What Happened Today: August 04, 2022
China escalates war games in Taiwan waters; DOJ charges 4 in killing of Breonna Taylor; Alex Jones’ attorney accidentally leaks his phone to prosecution
The Big Story
China fired nearly a dozen ballistic missiles on Thursday into waters just off the coast of Taiwan, including one missile directly over the island. It was the start to the largest live-fire war games in decades, launched in response to U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan earlier this week. The exercises will also see the deployment of Chinese ships and jets, 22 of which already breached an informal boundary line in the Taiwan Strait that Chinese military aircraft had rarely crossed previously. It “all demonstrate[s China’s] ability to support a blockading force of Taiwan with missile fires,” said Major Gen. Meng Xiangqing on Chinese state television Thursday, adding that the drills will run through Sunday and become increasingly aggressive as a “statement of [China]’s commitment to Taiwan reunification, with force as necessary.”
Five of the missiles also landed in Japan’s exclusive economic zone, which Japan Defense Minister Nobuo Kishi said had never happened before. “This is a grave problem affecting the safety of our people,” he said. According to Gen. Meng, the missile targets were hit to send a message to Taiwan, Japan, and the United States. The exercises are as much a show of force as a legitimate training opportunity for the Chinese military to rehearse procedures that might eventually be used to attack the island, and some analysts say the biggest short-term risk from the exercises is an accident that could provoke unintended escalation between Taiwan and China. “It should be said that although this is an exercise resembling actual combat, it can at any time turn into real combat,” said Gen. Meng.
Read More: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2022/08/04/taiwan-fires-chinese-drones-amid-tensions-beijing/
In the Back Pages: To Live and Die for the Network State
The Rest
→ U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said Thursday that prosecutors had brought charges against four current and former Louisville, Kentucky, police officers stemming from their involvement in the 2020 fatal shooting of Breonna Taylor. Taylor was a 26-year-old Black healthcare worker who was at home with her boyfriend when law enforcement broke through her door and opened fire in response to her boyfriend firing his gun at what the couple believed to be intruders. Shot several times, Taylor died shortly after. Attorney General Garland said one officer was charged because of his alleged use of excessive force, while three others face charges of knowingly using false information in an affidavit to obtain the search warrant that police said was part of an investigation into alleged drug trafficking involving Taylor’s previous boyfriend.
→ Quote of the Day:
“You know what perjury is, right?”
During Alex Jones’ defamation trial, in which he is being sued for repeatedly alleging that the Sandy Hook massacre was staged, Jones learned that his lawyers had accidentally sent the entire contents of his cell phone to his accusers’ attorneys—a cache of texts and emails that offers ample evidence, according to the plaintiff’s lawyer, that Jones committed perjury. Jones had repeatedly claimed that he had not signed off on any stories alleging that the grieving families of the 20 killed children were “crisis actors,” and stated under oath that he had searched his phone for any emails or texts on the topic—two claims proven false, the plaintiff’s lawyer alleges, by the newly uncovered texts. The cell phone data also offered a detailed picture of Infowars’ finances, which was apparently misrepresented by Jones.
→ Big Tech now spends more on political ads than any other industry as it boosts efforts to keep Washington, D.C., regulators from cracking down on its monopolistic practices. Big Tech has taken the mantle from Big Pharma, the longtime leader in ad buys, spending $120 million in 2021 in ads mostly targeting Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s American Innovation and Choice Online Act, an antitrust bill that aims to curb anti-competitive behavior in the sector. Of the $120 million spent, not a whole lot of it has gone toward copywriters; the baffling slate of ads targeting Klobuchar and D.C. include your usual gloom-and-doom spots (empty supermarket shelves, China on the rise) as well as a folksy guy in a pickup truck darkly intoning that D.C. is coming for your Google Maps: “If I need directions, I simply click one button, and it gets me straight where I need to go, ”an app function sure to survive the anti-trust push.
