Author: Art Diamond

Israel’s Version of Reagan’s Missile-Defense System Protected Against Iran’s Barrage

(p. A13) Allow me to identify who saved the people of Israel last weekend from Iran’s missile barrage: Ronald Reagan.

In 1983, President Reagan in a televised speech proposed what he called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its core idea was that the U.S. would build defense systems that could shoot down nuclear-armed ballistic missiles, then expected to be fired by the Soviet Union at the U.S. mainland.

Democrats and much of the defense establishment mocked the idea, with Sen. Ted Kennedy naming it “Star Wars.”

. . .

By universal acclamation, the hero of last weekend was Israel’s missile-defense systems. The world watched in real time Saturday night as Reagan’s commitment to shooting down missiles protected Israel’s population from the more than 300 drones and ballistic and cruise missiles fired by Iran and its proxies at cities across Israel.

No nation more quickly recognized the necessity of missile defenses than Israel, a small, population-packed country that couldn’t afford the conceit of some U.S. politicians, then and today, that the American landmass is somehow safe from missile attacks. Within two years of Reagan’s announcement, Israel signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. to develop missile defenses. The fruits of that four-decade partnership couldn’t be clearer.

. . .

Reagan’s missile-defense legacy does have an important advocate: Donald Trump. As president in 2019, Mr. Trump revived the U.S. missile-defense program, and he restated that commitment, citing Reagan, during this year’s New Hampshire primary.

For the full story see:

Daniel Henninger. “WONDER LAND; Reagan Just Saved Israel.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, April 17, 2024): A13.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 18, 2024, and has the title “WONDER LAND; Ronald Reagan Just Saved Israel From Iran’s Attack.”)

Black American Woman Professor of Cinema Says “You Can Love” Gone with the Wind

(p. C5) The handsome Tudor Revival mansion set on a shaded lot in the bustling heart of Atlanta has long been known as the Margaret Mitchell House. Yet, in truth, Mitchell’s time there — a span of seven years, during which she wrote “Gone With the Wind” — was confined to a 650-square-foot first-floor apartment she so lovingly named “The Dump.”

Over time, Mitchell and the property she never owned would become inextricable. Visitors wanted to step into the cramped quarters where Mitchell, an unemployed former newspaper reporter, created a sprawling saga that came to define the antebellum South in the popular imagination.

. . .

“We’re not trying to label her,” said Sheffield Hale, the president and chief executive of Atlanta History Center, the museum and research center that has overseen operations of the house since 2004. “We’re not trying to praise or denigrate her. There’s a whole lot of non-Confederate gray in this exhibit.”

. . .

. . ., the director John Ridley, the screenwriter behind the 2013 Oscar-winning film “12 Years a Slave,” wrote an essay in The Los Angeles Times in which he urged the streamer HBO Max to remove the film from its platform before reintroducing it with more context for viewers.

“The movie had the very best talents in Hollywood at that time working together to sentimentalize a history that never was,” he wrote.

HBO acquiesced, pulling the film and then restoring it with a four-minute introduction that outlined its value and its flaws, and an explanation of why suppressing the film was not the right solution.

. . .

The book, published in 1936, was a critical and commercial success, winning a Pulitzer Prize and selling nearly a million copies within six months. Readers were enthralled with the travails of the protagonist, Scarlett O’Hara, from the start of the Civil War through the turmoil of Reconstruction.

“People had been dealing with really hard times,” Haley said, referring to the Great Depression. She added, “The story is about redemption and it’s about a character going through a war and coming out on the other side and ‘Never be hungry again.’”

. . .

. . . for all of the reappraising, visitors may come away with the sense that both the pride and the pain the story inspired were justified, said Stephane Dunn, a professor of cinema, television and emerging media studies at Morehouse College in Atlanta, who advised the exhibit’s curators.

“You can love it,” Dunn said.

She still does.

“I mean, I am a Black American woman, right?” she said. “I did not think slavery was romantic, but I found Scarlett fascinating. I found the costumes fascinating. I found in Mammy her strength, and she was not invisible in any scene she was in.”

“Gone With the Wind” has waned in popularity as an understanding of American history has evolved. But by the time visitors reach the end of the exhibit, organizers said, the hope is that they will understand how the story came to be and why it resonated.

“Because that helps us look at the stories we’re telling today,” Haley said, “to see if there are areas where we could stand to expand our perspectives.”

For the full story see:

Rick Rojas. “Pride and Pain Under One Roof.” The New York Times (Saturday, July 13, 2024): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 12, 2024, and has the title “At Margaret Mitchell’s House, ‘Gone With the Wind’ Gets a Rewrite.”)

