Month: July 2024

Organized Gazan Cigarette-Seeking Attacks on Aid Convoys “Pose a Formidable Obstacle” to Feeding the Hungry

(p. A1) A new problem is bedeviling humanitarian aid convoys attempting to deliver relief to hungry Gazans: attacks by organized crowds seeking not the flour and medicine that trucks are carrying, but cigarettes smuggled inside the shipments.

In tightly blockaded Gaza, cigarettes have become increasingly scarce, now generally selling for $25 to $30 apiece. U.N. and Israeli officials say the coordinated attacks by groups seeking to sell smuggled cigarettes for profit pose a formidable obstacle to bringing desperately needed aid to southern Gaza.

. . .

(p. A5) Andrea De Domenico, who runs the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in Jerusalem, confirmed that aid officials had “seen cartons of U.N.-branded assistance with cigarettes inside.” He said the contraband cigarettes had created “a new dynamic” of organized attacks on aid convoys.

. . .

Mr. De Domenico showed The Times footage he had taken during a recent drive along the road leading into Gaza from Kerem Shalom: Full flour bags can be seen strewed along the side of the road, seemingly of little interest to the looters.

“Their main purpose here was to search for the cigarettes,” said Manhal Shaibar, who runs a Palestinian trucking company at Kerem Shalom that ferries U.N. aid.

. . .

One cigarette seller in Gaza City said prices could range up to $40 per cigarette for more sought-after brands. Desperate smokers were willing to pay the high prices, despite being impoverished after several months of war, he said.

The seller, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he feared retribution, said Hamas forces were still present in the area but not as police to apply the law, just as “mafias.”

For the full story see:

Aaron Boxerman and Natan Odenheimer. “Cigarettes Smuggled in Gaza Aid Attract Mobs and Stall Convoys.” The New York Times (Wednesday, July 10, 2024): A1 & A5.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 9, 2024, and has the title “Cigarette Smuggling in Gaza Turns Aid Trucks Into Targets.”)

In the City of 38 Atlases “The Citizens Ate as if They Would Die the Next Day, and Built as if They Would Live Forever”

(p. D3) Of all the punishments chronicled in Greek mythology, none were as heavy-handed as the one that Zeus meted out to Atlas. Having led the Titans in their losing battle with the Olympian gods for control of the heavens, Atlas was condemned to bear the sky aloft for eternity.

And of all the temples built during the ancient Greek empire, none enlisted more Atlases than the one dedicated to the Olympic Zeus in Akragas, a city-state now called Agrigento, on the southwest coast of Sicily. Atop massive half-columns, 38 Atlases, each 25 feet tall and carved from limestone, seemingly held up the architrave — the main beam that rests on the capitals of columns — with their bent arms.

The Doric temple — the world’s largest — was built to commemorate the victory over Carthage at the battle of Himera in 480 B.C.; it survives today as a heap of tumbled pillars and blocks of stone at the Valley of the Temples archaeological park. Only one of its Atlases, or telamones, remains even semi-intact. It stands on display in the Regional Archaeological Museum, badly weathered and footless but upright.

This past summer the park’s director, Roberto Sciarratta, announced he had commissioned a colossal statue, a sort of Franken-Atlas, to mark the founding of Akragas 2,600 years ago.

. . .

The lyric poet Pindar described Akragas as the most beautiful city “inhabited by mortals,” and the philosopher Empedocles, a native son, is said to have remarked that the citizens ate as if they would die the next day, and built as if they would live forever.

. . .

Nowadays, a copy of the museum’s Atlas, cobbled together in the 1970s, lounges near the rubble, roped off from the public. “Many visitors believe the Atlas on the ground is authentic,” said Leonardo Guarnieri, a park spokesman, with a shrug worthy of Ayn Rand. “It is not authentic.”

He added that the hands of the new golem Atlas would be unencumbered. That ought to take a load off his shoulders.

For the full story see:

Franz Lidz. “Renewable Resources of the Ancients.” The New York Times (Tuesday, October 6, 2020 [sic]): D3.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 5, 2020 [sic], and has the title “From the Rubble of Atlases, a Colossus Will Rise.”)

The obscure mention of Ayn Rand near the end of the passages quoted above invites the cognoscenti to remember:

Rand, Ayn. Atlas Shrugged. New York: Random House, 1957.

