What Happened Today: March 17, 2022

Mariupol pummeled; jobs without college degrees; China’s “closed loop” factories

Mar 17, 2022

The Big Story

Despite progress this week on the negotiated peace plan between Russian and Ukrainian officials, Russian forces have intensified their brutal attack on the southern port city of Mariupol. Rescue workers today began pulling survivors out of the Mariupol Drama Theatre, where they’d been taking shelter when it was struck by Russian shelling, even after large white letters spelling the word CHILDREN in Russian had been installed in two places beside the building. The deputy mayor of the city informed the BBC that 1,000 to 1,200 residents had taken refuge in the theater, and most were expected to survive the attack, though the rescue attempt has been slowed by the persistent air strikes that continue throughout the city, with shells falling as frequently as once per minute. Russian officials have called the video evidence and on-the-ground reporting of the theater attack “a lie,” with Maria Zakharova, a representative for the Russian Foreign Ministry, saying, “Our armed forces don’t bomb cities. Everyone is well aware of this.”

The pummeling of Mariupol by Russian bombs over the past four weeks has caused the destruction of residential buildings, a maternity hospital, the fire department, and a church, as Russian forces on the ground encircle the city, a once-thriving sea port exporting steel and iron from its plants that has now become an essential territory for Russian ambition to conquer Ukraine’s coastline between Crimea and other areas already under Russian control. Stalled negotiations over humanitarian corridors have made it all but impossible for the remaining 200,000 or more Mariupol residents to flee, of whom at least 2,400 have been killed. Officials have told those in the city that funerals are too dangerous and to leave the dead in the streets, where workers are gathering them for burials in mass graves. Without electricity and gas, residents are burning scraps for heat and melting snow in lieu of the water that no longer flows through the city pipes. Escape is too dangerous for most, though safety in shelters like the theater is similarly precarious. The mother of one child who was just murdered in a shelling attack cried as she held her other child, who managed to sleep in her arms, the Associated Press reported. “I don’t know where to run to,” the mother said between sobs.

In the Back Pages: A review of St. Paul and the Broken Bones’ The Alien Coast

The Rest

→ In a remarkable about-face, dozens of prominent journalists have joined social media executives, former and current intelligence officials, and Biden administration Press Secretary Jen Psaki in a rare public letter apologizing for their coordinated effort in the lead-up to the 2020 presidential election to discredit a New York Post investigation that detailed sensitive information from a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden. Published on Facebook under Mark Zuckerberg’s personal account, the letter, under the title “Doing Better, Together,” outlines how Facebook and Twitter were mistaken to have immediately censored the story detrimental to the Biden campaign from their platforms, adding that “we got it wrong” when citing as authoritative sources the former officials from the Obama administration who described the laptop and its contents as “false Russian disinformation about American political leaders.” Just kidding! That letter doesn’t exist, though this would be a great time for one, after The New York Times reported last night that the laptop’s contents as detailed in the Post investigation were accurate and that the laptop was in fact Hunter Biden’s, in a new story that also outlines an IRS criminal investigation into Hunter Biden’s potential violations of “foreign lobbying and money laundering rules,” as well as how he used a loan to pay off a million-dollar debt for unpaid taxes.

Tom Elliott @tomselliott

@AnandWrites @WajahatAli @brooklynmarie @HeidiNBC @chipfranklin 7) Perhaps the biggest single source of the Hunter “disinformation” fake news was none other than @brhodes, who has actually bragged about his ability to manipulate gullible reporters

→ A new Maryland workforce development initiative announced this week by Gov. Larry Hogan will drop the requirement for a four-year college degree for thousands of state jobs, as Hogan said that as many as half of the 38,000 roles currently occupied by state employees could be performed by candidates who have other qualifications regardless of the credential. “We really want an economy that if you can do the job, you can get the job,” an administrator of the program said at a press conference. “People shouldn’t be compensated based on their years of education, but what their skills are to do the job.” The move to eschew the generic credential of a degree, which is increasingly untethered from the basic function of government business (as well as, frankly, most businesses), underscores the growing disconnect of today’s higher education from its longtime role as both steward and engine of American intellectual vitality, culture, and economic well-being.

→ Speaking of the decline of American education, a new survey released this week by the market research firm YouGov found that a representative pool of 1,000 adults believed on average that Jews accounted for 30% of the American population, a slight overestimation of the 2% of Americans who are Jewish. The respondents were similarly inaccurate in their estimate that 21% of Americans were transgender (it’s 1%) and that the 3% of Americans who live in New York City are, by their best guess, 30% of the nation’s population.

→ A new survey from the American Psychological Association finds that public school teachers and staff are experiencing extraordinarily high levels of verbal and physical abuse from students and parents. The survey’s 15,000 public school workers reported a huge rise in threats and assaults over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, with a high percentage now looking to leave public education entirely: 49% of teachers and more than 30% of social workers and staff members “desire or plan to quit.” While public school teachers were dissatisfied before the pandemic—a 2020 MetLife survey found that the United States’ teachers were the unhappiest they had been in decades—the past two years have made matters worse. In 2021, when public schools closed because of the pandemic, teachers were placed at the center of a contentious national debate about whether schools should close and when they ought to reopen. More recently, heated school board meetings about how race, gender, and sexuality should be taught and discussed in the classroom have situated teachers at the center of a national culture war. While teachers reported being unhappy and underappreciated prior to the pandemic, they did not report the verbal abuse or the death threats that have now become part of the job.

