Author: Art Diamond

Government Environmental Agency Accuses Itself of Bulldozing Habitat of “Threatened” Barred Owl and “Endangered” Redshouldered Hawk

(p. A18) A New Jersey state agency is accusing itself of violating its own regulations, saying it destroyed land that is home to rare owls and hawks while creating habitat for another type of bird.

At issue in the unusual bureaucratic conflict is the clearing of about 20 acres of swampy forest in a state-owned wildlife preserve in the southern part of the state as part of a project to improve conditions for the American woodcock, a common, plump shorebird prized by hunters.

The state’s Department of Environmental Protection paid private contractors $200,000 for the job, which involved the removal of trees and the bulldozing of stumps, according to public documents obtained by the nonprofit New Jersey Conservation Foundation.

But clearing the forest, in the Glassboro Wildlife Management Area in Clayton, destroyed habitat for the barred owl, which is threatened in New Jersey, and the red-shouldered hawk, which is endangered, according to a notice of violation issued to one arm of the environmental agency by another on April 6 [2023].

“It’s just depressing, really,” Joe Arsenault, a plant ecologist and environmental consultant who lives nearby and has studied the area for 25 years, said of the project’s outcome. “The site had exquisite, mature growth. It had ancient trees. Today it’s like driving through a parking lot.”

. . .

The forest will slowly regrow, Mr. Arsenault said, adding that his surveys of the land had also uncovered evidence of early settlement by Native American tribes that could date to the earliest humans to settle in New Jersey. With the land upturned, the site’s archaeological record is lost forever.

“It’s a gut punch,” he said. “It is the epitome of poor decisions and poorly spent money.”

For the full story, see:

Christopher Maag. “Plan to Create Habitat Destroys Tract of Forest.” The New York Times (Saturday, April 15, 2023): A18.

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

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “New Jersey Environmental Agency Accuses Itself of Harming Bird Habitats.”)


College Dropout Put Cheap Stores Where Oil-Stained Pavement Showed Presence of the Poor

(p. A10) Leon Levine, a college dropout, founded the Family Dollar chain in 1959, starting in North Carolina and spreading around the U.S.

He stocked cut-price clothing, food, toys and the smallest packages of toothpaste or hand cream for people without enough cash to buy jumbo sizes. The stores were in low-income neighborhoods or small towns. Mr. Levine sometimes found locations by looking for oil stains on the pavement—a sure sign of the leaky cars driven by poor people.

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Family Dollar Founder Looked for Oil Stains.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, April 15, 2023): A10.

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date April 12, 2023, and has the title “Leon Levine, Who Made Small Box Retailing Pay, Dies at 85.”)

Bell Labs Allowed Tanenbaum to Pursue Any Research that Interested Him

(p. A11) One evening in 1955, Morris Tanenbaum’s wife was playing bridge with friends. Dr. Tanenbaum, a chemist who worked for Bell Telephone Laboratories, the research arm of American Telephone & Telegraph Co., saw a chance to dash back to work to test his latest ideas about how to make better semiconductor devices out of silicon.

He tried a new way of connecting an aluminum wire to a silicon chip. He was thrilled when it worked, providing a way to make highly efficient transistors and other electronic devices, an essential technology for the Information Age.

“I don’t think I needed a car to get home that evening,” he said later in an oral history recorded by the IEEE History Center. “I was flying high.”

Dr. Tanenbaum’s pioneering work in the mid-1950s demonstrated that silicon was a better semiconductor material for transistors than germanium, the early favorite. He earned seven patents.

He later served as a senior executive of AT&T and helped manage the breakup of the phone monopoly mandated by the 1982 settlement of a Justice Department antitrust suit. At the signing of the consent decree, Dr. Tanenbaum cried gently, according to “The Deal of the Century,” a history of the breakup by Steve Coll.

What pained him most was the fate of Bell Laboratories, which had invented the transistor in 1947 and allowed him, as a young Ph.D. chemist in the early 1950s, to pursue basic research even if it didn’t promise near-term financial rewards.  . . .

