Month: February 2024

Democratic Politicians Are More Tolerant of Illegal Immigration Than Are Democratic Voters

(p. A10) Before Trump ran for president, Democrats tended to combine passionate support for many forms of immigration with a belief in strong border security. But Trump’s harsh anti-immigration stance pushed the party toward the opposite end of the spectrum.

Today, many Democratic politicians are willing to accept high levels of undocumented immigration and oppose enforcement measures that the party once favored. Some Democrats, especially on the left, argue that the government doesn’t even have the power to reduce migration much.

This shift has created political vulnerabilities for Democrats — because most Americans are closer to the party’s old position than to its new one.

. . .

Even with all their current concerns, Americans are not opposed to immigration. Most say that legal immigrants strengthen the country, and many believe the U.S. should remain a haven for people fleeing repression. But most Americans also think that the country’s immigration laws should mean something and that citizens of other countries should not be able to enter this country simply because they want to.

For the full commentary, see:

David Leonhardt. “Democrats Are Out of Step With Public Opinion on Immigration.” The New York Times (Friday, January 19, 2024): A10.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 17, 2024, and has the title “A 2024 Vulnerability; The Democrats are out of step with public opinion when it comes to immigration.”)

A Miraculous Machine in the Middle-Ages That Did Nothing to Improve the Lives of the Masses

Before the industrial revolution clever inventors sometimes devised elaborate and amazing machines. The Antikythera mechanism is a famous example. Though these machines amaze us, they usually did little to improve the lives of those who lived at the time of invention. Why? Maybe the answer is that just before the industrial revolution, entrepreneurs were encouraged and enabled (through property rights and patents) to apply amazing inventions to the betterment of the people.

(p. C9) What kind of a book do we have in “Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend”?

. . .

The authors call the book a “clockwork”; its many disparate parts are joined in scrupulous devotion to a 16th-century automaton—an object, they write, which is at once “a sculpture, a machine, an icon, and a messenger.”

The figure is of a Franciscan friar, about 16 inches tall, carved out of wood, cloaked in a modern replica of the garb he once wore. His 5-pound weight is due to an intricate iron mechanism that fits inside his wooden body; it is wound with a key.

. . .

Imagine, Ms. King and Mr. Todd suggest, what it would have been like to see this automaton at the time of its creation. He is placed upon a candlelit table. His feet take steps under his tunic—but he actually glides on three wheels, making his movement seem ethereal. He is deliberately slow. This is not a mechanism meant to thrill us with speed and virtuosity. His movements are graceful, solemn.

As he moves, the friar raises and lowers a cross in his left hand and strikes his chest with his right, as if declaring “mea culpa.” He also lifts the cross to his lips and fixes his gaze steadily, perhaps at an observer at the opposite end of the table. He looks down at the cross, up at the observer, and begins to turn: “You let out half a breath,” the authors tell us, “but as his full body pivots on the table, feet in motion, head forward, his eyes slide left in their sockets to stay fixed on you!” Then he changes direction, staring at what might be another observer. There is no doubt about his seriousness; the impact on believers, in the half-light, would have been considerable.

. . .

In seeking to learn more about the friar’s provenance, Ms. King contacted Servus Gieben, a Dutch-born Franciscan who served as the director of the Franciscan Museum in Rome. In his correspondence with Ms. King, Gieben, who died in 2014, reaffirmed his theory that it may have been commissioned by Philip for his son Carlos. In 1562, at the age of 17, Carlos fell down a flight of stairs and so gravely injured his skull that he was not expected to survive (either the injury or the era’s “treatments”).

. . . The corpse of a Franciscan friar, Diego de Alcalá (ca. 1400-63), had remained free of decay after his death that it was thought to have healing powers. And behold: Once it was laid upon the dying prince, Carlos soon began to recover. Philip II spent 26 years petitioning four consecutive popes to recognize the miracle and declare Diego a saint. (He ultimately was, as the city of San Diego now affirms.)

Gieben suggested that the facial resemblance between the automaton and Diego was evident. And what better way, he thought, for Philip to honor Diego than by providing his often wayward son with an admonitory reminder in the form of the penitential friar himself, created by the most brilliant clockmaker in the empire. As Don Carlos was brought back to life, so an inanimate automaton would turn animate.

Even today, the authors suggest, the friar remains “a small miracle. Or the image of a small miracle. Or the metaphor of a large miracle. Or an artificial miracle.”

For the full review see:

Edward Rothstein. “A Wonder of Another Age.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, December 23, 2023): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date December 22, 2023, and has the title “‘Miracles and Machines’ Review: Mystery of the Clockwork Man.”)

