April 30, 2024

Universities Face an Urgent Question: What Makes a Protest Antisemitic?

Pro-Palestinian student activists say their movement is anti-Zionist but not antisemitic. It is not a distinction that everyone accepts.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/nyregion/college-protests-columbia-campus.html

https://archive.ph/YGHvh


In a video shared widely online, a leader of the pro-Palestinian student movement at Columbia University stands near the center of a lawn on the campus and calls out, “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.” Dozens of protesters, who have created a tent village called the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” repeat his words back to him: “We have Zionists who have entered the camp.” “Walk and take a step forward,” the leader says, as the students continue to repeat his every utterance, “so that we can start to push them out of the camp.” The protesters link arms and march in formation toward three Jewish students who have come inside the encampment.

https://twitter.com/jessicaschwalb7/status/1782252789625663770
“It was really scary because we had like 75 people quickly gathered around, encircling us, doing exactly what he said to do,” Avi Weinberg, one of the Jewish students, said in an interview. He and his friends had gone to see the encampment, not intending to provoke, he said. When it began to feel tense, one of the students started to record the encounter. They are not sure precisely how the protest leader determined they were supportive of Israel. “Suddenly we are being called ‘the Zionists’ in their encampment,” Mr. Weinberg said. “He put a target on our back.”

On Thursday, the incident took on new significance when a video from January resurfaced on social media showing the same protest leader, Khymani James, saying “Zionists don’t deserve to live” and “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists.” The next day, Columbia officials announced they had barred Mr. James from campus. Columbia has been ground zero in a national student movement against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, with protesters setting up encampments on campuses across the country. Hundreds of demonstrators — at Columbia, Yale, Emerson College, the University of Southern California and beyond — have been arrested.



Pro-Palestinian demonstrators across the country say Israel is committing what they see as genocide against the Palestinian people, and they aim to keep a spotlight on the suffering. But some Jewish students who support Israel and what they see as its right to defend itself against Hamas say the protests have made them afraid to walk freely on campus. They hear denunciations of Zionism and calls for a Palestinian uprising as an attack on Jews themselves. The tension goes to the heart of a question that has touched off debate among observers and critics of the protests: At what point does pro-Palestinian political speech in a time of war cross the line into the type of antisemitism colleges have vowed to combat?

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April 30, 2024

They Shoot Owls in California, Don't They?

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/29/science/california-barred-spotted-owls.html

https://archive.ph/nBDwO



In the ancient forests of the Pacific Northwest, the northern spotted owl, a rare and fragile subspecies of spotted owl, is being muscled out of its limited habitat by the barred owl, its larger and more ornery northeastern cousin. The opportunistic barred owl has been moving in on spotted owl turf for more than half a century, competing with the locals for food and space, outnumbering, out-reproducing and inevitably chasing them out of their nesting spots. Barred owls have also emerged as a threat to the California spotted owl, a closely related subspecies in the Sierra Nevada and the mountains of coastal and Southern California.


Crammed into marginal territories and bedeviled by wildfires, northern spotted owl populations have declined by up to 80 percent over the last two decades. As few as 3,000 remain on federal lands, compared with 11,000 in 1993. In the wilds of British Columbia, the northern spotted owl has vanished; only one, a female, remains. If the trend continues, the northern spotted owl could become the first owl subspecies in the United States to go extinct.


In a last-ditch effort to rescue the northern spotted owl from oblivion and protect the California spotted owl population, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has proposed culling a staggering number of barred owls across a swath of 11 to 14 million acres in Washington, Oregon and Northern California, where barred owls — which the agency regards as invasive — are encroaching. The lethal management plan calls for eradicating up to half a million barred owls over the next 30 years, or 30 percent of the population over that time frame. The owls would be dispatched using the cheapest and most efficient methods, from large-bore shotguns with night scopes to capture and euthanasia.


Karla Bloem, the executive director of the International Owl Center in Minnesota, is conflicted over the prospect of killing one species to protect another. “The concept of shooting birds is awful — nobody wants that,” she said. “But none of the alternatives have worked, and at this late date no other option is viable. Extinction is a forever thing.” Bob Sallinger, the executive director of Bird Conservation Oregon, agreed but emphasized that the culling must complement the restoration and preservation of the few remaining old-growth forests. “The science clearly shows that you must both protect and increase habitat and remove some level of barred owls if the northern spotted owl is to have a chance of survival,” he said.