→ Another public-facing position fraught with threats of verbal and physical abuse: being a jailer at Rikers Island, a New York City prison complex that remains “unstable and unsafe,” according to a new report released by a federal monitor charged with overseeing reforms at the prison complex. In January 2022, which was the second most violent month in the prison complex’s history, the report found that 1 in 3 jailers did not show up to work for most of that period. With inmates regularly assaulting and even murdering one another, and guards frequently beating or getting beaten by prisoners, the rate of violence is “seven to eight times higher” at Rikers compared to other correctional facilities and has been a point of controversy for years. This is the watchdog group’s first report since Mayor Eric Adams took office and appointed a new Department of Corrections commissioner, but despite the management changes, the report finds that Rikers remains “trapped in a state of persistent dysfunctionality.”

→ Accusations of war crimes and widespread condemnation as a global pariah can make a person a bit spooked by their own shadow, as President Putin demonstrated in a grim and ominous video announcement last night, in which he lashed out against Western efforts to destroy Russia, with warnings that he will cleanse his country and government of the “scum and traitors” (yikes) who he believes are working against him from inside Russia. The “purification” (double yikes) will be a “natural and necessary self-cleansing of society [that] will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, cohesion and readiness to meet any challenge,” Putin said. Russia has installed a new law with a 15-year maximum sentence for any member of the media disseminating “fake news” about the Russian military or supporting the ongoing sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. Earlier this week, Russian prosecutors asked a Russian court to take up new charges that would add 13 years of prison time and harsher prison conditions to the confected sentence against Alexei Navalny, the most prominent political opponent of President Putin, who was jailed last year as support for his campaign to replace President Putin was gaining a groundswell of grassroots support in Russia. “He was sentenced to life from the very start,” an aide to Navalny wrote on Twitter about the new charges. “So long as Putin is still in the Kremlin.”

→ Tennis fans eager to see the sport overwhelmed by moral imbecility will cheer the news that British sports minister Nigel Huddleston said this week that Russian and Belarusian athletes will not be allowed to participate in professional sporting events held at sites in the United Kingdom unless that athlete has made a public disavowal of the leaders of those nations. That includes the All England Club, which will host Wimbledon early this summer. “Many countries around the world have agreed that we will not allow representatives from Russia to compete and there are visa implications here as well,” Huddleston told a sport and culture committee. “We need assurances that [the competitors] are not supporters of Vladimir Putin.” This truly dumb purity test would serve no purpose other than to antagonize Russians who have no responsibility for the war, and just as Putin ramps up his paranoid purge, the measure would be potentially awkward to navigate for celebrity players like the newly crowned world number one Daniil Medvedev, a leading contender for the Wimbledon title who said in February he wanted to “see peace” but carefully tiptoed around any strong condemnation of Russia or its president.

→ To keep production lines humming during China’s latest COVID-19 surge, factories are requiring workers to eat, sleep, and labor in “closed loop systems.” China is seeing its highest COVID-19 case count in two years, and while much of the country is in lockdown, the factories that produce parts for Apple and Tesla have adopted feudalistic models to remain open. Not all factories can indenture their workers—there must be factory housing available—and therefore many smaller factories will likely close during this latest wave. The prospect of widespread closures led to Chinese President Xi Jinping assuring his country’s Politburo that China would “strive to achieve the biggest prevention and control effect with the smallest cost, and minimize the impact of the Covid situation on economic and social development.” Walking that now-familiar tightrope between controlling COVID-19 and stabilizing the economy, “closed-loop management” has emerged as a central plank in China’s approach. While workers within these systems have been able to keep up production, they haven’t been able to leave the plant for weeks. “While it was slightly depressing to not be able to leave for a walk,” one worker told Reuters, “he felt that it was a good approach to battle COVID-19.”

A review of St. Paul and the Broken Bones’ The Alien Coast

Generally speaking, there are two types of enjoyment to be garnered by listening to new music: hearing sounds similar to those you’ve heard before and hearing sounds that are, generally speaking, new to you. The sweet spot between these two circles is music that sounds familiar but different at the same time, articulating something new from within the old.

That’s the case for the new album by St. Paul and the Broken Bones, The Alien Coast. The fourth album from the Birmingham, Alabama, eight-piece soul band, The Alien Coast radically expands on the band’s previous notions of soul, adding in a healthy dose of electronic apocalypse for good measure.

The album opens in familiar enough fashion with a keyboard playing beautifully, as Saint Paul himself (Paul Janeway) starts singing about fire and brimstone on a track called “3000 AD Mass.” And then things start to take a more mysterious turn on “Bermejo and the Devil,” which consists of spooky chanting about a devil with red eyes and sharp teeth. The lyrics become still more mysterious, like on “Minotaur,” where Janeway cries out “Innocence is lost by violent decay, stuck inside the maze of all the mundane.” The song is about loneliness, which, as Janeway told NPR, can feel like being “stuck in a maze and just waiting. And also, the Minotaur is kind of cool, so I’m about that as well.”

As the band searches for an “apocalyptic dance groove,” as Janeway mentions on “The Last Dance,” much of its sound is driven by Janeway’s falsetto. His high voice will sound familiar to any fan of soul, but this style of singing with electronic bleeps and guitar swirls sounds out of place in the best way, creating the impression of a haunting. This is a vibe explored on “Ghost in Smoke,” where lazy guitars and horns play mournfully over Paul lamenting the end of something. “There was a time / When I never lost my mind / But it ain’t now / The fog, it keeps on rolling in.” The world feels so overwhelming to this song’s protagonist that he has no choice but to disappear into its creations.

Over the pandemic, Janeway said in an interview that he had “lots of time to dig into subjects like 17th-century Italian sculpture, Greek mythology, and dystopian science fiction.” The sounds of The Alien Coast certainly seem like the creation of someone with myriad interests. Sometimes, when an artist keeps wanting to add to their sound, it can come out like an unformed mishmash. On The Alien Coast, the experimentation pays off.

David Grossman is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn and is on Twitter at @davidgross_man.

The Scroll

Discussion about this post