July 30, 2024 ❧ New Israeli war crimes, Kamala's VP search, and climate protestors take on J.D. Vance

Plus: New York bans graphic school-shooter training, Venezuela's disputed election results, and the sharks are on coke now

And the news shall set you free

FIGHTING BACK

❧ Climate protestors just occupied J.D. Vance's office. On Monday, the halls of the U.S. Senate office building got some unexpected visitors. Early in the morning, a group of young environmentalists from the Sunrise Movement showed up outside J.D. Vance’s office and blockaded the hallway, carrying banners that said things like “VANCE PROFITS, WE PAY THE PRICE” and “VANCE: STOP KILLING GOOD JOBS.” They were there to protest the Ohio senator’s abysmal policies around climate change—and his heel-turn hypocrisy from what used to be some fairly reasonable views. 

As the activists point out, Vance wasn’t always terrible on the environment. As recently as 2020, he was openly talking about “a climate problem in our society,” and even criticized the natural-gas industry, saying it “isn’t exactly the sort of thing that’s gonna take us to a clean energy future.” His investment portfolio has also included some distinctly “green” companies, including an energy firm called Heliogen whose mission statement was to “replace fossil fuels.” But when he ran for the Senate in 2022, he received around $283,000 from the oil and gas industry—and purely coincidentally, his views on climate reversed. Nowadays, he says he doesn’t think there’s a “climate crisis” after all, and goes around yelling “Drill, baby, drill!” at Trump rallies.

(Photo: Adah Crandall, Sunrise Movement)

Young people are a lot smarter than anyone gives them credit for. They can see when someone’s bought and paid for, and J.D. Vance doesn’t exactly make it subtle. In a public statement, one of the protestors, 21-year-old Takeira Bell, summed up the problem with him and his politics perfectly: 

“JD Vance is willing to sell our futures to the highest bidder. He will kill green jobs, give tax breaks to billionaires, and deny that there is a climate crisis just to keep the campaign contributions flowing. Today, we showed up to tell him, ‘We won’t let you sell out our families to the highest bidder.'”

Importantly, though, it’s not just Republicans on the receiving end of the Sunrise Movement’s criticism. Following their occupation of Vance’s office, the volunteers—minus eight who got arrested—also held a march to the Democratic National Committee offices in Washington, D.C., demanding that Kamala Harris adopt a strong climate platform. That’s exactly the kind of bipartisan pressure that’ll be needed, if we’re going to get any real progress on the climate before it’s too late. 

Image: Sunrise Movement via Twitter

AROUND THE WORLD

❧ Over the weekend, an Israeli soldier shared a video of himself blowing up the main water reservoir in Rafah, a flagrant violation of international law that has already been denounced by the United Nations. The water reserve is in the neighborhood of Tal al-Sultan, near an area Israel designated as a safe zone. “The destruction of the water reservoir will exacerbate the crisis in the city,” Rafah’s mayor, Ahmed Soufi said. 

Even before this attack, Gaza was already dealing with an unthinkable water crisis. Earlier this month, Oxfam reported that Israel’s campaign of wanton destruction has reduced access to clean drinking water in the Strip by 94 percent, leaving fewer than 5 liters a day per person (the equivalent of less than a single toilet flush). Lama Abdul Samad, the Oxfam Water and Sanitation Specialist for the occupied Palestinian territories, said: 

“We’ve already seen Israel’s use of collective punishment and its use of starvation as a weapon of war. Now we are witnessing its weaponizing of water, which is already having deadly consequences. ”

Video: Andalou Agency

The destruction of the reservoir is one of countless instances of Israeli soldiers posting videos of themselves committing war crimes on social media. This has included videos of destroying civilian infrastructure, looting and vandalizing abandoned homes, and, in some cases, beating, humiliating, and executing detained Palestinians. The destruction often appears purely sadistic, without even a fig leaf of military justification, and this case is no different: The soldier who posted it online said he blew up the reservoir “in honor of Shabbat.” 

The IDF’s war crimes are often blamed on rogue actors who are portrayed as unrepresentative of the broader Israeli military. But Haaretz reports that the attack on the water site was carried out by soldiers with the “approval of their commanders.” The U.S. State Department, as usual, said that it was deferring to Israel for an investigation into what happened. (The Israeli army has famously never lied about anything, so we needn’t get any independent investigators involved.)