“Bell Laboratories, the world’s premier industrial laboratory, was destroyed, a major national and global tragedy,” he wrote later in an unpublished memoir written for his family.

. . .

Hired by Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, N.J. in 1952, he was told to look around for a research project that interested him. Researchers were allowed to pursue nearly any project “potentially related to some Bell System problem or future opportunity,” he wrote later. “What more could a young person expect?”

He zeroed in on studies of potential semiconducting materials. The first transistors were made from germanium, but that material was expensive. Silicon is abundant and thus cheaper. It also helps prevent overheating of circuits. Early efforts to use silicon for electronic devices hadn’t worked well, though. That was a challenge for Dr. Tanenbaum and his colleagues, including Ernie Buehler.

They weren’t alone in finding ways to use silicon. Gordon Teal was doing similar work at Texas Instruments Inc. in the mid-1950s. “From that moment forward, the world was focused on silicon,” Dr. Tanenbaum wrote.

Though AT&T made early breakthroughs, other companies, including Intel Corp. and Texas Instruments, charged ahead with better and faster microchips that transformed the world. AT&T was busy trying to defend its telephone monopoly. On the silicon front, Dr. Tanenbaum said, “we kind of dropped the ball.”

For the full obituary, see:

James R. Hagerty. “Chemist Helped Put Silicon in Microchips.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 04, 2023): A11.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 3, 2023, and has the title “Morris Tanenbaum, Who Helped Put Silicon in Microchips, Dies at 94.” The fourth paragraph quoted above appears in the online, but not the print, version.)

The book by Col mentioned above is:

Coll, Steve. The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T. New York: Atheneum Books, 1986.

Miami Cubans Sent “El Voto Castigo” Protest to Clinton’s Betrayal of Elián González

“Armed federal agents raided the Miami house where Elián González, second from right, was staying with relatives.” Source of photo and caption: NYT article quoted and cited below. The original photographer was Alan Diaz/Associated Press.

Today (April 22, 2023) is the 23rd anniversary of the day when the Clinton Administration seized a six year old boy in order to force him back into the slavery that his mother had died trying to escape.

(p. C1) MIAMI BEACH — Elián González, the little Cuban boy at the center of a new play bearing his name, never appears onstage. Instead, audiences hear the sound of a child’s high-pitched giggle, a haunting echo of the events that, more than two decades ago, ripped Miami apart and riveted the nation.

One of three survivors after a storm capsized the small boat carrying his mother and about a dozen others fleeing Cuba, Elián was the center of a monthslong custody battle — his father and the dictator Fidel Castro on one side, Miami relatives and Cuban exiles on the other — that became a proxy for a larger political struggle. After U.S. immigration agents launched a pre-dawn raid in Little Havana to reunite the boy with his father, who ultimately brought him back to Cuba, outraged opponents protested in the streets.

For years, the story’s enduring image has been the dramatic photograph of a terrified 6-year-old boy, cornered by an armed federal agent. Miami New Drama now hopes to broaden that portrait with “Elián,” by the Cuban American playwright Rogelio Martinez, which examines the pain, rage, confu-(p. C4)sion and division that still resonates in a city filled with immigrants.

“Elian was a pivotal event,” said Michel Hausmann, who directed the play and is Miami New Drama’s artistic director. “Let people get upset, let them argue. I think it’s part of our duty as artists.”

. . .

It is all part of Hausmann’s mission to speak to this majority Latino city. A Jewish Venezuelan who left his native country in 2009 amid rising antisemitism and attacks on his Caracas theater troupe from the socialist government, he has commissioned multiple popular plays centered on the Cuban American and Venezuelan communities.

. . .

Enraged by the U.S. government’s actions, thousands of Cuban Americans switched from Democrat to Republican in what they called “el voto castigo” (the punishment vote). It was a crucial shift in an election year, with George W. Bush becoming president after defeating Vice President Al Gore in Florida by 537 votes.

