Tuesday, June 13, 2023

13: Arizona



Fear and Mayhem as Russia’s War Comes Home Attacks from Ukraine have killed at least a dozen Russian civilians and displaced thousands. But they have not fundamentally changed the calculus for Vladimir Putin. .

Arizona, Low on Water, Weighs Taking It From the Sea. In Mexico. A $5 billion plan to desalinate seawater in Mexico and pipe it to Phoenix is testing the notion that desert cities can keep growing as the Earth warms. ........... As the state’s two major sources of water, groundwater and the Colorado River, dwindle from drought, climate change and overuse, officials are considering a hydrological Hail Mary: the construction of a plant in Mexico to suck salt out of seawater, then pipe that water hundreds of miles, much of it uphill, to Phoenix. ......... a $5 billion project proposed by an Israeli company is under serious consideration, an indication of how worries about water shortages are rattling policymakers in Arizona and across the American West. ........... On June 1, the state announced that the Phoenix area, the fastest-growing region in the country, doesn’t have enough groundwater to support all the future housing that has already been approved. .............. Desalination plants are already common in coastal states like California, Texas and Florida, and in more than 100 other countries.

Israel gets more than 60 percent of its drinking water from the Mediterranean.

............. The water would have to travel some 200 miles, climbing more than 2,000 feet along the way, to reach Phoenix. ............ “The minute you have to move water around, you have huge fixed costs.” ............ It would flood the northern Gulf of California with waste brine, threatening one of Mexico’s most productive fisheries. .......... And the water it provided would cost roughly ten times more than water from the Colorado River. ........... In a sense, Arizona has been here before. The state owes its boom to superhuman-scale water projects, culminating in the 336-mile, $4 billion aqueduct that diverts Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson. IDE Technologies, the Israeli company behind the new desalination proposal, has seized on that legacy, calling its project “an infinite and unlimited reverse Colorado.” ................. Puerto Peñasco, a city of 60,000 an hour south of the border. From the ocean, the city is a ribbon of luxury villas and high-rise condos, fronted by soft beaches unfurling into turquoise water. Tourists from Phoenix, who make up the bulk of visitors, call it by its Anglicized name, Rocky Point; its unofficial moniker is Arizona’s beach. .......... Desalination works by vacuuming up huge volumes of ocean water, then pushing it at high pressure through a series of membranes to filter out salt. Every 100 gallons of seawater produces about 50 gallons of potable water and another 50 gallons of brine that has a salt content that is roughly twice as high as seawater. ................... IDE would release that brine into the sea. On the open ocean, waste brine can be quickly dispersed. ............ More than half of the fishing in Mexico is harvested from the Gulf of California. ........... IDE, one of the world’s largest desalination companies .......... The company asked Arizona to sign a 100-year contract to buy water from the desalination project. In return, IDE says it would find private financing to cover the estimated $5 billion initial cost of building the desalination plant and pipeline. The company has been working with Goldman Sachs to arrange that financing. ................. Between Puerto Peñasco and Phoenix sits one of the most ecologically fragile places in Arizona: Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, a riot of velvet mesquite, teddy-bear cholla and red-flower-tipped ocotillo, teeming with roadrunners and rattlesnakes and giant-eared jackrabbits, spilling across 500 square miles at the state’s southern edge like an overstuffed psychedelic fever dream............... a biosphere reserve — a distinction bestowed almost nowhere else in the Southwest United States. The pipeline would cut through the middle of it. ........... Desalination plants require a tremendous amount of energy. To power the plant, IDE would build one of America’s largest solar farms near Phoenix, plus a transmission line to move that power to Mexico. That line would need a 150-foot-wide right of way corridor ........... The water pipeline would require a 175-foot corridor. ................. the land has spiritual significance for the Tohono O’odham Nation, whose people lived there for thousands of years before being displaced to a reservation east of the park. ........... Arizona is Buckeye writ large. Since the megadrought began in 2000, Arizona’s population has jumped almost 50 percent and shows no signs of stopping. .



TSS #037: 5 Rules for a Permissionless Life .



