Dec. 12, 2023 ❧ A "sick joke" at UN climate summit, Congress re-authorizes FISA surveillance, and a tomato mystery on the ISS
Plus the IDF assassinates a poet, an insane election abortion ruling in Texas, Hong Kong's "patriots only" election, the EU vs. AI, and Greenland's shark elders
REMEMBER: The plural of “news” is “newses.”
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
AT COP28 SUMMIT, WORLD LEADERS PASS EMBARRASSINGLY WEAK CLIMATE AGREEMENT
The United Nations summit on climate change in Dubai will wrap up this week. Following the hottest year on record, in which the world was besieged by an unprecedented number of devastating environmental calamities, the world eagerly awaited answers from world leaders about how the globe will go about solving the monumental task of slowing man-made global warming. The draft of a final agreement released on Monday was hailed by Sultan Al Jaber, the climate science-denying Emirati oil executive who has been leading the talks, as “a huge step forward.” Your skepticism is warranted. According to Lisa Friedman in The New York Times:
The long-awaited draft said nations “could” take actions to slash greenhouse gas emissions, including “reducing both consumption and production of fossil fuels” by 2050, in line with what the science says must be done to avert the worst consequences of global warming. But it said nothing about deeply cutting fossil fuel use this decade, which scientists say is required to keep global warming at relatively safe levels. And the use of “could” makes action optional, analysts said…
This is utterly humiliating and infuriating, and many world leaders have bemoaned the total impotence on display. Former Vice President Al Gore said that the summit was “on the verge of complete failure” adding that “This obsequious draft reads as if OPEC dictated it word for word.” He’s right: earlier in the summit, The Times reported that the Saudi head of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Haitham Al-Ghais sent a letter warning other OPEC members to “reject any text or formula that targets energy i.e. fossil fuels rather than emissions.”
The Saudi effort to kill climate progress elicited angry reactions across the world, including from the European Union and United States which hoped to include language phasing out fossil fuels. Perhaps the most stirring responses came from the leaders of small Pacific island nations, which are expected to be underwater by the end of the 21st century if sea level rise increases at the projected rate. The Minister of Natural Resources for the Marshall Islands, which sits just six feet above sea level, emphatically rejected the draft: “The Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant,” he said in a statement quoted by The New York Times. “What we have seen today is totally unacceptable. We will not go silently to our watery graves.”
It’s worth pointing out that this event was referred to as “COP28” because it’s the 28th summit of its kind to occur. Somehow, this marks the first time fossil fuels have even been mentioned in a final COP agreement. We’d call this progress, but to acknowledge the problem while doing nothing about it is arguably even worse than simply being ignorant. The globe rapidly approaches the 1.5C warming benchmark scientists say will lead to irreversible climate effects, including sea level rise and more extreme and frequent wildfires, storms, heatwaves, and droughts. The Paris Climate Accord, at which signatories agreed to adopt policies that would keep global emissions below 1.5C, was woefully insufficient. But it at least involved committing to a clear goal, even if it turned out to be unenforceable. The COP28 agreement didn’t even get that far. The best our world leaders could muster in a time of crisis was to say that countries can do something about it if they really feel like it, but it’s, like, totally up to them and not a big deal, really.
As NASA climate scientist and author Peter Kalmus recently said in an interview with Current Affairs, the COP28 summit has been “a sick joke.” He continued:
It’s just so over the top. This is supposed to be the international system for solving the global problem of global heating. We can’t solve it effectively and rapidly without some sort of global mechanism for coordinating that effort… Look at what’s happening; look at the fires and the deaths and the heat waves and the flooding. Plenty of scientists who study the Amazon rainforest feel that it’s already past its tipping point. I study coral reefs, and I feel like they can’t be saved at the levels that we’ve lived with them on planet Earth any longer. I also study extreme heat, and I’m terrified by what’s coming down the pipe. Not to mention things like ten, a hundred, or a thousand times as many immigrants coming to national borders and destabilizing geopolitics. Or things like hits to the agriculture system and crop yield losses that are going to raise food prices and will also destabilize global geopolitics. I’m almost at a loss of finding words to adequately describe the corruption and the evil at COP28.