The book under review is:

King, Elizabeth, and W. David Todd. Miracles and Machines: A Sixteenth-Century Automaton and Its Legend. Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2023.

When Elmo Asked Followers How They Were Doing, They Responded from the “Pits of Despair”

(p. 9) On Monday [Jan. 29, 2024] the X account for Elmo, the fuzzy red monster from “Sesame Street,” posed a softball question to its 457,000 followers: “Elmo is just checking in! How is everybody doing?”

In thousands of responses, social media users let Elmo know that no, actually, they were not doing too hot.

“Elmo I’m depressed and broke,” one wrote. Others told Elmo that they had been laid off, that they were anxious about the 2024 election, or that their dog had rolled around in goose feces.

“Elmo each day the abyss we stare into grows a unique horror,” read a response posted by Hanif Abdurraqib, a poet, essayist and contributor to The New York Times. “One that was previously unfathomable in nature. Our inevitable doom which once accelerated in years, or months, now accelerates in hours, even minutes.”

The response continued: “However I did have a good grapefruit earlier, thank you for asking.”

According to X’s metrics, Elmo’s question was seen more than 140 million times. Samantha Maltin, the executive vice president, chief marketing and brand officer of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind “Sesame Street,” said that Elmo might not have been prepared for all the emotional fatigue shared in response.

. . .

This was not Elmo’s first brush with an internet dog pile: In 2022, his rant about a pet rock named Rocco also went viral on social media, leading many users to respond by venting their own feelings of frustration.

Why does Elmo keep getting dragged into the pits of despair?

For the full story, see:

Callie Holtermann. “The Day Elmo Asked An Innocent Question.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sunday, February 4, 2024): 9.

(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 30, 2024, and has the title “Elmo Asked an Innocuous Question.”)

Public “Blowback” Against Woke Agenda “Has Prompted Disney to Retrench”

(p. 19) The emphasis on diversity in some of Disney’s live-action films, including “The Little Mermaid,” “The Marvels” and “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” has . . . led to fan complaints. Although Disney has also received positive feedback, the blowback — and poor ticket sales for some of the films in question — has prompted Disney to retrench.

“Creators lost sight of what their No. 1 objective needed to be,” Robert A. Iger, Disney’s chief executive, said at the DealBook Summit last month. “We have to entertain first. It’s not about messages.”

For the full story, see:

Brooks Barnes. “The Story of Pocahontas, With Many Liberties Taken.” The New York Times, Arts&Leisure Section (Sunday, December 17, 2023): 17 & 19.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Dec. 16, 2023, and has the title “What ‘Pocahontas’ Tells Us About Disney, for Better and Worse.”)

Shih Ming-teh Spent 20 Years in Prison for Arguing That Taiwan Should Be Free from Communist China

(p. B10) Shih Ming-teh, a lifelong campaigner for democracy in Taiwan who spent over two decades in prison for his cause and later started a protest movement against a president from his former party, died on Jan. 15, [2024] his 83rd birthday, in Taipei, the island’s capital.

. . .

Mr. Shih helped lead a pro-democracy protest in 1979 that was brutally broken up by the police and that is now viewed as a turning point in Taiwan’s journey from authoritarianism to democracy. When he stood trial over the confrontation, he smiled defiantly to the cameras, although his original teeth had been shattered years before under police torture, and delivered a groundbreaking argument for Taiwan’s independence from China, an idea banned under the rule of Chiang Kai-shek and then his son, Chiang Ching-kuo.

. . .

“I could see that he was working like a man on fire to challenge the authoritarian rule,” Linda Gail Arrigo, an American scholar and pro-democracy campaigner in Taiwan, who was married to Mr. Shih from 1978 to 1995, said in a recent interview with the Formosa Files podcast. “He expected to die in prison — by execution.”

. . .

Many of his colleagues were quickly arrested, but Mr. Shih eluded the police for nearly a month before being captured and tried with seven others. An arrest photo showed his jaw covered in bandages, the result of a hasty attempt at plastic surgery to alter his appearance.

The trial drew yet more attention to their calls for democracy, especially because the government — eager to prove its case to the Taiwanese public and the wider world — let journalists and international observers into the courtroom. Tall and lean, Mr. Shih smiled for the cameras, his hands tucked in his pockets, in what he said was an effort to convey insouciant confidence.

He used the trial to attack the Nationalist government’s position that Taiwan was part of China. Instead, he argued, Taiwan had been separated from China for decades and had in effect become independent, even if Taiwan’s rulers would not accept that reality. That argument would enter the island’s political mainstream.