Hamas Used $1 Billion of United Nations Aid to Build Tunnels and Buy Weapons

(p. A7) For years, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency sent millions of dollars each month to Gaza to pay employees and support hospitals, schools and other infrastructure, according to a new lawsuit. The money was wired from New York, where the agency has an office, to the West Bank, where financial institutions loaded some of that cash onto trucks to be driven across Israel to Gaza.

The suit, filed Monday [June 24, 2024] in federal court in Manhattan, said some of those dollars ended up funding the military operations of Hamas, the Islamist group that has controlled Gaza for nearly 20 years and has pledged to erase the Jewish state. The money trail is at the heart of the case against seven current and former top UNRWA officials who are accused of knowing that Hamas siphoned off more than $1 billion from the agency to pay for, among other things, tunneling equipment and weapons that aided its attack on Israel on Oct. 7.

. . .

UNRWA was created in 1949 and is funded primarily through donations from U.N. member nations. The United States has long been the largest contributor, giving $371 million in 2023, nearly 30 percent of the agency’s contributions, according to a congressional report.

. . .

The suit relies on a long and tortuous trail of cash that stretches from Manhattan to the Middle East.

. . .

The complaint says the group used the money “to buy via smugglers its weapons, ammunition, explosives, construction materials for the tunnels and rocket-making supplies.”

. . .

The complaint does not reveal what evidence the plaintiffs will present to prove with certainty that UNRWA money in Gaza was used to finance the Oct. 7 attack. Nor does the complaint provide specific details to support the claim that Hamas controls the currency exchanges.

But a report by Key Aid Consulting for UNRWA in 2018 said that the exchanges are open to “leakage,” which includes “misappropriation, fraud, corruption, double-counting and any irregularity considered as a diversion of cash grants or vouchers from legitimate uses.”

For the full story see:

Ken Belson and Katherine Rosman. “Hamas Siphoned Off $1 Billion in U.N. Aid, Lawsuit Claims.” The New York Times (Wednesday, June 26, 2024): A7.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 24, 2024, and has the title “Hamas Skimmed $1 Billion in U.N. Aid for Weapons and Tunnels, Suit Says.”)

Coastal Cities Can Adapt to Flooding

(p. A9) Cities around the world face a daunting challenge in the era of climate change: Supercharged rainstorms are turning streets into rivers, flooding subway systems and inundating residential neighborhoods, often with deadly consequences.

Kongjian Yu, a landscape architect and professor at Peking University, is developing what might seem like a counterintuitive response: Let the water in.

“You cannot fight water,” he said. “You have to adapt to it.”

. . .

Niall Kirkwood, a professor of landscape architecture at Harvard who has known Mr. Yu for years, acknowledged that it can be difficult, and sometimes impossible, to convert land in city centers that have already been densely built. Still, he said, Mr. Yu’s impact as a innovator has been incalculable.

“He’s created a clear and elegant idea of enhancing nature, of partnership with nature that everyone, the man on the street, the mayor of a city, an engineer, even a child, can understand,” Professor Kirkwood said.

. . .

John Beardsley, the curator of the Oberlander International Landscape Architecture Prize, which was awarded to Mr. Yu last year, echoed Professor Kirkwood, saying Mr. Yu’s impact on policy in China, a country that has been more likely to imprison environmental activists than take their messages to heart, has been astonishing.

Mr. Beardsley attributes this to Mr. Yu’s adroit political skills and infectious enthusiasm,  . . .

“Kongjian has managed to be very critical of the government’s environmental policies while still maintaining his practice and his academic appointments,” he said. “He’s both brave and deft in this regard, threading a very narrow needle.”

For the full story see:

Richard Schiffman. “One Architect’s Advice For Flood-Prone Cities: Act as a Sponge Would.” The New York Times (Friday, March 29, 2024): A9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 3, 2024, and has the title “He’s Got a Plan for Cities That Flood: Stop Fighting the Water.”)

Nock Taught Buckley that Members of the “Remnant” Can Save the World

I was taught about the remnant by Ben Rogge, my mentor at Wabash College. When I find hope ebbing, I remind myself of Nock’s story, as briefly distilled by Rogge.

(p. A13) It isn’t a backhanded compliment to say that the funniest show on television this week—or any in recent memory—is “The Incomparable Mr. Buckley.” The “American Masters” production does its ostensible duty, exploring the origins, education and machinations of William F. Buckley Jr. as an architect of American conservatism. But his wit is so sharp, his ripostes so surgical, and his extemporaneous bons mots so witheringly droll that the humor, as well as anything else, explains not just his long and lasting popularity but his ability to charm the opposition.

