Nov. 21, 2023 ❧ UnitedHealth's A.I. scam, Elon Musk endorses antisemitic tweet, and Argentina elects an anarcho-capitalist
Plus, a Tennessee town tries to ban being gay, a nonconsensual nose-picker runs amok in the Senate, Spain holds elections amid Catalan independence protests, and some shrimp live in trees!
With Thanksgiving on the way, Current Affairs presents you with a cornucopia of news! But the festivities are not fun and games for everyone…for the turkeys dream only of vengeance.
While you sit around waiting for the turkeys’ inevitable rampage against the human species, here’s some other stuff going on in the world.
STORIES THAT SHOULD BE BIGGER
UNITED HEALTH SUED FOR USING AI TO DENY ELDERLY PATIENTS’ CLAIMS
In a new class-action lawsuit filed last Tuesday, multiple plaintiffs have accused UnitedHealth Group—the world’s largest healthcare company by revenue—of wrongfully denying care to its elderly patients, using AI technology the company knew to be faulty. According to an in-depth report in Ars Technica, UnitedHealth began using an AI model called nH Predict in November 2019. A product of the company’s NaviHealth subsidiary, nH Predict’s main task is to evaluate how much “post-acute” care an elderly person will need after a traumatic event, like a fall, a serious illness, or even a stroke. The software is proprietary, so the exact way it works is unclear, but it appears to draw on a database of more than 6 million past medical cases to evaluate current ones. As the lawsuit puts it, UnitedHealth routinely uses its AI “to predict how much care an elderly patient ‘should’ require,” and approves only the AI-generated amount, even when it “overrides real doctors’ determinations as to the amount of care a patient in fact requires.” As tech journalist Beth Mole writes in Ars Technica, the AI routinely lowballs its estimates, and denies claims that human staff would have approved:
The plaintiffs leading the proposed class-action suit include the family of Gene Lokken, who died on July 17 of this year. On May 5 2022, the 91-year-old fell at home, fracturing his leg and ankle. After around six days in the hospital, he was moved to hospice care, where he spent a month recovering from his injuries. After that, doctors said he became well enough to start physical therapy. But UnitedHealth only paid for 19 days of therapy, dumbfounding his doctors and therapists, who described his muscle functions as "paralyzed and weak."
In fact, more than 90 percent of patients who appealed their payment denials had the decision reversed, meaning the AI itself has an error rate of around 90 percent—significantly worse than simply flipping a coin. This would be unacceptable in any industry, let alone one where people’s health and well-being hang in the balance. And yet, UnitedHealth has responded by relying more on nH Predict, not less. Mole continues:
Instead of changing course, over the last two years, NaviHealth employees have been told to hew closer and closer to the algorithm's predictions. In 2022, case managers were told to keep patients' stays in nursing homes to within 3 percent of the days projected by the algorithm, according to documents obtained by Stat. In 2023, the target was narrowed to 1 percent. And these aren't just recommendations for NaviHealth case managers—they're requirements. Case managers who fall outside the length-of-stay target face discipline or firing.
It’s difficult to see any explanation for this behavior, other than the obvious one: UnitedHealth uses the faulty AI on purpose, because it allows them to save millions of dollars by denying claims. They don’t care if their patients suffer—or go into crippling medical debt—as a result. This is exactly the case made by the lawsuit, which accuses the company of breach of contract, breach of good faith, and unjust enrichment among other charges.
In the last few years, we’ve heard all kinds of doomsday predictions about the rise of AI, and how it could threaten the future of life on Earth. But NaviHealth shows how AI can threaten us not just when it works too well, but when it doesn’t work at all—and when corporate greed takes advantage of its dysfunction to inflict austerity measures on sick and hurting people. A for-profit healthcare system will always generate this sort of abuse. If there’s any kind of justice left in the courts, UnitedHealth will get taken to the cleaners in this suit, and its victims will receive heavy punitive damages. But in any case, the urgency of building a universal healthcare service that’s free to everyone has never been more clear.
BIG STORY
ADVERTISERS FLEE TWITTER (“X”) AFTER ELON MUSK’S LATEST FORAY INTO ANTISEMITISM, BUT THE ADL STILL CONSIDERS HIM AN ALLY
Advertisers are withdrawing from Elon Musk’s Twitter (now known as “X”) in droves after Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory. In response to a PSA about anonymous users posting “Hitler was right” on the Internet, a user tweeted that rising antisemitism in America was the fault of Jews for “pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them” and supposedly importing “hordes of minorities” who dislike them. “You have said the actual truth,” Musk responded.
