What Happened Today: December 2, 2022
War and peace in Ukraine; China’s draconian COVID-19 trackers; ‘No strike for you,’ says Congress
The Big Story
Yesterday, President Joseph Biden spoke at a press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron and offered a cautious statement on Ukraine: “I’m prepared to speak with Mr. Putin if in fact there is an interest in him deciding he’s looking for a way to end the war,” Biden said. “He hasn’t done that yet.” Today the Russians said they were “open to negotiations” but only if the West accepts the annexation of new territories they’ve gained during the war. Meanwhile, NATO allies say that any agreement would have to include the wishes of the Ukrainian government, and so far President Zelenskyy is not relenting on his demand to have all Russian troops withdraw from Ukraine before negotiating. Adding to the sticky situation is that the opposing parties appear to have fought each other to a bit of a standstill just in time for winter. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley told reporters two weeks ago that “the probability of a Ukrainian military victory—defined as kicking the Russians out of all of Ukraine to include what they claim as Crimea—the probability of that happening anytime soon is not high, militarily.” He also estimates that each side has lost around 100,000 soldiers in combat.
Part of the challenge for the Ukrainians going forward is increasing skepticism among their allies in the West, who are paying a heavy price in energy and munitions to keep the war going. According to one NATO official who spoke to The New York Times on Sunday, two-thirds of NATO members are “pretty tapped out” on their ability to continue providing munitions. Back in September, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimated that U.S. stocks of key munitions like the M-777 howitzer, 155mm ammunition, and Javelin missiles were “limited” due to our aid to Ukraine, and rebuilding stocks would be a time-consuming process—potentially yearslong. The dean of the “realist” school of international relations, John Mearsheimer, who predicted this war in 2015, recently told UnHerd that due to the completely incompatible needs of both sides in the conflict, the point where a peace agreement could have been reached is long past. “There are no realistic options,” he said. “We’re screwed.” In spite of that grim assessment, or perhaps in concert with it, the Pentagon is contemplating a major expansion of a training program in Germany for Ukrainian troops.
Read More: https://asiatimes.com/2022/12/ukrainian-military-casualties-are-big-trouble-for-biden/
In the Back Pages: A Hate Crime a Day Keeps the DOJ Away
The Rest
→ Is the cavalry coming for Julian Assange? The infamous WikiLeaks founder has been locked up in England’s Belmarsh Prison since April 2019 while fighting against a U.S. extradition request, and he’s now receiving support from advocates all over the world. The founder of a similar site to WikiLeaks called Cryptome, Mr. John Young, tweeted at the Department of Justice on Tuesday, asking to be named as a co-defendant with Assange given that his website published the same unredacted diplomatic cables WikiLeaks did, and before WikiLeaks did, and has never been accused by U.S. law enforcement of any crime. On Monday, a collection of major newspapers that originally partnered with Assange in releasing the cables wrote an open letter to the Biden administration asking it to drop the charges. “This indictment sets a dangerous precedent, and threatens to undermine America’s First Amendment and the freedom of the press,” said the editors of The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, Der Spiegel, and El País. “Publishing is not a crime.” The outlets admitted that they originally criticized Assange in 2011 but are now changing their tune due to the precedent-shattering implications of the government using the Espionage Act against a journalist. Finally, Australia’s Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told his parliament on Wednesday that he’s been very clear to the United States that “it is time that this matter be brought to a close.” The prime minister pointed out that Aussie citizen Assange’s source Chelsea Manning has already been set free from the crime charges Assange is now facing.
→ The battle for the future of Asia is on, and the battlefield is loans. China’s signature Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013 under the guise of shrinking an infrastructure gap with trade partners, has its hands in infrastructure projects reaching at least one-third of world trade and GDP and 60% of the global population. The Chinese have invested hundreds of billions of dollars in securing a more efficient future for global trade while establishing untold amounts of influence over the smaller nations who have accepted their help. In South Asia, the story has been fairly one-sided, until now. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s India—a rising power that will soon overtake China as the world’s most populous country—is pursuing a kind a foreign investment initiative of its own. Comparing the eight years since Modi took office to the previous eight shows a three-fold increase in lending to foreign governments. While the Indian government has been careful to downplay that its increased spending has to do with competition with China, an analysis published by researchers at William & Mary College shows that India was “significantly more likely” to send money somewhere if the Chinese had done so in the previous year. One country that may benefit from India’s increased interest in foreign investment is Israel. Not only is incoming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu known to be close with Modi, but just this July, Israel sold 70% of its Haifa Port to Indian conglomerate and Modi proxy Adani Group. Perhaps Adani can finally get the high-speed train from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv working.