With that, he stressed that although it is increasingly unlikely that the world will manage to stay below 1.5C of warming, he is not a “doomer.” Instead, he urges ordinary people to become climate activists. Of billionaires and fossil fuel executives, he said:
“They’re basically selling the entire future of humanity for a little bit more money. They already have more money than they know what to do with…So, we have to take power away from them. It’s like the toddlers are in charge. Imagine toddlers in charge of nuclear weapons and being able to press the launch button…We have to build power as a movement and then revoke the social license for fossil fuels, and put those executives behind bars as well.”
CONGRESS IS POISED TO REAUTHORIZE FISA SURVEILLANCE
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have reportedly agreed, at least in principle, to a short-term deal extending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This includes the Act’s controversial Section 702, which was first enacted in 2008 as part of the so-called “War on Terror.” Notoriously, Section 702 allows U.S. intelligence agencies like the FBI and NSA to spy on communications from people around the world without a warrant, if they believe those people might have “foreign intelligence information” of any kind. It also allows them to “incidentally” collect the data of any U.S. citizen who happens to communicate with those foreign targets, store it in vast databases, and access it pretty much whenever they want. Over the years, these broad surveillance powers have been systematically abused. As Edward Snowden recalls in his book Permanent Record, they formed the legal basis for the NSA’s PRISM program:
I sat at a terminal from which I had practically unlimited access to the communications of nearly every man, woman, and child on earth who’d ever dialed a phone or touched a computer. Among those people were about 320 million of my fellow American citizens, who in the regular conduct of their everyday lives were being surveilled in gross contravention of not just the Constitution of the United States, but the basic values of any free society.
More recently, declassified FBI documents showed that the agency misused its Section 702 powers to gather information on Black Lives Matter activists, under the pretext that they might have ties to international terrorism. The FBI also searched FISA databases for information on Representative Darin LaHood (R-Illinois), for reasons that remain unclear. LaHood is just one of several lawmakers who’ve been strongly critical of warrantless surveillance programs. In early November, Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and three of his colleagues introduced a bipartisan bill that would place firm restrictions on FISA spying, including “prohibiting the targeting of foreigners as a pretext for surveilling Americans.” The ACLU is also vocally opposed to Section 702 and has attempted to bring court cases against it. With the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act itself scheduled to expire on December 31, the long-term future of Section 702 will depend on the deal Congress strikes. One thing is certain, though: if the Fourth Amendment is going to mean anything at all, our elected leaders need to make serious reforms and rein in their spies.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Texas officials removed books on slavery from the gift shops at historical sites. For Texas Monthly, investigative reporter Steven Monacelli acquired a series of emails to and from the Texas Historical Commission, dealing with the book removals. They tell a story that’s both ridiculous and disturbing. Apparently, the whole thing started when Michelle Haas—an “amateur historian” whose self-published book, 200 Years a Fraud, claims to disprove Solomon Northup’s 12 Years a Slave—started emailing the Commission with complaints. Among other things, she was outraged to find Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning on sale at Varner-Hogg Plantation, and blamed “activist staff” for including books about slavery and racism in the site’s gift shop. (Of course, only a bleeding-heart radical would think that some hogwash about “slavery” is relevant to the history of a Texas plantation.) Rather than dismiss her emails as the work of an obvious crank, the Historical Commission actually responded to Haas’ whining and removed all the books she objected to. More than 23 titles were discontinued, including Remembering the Days of Sorrow (a book of Texas slave narratives), Alex Haley’s Roots, and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. One board member in particular, David Gravelle, seems to have been especially sympathetic to Haas’ grievances, writing the following:
Put the non-historical books in a box and remove them. Waiting on the bureaucracy to move isn’t good enough. The visitor who visits a gift store today will get an impression from the books. Is it the one we want them to have?