Many people have pointed out that this is a textbook example of the “Great Replacement” narrative: a conspiracy theory that a cabal of Jewish elites are masterminding a plot to “replace” white Americans with non-white immigrants. Numerous white supremacist mass shooters over the last several years have cited the belief in this “replacement” to justify murdering Jews and other minority groups: including the shooters at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue in 2018, at Christchurch New Zealand mosques in 2019, at an El Paso Walmart in 2019, and at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022. This is not the first time Elon has been under fire for reinstating, promoting, and even paying blatantly antisemitic accounts. As his platform has devolved into a sewer of racist harassment, false information, and scams, more than half of Twitter’s 100 top advertisers pulled their funding.
Elon’s endorsement of the Great Replacement was the last straw for several of Twitter’s largest remaining advertisers: including Apple, Disney, Paramount, Warner Bros, and several other big names. Major conservative influencers on the platform—including the Babylon Bee, Timcast, and PragerU—have rushed in to save Musk, announcing that they will begin buying up more advertising in an effort to support Musk against “anti-free speech bullies,” in the words of the Babylon Bee founder Seth Dillon.
There has never been a better time to check out our guide to PragerU propaganda!
If you’re one of the intrepid souls still on Twitter in November 2023, you’re probably about to be deluged by even more claptrap from PragerU than usual. Fortunately, Current Affairs has everything you need to recognize and counter their propaganda strategies (which are now, disturbingly, being added to some school curriculums in red states)
Check out, ‘The Student’s Guide to Resisting PragerU Propaganda,’ which is available on our website and on Amazon.
In an effort to cover his ass following the backlash, Elon has, ironically, been acting like an “anti-free speech bully” himself. He has launched a “thermonuclear lawsuit” against Media Matters (and has indicated a desire for them to be thrown in jail) over a report showing that companies’ ads were running alongside pro-Nazi content (something Musk himself has admitted). He also attempted to show how not antisemitic he is by cracking down on criticisms of Israel: he has announced that he intends to suspend users for using the phrases “decolonization” and “From the River to the Sea” in relation to Israel, arguing that they “necessarily imply genocide,” which is an absolutely ludicrous assertion (particularly for “decolonization” since early Zionists, including Theodor Herzl, openly described themselves as “colonizing” Palestine and the United Nations has called the Israeli settlement of the West Bank “settler colonialism.” Not to mention that dozens of countries around the world have been decolonized within the last hundred years without a genocide occurring.)
In an act of astonishing cynicism and hypocrisy, the Anti-Defamation League has slathered Musk with praise for announcing his intention to censor critics of Israel and its CEO Jonathan Greenblatt thanked him for his “leadership in fighting hate.” Though Musk previously threatened to sue the ADL over their criticism for a previous antisemitic tweet and has blasted them for supposedly being “anti-white,” Greenblatt has been shamelessly courting Musk’s approval. Just last month, he called Musk “an amazing entrepreneur and extraordinary innovator. He is the Henry Ford of our time” — a comparison that is uniquely perverse, since Henry Ford is infamous for having printed numerous antisemitic tracts in his newspaper The Dearborn Independent, and for having supported the Nazis (facts you can, ironically, learn from the ADL’s website).
As we discussed in our last briefing, surrounding the inclusion of antisemitic pastor John Hagee alongside politicians from both parties at an official pro-Israel demonstration, Greenblatt’s embrace of Musk really calls into question how seriously we should take American Zionists when they call others antisemitic. We are seriously at the point where the largest group in America supposedly dedicated to combatting “defamation of the Jewish people” considers Elon Musk to be an ally (and has nothing to say about Hagee’s antisemitism), but considers Jewish Voice for Peace and IfNotNow (Jewish organizations that have protested Israel’s bombing of Gaza) to be antisemitic hate groups. Any group that holds that stance is not serious about the real threats antisemitism poses to Jewish people—they are only using it as a weapon to silence critics of their foreign policy goals.
AROUND THE STATES
❧ Murfreesboro, Tennessee briefly had a law on the books banning public homosexuality. Back in June, the city enacted new “community decency” legislation that prohibits “indecency, lewd behavior, nudity or sexual conduct” in public spaces. This might sound normal enough, but as the independent journalist Erin Reed first uncovered, it was actually breathtakingly homophobic. You see, the ordinance referred to section 21-71 of the city code for its all-important definitions, and the code defined inappropriate “sexual conduct” as including simply “homosexuality”—that is, not just gay sex acts, but simply being visibly gay. As The New Republic notes, the legislation came on the heels of several other attacks on LGBTQ rights in Tennessee, whose governor Bill Lee attempted to ban drag shows at the state level in February. Thanks to an ACLU lawsuit, the Murfreesboro city code (written in 1949) has been updated, and no longer defines “homosexuality” as a crime. The fact that it took a lawsuit to dispose of the homophobic language, though, remains disturbing.
