The Question
Why do kids hate music lessons?
Talking Points
- Russia proposed a cease-fire for Orthodox Christmas
- A far-right Israeli politician sparked outrage at Al-Aqsa
- Cristiano Ronaldo made the move to Saudi Arabia
- Kurds marked the funeral of a slain activist
- Prince Harry's tell-all memoir included his body-count
- The Biden administration began expelling migrants
- Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest during an NFL match
- The meme was almost over for Bed Bath & Beyond
- Meta was handed a $413m fine by the European Union
- The woes continued at Salesforce with a 10% layoff
Deep Dive
The Sinaloa Cartel was dealt a significant blow this week with the capture of Ovidio Guzmán. You know the name. The city of Culiacán descended into an orgy of retaliatory violence.
Mouse trap
On Thursday morning news broke across Sinaloa that the head of the local cartel, Ovidio Guzmán had been arrested in Culiacán. The 32-year-old known as El Ratón ('the mouse') was snatched from his residence and promptly whisked off to Mexico City. The cartel started by the family patriarch El Chapo turns over billions each year. If you are sampling methamphetamines, fentanyl, or cocaine in the United States there is a one-in-four chance it has originated from the Sinaloa Cartel. It is an extraordinarily dangerous organisation — the government does not have a monopoly of violence in Sinaloa. That he was arrested in Culiacán represents a real breakthrough.
The cartel response was typical: ultra-violence. Firefights erupted the whole way up the Sinaloa coastline as the group sought to deter El Ratón's extraction. In Culiacán the night air was punctuated by the unmistakeable drone of army helicopters pouring minigun fire onto cartel positions. As morning broke the entire city was besieged . Gun battles broke out everywhere. Cellphone footage showed convoys of gunmen racing into the city centre and the air was choked with smoke from burning vehicles. One Aeromexico flight was grounded when it was sprayed with bullets on the runway. Another video showed a cartel soldier firing at an army helicopter with an American .50 calibre anti-materiel rifle — there's not many small arms that can down light aircraft but this is one of them.
A family affair
Whether or not El Ratón stays in custody is anyone's guess. In 2019, the same year his dad was sent to serve out a life sentence in ADX Florence, Guzmán Jr was briefly taken into custody by the National Guard in Culiacán. Gunmen rushed into the city to prevent El Ratón's exfiltration. The cartel surrounded the soldiers and their captive. Roadblocks were set up, cars burnt, and the gunmen laid siege to a residential block housing the families of local police. The escalation worked: President López Obrador ordered the kingpin's release, stating that "the capture of one criminal cannot be worth more than the lives of people". Despite the righteousness of the decision, López Obrador was judged as soft on crime by the US. In a bout of curious timing, El Ratón's current arrest precedes a presidential visit by Joe Biden by a matter of days.
Incarceration didn't suit Guzmán Sr either. After a botched assassination attempt killed a cardinal in 1993, the government came down on El Chapo like a tonne of bricks. He was in Guatemala, en route to El Salvador, when the heat caught up with him. 20 years on drugs and weapons charges was the ticket. But that first stint behind bars, in the maximum security facility Altiplano, was cut short in 2001 when a guard wheeled him out in a laundry cart. Timeless. He spent another 13 years on the run in the Sierra Madre, running an enormous drug empire all the while, before he was caught again. Back to Altiplano. He only lasted a year there before escaping via a 1.5km tunnel his associates dug directly to his cell.
The Juárez assault
The siege in Culiacán comes just days after a brazen prison raid in the border city of Ciudad Juárez. On New Years Day Los Mexicles cartel assaulted a jail with armoured vehicles. Among the 30 prisoners boosted was Ernesto Alfredo Pinon de la Cruz , or simply El Neto — a top assassin for that cartel. 19 lives were extinguished to free him. Another seven were snuffed out in the ensuing manhunt. And in the end, it was for nought: El Neto met his own violent end on Thursday. Just another bullet-ridden, burnt-out wreck on the side of the road.
Worldlywise
We need to talk about Kevin
The party which holds a majority in the House of Representatives gets to elect the speaker. The speaker gets to wave around a gavel and sit in a different chair, but it's not simply a ceremonial role. This individual dishes out legislative treats and appoints favoured subjects to committees of power and prestige. The Republican majority maybe slim, but it is a majority. Electing the agreed-upon candidate, in this case Kevin McCarthy, should be as simple as a show of hands. In the good year 2023 this matter of process has become a circus .
On Tuesday McCarthy walked into the chamber knowing full well that his detractors in the House Freedom Caucus would vote against him. The Democrats would vote for their guy, but they are in a minority, so we can skip over them. McCarthy's cunning plan was to try his own variant of the filibuster: keep the representatives in their seats for repeated votes until, out of some combination of boredom and pity, they elected him. It did not work. At time of writing McCarthy has lost 11 leadership votes — the most since the Civil War. It's really getting quite embarrassing now.
The Freedom Caucus comprises 20 or so far-right and fringe politicians. But regardless of their political beliefs, politics is a game of simple arithmetic and they have the numbers to cause as much annoyance as they please. McCarthy has demeaned himself in his negotiations; offering up plum positions and enough vetoes as to make his own position, if he gets the gavel, borderline meaningless. Having conceded everything, he still can't get their votes. The rebels have been dubbed 'The Taliban 19' , which is not much of a slight given the Taliban's recent successes.