. . .

Martinez, the playwright, has long been interested in politics, with a Cold War trilogy among his plays that have been produced by leading theaters around the country. But with “Elián,” politics became personal.

Martinez’s mother brought him to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, when he was 9, but avoided telling him that the Cuban authorities were not allowing his father to leave.

“My mom said, ‘We’ll see him next week,’” Martinez said. “Like we’re just going ahead. But as we were getting into the car, my mom said, ‘Go, go back. Go hug your dad.’”

Martinez did not see his father again until he was an adult, and only briefly.

. . .

Diaz, the lawyer and former mayor, was 6 when his mother brought him to Miami in 1961, forced to leave behind his father, a political prisoner. He was deeply wounded by the raid, which the play portrays as a betrayal of an agreement Elián’s relatives in Miami had signed with Reno 12 hours before. His character struggles to reconcile his faith in the system with his feelings as an exile.

“If you forget these things, they can happen again,” the real-life Diaz said. “It was an incredible learning experience,” he added, “to find myself fighting my old country and my new country at the same time.”

. . .

“You are doing great work in presenting this,” a host for Mega TV, Padre Alberto, told Hausmann and Pelaez, his guests from the play. “Elián was very difficult for all of us, and it continues to be very hard to think about, and to make us very emotional.”

Glenda and Dariel Candelario experienced such emotion at a recent performance. The couple, who emigrated from Cuba in 2014, were among the thousands of children forced to attend rallies in Havana demanding Elián’s return. “They didn’t give us any choice,” Glenda Candelario said.

“We had been indoctrinated — we only had the Cuban government part of the story,” said her husband, who was 15 at the time. “I’m so excited to see this now, to hear the other side.”

For the full story, see:

Jordan Levin. “Divisive Battle Over Elián González Reverberates on a Miami Stage.” The New York Times (Saturday, September 12, 2022): C1 & C4.

[Note: ellipses added.]

(Note: the online version of the story was updated Nov. 15, 2022, and has the title “Cuban Boy’s Odyssey Is Revisited.” Where the wording differs between versions, the passages quoted above follow the online version.)

Elon Musk Says “Violent Crime in SF Is Horrific”

(p. A14) The fury erupted within hours, as word spread that the 43-year-old man who had been stabbed to death this week in an enclave of high-rise condominiums near the Bay Bridge was Bob Lee, a well-known tech executive.

The leaders of “lawless” San Francisco had Mr. Lee’s “literal blood on their hands,” Matt Ocko, a tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist in Palo Alto, Calif., tweeted. “I hate what San Francisco has become,” added Michael Arrington, the founder of the industry blog TechCrunch.

“Violent crime in SF is horrific,” Elon Musk, the chief executive of Twitter and Tesla, chimed in.

The drumbeat has built since then in the liberal city that only last year recalled its progressive district attorney amid calls for law and order and deepening frustration over the city’s homelessness crisis.

For the full story, see:

Kate Conger and Shawn Hubler. “Fatal Stabbing Stirs Outrage Over ‘Lawless’ San Francisco.” The New York Times (Saturday, April 8, 2023): A14.

(Note: the online version of the story was updated April 10, 2023, and has the title “Stabbing of Cash App Creator Raises Alarm, and Claims of ‘Lawless’ San Francisco.”)


“France’s Most Famous Public Intellectual” Fears That if Putin Conquers Ukraine Western Civilization “Might Collapse”

(p. C1) In his new documentary film “Slava Ukraini,” Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s most famous public intellectual, dodges Russian sniper fire in Ukraine, nonchalantly wearing a khaki bulletproof vest over a chic bespoke suit.

He climbs onto a Ukrainian naval vessel in Odessa that is sweeping the Black Sea for Russian mines, his mane of graying hair blowing gently in the wind. And he surveys blown-out apartment blocks in Kyiv, descends into trenches with Ukrainian soldiers in Sloviansk and comforts a mother whose young son is so traumatized by war, he has stopped speaking.

