What Happened Today: October 13, 2022
What Happened Today: October 13, 2022
Alex Jones hit with $1 billion in damages; Macron won’t use nukes; Germany’s Apokalypse Now
The Big Story
A Connecticut jury said on Wednesday that media personality Alex Jones must pay at least $965 million to one first responder and the families of eight Sandy Hook shooting victims after he spent years falsely claiming that the mass shooting was an elaborate hoax. In 2021, Jones lost four defamation lawsuits brought against him by family members of Sandy Hook victims after he refused to turn over documents and bank records to the court. Wednesday’s verdict is the second of three trials that will determine the total damages owed by Jones, with the third trial slated for later this year in Austin, where Jones runs his Infowars media operation.
Jones already owes north of a billion dollars in current judgments and will likely owe more as the judge in the Connecticut case considers punitive damages, which are limited to attorney fees incurred by the plaintiffs, on top of the compensatory damages Jones owes to the plaintiffs directly. During his testimony, Jones said he was “done” apologizing after relatives of the shooting victims spent days describing to the jury the threats of death and rape they received from Jones’ audience after he alleged the shooting was fabricated as a plot “to go after our guns” and that the families of the victims were coached crisis actors.
A financial analyst during a previous trial estimated Jones’ net worth between $135 million and $270 million. Other witnesses testified that Jones was earning roughly $50 million annually selling survival gear and nutritional supplements during his Infowars broadcast, which ran afoul of a Connecticut law against the use of lies to market products. During the trial, the jury heard testimony from Alex Jones’ father, David Jones, who ran the diet supplement product line at Infowars. “Our customers are so loyal to us,” David Jones said. “If we say something is good and good for you, they’re going to buy it, and buy a lot of it.”
Read More: https://www.wsj.com/articles/jury-orders-alex-jones-to-pay-more-than-950-million-to-sandy-hook-families-for-defamation-11665604838
In the Back Pages: Germany’s Apokalypse NowThe Rest
The Rest
→ Following Russian President Vladimir Putin’s recent threats to deploy “all weapon systems available” in the defense of Russian territory, French President Emmanuel Macron said he would not hit back with nuclear weapons should Putin attempt a nuclear attack in the conflict. “France has a nuclear doctrine that is based on the vital interests of the country and which are clearly defined,” Macron said. “These would not be at stake if there was a nuclear ballistic attack in Ukraine or in the region.” The comments have raised eyebrows across Europe, partly because France is the European Union’s sole nuclear power, but more so because nations within the NATO alliance have thus far kept mum about their plans to respond to Russia’s use of nuclear weapons. “It’s a political mistake. One of the principles of nuclear dissuasion is that there’s an uncertainty as to what is considered a vital interest,” said Jean-Louis Thiériot, a French conservative member of parliament.
→ Number of the Day: 51
The number of local news websites that have been created by the American Independent, a progressive media company “churning out Democrat-aligned news content in midterm battleground states.” American Independent newspapers like the Milwaukee Metro Times have the look of a local news source, with small-town sports stories and ads for local attractions that serve to “put a sheen of original reporting on partisan messaging.” Behind the whole project is David Brock, a political consultant who served as a close adviser to the Clintons and founded the left-wing media watchdog group Media Matters in 2004. While the relationship between Brock’s operations and these publications is disclosed on the mastheads, Brock’s efforts at publishing propagandistic news—or “pink slime,” as such journalism has come to be called—was flagged last month by a media watchdog group for “fail[ing] to adhere to several basic journalistic standards.”
Read More: https://www.axios.com/2022/10/06/democrats-local-news-david-brock
→ At a hearing on Monday, Pfizer’s president of international developed markets was asked by Rob Roos, a member of the European Parliament, if the COVID-19 vaccine was “tested on stopping the transmission of the virus before it entered the market?” Her response: “No. You know, we had to really move at the speed of science to know what is taking place in the market.” When the vaccine was introduced to market, the Food and Drug Administration noted that “at this time, data are not available to make a determination about how long the vaccine will provide protection, nor is there evidence that the vaccine prevents transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from person to person.” Pfizer’s CEO said that same month that spread among vaccinated people was “something that needs to be examined. We are not certain about that right now.” Nonetheless, skepticism about the vaccine’s efficacy in limiting spread was often decried as misinformation; following Monday’s hearing, Roos took to Twitter to argue that this lack of data about transmissibility was not clearly communicated to the public and was often censored. “Millions of people worldwide felt forced to get vaccinated because of the myth that ‘you do it for others,’” Roos said. “Now, this turned out to be a cheap lie.”