❧ The NYPD is getting new radios that will prevent the public from listening to police frequencies. Proponents of the new system, which will cost the city $500 million, say it’s important to protect the names of witnesses and victims that might be spoken over the airwaves. But at the same time, encrypted radios will make it impossible for journalists to report on police activity at a moment’s notice, and will dramatically reduce the NYPD’s transparency and accountability to the general public. Just as cops often conveniently “forget” to turn on their body cameras, it’s easy to imagine a situation where the audio from a police shooting or brutality case is “lost”—and without a public broadcast, no one would know what really happened. Speaking to The New York Times, Albert Fox Cahn—who leads New York’s nonprofit Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, or STOP—says “The idea that we’re going to turn this sort of vital information into something that’s only accessible to the public at the whims of police is just truly chilling.”
⚜ LONG READ: Also in Tennessee, lawmakers are calling for an audit of the state’s juvenile justice system. The call comes after ProPublica and WPLN unearthed the use of brutal corporal punishment and solitary confinement in Knoxville’s Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center. Paige Pfleger writes:
With a glint in his eye, Richard L. Bean reminisces about the days when children in his detention center could be paddled. “We didn’t have any problems then,” Bean says. “I’d whip about six or eight a year and it run pretty smooth. They’d say, ‘You don’t want him to get hold of you.’” Once, he chuckles, a kid had to be held down by four guards to be spanked. Bean took the helm of this East Tennessee detention center — now named the Richard L. Bean Juvenile Service Center — in 1972. The laws and the science on how to treat children in detention have changed a bit since then. Yet Bean has held on to an old-fashioned approach to his work. These days, he’s reliant on a different tool for keeping kids in line: locking them alone in cells for hours — sometimes even days — at a time. “What we do is treat everybody like they’re in here for murder,” he says. “You don’t have a problem if you do that.” Most of the children in the Bean Center are not in for murder — in fact, most have only been charged with a crime, but are awaiting court dates…
The investigation found that the Bean Center placed children in solitary confinement more than any other juvenile detention center in the state (though, it should be stressed that the appropriate amount of time for anyone to be in solitary confinement is zero minutes and zero seconds):
In 2016, a suit in Rutherford County challenged the use of solitary confinement in the juvenile detention center after a child was kept in solitary for days for disrupting class. Around the same time, research emerged showing that isolating children doesn’t actually improve their behavior — if anything, it could worsen it. Solitary confinement can cause psychological impacts like depression, anxiety or psychosis, and young people are especially vulnerable to those effects. The majority of suicides inside juvenile correction facilities in the United States happen when a child is isolated. So in 2017, DCS mandated that juvenile detention centers throughout the state change the way they use seclusion, adding guidelines and a reporting requirement. The new standards said that children kept in seclusion inside Tennessee’s juvenile detention centers could be locked into cells that are 50 square feet — about the size of a U-Haul cargo van — usually with a concrete slab for a bed and a metal toilet affixed to the wall…
…WPLN and ProPublica reviewed eight years of… inspection reports, covering 2016 to 2023, and found multiple instances of children being locked up in seclusion — sometimes for days or more than a week — for minor rule infractions like laughing during meals or talking during class. One facility put a child in seclusion for eight days for simply having head lice, which the inspector called “a little extreme.” And while many facilities were documented using seclusion improperly, the Richard L. Bean Center emerged as particularly prolific in its use of seclusion as a means of punishment, even years after the state standards were imposed.