We are now approaching the tenth month of this genocidal war, and even as atrocity after atrocity is made public, the Biden administration has put no material pressure on Israel to stop the carnage. Many Democrats who made a show of boycotting Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech before Congress last week still voted to provide him with military aid back in April, when the death toll was already at 34,000. Words will not suffice, and nobody can plead ignorance about what is happening. The world is often morally gray, but this is not. Anyone in power who does not support cutting off military aid to Israel should be considered culpable for the crimes against humanity they commit.

In other news…

• [CONTENT WARNING: Sexual assault and torture] Israel’s military police also arrested nine IDF soldiers at the infamous Sde Teiman detention center who are suspected of brutally gang raping a Palestinian detainee—one of many cases of abuse against Palestinian POWs held there, which reportedly also include the use of electric chairs as torture instruments and “amputating limbs after inflicting injuries due to constant handcuffing.” Dozens of far-right Israelis, apparently outraged by the suggestion that raping and torturing Palestinian POWs might be worthy of punishment, launched a January 6-style riot at the torture facility. Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir and several other members of the Knesset reportedly rushed to join in the attack. (Haaretz)

The Knesset, meanwhile, called an emergency session and ended up debating whether raping Palestinian POWs was “legitimate." Opinion was divided. (Screenshots from Knesset TV via Jon Ben-Menachem on Twitter)

• Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has floated the possibility of launching a military intervention “so that Israel cannot do these ridiculous things to Palestine,” saying that “just as we entered Libya, we can do something similar to them.” (Al Jazeera)
  
  
• In Venezuela, the official version of the election results are in. They say Nicolás Maduro held on to the presidency, with 51 percent of the vote to opposition leader Edmundo González’s 44 percent. However, González and his supporters are claiming fraud—which is plausible, since González was leading by as much as 30 points in the polls—and big street protests have broken out in Caracas. (Associated Press)

Of course, appearing on the ballot this many times probably helps. 

(Image: National Electoral Council of Venezuela, via Los Angeles Times)

• The British Labour Party reportedly offered “private assurances” that it would not investigate corrupt relationships between Rupert Murdoch-owned newspapers and the police, in exchange for endorsements from the Sun and Sunday Times. Keir Starmer strikes again! (Tribune)
  
  
• Several Argentinian lawmakers in Javier Milei’s government got caught visiting dictatorship-era military officials in prison, where they’re serving out sentences for crimes against humanity. (Buenos Aires Times)
  
  
• Hundreds of demonstrators—most of them young people—have gathered in central Nigeria to protest the cost of living currently gripping the country. “The prices of everyday commodities have astronomically increased, uninterrupted electricity is a distant dream and fuel queues remain a common feature of life in the country, despite Nigeria’s status as one of the world’s top oil and gas producers,” says the Guardian.
  
  

• Across the Pacific and Indian Oceans, 73 percent of corals have been hit with enough heat to begin bleaching. It is the most widespread bleaching event on record, and scientists are scrambling to figure out how to protect the reefs as climate change worsens. (Mother Jones)

AROUND THE STATES

❧ As a new school year approaches, New York state has banned realistic “active shooter” drills in classrooms. The state will no longer allow the use of prop guns or for actors to role-play as shooters and victims, something which is startlingly common across the United States. As school shootings have grown more common over the last 20 years, school districts have gone about making their shooting simulations more elaborate, and often outright traumatizing. A 2019 article for NBC News described how horrifying they can often be:

Some schools [went] so far as to use fake blood and fire blanks at students. A drill last month at an Indiana school prompted outrage when teachers were shot execution-style with pellet guns, leaving them injured.

At the same time, students’ anxieties have swelled. Some are not told that the lockdowns are just drills, prompting them to send what they believe are final goodbyes over text to their parents or faint or throw up. Others are afraid to go to school in the days following the drills.

During an active shooter drill at Deering High School in Portland, MI, students lay on the floor simulating having been shot.