A funeral for the faithful
This week Pope Benedict XVI was laid to rest in the Vatican, ending the scriptural oddity which began when he retired almost a decade ago. The Roman Catholic Church is a broad one but not so expansive as to allow for two living popes. Let alone those hectic years during the Schism when there were three of them each claiming to be the Vicar of Christ on Earth. Benedict quit as Supreme Pontiff at a time of intense introspection at the Vatican; pondering the hell on Earth that men of the cloth had created for the children under their guidance.
In his final speech to the faithful in 2013, Benedict noted his advancing age and ebbing health. In private conversations he suggested that his failure to change with a changing world played a part. A generous reading of this is that he fast-tracked renewal in an institution nearly two millennia old. A cynic may argue his personal complicity in abuse committed underneath him as bishop of Munich made his exit fait accompli. The answer is probably somewhere in the middle. He will be remembered for his dogmatism. Benedict was a proud reactionary who sought to stamp out the embers threatening the church. Feminism, gay rights, women ordained as priests, IVF, abortion. Contemporary Catholics of a liberal bent nicknamed him 'God's Rottweiler'.
After his retirement Benedict remained in the Vatican. But it was not the life of quiet contemplation which the world prayed for. In 2019 he blamed the child sex abuse scandals on the sexual revolution and homosexuality. That is his legacy. Now he is gone, commemorated by the reformist Pope Francis beneath the stony gaze of the apostles atop Saint Peter's Basilica.
Winners and Losers
📈 London street cleaners
Your average climate activist has a broad variety of tactics available to them. The really effective ones can't be reprinted for legal reasons but if we run down the list, right down at the very bottom, you'll see "gluing yourself to a handrail in public". Extinction Rebellion announced it is shifting away from this low-energy disruption because, as XR leaders admit, it doesn't work. A huge boon for the council workers trying to clean Waterloo bridge without running over someone's nan.
📈 Sherlock Holmes erotic fan-fiction writers
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes detective novels have been translated to screen and stage more than 250 times since A Study in Scarlet was published in 1887. But on January 1 the final 10-volume collection, The Case-book of Sherlock Holmes , only jsut emerged from the shadows of copyright protection into the public domain . It's open season: Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson are lovers and there is nothing the Doyle estate can do about it.
📉 Juan Guaidó
Venezuela's dashing president-in-exile is now the former-president-in-exile after Washington withdrew its recognition. His quixotic attempt to topple Nicolás Maduro (or at least be installed by the State Department in his absence) is over. But, as the old saying goes, anyone sitting on a spare half-a-million barrels per day during an energy crisis is going to make friends real quick.
📉 Israel's Supreme Court judges
The Only Democracy In The Middle East™ is parting ways with the outmoded concept of 'constitutional checks and balances'. Bibi Netanyahu's coalition has unveiled a new plan to make the highest court in the land subservient to parliament . Any Supreme Court decision could be overturned with a simple majority in the famously sensible Knesset. It also removes "reasonableness" as a method of adjudicating whether the government has acted unlawfully.
Highlights
The Image
Skiers in Leysin, Switzerland display relentless optimism in the face of an undeniable truth. Photo supplied by Reuters .
The Quote
"A tough year, tougher than the year we leave behind. We expect one-third of the world economy to be in recession. Why? Because the three big economies — US, EU, China — are all slowing down simultaneously."
– IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva forecasts a year of change in 2023... It'll just be for the worse.
The Numbers
£33,000
- As of 2pm on Thursday afternoon the average FTSE 100 CEO would have pocketed 33 grand. That figure happens to be the median annual salary in the United Kingdom. There's a good reason why the Tube is closed.
48 frames per second
- Filmmakers landed on 24 frames per second nearly a century ago and have rarely budged since. Increasing the number of frames per second forsakes smoothness for fidelity — we've all experienced the dreaded 'sitcom effect'. In his typically uncompromising way, James Cameron's Avatar sequel flips between 24 and 48 fps depending on the scene. As part of our ongoing outreach to the six Zoomers reading this newsletter: 24 fps is low-key goated when the suspension of disbelief is the vibe.
The Headlines
"Elon Musk has destroyed more than half of Twitter's value in a little over 2 months, investor filing suggests" — Fortune .
"Poor taxidermy is making 'fattypuses' and 'platysausages' out of Australian animals"
— ABC .
The Special Mention
Credit where credit's due. The British Museum is reportedly in talks with the Acropolis Museum on a deal which would see the Parthenon Marbles returned to their rightful home. Which is not to say that Britain does not have some claim to the traditions of Ancient Athens — it has after all given us a century-long interpretation of the archetypal Greek tragedy on the price of hubris.
The Most-Read Article
'Ice Age hunters used cave paintings to time life cycles of animals, study shows'
The Best Long Reads
- Businessweek eats McDonald's in Moscow
- Financial Times gauges the threat of new Covid variants
- The Atlantic discovers the hidden cost of cheap TVs
Thomas Wharton
Senior Editor
The Answer...
The tuneless among us know music lessons are a cruel and unusual punishment (off-key trombonist here). If musical talent is distributed throughout the population in the same way height is, then practice isn't perfect. Let's see if this delightful piece strikes a chord with the recovering novice musicians out there.
