What Happened Today: January 13, 2023
When will somebody explain the UFOs?; Narcos: Special Forces; Jewish students bullied and ignored at GWU
The Big Story
Since August 2021, the Department of Defense has recorded 366 instances of unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) seen near critical infrastructure or in protected airspace, according to a new report to Congress compiled by the director of national intelligence. Most of the sightings were made by military pilots who observed aircraft assumed to be either drones or balloons exhibiting “unremarkable characteristics.” That leaves 171 reports of aircraft that “appear to have demonstrated unusual flight characteristics or performance capabilities,” an uptick in submitted sightings that the authors attribute in part to the “reduced stigma” for pilots and other observers to come forward.
The higher volume of UAP sightings coincides with the Department of Defense creating the new All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office, which will expand “UAP detection and identification efforts” across the government.
If it all seems a little odd, that’s because it is. While there have always been UFO enthusiasts inside the government (former Nevada Senator and Majority Leader Harry Reid) as well as outside of it, things have really heated up in the past five years since former DoD employee Lue Elizondo went public about the secret office he claims to have worked for inside the Pentagon (confirmed by Reid) called the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program. Around the same time, former Blink-182 musician Tom DeLonge told Joe Rogan that the DoD was using him to get the message out to the public through his entertainment company, To the Stars. The company’s advisory board now lists at least one ex-CIA veteran and at least two other advisors to the intelligence community.
“Having participated in debriefs of numerous military aviators and radar operators,” wrote Christopher Mellon, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for intelligence and an outspoken advocate for greater government transparency around UAPs, “I’ve spoken with several credible people who claim the U.S. has evidence of alien technology in its possession.”
Read More: https://www.space.com/pentagon-2022-ufo-uap-report
In the Back Pages: What Would the Torah Say about Rent Control?
The Rest
→ Petro-giant ConocoPhillips is in talks to resume a relationship with Venezuela that it had to abandon in 2007 after its assets were nationalized by former president Hugo Chávez. According to a new report in The Wall Street Journal, ConocoPhillips and Petróleos de Venezuela SA, Venezuela’s national petro company, are negotiating an arrangement for Conoco to stop producing oil in the country and instead transport and sell the Venezuelan product in the United States. This would allow Conoco to recover the estimated $10 billion it suffered in losses but, notably, would also help a United States that can’t turn to the Strategic Petroleum Reserves forever. When President Biden took office in January 2021, the SPR contained 638 million barrels. That number is now 371.5 million after Biden sold a million barrels to China while tapping into the reserves to ease gas prices at U.S. pumps. (On Thursday the House passed bipartisan legislation to ban the sale of SPR reserves to China.) While the State Department is playing coy about the talks between ConocoPhillips and Venezuela, it already gave Chevron the green light to resume oil production there in November, in exchange for a commitment to “free and fair elections” in 2024.
→ New York State Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan ordered the Trump Organization to pay the maximum penalty of $1.6 million on Friday morning for tax fraud, conspiracy, and falsifying business records, among 17 other counts. Trump CFO Allen Weisselberg pled guilty last fall to manipulating salary-compensation packages to avoid paying taxes. The creative accounting has now netted him a five-month stint at Rikers Island. The tax-fraud discovery grew out of the investigation by the Manhattan district attorney’s office over Trump’s “hush-money” payments to Stormy Daniels, all of which the Trump Organization has dismissed as politically motivated on the part of Trump’s opponents in the D.A.’s office. More investigations are still pending, with New York State Attorney General Letitia James examining if the Trump Organization falsely valued its assets, helping to gain benefits worth $250 million. As to whether any of these probes will land the former president jail time, The New York Times wrote in November, “Trump Faces Five Major Investigations, He Has Dozens Of Ways Out.”