(Photo: Derek Davis, Portland Press Herald via Getty Images)

These are the sorts of frightening scenarios that New York, thankfully, has outlawed in its drills, citing evidence that they can be traumatizing to children. But the state will still allow less immersive drills, which often involve teachers turning off the lights, locking and barricading doors, and having students hide under their desks. It will also require that four of these drills, as well as eight evacuation drills, be performed each year, which seems quite excessive. New York says that its new guidelines for these drills will be “trauma-informed,” but it seems like requiring children to cower in the dark multiple times a school year could have a traumatic effect on them. 

New York is one of more than forty U.S. states that require active shooter drills in their classrooms, and they are practiced in 95 percent of school districts across the country. But according to the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety, “there is almost no research affirming the value of these drills for preventing school shootings or protecting the school community when shootings do occur.” 

Most states have no regulations on how realistic those simulations can be, which is a major problem in and of itself. But the fact that active shooter drills are a regular ritual for the vast majority of students is a sign of how thoroughly normalized gun violence has begun, even while the U.S. is an extreme outlier compared with peer nations. This year, the U.S. has averaged more than one mass shooting per day. This is a fixable problem, as countries that ban firearms have demonstrated. But instead of taking action, our leaders have treated gun violence like a force of nature, preferring solutions designed to prepare us for the inevitability of mass shootings rather than trying to make them less inevitable.

PAST AFFAIRS

In June 2022, Arjun S. Byju examined “How Active Shooter Trainings’ Normalize Mass Shootings”

“The assumption implicit in all active shooter trainings is that these violent rampages will happen and may strike “anywhere at any time.” Indeed, for those who watch the news, it may seem obvious that public mass shootings are increasing in frequency and severity and can occur anywhere from playgrounds to nursing homes. This is surely distressing, and any honest and holistic assessment of the trend would raise two obvious questions: why do these shootings happen and how can we prevent them?”

Art by John Biggs, from Issue 36 of Current Affairs Magazine, May/June 2022

In other news…

• The Eighth Circuit court of appeals has struck down Missouri’s “revolving door” anti-corruption law, which prevents politicians from becoming lobbyists for two years after leaving office. (Missouri Independent)
  
  
• In a much-needed win for public transit, the city council of Mobile, Alabama has struck a deal to build an Amtrak line to New Orleans, which may be operational as soon as next February. (Times-Picayune)

It’s frankly embarrassing that we don’t have these in every U.S. city. (Image: Amtrak)

• Officials in Ramsey County, Minnesota have been billing people who call the public crisis hotline—including people considering suicide, who’ve received bills for up to $342. (KMSP)
  
  
• New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams just declared a state of emergency in city jails—where there have been 26 deaths since January 2022—to prevent a ban on solitary confinement from taking effect. The city’s Public Advocate, Jumaane Williams, is calling it a “desperate abuse of power” and has promised to see the ban implemented. (The Guardian)
  
  
• After two pedestrians were killed by traffic in a single week, including a 30-year-old pediatric resident on a bicycle, hundreds of Philadelphia residents rode their bikes to City Hall to demand that the city install concrete protective barriers to bike lanes. (Philly Voice)
  
  
• Nebraska—a state that struggles to bring in outsiders—is hoping for an influx of “climate migrants” from coastal areas to “revitalize” the state. Yet another reason to stop climate change: If you don’t, you may have to move to Nebraska. (Nebraska Examiner)
  
  
• For Truthout, Ron Hochbaum writes that last month’s Supreme Court ruling allowing state and cities to criminalize homelessness “formalizes segregation of the poor” in a way that “echoes past laws and rulings dictating who’s allowed in public.”

HAPPY NATIONAL WHISTLEBLOWER DAY!

In the past, Current Affairs has covered all kinds of people—like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange—who have made the world a better place by exposing the wrongdoing of powerful people and organizations. But did you know there’s an entire day for whistleblowers? 

It’s today! So if you know something shady about your boss or your local government, why not celebrate July 30 by sending a securely encrypted email to a publication you trust about it? 

CROOKS vs. SICKOS (Or, “What’s going on with our politicians and oligarchs?”)

❧ The hunt is on for Kamala Harris’ running mate. Having just replaced Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket, Harris now has until August 7 to choose her VP candidate—just over a week. Her campaign is reportedly engaged in a “thorough” search, and has a shortlist of “roughly a dozen” names. However, the Democrats apparently feel that one woman of color on the ticket is enough diversity, and are considering only white dudes for the role. 