→ School administrators fear that the upcoming academic year could be off to a historically rocky start as more administrators raise the alarm on a crisis-level teacher shortage. As The Scroll noted recently, Florida has tried to fill its teacher gap with veterans, even if they haven’t completed a bachelor’s degree. Arizona has passed a new law permitting current college students to work as teachers. Elsewhere, school officials say they will have to combine several classes for instruction in gymnasiums while they struggle to recruit teachers. Because there’s no database tracking teacher employment nationwide, it’s difficult to calculate fully the scope of the shortage, but the state and district reports of understaffing that have emerged in recent weeks point to gaps of hundreds to thousands of teachers, including 3,000 empty slots across 17 districts in Nevada and significant shortages in 88% of Illinois schools. In Nevada’s Clark County District, administrators are paying $4,000 bonuses to teachers who move from out of state and $5,000 to current teachers who stay to educate the district’s 320,000 students.
→ As rescue teams continue searching for survivors in eastern Kentucky, where severe flooding has claimed the lives of at least 37 people, officials are beginning to worry about the thousands who still don’t have power as a heatwave crosses the state. “We have already lost 37 Kentuckians,” Gov. Andy Beshear said. “We don’t want to lose any more to what is going to be vicious heat.” Four hundred members of the Kentucky National Guard are urgently working through the towering piles of debris in the hopes of pulling out more people.
→ Might this mark the end of the Golden Age of television? Warner Bros. Discovery, the media empire formed from the corpses of dozens of smaller American media companies, is planning on consolidating two of the company’s largest streaming platforms, HBO Max and Discovery+, leading to concerns that HBO Max will be gutted by layoffs and content losses. Some have speculated that HBO will lose as much as 70% of its staff and that the platform known for its artful television, from The Sopranos to Veep to Succession, will develop fewer scripted shows going forward. The uncertain future for the streaming platforms comes just after Warner Bros. Discovery shelved the forthcoming film Batgirl, slated for an HBOMax release, for an $80 million tax write-down.
→ “It was good luck for the Taliban that the price of coal immediately went up after they came,” said an Afghani villager, commenting on the terrorist organization’s good fortune that it came to power just before Russia invaded Ukraine and a global energy crisis took root. Now the Taliban is sending laborers, many of whom are children, into its coal mines in a bid to boost its economy, which contracted 20% last year after international aid was cut off. So far the plan has been working, not only because the price of coal has gone up but also because of the Taliban’s surprisingly effective management of its resources. “The Taliban have been quite adept in terms of regulating and controlling [the] border points,” one analyst noted amid predictions that Afghanistan’s exports will increase to $1.8 billion from $1.2 billion in 2019. The coal is mostly being sent to Pakistan and China. “If it keeps on going like this,” one man working in the mines said, “I’m not sure Afghans will have coal left to buy in the winter.”
→ WNBA star Brittney Griner received a nine-year prison sentence on Thursday in a Russian courtroom after pleading guilty in July for possession of cannabis vape products found in her luggage at a Moscow airport. President Biden swiftly released a statement saying “Russia is wrongfully detaining” Griner. The Biden administration has already made a proposal to Moscow for the release of Griner along with another prisoner, the American Paul Whelan, now serving a 16-year Russian prison sentence for espionage. Though unconfirmed by the White House, the proposal involved a swap for Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout, now in U.S. custody. It was unlikely that any deal would have happened while Griner’s case was still pending, even as it was negotiated by Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov, the most senior level of diplomatic talks to take place between the two nations since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in February.
→ With Democrats worried that they’ll lose control of the House in November, the party is working to pass a raft of bills aimed at protecting rights they believe are imperiled by a Republican majority. “We will not play defense anymore,” said Rep. Kathy Manning (D-NC), who sponsored a bill that would protect access to contraception. “This time we’re playing offense.” Other bills seek to protect gay marriage and sexual relationships. Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers, including those who support these bills, charge that Democrats are not playing defense or offense so much as playing politics, trying to distract voters from more pressing concerns like rising inflation.
