What Happened Today: March 24, 2022
White House to take 100,000 Ukrainian refugees; vaccine for the under-5s; Albright dies
The Big Story
White House officials announced a new initiative for the United States to take in 100,000 refugees from Ukraine, along with a promise of $1 billion to the European nations who’ve aided refugees displaced by the conflict, just as President Biden meets with NATO leaders in Brussels today for a summit to coordinate their response to the ongoing Russian invasion. The United Nations said today that as many as 4.3 million Ukrainian children—more than half the 7.5 million children who lived in Ukraine before the invasion—have been driven to seek shelter in either temporary facilities in Ukraine or fled to other countries, making it one of the largest displacements of children since World War II.
Though the U.S. resettlement effort to shelter 100,000 refugees offers a nice, round number for headlines, the Biden administration officials have thus far been vague about how the program will work in practice. To avoid breaking the cap of 125,000 worldwide refugees Congress green-lit for entry into 2022, the Ukrainian refugees will arrive in the United States through various other mechanisms, including the emergency humanitarian parole process used to accept Afghanistans fleeing their country after the debacle of the U.S. withdrawal last August. Priority will be given to those Ukrainians with family already here, one official told reporters today without offering specifics on what types of relations will fall under the “family” rubric. It’s also not clear when this will all take place, as one official on background told reporters that the resettlement to the United States might be delayed until after the end of September, leaving questions about where the refugees with a promise of U.S. resettlement will live until then. All of this occurs just as U.S. agencies prepare for the anticipated “mass migration event” at the U.S. southern border, where as many as 170,000 migrants could soon seek their own refuge in the United States after the expiration of a temporary policy that allowed border officials to deport migrants without hearing asylum claims.
Read it here: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-accept-up-100000-ukrainians-fleeing-war-sources-2022-03-24/
In The Back Pages: A Review of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Drone Mass
The Rest
→ “I am sure you already understand that Russia does not intend to stop in Ukraine,” President Zelensky said today during a video address to a closed-door meeting of NATO leaders gathered for their summit in Brussels. “It wants to go further.” As my Scroll co-editor wrote this week elsewhere, the invasion of Zelensky’s sovereign nation fits neatly into “a series of expansionist military interventions” that stretches all the way back to 2013, when President Obama made the Iran deal the centerpiece of his foreign policy and opened the door for the Russian intrusion into Syria. After Syria, then Crimea, and now Ukraine, it would seem Zelensky is quite right to warn NATO leaders that Russian ambition likely extends beyond the Ukrainian border. In his own address, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg said today that the alliance has doubled the NATO battle group presence “in the eastern part of the Alliance,” a regiment of nearly 40,000 air, sea, and land troops, with some 10,500 allied troops stationed in Poland.
→ Madeleine Albright, the United States’ first female secretary of state, died on Wednesday at the age of 84. As a child, Albright’s family fled Nazism and then Communism before finally finding safety in the United States. In her role as ambassador to the United Nations from 1993 to 1997 and as President Clinton’s secretary of state from 1997 to 2001, she was a key architect of and advocate for NATO expansion and Middle East adventurism. Albright saw the United States as “the indispensable nation” and believed that the country should be aggressive in pursuing its interests overseas. “I come out of a Europe where I felt great wrong had been done because good people waited too long to try to figure out what to do,” she told a reporter in 1999, the same year several formerly Soviet nations joined NATO. “I do believe in American power.”
→ In the ongoing effort to privatize the basic functions of government through biosecurity technologies administered by Silicon Valley, Arizona has become the first U.S. state to allow its residents to install their driver’s license and other pieces of state identification through the Wallet app in iPhones and Apple watches. Apple said yesterday the move to integrate Arizona’s state identification into its Wallet ecosystem is the first step in a program that will soon include several other states as well as integration with TSA security checkpoints at some airports. The federal and state identification will be tied to Apple device users’ facial recognition profiles and fingerprint records, Apple said, adding that driver’s licenses must first be added to Apple Wallet, after which users record a set of head and facial movements to verify their identities.
→ While Wall Street cheered the runaway success of tech stocks during the COVID-19 pandemic (Scroll readers will recall yesterday’s coverage of the Wall Street bonuses doled out in 2021 that collectively hit an all-time record), on the other end of the financial spectrum, Americans are likewise making history, with “a record 23% of Americans who’ve died in the past five years” and left behind an estate of debt greater than their assets, according to a new Washington Post investigation. That roughly 1 in 5 Americans die with only debt to their name is part of the ongoing hollowing-out of the American middle class, with now 44% of Americans employed in low-wage positions (another record).
