What Happened: July 9, 2021

The Big Story

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is recommending that U.S. schools fully reopen in the fall and says that teachers and students who have been vaccinated are not required to wear masks. The new guidance released Friday calls for reopening schools even in cases where they are unable to implement all of the mitigation measures recommended by the agency. Students and faculty who have not been vaccinated—which includes all children under 12 who are ineligible for vaccines—are advised to continue to wear masks and, where practicable, to sit three feet apart. In its guidance, the CDC acknowledges that young people have endured significant hardships as a result of prolonged lockdowns and emphasizes that reopening schools should be the priority even in cases where not all mitigation measures can be applied. As reported here earlier this week, school enrollment is down overall by 3% in 2020-2021. The greatest drop has occurred at the lower grade levels, with pre-K and kindergarten enrollment falling by a combined 13% this year.

Read it here: https://nypost.com/2021/07/09/cdc-says-schools-should-prioritize-fully-reopening-this-fall/

Today’s Back Pages: Your Weekend Reads

The Rest

A sweeping new executive order from President Biden takes aim at corporate consolidation and the runaway power of big business. The order includes 72 initiatives to combat anticompetitive practices in the market, focused on those areas of the economy such as the technology sector, where monopolistic power is most concentrated. Among the measures of the order outlined in a White House fact sheet, several have no direct connection to antitrust actions but are instead designed to give American workers more power in the consumer and labor markets. These include efforts to “make it easier to change jobs and help raise wages by banning or limiting non-compete agreements,” “lower prescription drug prices,” and “make it easier for people to get refunds from airlines and to comparison shop for flights by requiring clear upfront disclosure of add-on fees.”
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/biden-takes-aim-at-corporate-consolidation-big-business-tactics-11625832017

Two Haitian Americans have been arrested among the 28 alleged mercenaries involved in the assassination of Haitian President Jovenel Moïse. Aside from the two Americans, the other 26 are all Colombian nationals.

In an op-ed yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, Donald Trump made a credible case for why his recently announced lawsuit against leading technology companies is a necessary response to their undemocratic attempts to censor and control public debate. Trump did not, however, address the fact that he appears to have no chance at winning the suit, which he has used to drive fundraising through his nonprofit, the America First Policy Institute. It’s worth noting that after the ex-president previously raised an estimated $280 million to fight alleged election fraud, it was reported that only $13 million went to funding those legal challenges.
Read it here: https://www.wsj.com/articles/donald-j-trump-why-im-suing-big-tech-11625761897

“It is not conservatives who have turned American politics into a culture war battle,” the left-wing writer and Mother Jones columnist Kevin Drum noted this week. “It is liberals.” Drum went on to argue that these neverending culture wars, of which the critical race theory debate is the latest battle, are driven by liberals’ social and political views, which have taken a dramatic turn to the left while conservatives’ views have remained comparatively constant.
Read it here: https://jabberwocking.com/if-you-hate-the-culture-wars-blame-liberals/

Skating on the current third rail of American politics, this thread methodically builds a case for how millions of non-insane, non-extremist Trump supporters might have come to the conclusion that the 2020 election was stolen. Whatever your political leanings, it’s an illuminating, if sympathetic, account of how millions of Americans arrived at their beliefs.

A 2,000-year-old building in Jerusalem that once functioned as an events and civic center of sorts is set to reopen to the public after a recent excavation. The building, believed to have been built between 20 and 30 A.D., is close to the site of the Second Temple and contains two ornately decorated halls that might have been used for hosting notables who came to visit.

The fiancée and the family of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange have rejected an extradition offer made by the United States, saying they do not trust the U.S. government’s promise that Assange would be able to serve his sentence in his native Australia and would not be held under the harshest maximum-security conditions. Last month, a key government witness in the case against Assange recanted his allegations, telling the Icelandic magazine Stundin that he had lied about Assange in an effort to avoid prosecution in the United States.
Read it here: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2021/jul/08/julian-assange-fiancee-rejects-us-proposals-over-possible-extradition

A long-running experiment that implemented shorter working hours in Iceland appears to be a success for both workers and employers. In two trials run between 2015 and 2019, roughly 2,500 people moved to a four-day work week, reducing their hours from 40 to 35 or 36. In the experiment, run jointly by representatives of the Icelandic government and one of the country’s major trade unions, workers reported greater well-being and morale in the workplace without any loss of productivity. The workers were paid the same for the shorter hours—no doubt key to morale. 

