What Happened Today: August 03, 2022
Peter Thiel’s bid for the Senate; China escalates its influence in Taiwan Strait; Earth’s spinning ahead of schedule
The Big Story
While votes are still being counted from some of the primary contests across five states on Tuesday, billionaire investor Peter Thiel nonetheless emerged as a potentially decisive factor in who controls the Senate after the November midterms. Several candidates with Donald Trump’s support claimed victories on Tuesday. But Blake Masters’ decisive win in Arizona’s Republican primary was distinct from the rest because he was essentially a political unknown who used his close association with Thiel and the breakaway “new right” faction of post-Trump nationalists to vault into office.
As the co-author of Thiel’s memoir and former manager of the businessman’s family hedge fund, Masters ran a campaign defined by his animus for illegal immigration and for the United States’ ruling class elites, whom he portrayed as parasitic promoters of wokeness and globalization. Masters was also bolstered by a ringing endorsement from Donald Trump, arranged for him by Thiel, as well as $15 million that Thiel poured into a superPAC—proving for a second time during the 2022 election cycle that a lot of Thiel money and a Trump endorsement are a potent combination. Along with another Thiel-backed Senate candidate Eric Schmitt, the attorney general in Missouri who comfortably notched his primary Tuesday, a sweep in November by the Thiel contingent could swing the Senate for Republicans and position the entrepreneur as a commanding influence in U.S. politics.
In the Back Pages: Doom Sells
The Rest
→ China had warned the United States that it would “pay the price” if House Speaker Nancy Pelosi traveled to Taiwan. With her visit to the island now over, China’s People’s Liberation Army has started a “targeted military operation” that is functionally blockading Taiwan, which is heavily reliant on imports and exports. The operation involves several live-fire drills within 10 miles of the coast of Taiwan, with China warning that no boats or ships should approach the area for the next 72 hours. To what extent Taiwan will heed these instructions, or how China would respond if it does not, remains unknown. “We resolutely defend national sovereignty and will counter any aggression against national sovereignty,” said a spokesman for Taiwan’s defense ministry, Maj. Gen. Sun Li-fang.
→ Primary voters last night in Kansas recalibrated the extent to which abortion rights could become a decisive factor in November’s midterms, challenging Republican campaigns that had aimed to make inflation and the economy the top issues. Usually a low-key affair with small voter turnout, the Kansas primary on Tuesday saw voters come out in numbers comparable to a general election to reject a constitutional amendment that would have significantly restricted abortion access statewide. The turnout was as surprising as the 20% margin denying the amendment in a GOP stronghold. As the first instance of voters weighing in on abortion since the Supreme Court decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, the Kansas primary had drawn millions of dollars into opposing campaigns that deployed canvassers and emotionally charged television spots arguing both sides of the proposed amendment. “There were no major contested Democratic primaries to drive turnout, and the amendment still failed resoundingly,” one Republican political analyst told The Wall Street Journal. “If Republicans think the issue of abortion isn’t on the minds of voters, tonight’s results should put them on notice.” Similar ballot initiatives in November on abortion access in California, Montana, Kentucky, and Vermont, and potentially in Colorado and Michigan, could see campaigns in those states significantly altering their strategies following the outcome in Kansas.
→ Quote of the Day:
According to most scholars, countries, economists, and central banks, a recession refers to a period of two or more consecutive quarters of decline in a country’s real gross domestic product (real GDP).
Or does it? The claim comes from the Wikipedia page for “Recession,” which saw so many users editing and arguing over the definition of a recession that Wikimedia, the foundation that runs the online encyclopedia, finally made the page’s editing privileges “semi-protected,” which means that “edits can only be edited by logged-in users whose accounts are at least 4 days old and have made at least 10 edits.” The definition showdown on Wikipedia reflects a larger debate taking place nationally. The United States has now notched two consecutive quarters of declining real GDP, leading some to conclude that our economy is officially in a recession. Technically, however, the United States is only in a recession if a panel of eight academics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says we are—a peculiar system put in place in 1978 by former Ronald Reagan adviser and National Bureau of Economic Research President Martin Feldstein. The White House is now holding firm to the fact that these eight seers have not yet uttered the R-word.
