Feeling Like A Lot Is Happening? It Is. Let’s Talk.
While we’re a technically bit early for a genuine “October Surprise,” there are so many things going on in the U.S. and the world at large that it’s worth taking a minute to assess this all.
Hello, friends,
It’s definitely been a while since we’ve last spoken here. I hope you’ve all been well! I’ve made a couple of little TikToks you can find on my page, and I’ll probably even turn this into something like a video format thing, so maybe we can consider this kind of like the behind-the-scenes notes to the ongoing issues I plan to talk about? I dunno.
With that said…
If you’re looking at the news and feeling overwhelmed right about now, that’s okay. There’s a lot to be overwhelmed by, and I’m not even talking about relatively petty stuff. I’m talking about nation-reshaping issues that are absolutely worth our time.
A lot of those, actually.
What I’m going to aim for here is to give as brief and “neutral” an assessment as I can. For each and every one of these issues, I strongly - strongly - urge you to look deeper into them. Each one could be an entire political praxis for the immediate future, and they’re all happening at once. Some of them are more ‘political’ than others, but they warrant consideration, anyway.
Lastly, these aren’t arranged in any particular order, just kind of whichever I feel like tackling first. The exception to this is that I’m going to start with two events happening near each other, but not necessarily caused by one another. More like “they each make the other way more complicated.”
Let’s begin with Hurricane Helene.
Oh, and there’s a Vice Presidential Debate between Tim Walz and JD Vance on Tuesday!!!! So all of this’ll be talked about quite a bit.
Hurricane Helene Fucked Up The South
For background, I invite you to read the Wiki page for this storm. It should contain a lot of the “what the storm did when it was a storm,” even if it’s by its very nature not going to be up-to-date on the most recent stuff about the storm. If you want to know about fundamentals such as how it formed and what track it took, that’s your source.
With that said: The storm is outright devastating. I know many people in the Carolinas who are impacted, and it’s definitely gonna be one of those “had an impacts.” We wish them all the best.
But if it was just a storm, that’d be bad enough.
There’s an ongoing psy-op on Twitter which goes something like this: “You know all that money the U.S. just sent to insert-foreign-country? That’s money we could be using to fund the area!”
And…I mean, there’s a lot of oversimplification taking place with a statement like that, but it does have a fundamental point, right? We could be spending more money on civil engineering and all that jazz. That would be a good thing. I’m on board with that!
Also, yeah: Leadership is definitely a question given that we’re heading into an election. You may not love Biden’s performance, but Republicans want to essentially sell off NOAA, so that’s not exactly great. Kinda bad, actually! The bottom line is that one party believes in climate change, and one does not - or, at least, wants to profit off of it. Which one is gonna make progress on climate change - even if that progress isn’t enough for our tastes?
Vote wisely, I guess?
And, yeah, the mechanical enactment of the election itself is gonna be hard! North Carolina was looking pretty swing-state-ish, and now it’s a wreck where voting will be hard - and that’s riiiight after purging 750,000 voters from the rolls.
That’s kind of a problem!
But let’s get back to the disaster, itself: This was a Category 4 hurricane. Infrastructure, even top-tier stuff, can only do so much when you’re getting deluged with rain across a tremendous area. I reported on Hurricane Sandy from Freeport and Long Beach the day after for The Weekly Freeporter, and they were wrecked. No joke wrecked. There was no simple fix for a lot of the stuff people encountered. It’s just bad.
The south-eastern US has a very different geography. It’s got a lot of mountains. Water goes down-hill. That’s how we get rivers. Normally, rivers are pretty chill! Some a little more-so than others, but we can build bridges over rivers and sail boats down them and use them for water under most circumstances.
Now imagine a lot of water, falling all at once. Any water landing on a hill is gonna go down-hill and those rivers at the bottom are going to flood. That’s just gravity. Infrastructure can definitely help, but at some point it’s just too much.
The bottom line is that this is climate change in action. As per Youtube Weatherman Sensation Ryan Hall, the Atlantic Ocean is still very hot. There could very well be more storms to come. Nature does not have the Sapience to look at us and go, “This area has suffered enough.” I remember right after Hurricane Sandy we got a fucking Nor’Easter. “Here’s a storm fueled by a hot Atlantic Ocean - now, here’s a blizzard while you recover from that!”
So if you want to ‘fix’ this problem, you’re gonna need a diversity of tactics primarily centered around ending carbon fuels. We’ve talked about the LFTR concept for relatively safe nuclear power here before, but there’s also solar, wind, and more. No one strategy is perfect, nor is any one strategy universal.