A STAR REPORTER’S BREAK WITH REALITY Lara Logan was once a respected 60 Minutes correspondent. Now she trades in conspiracy theories that even far-right media disavow. What happened? ......... “So what does fifth-generation warfare really mean?” It means that “you’re meant to believe the narrative, regardless of the truth.” ........... Turning to The New York Times to understand this moment, Logan warns, is “like being in the battle of Normandy, on the beaches of Normandy, Dunkirk, and going on your knees every day and crawling over to the Nazi lines and asking them to please write nice things about your side in German propaganda.” Her dress is decorated with two identical navy-blue stickers reading stop woke indoctrination. ........... when she talks about subjects like the “little puppet” Volodymyr Zelensky, or how COVID vaccines are a form of “genocide by government,” or how President Joe Biden’s administration has been “participating in the trafficking of kids” .......... Logan, who is 52, is still, after all, a war correspondent. That is how she sees it. The fighting may not be in Afghanistan or Iraq, and she may not be winning Emmys for her coverage anymore, but in her mind this is her most crucial assignment yet, uncovering this “war against humanity.” And she must be getting close to the real story, because the American media have tried to silence her from all sides. ............... In October, during an appearance on that network, Logan declared that “the open border is Satan’s way of taking control of the world” and that the global elite “want us eating insects” while they “dine on the blood of children.” Newsmax condemned her remarks and announced that it had no plans to invite Logan on its shows again. ........... Logan’s life has been rife with personal trauma, some of it well known. In 2011, she was gang-raped in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. In 2012, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. In 2013, a story she reported for 60 Minutes was publicly disavowed. ........... How a career built on pursuing the truth had become so unmoored from it. ............ When I had contacted Logan about an interview, her response, via text message, was: “Unfortunately I have no doubt this is another hit piece desperately seeking to discredit several decades of award-winning work at 60 Minutes, CBS, ABC, NBC and beyond and you are only seeking my voice to add legitimacy to the anonymous cowards you will use to attack me once again. Feel free to use this statement if you are sincere.” She then shared a screenshot of our exchange with her 530,000 Twitter followers. ............... Logan had begun her career as a full-time journalist 16 years earlier, fresh out of college and with a résumé consisting of two part-time newspaper gigs in her hometown of Durban, South Africa, along with a bit of swimsuit modeling. ........... She was en route to Kabul shortly after the first American air strikes that October. ........... Responding in a short dispatch for The Guardian, Logan parried adroitly. “If General Babajan smiles around me, perhaps it is because I offer him respect and attempt, at least, to talk to him in a non-demanding manner,” she wrote. “It’s not rocket science.” ............ More fundamental to Logan’s success in Afghanistan, however, was the simple fact that she showed up when others didn’t. ............ “The good ones,” he said, “always want the worst assignments.” By spring 2002, Logan had a $1 million contract with the network. ............. “She was also very good under fire. Even in a very bad firefight or something, after an IED exploded, she would get in front of the camera, and she’d be able to deliver.” ............. “When I looked at Mum, I saw a woman who thought she was secure and safe in her marriage suddenly alone.” .......... That was how Logan explained it when the Mirror reporter asked why she was so willing to pitch herself into danger as a journalist. “I’m afraid of being seen as vulnerable,” she said. “All my life, I’ve been fighting to prove that I’m not weak.” ............. She refused orders from CBS to keep out of Iraq during the American invasion in 2003, hiring local fixers to sneak her across the Jordanian border. On the drive into Baghdad, she played Van Morrison. With virtually every other American television broadcaster evacuated from the city, “shock and awe” was hers. One of Logan’s early segments for the relatively short-lived Wednesday edition of 60 Minutes showed a Humvee she was in flip over when it hit a land mine; in a Sunday segment, viewers saw Logan defy a vehicle commander’s orders to stay put as he went to inspect an unexploded bomb. In 2005, the Times christened her the “War Zone ‘It Girl’ ”; in 2006, CBS elevated her to chief foreign correspondent. ................ “It’s hard to judge what Lara Logan is going to be in 10 years,” Fager told Broadcasting & Cable magazine in the fall of 2008. “But boy, she’s made a mark in a short period of time.” ............. On the evening of February 11, 2011, at the height of the Arab Spring, Logan threaded through the congested streets of Cairo. She, her cameraman, her security guard, and her producer had come straight from the airport, as she later recounted on 60 Minutes, having landed just moments after President Hosni Mubarak announced his resignation. “It was like unleashing a champagne cork on Egypt,” she recalled. .............. Logan’s agent, Carole Cooper, had advised against the trip; only a week earlier, Logan and her crew had been detained overnight by Egyptian officials targeting journalists. But now, in Tahrir Square, thousands of people were singing, chanting, unfurling flags. For more than an hour she reported from the crowd, people smiling and waving at the camera. Then the camera’s battery went dead. The light illuminating Logan and the people around her was suddenly gone. A few moments later, Logan felt hands on her body. She thought that if she screamed loud enough, the assault would stop, but it didn’t. ................. The mob tore off her clothes. For a few minutes she managed to hold on to her security guard’s arm, but then, like