Now, Monacelli reports, the gift shops at multiple plantation sites in Brazoria County have been altered to sell only the most bland, apolitical books, including “a guide to birds in the state, a book of wildlife photo portraits, and a southern cookbook.” Given the rapid expansion of book banning in conservative states, this probably shouldn’t be a shocking development. Still, the gutless, dishonest attempt to erase Black history deserves nothing but contempt.
❧ In other horrifying Texas news, the state’s Supreme Court is preventing a woman from getting an emergency abortion. Since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, Texas has had a near-total ban on abortion, with only a very narrow exception for medical emergencies. Perversely, that exception does not include the case of a non-viable fetus, and at least one Texas woman has already been forced to carry a pregnancy to term even though her twins would not survive outside the womb. (Twenty other women have also sued the state, alleging that the abortion ban has threatened their health in one form or another.) This is, obviously, an unthinkable trauma to put someone through—and yet, Texas is trying its hardest to inflict that suffering again. In a ruling handed down yesterday, the state’s Supreme Court overturned a previous court order that would have granted a medical exception for Kate Cox, whose fetus was diagnosed with trisomy 18. Otherwise known as Edwards Syndrome, this is a chromosome disorder that is almost always fatal; only ten percent of children afflicted survive past their first birthday. The case is particularly infuriating, because the court’s decision was brought about by an emergency petition from Ken Paxton, the Texas Attorney General who’s spent most of the past year frantically dodging various corruption and bribery charges, and certainly has no business making anyone’s medical decisions for them. Cox has reportedly left the state to seek proper medical care elsewhere, but plenty of other women in her situation wouldn’t have that option. It’s a stark reminder that reproductive healthcare is a bedrock human right, and when it’s taken away, only pointless suffering follows. Texas’ abortion ban, and every other law like it, needs to be abolished as soon as possible.
❧ LONG READ: Life expectancy in America remains lower than in other peer countries. Since the 1970s, as state-level policies dramatically diverged based on which party has been in power, life expectancy has diverged as well. According to Paul Starr in The American Prospect:
Conservatives often argue against proposals for public remedy on grounds of futility. Public remedy will be ineffectual, they say, because the problems it is meant to fix arise from intractable social conditions or human nature. When the new Speaker of the House Mike Johnson recently responded to demands for gun regulation after a mass shooting by saying that “at the end of the day” the true problem is not guns but the “human heart,” he was making the futility argument.
The “futility thesis,” as Albert Hirschman calls it in his classic The Rhetoric of Reaction, has a long history, but it has special relevance to contemporary politics. It played a major role in the neoconservative attack on liberal programs of the 1960s and subsequent rollback of federal regulation and spending. One of Ronald Reagan’s favorite lines, “We had a war on poverty, and poverty won,” perfectly expressed the conservative charge that liberal reform was futile. That view helped persuade Congress under Reagan and his successors not only to cut programs for low-income communities but also to devolve policy to the states through such measures as block grants that let the states decide how money would be spent.
Although we hardly knew it at the time, the United States was conducting a national experiment: What would be the effect on Americans’ well-being if we turned over a wider array of policies to states controlled by political parties with opposed agendas? Three other developments have made state governments more central in policymaking. One is preemption. Since the 1980s, states in Republican hands have increasingly preempted local laws, preventing Democratic-run cities from adopting such policies as tobacco taxes and anti-smoking regulations, paid sick leave, and higher minimum wages.
The other two developments advancing the power of states are the work of the Supreme Court. By striking down the constitutional right to abortion, the Court has given states leeway to adopt diametrically opposed policies on reproductive rights. And by refusing to impose any limits on partisan gerrymandering, the Court has enabled incumbent state parties to expand their legislative majorities and entrench themselves in power.
These shifts have greatly increased both the importance of state-level policy and divergences between red and blue states. For many purposes, it no longer makes sense to think of the United States as one country. Depending on their state of residence, Americans live under drastically different policies concerning public health, taxes, the stinginess or generosity of public benefits, unionization, gun safety, and many other things that affect their well-being, indeed, their survival.