“Nowadays these claims seem nothing out of the ordinary, but at the time they were a breakthrough,” Mr. Shih wrote in an account of the trial published in 2021. “My smile and my political counterattack were the reason that the tyrants did not dare to execute me.”

For the full obituary, see:

Chris Buckley and Amy Chang Chien. “Shih Ming-teh, 83, Defiant Activist for a Democratic Taiwan, Dies.” The New York Times (Thursday, January 25, 2024): B10.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Jan. 24, 2024, and has the title “Shih Ming-teh, Defiant Activist for a Democratic Taiwan, Dies at 83.”)

Indigenous North-American Indians Were Not Peaceful

Critics of America, suggest that the founding occurred by stealing land from peaceful Indians. But as suggested in the book reviewed below, pre-European Indians fought wars against each other. To the extent that Indians chose, or were allowed to choose, to live under non-violent European rule-of-law, they could flourish.

(p. 17) In THE CUTTING-OFF WAY: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500-1800 (University of North Carolina Press, 287 pp., paperback, $29.95), Wayne E. Lee argues that the fluid, Native American style of war was quite alien to the European soldiers who encountered it. Tribes like the Tuscarora and the Cherokee avoided battles and conventional sieges, instead carrying out what Lee calls “conquest by harassment” — dispersed campaigns of ambushes and raids, which could be sustained for years.

. . .

The aims of their wars were also different, argues Lee, a professor of early modern military history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. We tend to think of wars as being fought to conquer people, control them and occupy their land. But Native Americans often waged war not to settle territory but to clear it. Specifically, they aimed to push other tribes out of choice hunting grounds and hold exclusive access to them.

For the full review see:

Thomas E. Ricks. “War Stories / Military History.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, Jan. 21, 2024): 17.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date Dec. [sic] 4, 2023, and has the title “How Different Peoples Around the World Fought and Built Empires.”)

The book under review is:

Lee, Wayne E. The Cutting-Off Way: Indigenous Warfare in Eastern North America, 1500–1800. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2023.

Californians Prepare for “Calamity” by Learning Military Tactics and Firing Guns

(p. 8) In the chilly dusk on a recent Saturday, nine people were creeping through the California hills. Their faces were painted in shades of green, yellow, brown and black, so that they blended into their surroundings. Moving uphill through thickets of trees, they tried to be silent, as if not to draw the attention of some unseen enemy. They were conscious of every breath, every dry leaf that crunched underfoot, every snapped twig.

These people were not military personnel. They were just civilians — biotech workers, a masseuse, an entrepreneur — who had decided to spend a weekend preparing themselves for a war, societal collapse or some other calamity.

A booming voice broke the silence: “Camo! Five, four, three, two, one!”

The person giving the order was Jessie Krebs, a wilderness expert who has trained hundreds of U.S. Air Force officers in how to stay alive behind enemy lines through an intensive course called Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE.

. . .

Outdoor education programs, survival courses and military simulations have been in high demand as wars abroad intensify and prospective voters in the 2024 presidential election tell pollsters and journalists about their fears of a civil war or even World War III.

. . .

Mr. Yu said his interest in survivalism germinated after reading “Emergency,” a 2009 book by Neil Strauss on his transformation from “helpless urbanite” to independent survivalist. “The coolest thing to do is to develop a skill set like James Bond,” Mr. Yu said. Of late, he said, he had taken up flying lessons, despite a fear of heights; learned to pick locks; and fired guns.

For the full story, see:

Will Higginbotham and Marlena Sloss. “Getting Ready for the Worst. Just in Case.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sunday, January 21, 2024): 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 19, 2024, and has the same title as the print version.)

Thiel Says British Public Supports National Health System Because They Suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome

Peter Thiel claims that the British public supports their National Health System because they suffer from the Stockholm Syndrome. The claim is amusing, thought-provoking, and may be partly true. But I suspect that there are other reasons for the British public’s support. I suspect they assume that future advances in health care inevitably will be more expensive than they will be able to afford. They do not understand that in a laissez-faire health system substantial incentives would exist to develop effective low-cost cures and therapies.

(p. 8) It began with a £1 contract.

In the hours after a pandemic was declared in March 2020, Palantir, the secretive American data analytics company, was invited to 10 Downing Street along with other tech groups, including Amazon, Google and Meta, to discuss how it could help the British government respond.