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April 30, 2024

The US says it opposes the International Criminal Court's investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/israel-icc-war-crimes-gaza-us-z6p08j7ch



The US has said it opposes the International Criminal Court’s investigation into alleged Israeli war crimes in Gaza after reports the court was poised to issue arrest warrants against Binyamin Netanyahu and other officials. Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, is understood to have asked President Biden to block the inquiry. The court, which is based in The Hague, is believed to be considering warrants for the arrest of Netanyahu; Yoav Gallant, his defence minister; and Herzi Halevi, the Israel Defence Forces chief of staff.


Despite public dissent at Netanyahu’s handling of the conflict over recent weeks, the Biden administration offered a public show of support for him on Monday. “We’ve been really clear about the ICC investigation,” Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said. “We do not support it. We don’t believe that they have the jurisdiction.” Neither Israel nor the United States are among the court’s 124 member states. “Under my leadership, Israel will never accept any attempt by the ICC to undermine its inherent right of self defence,” Netanyahu wrote on Twitter/X last week. “While the ICC will not affect Israel’s actions, it would set a dangerous precedent that threatens the soldiers and officials of all democracies fighting savage terrorism and wanton aggression.”

Behind the scenes, however, the prime minister is reported to be increasingly concerned that the court could hold him personally accountable for the spiralling death toll in Gaza and for mounting allegations of war crimes by Israeli troops. Almost 35,000 Palestinians have been killed since the war began in October, according to the latest figures from the Hamas-run health ministry in Gaza. Netanyahu voiced his concern about the investigation during a phone call with Biden on Sunday, in which the two leaders discussed the latest hostage negotiations with Hamas and efforts to broker a ceasefire. Israeli officials told Axios that the prime minister asked Biden personally to help prevent the court from issuing warrants against him and other senior officials.

US officials have indicated that they remain uncertain if warrants are imminent, but have revealed that the prosecutor’s office is under pressure to take action against Israel from several member states and activist groups, Axios reported. Members of Congress have warned that any ICC arrest warrants for Israeli officials will be met with US retaliation. Mike Johnson, the Republican House speaker, said that a move targeting Israel would be “disgraceful” and demanded that the Biden administration should “use every available tool to prevent such an abomination”. “If unchallenged by the Biden administration, the ICC could create and assume unprecedented power to issue arrest warrants against American political leaders, American diplomats, and American military personnel,” Johnson said in a statement.

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April 30, 2024

Net Neutrality in Name Only?

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-04-29-net-neutrality-in-name-only/


The flurry of executive branch rulemaking pushed through under the deadline to avoid reversal in a future Congress feels like such a robust exertion of presidential power that the details often get fuzzy. All rules are not created equal, and some of them are missed opportunities rather than real protections for the public. A case in point is the Federal Communications Commission’s alleged restoration of net neutrality, which could actually create the thing that it’s supposed to prevent: tiered broadband speeds. According to some experts, big telecom firms are now poised to create special circumstances for Big Tech applications that deliver their content at faster speeds. The telecoms lobbied the FCC heavily for this privilege and are already making plans to exploit it.

We once had net neutrality in the U.S., after it passed during the Obama administration in 2015. Donald Trump’s FCC chair Ajit Pai rolled back those regulations in 2018. The telecom industry successfully delayed Democrats the opportunity to do anything about this by denying a fifth FCC commissioner from getting confirmed for 32 months. Gigi Sohn, the Biden administration’s first nominee for the commissioner seat that would give Democrats the majority, didn’t get a vote for two years and finally withdrew from consideration, after a $23 million lobbying campaign. The eventual appointee, Anna Gomez, was not considered as strong on consumer protection as Sohn, and didn’t make it onto the FCC until last September. That gave the agency a short window to pass net neutrality rules.



The rule, which was finalized last week, reclassifies broadband service under Title II of the Telecommunications Act, making it an essential service that will “ensure the internet is fast, open, and fair.” Under the new rule, providers are not allowed to block or throttle certain websites or applications, such as degrading the quality of streaming video. Those prohibitions deal with slowing down content online. However, as explained in an article by Barbara van Schewick, director of Stanford Law School’s Center for Internet and Society, the new rules could open up the opportunity for telecom companies to speed up certain content, by creating “fast lanes.” Mobile internet service providers (ISPs) in particular could give better speeds and quality in 5G networks to certain applications or websites in exchange for an increased consumer price.