SO WHAT HAVE BEEN THE RESULTS OF THE NATIONAL EXPERIMENT of putting more policymaking in the hands of states? Survival, as registered in mortality rates and life expectancy, is the ultimate measure of well-being, and the data for the United States in recent decades do not tell a happy story…As state-level policy has diverged since the 1970s (and especially since 2000), so have differences in mortality rates and life expectancy among the states. These differences are correlated with a state’s dominant political ideology. Americans’ chances of living longer are better if they live in a blue state and worse if they live in a red state. The differences by state particularly matter for low-income people, who are most likely to suffer the consequences of red states’ higher death rates. To be sure, correlation does not prove causation, and many different factors affect who lives and who dies. But a series of recent studies make a convincing case that the divergence of state-level policymaking on liberal-conservative lines has contributed significantly to the widening gap across states in life expectancy.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Israel has murdered poet, scholar, and activist Dr. Refaat Alareer and his family in Gaza. Alareer was the editor of the 2014 anthology Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine, and the co-editor of 2015’s Gaza Unsilenced. He was also a professor of world literature at the Islamic University of Gaza, and an outspoken advocate for the human rights of Palestinians, giving interviews with news networks like CNN, the UK’s Channel 4, and Democracy Now! to condemn Israel’s “barbaric” bombing campaign. Dr. Alareer stirred up his fair share of controversy, calling Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel “legitimate and moral” and comparing it to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. However, his remarks can’t possibly justify his killing in yet another bombing—one which also took the life of his brother, his sister, and her three children last Thursday.
By all appearances, Dr. Alareer’s death was a deliberate assassination. A preliminary report from the organization Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor concludes that his family’s apartment was “surgically bombed out of the entire building where it’s located.” He had also received “weeks of death threats” from pro-Israel accounts online, after being singled out by former New York Times journalist Bari Weiss. This targeted killing is, of course, a serious and flagrant war crime. However, it’s also entirely consistent with the findings of Reporters Without Borders, who warn that the Israeli military is “eradicating journalism in Gaza,” having killed 63 reporters since October 7. It’s also perfectly consistent with Benjamin Netanyahu’s stated goal to “thin” the population of Gaza “to a minimum” (otherwise known as genocide.) At the time of writing, Israel has announced a “safe zone” for Gaza’s civilians—of whom there are at least 1.8 million—which is smaller than London’s Heathrow Airport, practically guaranteeing that there will be more horrific deaths to come. Dr. Alareer himself had long suspected that he might be killed, and reposted his 2011 poem “If I Must Die” as his last message to the world:
If the Israeli government thought that death would silence Dr. Alareer, however, they severely miscalculated. Since Thursday, “If I Must Die” has been translated into Chinese, Hebrew, Japanese, Spanish, Italian, Malay, Arabic, Greek, Indonesian, Tamil, and many other languages. It is now, almost certainly, one of the most-read poems of the 21st century. Hundreds of people attended a vigil in New York City to mourn Dr. Alareer, some bringing handmade kites as the poem asks. It’s a particularly shocking death, and there’s little good you can say about a government that bombs defenseless poets from the sky. But it’s worth remembering that every one of the more than 17,700 Palestinians who have died in Gaza so far had their own story, their own unique and irreplaceable human life. The ongoing Israeli bombardment is a crime almost beyond comprehension, and it’s everyone’s responsibility to bring it to a swift end.
DID YOU KNOW that members of Israel’s right-wing Likud party once tried to assassinate Henry Kissinger?
In The Intercept, Daniel Boguslaw reminds us of reports from the New York Daily News in 1977, where it was revealed that a “die-hard clique of Israeli right-wingers” had offered $150,000 for the Secretary of State’s life. Reportedly, Kissinger’s desire to end the 1973 oil embargo led him to strike “disengagement” deals with Egypt and Syria, which led to Israeli withdrawal from territories it had occupied in those countries. This was too much for Likud’s far-right fringe, who then marked Kissinger for death. Although it’s hard to feel that Henry K would have been a great loss to the world, it’s notable just how long Israel’s extremist factions have been doing this sort of thing!