→ About 800 million masks hastily procured in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic will be burned in Germany this week, as their sell-by date is set to lapse. Germany spent just less than $6 billion on masks, with its health minister coming under fire at the time for what critics called an excessively large purchase. Now it appears that Germany not only over-ordered but also ordered poorly, as some 20% of those masks were thrown out due to defects.
Quote of the Day:
Why does a person have to be committed to one other person in only certain prescribed ways in order to enjoy stability in housing after the departure of a loved one? Do all nontraditional relationships have to comprise or include only two primary persons?
A judge in an eviction court in New York City has ruled in favor of a polyamorous union, arguing that three (or more) lovers are entitled to the same legal protections as traditional couples. The case in question concerned three men in a polyamorous union in a New York City apartment; only one of the men was on the lease, and when he died, the building owner moved to evict the other men, alleging they were not allowed to renew the lease because they were “nontraditional family member[s].” The judge in the case, New York Civil Court Judge Karen May Bacdayan, noted how much LGBT activists have changed the definition of what constitutes a legally protected relationship in recent decades, and argued that “those decisions [about gay marriage] open the door for consideration of other relational constructs,” including polyamory. “Perhaps, the time has arrived.”
→ Richmond, Vermont: home to 4,100 residents and one water department employee dubious of the benefits of fluoride for dental hygiene. Last month, the town was informed that Kendall Chamberlin, the area’s superintendent of water, reduced the level of fluoride in the water supply because of the risks associated with the additive sourced from China. “To err on the side of caution is not a bad position to be in,” Chamberlin said in defense of his decision to the town’s Water and Sewer Commission. Several years ago, federal officials said some children were getting too much fluoride and reduced their recommended amount, which can reduce cavities by about 25%. The fluctuation in recommendations and nativistic suspicion toward foreign suppliers has spurred some fluoride cynics like Chamberlin. “For a single person to unilaterally make the decision that this public health benefit might not be warranted is inappropriate,” said Allen Knowles, a Richmond-area physician speaking at a town meeting. “I think it’s outrageous.”
→ Steve Schmidt, the prominent Republican political operative who helped launch The Lincoln Project—a PAC he formed with fellow Republicans in 2019 to oppose Trump’s reelection, then resigned from in 2021—is calling upon the organization to either be “professionalized and reformed or shut down.” Schmidt points out a range of flaws and troubling issues with the organization, from how it handled and tried to cover up a sexual abuse scandal in 2021 to how it manages its finances and salaries, including by fundraising for projects that never come to be and paying its leadership lavish incomes from donations. “@ProjectLincoln played an enormous role in helping defeat MAGA in 2020. It has become a self interested shell of that organization,” he concluded; now it needs to be “taken down to the studs after the midterms and made ready for the great fight ahead.”
Read More:
Thread of the Day:
A deep dive into how Wikipedia’s parent organization, Wikimedia, spends the money it raises from users shows that less than half of it goes toward supporting the website and its operations; the rest funds a hodgepodge of progressive organizations. “At this point, you should know that while Wikipedia emphasizes a ‘Neutral Point of View,’ Wikimedia is openly politicized. It is a full participant in America’s culture wars, and this helps us understand how they spend the donations,” the thread claims. Some examples include the SeRCH foundation, which produces videos that argue that objectivity is “a conquering gaze from nowhere,” as well as organizations advocating for the abolition of the police. Read the whole thread, which features the scandalous details of how a “lab experiment went horribly wrong” and led to the deaths of 12 octopuses.
→ The routine five-hour train ride from Detroit to Chicago became a 19-hour nightmare for the passengers of Amtrak’s Wolverine Train 351 last Friday, after a series of delays that went from bad to worse and had at least one passenger pulling open the doors to escape into a waiting Uber. Stopping and starting because of an electrical problem, then a brake issue, then more trouble with a battery, the train was soon without lights, heat, or running toilets. Describing the ordeal, one passenger said, “We’re cold, hungry, people need to use the bathroom. It smells awful. And a percentage of people are having acute anxiety symptoms and screaming.” The current cost for Amtrak’s current backlog of repairs? $42 billion.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
TODAY IN TABLET:
How to Lose Friends and Influence Over People by Mohammed Khalid Alyahya
A decade of Obama-Biden foreign policy has broken the Middle East and America’s security order.