→ Some 13 U.S. Special Forces service members stationed in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, have requested legal representation after the Army’s criminal investigation launched a sting of possible drug trafficking and even human trafficking at the base. Two other soldiers identified in the probe were immediately cleared of wrongdoing, an Army representative said this week. According to a report by Connecting Vets, the sting grew out of evidence collected in a separate probe that led to the arrest of two other Special Forces members, with one Green Beret facing charges of sex-trafficking minors at local “drug-fueled parties.” The investigations and arrests only add to a string of other recent scandals involving Special Forces across the U.S. Armed Forces, with episodes of drug use both on and off the field. “This is what happens when there is no war, no direction, and an 18-month red cycle with no mission,” an anonymous special forces soldier told Connecting Vets, “Dudes are fucking around with young kids and the craziest drugs. All these lives ruined because people are just bored.”
→ Quote of the Day:
Shameless alarmist bullshit pandering to the prejudices of those who can easily be stirred to think the worst about faraway parts of the interior US -- “Flyover country”
Novelist and Montana resident Walter Kirn on a New York Times Magazine piece about Montana’s “Hard Right Turn,” which includes lines like “Montana continued to foster strains of right-wing extremism, providing refuge to white nationalists and militias”; “‘They’re trying to convert the state,’ said Whitney Williams, who ran for governor as a Democrat in 2020”; and “For some, a larger, existential question loomed: whether Montana itself had undergone a spiritual transformation.” The piece focuses on what some view as the disintegration of Montana’s historically libertarian approach to life being supplanted by a religious, conservative, Christian one; but since Walter actually lives there and the author of the piece appears to live in New Mexico, we’ll give this one to Kirn.
→ Thread of the Day:
Did you know that Paris was revamped by Napoleon III in 1853? After the nephew of the biggest little emperor rose to power in a coup d’etat in 1851, he decided Paris needed a major upgrade. With his newly appointed prefect of the Seine, Georges-Eugene Haussmann, Paris was radically transformed into the City of Lights we know today. Something of a Gallic Robert Moses, Haussmann tore down 19,000 buildings with 120,000 dwellings and replaced them with 34,000 buildings containing 215,000 lodgings while widening the crowded streets into magnificent sunlit boulevards. Most distinctively, Haussmann imposed rules regarding new construction, including that they be faced with that distinctive Lutetian limestone and replaced every 10 years.
→ Rumor Radar (A new feature, not a bug, of The Scroll in 2023):
Is President Joe Biden being set up by rival leaders within the Democratic party? After a second trove of documents were found in Biden’s Wilmington, Delaware, garage on Thursday, the Beltway is abuzz. “Alleged classified documents showing up allegedly in the possession of Joseph Biden … I’m suspicious of the timing of it,” said Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, when he spoke to Fox News on Thursday. “I’m also aware of the fact that things can be planted on people ... things can be planted in places and then discovered conveniently. That may be what has occurred here. I’m not ruling that out.” Other less conspiratorial Democrats are rushing to the president’s defense, like Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), who emphasized that while it’s always a concern when classified documents are not stored properly, Biden’s offense doesn’t come close to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago document dustup. Attorney General Merrick Garland has now appointed a special counsel, former U.S. attorney Robert Hur, to investigate the matter. Remember, Ken Starr wasn’t looking for Monica.
→ Another ambitious young tech founder is under fire for making up her business. Charlie Javice, 30-year-old CEO of financial aid start-up Frank, is being sued by JPMorgan Chase for fraud, alleging that Javice concocted a list of more than 4 million fake users during their acquisition talks, when in fact the company only had less than 300,000. JPMorgan alleges Javice paid a data science professor $18,000 to create the fake list, and in return, she made off with $10 million when the bank acquired her company—not a bad deal. Javice is, of course, countersuing, with her lawyer telling Forbes, “After JPMC rushed to acquire Charlie’s rocketship business, JPMC realized they couldn’t work around existing student privacy laws, committed misconduct, and then tried to retrade the deal.” Of course, the U.S. government was already skeptical of Frank and CEO Javice in 2020, when members of Congress called on the FTC to investigate them, but Chase went ahead and bought the company anyway.
