Weekly Picks – March 31, 2024

March 31, 2024 Weekly Picks Mosaic Credits (clockwise from top left): Maggie Chiang; Biodiversity Heritage Library; Amit Katwala/ New Humanist; Amira Khalil; UN Women/ Bashar Al-Jabari/ Flickr

This week’s collection:

Introductory excerpts quoted below. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.

1. Aid Wars

“As Israel’s ground operation in Gaza nears its close, the next major struggle is coming into view. The battle over the provision of essential humanitarian aid, already so brutal over the past few months, will become increasingly central to the conflict. But for all the pacifying rhetoric from US, there is no reason to think that the war’s humanitarian phase will be any less destructive than the direct military violence Palestinians in Gaza have faced so far. Indeed, it may be far worse: the IPC has now classified 1.1 million Palestinians as facing imminent risk of famine, as Israel continues to flout orders from the International Court of Justice to open access to the Strip for food and other aid to enter. Already, at least thirty-one Palestinians have died from starvation or dehydration. Twenty-seven of those were children.

. . .

There’s simply nothing left in Gaza for Israel to destroy, and nowhere left for its military to go. Of course, where the IDF has gone, they have not succeeded in eradicating Hamas and the other Palestinian militant factions—they continue to suffer ambushes and other attacks around Gaza City, Central Gaza, and Khan Younis, the other major arenas of combat. But—especially atop the massive complex of tunnels that extend subterraneously throughout the Strip and serve as the infrastructure for guerilla attacks—holding territory is much less appealing to the Israelis than taking it, and provides significantly diminishing returns.

But if major combat operations in Gaza are drawing to a close, the Israelis and the Americans remain far from achieving their political objectives, the most important of which are the pacification of Palestinian militancy and the imposition of a new governing authority through which to delegate colonial control. To finish the job, they are rapidly converging on a comprehensive strategy that has been battle-tested over the course of a century of US-led counterinsurgency campaigns: undercut popular support for the resistance and “win hearts and minds” by seizing total control over the provision of basic necessities. In practice, this means the imposition of total siege conditions and the cultivation of starvation, disease, and other forms of deprivation. Thus, through the controlled entry of aid via the political actors they want to empower, Israel and the US can play kingmakers.”

2. Zombie forensics

“You’ll be familiar with the scene. A hard-nosed cop, a nervous suspect, the slow scratching of needles. In the hundred years since it was invented, the polygraph machine – or lie detector – has oozed into every crevice of America’s justice system and popular culture, appearing in true crime documentaries, blockbuster movies and daytime TV shows, as well as interrogation rooms.

What you might not know, however, is that lie detectors are increasingly being used in the UK too. A lack of transparency from police forces means it’s difficult to know exactly how the polygraph is being used, and to what extent. What’s certain is that convicted terrorists and sex offenders are now being tested on the polygraph after parole to make sure they’re complying with the terms of their probation. In October 2023, a Ministry of Justice report revealed that a total of 88 lie detector tests had been carried out on 39 people since June 2021, leading to four paroled terrorism offenders being sent back to prison – one for failing to comply with the polygraph test, three for revealing “risk-related information” during one of their tests.

Good news, on the surface. The system works! But there’s a problem. Ever since it was invented, the polygraph test has been repeatedly debunked. It’s inaccurate, unscientific and biased. Results vary wildly depending on who’s conducting the test, and who’s taking it. It has a tendency to produce false positives or coerce innocent people into admitting things they didn’t do. It has helped put criminals behind bars, but it’s also been used to perpetrate gross miscarriages of justice.”

3. The Women Who Found Liberation in Seaweed

“In the 19th and early 20th centuries, a fervor for natural history swept Europe. In Victorian England especially, this general enthusiasm crested into fads, often centered around collecting and arranging specimens, and enabled by changes in infrastructure and technology and increasing democratization of science. As historian Stephen Hunt told Atlas Obscura, working-class people and aristocrats alike used their expanding leisure time to hop trains out to the seashore or countryside, gather specimens, and examine them under increasingly affordable microscopes or present them at the next meeting of their local natural history club.

One of these trends was the “seaweed craze.” According to the historian David Elliston Allen, European algae mania began in London in the 1750s when a merchant and botanist named John Ellis created a fanciful miniature seascape out of frondy specimens that ended up impressing the Princess Dowager of Wales. Within a century, the United Kingdom’s shorelines were thronged with excited splashers wielding, in the words of famed 19th-century seaweeder and author Margaret Gatty, “a basket, a bottle, a stick, [and] a strong pair of boots.”