The book is:

Mitchell, Margaret. Gone with the Wind. New York: Vintage Classics, 2020 (1st ed. 1936).

Ondrasik Sings in Support of Israel’s Fight “For Freedom, Democracy, Life, Civilization”

(p. A11) The music industry loves a good cause. Band Aid, Live Aid, Farm Aid, Stand Up to Cancer, Hope for Haiti, the Concert for Sandy Relief, the Concert for Ukraine—when the issue is potent enough, big-name musicians from every genre will come, and usually perform for free. All they typically want is to show the world how much they care.

The ability to shine a light on issues and causes that matter is a perk of fame. For John Ondrasik, right now, that’s Israel. The Grammy-nominated American singer and musician, who goes by the nom de chanson Five for Fighting, has been steadfast and outspoken about the Jewish state’s security needs since the Oct. 7 attacks. This has made him a unicorn among his music-industry peers. Most prefer simply to keep their heads down.

. . .

Mr. Ondrasik, 59, isn’t keeping his head down. He appears on Fox News and on Mark Levin’s radio show. He’s aggressive on Twitter in support of Israel. He is, as his stage name suggests, something of a brawler. On April 13 [2024], the night before Iran launched a barrage of missiles and drones at Israel, he performed at an outdoor concert in Tel Aviv and condemned “the evil that is Hamas.” He sang his Oct. 7-themed song, “OK”—the refrain is “We are not OK”—for the families of hostages still in Gaza.

“Why are you doing this?” Mr. Ondrasik says people always want to know. He isn’t Jewish. He doesn’t have relatives in Israel. He’s from Southern California and his heritage is Slovak. But, he says, “I’m human.” In Tel Aviv he told the crowd, “One doesn’t have to be Jewish to support Israel in their fight—sorry, our fight—for freedom, democracy, life, civilization, against those who want to tear it down.”

. . .

The left-right dynamic infuriates Mr. Ondrasik: “It’s not political. It shouldn’t be.” He says his support for Israel derives from the same impulse that led him to champion Ukraine in its fight for survival against Russia. They are both free nations fighting to preserve the Western values of democracy and human rights against those who would replace them with tyranny.

For the full interview see:

Matthew Hennessey. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; A Lone Voice Sings for Israel.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 27, 2024): A11.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added; some words in the original were italicized, but the format of this blog does not allow that to be distinguished.)

(Note: the online version of the interview has the date April 26, 2024, and has the title “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Five for Fighting: A Lone Voice Sings for Israel.”)

Climate-Change-Induced Flooding Blamed for Hurting Tiny Flowers, Instead Helped Them “Flourish”

(p. A10) The whimsical image fit when the state of Vermont announced last month that a plant thought to be locally extinct — false mermaid-weed — had been found through a chain of events that seemed stolen from a fairy tale.

It began with a sharp-eyed turtle biologist for the state, Molly Parren. She had been out surveying the habitat of wood turtles in rural Addison County on May 7 [2024] when she spotted some wild meadow garlic, which is extremely rare, beside a stream. Ms. Parren snapped a photo and sent it to her colleague, Grace Glynn, Vermont’s state botanist.

But when Ms. Glynn opened the photo, another plant, visible in the foreground, seized her attention. She knew at once what it was: Floerkea proserpinacoides, or false mermaid-weed, an herb that had not been documented in Vermont for more than a century, and one that Ms. Glynn had sought in vain for years.

. . .

The day after the false mermaid-weed was spotted, Ms. Glynn rushed to the rural site to confirm its presence in person. She found a dense carpet — “so many plants, it was hard to imagine how they had been overlooked,” she said.

And yet her disbelief was familiar. “It happens a lot, people saying, ‘We couldn’t have missed that,’” she said. “But we do, and we’re humbled over and over — I love that.”

Far from an anomaly, rediscoveries of plants thought to be extinct are a relatively regular feature of field botany.

. . .

Tricky as it is to find elusive species, it is harder to pinpoint why they thrive or dwindle, and how such shifts might be related to a changing climate. Flooding is cited as one possible factor in the disappearance of false mermaid-weed from Vermont. And yet flooding in the state last summer may have helped it flourish by the stream where it was found, Ms. Glynn said, by depositing sediment and creating a more hospitable habitat.

For the full story see:

Jenna Russell. “By a Stream in Vermont, Rediscovering a Plant Last Seen a Century Ago.” The New York Times (Friday, June 14, 2024): A10.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the date June 11, 2024, and has the title “By a Stream in Vermont, a Glimpse of a Plant Last Seen a Century Ago.”)

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.)