It can be easy to dismiss Lévy — and plenty do — as a 74-year-old reckless war tourist, an heir to a timber fortune playing action hero as Russian missiles rain down on Kyiv, Kharkiv and Mariupol. But instead of spending the last 12 months in his art-filled home on Paris’s right bank or enjoying retirement at his 18th-century palace in Marrakesh, Lévy has been braving Russian military assaults, vertigo and what (p. C5) he calls his natural tendency for melancholy to make his Ukraine film.

It was, he said, a necessary cri de coeur to support Ukraine in a conflict he views as nothing less than a battle for the future of Europe, global liberalism and Western civilization.

“In Ukraine, I had the feeling for the first time that the world I knew, the world in which I grew up, the world that I want to leave to my children and grandchildren, might collapse,” he said during an interview at the Carlyle Hotel in New York earlier this month, . . .

For the full story, see:

Dan Bilefsky. “A Philosopher Chooses Action.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 1, 2023): C1 & C5.

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Feb. 28, 2023, and has the title “A Polarizing French Philosopher Chooses War Zones Over Salons.”)


William F. Buckley, Sr. Spent $100,000 to Fund His Son’s Entrepreneurial Start-Up: National Review

In my Openness book, I give reasons why risky innovative start-ups at fragile early stages almost always need to be substantially self-funded. When close relatives invest, I include that as self-funding.

(p. A15) . . . “William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908-1922,” [is] a fascinating if uneven book by the independent historian John A. Adams Jr.

. . .

The business climate in Mexico was promising for foreigners like the Buckleys, thanks to the pro-development policies of its autocratic president, Porfirio Díaz, who would rule the country for more than three decades.

Buckley’s prominence among the American expatriate community made him a natural conduit between officials in the U.S. and Mexico once the latter country was plunged into chaos following the ouster of Díaz in 1911. Buckley was Zelig-like, cropping up repeatedly at key moments. He visited the U.S. Embassy in February 1913 during the Decena Tragíca (Ten Tragic Days), when Francisco Madero, Díaz’s successor, was overthrown in a coup led by Gen. Victoriano Huerta, instigating a spasm of violence that killed thousands in Mexico City.

. . .

Buckley favored Huerta, serving as the regime’s legal counsel in negotiations with the U.S. aimed at preventing hostilities between the two nations. He was thus dismayed by the ascendance of Venustiano Carranza and, later, Álvaro Obregón. Both leaders endorsed the Mexican Constitution of 1917, including Article 27, which asserted national ownership of natural resources while circumscribing the economic power of the church. These provisions horrified Buckley, who was a staunch believer in free-market capitalism as well as a devout Roman Catholic. In the bulletin of the American Association of Mexico, an advocacy group he founded in 1919, Buckley denounced the “dangerous Bolshevist movement” that had taken root in Mexico.

. . .

. . ., Mr. Adams consulted with several Buckley family members, including a descendant based in Mexico City, as well as Judge James L. Buckley, the sole survivor among the 10 children born to Will and his wife, Aloise. Judge Buckley, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday, contributed a foreword acknowledging the importance of Mexico to the family’s understanding of itself, writing that “it had somehow permeated our DNA.”

. . .

As another of his offspring once said, Buckley’s experience in Mexico “deepened his frontier suspicions of autocratic [leaders] (and big government in general), and this attitude dyes all his children strongly.” Surely that was true of Buckley’s favorite son, William F. Buckley Jr., who, after serving a short stint with the CIA in Mexico City (he, too, was fluent in Spanish), founded National Review in 1955, which remains one of the leading voices of the conservative movement. The elder Buckley helped fund his son’s upstart venture with a $100,000 contribution from a fortune that traced its origins to Mexico during the most tumultuous period of that nation’s history.

For the full review, see:

Andrew R. Graybill. “BOOKSHELF; Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 27, 2023): A15.

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

(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 26, 2023, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘William F. Buckley Sr.’ Review: Conservatism’s Mexican Roots.”)