AROUND THE WORLD
❧ Javier Milei, a self-proclaimed “anarcho-capitalist,” is Argentina’s next president. Milei defeated Sergio Massa, the center-left Peronist candidate who had served as Minister of the Economy since 2022, by a margin of 56 to 44 percent of the vote in Thursday’s run-off election. Milei is a relative newcomer to politics, having started his electoral career in 2020 with a promise to “blow up” Argentina’s establishment, and he’s certainly done that. When he takes office on December 10, he’ll be the world’s first libertarian head of state. A former economist, radio host, Rolling Stones cover musician and “tantric sex instructor”, Milei is popularly known as “El Loco” for his love of strange stunts and costumes. In the past, he’s dressed up as a yellow-and-black superhero called “General Ancap,” brandished a chainsaw when he talks about “slashing” government spending, and used a huge dollar bill with his face on it to illustrate his desire to abolish the peso. This might make him sound pretty entertaining, but there’s a darker side to Milei’s politics. Among other things, he wants to ban abortion in Argentina, denies that human activity causes climate change, and wants to make it legal to buy and sell human organs. Unfortunately, it’s understandable why Argentinians would want to kick out their established political leaders; the country has been going through a terrible inflation crisis, with rates reaching 143 percent in October, and two-fifths of its people currently live in poverty. But electing a far-right lunatic with strange hair is never the right answer, whether his name’s Boris Johnson, Donald Trump, or Javier Milei. In the days to come, we can only hope the Argentinian left pulls itself together, and mounts a strong comeback.
❧ In Spain, Pedro Sanchez has been reelected as Prime Minister—but thousands on the right are already protesting against him. Sanchez, a socialist who’s been Spain’s Prime Minister since 2018, gained the backing of 179 of the 350 members of the lower house of Parliament in order to stay in power this week. But in exchange, he had to support a controversial amnesty deal for Catalan separatists, who launched an unsuccessful bid to secede from Spain in 2017. As he attempts to form a coalition government with members of the Catalan separatist parties, Sanchez has been greeted by violent protests in Madrid, where both the conservative Populist Party and the far-right Vox party have rallied their supporters against him. With all this turmoil, it’s anyone’s guess if Sanchez will actually be able to govern effectively—and the future of the Catalan question is still very much up for grabs.
⚜ The U.S. is expanding its military and economic presence in Greenland. Adam Federman of InTheseTimes Magazine explains how this has increased Cold War tensions with Russia and how military bases and new mining projects have affected the local indigenous communities:
In the spring of 1953, when Regina Kristiansen was 14, she and her family were forced to leave their village of Uummannaq in northwestern Greenland, hundreds of miles above the Arctic Circle. At the behest of Danish authorities, who promised them new homes, they were given just a few days to gather their belongings. Kristiansen drove a dogsled across the ice for two days before reaching a barren island in Baffin Bay. Along with seven other families, they lived in makeshift tents for months as storms lashed the shore and winter approached. One woman gave birth in the tents. Another, a village elder, died before Denmark finished building their homes…
Altogether, 116 people from 26 families left Uummannaq, and their homes were burned to the ground. At the time, the Danish government — then a waning colonial power — characterized the move as voluntary. But in fact, the families were evicted to allow for the expansion of a U.S. Air Force base called Thule. The 233,000-acre base and deepwater port is one of the largest U.S. military installations in the world, and it played a prominent role in North American missile defense during the Cold War. It has also been a source of some of the U.S. military’s most closely held secrets…
This April, 70 years later, the U.S. military held a ceremony at the base during Greenland Heritage Week and acknowledged the “hardship and pain” caused by the relocation. The purpose of the event was to unveil a new name for the facility: Pituffik, a Greenlandic word that refers to the larger region, where Inuit hunters have lived for millennia, since Greenland’s first inhabitants traveled over the ice from Canada some 4,500 years ago. But despite the gesture of a name change, the ceremony, attended by top Danish and U.S. defense officials, also signaled America’s return. Over the past 15 years, a quiet race has been underway among the world’s superpowers to gain control over the Arctic, with the United States, Russia and China all vying for dominance in a region with enormous strategic and economic value…
Mining poses a new threat to this way of life and a region that, aside from the U.S. air base, has seen little development in the past 70 years…Dredging the beaches to separate the heavy mineral sand would generate large volumes of silt and wastewater, some of which would be pumped back into the ocean, destroying some of the primary food sources for walruses. According to the North Atlantic Marine Mammal Commission, shipping traffic would increase by up to 80% during the short ice-free season, when several species, including nearly a dozen on Greenland’s “red list” of threatened plants and animals, inhabit the area. Walruses and other migratory animals, including bowhead whales and narwhals — which are highly sensitive to noise — might leave the area altogether…
The ilmenite deposit also underlies the former village of Moriusaq, where several families forced out of Uummannaq in 1953 eventually settled, in part because of its proximity to some of the region’s best hunting grounds. Over time, the population dwindled, until the settlement was officially closed in 2010.