❧ An abysmal 27.5 percent of voters went to the polls in Hong Kong to vote in a “Patriots only” election imposed by the Chinese government, which barred opposition candidates from participating. It’s historically low turnout for a district council election in Hong Kong and a precipitous fall from 71.2 percent participation in the city’s 2019 election, in which anti-Beijing opposition candidates dominated. This week’s election was the first time Hong Kong has voted for district council since the massive wave of pro-democracy protests that broke out in 2019 following a bill that would allow Hongkongers to be extradited to mainland China. Since the protests, Beijing instituted a massive national security bill that has been used to crack down on protest leaders: More than 10,000 people had been arrested in connection with the movement as of 2022. The bill also overhauled Hong Kong’s electoral system, reducing the number of directly elected officials on the council from 90 percent to just 20 percent and requiring all candidates to pass “national security” screenings to ensure that only “patriots” (read: those loyal to Beijing) run the city. As one university student told The Associated Press, “It’s useless even if I vote. All candidates are leaning to one side.”
❧ The European Union has agreed to pass a new set of regulations on artificial intelligence programs in one of the first sweeping attempts around the world to get control over the feverishly growing technology. It does so using a sliding scale of risk levels to determine the severity of regulations—the general principle being that the greater harm posed by the use of the technology, the more stringent the regulation (which seems rather sensible). Just one year after the first release of ChatGPT, the EU’s new rules would require the program and others that can create artificially manipulated “deepfake” images to include some indication that what viewers are seeing is fabricated. The bill will also limit the ability of police and governments to use biometric tracking software (including facial recognition tools) outside certain circumstances related to national security (though some critics say there are still significant loopholes that would allow wide latitude for surveillance). The New York Times also reports that the bill limits how AI is used for “the operation of crucial services like water and energy.” While the EU is not the first place to pass restrictions on the use of AI (China passed a narrower law regulating generative AI programs like ChatGPT over the summer), the rulebook they have drawn up is the first of its scope. While the laws may take anywhere from 12 to 24 months to fully implement in Europe, the EU is still quite a bit further along than the United States, which does not have any federal AI regulations on the book. We saw firsthand how it can be used for evil recently, when—in a previous briefing—we discussed how UnitedHealth used the technology to wrongfully deny elderly patients care. Hopefully, Europe’s law will provide a framework for American legislators to advance regulations of their own.
PAST AFFAIRS
“How Can We Trust What We See?” by Nathan J. Robinson & Stephen Prager
Over the summer, right-wing commentator Tim Pool baselessly suggested that damning audio of Donald Trump showing off classified documents was “Probably just AI generate [sic] voice deepfakes.” It demonstrated a potentially overlooked danger of artificial intelligence: not only will it become easier to create false information, but true information will become more difficult to trust.
“The possibility that anything could be an AI deepfake invites anyone to dismiss any piece of evidence that does not jibe with their worldview as fraudulent, even if there is a perfectly real-looking photo, video, or sound clip of that thing happening. The reality of AI means that genuinely curious and honest people will not only be fooled by deepfakes but be fooled by people like Pool into believing that genuine things are made up by people trying to manipulate them. Pool’s motives aside, he’s contributing to a propaganda strategy that may sever the final remaining strands of consensus reality that our political culture has left. Soon, it may be very difficult to know for sure whether any piece of information is authentic, and bad actors will take advantage of it.”
In another nefarious use of AI, the Ron DeSantis campaign made deep fakes of Donald Trump hugging the hated Dr. Anthony Fauci (or should we say “Faux-ci”)
AROUND THE STARS
❧ Eight months ago, one of the first tomatoes ever harvested in space went missing for months, kicking off a mystery that has embroiled the International Space Station in a gripping “whodunnit?”. NASA, seeking to address the challenge of growing food in space for long-term missions, has been conducting botany studies aboard the ISS using a vegetable production system known as “Veggie.” In March, astronauts successfully grew a red dwarf tomato plant, the first of which was picked by astronaut Frank Rubio.
