What Happened Today: August 23, 2023

India lands on the moon; Is Yevgeny Prigozhin dead?; AI can't copyright its art says judge

---

The Big Story

Days after Russia’s failed attempt to land on the Moon, India became the fourth nation to safely touch down on Wednesday when its Chandrayaan-3 spacecraft completed a soft landing on the moon’s unexplored South Pole. Anil Bhardwaj, director of the Physical Research Laboratory in India, told Space.com that India made several modifications since a prior attempt four years ago ended in a crash, including software changes, stronger legs on the spacecraft, and more nimble engines. 

While awaiting the good news, supporters across India took to mosques and holy sites, including the Ganges River, to pray for the craft’s safe landing. “India is achieving scientific and technological progress,” Sikh Petroleum Minister Hardeep Singh Puri told reporters from his temple in New Delhi.

Now the mission will move into a data collection phase as the craft’s lunar lander, Pragyan, will collect samples from the surface and send back analytic information to the control team. There’s hope that the Moon’s South Pole, which is rich in frozen water, could eventually accommodate a base on the frozen surface for future deep-space missions. India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that the success is exciting not only for India, but for all nations, as it shows that all nations, including those “from the Global South, are capable of achieving such feats. We can all aspire to the Moon and beyond.”

Read More: https://www.space.com/india-chandrayaan-3-moon-landing-success

In The Back Pages: San Francisco’s Radical Reparations Plan

---

The Rest

A small Embraer jet on its way from Moscow to St. Petersburg crashed on Wednesday, killing all 10 people aboard. The manifest of that flight included Wagner Group mercenary leader and Russian oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who recently led an insurrection against Russia’s primary military forces to protest their attacks on his fighters. In the aftermath of the one-day coup, Prigozhin was given a dressing down by Russian President Vladimir Putin but was seemingly let off, with rumors that he was taking refuge in Belarus. Whether Prigozhin was on the plane that crashed remains unconfirmed.

→ Quote of the Day: 

Some country, obsessed with maintaining its hegemony, has gone out of its way to cripple the emerging markets and developing countries. 

That’s from China’s Commerce Minister Wang Wentao on Tuesday at the ongoing BRICS conference in South Africa. The thinly veiled knock on the United States came during a speaking slot that Chinese Premier Xi Jinping skipped out on at the last minute. Bill Bishop, author of “Sinocism,” a popular newsletter about Chinese affairs, noted the leader of China’s absence is “extraordinary … as Chinese leaders never miss highly choreographed events like this.” No explanation has been offered, and Xi was seen later that evening at the summit dinner hosted by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, though it’s been several weeks since he’s been heard speaking in public.

→ On Tuesday, Iran released a 30-second video set to thumping techno music showcasing its latest military drone, the Mohajer-10. The video included a warning written in Hebrew: “Prepare your bunkers.” The drone is reportedly able to fly up to 130 miles per hour while carrying payloads of up to 660 pounds, and has the range to reach Israel. President Ebrahim Raisi said on state television, “Today, we can firmly introduce Iran as an advanced and technologic nation to the world.”

→ Federal Judge Beryl Howell of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has ruled that works of art generated solely by AI are not eligible for copyright, noting in her opinion that “human authorship is a bedrock requirement.” Other court cases have provided precedent for Howell’s decision, but plaintiff Stephen Thaler argues that AI should be considered “as an author where it otherwise meets authorship criteria.” Howell disagreed, saying copyright laws protect the ephemeral act of human creativity, and human creativity alone: “The act of human creation—and how to best encourage human individuals to engage in that creation, and thereby promote science and the useful arts—was thus central to American copyright from its very inception.”

→ On Monday, the FDA approved the first respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) vaccine for pregnant women from Pfizer, which is intended to create antibodies that will pass to the fetus in the third trimester, theoretically offering the newborns protection from RSV for at least their first six months. 

• On average, about 80,000 children aged 5 years and below are hospitalized with the disease each year, and between 100 and 300 succumb to it, according to the CDC. 