everyone else in her crew, he was beaten back. This was when Logan thought she was going to die. Later she would recall for Newsweek how the men raped her with their hands, with sticks, with flagpoles. Onlookers took photos with their cellphones. The assault lasted at least 25 minutes before a group of Egyptian women intervened. They were able to cover Logan until soldiers managed to reach her and get her to her hotel, where she was seen by a doctor. .............. Logan’s eventual decision to talk openly about what happened inspired other women in journalism to share their own stories of being sexually assaulted while on the job. After she spoke out, the Committee to Protect Journalists launched a major effort to survey the problem and stigma of sexual violence in the field. .............. For years afterward, however, as she told the Toronto Star, Logan would continue to cope with internal injuries—severe pelvic pain, a hysterectomy that failed to heal. And there was the emotional damage. Logan talked about problems of intimacy with her husband, the dark memories that could sweep over her with a single touch. .............. A little over a year after the assault, Logan, at 41, was diagnosed with Stage 2 breast cancer; she underwent a lumpectomy and six weeks of radiation, then went into remission. It was during this period of her life, Logan would say, that she “wanted to come apart.” She felt herself in a situation where “nobody could see it and nobody could see me and nobody understood.” She began suffering panic attacks. She tried therapy. ............... Some of Logan’s reporting broke significant ground. No journalist had yet substantiated, for example, the role of Abu Sufian bin Qumu, an Ansar al‑Sharia leader and former Guantánamo Bay detainee, in the Benghazi attack; the Obama administration did not publicly announce his involvement until the next year. But the segment’s revelations were framed almost as sideshows to the Rambo-esque account of Davies, whose view of the attack comprised the majority of the report’s 15 and a half minutes. ........... And when, after the Times report, they tried to reach Davies to demand answers, they couldn’t find him—The Daily Beast later reported that he had emailed his publisher saying that because of a threat against his family, he was going dark. .............. For most of her professional life, Logan had not struck her peers as especially political—“very moderate,” one former colleague called her. She now began to shape a new worldview, one steeped in antagonism toward the media establishment she felt betrayed by, and toward the figures and institutions she believed it served. It was a worldview that offered both absolution and purpose. And it was soon to find a partisan expression in Donald Trump. ........... She likened right-wing outlets such as Breitbart News and Fox to the “tiny little spot” where women are permitted to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall, while “CBS, ABC, NBC, Huffington Post, Politico, whatever”—the “liberal” media—took up the rest of the space, reserved for men. .................. “I was like, ‘You know, you’re talking about me … You’re talking about all these people who’ve worked with you—we’re part of some vast left-wing conspiracy? Like, seriously, you believe that?’ And she was like, ‘No, you don’t understand … You may not know you’re complicit—but you’re complicit.’ ” ............... As the months passed, Logan’s comments became more extreme. Eventually some of her closest friends from her former life could no longer stomach a phone call with her, knowing it might turn into a stem-winder on the virtues of Michael Flynn, who had admitted to lying to the FBI about his contact with the Russian ambassado ................. After the January 6 insurrection, she rallied behind the people who were charged with taking part in it. ............. an appearance on Fox News—in November 2021, as the country battled COVID—during which Logan compared Anthony Fauci, then the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, to the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele. Fox stayed silent about the remarks but ultimately did not pursue a new season of Logan’s streaming show. .............. But by that point, Logan had come to seem firmly of the mind that setbacks, criticism, or a reproach of any sort were only evidence that she was doing something right. Carole Cooper, her agent—who, according to people familiar with their long relationship, had been like a second mother to Logan—dropped her. ................ Logan was undeterred. The stakes, as she had come to see them, were simply too high. This is what she tries to communicate to people at the various local speaking gigs that now constitute much of her career, events such as the Park Cities Republican Women Christmas fundraising lunch in Texas, which she keynoted last year. “We had to cut her off because she was going too long,” one member who helped arrange the lunch recalled. The message was: “The world is on fire” and “your kids are being exposed to cats being raped” and “elections are stolen” and “we’ve lost our country.” The woman added, “It’s a Christmas lunch, mind you.” ........... In the past several years, I have written about a number of public figures on the right who believe very few of the things they profess to believe, who talk in public about stolen elections and wink at the specter of global cabals, and then privately crack jokes about the people who applaud. ................. In recent years, many Americans have embraced conspiracy theories as a way to give order and meaning to the world’s chance cruelties. Lara Logan seems to have done the same, rewriting her story as a martyrdom epic in the war of narratives. .................. She lingered until the very last person left the auditorium. .......... I think she stayed for as long as she did that night because she believes she has seen the light and wanted the people in the auditorium to see it too. I think she also stayed because the people there represent some of the only community she has left. .



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