Survivors of the tragic Fyre festival—a planned luxury, music, and decadence festival on an island that turned into a FEMA camp for the very wealthy—have had their payout from a class action lawsuit slashed from $7,220 to $281 per person. Tickets for the festival started at $1,200 and went as high as $12,000 for VIP packages.

The Back Pages

Your Weekend Reads
— The following is the first thing I’ve ever read by Ian Douglass, but I felt that he spoke for all of us with this paean to wasting thousands of dollars on a not-really-justifiable obsession with professional wrestling. Personally, I never got into the men in tights jumping off the top ropes, but that’s not the point. If you haven’t sunk your time and money and limited supply of enthusiasm on some pop-culture niche or another, can you really be sure you were alive in postwar America? The piece doubles as a handy guide to how to become an author:

The misguided nature of my spending was reinforced by my parents every time a package containing a video cassette from Highspots.com arrived in the mail. The only window of opportunity wrestling opened through which my parents might have been impressed by me occurred when my father stumbled into the basement one day while I was watching the incredible June 8th, 1990, match between Jumbo Tsuruta and Mitsuharu Misawa for at least the sixth time.

Read it here: https://www.splicetoday.com/sports/redeem-your-past-stupidity#.YOhVZ4nREmw.twitter


— “On the face of it, Simone Weil is a remarkably poor candidate for domestication. Implausible and impractical to a fault, arguably more of a mystic than a philosopher, Weil is unlikely to appeal to sober rationalists, even in her most neutered guises,” writes Becca Rothfeld in this smart and sensitive essay on Weil’s “violent originality.” And what a life, as this passage illustrates:

She was ethnically Jewish yet frequently anti-Semitic. She was a fervent pacifist for much of her life, but she worked alongside anarchist forces to fight fascists on the ground in Spain. (Admittedly, her efforts were ineffectual: She tripped into a pot of hot cooking oil and singed her leg before she saw any combat.) Although she trained as a philosopher at the famed École Normale Supérieure, she eschewed the measured tones of a scholar, opting instead for the oracular prose of a visionary or poet. She was bourgeois by birth, yet her desperation to display solidarity with the working classes drove her to the factories and the fields.

Read it here: https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/distinctions-that-define-and-divide/articles/principled-to-a-fault


— All of us, at one point or another, need someone to explain what the hell this cryptocurrency and Bitcoin stuff is. Jon Stokes, founder of the influential technology news site Ars Technica, gives a detailed but still accessible account.

Why it matters:

Cryptocurrencies are about to change everything the way the internet changed everything in the late ’90s. We’re in the early stages of another round of massive cultural upheaval that’ll be even bigger than the Web, social media, and the smartphone. You won’t recognize the world in 10 years—2031 will be even further from 2021 than 2011 is.

Stokes says cryptocurrencies will unseat the ubiquitous and totalizing power of banking on a level comparable to what the printing press did to the Catholic Church. He writes:

Let’s say that in 10 years, banks are still around, and like printers nowadays many of them even have a very good business in some niche. But “banking” is as untethered from banks as “publication” is from printers.

Think about the level of upheaval, which we’re still trying to understand even as it overwhelms us, that the unbundling of publication from physical printing has done to society. Then imagine that banks go this same route.

Banks are massively larger and more important in terms of their institutional power and centrality to our way of life than printers ever were. When this insanely consolidated, over-levered, politically invincible [sic] loses its grip on the basic plumbing of finance, it will be a way bigger deal than the advent of the Web. More along the lines of the Catholic Church losing its grip on government and culture with the rise of the printing press.

Read it here: https://1729.com/crypto-for-people-who-dont-follow-crypto