• While the vaccines had a generally low side-effect profile, one notable observation from the clinical trial was a 20% higher incidence of preterm births in women who’d received the vaccine. 

• University of California at San Francisco epidemiologist Tracy Beth Hoeg, MD, PhD, wrote on Twitter that four members of the Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee voted against approval due to safety concerns, but were outvoted. Hoeg was on the publicly available meeting call when the decision was made, and she writes, “So much of what they say and end up deciding is based on feelings. It’s nauseating. Members kept mentioning they had seen very severe cases of RSV and just wanted to ‘keep babies safe’—as if somehow the very fact they had seen severe RSV meant any vaccine is better than no vaccine no matter how little data we have on safety.” 

• Dr. Peter Marks, MD, PhD, director of the FDA’s Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research, said in a statement, “This approval provides an option for healthcare providers and pregnant individuals to protect infants from this potentially life-threatening disease.”

→ Number of the Day: 60

That’s how many American universities will require the COVID-19 vaccine for students who wish to attend school this fall, including Harvard University, which requires the primary series but not a booster; Johns Hopkins, which strangely requires only one dose; Juilliard, which requires either the two primary shots or one bivalent shot; and Sarah Lawrence and Swarthmore, which—predictably—require both the initial series and a booster.

→ Graph of the Day:

The crime stats from Chicago, the United States’ third-largest city, paint a bleak picture almost three-quarters of the way through 2023. The total of all “major crimes”—which includes homicides, sexual assaults, robberies, burglaries, aggravated batteries, and motor vehicle thefts—is up 34% through July 31 compared to 2022, which saw a 33% increase from 2021. One small sliver of hope is that Chicago’s murders are down 6%, though it’s not much consolation to the families of the 359 homicide victims reported so far this year, a count that far outpaces that of all other major cities. 

Read More: https://chicagocitywire.com/stories/648906288-spree-of-robberies-car-thefts-drive-chicago-crime-to-new-highs

→ Apparently, Goldman Sachs is done being lax with its workers’ remote proclivities, recently announcing there would be a price to pay for not being in the office five days a week. Human resources chief Jacqueline Arthur told the New York Post that “while there is flexibility when needed, we are simply reminding our employees of our existing policy.” But there is dissention in the ranks. One insider told the Post, “I think [CEO David Solomon]’s really missing (another) trick if he thinks sending out that five-day note at this point will gain friends.”

→ In a move as daring as Douglas MacArthur’s some 70 years ago, a Chinese dissident named Kwon Pyong landed on the beaches at Incheon, Korea, last Wednesday … on a Jet Ski. Pyong supposedly made the 200-mile trek across the Yellow Sea with a recently purchased Jet Ski and five cans of fuel, desperate to escape the Chinese mainland after finding out that he was banned from leaving China for life.

Read more about the incredible escape of Pyong, here: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-dissident-jet-ski-south-korea-xi-jinping-rcna101343

---

TODAY IN TABLET: 

Teaching Yiddish Modernism in Tel Aviv by David G. Roskies

Sweet summer heat

Admit It: You Hate Religious Jews by Liel Leibovitz

What the latest outburst of anti-Haredi misinformation tells us about progressive notions of identity and power

---

---

---

San Francisco’s Radical Reparations Plan

As the middle class flees the city by the bay, its government is considering paying a lump sum of $5 million to Black residents ‘harmed’ by discrimination

By Sotonye Jack

Last month, the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee, with the support of the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, submitted a nearly 400-page plan to repair harms allegedly inflicted by the city on its Black residents. San Francisco’s government invested considerable resources in the plan, which comes after a two-year investigation into what a 2021 report from the reparations committee called “city-sanctioned discrimination” against Black San Franciscans. The centerpiece of the plan, which seeks to reshape the city’s laws and economy to the tune of more than $100 billion, is a proposal to pay out $5 million to every eligible Black resident of the city.