Read: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/03/20/intergenerational-wealth-middle-class-spiral/
→ The 18 million American children under the age of 5 may soon become eligible for COVID-19 vaccinations, after Moderna said yesterday that its clinical trial on that age group indicated a similar immune response to a vaccination dose of the same strength administered to a cohort of young adults. Moderna will now seek emergency authorization of its under-5 vaccine—though, as noted by Jacqueline Miller, a Moderna executive, the results of the “successful trial” mean that the shot was 44% effective for children between 6 months and 2 years of age and slightly less so, at 37%, for 2- to 5-year-olds. These levels of protection “are higher than zero,” she said, adding that a booster will likely be needed for the kids just as they have been for adults. In April, Pfizer and BioNTech will announce results from their clinical trials for vaccines for kids under age 5.
→ It’s a big news week for the under-5s: Mayor Eric Adams announced that New York City will lift its mask mandate for young children, with those enrolled in pre-kindergarten programs given the option to don a mask if they so choose. Adults, however, still don’t have as much leeway—at least not when traveling. On Wednesday, the heads of the United States’ most prominent commercial and cargo airline companies, including American Airlines, Delta, and Southwest Airlines, implored Present Biden to drop the federal guidelines mandating that travelers wear masks. “We strongly support your view that ‘COVID-19 need no longer control our lives,’” they wrote to President Biden. They also requested that the administration sunset the requirement that international travelers take a COVID-19 test prior to their trip.
→ President Putin’s leading political opponent, Alexei Navalny, was hit with an additional nine years to his ongoing prison stint after a Russian court this week found him guilty of charges for fraud and contempt of court. The judicial proceedings against Navalny have been widely criticized as an obvious crackdown on political dissent that abuses the power of a court while lacking both evidentiary standards and coherent legal logic. This week, German’s foreign ministry described the new sentence as “part of the systematic instrumentalization of the Russian judicial system against dissidents and the political opposition.” Navalny is currently serving a two-and-a-half-year term in the penal colony outside of Moscow where his “trial” was also held, in a hastily assembled courtroom. As part of Navalny’s new sentence, he will serve his new term in a maximum security prison.
→ After I reported last week on North Philadelphia’s ongoing spiral into the depths of drug abuse and violence alongside a spate of new luxury property developments, VICE News put out a dispatch this week with additional detail on the effects of the animal tranquilizer Xylazine being mixed into the opioid drug supply there. Harrowing reports describe users losing fingers and toes, suffering skin lesions, and undergoing overdoses that cause pain far worse than that endured on heroin and fentanyl. With supplies of fentanyl sometimes unreliable, one researcher in North Philadelphia found a sharp uptick in the use of Xylazine as a primary ingredient. “We’ll have someone that’ll do a bag that’s 23 parts Xylazine to one part fentanyl, and we’ll have 15 people (overdose) on one corner,” the researcher said. In a chemical analysis of drug samples found in Philadelphia since September 2020, every one has been found to contain the tranquilizer.
Read more: https://www.vice.com/en/article/bvnbqd/xylazine-tranq-dope
→ Private equity firms are investing heavily in the senior care sector, seeing a potential windfall in the United States’ aging population. According to a new report from the Private Equity Stakeholder Project, in the past two decades, Medicare spending on hospice facilities increased from $2.8 to $17.7 billion and on home healthcare services by 108%. In the past decade, meanwhile, private equity acquisitions of hospices rose by almost 25%, and from 2018 to 2019, private equity firms were involved in nearly 50% of deals in the home healthcare sector. Private equity firms tend to seek quick returns on their investments via aggressive cost-cutting measures, though such measures often come with poorer service for customers—in this case, for those seniors acquiring health services or end-of-life care. A report published by the Journal of the American Medical Association found that “profit maximization” strategies come with a clear drop in the quality of care and can even lead hospices to prioritize “patients who are anticipated to remain in hospice for longer periods of time than those who are predicted to die sooner,” the logic being that the dead don’t pay for bed space.
Read More: https://pestakeholder.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Home-Healthcare-and-Hospice-report.pdf
A Review of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Drone Mass
If the name Jóhann Jóhannsson doesn’t ring a bell, you might know the director Denis Villeneuve. The French Canadian director with a penchant for minimalism, nominated for the Best Picture Oscar this year with Dune, is divisive. Some people think Arrival and Sicario are classics; others think they sacrifice too much in the name of aesthetics. Whatever one’s take, it is hard to disagree that the music within those movies captures that aesthetic, a haunting smoothness, perfectly.
