What Happened Today: February 14, 2023
Goodbye moody teen, hello depressed teen; Philly police perps; Pickleball provocateurs; Michael Lind on saving the planet
The Big Story
Almost 3 in 5 teenage girls reported feeling “persistently sad or hopeless” in 2021, according to a new Centers for Disease Control and Prevention study—a rate of despair that’s twice as high as it is for boys and a more than 20% increase from a decade prior. Also, roughly 1 in every 3 teen girls had seriously contemplated suicide, the study found, a significant increase from 19% in 2011.
“America’s teen girls are engulfed in a growing wave of sadness,” Debra Houry, the CDC’s acting principal deputy director said during a press event on Monday, noting that the widespread despair among American girls corresponded to “dramatic increases in experiences” of violence.
Since 2017, the rate of teen girls who report being the victim of sexual violence has grown by 20%. But based on the survey’s methodology, which includes “several measures of experiences of violence, including feeling unsafe at school [and] bullying,” it’s difficult to assess how much of what’s being counted as violence is physical versus perceived.
Similarly, girls but not boys are suffering dramatic increases in incidents of cyberbullying, with roughly 1 in every 5 girls targeted for online harassment. That’s about double the number of boys who said the same.
Last week, a superintendent of a New Jersey school district resigned after the school was accused of mishandling the violent attack of 14-year-old student Adriana Kuch by four other teen girls in the school hallway, which was shared in a TikTok video. “She said, ‘I don’t want to be that girl who gets beat up on video and made fun of,’” Adriana’s father, Michael Kuch, recalled her saying the day before she took her own life after the fallout of the video.
In the Back Pages: Why I Am Against Saving the Planet
The Rest
→ The six largest oil companies made more money last year than any year prior, a windfall that topped a collective $200 billion as Western leaders urged them to increase oil production to compensate for Russian fossil fuels. Resisting pressure from activists and Western officials in recent years to accelerate efforts to decarbonize operations, oil companies like the American ExxonMobil were well positioned to respond to the sudden demand for their fossil fuels, and their stock grew in kind, rallying more than 50% in 2022. Oil producer BP’s CEO Bernard Looney said last week he was slowing the company’s plan to cut oil and gas production 40% by 2030 as part of its switch to renewable power, a decision driven by the fact that “governments and societies around the world are asking companies like ours to invest in today’s energy system,” Looney told the Financial Times.
→ The FBI has opened up an investigation into the eight Philadelphia cops who were stripped of their weapons and placed on restricted duty because they had siphoned tens of thousands of dollars out of a city anti-violence grant program. Despite rules against city employees taking money from such programs, the group of cops, led by a captain who has resigned his post, took at least $75,000 from the $392,000 fund for a youth boxing program. Children and family members of the police also took some of the money, according to a new report by The Philadelphia Inquirer. Catch up on how hundreds of millions of dollars are being managed for similar programs nationwide in the recent Tablet Magazine piece below:
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/anti-gun-violence-hustle
→ At least 10,000 pregnant Russian women looking for more ways to get out of the country have taken up offers from various Argentine criminal rings to arrange their travel and the delivery of their babies in Argentine clinics. As parents of children who were born on Argentine soil, the Russian mothers can then apply for a second nationality, which is valuable as the Argentine passport offers visa-free entry to 171 countries, far more than what’s available to Russian nationals. According to the Argentine news outlet Clarín, the service—purchased predominantly by affluent Russian families—can cost as much as $35,000.
→ Though Adderall can help with the late-night cram sessions, only prayer can power college kids for five straight days of worship. Since Feb. 8, students and campus members of Asbury University in Kentucky have participated in a continuous “spontaneous revival” of prayer, song, and testimonies that has begun to attract visitors from as far as Oregon to join in the celebration. Unplanned, with no obvious catalyst, the revival simply started, and now the students are keeping it going. Dr. Kevin Brown, Asbury University’s president, said, “There is just a spirit of the Lord in this place. Really, browed [sic] its way into the hearts and minds of our students, staff, faculty, and our community.”
Read More: https://www.wkyt.com/2023/02/13/days-long-spontaneous-revival-continues-kentucky-university/
Led by a strong year for Rhône, fine-wine returns beat stocks and bonds in 2022.
Americans watched 19.4 million years’ worth of streamed video content in 2022, a record.
The all-time highest-grossing documentary (Fahrenheit 9/11) is only the 589th highest-grossing movie.
Global meat and dairy production now requires land equivalent to all of North America plus Brazil.
There have been more than 90 incidents of armed staff mishandling guns at schools since 2017.
A janitor was accidentally shot in the eye while looking at a school guard’s gun in the parking lot.
Kids of doctors are 24 times more likely to become doctors themselves.
Of pills tested at a Tijuana pharmacy, 71% contained meth or fentanyl.
The Swiss run the world’s fastest average marathon time, at 3 hours and 50 minutes.