The book under review:

Adams, John A., Jr. William F. Buckley Sr.: Witness to the Mexican Revolution, 1908–1922. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2023.

78% of Americans Not Confident Children Will Be Better Off

(p. A2) An overwhelming share of Americans aren’t confident their children’s lives will be better than their own, according to a new Wall Street Journal-NORC Poll that shows growing skepticism about the value of a college degree and record-low levels of overall happiness.

The survey with NORC at the University of Chicago, a nonpartisan research organization that measures social attitudes, showed pervasive economic pessimism underpins Americans’ dim hopes for the future. Four in five respondents described the state of the economy as not so good or poor, and nearly half said they expect it will get worse in the next year.

. . .

For more than three decades, NORC has asked Americans whether life for their children’s generation will be better than it has been for their own using its General Social Survey. This year 78% said they don’t feel confident that is the case, the highest share since the survey began asking the question every few years in 1990.

. . .

Some 56% of respondents said that a four-year college degree wasn’t worth the cost because people often graduate without specific job skills and with heavy debt.

For the full story, see:

Janet Adamy. “In U.S., Most Doubt Their Children Will Be Better Off, a New Poll Finds.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 25, 2023): A2.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date March 24, 2023, and has the title “Most Americans Doubt Their Children Will Be Better Off, WSJ-NORC Poll Finds.”)

The poll mentioned above can be viewed at:

WSJ/NORC Poll (March 2023).

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Brother Gabe Helped Send Misappropriated Funds to Dems, and Then Got “The Rock Star Treatment” From Biden White House

(p. B1) The group, Guarding Against Pandemics, raised more than $22 million in its first full year in 2021, turning it into an overnight lobbying force in Washington. The group’s founder, Gabe Bankman-Fried, a former legislative assistant, started getting the rock star treatment: two White House meetings with senior staff and invitations to speak on panels with government officials.

But almost all the money raised by Guarding Against Pandemics appears to have come from Gabe Bankman-Fried’s brother, whom federal prosecutors have accused of misappropriating billions of dollars from customers of his crypto exchange, FTX. The collapse of FTX prompted federal authorities to investigate allegations (p. B6) that sweeping fraud drove the exchange into bankruptcy in November [2023], as well as potential campaign finance law violations by both brothers.

Federal prosecutors in Manhattan have charged Sam Bankman-Fried, 31, with orchestrating a scheme to evade limits on corporate political donations. Prosecutors have said he recruited FTX executives and others to serve as proxies for the crypto exchange and make tens of millions of dollars in illegal political donations using customer money.

The authorities are investigating whether Gabe Bankman-Fried, 28, and some of his colleagues were part of the same so-called straw donor scheme, five people familiar with the matter said, speaking on the condition of anonymity. And they are trying to determine whether he knew some of the funds that his organization received had been misappropriated from customers.

Last month, a top FTX executive, Nishad Singh, pleaded guilty to using company money to make millions of dollars in straw donations to Democratic campaigns and committees.

. . .

The Bankman-Fried brothers relied on a small set of political consultants to guide their spending, applying the principles of effective altruism, the philanthropic movement that has a large following in the tech industry. A top adviser to both brothers was Michael Sadowsky, a committed effective altruist who had worked with the younger Mr. Bankman-Fried at the data firm Civis Analytics.

. . .

With a $25 million cash infusion from Sam Bankman-Fried, Mr. Sadowsky’s PAC became an instant force in Democratic politics. His group supported dozens of progressive candidates and got widespread attention when it spent more than $11 million on an unsuccessful House primary candidate in Oregon, an astonishing sum for such a race.

. . .

Two other key figures in the Bankman-Frieds’ political network had ties to prominent Democrats: Jenna Narayanan, a former political adviser to the billionaire investor Tom Steyer, and Sean McElwee, the founder of Data for Progress, a progressive think tank.