This opportunity would not be available for “home basic broadband,” FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel said last week. But in 5G, ISPs can use “network slicing,” literally creating a separate area of spectrum for selected apps that would allow them to work perfectly even if the rest of the network is busy. Today, that is primarily available for mobile phones, but as The Washington Post has reported, other devices using the internet could have this network slicing ability, like video game terminals, or various smart devices for the home. In addition, cable companies could soon gain the ability to use network slicing for their internet products. More and more of what we think of as the internet, in other words, could have the ability to use fast lanes, at odds with the principles of net neutrality.

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April 30, 2024

The VA Bows to the Dialysis Duopoly

https://prospect.org/health/2024-04-29-va-bows-to-dialysis-duopoly/


The federal contracting system has long been riddled with monopolists, union-busters, and rampant profiteers. From the Pentagon to the Department of Agriculture, bad behavior from private companies is routinely and paradoxically rewarded with public funds, and little oversight from the government institutions. Sometimes, these corrupt dynamics literally cost lives. The Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has long been assailed for the costly and ineffective contracting network it has built to (often, grossly inadequately) service veterans’ health care needs.

This dysfunction has been both caused and worsened by privatization schemes that transfer untold billions to private corporations, at the cost of basic access to care for veterans. These ineffectual privatization schemes extend to everything from the VA’s IT network to its provision of mental health treatment. Each additional iteration of privatization undermines veterans’ basic access to quality care, allows the obscene profiteering of taxpayer money by private companies, fosters the formation of abusive monopolies, and endangers workers and patients alike. Perhaps nowhere is this dynamic more viciously on display than in the VA’s relationship with its dialysis contractors.



There are over 40,000 veterans enrolled in the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) who are suffering with kidney failure, as per the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK). Kidney failure is largely treated by dialysis, and approximately 81 percent of veterans who received dialysis treatment through the VHA do so through so-called “community providers,” which is now largely accomplished via two distinct programs; the Nationwide Dialysis Services Contract (NDSC) program and the Community Care Network (CCN). NDSC is significantly more expensive for dialysis services, in part because its fees are not capped by Medicare rates, as CCN is.

This is on its face obscene, given that providers have been found to charge NDSC patients significantly increased rates compared to Medicare patients, while providing no rationale for such a significant price differentiation. Of course, while (appropriately) attempting to remediate pricing discrepancies between government programs, CCN has itself proven to be a wildly inadequate system, reliant on private care providers that routinely underdeliver in their care commitments. Even so, it is the preferable (and significantly less expensive) system for dialysis care within the VHA and, except for limited circumstances, veterans are supposed to be referred to providers secured under the CCN umbrella first.

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April 30, 2024

A Great Week for American Workers

https://prospect.org/labor/2024-04-29-great-week-for-american-workers/


Over the past 50 years, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of weeks that have actually been great for American workers. It was just under half a century ago that California gave collective-bargaining rights to farmworkers (which at the time meant Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers) for the first time, since they’d been excluded from coverage under the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA). Fast-forward to 2018, when teachers in Republican states like West Virginia and Kentucky went on strike (with parental support) to successfully compel their states to increase school funding and decrease class sizes; and 2019, when a handful of Senate Democrats, chiefly Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, succeeded in amending a rewrite of NAFTA that actually gave workers a modicum of power. In the past couple of years, the new rank-and-file-elected regimes at both the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers won historically good contracts at, respectively, United Parcel Service and the Big Three automakers.

Those are the high points. In general, however, it’s pretty much been disaster after disaster for five decades: Reagan busting the air traffic controllers’ union, four failed congressional attempts to make the NLRA more functional, even more failed attempts to raise the federal minimum wage (stuck at $7.25 for the past 15 years), the passage of NAFTA, the enactment of permanent normal trade relations with China, and the relentless, sickening decline in the share of American workers who belong to unions, which now stands at 10 percent, and a bare 6 percent among private-sector workers. That decline correlates well with the shrinking of the American middle class. However, the seven days between Friday, April 19, and Thursday, April 25, saw a succession of worker victories that was almost breathtaking in its scope.

Two of those victories were the direct result of worker mobilizations. On Friday, the UAW won a recognition election at Volkswagen’s Chattanooga factory by a 73 to 27 percent margin, in an election where fully 84 percent of the eligible workers voted. Workers evidently viewed the UAW’s landmark victory in its strike several months earlier against General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis as proof positive that the union could raise their wages and benefits. They ignored the pleas of six Southern governors that the union would subvert “Southern values,” which most workers apparently understood to mean “low-wage work sustained by a lack of worker power.” The new UAW leadership, headed by president Shawn Fain, had made sure to keep the strike against the Big Three and the unprecedented contract they won in the public eye, and that leadership then appropriated $40 million to unionize factories in the South—historically, the graveyard of unionization efforts.