But maybe we shouldn’t judge so fast! Pershing Square Capital Management CEO Bill Ackman took to Twitter to talk about how his own experience has inspired him to take things slow when it comes to accusations of financial fraud: https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1613698252599164928
→ Great 20th-century man, Catholic, historian, and philo-Semite Paul Johnson died Thursday at the age of 94. Johnson was the author of, among 50 other books, A History of the Jews and a fierce defender of Israel. On the “mental disease” of antisemitism, Johnson observed that “in the whole of history, it is hard to point to a single occasion when a wave of anti-Semitism was provoked by a real Jewish threat (as opposed to an imaginary one).” Johnson began his career as a lefty but moved rightward over the course of his life, drawing the ire of his former comrades. Capable of putting down some 6,000 words on a good day, the prolific author wrote for a general audience rather than the academy as he fired off histories of religion and nations in between narrative biographies of Mozart, Eisenhower, Jesus, and Socrates. Modeling himself off what’s become an anachronistic English man of letters, Johnson used his forceful opinions and knack for well-turned phrases to fill a book of his notable quotes in 1994. Extolling the virtues of a similarly concise prose stylist, Johnson wrote in a book review that “what is required for this kind of work is a combination of ruthlessness and elegance. Ruthlessness in discarding everything but the essential; elegance in concealing your brutality behind a flow of prose in which not a word is wasted.”
Read More: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/12/books/paul-johnson-dead.html
→ A group of Jewish students in Lara Sheehi’s postgraduate Professional Psychology Program at George Washington University have accused the professor of anti-Jewish harassment and of defaming them to other professors at the school. The claims seem…unsurprising, as Sheehi has tweeted that Israelis are “so fucking racist” and “destroy Zionism and commit to land back, then we’ll take you seriously you fucking genocidal fucks.” The students involved spoke with a dean and with the chair of the department about Sheehi’s bullying, but neither took any action. When the school set up a “restorative circle” to address the concerns of one Jewish student, the professor told that student they were privileged compared to Palestinian students. GW’s spokesperson told The Washington Free Beacon that the university “strongly condemns antisemitism and hatred” but “also recognizes and supports academic freedom.” It’s worth contextualizing Professor Sheehi’s behavior beside the story of Hamline University’s choice not to renew the contract of Dr. Erika López Prater, who showed a picture of the Prophet Muhammad in her classroom. Academic freedom for who?
TODAY IN TABLET:
The True Meaning of Superman by Daniel Z. Feldman
A new congressman just swore in on a Man of Steel comic book. There’s a very Jewish lesson there.
On The Move by Rokhl Kafrissen
Rokhl’s Golden City: Two tales of Jewish immigration on film
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.
What Would the Torah Say about Rent Control?
In the midst of a national housing crisis, California’s Jewish organizations are breaking ground
By Louis Sallerson
A few years ago, Ikar, a large and vibrant Jewish congregation in Los Angeles found itself temporarily out of a home. The congregation had rented spaces since its founding in 2004. But, with more growth and buzz, Ikar was finally able to purchase land just south of the Pico Robertson neighborhood.
As they were planning for their new location, Ikar’s leaders discovered that L.A.’s zoning laws provided a financial incentive to build additional units of affordable housing. In short order, IKAR went from home-seeker to housing developer. The group planned to build “55 units of permanent supportive housing for formerly homeless seniors in partnership with a non-profit affordable housing developer,” Ikar’s CEO, Melissa Balaban, told Tablet.
Brooke Wirtshafter, Director of Community Organizing at Ikar, explained their motivations. “We feel like this is the most important way we can live out our values as Jewish folks in Los Angeles,” she said. “To actually build housing on our site and to make this happen right there next to where we have our community.”
California has become the epicenter of America’s homelessness crisis and the country’s increasingly volatile housing politics. Jewish groups in the golden state are taking an active role in advocating for solutions to the problem both through legal reform and, in cases like IKAR’s, by trying to create new housing opportunities.