. . .

The Buckley family story is a tale well told in this almost two-hour production, . . .

. . .

The Buckley money came from William Sr.’s oil explorations in Mexico and he established the family dynasty at Great Elm, the Connecticut estate where William Jr. and his nine siblings were not only raised but educated. It was an idyllic upbringing, influenced by the thinking of ur-libertarian Albert Jay Nock, who was a frequent guest at Great Elm and believed that “The Remnant,” a small minority of enlightened and educable individuals, would be the inheritors and saviors of society. That Buckley perceived himself as being part of that remnant was never a question. Call it perverse, but it was part of his charm.

For the full review see:

John Anderson. “TELEVISION REVIEW; William F. Buckley’s Wit and Wisdom.” The Wall Street Journal (Wednesday, April 3, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date April 2, 2024, and has the title “TELEVISION REVIEW; ‘The Incomparable Mr. Buckley’ Review: Withering Wit and Wisdom.”)

Nock’s essay on the Remnant, mentioned above, has been reposted on the web:

Nock, Albert Jay. “Isaiah’s Job.” Atlantic Monthly 157, no. 6 (June 1936): 641-49.

Unlike DNA, RNA Has “Catalytic Power”

(p. 8) In the early 1980s, when I was much younger and most of the promise of RNA was still unimagined, I set up my lab at the University of Colorado, Boulder. After two years of false leads and frustration, my research group discovered that the RNA we’d been studying had catalytic power. This means that the RNA could cut and join biochemical bonds all by itself — the sort of activity that had been thought to be the sole purview of protein enzymes. This gave us a tantalizing glimpse at our deepest origins: If RNA could both hold information and orchestrate the assembly of molecules, it was very likely that the first living things to spring out of the primordial ooze were RNA-based organisms.

. . .

RNA discoveries have led to new therapies, such as the use of antisense RNA to help treat children afflicted with the devastating disease spinal muscular atrophy. The mRNA vaccines, which saved millions of lives during the Covid pandemic, are being reformulated to attack other diseases, including some cancers. RNA research may also be helping us rewrite the future; the genetic scissors that give CRISPR its breathtaking power to edit genes are guided to their sites of action by RNAs.

Although most scientists now agree on RNA’s bright promise, we are still only beginning to unlock its potential. Consider, for instance, that some 75 percent of the human genome consists of dark matter that is copied into RNAs of unknown function. While some researchers have dismissed this dark matter as junk or noise, I expect it will be the source of even more exciting breakthroughs.

For the full essay see:

Thomas Cech. “Move Aside, DNA. RNA Has Arrived.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, June 2, 2024): 8.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date May 29, 2024, and has the title “The Long-Overlooked Molecule That Will Define a Generation of Science.”)

The essay quoted above was adapted from the author’s book:

Cech, Thomas R. The Catalyst: RNA and the Quest to Unlock Life’s Deepest Secrets. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024.

A Dollar Spent on Medicaid Yields (at Most) 40 Cents of Value to Recipients

(p. C3) A . . . National Bureau of Economic Research study estimated the value of Medicaid to its recipients at between 20¢ and 40¢ per dollar of expenditure, with the majority of the value going to health-care providers like doctors and hospitals. By comparison, the Earned Income Tax Credit—a cash transfer program designed to enhance the incomes of the working poor—delivers around 90¢ of value to its recipients per dollar of expenditure. Given that more than half of Obamacare’s reduction in the numbers of the uninsured has been from its expansion of Medicaid, this makes the law look more like welfare for the medical-industrial complex than support for the needy.

For the full commentary see:

Daniel P. Kessler. “The Health of Obamacare.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 12, 2015 [sic]): C3.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 11, 2015 [sic], and has the same title as the print version.)

The NBER working paper mentioned above was later published in:

Finkelstein, Amy, Nathaniel Hendren, and Erzo F. P. Luttmer. “The Value of Medicaid: Interpreting Results from the Oregon Health Insurance Experiment.” Journal of Political Economy 127, no. 6 (Dec. 2019): 2836-74.

(Note: my title for this blog entry continues to be supported in the 2019 published version of the earlier NBER working paper.)

“A Pattern of Stumbles Across the World of Generative A.I.”