Within days, Palantir’s software was processing streams of data from across England’s National Health Service, with Palantir engineers embedded to help. The company’s services, used by the C.I.A. and Western militaries for more than a decade, were deployed to track emergency room capacity and direct supplies of scarce equipment.

Palantir charged the government just one pound.

The deal provided the company with a valuable toehold. Since then, Palantir, which is chaired by Peter Thiel, the billionaire investor and one of President Donald J. Trump’s major 2016 donors, has parlayed the work into more than £60 million in government health contracts. Its biggest reward may be yet to come: a seven-year contract worth up to £480 million — about $590 million — to overhaul N.H.S. England’s outdated patient data system.

. . .

Palantir declined to comment on its bid but said it was proud to support “the world’s most important private and public institutions.” The company defended the quality of its work and said, “We are now helping to reduce the N.H.S. backlog, cut the amount of time nurses and doctors need to spend on administrative tasks and speed up cancer diagnosis — all while rigorously protecting data privacy.”

. . .

Speaking at Oxford University in January [2023], Mr. Thiel went off script. The N.H.S. makes people sick and should embrace privatization, he said in response to a question. The British public’s support for the service, he said, was “Stockholm syndrome.”

For the full story, see:

Euan Ward and Adam Satariano. “Uproar in U.K. Over Data Giant’s Push for Heavier Role in Health Care.” The New York Times, First Section (Sunday, October 1, 2023): 8.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 29, 2023, and has the title “How Peter Thiel’s Palantir Pushed Toward the Heart of U.K. Health Care.”)

Economists’ Models of Growth and Inflation Predicted a Recession That Has Not Happened; So “Economists Can Learn a Huge, Healthy Dose of Humility”

(p. B1) Many economists spent early 2023 predicting a painful downturn, a view so widely held that some commentators started to treat it as a given. Inflation had spiked to the highest level in decades, and a range of forecasters thought that it would take a drop in demand and a prolonged jump in unemployment to wrestle it down.

Instead, the economy grew 3.1 percent last year, up from less than 1 percent in 2022 and faster than the average for the five years leading up to the pandemic.

. . .

(p. B3) . . . what is clear is that old models of how growth and inflation relate did not serve as accurate guides.

. . .

“It’s not like we understood the macro economy perfectly before, and this was a pretty unique time,” said Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former Obama administration economic official who thought that lowering inflation would require higher unemployment. “Economists can learn a huge, healthy dose of humility.”

. . .

Many economists previously thought that a more marked slowdown was likely to be necessary to fully stamp out rapid inflation. Mr. Summers, for instance, predicted that it would take years of joblessness above 5 percent to wrestle price increases back under control.

“I was of the view that soft landings” were “the triumph of hope over experience,” Mr. Summers said. “This is looking like a case where hope has triumphed over experience.”

. . .

“I would have thought that it was an iron law that disinflation is painful,” said Laurence M. Ball, a Johns Hopkins economist who was an author of an influential 2022 paper that argued bringing down inflation would probably require driving up unemployment. “The broad lesson, which we never seem to completely learn, is that it’s very hard to forecast things and we shouldn’t be too confident, and especially when there’s a very weird, historic event like Covid.”

For the full story, see:

Jeanna Smialek and Ben Casselman. “How Experts Got It Wrong On Economy.” The New York Times (Saturday, January 27, 2024): B1 & B3.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Jan. 26, 2024, and has the title “Economists Predicted a Recession. So Far They’ve Been Wrong.”)

Miracle Drugs Should Not Lead Us to Ignore Nutrition as a Driver of Health

(p. A15) More than 100 years after the miraculous discovery of insulin to treat diabetes, how are things going? More people are getting the disease. (Between 1959 and 2021, the number of Americans diagnosed with diabetes increased from 1.5 million to 29.7 million, according to federal government surveys.) Patients are doing worse. (Fewer than 1 in 5 Type 1 patients are achieving blood-sugar goals established by the American Diabetes Association.) Diabetes intensifies America’s economic and racial divide. (Type 2 diabetes disproportionately affects the poor, the undereducated and minorities.) And the epidemic is global. (According to the World Health Organization, diabetes is the ninth leading cause of death worldwide.)

If any disease needs to be rethought, it is surely diabetes, and that is the premise of Gary Taubes’s latest book.

. . .

The hero of “Rethinking Diabetes” is Dr. Richard Bernstein, an engineer-turned-doctor who also has Type 1. In the 1970s, he became the first person to use a home glucose meter; looking at his data, he realized that a low-carb diet minimized his glycemic swings. For the past 40 years, in his books, academic papers and other advocacy, he has been the leading low-carb evangelist for people with diabetes.