With nearly 70,000 homeless people living on the streets in L.A. county last year, 55 new units of housing is a drop in the bucket on a city-wide scale but is potentially life-changing for dozens of real people. The problem is even worse at the state level. While California makes up less than 12% of the U.S. population, it accounted for roughly 30% of homelessness in the U.S. in 2022, according to federal data. And it’s not only the homeless feeling the squeeze. A chronic statewide shortage of affordable housing has driven middle and working class families out of cities like L.A. and San Francisco. According to the California Association of Realtors, only 16% of Californians could afford to buy a median-priced home in 2022. The California Budget and Policy Center reports that over half of renters put more than 30% of their income towards housing costs.
Last year, California passed a rash of laws meant to solve this crisis. These included laws that would force municipalities to accept buildings of Accessory Dwelling Units (ADU’s), or units adjacent to larger units, as is the case with converted garages or backyard sheds. The laws would also override aspects of the local zoning code in transit-heavy neighborhoods. Several laws provided additional protections for tenant rights and more funding for affordable housing.
But in many cases, it seems existing laws are an obstacle to new construction. Before IKAR could break ground on its new affordable housing project, the organization ran into a complicated raft of state housing regulations. Ikar attempted to utilize a statewide law that said churches and synagogues could undercut local parking minimums by 50% if they built affordable housing on their land. This was an important factor in the affordability of this project, reducing the cost by $7-11M.
But, it wasn’t so easy.
“The city said no, sorry, that only applies to existing construction, to existing buildings, not new construction, ” said Balaban.
Ikar doubled down, helping to pass a bill that allowed the parking exception on new synagogues and churches. The bill was passed and signed into law by Governor Newsom on July 19th 2022.
Aside from Ikar, many other California-based Jewish groups are making housing issues a priority. The Stephen Wise Temple, for example, a large and influential reform synagogue in Los Angeles, has long made housing a focus of its social justice work. Stephen Wise’s Rabbi Ron Stern has been coordinating on housing legislation, both for California generally and Los Angeles specifically. The synagogue recently partnered with LA Voice, a progressive activist group that organizes religious communities in the Los Angeles area, to push housing-focused legislation. During the 2022 Los Angeles County Midterm Elections they helped pass ULA (also known as the “Homelessness and Housing Solutions Tax”), a measure that taxes all real estate sales over $5 million in Los Angeles, and earmarks that revenue for affordable housing.
Statewide, there are Jewish organizations supporting the pro-housing, YIMBY movement (YIMBY stands for “Yes, In My Backyard”). In this, YIMBY Jewish Action (YJA) leads the way. YJA is the Jewish affinity arm of YIMBY Action, a national organization that pushes a variety of policies including: up-zoning, funding affordable housing, and streamlining permits. YJA organizes at Jewish events, and they recently hosted Hannukah parties in cities across California to gin up support for the next rash of housing legislation in the state.
Comparing YJA to other Jewish groups involved in the housing debate highlights the different ways that politics and religious identity are applied to the issue. On the one hand, IKAR and Stephen Wise are Jewish organizations first. They have entered into the political arena of housing, their leaders say, as an extension of their Jewish values. But YJA began as an issue-focused lobbying group, and only later added a Jewish dimension as a way of extending its message into different communities.
Not all Jewish groups in California have signed onto the new housing focused agenda. Some Jewish politicians and political activists object to how the new housing legislation is wresting control away from local communities. John Mirisch, a former Mayor of Beverly Hills who now sits on the city council, is one such objector. Though he does not object to affordable housing on synagogue land, he is opposed to the statewide legislation that helped make Ikar’s housing possible.
“I would like to see it done locally,” said Mirisch. “I think that can and should be done with the communities. There are places where there are synagogues or religious institutions embedded within communities where it makes a lot of sense and other ones where it doesn't.”