These days, many Americans see San Francisco as a grim warning about urban decay. Scenes of rampant homelessness, public drug use, and brazen property crimes are routinely spread across newsfeeds, alongside headlines like this doozy from the Aug. 11 issue of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Crime is so bad near S.F. Federal building employees are told to work from home, officials said.” But ideas and policies tested out in California tend to spread to other parts of the country. “As California goes, so goes the nation.” That is especially true given that Gavin Newson, the former mayor of San Francisco who now serves as California’s governor, is widely seen as a potential presidential nominee for the Democrats. This is why the reparation plan needs to be examined closely—it could be the model for more widespread efforts to push similar measures as the new baseline of the racial equity agenda.

As the plan acknowledges, chattel slavery did not exist in San Francisco or California. The plan therefore tries to make the case that the “tenets of segregation, white supremacy, separatism, and the systematic repression and exclusion of Black people from the city’s economy” were codified in San Francisco’s urban renewal policies of 1948. Those policies included the creation of the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA), California’s first redevelopment agency, which sought the rehabilitation of slums across the city. The agency was formed under California’s Community Redevelopment Act of 1945, California’s response to the Housing Act of 1937 passed by FDR. The Housing Act provided subsidies to municipal housing agencies with the goal of improving living conditions for poor Americans nationwide.

This is how the reparations committee describes the alleged harms of 20th-century urban renewal projects:

Of particular focus in this plan is the era of Urban Renewal, perhaps the most significant example of how the City and County of San Francisco as an institution played a role in undermining Black wealth opportunities and actively displacing the city’s Black population. As San Francisco’s African American population grew between 1940 and 1963, public and private entities facilitated the conditions that created near-exclusive Black communities within the city, while simultaneously limiting political participation and representation, disinvesting from academic and cultural institutions, and intentionally displacing Black communities from San Francisco through targeted, sometimes violent actions.

But the plan’s characterization of this history is incomplete and inaccurate, leaving out crucial details about the causes of these problems and the ways they have been addressed. The plan also privileges Black displacement while rendering the forced removal of the city’s Japanese and poor white residents invisible.

San Francisco’s urban renewal concentrated most of its efforts in the Western Addition district of the city—an area that many African Americans moved to following World War II. The Western Addition had previously been home to a large population of Japanese residents since the early 20th century—with nearly 600 Japanese businesses operating between South Park and the Western Addition by 1909.

The Western Addition’s Japantown, established in 1906 after the destructive San Francisco earthquake, had the world’s largest and oldest Japanese population living outside of Japan by 1940. But over 5,000 of those residents were forcibly removed after FDR’s executive order to intern Japanese families on the West Coast. This paved the way for Black San Franciscans to move in and turn the neighborhood into a cultural base. The Western Addition’s famous Fillmore district subsequently became known as the Harlem of the West, famous for its jazz and other clubs.

Following the internment of Japanese residents, urban renewal displaced nearly 5,000 more families in the 1950s and 1960s, around 40% of whom were white. The Reparations Committee does not call for reparations for these white families displaced by urban renewal, nor mention them in its plan. The plan also does not mention the displacement of Japanese families which made the historic Fillmore district possible, or call for reparations for these families. The plan does deign to mention that San Francisco compensated the small number of Japanese city employees for income losses during internment, as a supporting example of what the city could and should do for its Black residents.

The legal history of urban renewal also offers a different perspective than the one presented in the reparations plan. Residents of San Francisco’s Western Addition successfully won representation in the SFRA’s decision-making process through a suit filed against its actions in the area. In the ’70s, residents of the South of Market area successfully halted progress on the large-scale Yerba Buena Center project, which raised concerns among community members over dislocation of residents and negative environmental impacts.

These lawsuits and various others led to the Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Act of 1970 (URA), which settled an until-then unresolved Fifth Amendment issue. The Fifth Amendment guarantees compensation for citizens whose property has been seized by the United States government, but does not guarantee compensation for the expenses associated with relocating. The URA, which uniformly provides benefits to forcefully relocated residents and businesses, was seen as a landmark civil rights victory, coming just two years after Johnson’s transformative Fair Housing Act of 1968. The resolution of community complaints through successful legal challenges goes unmentioned in San Francisco’s current reparations plan.