→ If it seems like time is racing along at an unusually fast pace this summer, that’s because it is. On June 29, researchers at England’s National Physical Laboratory observed that Earth spun its typical 24-hour rotation a little bit faster than usual, to a tune of 1.59 milliseconds, which made it the shortest day in six decades, since atomic clocks were first used by scientists to record the passage of time. The day of record-breaking shortness in June was quickly followed up by another in July, when the English laboratory noticed Earth again spun ahead of its 24-hour spin cycle. Why the earth is quite literally spinning too fast remains unknown, though some scientists speculate it could just be some seismic activity jostling the earth’s center of mass, or climate change modulating water flows that shift the earth’s weight.
→ Number of the Day: ≈ 2.9 billion
A report in Gizmodo found that dozens of companies are selling the data of billions of pregnant women (the exact number is impossible to pin down) to eager buyers. “When we hear about data that impacts the privacy of people seeking reproductive care, oftentimes it’s easy just to think about period tracking apps or the name of a person who visits an abortion clinic,” Justin Sherman, a cybersecurity fellow at the Atlantic Council, told Gizmodo. “But there are whole categories of data around ‘maternal products,’ for example, that also threaten those people’s privacy. It’s really startling to see a lot of that data here.”
Read More: https://gizmodo.com/data-brokers-selling-pregnancy-roe-v-wade-abortion-1849148426
→ Tweet of the Day:
A megathread from a reporter in the room where lawyers from Penguin Random House are trying to convince a judge that their client should be allowed to acquire Simon & Schuster—what would be the largest publisher in the United States buying the third largest—after the Justice Department filed a lawsuit blocking the deal amid concerns that such a merger “is likely to diminish overall output, creativity, and diversity among books published.” Stephen King, the author of 64 novels at the time of publication, was the star witness for the state’s lawyers, arguing that “consolidation is bad for competition,” adding that he was able to shop his early books, including Carrie (Doubleday, 1974) and Cujo (Viking Press, 1981), to hundreds of different imprints; now only a handful of imprints remain. “It becomes tougher and tougher for writers to find enough money to live on,” he said.
→ The Grand Sud region of Madagascar, home to roughly 4 million people, has dried up after three years of drought, with the country now facing a widespread famine. Water has become so scarce that families are selling their last possessions to afford it, including pots and pans, while the death toll caused by starvation is ticking up. “They had nothing to eat, so they ate cactus leaves or they found leaves on the ground,” one official said, as many starving residents have started eating the tough and tasteless plants typically reserved for livestock. The famine is in part a product of governmental failure, with officials in Antananarivo, the capital, not attending to the needs of citizens in remote regions of the country like the Grand Sud. Others argue that this is a result of global heating and a harbinger of what’s to come in many poor nations in the global south. Still others note that the West has not lived up to its promises, made repeatedly since 2009, to provide billions of dollars to poorer nations to help mitigate the effects of climate change—money that, in Madagascar, would have gone toward a pipe system to bring water to the country’s drought-stricken south.
→ Map of the Day:
Pedestrian fatalities have been surging in recent years, with the Governors Highway Safety Association now projecting that 2022 will be the deadliest year for pedestrians in four decades. Vox set out to find the most dangerous roads in the country and quickly discovered that U.S.-19, which cuts from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Erie, is far and away the worst. Since 2017, for every 100 miles of U.S.-19 there have been at least 34 deaths per year—6 more deaths than the runner-up, I-95. One particular stretch of U.S.-19, meanwhile, is especially treacherous: Of the 60 fatality “hot spots” Vox found—roads with the highest number of pedestrian fatalities—7 were in Pasco County, Florida, where even those in cars are cautious. Drivers on that stretch of road recalled an old, out-of-print bumper sticker that read “Pray for me. I drive on U.S.-19.”
Read More: https://www.vox.com/23178764/florida-us19-deadliest-pedestrian-fatality-crisis
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Survivors in the Catskills Tablet senior writer Armin Rosen on how a recent gathering of 56 survivors in the Hudson Valley was a painful and uncomfortable reminder that living memory of the Holocaust has nearly run out forever.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/holocaust-survivors-in-the-catskills
Mourning and Joy Sandra Cohen on how Tisha B’Av is a time to come forward with our pain.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/holidays/articles/mourning-and-joy-tisha-bav
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something you want to tell us about that’s going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
Doom Sells
How I spent 6 years trapped in the cult of climate alarmism
By Katherine Dee
It happened out of nowhere.