Mirisch has opposed most of CA Jewish Yimby’s legislative initiatives, and he believes that much of this legislation is not a moral crusade to create affordable housing, but a subversive means by which to enrich wealthy capitalists. “You should know, one of [YIMBY’s] first funders was Peter Thiel. So [they] definitely fit into that Koch brothers, ultra libertarian kind of group,” said Mirisch. “This is basically a ploy to deregulate, in this case, the housing market under the guise of false narratives, of affordability, of equity, and of the environment, none of which hold true.” YIMBY Action denies that it has taken money from Peter Thiel.
Mirisch also references Jewish laws concerning ecological preservation. “There is a Jewish concept called shmita, which is the notion that we shouldn't take from the planet more than the planet can give… I think Judaism recognizes limits to growth, and denying that there are limits to growth to me is not a very Jewish way of looking at things.”
IKAR’s Wirtschafter takes issue with Mirisch’s environmental argument.
“There's good data out there to support the opposite conclusion, which is that we have to actually increase density in our already urbanized areas in order to make room for the people who already live in these mega-cities, and encourage people to live closer so that they will drive shorter distances.”
Another flashpoint in the housing debate is rent control. LA Voice has begun to organize and campaign for the repeal of the Costa-Hawkins Rental Housing Act in California, which imposes strict limits on the level of rent control that the government can impose and allows landlords to charge higher prices in units that might otherwise have fallen under rent control guidelines. Among other things, the law prevents the city government from imposing rent control on newer buildings, single-family homes and other structures.
For Stephen Wise’s Rabbi Stern, the push to repeal Costa-Hawkins is misguided. He believes, based on conversations with real estate professionals in, and connected to, his congregation, that the repeal would further aggravate the housing shortage. When he was approached by LA Voice to campaign for Costa-Hawkins repeal, he declined to participate in the campaign.
Rather than reinstating rent control, which critics say drives up housing costs as landlords try to make up for their losses on rent-controlled units by charging more everywhere else, Stern argues that the key is new development. “We should be reducing the obstacles to building to make it more profitable for the real estate community," he said. “The best thing the city could do would be to get out of their way and give them incentives.”
Tablet contributor Joel Kotkin, a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive director of the Urban Reform Institute, who identifies himself as a traditional social democrat, offered a different model of progressive urbanism.
“The problem with progressive housing policy, such as it exists, is a lack of understanding of markets,” Kotkin told Tablet. “Rabbis are not economists, nor are even the most well-meaning non-profit and religious groups. As long as the state insists on forcing densification, the only thing we will produce in large numbers are small expensive units or highly subsidized ones. This does not meet the needs of middle and working class families, and the state financing for the rest seems highly challenging given the looming budget crisis.”
“What is really needed,” Kotkin continued, “is not to attack existing low or medium density housing but to incentivize developers to build affordable, family-friendly housing. This is historically the role of suburbs and exurbs, which is the only part of California that is growing but far less quickly than would otherwise be possible.”
But, groups like YJA dispute that their housing strategy is coercive, or that it ignores affordable, family housing. “Statewide housing legislation doesn’t force density, it allows density, which is a huge difference,” said Sonja Trauss, one of the leaders of YJA.
“The low density zoning that’s protected locally is actually the policy doing the forcing, whereas we want to allow whatever density people want. We are actually incentivizing, affordable, family friendly housing by allowing efficient use of land. The changes we want would allow townhouses, row houses, rural houses, condo buildings, that are close to schools, work grocery store and other families.”
As Californians grapple with these issues, the housing crisis and its solutions have become a national focus. In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams announced a housing moonshot, pledging to help the city build over 500,000 new homes in the next decade. At a national level, the Bipartisan Policy Center released a legislative proposal in October to increase the stock of affordable housing in the U.S.
No doubt the same controversies that swirl around California's housing politics will soon be present in most of the U.S.. As is the case with every other contemporary controversy, we’ll see Jewish organizations and individuals on both sides, each marshaling economic, moral and religious arguments to enact their visions of the future.