Full Court Press by Maggie Phillips
Uyghur Muslims in America turn to activism—putting pressure on the NBA and its sponsors—to help their fellow Uyghurs in China.
UNORTHODOX Ep. 334: Israeli actor Michael Aloni, Pastor Corey Brooks, JQY founder Mordechai Levovitz, and new Shabbat music from Yair Rosenberg
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.
Germany’s Apokalypse Now
The worst nightmares of Europe’s sleeping giant are coming true all at once
By Jeremy Stern, Tablet news editor
Being a Germany watcher in the early 21st century can often feel like being an expert on ancient Greece: You kind of missed all the exciting bits. Alas, that seems to be changing. Just as an economic cyclone is threatening to wreck Germany, one of the world’s more deceptively combustible societies, the country is also emerging as the fulcrum of Vladimir Putin’s strategy to salvage his war in Ukraine by breaking Western solidarity—a gambit that now involves a credible nuclear weapons threat. For a country with an almost uniquely pathological fear of inflationary shocks, populist politics, and nuclear technology, the winter of 2022 is shaping up to be a horror show.
What is currently grist for German nightmares may also turn out to be a genuine tragedy for the entirety of Europe, as well as the United States. For several decades, Germany was able to build strong domestic cohesion, a solid social welfare system, and limited income inequality on the back of a strong manufacturing sector and competitive exports. This kept unemployment low, wages stable, and politics bland. Its high quality of life often came at the expense of poorer members of the eurozone, but few Germans could argue with the result: the world’s fourth-largest economy and one of its most steady and apparently sane political societies.
But the past two years, and the past seven months in particular, have revealed this model to be something of a Ponzi scheme. The entire German system, it turns out, depended on a never-ending supply of cheap Russian gas, immaculate just-in-time Chinese supply chains, and ever-expanding foreign markets. No other country bet more on the end of history, and we all know how that turned out.
Until the end of September, there had been widespread speculation that Chancellor Olaf Scholz was willing to trade sanctions relief in exchange for a revival of the halted Nord Stream gas pipelines. Now that the pipelines have exploded, the loss of the cheap energy that underpinned modern Germany is all but irreversible. Meanwhile, the Chinese market is becoming tighter and more hostile, even as Chinese firms have started to outcompete German firms in cars, machine tools, and more. Because Germany depends so disproportionately on foreign markets, remains ideologically committed to large savings surpluses, and suppresses wages to keep exports competitive, Germans cannot consume enough of what they make—while German workers make things that are especially vulnerable to inflationary pressures. Baseline inflation forecasts for Germany are now in double-digit territory. Steel, fertilizer, chemical, and toilet-paper plants are shutting down or are on the brink of closure, and German automakers are threatening to shift more production to places like South Carolina and Alabama. The anger and the frustration of a large number of increasingly nationalist voters—the worst fear of the German establishment, for obvious reasons—have benefited the far-right Alternative für Deutschland, which now polls as the most popular political party in all five states of the former East Germany.
In response to all this, Berlin resolved last week not to reverse course on nuclear power or invest in economic modernization—both of which remain poisonous in German domestic politics—but to embrace a €200 billion national energy subsidy that whipped a majority of the European Union into a frenzy. By opposing an E.U. price cap while unveiling a surprise domestic relief package to keep its own voters warm and its factories from shutting down, Germany was seen as sabotaging E.U. state aid programs, efforts to build a unified response to the energy crisis, and attempts to ensure that poorer member states can bid for gas on a level playing field—the union’s core reasons for existing. The German national subsidy, which has since been slightly downscaled, could still make energy more expensive for its neighbors—none of whom have forgotten that Germany’s two big contributions to Europe over the past 15 years have been the cult of fiscal austerity and the dependence on Vladimir Putin.
Berlin has taken a Wilhelmine attitude to its allies’ fury. At a meeting of E.U. leaders last Friday, Scholz dismissed Polish, Italian, and other provincial frothing about his subsidy—which he refers to, approvingly, as a “double ka-boom”—as simple “misunderstandings.” Economy Minister Robert Habeck, meanwhile, recently appeared to accuse the United States of war profiteering by putting Germany in the position of having to buy expensive U.S. liquefied natural gas exports now that its rightful cheap Russian gas is spilling into the ocean.
Read More: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/germany-apokalypse-now