What Happened Today: January 26, 2022

Justice Beyer to retire; Belgium’s drug crisis; hospital staffing woes

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The Big Story

The oldest member of the United States Supreme Court and senior member of the three-judge liberal minority, Justice Stephen Breyer, will retire from the bench, according to several news outlets today. The vacancy would allow President Biden to fulfill his campaign pledge that if given the opportunity he’d nominate the first Black woman to ever serve the nation’s highest court. That promise has led some speculators to believe Ketanji B. Jackson, a D.C. court of appeals judge, was the top candidate, while others have put forward J. Michelle Childs, a district court judge who lacks the usual Ivy League pedigree of many top judges and would allow Biden to tout his selection of someone who breaks the mold of the usual Washington elite pedigree. Pressure mounted on Justice Breyer, who’s 83, to step down after fellow justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in 2020 and Trump successfully swung the court to a conservative majority with his appointment of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Getting another liberal judge onto the court won’t affect the hold the conservative majority has now on the bench—it will only shore up the liberal wing. But Democrats will have to move quickly if they want to take advantage of the rule that allows the Senate to appoint a nominee with a simple majority, which they could do with the tie-breaking vote held by Vice President Harris. The process of unifying the party around one candidate will be difficult with the ongoing feud between Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and the rest of the Democrats who’ve resented their unwillingness to back the Democrats’ major legislation efforts. If the Democrats lose the majority in the upcoming midterms, the resistance against Biden’s nominee in a Republican-controlled congress will be all the more difficult to overcome. 

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/01/26/us/stephen-breyer-retirement

Backpages: Zohar Atkins on the Modern Obsession with Identity

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The Rest

→ Continuing to chip away at the city’s democratic foundation, surrogates of the Chinese party in Hong Kong announced today that they would tighten local security laws against crimes of treason and thefts of state secrets by foreign political entities. Hong Kong’s Secretary for Security Chris Tang said the new espionage laws “will reflect the importance of spies in the legislation,” expanding the firepower some officials and law enforcement have thus far marshaled against pro-democracy protestors, media organizations, and dissenting government members who’ve questioned the influence of China to limit Hong Kong’s once-vibrant freedoms. Similar security laws were used to arrest a group of 47 activists in 2020 during protests. Sympathizers of the group have recently made calls for the city to hasten the legal process around their cases as most are still in detention, awaiting the chance to defend themselves in court. 

Read more: https://hongkongfp.com/2022/01/26/hong-kong-to-enhance-spy-law-to-prevent-acts-of-espionage-and-theft-of-state-secrets-security-chief-says/

→ The new entrants in the streaming wars are making life difficult for Netflix: HBOMax picked up 1.3 million new subscribers in just its final quarter of 2021, a burst of growth equivalent to all new signups for Netflix for the entire past year. Just as Netflix disrupted the entertainment business when it first broke into the market, now upstarts like WarnerMedia’s HBO platform and offerings from Disney have crowded the menu of streaming options for consumers. This year will see a flood of new television and films made especially for the streaming services, with the biggest eight media groups expected to spend a whopping $115 billion developing their at-home content. 

→ All 100 of the monkeys destined for a testing lab were accounted for after a truck hauling the animals overturned this weekend on a Pennsylvania highway. Several of the crates holding the cynomolgus monkeys cracked open, leaving motorists confused as the animals scattered around the crash site. The strange moment wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs for everyone involved: State law enforcement put out bulletins urging locals “not to approach, attempt to catch, or come in contact” with the at-large primates, three of whom, state police said in a statement, had to be euthanized once they were tracked down. It’s unclear why the monkeys had to be put down or what exactly they were being tested for once they reached their destination at a lab site often used by the CDC. Cynomolgus monkeys are predominantly used in laboratory studies of toxicology. 

→ Milwaukee suffered more than 10,000 cars being stolen last year and a tripling of car thefts over the past two years, but local elected officials aren’t pushing for a crackdown on the crime wave. Instead, they’re issuing a legal attack against … the car makers. With more than 60% of the stolen cars made by Kia and Hyundai, Milwaukee Alderman Khalif Rainey (D) recently called upon his city’s prosecutors to sue the car manufacturers for insufficient car security systems, which “are directly responsible, in my view, for the drain on police and other city resources,” he wrote in a press release outlining the unorthodox strategy.