For the full story, see:

Matthew Goldstein, David Yaffe-Bellany and Lora Kelley. “Fraternal Turn to FTX Inquiry.” The New York Times (Friday, March 24, 2023): B1 & B6.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the same date as the print version, and has the title “The Younger Brother Caught in the Middle of the FTX Investigation.”)

Corporate Fraud Index “Is the Highest in Over 40 Years”, Portending Economic Woes

(p. A2) Manipulation of earnings from Corporate America is on the rise, an ominous omen for the U.S. economy.

That is the conclusion of new research on accounting fraud, using a technique that flagged Enron as an earnings manipulator several years before the energy company’s spectacular 2001 implosion.

Unless you study accounting, you have likely never come across the M-Score, which is the number underlying both the Enron episode and the economywide concern now. The “M” is for manipulation, and uses a company’s financial statements to determine whether it is engaging in manipulation.

. . .

“We think this is a measure of misinformation in the economy,” said Dr. Beneish. The new aggregate measure was published in a December [2022] paper, and the latest data—compiled in March [2023] and shared with The Wall Street Journal—shows that the collective probability of fraud across major companies is the highest in over 40 years.

For the full commentary, see:

Josh Zumbrun. “Signs of Fraud Flash Warning for Economy.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 25, 2023): A2.

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

(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 24, 2023, and has the title “THE NUMBERS; Accounting-Fraud Indicator Signals Coming Economic Trouble.”)

The December 2022 paper mentioned above is:

Beneish, Messod D., David B. Farber, Matthew Glendening, and Kenneth W. Shaw. “Aggregate Financial Misreporting and the Predictability of U.S. Recessions and GDP Growth.” The Accounting Review (Dec. 2022), DOI:10.2308/tar-2021-0160.

“The Reliability of Science Is Based” on Free Speech

Theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli’s argument should be pondered by global warming and Covid scientists who want to censor and cancel those with whom they disagree. They should also read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.

(p. C5) Science is a process that builds upon existing theories and knowledge by continuously revising them. Every aspect of scientific knowledge can be questioned, including the general rules of thinking that appear to be most certain.

. . .

Consider a folk healer’s herbal medicine. Can we say this treatment is “scientific”? Yes, if it is proven to be effective, even if we have no idea why it works. In fact, several common medications used today have their origin in folk treatments, and we are still not sure how they work. This does not imply that folk treatments are generally effective. To the contrary, most of them are not. What distinguishes scientific medicine from nonscientific medicine is the readiness to seriously test a treatment and to be ready to change our minds if something is shown not to work.

Exaggerating a bit, one could say that the core of modern medicine is not much more than the accurate testing of treatments. A homeopathic doctor is not interested in rigorously testing his remedies: He continues to administer the same remedy even if a statistical analysis shows that the remedy is ineffective. He prefers to stick to his theory. A research doctor in a modern hospital, on the contrary, must be ready to change his theory if a more effective way of understanding illness, or treating it, becomes available.

. . .

What makes modern science uniquely powerful is its refusal to believe that it already possesses ultimate truth. The reliability of science is based not on certainty but on a radical lack of certainty. As John Stuart Mill wrote in “On Liberty” in 1859, “The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”

. . .

There is no secure method for avoiding error. Our point of departure is always just the ramshackle, error-filled totality of what we think we know. But uncertainty does not make knowledge worthless. If our theory is contradicted by experiment, this remains a real fact, solid as rock, even if we don’t yet know with clarity where our mistake lies. The fact that the assumptions in our reasoning can be mistaken doesn’t change the fact that scientific reasoning is our best cognitive tool.

For the full essay, see:

Carlo Rovelli. “The Best Reason to Trust Science.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, March 11, 2023): C5.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the essay has the date March 9, 2023, and has the same title as the print version.)

Rovelli’s essay quoted above is based on his book:

Rovelli, Carlo. Anaximander and the Birth of Science. New York: Riverhead Books, 2023 (2011).

Mill’s wonderful defense of freedom, mentioned above, is:

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty and Other Essays, Oxford World’s Classics. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008 (1859).