But Dr. Bernstein is also a controversial figure, and not just because his nutritional guidance defied the medical establishment. I interviewed Dr. Bernstein and wrote about him in 2007. He’s prone to hyperbole and absurdities, such as his claim that insulin-pump patients “all have complications.” More important, his low-carb diet is uncompromising, and his advice is not realistic for everyone. When I interviewed him, he hadn’t eaten an apple since the Nixon administration. Nonetheless, I believe that Dr. Bernstein’s insights about diet and diabetes—and Mr. Taubes’s central argument—are correct. Imperfectly, I follow Dr. Bernstein’s guidance, and I’m far healthier because of it.

Mr. Taubes’s larger point is that we have allowed pharmacological miracles in the treatment of diabetes, insulin being one of them, to supplant food and nutrition as the foundation of good health. He concurs with Dr. Arnoldo Cantani, a 19th-century Italian physician, who said that the remedy for diabetes “is not in the drugstore but in the kitchen.”

For the full review see:

James S. Hirsch. “BOOKSHELF; Beyond Insulin.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Jan. 8, 2024): A15.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date January 7, 2024, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Rethinking Diabetes’ Review: Beyond Insulin.”)

The book under review is:

Taubes, Gary. Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments. New York: Knopf, 2024.

Cleaning Pigeon Poop Off Their Antenna to Rule Out a Cause of Static

(p. B11) Arno A. Penzias, whose astronomical probes yielded incontrovertible evidence of a dynamic, evolving universe with a clear point of origin, confirming what became known as the Big Bang theory, died on Monday [January 22, 2024] in San Francisco.

. . .

In 1964, while preparing the antenna to measure the properties of the Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, another young radio astronomer who was new to Bell Labs, encountered a persistent, unexplained hiss of radio waves that seemed to come from everywhere in the sky, detected no matter which way the antenna was pointed. Perplexed, they considered various sources of the noise. They thought they might be picking up radar, or noise from New York City, or radiation from a nuclear explosion. Or might pigeon droppings be the culprit?

Examining the antenna, Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson “subjected its electric circuits to scrutiny comparable to that used in preparing a manned spacecraft,” Walter Sullivan wrote in The New York Times in 1965. Yet the mysterious hiss remained.

The cosmological underpinnings of the noise were finally explained with help from physicists at Princeton University, who had predicted that there might be radiation coming from all directions left over from the Big Bang. The buzzing, it turned out, was just that: a cosmic echo. It confirmed that the universe wasn’t infinitely old and static but rather had begun as a primordial fireball that left the universe bathed in background radiation.

. . .

. . . Dr. Penzias’s path to stumbling onto the answer to one of humanity’s most central questions started . . ., when he joined Bell Laboratories as a member of its radio research group in Holmdel.

There, he saw the potential of AT&T’s new satellite communications antenna, a giant radio telescope known as the Holmdel Horn, as a tool for cosmological observation. In teaming up with Dr. Wilson in 1964 to use the antenna, Dr. Wilson said in a recent interview, one of their goals was to advance the nascent field of radio astronomy by accurately measuring several bright celestial sources.

Soon after they started their measurements, however, they heard the hiss. They spent months ruling out possible causes, including pigeons.

“The pigeons would go and roost at the small end of the horn, and they deposited what Arno called a white dielectric material,” Dr. Wilson said. “And we didn’t know if the pigeon poop might have produced some radiation.” So the men climbed up and cleaned it out. The noise persisted.

It was finally Dr. Penzias’s fondness for chatting on the telephone that led to a fortuitous breakthrough. (“It was a good thing he worked for the phone company, because he liked to use their instrument,” Dr. Wilson said. “He talked to a lot of people.”)

In January 1965, Dr. Penzias dialed Bernard Burke, a fellow radio astronomer, and in the course of their conversation he mentioned the puzzling hiss. Dr. Burke suggested that Dr. Penzias call a physicist at Princeton who had been trying to prove that the Big Bang had left traces of cosmological radiation. He did.

Intrigued, scientists from Princeton visited Dr. Penzias and Dr. Wilson, and together they made the connection to the Big Bang. Theory and observation were then brought together in a pair of papers published in 1965.

For the full obituary, see:

Katie Hafner. “Arno A. Penzias Is Dead at 90; Confirmed the Big Bang Theory.” The New York Times (Thursday, January 25, 2024): B11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Jan. 22, 2024, and has the title “Arno A. Penzias, 90, Dies; Nobel Physicist Confirmed Big Bang Theory.”)