change. The obscurity of Genesis’s narrative, on the other hand, demands readerly participation. It hints through its very narrative opacity at psychological inwardness and social dynamics: Its people live out dramatic upheavals as individuals and as a collective. Similarly, in Dialectic of Enlightenment, Frankfurt School philosophers Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer judge The Odyssey to be the origin of the West’s imperial domination: a story about the supposedly enlightened male’s entitlement to master nature, natives, and women.
Just as Blake defends the tribes of Northern Europe against Greco-Roman calumny, Auerbach, Adorno, and Horkheimer—all of them exiled as Jews from Hitler’s Germany—demote Homer as a way of rebuking German nationalism, which saw itself and its own supposed martial greatness as the heir of “Aryan” Greece. In lieu of classical models, they write in defense of Jewish traditions from Genesis to the critical theory anticipated by Marx and Freud.
The critics of the classics, then, from Dante to Auerbach, are a more serious company than their heirs among today’s social media activists might suggest, and the points they raise—against amoralism and aristocracy, martial triumphalism and cultural supremacism—aren’t easily dismissed.
How can this challenge be answered without capitulating to the often mindless iconoclasm of today’s culture war?
Read More here.
What Happened Today: June 27, 2022
The reason for the agricultural shortages has nothing whatever to do with anticompetitive behavior. Such claims are laughable and ignorant. If they were true, they would be longstanding problems from well before the pandemic.
In fact, these problems started appearing in late 2020 with the pandemic shutdowns causing labor and supply shortages that became more acute in 2021. The aftereffect of the shutdowns are still with us, although that situation is gradually normalizing. Still, they left in their wake not just loss of operations, but deferred maintenance as well. Hence, all the fires in agricultural and food factories.
The other, more recent factor is the Biden administration's "war on supply," a new and very dangerous development that is starting to spread to other countries. Since spring a year ago (2021), the administration has pressured every point along the supply chain that depends on fossil fuels, targeting companies that produce and transport such inputs. Federal agencies like the SEC and the Fed have had their mandate quietly and arbitrarily expanded to include restricting or stopping the flow of capital to such firms. I talked with a friend who works in this area last week about just this development. It's pretty frightening, given that we're already seeing shortages in this sector on par with the 2010-14 period, and the impact is far from being fully felt. There was no "war on supply" in the Obama or Trump years, in spite of Obama's opposition to coal. The 2010-14 surge in prices was caused by the world's central banks flooding the world with cheap dollar credit, setting off a speculative mania in commodities.
Few realize how much agriculture globally depends on synthetic fertilizers and other other inputs derived from oil and natural gas. We've all been learning the hard way in real time. Then Russia invaded Ukraine. The war and associated sanctions have choked off more supply, plus wheat, barley, and oats.
If you want to learn the facts about this situation, not fanciful notions put forth by ideologues in Washington, I strongly suggest that one person at The Scroll take a look at your fellow Substacker called Doomberg. This is an anonymous collective of people writing about natural resource inputs in our economy, known to industry insiders and contributors for years to industry newsletters and other publications. They're anonymous for now out of fear of reprisals for speaking out with the facts and the laws of chemistry and physics. They take on the "war on supply," especially the critical role of fossil fuels in producing food, and the fantastic hallucinations people have about electrifying everything, not knowing that batteries require yet more natural resources far beyond known supplies and that electricity that has to be generated somehow (and not by solar and other renewables, another fantasy easy to refute if facts count for anything).
https://doomberg.substack.com/