More intriguing news stories to catch-up on

By Robert A. Vella – July 24th 2023

Here are some more intriguing news stories for readers to catch-up on:

First up is climate change which is so obvious now that deniers (i.e., Republicans) are retreating from public forums and mostly reiterating their rhetorical nonsense in the relative safety of select groups who desperately want to be told such untruths.  As the long anticipated and much feared climate tipping points (glacial and permafrost melting, ocean heating and circulatory changes, etc.) are starting to kick-in, scientists are seeing strong evidence in support of the worst-case scenario of rapid and accelerating global warming which – if left unchecked – will begin to threaten the stability of modern civilization within this century.  Last week, the world witnessed four large and persistent heat domes (or high pressures systems) – along with other extreme weather events (e.g., historic flooding in the Northeastern U.S. and Southeast Canada) – spaced across the northern hemisphere which have driven up temperatures to shocking record levels.  One was located over the Southwestern U.S./Northern Mexico, one was over the North Atlantic Ocean, one was over North Africa (and roasting Mediterranean countries), and another one was over South-Central Asia.

The fossil fuel industry, under intensifying criticism as the primary driver of climate change (which it has recently tried to deflect with clever advertising campaigns, see:  PR firms are facing a backlash for ‘greenwashing’ Big Oil — and the pressure on them is growing), has been caught infiltrating environmental groups (and other organizations fighting global warming) with lobbyists working as double agents.

The next two stories detail how Americans are segregating themselves along political lines via interstate migration as cultural polarization in the country is becoming dangerously destabilizing, and how life expectancy is decreasing in the U.S.

Our fifth story involves a troubling fiasco brewing in President Biden’s CHIPS and Science Act passed last summer which provides $280 billion for rebuilding America’s semiconductor manufacturing industry.  It was a commendable legislative effort, but the sad realities of a neoliberal global economy has thrown a major monkey wrench into his plan.  TSMC, a Taiwanese company who planned to build a huge semiconductor plant in Arizona, is now having second thoughts.  The CHIPS Act was intended to partially restore America’s once-mighty manufacturing base and to create thousands of blue-collar union jobs.  But, TSMC doesn’t want to hire American workers whom they consider to be unproductive and disobedient (my words).  Instead, the company intended to bring in migrant workers mostly from Asia;  however, now they seem to be backing away from the project altogether.

Next, two of Biden’s recent moves are causing much consternation among his base supporters.  On the Friday evening before the July 4th Independence Day holiday (when the news media was paying the least amount of attention), he made a final decision on the public release of the government’s classified JFK assassination files which kept thousands of documents secret especially those concerning the CIA’s involvement in its anti-Castro operations against Cuba.  On July 3rd, Biden likewise nominated neoconservative cold-warrior Elliot Abrams (who was criminally convicted during the Iran-Contra scandal) to a key diplomatic post.  Abrams had supported right-wing factions in Central America who committed mass murder and other atrocities during the 1980s.

Lastly, our eighth story confirms that the first recorded interstellar visitor (i.e., a space rock) to or near Earth occurred three years earlier than previously thought.  Hopefully, the much smaller meteorite that crashed off the coast of Papua New Guinea in 2014 wasn’t an extraterrestrial spaceship like Oumuamua was hypothesized to be when it transited our solar system in 2017!  Live long and prosper…

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Climate Change

From:  Why a sudden surge of broken heat records is scaring scientists

A remarkable spate of historic heat is hitting the planet, raising alarm over looming extreme weather dangers — and an increasing likelihood that this year will be Earth’s warmest on record.

New precedents have been set in recent weeks and months, surprising some scientists with their swift evolution: historically warm oceans, with North Atlantic temperatures already nearing their typical annual peak; unparalleled low sea ice levels around Antarctica, where global warming impacts had, until now, been slower to appear; and the planet experiencing its warmest June ever charted, according to new data.

[…]

It is no shock that global warming is accelerating — scientists were anticipating that would come with the onset of El Niño, the infamous climate pattern that reemerged last month. It is known for unleashing surges of heat and moisture that trigger extreme floods and storms in some places, and droughts and fires in others.

But the hot conditions are developing too quickly, and across more of the planet, to be explained solely by El Niño. Records are falling around the globe many months ahead of El Niño’s peak impact, which typically hits in December and sends global temperatures soaring for months to follow.

From:  The Earth is getting hotter. How heat domes, El Niño and greenhouse gases all play a part.

Professor Paul Andrew Mayewski, director at the Climate Change Institute at University of Maine, and climatologist Sean Birkel, also at the Climate Change Institute, gathered National Weather Service data and, along with other outlets, generated global visualizations to show changes in the planet’s climate. Here’s how hot the globe was Tuesday.