Women were in on it from the beginning. (Ellis got his specimens from his sister in Dublin—behind every great man is a woman sending him seaweed in the mail.) But over time, sea plants emerged as a unique locus of opportunity for female natural historians, who were barred from major scientific societies and discouraged from supposedly unseemly pursuits like chasing animals and dissecting the sex organs of land plants. Plus, many were at the shore already, attempting to restore their health through sand promenades and breathing salty air.”

4. Antimarket

“The words ‘market’ and ‘capitalism’ are frequently used as if they were synonymous. Especially where someone is defending the ‘free market’, it is generally understood that they are also making an argument for ‘capitalism’. Yet the two terms can also denote very different sets of institutions and logics. According to the taxonomy developed by the economic historian Fernand Braudel, they may even be opposed to each other.

In Braudel’s analogy, long phases of economic history are layered one on top of another like the storeys of a house. At the bottom is ‘material life’, an opaque world of basic consumption, production and reproduction. Above this sits ‘economic life’, the world of markets, in which people encounter one another as equals in relations of exchange, but also as potential competitors. Markets are characterised by transparency: prices are public, and all relevant activity is visible to everyone. And because of competition, profits are minimal, little more than a ‘wage’ for the seller. Sitting on top of ‘economic life’ is ‘capitalism’. This, as Braudel sees it, is the zone of the ‘antimarket’: a world of opacity, monopoly, concentration of power and wealth, and the kinds of exceptional profit that can be achieved only by escaping the norms of ‘economic life’. Market traders engage with one another at a designated time and place, abiding by shared rules (think of a town square on market day); capitalists exploit their unrivalled control over time and space in order to impose their rules on everyone else (think of Wall Street). Buyers and sellers on eBay are participating in a market; eBay Inc. is participating in capitalism. Capitalism, in Braudel’s words, is ‘where the great predators roam and the law of the jungle operates’.

Why then have ‘capitalism’ and ‘markets’ so often been conflated?

. . .

Liberal ideology has tended to duck the problem of capitalism altogether, opting instead to imagine that ‘economic life’ (i.e. competitive egalitarian markets) still rules the roost. This myopia is manifest in the economics curricula of major universities, which despite the best efforts of various campaigns and the Soros-funded Institute for New Economic Thinking have continued to exclude theories which emphasise power, uncertainty, monopoly and instability, and clung to an orthodoxy in which economic activity is chiefly determined by prices and incentives. Politicians, meanwhile, cleave to liberal fairy tales about making work pay, social mobility and ownership for all, which are increasingly divorced from a reality of in-work poverty, unearned wealth and spiralling rents. And financial services masquerade as just another ‘sector’ among many, selling their wares in a marketplace like humble shopkeepers.”

5. Of Life and Lithium

“While we may change the kinds of cars we drive, we won’t change our lifestyles to fit a climate-challenged future. Millions upon millions of new zero-emission vehicles will be required and to create them, we’ll need staggering amounts of resources that are still lodged below the earth’s crust. On average, a single battery in a small electric car today contains eight kilograms (17.5 pounds) of lithium, or “white gold.” To put that in perspective, if Californians continue to purchase vehicles at the same pace as in 2023, the amount of lithium required will exceed 113 million kilograms (249 million pounds) annually going forward.

That’s a mountain of lithium and an awful lot of mining will need to be done to make the governor’s plan a reality. And mind you, those figures are lowball estimates — a Tesla Model S battery needs 62.6 kilograms of lithium, for instance — and they don’t address the additional mining electric vehicles will demand to produce considerable amounts of cobalt (14 kilograms), manganese (20 kilograms), and copper (upwards of 80 kilograms) per car. Newsom is correct: ridding California’s sprawling freeways of gas-guzzlers is a necessity and will also be highly profitable, especially for the extraction industry. Nevertheless, it will come with significant cultural and environmental costs that must be accounted for.

. . .

In total, the Thacker Pass mine, the largest known lithium deposit in this country, could one day eat up more than 17,000 acres of public lands, more than half the size of San Francisco. It’s set to be the largest lithium mine in the country, churning out as many as 40,000 metric tons annually, enough to power 800,000 electric vehicles. Inevitably, Thacker will make Lithium Americas’ shareholders very rich, bringing them an estimated nearly $4 billion once all the recoverable lithium is extracted. However, that projection, from 2021, was based on the price of lithium when it sold for an average of $12,600 per ton. By 2023, a ton of lithium was selling for around $46,000.

Promising that the mine will power its all-electric-vehicle future, General Motors now holds exclusive rights to the lithium the mine will extract and has invested $650 million in it. President Biden’s Department of Energy is also all in, loaning $2.26 billion to Lithium Americas to jump-start the project.