→ Map of the Day
This spike map of the United States by Alasdair Rae, the professorial fellow in Urban Studies and Planning at the University of Sheffield, shows population density in the United States by square kilometer, allowing us to see the country’s crowded coasts as well as its “megalopolises,” or urbanized regions that are less defined by single cities than by sprawling networks of webbed urban areas. On the map above, for instance, the density of New York City stretches well beyond the city’s limits and seems tethered to Philadelphia and Washington, D.C.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
Socialism for Imbeciles Bernard-Henri Lévy writes that France’s left declares its loyalty to a dark, antisemitic past.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/socialism-for-imbeciles-france-bernard-henri-levy
A Wintry Tisha B’Av Nomi Kaltmann, Tablet’s Australian correspondent, writes on being in the Southern Hemisphere and feeling out of sync on a day of communal mourning.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/holidays/articles/wintry-tisha-bav-southern-hemisphere
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.
To Live and Die for the Network State
A review of The Network State, Balaji Srinivasan’s new book, which provides a thrilling road map for rebuilding society. But can it work without the blood, soil, or faith that has always inspired nations?
By Antonio García Martínez
Recently, I experienced a social novelty.
Anna Gát, founder of a roving social club and literary salon named Interintellect, very graciously invited me to one of her events. A dozen or so of us, some known to me, but most not, gathered in the backyard of a tastefully restored San Francisco Victorian and drank and ate and discussed various topics of the day. It was a convivial and enjoyable affair, that crackling mix of novelty and familiarity among like-minded strangers and acquaintances that’s virtually impossible to find in coastal cities—outside the confines of the workplace, at least.
Afterward, as I walked home down the steep slope of Fulton Street, I thought, This is like a synagogue, but without Jews or Judaism. Like many things nowadays, the seculars have reinvented a religious concept to cope with the very barrenness that secularism bequeathed us.
Synagogues aren’t the only legacy institutions with attempts at secular reboots: We’re on to nation-states as well. Noted entrepreneur and online provocateur Balaji Srinivasan recently published his intriguing tome The Network State (available online in very readable format here). The first sections are an introduction to the World According to Balaji, which will seem familiar to anyone who’s followed the very opinionated poster for any length of time. And for those who haven’t, and are perhaps unfamiliar with the canon of references inhabiting Balaji’s fervid mind, the text is absolutely jammed with esoteric references and links to outside sources. At times the book seems less like a book and more like a Wikipedia page; it’s not clear to me how you’d even read it in printed form, which is perhaps why there isn’t one (Kindle and online only).
The most interesting section is the one currently relegated to the end, on the titular concept itself, the network state. It is not, as Balaji is quick to point out, some metaverse concept visitable only with virtual reality headsets. No, it’s an actual patch of land (or several of them) with a physical border and representation in the United Nations. As Balaji defines it:
A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
The most radical (and underrated) change wrought by technology has been the decoupling of information from physical movement, the flight of bits liberated from the slow lurch of atoms. This dislodges human life from a geographic setting, making what you see, think, and experience independent of the colored shape on the map labeled “San Francisco, California, USA” (or whatever). It’s what the early media theorists like Marshall McLuhan puzzled over, the global wiring-together of the human nervous system. His “global village,” however, was one warmed by the blue tones of an old-timey television receiving signals from a centralized transmitter in a still geographically and politically unified state.
What the early luminaries missed, prescient though they were, was the unique many-to-many property of mobile computing; left to self-sort ideologically and aesthetically, consumers in a globalized society bereft of meaningful religious or cultural ties would organize themselves into patchwork quilts of belonging no longer limited by political borders. In the case of affluent elites, their self-organized state would look like an urban archipelago in a more rural and regional sea. (In the United States, the political color codings here are obvious.)
This network state idea could be dismissed as just another unworkable fantasy from crypto bros. Except they’re not proposing some unlikely future but rather describing a de facto reality that’s only accelerated with the post-COVID-19 crack-up. The network-staters are already here; we just don’t refer to them as such.
Read more: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/live-die-network-state-antonio-garcia-martinez-balaji-srinivasan