Last Thursday also saw the first bargaining session between the union of Starbucks baristas and their employer. In a joint statement, both sides said they made “significant progress” toward a model contract for Starbucks stores. Just as the new leadership at the UAW had mobilized thousands of its members to strike the Big Three, so the Starbucks baristas had mostly self-organized the more than 300 outlets that have voted to go union, despite the determined opposition of the company, which illegally fired a number of its employees for their involvement in the organizing campaign. Eventually, the grit and determination of those baristas to stick with their campaign, along with the company’s scorched-earth resistance, threatened to give Starbucks the kind of bad name that could alienate its clientele. Earlier this year, the company announced it would finally commence bargaining with its workers over a national contract.

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April 30, 2024

Reimagining balance through economic equalisation

In the Middle Ages, a new sense of balance fundamentally altered our understanding of nature and society

https://aeon.co/essays/how-socioeconomic-equalisation-generates-new-ideas-of-balance





We speak today of balanced performances, balanced tastes, balanced mental states, balances of power – the balance of nature itself. In all these cases, balance holds a valence so positive that it approaches an unquestioned ideal. The sense we have of its presence or absence in large measure determines our judgment of what is right or wrong, ordered or disordered, beneficial or destructive, safe or dangerous. Its opposite, imbalance, almost invariably signals sickness and malfunction. When we stop to think about it, we can recognise the enormous breadth of meaning we attach to our sense of balance, but we might also recognise, with some surprise, just how little we actually do think about it. The same was true for the Middle Ages. Despite the central place that the ideal of balance occupied in virtually every area of medieval thought, it was almost never questioned or problematised as a topic in itself. And this raises a question: why did it, and why is it still, almost invisible as a subject of historical analysis?

I can suggest two reasons. The first is that our recognition of balance’s great importance to our psychological, intellectual and social life tends to encourage a biological and hence essentialist understanding of it. Balance is balance: we all know what we mean by it, we all trust our sense of it, we never imagine that this sense is changing, or even that it can change. For this reason, it is difficult for us to think of it in historical terms, as determined within specific cultural contexts, or as changing over time. The second, equally relevant, is that balance lies beneath the level of conscious awareness. It is tied to a generalised sense, a wordless awareness, a diffuse feeling for how things properly work together or fit together in the world, extending all the way down to our discomfort when we see a picture hanging unevenly on a wall.

For this reason, I have argued that, rather than serving as the subject of thought, balance has traditionally served as the un-worded but pervasive ground of thought, exercising its great influence beneath the surface of conscious recognition. For the historian who has become aware of balance as an historical subject in itself, the first problem, then, is how to recognise the changes that have occurred to and within this un-worded sense over historical time. The second is how to uncover and reveal the profound intellectual effects these changes have made possible. Between approximately 1250 and 1375, a manifestly new sense of what balance is, and can be, emerged. When projected onto the workings of the world, this new sense transformed the ways the workings of both nature and society could be seen, comprehended and explained. The result was a momentous break with the intellectual past, opening up striking new vistas of imaginative and speculative possibility.

The group of medieval scholars whose speculations most clearly reflected this new modelling of balance occupied the very pinnacle of their intellectual culture – brilliant innovators whose ideas stand out today for their boldness and their forward-looking elements. Indeed, the innovations these scholars pioneered, and the new sense and model of balance that made this innovation possible, provided both a first view of, and a fundamental foundation for, the emergence of modern science. I speak of ‘models of balance’ because even though the complex sense of balance remained un-worded in the pre-modern period, it was far from unstructured. These models were (and still are) composed of a cluster of interlocking assumptions, perceptions and intuitions, characterised by a high degree of interior reflectivity and internal cohesion. Within any given intellectual culture, and at any given period in history, they possess a degree of internal order and organisation sufficient to allow them to be experienced as unified wholes, which adds greatly to their potential to influence the thinking mind. Though a product of history, they are felt to be ‘natural’, which further facilitates their absorption and acceptance.

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April 28, 2024

How Zendaya Became Hollywood's Reigning Red Carpet Queen

Red-carpet fashion experts give us the dish on why we can’t stop talking about the “Challengers” star’s clever, campy press tour gowns.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/obsessed/how-challengers-star-zendaya-became-hollywoods-red-carpet-queen



For weeks, it seems, the name on everybody’s lips has been Zendaya. Coming into the Challengers press tour, we all knew that Queen Z would show up to every red carpet ready to serve. After all, the looks she used to promote past films like Spider-Man: Homecoming and Dune: Part Two are still etched into our brains. Still, the eye-popping green and white ensembles she and stylist Law Roach have put together this year feel like their magnum opus; night after night, photo after photo, they’ve had us basically screaming “game, set, match!” (Is that the correct usage of that term? I’ll be the first to admit that my interest in tennis began when Luca Guadagnino announced this movie, and will end after it premieres this weekend.)