→ Thread of the Day:
While the Chinese government has committed to easing the quasi-martial law of its COVID-19 lockdowns, this Twitter thread shows just how intense things have been, and still are, in the zero-Covid obsessed nation. To move throughout the nation, the Chinese have adopted a strict passport system, with citizens being flagged as red, yellow, or green depending on their likely infectiousness; those with a red status cannot enter certain venues, and may even be detained or sent to quarantine camps. Earlier this year, Fortune reported that the codes might have been abused to deny a group of citizens entry to the city of Zhengzhou, to prevent them from protesting against banking regulators whom they accuse of being complicit in a scheme that took money out of their accounts. The protestors’ codes were green when they left home and red when they approached Zhengzhou. And the code isn’t determined only by whether or not you are ill, but by whether you were in proximity to someone who was for more than 10 minutes. Whether this level of Minority Report-style surveillance is coming to the West remains to be seen, although a U.S. patent, No. 11,107,588, filed by two Israeli inventors on Aug. 31, 2021, seems to more or less echo the Chinese system, with the ambition to target vaccination at just those people expected to have been exposed to a pathogen due to their proximity to the infected. Via cell phone data, of course.
→ The Secret Service has finally found the records on Hunter Biden’s wayward gun purchase! The original Freedom of Information Act request submitted by government watchdog Judicial Watch requested records, “including but not limited to reports, telephone logs, witness statements, and memoranda, related to the reported purchase, possession, and disposal of a firearm owned by Hunter Biden found in a Delaware dumpster circa October 2018” and “[a]ll records of communications sent to and from USSS officials internally and with outside parties regarding the reported purchase, possession, and disposal of a firearm owned by Hunter Biden found in a Delaware dumpster circa October 2018.” In April 2021, the government informed Judicial Watch that it had found and would process records related to the request. In September 2022, Judicial Watch sued for the records, and in October the Secret Service responded, saying that its previous communication was in error and there were no records found. As of Nov. 10, it has found 100 records totaling 400 pages and will deliver them to Judicial Watch by Jan. 9, 2023. According to reporting in Politico after Hunter’s gun went missing, Secret Service agents approached the owner of the gun shop where he’d bought it and asked for paperwork related to the sale. While the Secret Service denied involvement at the time, perhaps these magical documents will shed some light on the odd tale.
→ Scientists at Caltech have, sort of, proven the existence of a “wormhole”—a concept first proposed by Albert Einstein and Nathan Rosen in 1935. In a leap forward for quantum physics no less impressive than the discovery of the Higgs boson, researchers led by Maria Spiropulu (who also worked on the Higgs discovery) used Google’s massively powerful quantum computer Sycamore to create a holographic version of a wormhole. Think The Matrix. A wormhole, theorized by Einstein and Rosen, is a bridge between two points in space-time, essentially a bridge between singularities of immense gravity—known to us as the center of black holes. What Spiropulu’s team was able to do—based on Einstein and Rosen’s quantum theory that every particle is entangled with every other particle and influences its behavior—was to create a quantum computed simulation in which qubits, tiny bits of information, could travel from one “end” of a 2D wormhole and be recognized on the other “end.” It’s a big breakthrough in particle physics and will open the door to much greater experimentation about the nature of the universe. But, says, Renate Loll, a quantum gravity theorist from Radboud University in the Netherlands, we shouldn’t get too caught up in the implications of a holographic 2D wormhole “while losing sight of the different and bigger challenges that await us in 4D quantum gravity.” We just don’t have the computing power yet to get the Millennium Falcon through hyperspace. The destruction of the Death Star will have to wait.
→ Just because the government can’t take away Americans’ guns doesn’t mean that your bank can’t add you to an unofficial gun owner database. At the request of Amalgamated Bank earlier this year, the International Organization of Standardization created a new category code for gun and ammo shops that banks will use when processing those transactions—though Visa says it won’t allow them to see what kind of item was purchased, limiting its utility as an early-warning system. Nonetheless, says CEO of Amalgamated Bank Priscilla Sims Brown, new software is being developed that could detect potential mass shooters based on their purchases so banks can report them to the Treasury Department. According to Brown, banks already make thousands of “suspicious activity reports” each year, and the new category of gun shops will not be handled any differently.