The Philippines are the world’s slowest, running an average 5 hours 25 minutes.
Wittgenstein saw everything as a game while it was all about suffering for Buddha.
→ Number of the Day: 800 feet
That’s how close a United Airlines 777 Boeing jet came to the surface of the Pacific Ocean just after taking off from a Hawaiian runway, according to a new report of the Dec. 18 flight’s tracking data. For a terrifying 21 seconds, the plane dove toward the ocean, passengers in the cabin screamed for their lives as the plane dove toward the ocean, before pilots could right the aircraft. An investigation into the near-crash continues, and the pilots have undergone “additional training,” according to their union.
→ Pickleball, the squeaky, unathletic little brother that follows tennis around everywhere, will now become a permanent eyesore on outdoor courts in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, further escalating the war for viable urban recreational space between its practitioners and those who enjoy real sports. The decision from the New York City Parks Department to install three permanent pickleball courts in Carl Schurz Park comes after a contentious showdown between the basketball players and skateboarders who’d used the space for decades and the pickleballers who painted unsanctioned court lines in what critics rightly called a land grab. As some noted at a recent community meeting, sanctioning the illegal courts has only emboldened the pickleball players, all of whom also hate children. “I’ve seen people wander onto the [pickleball] courts and adults are screaming at them,” one park user said. “It has become a deterrent for kids to come and play in the park. It’s a hazard.”
→ The R&B singer-songwriter SZA has notched her eighth week at the top of the Billboard album chart with her latest, SOS, a reign driven in part by the 1.7 billion times the album has been streamed in the United States since its release in December. The run at the top of the charts marks the first time since Taylor Swift did it in 2020 that a female musician has held on to the No. 1 title for that long.
→ Tweet of the Day:
Demonstrating how not to effectively lead by example, Michigan state representative Ranjeev Puri penned an open letter in the wake of the shooting this week on the Michigan State University campus. As Tablet Magazine contributing writer Maggie MacFarland Phillips notes in the Tweet above, such narrow thinking "overlooks the work of people of faith to end gun violence."
TODAY IN TABLET:
A Pond of Fish by Leslie Epstein
Tablet Original Fiction
A Secular Jew Raises His Head and Doesn’t Like What He Sees by Barrett Rollins
Fears of an American Holocaust distract from the real threat—the mainstreaming of casual antisemitism
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.
Why I Am Against Saving the Planet
(and why you should be, too)
By Michael Lind
We are constantly being exhorted to “save the planet.” Indeed, saving the planet has become the de-facto religion of politicians, business elites, and intellectuals in the West, replacing Christianity’s earlier mission of saving individual souls. But what does the environmentalist slogan actually mean? On examination, the phrase means saving the planet from us—that is, from human beings and our works.
What is more, the very concept of “the planet” turns out to be incoherent. The use of “the planet” as a synonym for “the environment,” instead of as a description of the earth as one of the planets in the solar system, appears to be only a generation or two old. The term “environment” itself is a recent coinage: In 1828 the British writer Thomas Carlyle, a well known critic of democracy, coined the term “environment” to translate the German word umgebung in an essay on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was only in 1956—six years before I was born—that the English word “environment” was used for the first time in print to refer to the ecosystem. And the term “ecosystem” itself was coined as recently as 1935 by the British natural scientist A.G. Tansley.
The term “ecology” was invented in 1873 by the German scientist Ernst Haeckel, and his work owed much to his own environment of 19th century Romanticism, typified by a bias against society and civilization and a pantheistic awe before an idealized Nature. German romantic culture is the native soil from which our own modern environmentalism has grown, and many pseudoscientific elements of popular environmentalism that are unthinkingly assumed to be rational and progressive are in fact legacies of a passionately reactionary nineteenth century romantic tradition. One is the dubious idea of the web of life—no species of plant or animal can become extinct without harming all the rest. This is nonsense, because species have come and gone for billions of years, without necessarily causing the extinction of great numbers of other species. In some cases the disappearance of some kinds of plant and animal life has opened up opportunities for others, in the way that the extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to expand into new niches.
The notion of a self-regulating ecosystem disturbed by human activity that would automatically restore itself to a “natural” condition if not for human interference is another bit of unscientific nonsense taken on faith by the Green lobby. The evidence suggests that greenhouse gasses in the industrial era have warmed the earth’s atmosphere. But it is also true that global temperatures have fluctuated wildly for billions of years, most recently in the Pleistocene Ice Ages. Human civilization developed in one of several warm “interglacial” spells following repeated expansions of ice to cover much of the northern hemisphere. In addition to fluctuations like these, there are catastrophic events that alter the climate and wipe out many species, like the asteroid or comet thought to have wiped out the dinosaurs and many other animals and plants on earth. Contrary to what you would assume listening to Green propaganda, if the human race vanished tomorrow the climate would not “stabilize” but would continue to fluctuate dramatically over time—at least until the gradual warming of the sun evaporates the oceans and turns the earth into a steam shrouded desert world in half a billion years, if the predictions of contemporary astrophysicists are correct.