In addition to offering an incomplete or even revisionist history of the city’s urban reforms, the plan also offers a blueprint for who should receive the benefits of this reparations plan. According to the committee’s latest report, these are the main requirements for receipt of reparations:

• Being an African American descendent of an enslaved person or a descendant of a free Black person prior to the beginning of the 20th century, or who has “identified as Black/African American on public documents for at least 10 years”

• 18 years or older

• Born in SF or moved to the city before 2006

The plan goes on to state that, in addition to providing proof of the above eligibility requirements, proof of being harmed by the city of San Francisco must be provided. An example of the kinds of possible harm one could have experienced include being charged for a drug-related offense. “An individual, or direct descendant of someone, who was arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and/or sentenced in San Francisco for a drug-related crime and/or served a jail or probation sentence for a drug-related crime in San Francisco during the failed War on Drugs (June 1971 to present), including individuals who received offenses, or served, as juveniles.”

In addition to the $5 million lump sum payment the plan proposes for each eligible Black resident, the plan presents a host of other ideas in its “Economic Empowerment” section:

• Pay lower-income Black families the equivalent of San Francisco’s median income, currently $97,000, annually for the next 250 years

• Create a publicly funded banking institution to grant loans, credit, and financing to those who fall outside the requirements of private banking

• Create a publicly funded and comprehensive debt forgiveness program that clears all Black residents of student loans, personal loans, credit card debt, and all other debts

• Grant Black individuals tax abatement on sales taxes for the next 250 years

• Publicly funded home, rental, and commercial insurance guaranteed for eligible Black residents

• Remove credit score ratings from public banking institutions

• All government buildings being leased or sold in the city must pay a minimum 50% of their gross receipts into an SF Reparations Fund

• Reparations are exempt from all state and municipal taxation

• Convert public housing units into condos to sell to Black residents for $1

• Make all residential properties vacant for over three months “immediately available” to all Section 8 voucher holders and reparations recipients

While it is currently unknown what the total cost of a full implementation of the committee’s recommendations might be, an economist is not needed to figure out that the city would likely face immediate insolvency with the implementation of these proposals. Some estimates of the cost of the Committee’s recommendations for $5 million payouts sit north of $100 billion—which is more than a third of the state’s entire tax budget. San Francisco’s $14 billion budget, meanwhile, is around seven times less than the price tag of the $5 million payout goal of the reparations agenda.

This exorbitant proposal comes as the city is suffering a host of ills that are driving off its tax base, with businesses and residents fleeing for cheaper, safer, and cleaner regions of the state and country. A recent survey by the U.S Census Bureau found that nearly 8% of San Francisco’s residents plan on moving away from the city within a year. Besides Seattle, no other major metro area surveyed in the U.S. had as many residents saying they intended to move. The plan’s implementation would also likely face significant legal challenges for violating United States Civil Rights Law, including violation of the California Civil Rights Initiative, a 1996 proposition barring government agencies from granting preferential treatment in “public employment, public education, or public contracting” on the basis of race or any other discrete characteristic.

The reparations plan presents another substantive attempt to transform the city from one of San Francisco’s key power blocs—its activist base, which has suffered sizable criticism for its radical progressive agenda in other areas of San Francisco policy. Some recent examples include the San Francisco School Board voting unanimously in 2019 to destroy Victor Arnautoff’s “Life of Washington” mural at George Washington High School. In 2021, Superior Court Judge Anne-Christine Massullo blocked the destruction of the mural, implying that the School Board’s plans amounted to “parochial political agendas.” In January 2021, the School Board approved a plan to change the names of 44 schools whose names they said were associated with European colonization. The board voted to reverse the renaming effort following lawsuits in April of the same year.

The next San Francisco mayoral election presents a bifurcation of destiny for one of the nation’s most important cities: will San Francisco residents support someone who uses their executive authority to pursue more moderate policies and take on the city’s crime wave, fentanyl crisis, and rampant homelessness, or are San Franciscans as crazy as the news makes them seem? We’ll have to wait and see.