→ On March 8, 2020, Dr. Anthony Fauci of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases told the public, “There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask. When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better and it might even block a droplet, but it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And, often, there are unintended consequences—people keep fiddling with the mask and they keep touching their face.” By April 3, he’d changed his tune, later claiming that his invocation against mask wearing was a white lie meant to preserve crucial PPE for first responders. Eventually, the CDC updated its guidance from the use of cloth or regular medical masks to N95 respirators in light of the higher infectiousness of the Omicron variant. In a medical setting, N95 respirators are meant for single-use only, as their efficacy wanes with re-use. One study specific to COVID-19 showed that with proper decontamination, the masks could be effectively reused up to three times, but the average American has been walking around with the same mask for weeks or months. Now a new randomized controlled trial of N95s versus regular surgical masks in a medical setting showed no statistically significant difference. But there are credible doubters on both sides of the results. Where Dr. Michael Osterholm from the University of Minnesota pointed out some legitimate failings of the study, saying that the science had been settled on the advantages of the N95, Tablet contributor Dr. Vinay Prasad tweeted, “Truth is actual behavior interventions (like masking) generally fail.” Another study, published this year in the journal Cureus, by microbiologist Beny Spira of the University of São Paulo, concluded that there was no effect on morbidity and mortality between nations with high versus low mask compliance. Will we ever know if it was all just an homage to Eyes Wide Shut?
→ Conflict of Interest of the Day:
The now-disgraced Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX were among the largest donors of the last political cycle. Bankman-Fried personally gave $40 million to politicians and super PACs ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. His colossal failure, leading to an FTX bankruptcy and the loss of billions for investors, was discussed in a Senate Agriculture Committee hearing, of which some members received money from SBF. Those members include John Boozman (R-AR), who received $350,000; Debbie Stabenow (D-MI), $32,400; and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), $16,600. Many of the politicians who received money from FTX and Bankman-Fried have said they’ll donate those contributions to charity.
→ According to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the Congress has intervened 18 times to prevent railroad workers from striking. Make that 19. President Joe “Union Joe” Biden signed into legislation today a bill from Congress making a railroad strike illegal. The government has the power to step in under Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution to regulate interstate commerce, including labor disputes that could affect interstate trade. The president also has the executive authority to intervene under the Railway Labor Act of 1926, which allows intervention to prevent strikes that affect “essential transportation.” While the main bone of contention for the workers—paid sick leave—was passed in the House and had bipartisan support, it was defeated in the Senate bill that approved the strike stoppage. If the rail workers try to strike anyway, the new legislation would give their companies the power to use federal courts to order workers back to their posts. Should they refuse, the unions could be slammed with fines. “I know this was a tough vote for members of both parties. It was a tough vote for me,” said the president. “But it was the right thing to do at the moment.” He committed to acquiring paid sick leave for all Americans, saying, “The fight isn’t over.”
→ In yet another ominous (now obvious?) sign of the impending real estate deflation, Blackstone Inc. has paused investor withdrawals from its signature $69 billion Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT) after recent redemption requests hit an automatic backstop. Somehow, in an investment environment in which the REIT index is down 22.19% on the year, Blackstone’s fund is up 9.3%, and investors want their profits. The pressure—mainly from Asian investors concerned about China’s economic situation—has caused the fund to liquidate some of its holdings, including $1.27 billion in two Las Vegas casinos. According to Genevieve Roch-Decter, CEO of Grit Capital, in her assessment of the news, the “outlook for real estate investing is not good.” Blackstone maintains that there’s nothing to worry about and that “our business is built on performance, not fund flows, and performance is rock solid.”
TODAY IN TABLET:
Hearts Aglow by David Meir Grossman
The newest album from Weyes Blood is so ethereal you almost miss the sharp critiques within
Bienvenidos al Infierno by Eduardo Halfon
A story of diaspora and Guatemalan guerillas
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Scroll is republishing this September 22nd Tablet article on the rise of antisemitism and attacks on Jews in Brooklyn
A Hate Crime a Day Keeps the DOJ Away
If any other ethnic group in America* was being violently attacked on the streets of a major city with such numbing repetitiveness, a major civil rights investigation would follow (*except for Asians)
By Armin Rosen
New York politicians are at least talking about waging a more serious response to the frequent acts of violence and harassment targeting the city’s Orthodox Jews. Last week, Democratic Rep. Ritchie Torres, N.Y.-15, called for a federal probe of New York’s failure to prosecute suspects in anti-Jewish hate crimes, which have become so routine a feature of life in Orthodox communities that only the most egregious incidents ever become known beyond community media or the Twitter feeds of local politicians. On Monday, Mayor Eric Adams promised that assaults on Jews “won’t be tolerated.”