But there is a crucial difference, according to the belief system of environmentalists. If an asteroid annihilates the dinosaurs, that is natural and not a crime. But if a local species of frog becomes extinct because officials drain a malarial swamp and replace it with a civic water reservoir that saves millions of people from infectious diseases, that is mass murder (of frogs).
According to the peculiar ethics of mainstream environmentalism, practically any modification of “the environment” or “the ecosystem” or “the planet” or “nature” is, by definition, harmful. Developers who cut down woods and build housing subdivisions are evil, because they are displacing the local plants and wildlife. Electricity that powers life-saving hospitals and air conditioners or heaters in buildings is sinful, if it is generated by coal or oil or natural gas that emits carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. Paved roads? Forget it. They turn wild animals into roadkill.
In short—every single modification of nature by humanity is evil by definition, according to the popular conception of environmentalism.
It might seem that the term “planet,” as it’s used by the Greens, has no fixed meaning whatsoever. But that would be a mistake. “The planet,” in the lexicon of environmentalism, is defined in contrast with what it is not: the “Not-Planet.”
The Not-Planet includes all human beings. In environmentalist ideology, we humans are not part of “nature” or “the environment” or “the planet.” We are something outside of nature: an alien, destructive force, modifying “the planet” from without. By this standard, all buildings and cities and other human settlements that billions of people depend on for their survival are rendered alien excrescences harming “the planet.” The sand on a beach is “the planet” but the moment you build a sand castle, the sand in the castle becomes Not-Planet. You have taken sand which might have been used by a beach crab for its burrow. How dare you!
Not all plants and animals are included in “the planet,” either. For environmentalists who are romantically nostalgic for the lifestyles of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, agriculture itself is an abomination, replacing “natural” ecosystems with farms and ranches populated by human-modified strains of grains and vegetables and fruit and livestock. A wild buffalo is part of “the planet” but a free-range cow on a ranch or a cow in a feedlot is not. The coyote that dwells in a suburb and kills and eats a pet poodle is “the planet,” but the poor pet poodle, like its grieving owner, is an interloper on “the planet.”
In 2015, George Monbiot lamented in The Guardian that, measured by weight, 60% of the mammals on earth are livestock, and that while the human population is growing at 1% a year, the livestock population is growing at 2.4%. Global average meat consumption per person is 43kg a year, but swiftly heading towards the U.K. level of 82kg. The reason is Bennett’s Law: as people become richer, they eat more protein and fat, especially the meat and milk and eggs of animals.
Like chimpanzees, our closest relatives, we humans are omnivores who enjoy the taste of meat. Our precursors are thought to have hunted many large herbivores—mastodons, sloths, giant armadillos—to extinction to satisfy their appetites. In my part of central Texas, indigenous Americans drove herds of buffalo off of cliffs and killed the maimed and dying animals in order to have barbecues. Raising bovines in feedlots is more efficient, and, while cruel in many ways, it is no more cruel than stampeding them over bluffs, breaking their bones and spearing them with sharpened flints.
Humans are not the only species that hunts prey or modifies its surroundings to gain an advantage. It is our self-flagellating that sets us apart from other animals, not the fact that we change “the environment.” Is it a tragedy when a beaver family builds a dam, creating a lake that floods a field, drowning other animals and killing the plants and trees that grew there? If the answer of self-described environmentalists is no, if all animals except for humans are allowed to modify their environments for the benefit of their species at the expense of other species if necessary, then environmentalism is a weird cult that is founded on misanthropy.
By arguing that environmentalism is a post-Christian Euro-American secular religion, hostile to society and civilization—and livestock and pets!—I do not mean to suggest that all policies advocated for by environmentalists are misguided. It is in our own self-interest to outlaw the dumping of poisonous wastes into rivers and watersheds. It may also be in our own self-interest to mitigate atmosphere-heating greenhouse gas emissions with costly measures of various kinds. But there are costs to mitigating climate change as well as benefits, and rational people can prefer a richer but warmer world to a poorer but slightly less warm one. All of these individual policies benefit humanity, so there is no need to justify them on the basis of a romantic creed that defines “the planet” or “the environment” in a way that excludes us and our works.
I appreciated the snippiness on Pickleball, but the last essay by Michael Lind was one of the worst I’ve ever read in Tablet and one that provoked a sense of genuine revulsion. Like all too-online screeds, it took a core of truth and stretched its conclusions far beyond what might be reasonably discernible to a neutral observer. Lind’s sneering sense of contrarian victimization was palpable. I value Tablet highly and appreciate the concerns of Lind, which he would do well to limit to within rational bounds.
Sean, being anti-pickleball is AGEIST. We older people need recreation too, and I haven't played basketball or tennis since my 20s. Give us a break!