The Thacker Pass lithium mine is but one of many examples of the way once venerable Native lands have been and continue to be exploited.”

6. Light at the End of the Tunnel

“Every year, hundreds of muscular, sea-bright fish—chum salmon, chinook, coho, steelhead—push into the Columbia River from the Pacific Ocean, swim over 200 kilometers upstream, and turn left into Hardy Creek. They wend through rocky shallows shaded by alder and willow, cold water passing over flared gills. Plump with milt and eggs, they pump their tails furiously, striving for the graveled spawning grounds in southern Washington State where they’ll complete their life’s final, fatal mission.

And then they hit the railroad.

In the early 1900s, Hardy Creek was throttled by BNSF Railway, the United States’ largest freight railroad network. When the company built its Columbia River line, engineers routed Hardy Creek under the tracks via a culvert—a 2.5-meter-wide arch atop a concrete pad. The culvert, far narrower than Hardy Creek’s natural channel, concentrated the stream like a fire hose and blasted away approaching salmon. Over time, the rushing flow scoured out a deep pool, and the culvert became an impassable cascade disconnected from the stream below—a “perched” culvert, in the jargon of engineers.

“It’s an obvious barrier,” says Peter Barber, manager of the Cowlitz Indian Tribe’s habitat restoration program. “A fish would be hard-pressed to navigate through that culvert.”

The strangulation of Hardy Creek is an archetypal story. Culverts, the unassuming concrete and metal pipes that convey streams beneath human-made infrastructure, are everywhere, undergirding our planet’s sprawling road networks and rail lines. Researchers estimate that more than 200,000 culverts lie beneath state highways in California alone, nearly 100,000 in Germany, and another 60,000 in Great Britain. In Europe, they thwart endangered eels; in Australia, they curtail the movements of Murray cod. In Massachusetts’ Herring River, snapping turtles lurk in culverts to devour passing fish, largely preventing herring from spawning. Taken as a whole, these obstacles are a major reason that three-quarters of the world’s migratory fish species are endangered.”

7. The Gaza Strip has been destroyed. So has hope for a fair future for the two peoples.

“Wars are an extension of policies, and this current war is of a piece with Israel’s yearslong policy to thwart any national Palestinian project toward freedom and independence. Yet there is no denying that this war of destruction was triggered by Hamas’s attack on Oct. 7, 2023.

This attack — against Israeli soldiers and military installations, against civilians in their homes and at a dance party in nature — shattered Israel’s hubris and exposed its structural weakness as a military power. What is this weakness? It is its inability and refusal to comprehend that domination over the Palestinian people, while denying their history as an indigenous nation, their rights as a people and their freedom, is not sustainable in perpetuity. The impenetrable confidence, the arrogant certainty that it is possible to live a good and happy life while also controlling, oppressing, and imprisoning more than two million Gazans — and profiting from that oppression and exploitation — was blown up on Oct. 7 when many hundreds of Hamas militants and an unknown number of Palestinian civilians tore down the walls of the largest prison on earth, if just for a few hours. In the annals of national liberation struggles, this could certainly be seen as an achievement.

Still, my sense of defeat is strong and persistent, and it is threefold. For decades, Palestinians and left-wing activists in Israel, myself included, have warned Israelis and the states supporting Israel that ongoing oppression and ruthless domination will lead to a dreadful explosion, harmful to all, to bloodshed and intolerable suffering. But the appeal of material privileges and benefits that Israel offered Jews (both Israeli citizens and citizens of other states) who moved to the occupied Palestinian territory proved stronger. Those have included affordable villas, subsidies and tax exemptions, better education and health care, and land for agriculture and other business ventures that could be had for free or for only a symbolic price. Add to this the fact that the occupied territory has become a huge laboratory for Israel’s weapons industry and state-of-the-art surveillance technology, two of the Israeli economy’s most profitable exports. The careers and incomes of people from all walks of life are closely tied to these occupation-related industries and to the bureaucratic machinery needed for the maintenance of a repressive hostile rule imposed upon more than five million Palestinians.

Israeli Jews know that any peace agreement would require equal rights for Israel’s Palestinian citizens and either compensation or the return of their lands and property stolen by Israel in 1948, and the equal distribution of water resources between Jews and Arabs in the entire country. So the end of the occupation and equal rights are consciously or subconsciously conceived as posing a threat to the good life and well-being of many an Israeli Jew. All this has been bolstered by messianic racist theories and preaching. Such theories (including sexism) develop and spread in order to justify exploitation, discrimination of all sorts, and repression, but at a certain stage they receive a life of their own, spreading poison as they are perceived by more and more generations as irrefutable laws of nature.”