This is The Morning Press, a Brain Iron dot com production. Here’s eleven minutes or so of news for today, Tuesday, February 20, 2024.
The United States vetoed a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza Tuesday morning. US UN ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield has explained that the US position is that the Algerian-led resolution would run counter to achieving its stated aims of hostage release and lasting peace, and jeopardizes US-led efforts at brokering a peace deal. Thomas-Greenfield says the US has been working on a hostage deal for months that would free all remaining hostages, enable an extended pause in fighting, and would allow much-needed humanitarian aid to flow into the region, but Qatar’s prime minister, whose country has had a role in mediating those negotiations, said at the end of last week that talks were at an impasse after weeks of progress, with Israel accusing Hamas of refusing to budge from its “delusional” demands of permanent cease-fire and the return of Palestinian prisoners held by Israel.
A brief editorial aside: It is foolish to pretend that there are any easy answers, here, but any resolution or statement of purpose coming out of the UN that acknowledged the reality that Hamas is not a plausible governing or leadership force for the Palestinian people moving forward would at least be reassuring that there exists a rational understanding of what comes after a ceasefire begins. At a bare minimum, the Hamas attacks of October 7 must be understood as a total abdication of civic authority, and Hamas relinquishment of any claim to that authority is a necessary condition for Israel to consider ending its offensive. If a two-state solution is ever going to seem achievable again, it has to begin with a recognition that Hamas is not a viable negotiating partner for that end. Maybe the current government of Israel isn’t, either, but Israel isn’t going anywhere, and its leadership almost certainly is, sooner or later. The UN could help its rhetorical case by pairing its demand for a ceasefire with a recognition of Hamas’s total illegitimacy.
National Security Council spokesman John Kirby said Tuesday that the White House would announce a new sanctions package against Russia on Friday as a response to the death last week of Alexei Navalny, who died in an Arctic prison camp and whose body has not yet been released to his family. President Joe Biden said last Friday that there was no doubt as to Russian president Valdimir Putin’s culpability for Navalny’s death. “Make no mistake, Putin is responsible for Navalny’s death. Putin is responsible. What has happened to Navalny is yet more proof of Putin’s brutality. No one should be fooled—not in Russia, not at home, not anywhere in the world.” Biden also said, and Kirby reiterated today, that the most important thing the US can do at the moment would be to pass the bill currently stalled in Congress to provide Ukraine aid as their fight against Russia approaches its two-year anniversary this Saturday. Republican reluctance to pass such aid stems from former president Donald Trump’s preference that Congress not do anything that would look like a political win for Biden. Trump posted a statement to his social media platform on Monday that noted Navalny’s death and said it made him realize that the United States is a failing nation. “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country. It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”
A brief editorial aside: I have said before that Donald Trump is the single-greatest culture-wide opportunity for pop-psychology case study in American history, and his declaration that Navalny’s death only makes him think about everything that’s wrong with the United States speaks to why. He is incapable of imagining that things happen in the world that don’t have anything to do with him. The likely murder of a political dissident by Vladimir Putin really does make Trump think about how unfair it is that he keeps losing in court. The apologists for Trump often insist that he’s speaking for the disaffected and the forgotten, and maybe they really believe that, but if they do, aside from some heavily motivated reasoning, I wonder if it’s because they simply cannot imagine the mind of a person being so purely self-involved as Trump’s appears to be. This is a person whose entire imagination is devoted to rearranging the sensory inputs his mind receives into a story that is strictly about him, and I wonder if such pettiness and self-centeredness simply doesn’t compute with people. Perhaps this is far too much benefit of the doubt, but is it possible that Trump’s exclusive self-concern is so complete that his supporters have to assume it’s an act, that it’s some sort of a joke that they’re all in on with him? The alternative is that some of his supporters also see the world exclusively in terms of how events relate to Trump, which is rather disconcerting, though such cultish behavior does pop up, from time to time. To wit, former New York congressman Lee Zeldin on Twitter on Friday explicitly compared Navalny’s murder by Putin to what he sees as an equivalent attempt of Biden’s to ensure that Trump eventually dies in prison. Whether it’s a too-close blindness to Trump’s narcissism or enthusiastic endorsement of it, I guess the result is the same—the reaction by me to his overwhelming self-concern will be read by his supporters as over-determined in Trump’s direction as well. There is no escaping it—either he is making everything all about him, or I am. Biden responded to Navalny’s death like any American politician would and probably should—with condemnation and the promise of consequences for such lawless, antidemocratic behavior. That Trump’s Trump-centric response was almost certainly more motivating and meaningful to his supporters is incredibly disheartening.