Jóhann Jóhannsson was the composer of those scores, along with several other movies, and his artistic growth was sadly halted by his death in 2018. A fascinating musician since the 2000s, Jóhannsson had a creativity that has only been further showcased by a number of posthumous releases. There’s the heavy-metal feel of the Mandy score; a visual exploration of Yugoslav World War II monuments and memorials titled Last and First Men; and now, an original compositional project titled Drone Mass, out now on Deutsche Grammophon.
Deutsche Grammophon describes Drone Mass as “profoundly atmospheric work, at times reminiscent of the meditative minimalism of composers such as Pärt or Górecki.” This is true, but if you’re unfamiliar with either Pärt or Górecki, it may be best to think of Jóhannsson’s music as a melding of human and nonhuman sounds. His early masterpiece IBM 1401, A User’s Manual, was based on his father’s job as an IBM maintenance engineer. And his score for Arrival brims with alien dread.
The drone of the title does not refer to the machines that fly overhead but rather is the musical device created through sustained sound or repetition of a note. It drones on and on, with sounds lasting for a while after they start, expanding, contracting, repeating. As the droning changes, so do the sounds. Early on, tracks such as “One Is True,” “Two Is Apocryphal,” and “Triptych in Mass” mix chanting male and female voices with tense strings, intertwining them like a tight coil.
These chants draw on texts from the “Coptic Gospel of the Egyptians,” which was first discovered within the Nag Hammadi codices in 1945. The codices changed societal perceptions of the early Gnostic Christians, whose “philosophical ideals permeated not just early Christian thought but also the Jewish and pagan traditions from which Christianity arose,” according to the Biblical Archaeology Society.
It’s hard for listeners to discern what these chants mean, but they are gripping. Tracks like “The Low Drone of Circulating Blood, Diminishes with Time” move in and out of siren-like panics, and a sense of enormity emerges. Passion, maybe even desperation, comes out of “Moral Vacuums.” While what these voices are saying may be unclear, they speak directly to the human condition.
The titles on this album are truly extraordinary. The last, “The Mountain View, the Majesty of the Snow-Clad Peaks, from a Place of Contemplation and Reflection,” features voices overlapping on top of each other, at times in peace and at times in discordance. They press onward, finding patterns almost in spite of each other. It’s a wonderful work and a perfect opportunity to engage with an artist who continues to change the modern conception of compositional music even after he’s gone.
David Grossman is a freelance writer based out of Brooklyn and is on Twitter at @davidgross_man.
Really: all that's needed to end private equity -- one of those parasitic scams sucking our life away -- is for the Fed to raise rates back to something approximating reality. Like the related cottage industry of share buybacks, it's an equity-destroying, debt-proliferating industry unthinkable without the Greenspan-Bernanke-Yellen-Powell era of ultra-low, ultra-absurd interest rates. And we now have 7+ percent inflation, yet short rates still hover near zero. The most negative real rates in history. Expect more dramatic action in commodities and other real assets, a la the 1970s.
(Karen Petrou, Engine of Inequality, is your starting point about the noxious effect of Fed policy.)
Looking forward to the Jóhann Jóhannsson/Drone Mass. I hear echoes of Messiaen.
I hope "White House to take 100,000 Ukrainian refugees" doesn't mean they'll live in the basement of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Madeleine Albright was definitely a non-believer in "Middle East adventurism" and a skeptic of direct American military involvement, if you know anything about her views. She was well inside the standard postwar liberal internationalist tradition, concentrating on alliances with like-minded democratic countries and effective international institutions. Outside that orbit are more problematic, mainly transactional relationships with dictatorships and authoritarian governments, where you have to maintain some distance and direct involvement is probably a bad idea.
Kudos for mentioning Biblical Archaeology Society. You know, someone at The Daily Scroll is tasteful, discerning, and culturally literate. Who knew? ;-)
Doubled NATO presence “in the eastern part of the Alliance,” a regiment of nearly 40,000 air, sea, and land troops, with some 10,500 allied troops stationed in Poland” ? If NATO chief actually said a “regiment” of 40k land/ air/sea troops, it is either a serious translation error or something worse… And if the NATO total troop level is only 40k, it is pathetically small.