Attacks on Jews in New York are often treated as a parochial problem, not as a phenomenon with implications for broader civic and social health. Even if that changes, and even if decision-makers and the general public begin treating these incidents as an active civic crisis, the problem elides any easy political fix because it reflects a deeper corrosion. America’s most populous city prides itself on being a special place of safety and tolerance for the diverse peoples of the world, but the pace of attacks on visible Jews, along with the general indifference toward this shameful reality, reveal this to be a self-serving myth. New York is increasingly chaotic, violent, and small-minded, and its official and even semipopular fetish for equity and multiculturalism seems to have translated into even worse treatment of certain minority groups.
Over the past month alone, we found 13 reported incidents of violence or harassment against Jews in New York that appear to have been antisemitic in nature. It is a staggering number, proof that in New York City there is a sense of impunity for attacking people who look a certain way, along with a widespread desire to take advantage of the opportunity. The conditions are favorable for would-be tormentors of Jews in New York, even despite the statements of Torres and Adams. On Wednesday, three men who pleaded guilty to bludgeoning two Orthodox Jews on a Shabbat afternoon in May of 2021 for refusing to say “free Palestine” during an ongoing escalation between Israel and Hamas learned they wouldn’t have to go to jail.
Indeed, the past month’s blotter is a record of social breakdown that has been allowed to become utterly normal:
August 21: Two Hasidic men, ages 66 and 72, were sprayed with a fire extinguisher around 6 a.m. in separate incidents in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Williamsburg. The second and older victim was punched in the nose. Both attacks were caught on camera, and did not appear to have any robbery motive.
August 22: Three teenagers stole a kippah from a 13-year-old boy in southern Staten Island in an almost poignantly brutish act of ethnoreligious bullying.
August 30: A crowd of teenagers surrounded a Hasidic man in Williamsburg; one of them punched him in the face as bystanders failed to intervene. Naturally, the entire confrontation was captured on a cellphone camera by someone who also did nothing to stop the attack.
September 1: A strangely calm-sounding man with a megaphone greeted the students of Queens College with antisemitic conspiracy theories, the most mild of which had to do with Israel using Holocaust reparations to destroy Germany. The man had apparently showed up on campus on multiple days that week, and had yelled similarly horrific things about Muslims, Christians, and Black people.
September 4: A 40-year-old Hasidic woman and her 20-year-old son came under fire from a BB gun wielded by someone traveling in a car near Wythe Avenue and South 10th Street in Williamsburg. The drive-by attacker said nothing during the incident, meaning the motive will remain a mystery as far the NYPD and prosecutors are concerned—assuming the shooter is ever charged or even caught.
September 7: A young man chased a member of the Crown Heights Chabad community down Eastern Parkway, yelling antisemitic invective and threatening to kill him.
September 8: A moped driver who slammed into a car driven by a Jewish man began attacking the motorist, who had left his vehicle to offer help. While this was not an antisemitic attack per se, it was nevertheless a possible example of how visible Jews are in greater danger than others during relatively innocuous incidents like this one.
September 12: Another likely BB gun-type attack on a Hasidic woman in Williamsburg—this time the pellet lodged in the woman’s sheitel, protecting her from injury.
September 13: A man in his mid-30s sucker-punched a 58-year-old Jew on the boardwalk in Far Rockaway.
September 15: In what has become a pattern across the city, almost the criminal version of a meme, a man on a bicycle slapped the hat off of an Orthodox Jewish passerby in Borough Park.
September 17: In a similar incident in the same neighborhood, a woman punched a shtreimel and kippah off of a man’s head in Borough Park.
September 19: Four 10th-graders were heading home from a Monday night event at their yeshiva in Flatbush when a man pulled over, rolled down the window of his car, whipped out a gun, and told them to “run home.” This explicit threat to shoot Orthodox children for having the nerve to show their faces in public after dark—or maybe at all—went practically unreported in most city media.