In feel-good-inspirational-news-that-I’m-here-to-spoil, a school bus driver in Louisville, Kentucky noticed one of his elementary school passengers was not his usual happy self one morning. The first-grader was apparently upset because it was pajama day at his school, and he didn’t have any to wear. The bus driver dropped the load of kids off at school and hurried to the nearby Family Dollar, where he bought two pairs of pajamas. He hustled back to the school, and was able to get a school administrator to bring the boy to the office, where the bus driver presented him with the new PJs. “He was just glowing, he was so happy. He gave me a hug, then he walked back to class, hugging those pajamas. I was in tears,” the bus driver said. Overall, a nice story about a kind bus driver going out of his way to make one poor kid feel better.
A brief editorial aside: Pajama Day is a scourge. This is by no means my only blowhard position, but it is perhaps my most unshakable one. Children should not be wearing pajamas to school. School is for learning, and bedwear is not conducive to learning. It would be to my preference that children all wear uniforms to school—not necessarily as a lesson in conformity, but in discipline and consistency. These are the clothes we wear when we learn. We—the diverse community of individuals who come together in this publicly-funded endeavor of civic and social and practical education—all wear the same outfit because this is the outfit we wear when we learn. Pajamas invite sloth and distraction, and apparently occasionally make a kid feel horribly left out, to boot. Say no to pajama day, moms and dads!
In business news, an analysis from Deutsche Bank found that the market capitalizations of the seven biggest US tech companies—Apple, Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Tesla—if combined and broken off into their own exchange would together make them the second-largest country stock exchange in the world, behind the United States, and double Japan, in fourth. Just Microsoft or Apple have market caps about equal to the total of all companies listed in the UK or France. This level of asset concentration in just seven companies has led some analysts to worry about the effect that a downturn in one sector of the market could have on the global economy—specifically, all of the so-called Magnificent 7 can be said to be benefiting from a great deal of hype and expectation around artificial intelligence, in one way or another—and Deutsche Bank pointed to the years 2000 and 1929 as rivaling current market conditions in terms of all-time high market-cap concentration, years that are notable because of rather disastrous market corrections.
Also in business news, Capital One has announced that it intends to purchase Discover Financial Services for $35 billion in an all-stock deal that, if approved by regulators, would combine two of the biggest credit card companies in the country into one behemoth. The deal is likely to pose an interesting problem to regulators, as it doesn’t fundamentally change the reality of the competition for consumer credit—the four major credit card networks would all remain intact and distinct, with Capital One still issuing Visa and MasterCard products but now also pushing consumers to its new Discover product. If the deal goes through, Capital One will become a strange new sort of bank that, like American Express, both issues credit cards and also owns and operates a payment processing network, but also continues to issue cards for use on the competition’s payment processing networks. The question will be whether the unique hybrid that Capital One would become is something that will be perceived as limiting or encouraging competition among these massive financial institutions. Capital One will argue that its size and resources will give the Discover network, which as of now represents just a tiny portion of total market share, a better chance to compete with Visa, which accounts for well more than half of all credit card transactions in the country, and Mastercard, which has approximately a quarter of the market. But just last month, the US Office of the Comptroller signaled that it would take an increasingly skeptical look at mergers of large financial institutions, with a specific concern being the risk of banks that become too big to fail after acquisitions go through.