• One name that keeps coming up is Pennsylvania’s Governor Josh Shapiro—but he’s a vocal supporter of school privatization and fracking, and has slandered pro-Palestine protestors with comparisons to the KKK. So he’s not exactly ideal. 

No relation to Ben Shapiro, thankfully. (Image: Wikimedia Commons)

• There’s also Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and current advocate against gun violence. Astronauts are pretty cool, but Kelly is one of just three Democrats who refuse to support the pro-labor PRO Act, which puts a big stain on his record. 

He’s a rocket man, resisting union membership alone. 

(Image: Gage Skidmore via Flickr)

• In the Guardian, Mehdi Hasan makes the case that it should be Minnesota’s Governor Tim Walz, whose policy achievements include universal free school lunch, legalizing recreational marijuana, and banning the homophobic practice of “conversion therapy.” Walz’s biggest flaw is that he called in the National Guard during BLM protests in 2020, which he described as causing “[wanton] destruction and chaos.” He also endorsed Amy Klobuchar in the 2020 primary, which shows a certain lack of judgment. 

Who doesn’t like a nice orchestral Walz?

(Image: Governor Tim Walz via Flickr)

• The veepstakes has also dredged up a name that’s been mercifully obscure since 2020: “Mayor Pete” Buttigieg. After all, nothing has gone wrong with transportation since he was put in charge of it! Why not try the whole country?
  
  
• Amusingly, nobody seems to be talking about John Fetterman, who was being touted as “the future of the Democratic Party” back in 2022. Two years of being a huge jerk will do that.

In other news…

• According to a new poll, Nebraska labor leader Dan Osborn—who’s running for the Senate as an independent—is now tied against Republican incumbent Deb Fischer. (KLIN)
  
  
• In a series of leaked emails from 2014-2016, J.D. Vance said a lot of things that starkly contradict his rhetoric today, including supporting a friend through her gender transition and saying that “I hate the police.” (Daily Beast)
  
  
• After previously saying that anyone who impersonates others without marking themselves as parody would be banned from Twitter, Elon Musk tweeted an A.I.-generated deepfake video of Kamala Harris calling herself “the ultimate diversity hire.” (Twitter)
  
  
• The opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics featured drag queens and Republicans are not taking it well. (New Republic)

Not beating the “weird” allegations. (Tweet: Rod Dreher)

• Hamilton Nolan writes for How Things Work about how politicians are attempting to appeal to cryptocurrency traders, arguing that “The more that politicians talk about Bitcoin, the greater the chance they are frauds.”
  
  
• A billionaire Democratic donor on the board of Microsoft is calling for Kamala Harris to fire antitrust crusader Lina Khan from her position as chairwoman of the Federal Trade Commission. (The Lever)

SHARK FACT OF THE WEEK

You’ve heard of Cocaine Bear… get ready for Cocaine Sharks!

Brazilian marine biologists recently conducted a study in which they observed 13 sharp nosed sharks from the coast of Rio de Janeiro who tested positive for high amounts of cocaine in their systems. It’s not entirely clear how the sharks ended up on cocaine—theories range from illegal labs to packs of cocaine dumped by traffickers. 

Nevertheless, the study confirmed something that was long suspected to be true: That sharks, who’d been observed making bizarre erratic movements in areas known for the drug trade, were being affected in some way by narcotics dropped by humans. This was even the subject of a low-budget film, titled Cocaine Shark, that received a resounding 1.8 out of 10 on IMDB.

Imagining an apex predator in a coke-fueled rage is definitely a good subject for science fiction. But while the cocaine angle is attention-grabbing, biologists say that it’s a window into a much bigger problem: “Cocaine gets people interested,” Tracy Fanara, an environmental engineer in Florida who worked on Shark Week’s recent “Cocaine Sharks” documentary, told the New York Times. “But we have antibiotics, antidepressants, pharmaceuticals, sunscreen, insecticides, fertilizers. All of these chemicals are entering our ecosystem.”

Instead of the Jaws theme, these sharks play Pusha T on repeat.

(Image: Kevin Bryant via Flickr)