Further reading:

Extreme heatwaves to continue through August, WMO adviser says

Global heat in ‘uncharted territory’ as scientists warn 2023 could be the hottest year on record

Ocean heat around Florida is ‘unprecedented,’ and scientists are warning of major impacts

Fossil Fuel Double Agents

From:  ‘Double agents’: fossil-fuel lobbyists work for US groups trying to fight climate crisis

More than 1,500 lobbyists in the US are working on behalf of fossil-fuel companies while at the same time representing hundreds of liberal-run cities, universities, technology companies and environmental groups that say they are tackling the climate crisis, the Guardian can reveal.

Lobbyists for oil, gas and coal interests are also employed by a vast sweep of institutions, ranging from the city governments of Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia; tech giants such as Apple and Google; more than 150 universities; some of the country’s leading environmental groups – and even ski resorts seeing their snow melted by global heating.

The breadth of fossil fuel lobbyists’ work for other clients is captured in a new database of their lobbying interests which was published online on Wednesday.

It shows the reach of state-level fossil fuel lobbyists into almost every aspect of American life, spanning local governments, large corporations, cultural institutions such as museums and film festivals, and advocacy groups, grouping together clients with starkly contradictory aims.

U.S. Political Migration

From:  Conservatives move to red states and liberals move to blue as the country grows more polarized

Americans are segregating by their politics at a rapid clip, helping fuel the greatest divide between the states in modern history.

One party controls the entire legislature in all but two states. In 28 states, the party in control has a supermajority in at least one legislative chamber — which means the majority party has so many lawmakers that they can override a governor’s veto. Not that that would be necessary in most cases, as only 10 states have governors of different parties than the one that controls the legislature.

The split has sent states careening to the political left or right, adopting diametrically opposed laws on some of the hottest issues of the day.

[…]

Federalism — allowing each state to chart its own course within boundaries set by Congress and the Constitution — is at the core of the U.S. system. It lets the states, in the words of former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, be “laboratories of democracy.”

Now, some wonder whether that’s driving Americans apart.

U.S. Life Expectancy

From:  US life expectancy problem is ‘bigger than we ever thought,’ report finds

The country’s life expectancy problem gained renewed attention in recent years during the COVID-19 pandemic after seeing the largest drop since World War II.

As U.S. life expectancy continues to plummet, a new report found the country has been at a life expectancy disadvantage since the 1950s, and it has only gotten worse since then.

The study, published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health, also shows more than 50 countries have surpassed the U.S. in life expectancy since the 1930s, and a handful of states may be partly responsible.

“The scale of the problem is bigger than we ever thought … older than we thought, (and) the number of countries outperforming the United States is much larger than we thought,” said study author Dr. Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and health at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

[…]

The life expectancy growth rate rebounded in 1974, according to the study, then decelerated again in 1983. Provisional data from 2021 shows U.S. life expectancy has dropped to 76.1 years, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the lowest it has been since 1996.

[…]

Since the ’50s, life expectancy grew at a different pace throughout the country, according to the report.

Northeastern and Western states experienced the fastest growth, Woolf said, while south-central and Midwestern states saw the slowest growth.

CHIPS Fiasco

From:  TSMC to Bring 500+ More Migrant Workers to Arizona – The chipmaking giant, which expects to receive up to $15 billion in federal tax credits and grants for its Arizona facility, says U.S. workers are not up to the job.

The world’s largest contract chipmaker will import hundreds of workers from Taiwan to help build its sprawling new facility in Phoenix, Arizona, the company announced on Thursday.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) and its suppliers plan to bring “more than 500” migrant workers to Phoenix for a limited time, due to “labor shortages and other factors,” according to Nikkei Asia.

The news comes a week after the Prospect published an investigation of labor problems plaguing the TSMC site, which currently employs over 12,000 contract workers. Some described life-threatening injuries, while others detailed setbacks in construction that they alleged were caused by non-union contractors. The company has refused to sign an agreement with local labor groups, which union leaders say would help secure a reliable workforce.

“It’s a fucking disgrace,” Aaron Butler, president of the Arizona Building Trades Council, told the Prospect in response to the news that the company would bring more overseas workers.

In recent months, TSMC has issued a drumbeat of complaints over high labor and regulatory costs in the United States. The criticisms come as the company angles to receive tax credits and grants from recent federal legislation totaling up to $15 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Todd Achilles, a former tech executive who now researches semiconductor markets, described TSMC’s publicizing its grievances as press positioning.

From:  TSMC managers think Americans don’t work hard enough

Three TSMC employees also stated that it was challenging to standardize processes among US engineers who questioned their approaches. Wayne Chiu, an engineer who left TSMC in 2022, said he considered joining the Arizona facility but realized he would likely have to “pick up the slack” for US workers.