And in one more piece of business news, Walmart is going to buy television maker Vizio for a little over $2 billion, in a move that gives them access to the 18 million Vizio sets already in consumer homes that run their proprietary operating system. In addition to a flood of individual data about viewing habits, WalMart gains the ability to sell ads on all of those televisions, whereas up until now it has only been able to sell ads at its stores and on its website. The retail sector, and especially their grocery business, is relatively low-margin, and WalMart sees the Vizio acquisition as a chance to better compete with Amazon, which has become the third largest advertising company, behind Google and Facebook.
A brief editorial aside: I know no one cares about these things—we’ve been happy to pay just a few hundred dollars for perfectly adequate high-definition televisions that in the fine print tell us that we’re signing up to have all of our viewing data collected by the manufacturers, who then go on to do who-knows-what with that pile of information. But surely it’s a little disconcerting to realize, if you bought a Vizio television a few years ago, that the company could be sold to whoever, and that suddenly a new stranger has access to who-knows-what information about you. And now WalMart can take your customer profile and sell it on the open market to whoever wants to put their product in front of your face. And the next time your kids fire up the TV to watch cartoons, the home screen will be showing them what WalMart wants them to see. Maybe that’s fine, maybe it doesn’t matter. But it’s not exactly what you agreed to, when you bought the thing. It’s not really a choice you made. Oh, just disconnect it from the internet, or do your research and pick a TV that doesn’t collate your data and send it back to home base in China or Korea or Arkansas while you sleep. Good luck finding one of those! But even if you do, what’s to stop that company from being snatched up next year, so that the next time you power on the TV, there’s a new 47-page End User License Agreement that you have to click ACCEPT on if you want to get watching. Will regulators let the Vizio acquisition go through? Probably. And why not? We decided that none of this matters a long time ago, long before any of us really had a choice.
Now, here’s a look at the weather.
Astronomers have identified what they believe is the brightest object to ever be discovered in the universe, a quasar 12 billion light-years away that would shine 500 trillion times brighter than our sun, if we were as close to it. The part that our fancy telescopes can see, from so far away, is the accretion disk—the superheated swirling bright disk of gas and dust that feeds the supermassive black hole—which has a diameter of approximately seven light years, or some 41 trillion miles. The supermassive black hole that powers the quasar likely accretes, or consumes, a mass of gas and dust that is equivalent to the mass of our sun every single day, making it one of the most purely violent places in the known universe. This is how galaxies are formed, how the universe creates from unthinkably destructive forces. It took the light from that destructive force 12 billion years to get here for us to look up through our fancy telescopes to see it, something utterly inconceivable just 700 years ago. It is easy to find oneself regarding with dread and horror the inconceivably vast and ruinous power of the universe. How does one even imagine one’s place, here, in the face of such time and space and distance and stuff? But, incredibly—truly, inexplicably, and awesomely—here we all are, one result of that destruction and creation, one expression of a power so dangerously un-regard-able that we can only observe it from 12 billion light-years away. I find that one of the most difficult things to convey, to convince other people to appreciate, for even just a brief second, is the sheer unlikelihood of the mundane fact of our existence. How special it is, and how lucky we are, to have these little electrical storms brewing in our heads, to have this sense of self and place, to be an individuated consciousness in an unlikely world, in an unlikely time, no matter how wrong it may all seem to be going, sometimes. Whatever it can be attributed to, whatever it is you want to believe about all that, here we are, against all odds, and for that I can only be grateful. The alternative is inevitable, is coming, in ten minutes or 100 million years, the alternative will have its way. For now, though, who could ask for more than to find out about a quasar on the other side of time and space, spinning its little destructive dance, just the brightest thing in the known universe, spinning and spinning for all to see, spinning for no reason at all, spinning to give birth to reason itself.
That’s the weather from here—how’s it look out your window?
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The Morning Press is eleven minutes or so of the news of the day, and is a production of the BrainIron dot com multinational media empire. Please direct comments and complaints to brainironpodcast@gmail.com, or visit the website at www.brainiron.com. For a transcript of today’s episode and links to the stories referenced, find The Morning Press at brainiron.substack.com. To support this and the other podcasting and blogging endeavors of the good website Brain Iron dot com, please consider becoming a paid subscriber at brainiron.substack.com. Have a wonderful day.
The Morning Press for Tuesday, February 20, 2024