(p. B1) Days before gadget reviewers weighed in on the Humane Ai Pin, a futuristic wearable device powered by artificial intelligence, the founders of the company gathered their employees and encouraged them to brace themselves. The reviews might be disappointing, they warned.

. . .

(p. B5) Its setbacks are part of a pattern of stumbles across the world of generative A.I., as companies release unpolished products. Over the past two years, Google has introduced and pared back A.I. search abilities that recommended people eat rocks, Microsoft has trumpeted a Bing chatbot that hallucinated and Samsung has added A.I. features to a smartphone that were called “excellent at times and baffling at others.”

For the full story see:

Tripp Mickle and Erin Griffith. “Inside the Spectacular Flop of a Bold A.I. Device.” The New York Times (Friday, June 7, 2024): B1 & B5.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story was updated June 7, 2024, and has the title “‘This Is Going to Be Painful’: How a Bold A.I. Device Flopped.”)

Pigeons Can Learn to Accurately Spot Cancerous Breast Cells

(p. C4) . . . researchers at the University of California, Davis, the University of Iowa and Emory University have demonstrated that pigeons are surprisingly good at detecting cancer as well. Using grain as a reward, the scientists managed to train hungry pigeons to reliably spot malignancies in images of human breast cells.

The birds achieved roughly 85% accuracy, which is probably better than beginning medical students, the scientists said, although it doesn’t approach the prowess of seasoned pathologists. On the other hand, the birds’ training only involved 24 slides at four times magnification (and they graduated debt-free). What’s more, when Edward A. Wasserman and his colleagues exploited the “wisdom of flocks” by combining the “votes” of four pigeons on each slide, the birds’ accuracy shot up to an astonishing 99%.

When confronted with mammograms, by contrast, the pigeons were flummoxed. After awhile, they seemed to learn to detect cancer on these images, but when shown new ones, they couldn’t do any better than chance, which implies that they had simply memorized the right calls on the initial images during repeated viewings. By contrast, birds that learned to pick out cancer from tissue samples could carry over their skills to new images.

Why so good with images of actual tissue yet so bad with mammograms? The former consist of breast cells seen under a microscope, while the latter are murkier images of overlapping elements (such as blood vessels) within the breast. Like physicians, pigeons find it easier to make the diagnosis by looking at cells, which is why biopsies are taken.

For the full commentary see:

Daniel Akst. “R&D; Pigeons That Spot Breast Cancer.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Dec. 12, 2015 [sic]): C4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Dec. 11, 2015 [sic], and has the title “R&D; The Pigeons That Can Spot Breast Cancer.”)

The research summarized in the passages quoted above, was published in the academic article:

Levenson, Richard M., Elizabeth A. Krupinski, Victor M. Navarro, and Edward A. Wasserman. “Pigeons (Columba Livia) as Trainable Observers of Pathology and Radiology Breast Cancer Images.” PLOS ONE 10, no. 11 (2015): e0141357.

Subpoena Emails Between Wuhan Lab and U.S. Partners to Illuminate Origin of Covid

The passages quoted below are a very small part of a much longer essay that took up the space of a full page and a half of the SundayOpinion section of The New York Times.

(p. 6) On Monday [June 3, 2024], Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

. . .

(p. 7) The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them.

. . .

A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.

For the full essay see:

Alina Chan. “Why Covid Probably Started in a Lab.” The New York Times, SundayOpinion Section (Sunday, June 9, 2024): 6-7.

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

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date June 3, 2024, and has the title “Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points.”)

The essay quoted above summarizes and updates her co-authored book:

Chan, Alina, and Matt Ridley. Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19. New York: Harper, 2021.

Musk’s Predictions Are “Just Guesses,” Part of “a Conversation”

(p. B4) In the past, Musk has suggested that sometimes people read too much into what he says.

“People shouldn’t hold me to these things,” Musk said in 2022 during a TED Talk interview. “What tends to happen is I’ll make some like, you know, best guess, and then people in five years, there’ll be some jerk that writes an article: ‘Elon said this would happen, and it didn’t happen. He’s a liar and a fool.’”

“It’s very annoying when that happens,” Musk continued. “These are just guesses, this is a conversation.”

For the full commentary see:

Tim Higgins. “How Misunderstood Is Tesla’s Musk?” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, June 24, 2024): B4.

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date June 22, 2024, and has the title “Is Elon Musk Misunderstood, or Understood All Too Well?”)