From her tennis ball stilettos, to her preppy white halter dress appropriately adorned with tiny tennis rackets, to her 2013 Louis Vuitton green and white checkered mini jacket dress, Zendaya has nailed the perfect balance of preppy and campy with each and every Challengers outing. But what is it that makes her red carpet fashions so captivating in the first place? According to the experts I spoke with, much of the appeal comes from her ability to play with a theme in both elegant and cheeky ways. It also doesn’t hurt that Zendaya looks like a model. Journalist and The Daily Beast’s Obsessed contributor Esther Zuckerman, who wrote the book on red-carpet couture with Beyond the Best Dressed: A Cultural History of the Most Glamorous, Radical, and Scandalous Oscar Fashion, kept returning to a specific word to describe Zendaya’s looks: purposeful.

Looking back on all of Zendaya’s most memorable get-ups—like the gorgeous Vivienne Westwood gown that she wore to the 2015 Oscars, the archival 1995 Thierry Mugler cyborg suit she wore for Dune: Part Two, and her many, many Challengers fits—Zuckerman observed that Zendaya and Law Roach are deliberate and creative in how they craft a whole, cohesive outfit from head to toe. It’s not just about the gown, or the shoes, or the accessories; all of it is part of one well-executed vision. And unlike some celebrities who tend to rely heavily on their stylists, Zuckerman believes Zendaya plays an active role in shaping her visual brand. “It’s very thoughtful. It’s very creative,” Zuckerman said of the collaboration. “It’s like two artists coming together.”


Beyond how put-together the outfits are, their real innovation is how they transform whatever movie Zendaya might be promoting into an aesthetic playground. It’s not unheard of for a movie’s stars to dress up in specifically targeted ways; Margot Robbie spent the entire Barbie press tour recreating the doll’s most iconic looks, and Zuckerman wagers that Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo will be wearing green and pink for the foreseeable future, until Wicked premieres in November. Still, what we see from Zendaya and Law Roach feels different. “As opposed to theme dressing, it’s sort of like variations on a theme,” Zuckerman said. “We’re taking the idea of ‘sci-fi fashion’ or ‘tennis fashion’ and spinning it out into something new.”

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April 27, 2024

Angela Alsobrooks new MD US Senate advert w/Governor Wes Moore, Senator Chris Van Hollen, Jamie Raskin, Steny Hoyer, etc

airing on telly/cable

April 27, 2024

Pro-Israel Agitator Shouts 'Kill the Jews,' Gets Everyone Else Arrested

Around 100 protesters were arrested on Saturday at a pro-Palestine encampment at Northeastern University, but not the one whose hate speech got everything shut down.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/pro-israel-agitator-shouts-kill-the-jews-gets-everyone-else-arrested



Northeastern University had around 100 peaceful protesters arrested on Saturday at its Boston campus’ pro-Palestine encampment, claiming that there had been reports of protesters using antisemitic slurs; but according to witnesses, the protester who spewed hate speech was a pro-Israel counter protester.

On Saturday morning, Northeastern Vice President for Communications Renata Nyul released a statement, announcing that the protest on Centennial Common would be cleared by campus police and local law enforcement. In the statement, she explained that the reason they were clearing the encampment was because of the presence of hate speech at the site.

“What began as a student demonstration two days ago, was infiltrated by professional organizers with no affiliation to Northeastern. Last night, the use of virulent antisemitic slurs, including ‘Kill the Jews,’ crossed the line,” she said. “We cannot tolerate this kind of hate on our campus."



Across the country, university administrators and politicians alike have publicized reports of antisemitic speech at student-led protests, as part of their justification for arresting students, and disbanding protests urging them to divest from Israel. These accounts often vary from eye-witness accounts of the peaceful protests. GBH’s Tori Bedford quickly confirmed that she had heard someone say “Kill the Jews,” but it wasn’t the peaceful pro-Palestine protesters. The chant came from a pro-Israel agitator who joined the crowd late Friday night.

https://twitter.com/Tori_Bedford/status/1784196633648885993
https://twitter.com/Tori_Bedford/status/1784253324448928077
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