One day, I woke up, clocked into my job, and thought, “I don’t hear a lot about climate change anymore.” By that point there was only the distant childhood memory of a trailer for An Inconvenient Truth showing a floating, context-less image of a starving polar bear in the Arctic. I wondered about it all day, and when my shift ended, I punched the words into Google. This decision—my decision to just look something up—would shape the contours of my life for the next six years. Sometimes I wonder, if it hadn’t been climate change, would it have been something else? Or, if I hadn’t proactively looked for it, would doom-laden headlines have found me eventually?
I believed every word of every news story. And then, at some point, even the most serious reports didn’t seem to take climate change seriously enough. Eventually, I joined an online community of climate alarmists I met through the notorious subreddit /r/collapse. Every day, I hungrily sought information that would confirm my belief that the world as it had been promised to me no longer existed.
It’s hard to convey how overpowering that initial dive into the climate change media ecosystem felt. Some of the first articles I read announced that scientists were poised to “issue their starkest warning yet about the mounting dangers.” The more I read, the worse it got. Thousands-year-old methane stores were being released into the atmosphere, which would cause “catastrophic runaway warming.” It was the first time I understood that life was fragile, and not just my life, but all human life. It was fragile, and nobody cared that it was fragile. I didn’t know how to react to this information, so I read more doom headlines.
Seeing life’s transience was paralayzing. Once aware of it, I couldn’t justify living my short life on its own terms. I remember thinking of a friend, a 27-year-old Wiccan priestess: “She has maybe 10 years of happy adulthood left, and she’s wasting it on a fake religion?” I didn’t have any better answers, though. No transcendent meaning to guide me, not even any practical advice to offer. Everything melted away into an all-encompassing obsession with the Great Ending.
I think it would be easy to hear this story and say it was indicative of some mental illness: generously, an emergent anxiety disorder that went undetected until early adulthood. That may be true in my case. However, I am hardly alone. A survey of 20,000 people from 27 countries showed that a fifth of people under 35 believed it is “too late to fix climate change.” Speaking to ABC 7 News in the Bay Area in 2021, Oakland psychologist Noah Oderberg said that he was “seeing more and more people bringing up the subject of global warming in therapy, citing feelings of sadness and despair […] 50% said they were planning to have fewer children, and one of the reasons stated was their fear around climate change.” (Oderberg’s California residency isn’t lost on me, but still, those numbers are too significant to write off completely.)
While not everyone is like me—the poster child of someone who probably does have a genuine need for a Xanax prescription—climate alarmism and the doom accompanying it is nonetheless ubiquitous. It paints a veneer of fatalism across everyday life, even if not everyone is a wholesale believer or a card-carrying fatalist. When discussing my concerns about being prescribed steroids to treat a persistent seasonal allergy, a friend quipped, “We’ll all be dead soon because of the climate anyway; just take the allergy meds and enjoy your life.” It’s the kind of joke that only works because it relates a piece of commonplace wisdom. You could append that sentiment to almost any statement these days—the world will end because of climate change, anyway—with only the delivery to indicate whether it was meant in jest or as a somber statement of planetary climate justice.
A new breed of influencer has emerged, the self-proclaimed climate expert, whose social cache is based on validating the horrifying yet intoxicating suspicion that it’ll all be over soon. These people dispense their doom porn under the auspices of being “experts,” which means, as we all know, that they have “the science” as well as the misinformation police on their side. They are professors, but professors of volcanology or computer science. Maybe they’re famous scientists—household names. Or they’re entrepreneurs, esteemed authors, or Nobel Prize winners. Whoever they are, they seem trustworthy, and the media validates that by quoting them with reckless abandon even when they’re weaponizing information or just flat-out wrong. Beneath the veneer of being sober experts, these doomsayers sow distrust in the very institutions that carry their message, radicalizing readers to think the mainstream media isn’t extreme enough, and however bad things appear in the news, the reality is worse.
Read the rest here.
What Happened Today: August 03, 2022
You mentioned NM and Missouri. Surprised you didnt mention how Levin's whining about J money, has unleased the latest wave of left wing antisemitism. Maybe later.