⚜ VIDEO: Last week, the Israel Defense Force raided al-Shifa hospital in Gaza, claiming that the enclave’s largest hospital was a “Hamas command center.” The operation led to the deaths of at least 179 people according to the hospital’s director, while the World Health Organization uncovered a mass grave earlier this week and described the hospital as a “death zone” with hundreds of patients now in critical condition. Meanwhile, Israel has attempted to show “evidence” that al-Shifa actually contained the massive terrorist hub they claimed it did, but have fallen woefully short of what was promised. Here’s Krystal Ball of Breaking Points going over how the IDF’s grandiose claims failed to be born out:
HAPPY 81st BIRTHDAY, JOSEPH ROBINETTE BIDEN!
PLEASE DON’T BURN DOWN THE WHITE HOUSE WITH YOUR HAZARDOUS-LOOKING CAKE!
CROOKS vs. SICKOS (or, “What’s going on with our politicians?”)
❧ As Israel’s bombardment of the strip surpasses 12,700 Palestinians killed, including more than 5,000 children, a small number of American politicians has finally called for a ceasefire, including 24 members of the House and two senators: Dick Durbin (D-IL) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR). But you may notice that a rather conspicuous name is missing from the list: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT). Sanders has been very critical of Israel’s actions, saying “Netanyahu’s right-wing extremist government does not have the right to wage almost total warfare against the Palestinian people.” He has also called for U.S. military aid to Israel to be conditioned on Israel’s ending of the devastating crippling blockade of supplies to Gaza and Israel’s willingness to participate in peace talks. But he has stopped short of calling for a ceasefire, saying “I don’t know how you can have a ceasefire, [a] permanent ceasefire, with an organization like Hamas, which is dedicated to turmoil and chaos and destroying the state of Israel.” (He seems to not understand that a “ceasefire” means that Hamas would also have to stop fighting and likely release many if not all of the hostages.)
Sanders has instead insisted upon the much more timid language of ending “indiscriminate bombing” or initiating a “significant pause,” both of which are much more slippery and subjective. (Israel, of course, claims that it is not bombing indiscriminately. They instead insist that every bit of civilian infrastructure in Gaza is crawling with Hamas and therefore legitimate to destroy—though that’s still not legal according to international law. Others admit they simply do not consider any Gazan civilians innocent, such as Israeli president Isaac Herzog who has said “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible...It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not involved. It’s absolutely not true. They could have risen up.”)
But Sanders has dug in his heels even after 330 of his former DNC delegates called on him to support a ceasefire, as well as more than 300 former campaign staffers. As the delegates’ letter points out, Sanders “not only reshaped the national discourse regarding Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine, but also bravely confronted Congress’s unchecked support for Israel in terms of military aid and weapons” throughout his career. But, at this moment where his leadership would be essential — not just as a leading progressive and critic of American foreign policy, but as one of America’s most respected Jewish legislators — he has let down many people who have supported him for his brave, unapologetic moral stances in the past.
❧ [CONTENT WARNING: GROSS] Senator Markwayne Mullin has been accused of picking other people’s noses. In the last News Briefing, we told you how Mr. Mullin lost his temper and challenged Teamster leader Sean O’Brien to a fistfight during a Congressional hearing. Well, apparently that’s not even the most inappropriate thing he’s done during his time in office. According to Representative David Trott and his wife Kathleen, Mullin started “walking up and down the bus” during a 2015 Congressional trip to Israel, and when he found someone who’d fallen asleep, would “put his finger in their nose and take a picture,” apparently as a joke. Now, this might seem like puerile nonsense, unworthy of attention in a serious publication like Current Affairs—and it is. But in one way, Mullin has actually done a valuable service to the American people. Through his antics, he’s demonstrated that members of Congress can be every bit as stupid, childish, and vulgar as anyone else, and that there’s no particular reason to respect them or the laws they pass. The sooner people learn that lesson, the better.
SHRIMP FACT OF THE WEEK
Scientists in Indonesia have discovered a shrimp that lives in the trees!
The ongoing Expedition Cyclops, a partnership between several Indonesian scientific groups and the University of Oxford, has encountered several interesting animals in the Cyclops Mountains. The most surprising, though, might be a species of “tree-dwelling shrimp” that lives hundreds of meters away from the coast. We currently know very little about the shrimp—it doesn’t even have a Latin name yet. However, it’s very small, and the scientists say it “uses its hindlegs to undertake long jumps when chased by predators.” The team calls its discovery an “enormous surprise,” which seems like an accurate description of having a shrimp suddenly leap toward you out of a tree.
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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