Then, it went missing. Rubio was the immediate suspect, but held to his innocence, saying he’d “put [the tomato] in a little bag” to show to schoolchildren back on Earth. He says he “Velcroed it where I was supposed to Velcro it, and then I came back and it was gone.” Though Rubio says he searched for the tomato for anywhere from eight to twenty hours (mostly, he says, to prove he didn’t eat it), it never turned up. Rubio has since departed the ISS after just over a year of work there (the longest continuous spaceflight by a US astronaut), but his legacy has remained stained with a black (or, perhaps, red) mark for alleged tomato thievery…until this week. One of the astronauts currently aboard the spaceship revealed that the missing tomato had finally been found, though according to The Guardian, she did not reveal its condition. Though this vaguely tomato-shaped wad of shriveled goop will likely never see the light of day, Rubio can sleep and the ISS can float more peacefully knowing that this long celestial nightmare is over.
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ Hillary Clinton is getting involved in the Biden campaign. God help us. According to recent reporting by NBC, Clinton has begun actively fundraising for Biden’s reelection effort and raised “just shy of $1 million” at a single Washington, D.C. event with the Women’s Leadership Forum. She’s also been running damage control for his obscenely unpopular Israel policy, writing an op-ed in the Atlantic where she defends his refusal to call for a ceasefire in Gaza. She is now expected to take on “a role as one of the most prominent and influential surrogates in Biden’s re-election effort,” along with her notorious husband. This should terrify everyone because Hillary Clinton was the only candidate pathetic enough to lose an election to Donald Trump so far; even Biden, for all his many flaws, hasn’t managed that feat. It’s difficult to imagine a voter who isn’t already deeply devoted to the Democratic Party, who would be persuaded to vote for Biden by Hillary’s endorsement. So far, a reliable rule of thumb has been “If Hillary Clinton likes it, it’s a bad idea,” whether the “it” in question is overthrowing the government of Libya or not bothering to campaign in Wisconsin. But, hey; as NBC notes, Biden is polling badly, and “needs all the help he can get.” When you’re down by a few scores at halftime, why not bring your worst player off the bench? Perhaps the only worse move would be to consult with the triumvirate of losers Politico recently suggested to help Biden turn things around: Liz Cheney, Rahm Emmanuel, and Mitt Romney. But for a campaign as flailingly incompetent as Biden’s, even that can’t be ruled out.
SHARK FACT OF THE WEEK
Greenland sharks have incredibly long lives!
For a long time, scientists were unable to tell exactly how old a Greenland shark is. You see, it’s rude to just ask a shark its age, so the standard method has been to measure “growth bands” in their fins and vertebrae, a bit like the rings of a tree. Greenland sharks, however, don’t have these bands, which made things awkward for everyone.
Recently, though, some very clever scientists worked out a way to use carbon-dating on certain proteins in the sharks’ eyes. When they tried the technique on a female Greenland shark who’d accidentally been caught in a fishing net, the result was shocking: the shark was at least 272 years old, and possibly as many as 512!
The technology is still imprecise, capable only of giving rough estimates. But even if we assume the minimum figure of 272 is correct, it would make this particular shark the oldest vertebrate animal on record, surpassing the famous 191-year-old tortoise Jonathan. (Sorry, Jonathan.) In fact, the shark would be older than the United States, the internal combustion engine, and the saxophone. And to think that we humans, mere blips in the great sharks' eyes, have the arrogance to hunt them—to the extent they’re now classified as “vulnerable” to extinction! As a species, we really need to rethink a few things.
Writing and research by Stephen Prager and Alex Skopic. Editing and additional material by Nathan J. Robinson and Lily Sánchez. Fact-checking by Justin Ward. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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