→ Long-standing trade routes between South American drug production hot zones and Belgium, coupled with a massive campaign of money and bribes by criminal gangs, has left Antwerp customs officials at a loss for how to combat the surges of drugs flooding over their border and into Europe. Though 90 tons of cocaine was seized in Antwerp last year, the director of Belgium’s customs department, Kristian Vanderwaeren, said this week it’s having essentially “zero” impact against drug traffic, accounting for perhaps less than 10% of the total volume of what’s managed to sneak past the 3,000 overwhelmed employees of the border control. “We are doing a great job, but if you look at the outcomes, it is zero, unfortunately. I don’t want to be the pessimistic guy—but there you go,” he told The Times.

Read more: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/antwerp-fighting-a-losing-battle-against-the-billionaire-cocaine-kingpins-v20znxvt6

→ Continued labor shortages and wage competition with other industries has made the third year of the coronavirus pandemic perhaps the most challenging yet for hospitals, especially those outside of major metro areas that struggle to recruit the nurses and staff they need to remain operational. In what one Indiana hospital executive described to Bloomberg earlier this month as “the most significant labor shortage that we have ever seen,” the expense of upping salaries to retain and attract staff has been passed onto patients, with the average labor cost for each patient’s care up a startling 26% at the end of last year, according to new data from analyst firm Kaufman Hall. In Nebraska, that tight labor market means hospitals that once hired entry-level staff for $8 an hour have had to increase pay to $15 to stay competitive with the local Walmart. As one hospital executive said of the recent wage increase, “That’s the only way we get people to come to work.”

Read more: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-07/hospitals-struggle-to-match-walmart-pay-as-staff-flees-omicron

→ Infighting for the Democrats might get worse as senators struggle with how to both move on legislation and defend their slim majority in the midterm election. With Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema essentially negating the party’s voting advantage to get marque bills on infrastructure and voting rights passed, frustration has peaked to the point that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer isn’t ruling out the possibility that the two senators in key swing states would face a primary challenge during the midterms or 2024 elections. According to reporting today in Politico, fellow Democrats are up in arms that Schumer cast doubt with his recent comment that the defiant senators shouldn’t count on the help of the party. Back home in Arizona, Sen. Sinema’s state Democratic Party sanctioned her for not toeing the line on the recent filibuster vote, a censure championed by Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I think what the Arizona Democrats did was exactly right,” he said over the weekend. These public squabbles about loyalty will likely only help Republican challengers, who enjoy transforming Democrats’ dysfunction into campaign rallying cries. 

→ “They were caught red-handed. It’s the kind of thing that drives people crazy: big sophisticated corporations who think they don’t have to follow the pesky law.” Thus spoketh Bob Ferguson, the Washington State attorney general who brought suit against lobbyists for the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA). The Washington State court last week held up the hefty $18 million fine handed down by a lower court against GMA, a lobbying group that illegally withheld the identities of General Mills, Nestle, and other food corporations when GMA spent millions of the corporations’ money to fight a law requiring proper labels for genetically modified food products. Representatives for the group said they were considering a challenge to the ruling, which would bring the political finance case before the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Rabbi and poet Zohar Atkins has a new essay that asks, Why do contemporary philosophers “obsess about questions of identity and personal purpose in a way that is scarcely found” amongst our ancestors? You can read a free excerpt here and the full article by signing up for Atkins’ Substack, “What Is Called Thinking.”

The pandemic has exacerbated a deep social unease that seemed to have been growing worse, not better, over the past few years, particularly as issues of individual purpose and a sense of group identity became fodder for a rising identitarian political movement. 

In a new Substack essay, Zohar Atkins examines some of the causes as to why similar questions vexxed philosophers like Kierkegaard but were never much of a concern for the prominent ancient philosophers.

One possibility is that moderns suffer identity crises and confusions more than their ancient ancestors. But why?

Here are some potential causes for the malaise that Marx lamented as “alienation” but that other modern thinkers rebranded as the cost of heroic striving:

• More social mobility means you don’t accept your given lot in life.

• More geographic mobility means you don’t accept your given culture as innately true.

• More ideational mobility (the spread of ideas through technology) means you encounter more ideological diversity.

• Urbanization means you feel small relative to your surroundings.

• Globalization means you feel small in the world.

The key point is that mobility of all kinds, which we associate with opportunity, also tracks with a sense of meaninglessness—because the more that is up for invention, the less guidance one has on what to do.

Individualism doesn’t lead to technological innovation so much as technological innovation makes individualism inevitable. Moderns are obsessed with the individual because they saw the industrial revolution gut the stability of the tribe and the village.

Although we think of individualism as a political philosophy or worldview, it’s more likely that it’s a response to a lived crisis than it is the result of first principles thinking. We don’t derive the individual. We find ourselves individuated, in part, by the reality of increasing complexity and specialization.

Read more: https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/technology-is-existentialist