One last note I want to convey about Helene’s damage, and it’s one that I admit I don’t know much about. Twitter User Fossil Locator introduced me to Spruce Pine. As NPR and other outlets prove out, Spruce Pine is essential to the global technology development market. I won’t pretend I understand the details, but apparently a critical component of modern industrial silicon is produced here. If access is disrupted for a prolonged time, or if the quality of the material in question is degraded, that could pose a significant roadblock for technological development over the next few years.
At a time when we absolutely need technology to try to claw our way out of the climate change issue.
The BioLab Fire In Conyers, GA
This isn’t a natural disaster so much as it’s a man-made one. A chemical laboratory in Conyers, Georgia went up in literal smoke on 9/29, effecting a tremendous area.
My understanding is that a sprinkler mis-fired in a chemical storage area, reacted with the chemical being stored, and WOOSH the flames broke out.
There’s a lot of speculation as to how safe the air is to breathe. Authorities have indicated as of about an hour or two ago that the shelter-in-place order should be lifted, but whether that can be trusted is another story. It’s my understanding the primary air pollutant is chlorine gas, which if I recall my World War One history doesn’t hold its form for too long, but I freely admit I have no idea how badly the water or soil may be damaged from this, to say nothing of the health effects of what’s already gone down.
Now, More Perfect Union is reporting that the BioLab facility in question was procured by a Private Equity firm Centerbridge Partners in 2015, and there was a possibly-similar incident in 2020 as reported by the Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board. And there may have been others, too, with Rockdale County Fire Chief Marion McDonald saying this was probably the third such event.
It sounds like maybe we need better regulations in place to prevent these kind of disasters, but, hey, what do I know? Trump and his Republican buddies think it’s a great idea to deregulate chemical plans, so…Yeah.
Anyway, the Atlanta area basically just ate an accidental chemical weapons attack to the face. “So that’s great news!” he wrote sarcastically. Hopefully, this is just a relative blip compared to some of the other stuff on this list.
The Pending International Longshore Shipman’s Strike
You know The Progressive Cafe is a big fan of a good strike! This one might be the mother of all strikes, comparable to - if not more impactful than - the railroad workers strike might have been.
WDSU reports that about 85,000 workers across 14 ports along the East Coast are preparing to strike. Depending on how long this lasts, this would have quickly-felt, but acceleratingly-deep impacts to the American and even global economy. Do I really need to try to tell a smart cookie like you, dear reader, how big a deal it would be if all Trans-Atlantic trade with the United States was halted?
I searched the Longshoreman’s website for a subsection about the strike from their perspective, including a list of demands and whatnot, similar to the pages that the SAG and other creatives put up during their strikes, but at this time I don’t see one available. Maybe they’ll have one if-and-when the strike launches
Barrons has an article on the topic that’s interesting, if a little, well…Interesting. I feel like I pick up some bullshit vibes when they talk about how some Longshoremen make $150,000/year, as if somehow the guys who load and unload the ships carrying billions of dollars in goods shouldn’t be paid well.
But they also claim that analysis by J.P. Morgan would cost between $3.8-$4.5 Billion dollars per day. Something to consider, I guess?
There are also statements that the Longshoremen are demanding that certain advanced technologies not be used to essentially replace them, which…I get, but also I think isn’t necessarily a winning argument. In a perfect world, technology replacing people would be a good thing because those people would be cared for by our society and entitled to a good quality of living.
But I also get why, until that perfect world (or something like it) exists, they wouldn’t want to lose their jobs so a megacorporation can extract more money for its ownership class.
Israel Just Invaded Lebanon - And There’s More To Come
As we approach the one-year anniversary of the latest phase of the war in the Middle East, shit has gotten absolutely out of hand.
The latest is that Israel has launched an invasion of Lebanon, its neighbor to the north, under the pretense of eliminating the Hezbollah terror group. Some media outlets are trying to pretend this isn’t an invasion, and is instead a ‘limited operation’ of some sort, but that doesn’t seem likely.
Of course, Israel’s been invading Lebanon since the 1980’s, before Hezbollah even existed, and in fact this very war helped create Hezbollah in the first place, thus demonstrating that Israel’s brand of counter-terrorism actually just creates more terrorists that kill Israelis in a never-ending cycle of dead children, but, I digress.
Israel’s tactics for this operation have been, shall we say, interesting. Unethical? Sure! But effective? Very possibly. Belle from Beau of the Fifth Column explains it pretty well, here, but if you’re really trying to keep this quick: Israel infiltrated shipping logistics and planted bombs in pagers and “walkie talkies” (I.E. communications devices) intended for Hezbollah leadership.