“The most difficult thing about wafer manufacturing is not technology,” he said. “The most difficult thing is personnel management. Americans are the worst at this, because Americans are the most difficult to manage.”

News Update:  TSMC delays Arizona semiconductor plant due to skilled worker shortage

Biden Keeps JFK Records Secret

From:  Biden’s ‘Final’ Order on Kennedy Files Leaves Some Still Wanting More

On June 22, 1962, an intelligence official drafted a memo summarizing a letter intercepted between Lee Harvey Oswald and his mother. The memo was made public long ago. But for 60 years, the name of the letter opener was kept secret.

Now it can finally be told: According to an unredacted copy of the memo released recently by the government, the official who intercepted Oswald’s mail for the C.I.A. in the months before President John F. Kennedy was assassinated was named Reuben Efron.

And that means — what, exactly? A tantalizing clue to unraveling a complicated conspiracy that the government has sought to cover up for decades? Additional proof that the C.I.A. knew more about Oswald than initially acknowledged? Or a minor detail withheld all this time because of bureaucratic imperatives irrelevant to the question of whether Oswald was the lone gunman on the fateful day?

The mystery of Reuben Efron, who has been dead for three decades, may never be resolved to the satisfaction of some of those dedicated to studying the assassination. Thirty years after Congress ordered that papers related to the killing be made public with limited exceptions, President Biden has declared that he has made his “final certification” of files to be released, even though 4,684 documents remain withheld in whole or in part. Going forward, agencies will decide any future disclosures that may be warranted by the passage of time.

The president’s certification, issued at 6:36 p.m. on the Friday before the long Fourth of July holiday weekend, when it would not draw much attention, has frustrated researchers and historians still focused on the most sensational American murder of the 20th century. But they suffered a setback on Friday when a federal judge refused to block Mr. Biden’s order.

Jefferson Morley, the editor of the blog JFK Facts and the author of several books on the C.I.A., said the belated identification of Efron indicated that intelligence agencies still had something to keep from the American public.

Biden Nominates Neoconservative Cold-Warrior

From:  Why Is the Biden Administration Rewarding Elliott Abrams?

In 1981, an American-created military unit in El Salvador raped and murdered its way through several hamlets, including the village of El Mozote. Elliott Abrams, then new to his role as Reagan’s assistant secretary of State for human rights and humanitarian affairs, insisted that news reports had overstated the breadth of the massacre. In remarks to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Abrams dismissed the credibility of the numbers. Guerrillas had twisted the event for their own ends, he argued. We now know this to be false: A U.N. truth commission uncovered evidence of about a thousand murders, as Eric Alterman observed for The Nation.

Abrams’s record didn’t bother Donald Trump, who made him a special envoy to Venezuela in 2019. It apparently doesn’t bother Joe Biden much either. On Monday, CNN reported that the Biden administration had appointed Abrams to the ​​United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy. The bipartisan commission “appraises the U.S. Government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and “may assemble and disseminate information and issue reports and other publications to the Secretary of State, the President, and the Congress,” according to the State Department and CNN. The seven-member panel is required to include three Republicans (three Democrats when a Republican is president), and the appointment is largely a sinecure. Yet it betrays deeper problems. With Abrams as a public face, the United States is sending the wrong message to the world.

Abrams’s role in the El Mozote coverup is far from his only sin. As Alterman points out, Abrams has defended Efraín Ríos Montt, once the genocidal dictator of Guatemala, and he was convicted for his role in the Iran-Contra affair, only to be pardoned by George H.W. Bush. But after Representative Ilhan Omar of Minnesota harshly questioned Abrams about his record in 2019, some members of the American foreign-policy Establishment rose to his defense. Nicholas Burns, a former NATO ambassador, tweeted, “Elliott Abrams is a devoted public servant who has contributed much of his professional life to our country. It’s time to build bridges in America and not tear people down.”

Interstellar Visitor

From:  The first known interstellar meteor hit Earth in 2014, U.S. officials say

U.S. officials confirmed that a space rock that streaked through the skies off the coast of Papua New Guinea in January 2014 was, in fact, an incredibly rare meteor that originated from beyond the solar system.

This meteor is known as CNEOS 2014-01-08. It crash-landed on Jan. 8, 2014, but not until last week did government officials confirm the origin of this space rock.

The meteor was determined as “interstellar” or from beyond the solar system by Amir Siraj in 2019. At the time, Siraj, a student at Harvard University, worked to determine his findings with his academic adviser, Abraham Loeb, a professor of science at the university.

Siraj wrote about this process for Scientific American. He was studying what was at the time considered the first-known interstellar meteor called Oumuamua, which was identified in October 2017.