Of course, such tactics are far less discriminating than they sound, and among others a nine year old girl was murdered. You know, because nothing discourages people from supporting terrorists like the deaths of children. That’s never encouraged people to commit violence as revenge or anything!
Even more recently, Israel launched an air raid targeting Hezbollah’s long-time leader, Hassan Nasrallah. This essentially completes the decapitation strike, with Hezbollah’s upper and upper-middle management - anyone “worthy of getting a pager” - no longer operating at 100%, if not at 0%. From a tactical perspective, this is a pretty good thing for Israel! Their enemy’s command-and-control is crippled, meaning a coherent response to their invasion is incredibly unlikely.
Of course, to do this, Israel dropped a 2,000 pound bomb smack dab in the middle of Beirut, the capital city of Lebanon, and while this is a fast-moving still-dust-in-the-air story, the Wiki page for the bombing suggests significant fatalities. In fact, in a rare twist, Israel’s estimates of about 300 dead are proving an over-estimation. But, just to remind you all: It’s not like a policy of accepting 300 dead (and more injured) people to kill one or even a couple of jackasses could ever inspire people to take up arms against the bombers, now, could it?
So, Israel invaded Lebanon. What’s Israel’s end-game?
Interestingly, Jared Kushner (or, just as likely, someone writing for Jared Kushner) had a lot to say just after Nasrallah’s death. He said it on Twitter, and as much as I hate linking to anything a Fascist ghoul says - especially on a Fascist-owned platform! - this is kind of worth it
Basically, Kushner puts the anti-Hezbollah mission in the context of clearing out Iranian proxies from threatening Israel. Which - to be very honest - is what they exist to do. This is where I remind you that I do not give one solitary fuck that Nasrallah is dead, or that Haniyeh is dead, or that Bin Laden is dead (that one came up on Twitter, too). I don’t believe in the death penalty, but I do believe in self-defense and those guys were absolutely terrorists. Fuck them! But fuck the civilian casualties that it cost to get them, too.
Kushner also has two more messages vis-a-vis Iran.
The first is pretty naked: An attack on Iran’s nuclear weapons program is coming, and might be Israel’s military end-game with this maneuver. He says the only reason it’s still there has been Hezbollah’s knife to Israel’s throat. He dismisses their air defenses - which, I mean, they’re imported Russian air defenses, so that’s a pretty good bet, to be real about it.
The second is more complex: He points out how Iran is already pretty isolated and its projection of strength is based on the sacrifice of the lives of its pawns on the proverbial geopolitical chess board. It’s Houthis and Hezbollah and Hamas doing Iran’s fighting, while Iran isn’t fighting He says this while pointing out that other nations who are staying out of this are benefiting economically.
The message couldn’t be clearer: If you let Israel do what it wants and stay away from Iran, there’s money in it for you.”
Now, you might wonder why I’m so invested in something Kushner said. After all, hopefully he’s in no position to execute Trump’s Israel policy, right? But here’s the thing: I’m also pretty sure Biden isn’t executing Biden’s Israel policy.
Netanyahu has been running Biden’s policy on Israel. Endless are the “Biden is FURIOUS with Bibi for doing X” articles, just do an internet search for them. And on one level this is perfectly reasonable, right? Israel isn’t our vassal-state, it’s an independent nation, and it has the right to pursue whatever ends it chooses to. Why wouldn’t Israel’s leader decide Israel’s policy?
But…Netanyahu is essentially controlling OUR response to HIS behaviors by simply doing what he wants in spite of all of our warnings, then receiving such stiff punishments as…Lemme check my notes real quick…Ah, yes! Punishments such as the Biden administration helping cover up Isrealis starving civilians, leading in part to a punishment of $8.7 billion dollars worth of weapons…Oh, right, weapons that we gave to Israel.
See, normally, when one ally tells another, “Please do not do this, it would be really bad” and they keep doing it, that ally says, “I am done helping you.” Instead, we hear about how Kamala Harris’ support for Israel is “Ironclad.” In other words, no matter how many times they make really bad, morally unjustifiable decisions like committing genocide against Palestinians, Harris and Biden are going to support them.
So, Netanyahu is controlling Biden and Harris. And that’s really bad, because I’m pretty sure Kushner has made clear what the plan is, and that plan very well could lead to a major war.
Thank you for reading The Progressive Cafe. If this article has helped you, please consider signing up for our mailing list. This article is by Jesse Pohlman, a former hyperlocal journalist and sci-fi/fantasy author from Long Island, New York, whose website you can check out here.